What 5,631 Instantly.ai reviews actually say — a data analysis

By Jatinder Singh · Last recalculated November 8, 2026 · Based on 5,631 star-rated reviews out of 6,226 total indexed items · text analysis scoped to G2 + Trustpilot (5,337 reviews) · How we built this →

1. The two big platforms disagree — by a lot

The same product scores 4.76 on G2 and 3.83 on Trustpilot — a gap of at least 0.93 stars. The starkest number is the 1-star share: 0.7% on G2 versus 25.6% on Trustpilot. That is not a rounding difference. It means the two platforms are collecting fundamentally different populations of reviewer.

Precision note: G2 allows half-star ratings; the 4.76 above uses whole-star rounding, which rounds G2 down. Using the exact half-star ratings we hold for 93.3% of G2 reviews, G2's average is 4.82, which makes the gap wider than stated, not narrower. Trustpilot uses whole stars only, so its 3.83 is exact. We publish the conservative number.

2. Trustpilot is bimodal — people either love it or want their money back

Trustpilot ratings cluster at the extremes: 66.2% are 5-star and 25.6% are 1-star, meaning 91.8% of all Trustpilot reviews sit at one end or the other. Only 4.5% are 4-star. A normal product has a middle. This one barely does.

G2's distribution has the ordinary shape you would expect, with a real 4-star population (17.9%) and almost no 1-star tail:

3. We tested the obvious explanation. It was wrong.

The intuitive theory is that G2 looks better because its reviews are incentivised — vendors run G2 campaigns offering gift cards. G2 flags these, so we checked rather than assumed. Across 2,903 G2 reviews where we hold the flag, only 46 (1.6%) are marked incentivised — and they average 4.22 versus 4.86 for organic ones. Incentivised reviews score lower, not higher.

So incentivisation does not explain the gap. We had this hypothesis, tested it against our own data, and it failed. The real explanation is in the next section.

4. What people actually complain about: billing, not the product

We scanned the full text of every rated G2 and Trustpilot review for recurring themes and compared how often each appears in negative reviews (1–2 star) versus positive ones (4–5 star). The difference between those two columns is the signal — a theme that shows up equally in both tells you nothing.

Billing is the story. It appears in 39.5% of negative reviews but only 2.6% of positive ones — the widest gap of any theme. Reviewers are not mostly saying the software fails to send email. They are saying they were charged after cancelling, could not get a refund, or could not reach anyone about it.

The mirror image is just as informative: deliverability and warm-up — the core job of the product — appears more in positive reviews (26.5%) than negative ones (19.1%). It is what people praise, not what they complain about.

And an honest caveat about a number that looks dramatic but is not: support is mentioned in 48.9% of negative reviews — but also 54.6% of positive ones. It is the single most-discussed topic on both sides. People rave about support and rage about it in almost equal measure, so "reviewers mention support" is not evidence of a support problem. We are flagging this because it would be easy to quote the 48.9% alone and imply something the data does not support.

5. Both platforms are trending down, independently

This is the finding we would most like to be wrong about, because two unrelated platforms moving the same direction is hard to dismiss as noise.

Read this carefully. Years with thin review counts are volatile and we exclude any year with fewer than 15 reviews on a platform. A declining average does not by itself prove the product got worse — as a tool scales it onboards less-qualified users, and review mix shifts. But the direction is consistent across two independent platforms with different populations, which is harder to explain away than a single platform's drift.

6. Where the negative reviews live

333 of 372 (90%) of all 1–2 star reviews across both platforms are on Trustpilot. G2 contributes just 39. Combined with the billing finding, that is the explanation for the whole gap: Trustpilot is where people go to dispute a charge; G2 is where people go to evaluate software. Neither platform is lying. They are answering different questions, and reading only one of them gives you a distorted picture.

What we'd tell a buyer

On the evidence in our corpus: the product's core function — sending cold email and getting it delivered — is what reviewers praise most consistently, across both platforms. The risk concentrated in the negative reviews is commercial, not technical: billing, cancellation and refunds. If you trial it, the reviews suggest paying attention to the subscription and credit terms and keeping your own records of cancellation.

We are not going to hand you a verdict out of 6,226 reviews, because your risk depends on your use case. Read the 1-star Trustpilot reviews and the G2 reviews and judge for yourself — every entry links to its original source.