Smartlead Vs. Folderly Vs. Mixmax: Which is Best for Your Business?

Are you confused between Smartlead, Folderly, and Mixmax for lead generation and sales engagement? 

We get it–choosing the right platform for your business growth can be quite challenging (and confusing). Review sites can be, infamously, deceiving sometimes. That’s why we’re here to offer you an in-depth comparison of these three tools. 

We’ll look deep into the features, best use case, customer reviews, pros & cons of each tool, and last but not the least, their pricing plans. Whether you are a small business, a sales leader, a lead generation/marketing agency, or an individual marketer trying to scale their outreach, we’ll help you pick the right tool that perfectly fits your needs.  

Let’s get right into it. 

TL;DR

  • Folderly is an email deliverability tool that ensures 100% deliverability, improves open and reply rates, and integrates with popular CRMs, ESPs, and automation tools. It offers user-friendly setup, data safety compliance, spam trigger checking, and SPF generation for domain privacy.
  • Mixmax is a powerful sales engagement tool that offers a range of features designed to enhance your outreach. It offers instant scheduling, reminders, and delayed sending to mail merge, surveys, and polls. Mixmax also provides detailed email tracking and analytics, allowing you to monitor open rates, bounce rates, deliverability rates, and even track downloads. With email scheduling, you can set up emails to be sent at specific times. Moreover, you can personalize your emails with Mixmax's automation software to boost engagement in your campaigns. And for added convenience, you can save custom templates, eliminating the need to create new ones for every campaign. 
  • Smartlead is a sales engagement tool that excels in email deliverability, lead generation, cold email automation, and LinkedIn outreach. It offers unique IP servers and unlimited warmups to optimize deliverability. Smartlead enhances sender reputation with natural AI conversations and moves emails from spam folders to the primary inbox. It offers cold emailing API infrastructure. Custom-conditional email triggers and sub-sequences based on lead behavior can be set up. It provides a centralized master inbox, email tracking, and time-saving features like mailbox rotation and full whitelabel capabilities.
  • If you are intrigued by the amazing features Smartlead offers, start your free trial today.

Folderly

Folderly Homepage

Folderly is a comprehensive email deliverability platform that ensures your email outreach campaigns always land in your recipients’ inboxes. This powerful tool is a one-stop solution for boosting mailbox health. It can supercharge your inbox rate, analyze email content, and fine tune email infrastructure. Besides, you can also run domain health checkups in Folderly. Folderly offers integration with most of the major email service providers (ESPs) and supports custom integrations as well. 

What’s Folderly Best for? 

Folderly for Email Deliverability and Integrations

  • Folderly ensures 100% email deliverability with its advanced algorithms to enhance sender score. It maintains positive interactions with your emails and offers a comprehensive spam trigger checker.
  • The automated warm-up maintenance feature helps to maintain high email deliverability at all times. Folderly increases email open rates and reply rates for your email campaigns. 
  • Folderly, besides offering a Chrome extension, integrates with all major CRMs, ESPs, and marketing & sales automation tools. For example, Microsoft Office 365, SendGrid, Google Workspace, Gmail, Outlook, Amazon AWS, etc. 

Folderly for Ease of Use & Data Safety

  • You can connect your mailbox (with any email service provider) in just one click. The user interface is easy-to-navigate and as they offer a customer success manager, it’s easy to set it up. 
  • Folderly offers GDPR and CCPA-enabled solutions for its sixers data protection. 

Folderly for Spam Checking and SPF Generation

  • Folderly can check spam-trigger words from email templates to reduce the risks of getting flagged as spam by the ESPs. 
  • This tool performs SPF (Sender Privacy Framework) check and creates SPF records for your domain.

Mixmax

Mixmax Homepage

Mixmax is a powerful and comprehensive email productivity tool. It manages email outreach. It is used in email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. 

It is best for email communication as it optimizes it by providing various features such as email scheduling, email tracking, and various templates, which can help save time; there are also features such as polls, surveys, and CRM. 

What’s Mixmax Best for? 

It is one of the only tools in the market with a free plan giving its users a gist of its uses. It enhances email communication through instant scheduling, reminders, sends later, mail merge, surveys & polls, etc. 

Email tracking and analytics

It leads to the effective management of large campaigns by providing detailed email analytics. It helps to track the metrics such as open rates, bounce rates, email deliverability rates, download  tracking, etc.

Email Scheduling

It has the special feature of email scheduling that allows scheduling an email by entering a date and time, boosting email communication effectiveness.  

Email personalization to boost engagement

Automation software helps personalize emails to boost email outreach and sales campaign engagements.

Save custom templates

Already composed emails and drafts can be used as a template to enhance future campaigns. It increases effectiveness as there is no need for a new template during every new campaign.   

Folderly Vs. Mixmax Vs. Smartlead – Is Smartlead the Best Choice?

Smartlead Homepage

Smartlead is a comprehensive cold emailing tool for omnichannel outreach. With its unlimited mailboxes and automated email warmups, this sales engagement tool ensures your emails always land in your prospects’ inboxes. 

It offers auto-rotating email accounts, so you don’t need to worry about daily sending limits and sender reputation. Smartlead’s omnichannel outreach lets you automate your entire sales flow with LinkedIn activities, cold emails, and follow-up emails. You get a full whitelabel experience at Smartlead. Moreover, its useful integrations and the master inbox for managing all conversations makes it an all-in-one cold outreach tool. 

What's Smartlead Best for? 

Smartlead for Deliverability and Lead Gen Process

  • Smartlead offers unique IP servers for every campaign it sends out. 
  • This outreach tool offers unlimited warmups to maintain optimum deliverability
  • Smartlead improves a high sender reputation with natural (human-like) AI conversations. It also protects your reputation by auto-moving emails from spam folders to the primary inbox. This tool uses unique identifiers to cloak all warmup emails from being recognized by automation parsers. 
  • Moreover, it offers Smart-Adjust, which defends your live campaigns against low reply rates. 
  • You can automate your lead generation process with Smartlead’s powerful cold emailing API infrastructure, which allows you to auto-create and manage campaigns. 

Smartlead for Cold Email Automation

  • Smartlead offers unlimited sender accounts for its users. You can create campaigns and auto-rotate mailboxes in one click. 
  • It lets you create omnichannel outreach comprising cold emails, follow-up emails, and LinkedIn interactions. Also, you can scale your outreach across WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. 
  • You can set up custom-conditional email sending triggers and create sub sequences based on lead behavior. 

Smartlead for LinkedIn Outreach 

  • Just like Smartlead’s cold emailing feature, you can send unlimited Connection Requests on LinkedIn by auto-rotating multiple LinkedIn profiles.
  • You can perform other activities such as visit profiles, send messages, and like recent posts. Besides, you can also reply to all your connections from the master inbox.

Smartlead for Sales Engagement Automation

  • Smartlead presents a master inbox to maintain and reply to all conversations from one dashboard. 
  • You can track email open rates, click-throughs, and reply rates so you can measure what works and implement necessary changes. 
  • SDRs can save hundreds of hours with Smartlead’s auto mailbox rotation. This tool also offers a full whitelabel experience.  

So Which Tool Should You Choose – Folderly, Mixmax, or Smartlead? 

By now, it’s quite evident that Folderly, Lemlist, and Smartlead fit in for most of the use cases lead gen & marketing agencies and sales leaders look for. However, there are some differences on how these SaaS tools execute the use cases to address (execute) them. 

So if you are still reluctant to pick the right tool for your business, let’s have a quick look at two major deciding factors – pricing and the customer reviews. 

Folderly Pricing

If you are not sure which plan fits your needs, Folderly offers a 30-minute demo call to help you choose the right plan based on your business needs. 

Folderly Pricing Page
  • Cold Email (for cold outbound campaigns): $200/month/mailbox
  • Email Marketing (for warm customer engagement): Customizable pricing based on your individual sending volumes.

Mixmax Pricing

It comes with a free plan for a team under 5 members and upgrades its plan to custom pricing. Pricing is flexible according to one’s choice.

Mixmax Pricing Page

Free Plan

Calendering and email productivity for teams under 5

  • $0 per user, per month

SMB

Email campaigns and calendaring for teams

  • $29 per user, per month

Growth

Sales automation for growing teams

  • $49 per user, per month

Growth + Salesforce 

Sales engagement with Salesforce integration

  • $69 per user, per month

Enterprise

Enterprise controls & custom setup for larger teams 

  • Custom pricing as per the plan chosen 

Smartlead Pricing

Smartlead Pricing Page

Smartlead offers four pricing plans for marketing agencies, sales teams, and lead generation agencies. You can start for free with its 14-day free trial (no credit card required and email warm ups included) and choose the right plan based on your needs. 

Smartlead Pricing Page
  • Basic Plan: $39/month 
  • Popular Plan: $79/month
  • Pro Plan: $94/month 
  • Custom Plan: Fully customizable pricing

Additionally, as add-ons, you can avail 1 client at $29/month and 1 LinkedIn at $59/month. Smartlead offers a great money-traction for all kinds of businesses among all its competitors. And the pricing differentiation happens mostly on service level (e.g., custom CRM, webhooks, API access and integrations, active support, unlimited seats, etc.). 

What do Users Say About Folderly Vs. Mixmax Vs. Smartlead? 

Folderly Reviews

Folderly G2 review
Folderly G2 review

Mixmax Reviews

Mixmax G2 review
Mixmax G2 review

Smartlead Reviews

Smartlead G2 review
Smartlead G2 review

The Final Analysis: Pros & Cons of Folderly, Mixmax, and Smartlead

Folderly Pros

  • Offers a customer success manager
  • Helps in increasing deliverability and email warm ups.

Folderly Cons

  • The user interface is not very intuitive; onboarding might be slow
  • Price per inbox is very high 

Mixmax Pros

  • Easy automation of follow-up sequences
  • Excellent email templates
  • Real time email open notifications

Mixmax Cons

  • Customer support could be faster
  • Sometimes it doesn’t track emails
  • The UI is not very intuitive  

Smartlead Pros

  • Offers unlimited sender account and unlimited warmups
  • Unique IP servers for campaigns
  • A/B testing 
  • Custom CRM, webhooks & integrations, and API access
  • Omnichannel outreach across email and LinkedIn
  • End-to-end whitelabel experience – you can have the app under your domain
  • Auto-rotating email accounts to maximize email outreach 
  • Auto-categorization of lead intent and subsequences
  • You can track your campaigns’ performance – open rates, clicks, and reply rates 
  • Master inbox for managing all conversations in one place
  • Responsive support team and smooth onboarding

Smartlead Cons

  • Smartlead won’t run on mobile devices/applications
  • There are webhooks and API access, but not any native integrations (HubSpot integration is coming soon) 

Conclusion

In this article, we analyzed how Folderly, Mixmax, and Smartlead vary in terms of the features, product use cases, pricing plans, and customer feedback. We have also discussed the best features and pros & cons of each of the platforms. 

We hope this comprehensive comparison makes decision-making easier for you. If you are looking to grow your business at scale and nail outreach and 7x your chances of meeting bookings, we recommend giving Smartlead a try. 

You can avail a 14-day free trial (no credit cards required) to explore the platform and only pay for what you actually need. 

Frequently asked questions

General Questions

What are active leads?

Active leads are the contacts you upload in Smartlead, similar to contacts in HubSpot; if you upload 1000 leads to a campaign, they are considered 1000 active leads. If you upload similar leads to a new campaign, they are not considered a “new active lead” as they already exist in our system.

Do you provide mailboxes, or do I need to connect my own?

We don’t offer mailboxes yet. You need to get your own dedicated list of mailboxes using popular providers like Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, and others that exist in the market. Once you get them, follow our detailed guides to connect them quickly.

Do you offer guides and articles on succeeding with cold emails?

Absolutely, one of our most popular guides can be found right here. It's been used by a large percentage of users to go from zero to cold emailing experts. Covering all topics from email infrastructure to copywriting and lead sourcing.

Is another tool needed for warmups?

No, Smartlead has over 200,000 highly reputed mailboxes connected. The advantage you get along with naturalized AI conversations is access to aged domains you will never find in any warmup tool.

What is the API commonly used for?

It is used popularly by agencies to automate their entire lead generation process as well as to connect Smartlead to external tools to push and pull data from. You can also connect to 1000s of apps using Zapier.

What type of businesses sees the most success with Smartlead?

Anyone that can close deals from demos will succeed with Smartlead. It works for Sales companies, Marketing agencies, SaaS businesses, Recruitment, and offline companies (like construction).

Do you provide me with lead sources?

We do not provide you with leads. You will need to use other data providers. These leads can be automatically added to Smartlead using our API or bulk uploaded via our CSV upload system.

Do you integrate with any CRMs?

We're building native integrations with Hubspot, Salesforce, Close, Pipedrive, and many more. The best part, due to our open API and Webhook infrastructure, you can connect to any CRM in the world without an issue.

How many team members can I add?

You can add an unlimited number of team members, as well as assign them roles and authority access.

Do you have custom plans beyond the Pro plan?

Yes, it's common for many people to move to Custom plans after a few weeks. You can view all the options for up to 10M leads on the subscription page once you sign up for free.

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