Starlight vs
Instantly

Starlight writes one researched email to the right person. Instantly is built to blast. Replies come from the message, not the mailbox count.

Start free See the difference

Free plan, no credit card. Every message waits for your approval.

One prompt searches the web for your best-fit buyers

See the difference

Where Starlight pulls ahead of Instantly, row by row.

Starlight vs Instantly: a feature-by-feature comparison
Feature	Starlight	Instantly
Built for	Personalized 1:1 outbound	High-volume cold email
Lead discovery	Describe your buyer; the agents work out the searches	Filter the included lead database yourself
Outreach writing	Written for each person from live research	Templates with spintax and AI assist
Human review	Review mode or autopilot, per agent	Campaign sends once launched
Sending model	Your own mailbox, business hours, recipient timezone	Unlimited mailboxes with rotation and warmup
LinkedIn outreach	Our own Chrome extension, aware of who you're connected to	Email-centric
Scheduling	Native booking pages and links included	Via integrations
Pricing	Free plan, then pay for what you use	No free plan; outreach from $47/mo, bundles from $85/mo

Why Starlight wins

Live research on each person. Not a template with {{first_name}}.
Email plus LinkedIn in one cadence, from our own extension.
Every draft scored. You send what you'd put your name on.
Your inbox, their timezone, native booking, free to start.

What you'd still do in Instantly

Volume is the product. You inherit the deliverability problem it creates.
You still pick the list and write the copy — or accept merge-field mail.
Email only. No LinkedIn, no booking, no quality judge, no free plan.

What using it actually looks like

You describe the buyer. Starlight does the rest, and shows you its work.

Starlight's search page, where an ideal customer is described in plain language

Describe the buyer. That's the setup. One sentence about who you're trying to reach. Starlight works out the searches, runs them, and keeps digging once the obvious results run out.

A Starlight contact record showing a match score and the reasoning behind it

Bad-fit prospects never reach you. Everyone is scored against your ideal customer before you see them, with the reasoning shown. You spend your attention on the ones worth having.

Starlight's metrics dashboard with a written summary above the charts

You'll know if it's working. Your numbers come with a plain-English read on what changed and what to do next, instead of a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.

AI outreach you'd put your name on.

The worry with an AI sales agent is simple: what is it saying to people, and would you have said it? Starlight answers that by showing you. Every draft is graded before it reaches you, and the weak ones are rewritten automatically.

Grounded
Every claim traces back to something real about that person or their company. Invented details get caught.
Human
It has to read like you wrote it on a good day, not like a template with the gaps filled in.
On brief
It does what you actually asked for. Ask for a reply and it won't quietly push for a call instead.

What's left takes a few seconds each to approve, edit, or delete. Once an agent has earned it, you can let it send on its own.

Starlight's Messages page showing drafted outreach waiting for review and approval

5xMore replies to cold outreach

3xMore qualified meetings per rep

50%More pipeline per rep in 90 days

5xFaster from first touch to booked

60%Fewer leads lost to slow follow-up

Why you switch from Instantly

More mailboxes do not create more meetings. They create more ignore, more spam folders, and a deliverability project you then have to staff. That is the project Instantly is built around. It is the wrong project.

Starlight is built for the lever that still moves: the right person, a true observation, a line you'd send. Agents pick the list, write the copy, grade it, and put LinkedIn next to it. Your own inbox does the rest.

If the last thousand emails didn't book the meeting, the next thousand won't either. Start free and send twenty that could only have been written for those twenty people.

Frequently
asked questions

No, and that's deliberate. Starlight sends from your own Gmail or Outlook accounts with warm-up-aware daily limits and business-hours staggering in the recipient's timezone. It's built for personalized 1:1 outreach, not bulk campaigns across dozens of rotating mailboxes.

Yes. Starlight sources contacts from established B2B data providers and the open web, and you reach them by describing your ideal customer in plain language rather than assembling filters. There's no separate data subscription to buy.

Starlight shows SPF, DKIM, and DMARC status for every connected mailbox, respects warm-up-aware daily limits, spaces consecutive sends, and schedules into the recipient's working hours. Rotating dozens of mailboxes is a problem you only have at volume. Sending fewer, better messages from your own inbox avoids most of it.