Smartlead Vs. Woodpecker Vs. Mailshake: Which is Best for Your Business?

Are you confused between Smartlead, Woodpecker, and Mailshake 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

• Woodpecker is a powerful tool for cold email automation, offering personalized email sequences and scheduling. It provides analytics, real-time tracking, A/B testing, and custom variables for targeted campaigns. Woodpecker integrates with LinkedIn for omnichannel outreach and offers an Android caller app for calls and follow-up reminders. CRM integration supports smooth sales processes, while collaboration features enhance team efficiency. This tool prioritizes email deliverability with warm-ups, Bounce Shield protection, and deliverability monitoring.
• Mailshake is a versatile tool for omnichannel outreach, combining cold emails, LinkedIn, and cold calling. It offers follow-up automation, customizable templates, and trigger-based emails. Mailshake enhances deliverability, analyzes spam and sender scores, and optimizes domain settings. It integrates with popular CRM and productivity tools, provides real-time data metrics, A/B testing, and a Data Finder tool for prospecting. Mailshake includes an AI email writing tool, SHAKEspeare, and a user-friendly Chrome extension.
• 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.

Woodpecker

Woodpecker is a comprehensive cold emailing tool that helps B2B companies scale their outreach. With a range of powerful features like email automation, personalization, follow-up automation, team collaboration, etc, it empowers sales teams to automate and personalize their email outreach, track recipient engagement, and manage their leads effectively. You can also perform A/B testing to your email campaigns to ensure optimal outreach. 

What’s Woodpecker Best for?

Woodpecker for Cold Email Automation 

• Woodpecker enables you to create and schedule personalized email sequences, allowing for efficient and automated outreach. You can ensure a targeted approach by deciding the timing and cadence of emails.
• It offers analytics and real-time tracking. You can monitor email opens and click-through rates to measure campaign performance and optimize follow-ups. 
• Woodpecker allows you to insert custom variables, such as recipient names or company details, into their emails to give them a personal touch. It also offers intelligent follow-up reminders and automation. It means you can set up reminders based on recipient behavior or specific time intervals.
• The A/B testing feature allows you to experiment with different email subject lines, content variations, and call-to-action (CTA).

Woodpecker for Sales Assistance

• You can integrate LinkedIn activities automation. Moreover, you can combine email, phone call, and LinkedIn activities to ensure omnichannel outreach. 
• The dedicated android caller app lets you cold/warm call to your prospects. You can also set follow-up reminders. 
• Woodpecker integrates with popular CRMs and other tools to ensure that your data is synched and the sales process is smooth.
• The platform facilitates collaboration within sales teams with features like shared email templates, email campaign sharing, and user roles and permissions. 

Woodpecker for Deliverability 

Woodpecker stresses on maintaining high email deliverability rates for its users. It can predict and protect your deliverability while building sender reputation. It performs warm ups and protects deliverability with Bounce Shield. The deliverability monitor lets you keep track of your mailbox health. 

Mailshake

Mailshake is an email automation tool that helps sales teams to supercharge their email campaigns and drive meaningful connections with their audience. This tool offers an intuitive campaign builder to create and manage personalized email campaigns. You can also access customizable email templates and integration with popular CRMs and productivity tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Google Workspace. With its campaign builder, advanced personalization options, analytics, integrations, email deliverability tools, and automated follow-ups, Mailshake.com empowers you to execute effective email campaigns, nurture relationships, and drive more sales. 

What’s Mailshake Best for? 

Mailshake for Omnichannel Outreach

• Mailshake lets you run multichannel outreach combining cold emails, LinkedIn, and cold calling. You can send LinkedIn messages, create sequences, visit profiles, and send connection requests to your prospects. 
• Mailshake allows you to set follow-up automation for your cold outreach campaigns. It also offers you a repository of customizable follow-up email templates. Moreover, you can set trigger-based follow-up emails to automate the entire sales flow. 
• Within Mailshake, you can add recipients to a campaign individually or in bulk by uploading a CSV file/Spreadsheet.

Mailshake for Deliverability

• Once you connect your existing/new email account, Mailshake’s warm up tool automatically works on increasing the sender reputation by opening, replying, and removing emails from spam. 
• You can analyze your spam score and sender score to ensure landing in leads’ inboxes. 
• The email deliverability setup tool checks your domain for optimal delivery such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records. 
• SHAKEspeare, the AI email writing tool, can write personalized email copies for you in minutes. It can generate up to 3 variations of the same email.  

Mailshake for Prospecting and Integrations

• Mailshake offers a plethora of native integration with other CRM and productivity tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, GSuite, Outlook, Calendly, Zoho, SMTP, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.
• This cold outreach tool also offers a Chrome extension. 
• Mailshake offers real time access to data metrics such as opens, clicks, and replies for every campaign. Moreover, you can A/B test (split test) your individual emails as well as entire campaigns to ensure better results. 
• The Data Finder tool lets you find prospects based on company names, locations, and job roles. Within Mailshake, you can identify your leads and start cadences in one place. 

Woodpecker Vs. Mailshake Vs. Smartlead – Is Smartlead the Best Choice?

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 – Woodpecker, Mailshake, or Smartlead? 

By now, it’s quite evident that Woodpecker, Mailshake, 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. 

Woodpecker Pricing

Woodpecker offers a 7-day free trial for every customer. 

• Cold Email: $49/month/email slot
• Sales Assistant: $59/month/email slot
• Agency: $54/month/email slot 

Mailshake Pricing

Engagement

• Email Outreach: $58/month/user
• Sales Engagement: $83/month/user

Data Finder

• Free
• Starter: $49/month
• Pro: $99/month 
• Enterprise: $249/month 

Smartlead Pricing

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. 

• 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 Woodpecker Vs. Mailshake Vs. Smartlead? 

Woodpecker Reviews

Mailshake Reviews

Smartlead Reviews

The Final Analysis: Pros & Cons of Woodpecker, Mailshake, and Smartlead

Woodpecker Pros

• Intuitive user interface and real-time analytics tracking
• Responsive customer support team
• Automates cold email outreach and allows you to customize even the first message
• Unlimited team members/multiple team members per slot 

Woodpecker Cons

• Day wise campaign report is only available for a month
• The task of changing sequences is a manual and daunting task
• Limited to 7 follow-ups 

Mailshake Pros

• Comprehensive email sequencing; offers campaign and list management  
• Integration with CRM for automatic import of leads
• Offers Zapier enabled integrations for advanced automation
• Minimal learning curve
• Intuitive user interface

Mailshake Cons

• Adding template in a campaign can be confusing 
• Works only with Gmail/G Suite accounts.
• Lack of detailed analytics

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 Woodpecker, Mailshake, 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.