lemlist is a good product with a real brand behind it, and if email is your main channel this comparison is easy: use lemlist. What follows is about the other case, when LinkedIn is where your buyers actually reply and you want the message built for the person rather than for the sequence.
At a glance
Entry price
Conflicting figures: ~$133 Basic on aggregators, 490€–1,480€/user/month per a French reseller. No self-serve pricing page found.
Pricing model
Per seat, sales-led
How the AI writes
No generative writing documented. Outreach described as multichannel campaign animation.
Positioning
All-in-one omnichannel acquisition platform with a bundled B2B contact database.
Email-first versus LinkedIn-first
lemlist was built around cold email and grew outward. LinkedIn is a step inside a multichannel sequence: a visit, an invite, a message slot. That works, and for teams whose pipeline is 80% email it is the right architecture. Spruce goes the other way. LinkedIn is the whole product, so the profile (the headline, the last three roles, the company's stage, the posts) is available to the model at the moment of writing, rather than reduced to a handful of merge variables.
Where enrichment stops
lemlist's agentic enrichment reads a LinkedIn profile and returns fields: seniority, role history, company signals. Those fields feed a sequence. What they cannot do is stop the send. If a prospect comes back as a poor fit, they still enter the campaign you put them in, because the campaign is the unit of work.
Spruce puts a gate before the invitation. Every profile is scored against the personas you described, and a prospect who does not clear the bar never receives anything.
Who decides which message a prospect gets
In lemlist, you do. You build a campaign per persona, write the copy for that persona, and assign leads to it. When a prospect sits between two personas, someone has to make the call, campaign by campaign.
Spruce reads the profile and writes from it. There is no campaign to assign anyone to, so there is no routing decision to get wrong.
Where lemlist is clearly ahead
Deliverability tooling, warm-up, inbox rotation, reporting across a large sending volume, and an ecosystem of integrations built over nine years. If your motion is high-volume email with LinkedIn as a touch, none of what Spruce does compensates for giving that up.
Which to choose
If email is your primary channel, or you send at high volume across many domains, lemlist. Spruce is the better fit when LinkedIn is where your buyers reply, when you sell more than one thing, or when you are tired of maintaining a campaign per segment.
Side by side
| Spruce | lemlist | |
|---|---|---|
| Connection requests included | 800 per month, on every plan. | No published cap. You set the daily volume yourself, with a ramp-up. Their help centre suggests 20 a day as a recommendation, not an enforced limit. |
| Qualification before the invitation | Every profile is scored against the personas you declared. Profiles that do not match are dropped before the invitation goes out. | No scoring step of that kind. Filtering happens when you build the list. Whoever is in the campaign gets contacted. |
| Who writes the message | Each message is generated for that one prospect, from their profile. | You write the sequence. AI can draft it and variables fill the gaps, but it stays one template applied to a list. |
| Follow-ups | Also generated per prospect, inside the sequence you configured. | Steps written in advance and sent on conditions. Everyone on the same branch reads the same thing. |
| Campaigns to build and maintain | None. There is no campaign object in Spruce. | Yes. The campaign is the central object: you build it, fill it and keep it alive. |
| Sending behaviour | Paced over the working hours you define, and public holidays are skipped. | Sending windows and time zones you set per campaign. |
| Several LinkedIn accounts | Through linked Spruce accounts. It is not many accounts run from one workspace. | Extra senders are extra seats in the same workspace, billed per user. |
| After the reply | Manual setting on Essentiel. From Professionnel upwards, AI setting carries the conversation through to the booked meeting, then you close. | Replies land in the lemlist inbox and you take it from there. |
| Email and deliverability | Not offered. Spruce is LinkedIn only, deliberately. | lemlist wins here, plainly. Warm-up, sending infrastructure and cold email at volume are what the product was built for. Spruce does not do email at all. |
| Price | Essentiel 149€ per user per month, or 124€ per month billed annually (two months free). Professionnel 249€. Accompagnement 499€. | Email plan $69 per month for unlimited users. Multichannel $109 per user per month, $87 billed annually. Enterprise on quote. |
lemlist figures are taken from their public pricing page. If you are reading this more than a quarter after publication, check them yourself.
Where they are strong
- An established domain with real authority, online since 2017
- Their agentic enrichment reads LinkedIn profiles for role history and seniority
- Industrialised versus pages, each capturing both vs and alternative intent on a single URL
Where they fall short
- Email comes first here, and LinkedIn is a secondary channel rather than the core
- Enrichment hands back variables you plug into a sequence; it never gates the send
- Assigning personas and shifting the message stays manual work, campaign by campaign
- Add-on credits for phone lookup mount up
Our verdict
These are not really the same product. lemlist is the better email platform and we would not argue otherwise. Spruce is for teams whose pipeline lives on LinkedIn and who want each message written for the prospect in front of them, instead of for the segment they were sorted into.
Frequently asked
lemlist is cheaper. Why pay 149€?
Because you are not buying the same thing. lemlist gives you the machine to run campaigns. You still supply the list, the copy, the follow-ups and the time to keep all of it current. Spruce takes the qualification and the writing off your hands: every profile is scored against your personas before the invitation, and every message is written for that one person.
If your team already writes good sequences and has someone to maintain them, lemlist is cheaper and will stay cheaper. If that person does not exist, the 149€ replaces work rather than adding a tool.
Spruce includes 800 invitations a month. Can I send more with lemlist?
lemlist publishes no cap. The daily volume is a setting you control, with a ramp-up, and their help centre suggests 20 a day as a recommendation rather than a rule. There is no published ceiling to compare against.
In practice the ceiling is LinkedIn's, not the tool's. LinkedIn applies its own limits on top of whatever you configure, in lemlist and in Spruce alike. No tool raises them.
lemlist has AI as well. Is that not the same feature?
The AI in lemlist helps you write the sequence faster. That sequence is then sent to everyone on the list, with variables slotted in, which makes it a writing assistant.
In Spruce there is no sequence to write. Each message is generated from the prospect's own profile, and so are the follow-ups. It is a different job, even though both are called AI.
We already run lemlist. What does moving involve?
There is nothing to port, because there is no campaign to recreate. You describe the personas you want to reach, set your working hours, connect the LinkedIn account, and Spruce starts qualifying and writing.
Plenty of teams keep lemlist for email and let Spruce handle LinkedIn. The two are not mutually exclusive.
When is lemlist still the better choice?
When email is the main channel. If you want to reach thousands of people a month by email, warm up domains and watch deliverability closely, lemlist is built for that and Spruce is not. Spruce does LinkedIn and nothing else, on purpose.
Also when you want one tool covering a whole team's outbound across channels, with campaign reporting per rep. That is lemlist's ground.
Ready to structure your prospecting?
Join 150+ teams running smarter outbound with Spruce.
Essential plan free for 14 days · Cancel anytime · No commitment