Drip is considered a great email marketing platform for ecommerce businesses and with good reason. It has excellent automation features, segmentation capabilities, a visual email builder, and more.
But it’s more expensive than many other similar tools and doesn’t offer a free plan. Its email builder is fine, but not as user-friendly as that of its competitors. And email personalization options are also limited.
There are plenty of Drip alternatives that cover these weaknesses for the better monthly fee.
Three alternatives stand out—Klaviyo, Brevo, and MailerLite.
Here’s a quick summary of what makes these platforms the top Drip alternatives.
Best overall: Klaviyo
Yes
$20
Powerful segmentation
Great marketing automation features
Subject line assistant
Small and mid-size ecommerce stores
Klaviyo is an advanced email marketing platform for established ecommerce businesses.
Klaviyo pros and cons
- Data-driven segmentation and personalization
- Omnichannel marketing campaigns: emails, SMS, and mobile push notifications
- A subject line assistant
- Great signup form templates, multi-step popups and forms A/B testing
- Very good reporting capabilities
- Advanced marketing automation
- Price is similar to Drip’s
- No dedicated landing page builder
- No gamification forms
Runner-up: Brevo
Yes
$25
Transactional emails
WhatsApp and Facebook marketing
Multi-list subscriptions
Bloggers, non-profit organizations, ecommerce beginners
Brevo isn’t so strong at marketing automation, or signup forms like Drip, but it offers features like transactional emails, sales pipelines, SMS marketing, and many others that can be enough for successful small business marketing strategy implementation.
Brevo pros and cons
- Generous free plan and good price overall
- Transactional emails
- A best-time function for email campaigns
- A multi-list subscription function for your signup forms
- Sales automation
- SMS marketing
- Not as advanced as Drip
- Basic automation and signup forms
- Basic analytical part
Best cheap alternative: MailerLite
Yes
$10
Great user experience
Beautiful designs
Bloggers, solopreneurs, non-profit organizations, startups
If you’re seeking affordable alternatives to Drip that provide a comprehensive set of features, MailerLite is an excellent choice for you. It offers a 30-day free trial, granting access to advanced features. Alternatively, you can sign up for the free plan and get acquainted with the platform without providing your credit card information.
Mailerlite pros and cons
- User-friendly drag-and-drop, rich text, and custom HTML editors
- Beautiful and responsive templates for emails, signup forms, landing pages, and websites
- Ability to add interactive blocks to emails
- Email verification tool
- Email templates available on paid plans only
- Doesn’t have the advanced automation or segmentation capabilities
- Custom HTML editor is only available with the highest tier plan
Best Drip alternatives
Now, let’s discuss the alternatives to Drip in detail.
Klaviyo: features that stand out
- Subject line assistant
- Analytics and A/B tests for signup forms
- Advanced segmentation features
- Powerful automation workflows
Building an email campaign
Klaviyo has an intuitive email builder that lets you run all types of email campaigns.
You get a lot of useful features, such as a product content block that pulls product details directly from your ecommerce store. You can make personalized product recommendations based on customer behavior or static recommendations.
This alternative to Drip offers a rich library of email templates. You can find over 90 templates for different occasions and in a variety of styles.
In addition to making personalized product recommendations, you can personalize emails using the name, location, and other contact attributes. There’s a handy button in the text editor that lets you achieve this.
Klaviyo’s Subject Line Assistant enables you to create engaging subject lines that make your emails stand out.
Marketing automation
Klaviyo offers powerful automation capabilities. You can create automated workflows using conditional splits and webhooks. You can use event variables to personalize metric-triggered flow messages.
You can set triggers, such as lists, segments, metrics, price drops, etc.
There’s a library of pre-built automated workflows, such as:
- Welcome series
- Browse abandonment
- Win-back
- Cross-sells
- Back-in-stock and price-drop alerts
- Happy birthday messages with a discount
- Order and shipping updates
This Drip alternative lets you add SMS to your workflows for enhanced customer engagement.
Forms and list management
Klaviyo has an excellent form builder that lets you build mobile-friendly signup forms to build your email list. There are plenty of modern-looking pre-built signup forms you can use.
This Drip alternative provides:
- Multi-step forms
- Popups
- Embedded forms
- Flyouts
- Teasers
- Full-page forms (also can serve as a landing page)
You can create exit-intent popups with discounts, decide who sees your signup forms, such as new visitors or visitors from specific locations, etc.
Klaviyo offers analytics for its signup forms, such as signup rates and the device of the user, etc.
Klaviyo allows you to A/B test forms and optimize them for better conversions. You can test various elements, such as copy, color, and placement of the popup.
It doesn’t have a landing-page builder, but you can use full-page forms to act as landing pages.
You can segment your lists using one of the seven pre-built segments or build segments from scratch using a variety of rules.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
In addition to emails, this alternative to Drip supports SMS and mobile push notifications for your ecommerce apps.
Price
Klaviyo has a free plan that gives you access to all its features. The limit is the number of contacts you can reach, which is only 250. However, with free plan you can access all features, including:
- Automation builder
- Segmentation and personalization capabilities
- Forms and popups
- Multi-channel attribution
- A/B testing
Once you exceed 250 contacts, you’ll need to choose one of the two paid plans available:
- Email: Starts at $20/month
- Email and SMS: Starts at $35/month
Why should you choose Klaviyo instead of Drip?
Klaviyo offers A/B tests for signup forms, which helps ecommerce businesses create forms that encourage maximum signups. It also offers powerful analytics, personalization, and segmentation capabilities. AND you get a better email builder for your email campaigns.
Why should you choose Drip instead of Klaviyo?
In some price ranges, Drip is cheaper than Klaviyo, and if you don’t need SMS marketing, maybe it’s not worth paying more.
Brevo: features that stand out
- Inbox preview
- Transactional emails
- Send-time optimization
- SMS marketing
- Sales pipelines
- Multi-list subscription feature for signup forms
Building an email campaign
Brevo’s email builder is more user-friendly and intuitive than that offered by Drip. You can build both regular and A/B test campaigns where you can test the subject line or content.
This Drip alternative provides 42 email templates you can use to build your campaigns. A few are modern and occasion-ready, while others are basic.
You can monitor the appearance of your email on different devices using the inbox preview feature.
Email personalization is available through the Dynamic Email Content feature. Once you set it up, Brevo automatically personalizes your emails using the subscribers’ details like their gender. You can also add their profile data in the content, subject line, or preheader.
There’s also a Repeat Block that allows you to make personalized product recommendations.
Marketing automation
This Drip alternative provides pre-made automation workflows and also allows for the creation of custom workflows. You have the flexibility to add splits, conditions, and actions to personalize your workflows. Additionally, you can set up custom webhooks. However, it should be noted that the automation aspect may not be as robust as that of Drip.
But unlike Drip, on Brevo, your workflows can include SMS, WhatsApp, and web notifications. This Drip alternative also offers transactional emails and CRM functionality, including sales pipelines and automation.
Moreover, Brevo offers something unique—the Best Time feature uses insights from past campaign performance to automatically send your emails at the most optimal times.
Forms and list management
Brevo forms are quite basic. You won’t find a beautiful template collection.
However, Brevo offers a multi-list subscription option that lets your leads choose which list they want to sign up for.
Landing pages are available with the Business and Enterprise plans. You can either build a custom landing page for your brand or use a template.
Brevo allows you to manage your email list using a scoring system that you can use to segment your contacts. You can segment your lists based on the source, contact attributes, and location.
There’s also a blocklisting feature that isn’t available in most Drip alternatives.
The drawback is that it’s impossible to migrate your list directly from your previous email service provider.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
One of the strongest features of this Drip alternative is its compatibility with multiple channels, including:
- SMS
- Web push notifications
- Facebook ads
- Live chat
Its Conversations feature lets you manage conversations from Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp from a centralized inbox.
Price
Brevo has a free plan with a limit of 300 emails per day. In this free plan, you can get features like:
- Email campaigns
- SMS and WhatsApp campaigns
- Segmentation and personalization capabilities
- Transactional email sending
- Push notifications
- Signup forms
Brevo charges on a per-email basis and you can have an unlimited number of contacts.
There are 3 paid plans:
- Starter: Starts at $25/month
- Business: Starts at $65/month
- Brevo Plus: Custom pricing
If you don’t send emails often, there’s a pay-as-you-go option where you get email credits. Each email sent deducts one credit.
Why should you choose Brevo instead of Drip?
Brevo is much more affordable than Drip.
It has a flexible pricing system and supports omnichannel marketing, which helps you engage customers on multiple channels.
You also get multi-list subscription forms, an intuitive email builder, and an inbox preview feature.
Why should you choose Drip instead of Brevo?
Drip has modern and occasion-ready email templates, much better than what Brevo offers. You can design more engaging and aesthetic signup forms with Drip than with Brevo. Also, Brevo falls behind Drip’s automation functionality.
MailerLite: features that stand out
- Aesthetic, visually appealing designs
- Ability to add social media posts directly to your emails
- Automatic resending of unopened emails
- Out-of-the-box signup forms, including A/B testing capabilities
- Option to collect leads offline during events
- Website builder
Building email campaign
MailerLite provides three email campaign builders:
- A drag-and-drop builder
- Rich text editor
- Custom HTML editor
You can use one of the 90 modern email templates available. But they’re only available with the paid plans.
This Drip alternative lets you create various types of campaigns, such as:
- Regular campaigns
- A/B split campaigns
- RSS campaigns
- Auto-resend campaigns
MailerLite lets you add surveys, quizzes, products, HTML codes, and countdown timers to your emails.
If your email is related to events or mobile application installs, there are ready-made content blocks you can use for that.
There are content blocks that let you add Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts to your emails. It allows you to personalize email subject lines, preheaders, and content.
Marketing automation
MailerLite offers decent automation features to help you engage prospects at various stages of their customer journeys.
There are 15 ready-to-go workflows, which include:
- Simple and advanced welcome email series
- Abandoned cart series
- Win-back series
- Retarget campaigns
- New promotion
- Email series for an online course
- Birthday wishes
- Invitation for a demo call and NPS survey
- Membership renewal
- Thank you emails
- Post-purchase follow-up emails
- Email series for premium members
On Mailerlite you won’t find on-site behavior triggers, and automations are limited to up to three triggers. However, for many marketers the existing offering will be sufficient.
Forms and list management
MailerLite list-building features come up to what Drip or Klaviyo can offer.
MailerLite offers a variety of forms for your website. You can create GDPR-friendly:
- Embedded forms
- Signup popups
- Promotion popups
- Half-screen forms
- Narrow bars
There are 24 templates available that are easy to edit. And you can add reCAPTCHA to your forms.
This Drip alternative lets you:
- Measure the performance of your forms using metrics like the conversion rate.
- Run A/B tests on your forms and track their real-time performance.
- Collect leads offline using the iPad subscribe app.
There’s a user-friendly landing page feature with 49 templates. You can use A/B tests and heat maps to optimize their performance. It offers a drag-and-drop website builder that lets you create an engaging and interactive website.
You can create and manage interest groups using tags and segment your email list based on factors like email engagement, location, time zone, and interests.
So if you currently are focusing on growing your audience, Mailerlite can definitely be your choice.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
Besides email marketing, you can undertake Facebook retargeting with MailerLite.
Price
Like other Drip alternatives on this list, MailerLite has a free plan that supports only one user. You get features like:
- Email automation
- Signup forms
- 10 landing pages
- Segmentation and interest groups
There are three paid plans, which include a custom-priced plan. Here are the prices:
- Growing Business: Starts at $9 per month
- Advanced: Starts at $19 per month
- Enterprise: Custom
Why should you choose MailerLite instead of Drip?
MailerLite has powerful email list-building features including an app to collect leads offline. Compared to other Drip alternatives, it’s the most affordable option for ecommerce businesses and marketers with a limited budget.
For 2,500 subscribers and unlimited email sends, this Mailerlite charges $15 per month with the Growing Business plan and $27 per month with the Advanced plan. Drip charges $39 per month for the same.
Why should you choose Drip instead of MailerLite?
Drip offers better integrations with other ecommerce apps, and more advanced features for ecommerce businesses.
Alternative to avoid: ActiveCampaign
From our perspective, ActiveCampaign appears to be a robust platform to switch from Drip, and the learning curve may be steep. ActiveCampaign offers extensive functionality and numerous integrations with sales platforms, among others. Considering that it is even more expensive than Drip, ask yourself if you are prepared to make use of that additional functionality.
Drip alternatives: Summary
Based on our analysis, we can conclude that Klaviyo is the best alternative to Drip.
It offers advanced features that can help your ecommerce business grow.This helps you expand your customer base and nurture your leads throughout their buyer journey.
Brevo follows closely behind with its unique features and a big list of marketing channels. It helps you send messages that resonate with your subscribers’ needs and preferences. It shows your subscribers that you understand them, which fosters loyalty.
MailerLite also offers great marketing features, but its affordability stands out the most.
Your final choice will depend on the unique needs of your business and your budget.
In-depth Reviews
Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.