lemlist vs Woodpecker
Woodpecker
One meter, and the API as a $20 add-on $39/lemlist vs Woodpecker reaches nearly the same place by different routes: the API, an MCP server and a CLI come with lemlist's $55 entry plan billed annually ($69 month to month), or with Woodpecker's $39 tier plus its $20 add-on, $59 a month. lemlist is the better integration target, at 20 requests per 2 seconds against one concurrent request, and its plan carries 50,000 emails a month. Woodpecker is the better purchase at 5,000 emails or fewer, with unlimited email verification including catch-all and unlimited email accounts in the base price. Concurrency, volume and LinkedIn decide it.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Sending APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | lemlist | Woodpecker |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | Unlimited users at $55, with the developer tools included | Priced on emails sent, then the API as a $20 add-on |
| Entry price | $55/mo annual | $39/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.008 per credit | $0.0078 per email sent |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs | Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | No free tier. 14-day trial with the Multichannel features and 200 credits. | No free tier. A trial of 14 days or 100 sent emails, whichever comes first, and the API add-on works during it. |
| GTM motion covered | Engage Enrich Signal | Engage |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneLinkedIn profileIntent and newsJob changes | Work emailLinkedIn profile |
| MCP server | Yes https://app.lemlist.com/mcp | Yes https://api.woodpecker.co/mcp/v1 |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server Webhooks |
| Auth | API key over HTTP Basic, with an empty username. OAuth on the MCP server and CLI | API key in an x-api-key header |
| Rate limits | 20 requests per 2 seconds per API key, on every route. Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers on every response. | One request at a time, 6 queued, 15 second queue limit, counted per account rather than per key. Unlimited calls a month. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | API, MCP and CLI on the cheapest plan | One meter, and the API as a $20 add-on |
Pick each one when
lemlist
- Concurrency: 20 requests per 2 seconds against one request at a time.
- Unlimited users and email senders, with LinkedIn, SMS and calls on Multichannel.
- Contact data from 25-plus providers in the same account, $16 for 2,000 credits.
Woodpecker
- Small volume: $39 a month for 5,000 emails sent.
- Unlimited email verification, including catch-all, at no extra cost.
- No feature tiers to be gated by: one emails-sent meter and add-ons you tick.
A sender's rate card is not the part that bites, and none of what does is on a pricing page. Confirm the API is on the plan you intend to buy, then run one real sequence of 200 contacts through each on a mailbox you have already warmed. Afterwards, compare what the API tells you: which replies it classifies, what it reports on a bounce, and whether the webhook arrives at all.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. lemlist lists 5 tiers and Woodpecker lists 6. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | lemlist | Woodpecker |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Email, $55 | 5,000 emails, $39 |
| Tiers published | 5 | 6 |
| Free tier | No free tier. 14-day trial with the Multichannel features and 200 credits. | No free tier. A trial of 14 days or 100 sent emails, whichever comes first, and the API add-on works during it. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.008 per credit | $0.0078 per email sent |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
lemlist
lemlist publishes 5 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $55 to $87, with a quoted tier above it.
- $69 a month paid monthly
- Unlimited users and email senders
- 650M lead database, finder and verifier
- lemlist MCP and CLI, CRM integrations and API
Multichannel
- $109 a month paid monthly
- Unlimited emails and messages
- 5 senders per user
- LinkedIn, SMS and calls
Enrichment add-on
- $20 a month paid monthly
- $0.008 a credit, or 400 emails or 100 phones
- 25+ data providers behind one waterfall
Buying intent add-on
- $29 a month paid monthly
- Real-time alerts when a lead acts
Enterprise
- Priced on seats and volume
Woodpecker
Woodpecker publishes 6 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $39 to $999.
5,000 emails
- $312 a year billed annually
- 3 free warm-ups and 100 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
50,000 emails
- $632 a year billed annually
- 10 free warm-ups and 250 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
100,000 emails
- $952 a year billed annually
- 15 free warm-ups and 300 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
250,000 emails
- $1,752 a year billed annually
- 30 free warm-ups and 450 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
500,000 emails
- $3,992 a year billed annually
- 65 free warm-ups and 800 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
1,000,000 emails
- $7,992 a year billed annually
- 95 free warm-ups and 1,200 Lead Finder credits
- API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as a $20 a month add-on
What lemlist and Woodpecker cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
lemlist
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Woodpecker
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
lemlist publishes only an entry price, so that column is the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | lemlist | Woodpecker |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $660 | $708 5,000 emails |
| 10,000 a month | $660 | $1,188 50,000 emails |
| 50,000 a month | $660 | $1,188 50,000 emails |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
How this plays out once it is running
Both put the developer tools within reach of the cheapest configuration, which is rare in this category. lemlist includes the API, an MCP server and a CLI on its $55 Email plan, billed annually, with unlimited users and email senders and 50,000 emails a month. Woodpecker has no feature tiers: one meter on emails sent, from $39 a month for 5,000 or $312 billed annually, and the API, webhooks, MCP server and CLI as one $20 a month add-on that also works during the 14-day trial.
The throughput is not close. lemlist allows 20 requests per 2 seconds, with Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers on every response. Woodpecker processes one request at a time, queues six, times a queued request out after 15 seconds and drops the rest, with unlimited calls a month. A sequential sync runs fine on either; anything concurrent only runs on one.
What each one is genuinely good at
These are the things that keep somebody paying after the first month, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
lemlist
Ten requests a second, documented
Twenty per 2 seconds with the headers to pace against. Code that fans out works here and has to be rewritten to run serially against Woodpecker, where a burst times out in the queue instead of receiving a 429.
LinkedIn, SMS and calls in one sequence
Multichannel at $87 a user billed annually adds them with five senders per user. Woodpecker adds LinkedIn as a $29 a month add-on per connected account, so the channel exists on both and is priced on different axes.
Contact data at real volume
A $16 add-on buys 2,000 credits a month across 25-plus providers, 400 emails or 100 phones, on top of a 650M lead database. Woodpecker includes 100 Lead Finder credits and sells more from 500 for $10, which is a convenience rather than a data source.
Woodpecker
Cheaper at small volume
At 5,000 emails sent a month it is $39, or $59 with the developer bundle, against lemlist's $69 month to month. Billed annually it is $552 a year with the bundle against lemlist's $660, and it includes things lemlist does not, which makes Woodpecker the stronger buy at that size. The next tier is $79 for 50,000 emails, so past 5,000 the order flips: $99 a month with the bundle against lemlist's $69.
Unlimited verification, including catch-all
Included in the base price rather than bought. lemlist offers a finder and verifier in its product, and Woodpecker's unlimited catch-all verification removes a separate vendor from a small stack.
Unlimited email accounts and team members
At every tier, with 3 warm-ups free at 5,000 emails and more as the tier rises. Buying new mailboxes is $4 to $6 each, but connecting the ones you already own costs nothing.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
lemlist
The add-ons stack
Data is $16, intent signals $21, and LinkedIn means moving to $87 a user. Each is published and the total is rarely the figure on the first card.
No free tier to keep a staging account on
A 14-day trial and then the plan. Woodpecker is the same, so it does not separate them, and it does mean every test environment costs money after two weeks.
Woodpecker
One concurrent request
Six queued, 15 seconds, then dropped. The monthly budget is unlimited and the concurrency is one, an unusual combination that makes every batch serial by design.
The configuration costs more than the headline
LinkedIn at $29 an account, mailboxes at $4 to $6, warm-ups at $5 beyond those included, the developer bundle at $20. A realistic multichannel setup is well above $39.
The API is a tick box
Twenty dollars is cheap and it is still an add-on that a headline comparison misses. lemlist puts the same four tools on the plan itself.
Using lemlist and Woodpecker together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
Both send email from your own mailboxes and both can drive LinkedIn, so running them together is duplication rather than a stack. This is a choice, and the size of the operation makes it.
Up to 5,000 emails a month and with nothing concurrent in the integration, Woodpecker at $59 all-in is the cheaper and more complete package, with free verification and the same MCP server and CLI. Past that, Woodpecker's next tier costs more than lemlist's plan, and once a sync or an agent needs parallel requests, lemlist's published 20 per 2 seconds is the architecture that holds.
If you are migrating from Woodpecker to lemlist, the concurrency difference works in your favor and nothing needs rewriting. Going the other way, rewrite every parallel call as a serial queue before the cutover, because Woodpecker drops what it cannot queue.
lemlist or Woodpecker, for you
Three questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lemlist | Work email, Mobile phone, LinkedIn profile, Intent and news, Job changes | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Woodpecker | Work email, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between lemlist and Woodpecker
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two, and the order below catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Record last month's sends, replies and bounces as lemlist's API reports them, per mailbox and per account. Reputation does not move with the vendor, so this is the number the new sender has to reach on the same domains.
Check which fields change
Woodpecker does not return mobile phone, intent and news and job changes, which lemlist does. If anything downstream reads those fields, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
lemlist authenticates with an API key over HTTP Basic, with an empty username. OAuth on the MCP server and CLI. Woodpecker uses an API key in an x-api-key header.
The limits are the part that bites later. lemlist's limits: 20 requests per 2 seconds per API key, on every route. Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers on every response.
Woodpecker's limits: one request at a time, 6 queued, 15 second queue limit, counted per account rather than per key. Unlimited calls a month. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
The wider field for both
Sometimes the answer is neither, and the reason you are comparing these two points somewhere else entirely: lemlist alternatives and Woodpecker alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
lemlist alternatives
3lemlist gives you the API, the MCP server and unlimited senders on the entry plan. What it sells separately is the data.
See the alternatives →Woodpecker alternatives
3Woodpecker sells the API, webhooks, an MCP server and a CLI as one $20 add-on. Then it processes your requests one at a time.
See the alternatives →Everything in Engage
17The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 52 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: lemlist vs Outreach, Reply.io vs Woodpecker and lemlist vs Saleshandy.
And: Instantly vs Woodpecker and Smartlead vs lemlist. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Reply.io vs Woodpecker
One publishes a slider with a pricing cliff, the other has no feature tiers at all and sells the API as a $20 add-on.
Compare them →Instantly vs lemlist
Both put the API and an MCP server on the entry plan. Only one adds a CLI, and only one makes you wait for webhooks.
Compare them →Instantly vs Woodpecker
Two subscriptions you choose between, sending from $47 and data from $9, against one emails-sent meter and a $20 tick box for the API.
Compare them →Testing providers one at a time? Run the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
lemlist and Woodpecker, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is lemlist or Woodpecker cheaper?
At 10,000 emails a month it is lemlist, $55 a month against Woodpecker at $99, on the cheapest plan of each that carries the API. The cost model above moves with your own volume. Per unit they meter different things, a credit against an email, so the cost model above is the comparison, not the rate card.
Can I try lemlist and Woodpecker for free?
lemlist: No free tier. 14-day trial with the Multichannel features and 200 credits. Woodpecker: No free tier. A trial of 14 days or 100 sent emails, whichever comes first, and the API add-on works during it.
What are the rate limits on lemlist and Woodpecker?
lemlist: 20 requests per 2 seconds per API key, on every route. Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers on every response. Woodpecker: One request at a time, 6 queued, 15 second queue limit, counted per account rather than per key. Unlimited calls a month.
Do lemlist and Woodpecker both have MCP servers?
Both do. lemlist: https://app.lemlist.com/mcp. Woodpecker: https://api.woodpecker.co/mcp/v1.
Which is better, lemlist or Woodpecker?
lemlist vs Woodpecker reaches nearly the same place by different routes: the API, an MCP server and a CLI come with lemlist's $55 entry plan billed annually ($69 month to month), or with Woodpecker's $39 tier plus its $20 add-on, $59 a month.
What are the downsides of lemlist and Woodpecker?
lemlist: the add-ons stack; no free tier to keep a staging account on. Woodpecker: one concurrent request; the configuration costs more than the headline; the API is a tick box. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use lemlist and Woodpecker together?
Both send email from your own mailboxes and both can drive LinkedIn, so running them together is duplication rather than a stack. This is a choice, and the size of the operation makes it.
Can I migrate from lemlist to Woodpecker without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Woodpecker does not return mobile phone, intent and news and job changes, which lemlist does, so anything downstream that reads those fields has to change. Either way, run one live sequence on a warmed mailbox through both before you switch.