I know this is an old post, but thought I'd add a new tool we've created - If No Reply.

I think I’m in a good (albeit biased) position to answer this question because I’ve tried a lot of competitors - from Outreach, PersistIQ, Reply, SendBloom, Salestools, QuickMail, Woodpecker, Yesware, MixMax, Rebump, GMass to name a few (and now we use If No Reply ourselves).

I think can help point you in the right direction, or at least save a bit of time with your research.

Of the competitors, we ended up paying for Reply - and we were customers for a while. Lots of the platforms were clearly aimed at enterprises - such as Outreach, PersistIQ, SendBloom, and even arranging a free trial proved to be quite a frustrating experience. Meanwhile the Gmail tools tended to not do sales automation very well (they were focused mainly around email tracking or were so feature-rich that sending sequences took a back-seat).

Reply seemed to have done a pretty good job as a platform, and in my opinion was much better than similar products such as QuickMail.

One of the downsides of Reply was that it didn't sync with Gmail especially well. Sometimes emails wouldn't come through on Reply - it was quite a big problem for us (as you might expect). I imagine this is something that will get better over time, but putting that aside, there were other things we weren't totally happy with. Reply was a separate platform so you needed to learn how to use a separate platform, and there were a lot of features we didn't need or use (e.g. they have a whole prospecting section now). They're really a suite, whereas we wanted something more simple that worked with Gmail.

Another problem (not just with Reply - but with most of the competition) - and this is especially relevant for cold emailing - was that personalisation took a back-seat. Most tools offered mail merge, but when cold emailing it's crucial to completely personalise each message by adding a short paragraph (e.g. "I was reading your blog post on xyz and found abc really interesting."). Most of the tools we tried didn't offer this at all, and some were truly terrible (e.g. ReBump seems super spammy). With some tools it was at least possible to personalise messages beyond mail merge, but the workflow was convoluted (typically add a contact --> add them to a campaign --> make sure the campaign settings are such that the email won't send straight away --> go into the campaign --> edit the message… rinse and repeat for every contact!).

I think some people might have different priorities, and I still think Reply is a good option. However, it wasn’t the best option for us (and if you’re doing cold emailing from Gmail then I expect it won’t be the best option for you either).

The best option in my opinion is the tool we developed for this purpose - If No Reply. We built it to be distinct in 2 key areas - 1) simplicity, and 2) personalisation. It sits right within Gmail, so couldn't be simpler to learn. As for personalisation, you can preview and edit every aspect of every message before you hit the send button. Here are some of the features:

• Send from Gmail
• Automate follow-up messages
• Reply detection
• Templates (great for cold email campaigns)
• Dashboard showing people you’ve emailed
• Blacklist/opt-out recipients
• Responsive support
• API access

If you’d like to try it out, we offer a 14 day free trial - just sign up at www.ifnoreply.com (no credit card required).

If you’d like a demo, we have a video available on the homepage of ifnoreply.com