Reply tries to be a one stop sales tool but constantly breaks down if you actually rely on your CRM, since its integrations are shallow, syncing is unreliable, and getting data out is a pain, so you end up building messy workarounds just to keep things running.
Unless you want to live entirely inside Reply and don't care about your CRM or surprise costs, skip it, anyone who values real CRM integration or transparent pricing will just get frustrated.
Gosh, where do we begin here... Our thoughts on Reply are strong here.
No, really—like we used Reply for years. I'm talking 7+ years. So much in-fact that we got quite close to one of the co-founders that broke off to create a competing service. Yeah, it's a competitive space.
We even met with Reply at Copper HQ back in 2020 to try and convince them (Reply) to build a deep white-labeled integration with Copper directly, because we used them with every single customer of ours:
Founder of Reply (Oleg) on the left, along with me and his team (I'm 2nd from the right)
Spoiler alert: this didn't come to fruition—Outfunnel is who Copper chose as their white-labeled partner in the end.
Reply, like many others, are touting AI all the things—take this with a grain of salt though. Just like everything else, they are trying to use OpenAI to improve email writing.
We will give credit where credit is due though, back in the day, before this AI trend even happened, they did have a pretty nifty email sentiment analysis when writing emails which helped keep you concise and portraying the right tone. It was beyond its time.
They, like Close, integrate VoIP in quite core to their tool—same issues arise as with Close, you're essentially choosing Reply as your VoIP, and none of this SMS or Call information is going to sync over to your CRM (you know, where you'd love to have it).
There's some additional cool features that they do have like email warm-up and email validation baked into the tool (via partners)—this is appreciated, but you'll continually pay for credits to use these things.
They focused most of their API on adding leads to the system. They essentially want it to be relatively easy to get data into Reply from other tools, but getting insights out of Reply to your other tools, this becomes way more limited.
For the core things though, their API does work well, and they even have a pretty robust Zapier integration connector.
Gosh, I hate listing their internal tech stack here as a limitation, but they are using quite old tech (.NET) built atop Azure, which shouldn't matter, but we had constant issues with emails actually sending out. They had regular CRON jobs running, and often they just wouldn't even trigger.
It's very much an example of a company trying to bake in all the features instead of actually getting the foundation right.
They'd ideally like you to just live in their tool day-to-day, so keep that in mind when it comes to the type of integrations they have out of the box. They feel more built just to check a marketing box rather than to enable you in your CRM.
We invested hundreds of hours over the years building highly custom integrations to sync data from various CRM's over to Reply, and then back.
Don't let their pricing page fool you—they are incredibly expensive for this tool. Their free tier isn't even the tool, it's just a glimpse into how you can prospect to get leads in the system, so that you can pay them to actually send the outreach.
They charge per-seat (which isn't usually how marketing automation companies charge—again, they are trying to act more like a CRM in some ways, pricing included. This is where we highly recommend just purchasing a single seat and sharing it by adding email aliases if needed (oh, and they charge for that too).
Yeah, they charge for everything additional. Don't expect to get in at what's listed on the pricing page, they will upsell you in every single aspect of their product. To be fair, some of it makes sense since they are external integrations with 3rd party tools offering value, but in other ways, they are just being a bit 😅 (charging for adding email aliases, really?)
If you're genuinely planning on using a proper CRM core to your business, we'd recommend using a tool that actually encourages this behavior, versus trying to be a CRM of their own (yes, Reply is trying to do everything).
We were incredibly bullish on Reply, it worked well, just required tons of custom integration in order to get it working with Copper, Pipedrive, and HubSpot. Building kludgy workarounds like custom fields specific for Reply for merge fields to work how we needed them.
This was until Outfunnel came onto the scene with the approach of:
Your CRM is your company's lifeblood—what if we helped you not only keep your CRM in-sync with your email automation data, but enrich it as well?
This is where the 2 paths diverged, and Outfunnel came out as the winner actually trying to improve your CRM, whereas Reply is trying to dip their toes into the CRM world, trying to convince you that "your sales team doesn't need a CRM when you have Reply" 🙄
All-in-all, this was a tough one to write... It hits very close to home, and we absolutely adored Reply for half a decade. Oleg and team, if you're reading this, I'm sorry 🫶
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