Where they are honestly better
Whali knows who you are writing to. It searches a database of hundreds of millions of professional profiles and can tell you a person's career history and what they posted last week. We cannot do that. We find a named individual only when a firm publishes one on its own website, which happens often in professional services and almost never in trades or retail. If your plan is to reach a specific named person at a large firm, that is a real advantage and it is not ours.
They also track opens and clicks, and we do not. They attach your CV on their entry plan, where we hold that back until Pro, and their AI writes every draft where ours writes them on request. Those are genuine wrinkles and we would rather say so than pretend them away.
Why we do not track opens and clicks
This one is a choice rather than a gap, so it is worth a word. An open is measured by hiding a tiny invisible image in the email and seeing when it loads. Apple Mail has loaded those automatically since 2021, before the person has read anything, and Gmail fetches them through its own servers. So a large share of any open rate is software rather than people, and a number you cannot trust is worse than no number, because you will make decisions with it.
Click tracking costs more than it tells you. It works by rewriting your links to go through our domain first, so the person hovers over what should be your CV and sees a redirect they do not recognise. Both the invisible image and the rewritten link are exactly what spam filters look for, and everything here depends on one personal email from your own address reaching a small firm. We would rather protect that, and tell you the number that actually decides anything, which is who replied.
Where we are better, and why it is not only the price
We are cheaper on every tier for the same weekly volume: £3.01 a month on Starter, £5.01 on Pro and £9.01 on Max, which is £108 a year at the top plan. And our free plan is a real one rather than a trial that stops at the interesting part.
But look again at the row about how many emails get researched, because it is the one that matters most and the one a headline price hides. Whali's Starter gives you 100 emails a week and researches 50 of them. The other fifty are still emails, they just have less behind them. Every company we draft for that has a website gets read: what it actually sells, and its Companies House record where we can match it. That happens on every plan, including the free one, and there is no second budget to run out of.
The deeper difference is where the companies come from. A profile database tells you about people at firms big enough to be in a database. We search for the firm itself, live, at the moment you press go, and filter it to small and mid sized businesses near you using Companies House size and industry data. That is the filter a person led database cannot really offer.
It matters because of who ends up reading you. At a company of fifteen, the person opening your email can simply decide to have you. At a company of fifteen thousand, they forward you to a portal. The whole reason cold email works for students is that it reaches the firms that never advertise, and those are exactly the firms that are thinnest in a bought list.
It also changes what you get offered. A large firm has a scheme, and the scheme is a fixed fortnight in July whether that suits you or not. A firm of fifteen has no scheme to fit you into, so what it offers is shaped by the work instead of by a calendar, which can mean a month or two of real responsibility rather than a few days of watching someone else do the job. Nearside exists because that is what happened to its own founder, who cold emailed small firms as a student and came away with a two month internship. That was done by hand, before any of this was software. The software is that method, made repeatable.
It is also why the emails themselves still ask for something modest, a short project or a few days where you would be genuinely useful. That is not modesty for its own sake, it is what gets a reply. A small ask is easy to say yes to, and it is far easier to grow the thing once you are in the building than to talk a stranger into three months from a standing start. Ask for the door. The months tend to follow you through it.
Which should you use
If you want to reach a named analyst at a large firm, and you want to know whether they opened it, a profile database is the right tool and we are not it. If you want real weeks or months at a good small firm near you, the kind that has never posted an internship in its life, that is what we built. And if you are not sure, our free plan costs nothing and needs no card, so you can find out before you decide.