Why Sales Teams Are Switching from Salesloft in 2026
Salesloft is a pioneer. They helped invent the sales engagement category, serve thousands of enterprise teams, and maintain a strong 4.5-star rating on G2 with over 4,260 reviews.
So why are so many teams evaluating alternatives right now?
We analyzed G2 and Gartner Peer Insights reviews, talked to sales leaders who recently switched, and dug into the trends reshaping sales engagement. Here are the seven real reasons driving the exodus.
1. The Pricing Has Become Unsustainable
This is the number one reason teams cite. Salesloft doesn't publish pricing, which itself is a red flag for growing teams that need predictable costs.
Based on vendor intelligence data:
- Base pricing: $125–180 per user per month (annual contract required)
- Dialer add-on: $300–400 per user per year
- Minimum seats: Typically 3+
- Annual increases: 10–15% is common at renewal
But here's what really stings: Salesloft is just one piece of the stack. To run a functioning SDR operation, you also need:
- Prospect data enrichment (ZoomInfo, Apollo): $10K–30K/year
- Intent data (Bombora, 6sense): $10K–25K/year
- Website visitor identification (Clearbit, Warmly): $5K–15K/year
- AI chatbot (Drift, now part of Salesloft but priced separately): $5K–20K/year
A 5-person SDR team on Salesloft easily spends $50K–80K/year across all the tools they need. That's before you count CRM costs.
As one sales ops leader put it in their G2 review: "The platform itself is good, but the total cost when you add what's missing is hard to justify at our size."
2. Limited Daily Email Caps Throttle Outreach
This complaint appears repeatedly in recent reviews on Software Advice and G2. Salesloft enforces daily email sending limits that teams say feel arbitrary and restrictive.
For high-volume SDR teams, these caps mean:
- Reps can't work through their full daily list
- Sequences back up and timing gets thrown off
- Workarounds (splitting sequences, using multiple accounts) create management overhead
The caps exist for deliverability reasons — fair enough. But competitors like Apollo and Instantly.ai offer higher limits with built-in deliverability protection, making the restriction feel like a product limitation rather than a feature.
3. The Dialer Is an Afterthought
Salesloft's dialer works. It's not bad. But it's an add-on, not a core strength, and SDR teams that rely on phone outreach feel the difference.
Common dialer complaints:
- Glitchy connections and audio quality issues (cited in multiple Software Advice reviews)
- Extra cost ($300–400/user/year) on top of already-expensive licensing
- No intelligent call routing — reps choose who to call manually
- Limited local presence options compared to dedicated dialers
For teams where the phone is 40–60% of their outreach mix, the dialer add-on model feels like nickel-and-diming. Platforms like MarketBetter include a smart dialer that connects to your intent signals — so reps call the hottest leads first, not just the next name on a list.
4. No Built-In Visitor Intelligence
Here's the biggest structural gap: Salesloft can't tell you who's on your website right now.
Think about that. You're paying $125+/user/month for a sales engagement platform, and it doesn't know that your hottest prospect just visited your pricing page. That data lives in a completely separate tool — and often doesn't flow into Salesloft in a useful way.
This matters because the single highest-converting SDR action is responding to a website visitor within 5 minutes. Research from InsideSales shows that responding within 5 minutes is 21x more effective than waiting 30 minutes.
Salesloft acquired Drift (AI chatbot) to partially address this, but:
- Drift is priced separately
- The integration is still evolving
- It doesn't feed visitor data into your cadence prioritization
Modern SDR platforms like MarketBetter were built with visitor identification as a core feature. When someone visits your site, your SDR sees it immediately — and the platform tells them what to do about it.
5. The "Revenue Orchestration" Pivot Adds Complexity
Salesloft has aggressively expanded from a sales engagement tool into a full "Revenue Orchestration Platform." That means Cadence, Conversations, Deals, Forecast, Rhythm, and AI Agents — all under one umbrella.
For enterprise teams with 100+ reps and dedicated sales ops, this expansion is valuable.
For SMB and mid-market teams? It's overwhelming.
Real complaints we've heard:
- "We only use Cadence and we're paying for five other modules we don't need"
- "The UI has gotten more complex with every update"
- "Onboarding new reps takes longer now because there's so much to learn"
When you're a 5-person SDR team, you don't need revenue orchestration. You need a tool that tells your reps exactly who to call, email, and message today — then gets out of the way.
6. Formatting Issues Hurt Professional Communication
This might seem minor, but it's a consistent complaint that affects daily work: email formatting in Salesloft doesn't always render correctly.
From Software Advice reviews:
- HTML formatting strips out or displays incorrectly in recipient inboxes
- Rich-text emails occasionally appear off-brand
- Template rendering can differ between what you see in Salesloft and what the prospect receives
For SDRs sending hundreds of personalized emails daily, even occasional formatting issues erode trust and make your outreach look unprofessional.
7. The AI-Native Generation Leap
Perhaps the biggest reason teams are looking elsewhere isn't about Salesloft's weaknesses — it's about the leap in what newer platforms can do.
Salesloft added AI features (Rhythm, AI Agents, Smart Replies) to an existing platform architecture. These are additions, not foundations.
AI-native platforms built from scratch can:
- Identify website visitors and surface them in real-time
- Generate daily SDR playbooks based on intent signals, not just CRM data
- Automate research for every prospect before first touch
- Route hot leads to AI chatbots for instant engagement
It's the difference between adding GPS to a car designed without it versus building a car around navigation from day one.
Where Are Teams Going?
Based on our conversations with teams that have switched, the destinations break into three categories:
1. Simpler + Cheaper (Volume-focused)
- Apollo.io — All-in-one prospecting + sequences at a fraction of the cost
- Instantly.ai — Pure email automation, $30/month starting price
- Lemlist — Email + LinkedIn outreach with creative personalization
2. Similar Enterprise (Feature-rich alternatives)
- Outreach — Salesloft's closest competitor, stronger A/B testing
- HubSpot Sales Hub — For teams already on HubSpot CRM
- Groove (Clari) — For Salesforce-native teams
3. Full-Stack SDR Platforms (The New Category)
- MarketBetter — Combines visitor ID, AI chatbot, smart dialer, and daily playbook
- Common Room — Signal-based outreach (more community/PLG focused)
- Unify — Intent data + sequences in one platform
The third category is growing fastest because it addresses the fundamental limitation: sales engagement platforms automate outreach execution but don't solve outreach intelligence.
How to Know It's Time to Switch
If you're nodding along to any of these, it might be time to evaluate:
- Your total SDR stack cost exceeds $10K/user/year
- You're using 4+ tools to run daily SDR operations
- Reps spend 30+ minutes per day deciding who to contact
- You can't tell when a target account visits your website
- New reps take 3+ weeks to ramp on your tool stack
- You're paying for modules (Deals, Forecast) your SDRs don't use
- Your renewal quote increased 15%+ with no additional value
Making the Switch Without Disruption
Worried about migration? It's simpler than you think:
- Export your cadences/sequences — Most platforms import standard CSV data
- Migrate contacts in batches — Don't try to move everything at once
- Run parallel for 30 days — Keep Salesloft active while onboarding the new tool
- Focus on one team first — Pilot with your highest-performing SDR pod
- Measure speed-to-lead — The #1 metric to compare old vs. new
See how MarketBetter replaces Salesloft's entire stack in one platform →