Flodesk vs Omnisend: Which is better for small businesses?

The winner – Omnisend

4.8

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What Omnisend features are better than Flodesk?

Email marketing continues to be an effective strategy for businesses in 2023. The focus now is on personalization, with tailored content and offers based on user behavior and demographics.

Fortunately, many email marketing tools can help you do that. Two notable options are Omnisend and Flodesk.

Many marketers pick Flodesk for its intuitive email editor, which simplifies the creation of beautiful email campaigns. Meanwhile, Omnisend provides an extensive set of features tailored for ecommerce businesses.

Choosing between Flodesk or Omnisend depends on your specific needs and budget. Consider factors like ease of use, automation features, segmentation capabilities, pricing, and customer support before choosing.

In this post, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of both tools, taking these factors and more into account.

Flodesk vs Omnisend: Quick overview

Omnisend has achieved an impressive rating of 4.8/5 on the Shopify App Store thanks to its user-friendly interface and award-winning customer support.

The platform also boasts robust automation, segmentation, analytics features, and international SMS capabilities. It also comes with various pricing options suitable for all business sizes.

Conversely, Flodesk isn’t currently listed as an email marketing app on the Shopify App Store. However, users commonly praise its sophisticated email builder and visually appealing templates. You’ll likely benefit from Flodesk’s flat-rate pricing model if you have a large subscriber list and aren’t segmenting them.

So which tool’s better for your business — Omnisend or Flodesk?

To determine which suits your everyday operations, you need to consider your specific needs and requirements.

Before conducting a detailed comparison, let’s briefly examine their key features.

Flodesk vs Omnisend: Feature by feature

Flodesk and Omnisend differ significantly, not only in their areas of expertise but also in their pricing models and plans.

While both tools aim to enhance your email marketing ROI, one may outperform the other depending on your needs.

In this section, we’ll closely examine their various features and compare them thoroughly to help you make an informed decision.

Ease of getting started

Regarding the ease of getting started, Omnisend and Flodesk both scored high marks. Signing up on both platforms is a straightforward process, even for beginners.

Whether you opt for Flodesk’s free trial or Omnisend’s free plan, you won’t be required to provide credit card information, making the signup process even smoother.

Moreover, Omnisend’s initial home page offers clear guidance to assist users in becoming acquainted with the tool’s capabilities.

Flodesk lacks this assistance, leaving users to figure things out independently. However, this may be relatively easy since the interface is clean and easy to navigate. You can quickly set up your account, change the sender’s email, and find all the required features.

Omnisend is similar in this aspect as well. In addition, it’s worth noting that Omnisend truly shines when connected to your ecommerce store. For more basic needs, you might find other tools more suitable.

It’s a tie. While Omnisend boasts a wider range of features to explore and provides guidance, Flodesk’s interface is so intuitive that you may not require additional assistance.

Building an email campaign

Flodesk vs Omnisend: Which tool has a better email builder?

Omnisend has an intuitive email builder and 250+ modern-looking templates designed to save time and boost sales.

The platform provides various email types, including regular email campaigns, A/B tests, and automated campaigns. Omnisend also embraces AI-generated email campaigns in line with current trends, although this feature is still in the beta version.

In contrast, Flodesk only supports regular email campaigns and automated emails. However, Flodesk’s exceptional email builder compensates for these limitations.

For starters, the platform comes with some of the most visually-appealing email templates available in the market.

Additionally, its email wizard stands out as one of the most organized and user-friendly we’ve come across. It simplifies the process by guiding users through template selection, design editing, and adding campaign details, such as the subject line, recipients, and sending time.

While Flodesk’s email design builder may have a unique appearance compared to others, it contains all the essential email elements.

Next, let’s look at the email personalization features.

Whether you choose Omnisend or Flodesk, adding your brand colors and logo to emails is easy. In addition, Flodesk offers simple text personalization, but its text editor lacks a button for simple element insertion. Luckily, you can seek help from the Knowledge Base.

Omnisend makes personalization easy through its text editing options. Moreover, its content blocks allow you to tailor the content of your emails based on specific customer segments or individual preferences.

Omnisend has an extensive offering regarding unique features, leaving little to be desired. Here are a few worth mentioning:

• Inbox previews
• Unique discount codes
• Campaign booster for non-openers
• Product recommender
• Product picker
• Automated product listing

As for Flodesk’s unique features, they’re focused on visual aspects. An outstanding feature is the opacity editor right within the image editor. We haven’t seen it on most other platforms.

Additionally, you can directly embed pictures from Instagram into your emails.

That said, Flodesk needs certain ecommerce-oriented features such as A/B testing and auto-resending.

Omnisend has a considerable edge here. It provides not only visually appealing templates and a powerful email builder but also offers robust ecommerce functionality.

Marketing automation

Omnisend’s automation features are among its strongest selling points. The platform provides robust automation tools for creating targeted email campaigns.

Despite Flodesk’s user-friendly automation editor, it falls short compared to Omnisend. Let’s find out why.

• Prebuilt workflows: Omnisend provides 25 prebuilt automation workflows to launch out-of-the-box. These workflows contain both emails and text messages and are easily customizable. Flodesk’s templates are relatively limited but cover welcome, sales, nurture emails, and lead magnet delivery automation.

• Triggers: Omnisend has many triggers and filters based on various conditions, events, and behaviors. Flodesk offers only one trigger, activated when subscribers enter a segment.

• Different marketing channel integration: Omnisend allows users to integrate SMS and push notifications into the workflow. Flodesk needs this functionality.
• Ecommerce-related features: Omnisend offers many automation features for ecommerce businesses. These include automated order confirmation, abandoned cart emails, personalized product recommendations, etc. On Flodesk, you won’t find it.
• Analytics: Omnisend provides elaborate automation reports, offering insights into message stats, opens, clicks, sales, and more. The only drawback is that historical data is available for up to 18 months, which might limit access to older information. Although Flodesk also offers workflow analytics, it is less extensive than Omnisend’s.

Omnisend sweetens the deal by providing access to all automation-related features, even on the free plan. To access automation features on Flodesk, you’ll have to shell out a minimum of $38 per month.

Omnisend is the clear winner of this round since it beats Flodesk in every automation-related aspect.

Signup forms and landing pages

Expanding your subscriber list lets you widen your reach and grow your business.

Which tool offers better list-building capabilities: Flodesk or Omnisend?

Omnisend provides various form types: multi-step forms, popups, landing pages, teasers, and Wheel of Fortune for gamification. You can choose from 80+ prebuilt signup forms and landing page designs.

Omnisend’s most significant advantage lies in its time-saving capabilities through ready-to-use templates. Including your brand colors and styles in the brand, the brand asset allows for automatic form adjustment.

This isn’t to say that Flodesk is any less. With 40+ modern-looking templates, the tool excels in visual appeal. To enhance the aesthetics further, you can incorporate images from Unsplash.

Regarding landing pages, we found it odd that they’re termed ‘checkouts’ on Flodesk. However, the platform does offer stunning landing pages for various purposes, such as selling digital products, education, services, freebies, or even simple checkout pages.

Flodesk lacks automatic form launch to your website, and its popup settings are limited. On the other hand, for Omnisend, having A/B testing for forms would be a valuable addition. 

List management

Flodesk employs segments instead of conventional lists, but the functionality is quite similar. Importing contacts is a breeze, and we were pleased to find that it aligns with industry standards.

Omnisend simplifies list management with easy tagging and tag removal for organizing contacts. Moreover, audience segmentation is straightforward thanks to various behavior tags like clicked, purchased, and viewed the page.

Once again, Omnisend saves time and costs through suggested segment options, a list cleaning service for faulty emails, and prevention of contact duplication across segments or lists.

Omnisend stands out with its more advanced features, particularly in list management. However, for those seeking to sell digital products, Flodesk is a better option.

Segmentation

Next, let’s compare the segmentation capabilities of Flodesk vs Omnisend.

Omnisend leads by providing 30 prebuilt segments, giving users a head start in audience segmentation.

Here are some of the segmentation options offered by Omnisend:

• Shopping behavior
• Email and SMS campaign activity
• Contact properties
• Web browsing activities

In contrast, Flodesk doesn’t offer any prebuilt segments.

The available filters on Flodesk include activity date and status, source, belonging to other segments, and belonging to different data fields.

However, Flodesk needs common segmentation criteria like demographics and email activity. Also, although there’s an option to tag subscribers, we needed help locating this function.

Now, let’s discuss Omnisend’s ecommerce-focused segmentation features. The platform offers advanced segmentation based on various transactional events and purchase behaviors. Users can also segment audiences based on pages and products recently viewed.

Omnisend’s lifecycle-based segmentation can be used to prioritize valuable shoppers and personalize retention strategies.

Finally, with Omnisend, you can extend your targeting across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google through its built-in audience sync. This feature needs to be included in Flodesk.

Omnisend wins this round with its advanced segmentation capabilities.

Analytics

Flodesk’s analytics fall under three main sections:

• Automation: Insights on active subscribers, entries, open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates related to your automated workflows
• Email campaigns: Data on email engagement, opens, and clicks, categorized by device
• Checkouts: Monitor the number of visitors, orders, and total sales

Speaking of Omnisend, expect a reporting dashboard with data on metrics such as messages sent, open rate, click rate, revenue from campaigns and automations, click maps, etc. If you want to dig deeper, Omnisend offers a Customer Breakdown report. 

As mentioned earlier, one notable drawback of Omnisend is that the advanced reporting data is only available for the past 18 months. Both platforms need geolocation reports. 

As for Flodesk, it lacks geolocation reports, ecommerce metrics, and click maps — standard features found in other email marketing platforms.

Omnisend takes the cake with its comprehensive automation reports, allowing in-depth analysis of email marketing performance.

Customer support

Customer support can be a dealbreaker for many users. Omnisend’s support team stands out in this regard for several reasons:

• 24/7 email & live chat support for all users
• An average response time of three minutes
• Covers all timezones

Moreover, all Standard and Pro plan users paying over $400 monthly get a dedicated Customer Success Manager.

Flodesk’s customer support is limited compared to other platforms, lacking live chat or phone assistance. Their only support option is email, available in the US from 6 am to 6 pm Eastern Time.

On a positive note, Flodesk offers an extensive online help center with how-to videos, email marketing best practices, and platform guides.

Moreover, we found Flodesk University to be pretty helpful. It provides free video courses on email marketing strategy, accessible to everyone without the need for signup or registration.

Omnisend wins this round with its award-winning customer support, which is available across all plans.

Integrations

Ecommerce businesses often require multiple third-party services, and Omnisend provides integrations with 130+ apps.

These integrations can be set up for free with just a few clicks, streamlining various aspects of your business.

Some of the areas these apps can assist with include email capturing, customer support, shipping and logistics, and ad targeting.

Currently, Flodesk offers direct integration with Shopify, Instagram, Interact, Marvelous. However, Omnisend and Flodesk can be integrated with Zapier, allowing you to connect with thousands of other apps.

Omnisend wins since it offers more native integrations.

Compatibility with other marketing channels

Let’s compare Flodesk vs Omnisend regarding compatibility with other marketing channels.

Omnisend stands out in this aspect as it allows seamless integration of SMS and web push notifications into its workflows.

Additionally, it can retarget cart abandonment with Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads.

On the contrary, Flodesk might not be the ideal choice for leveraging omnichannel marketing. At present, it only supports email marketing.

Omnisend is the clear winner of this round.

Generative AI tools

Omnisend offers AI assistance for subject lines, email copywriting.

Meanwhile, Flodesk doesn’t have any AI tools as of now.

Price Comparison

Omnisend offers a tiered pricing model based on the number of subscribers in your email list. Flodesk offers flat-rate plans that include all features, regardless of your number of subscribers.

In this section, you’ll determine which pricing approach makes more sense for your needs.

Free plans comparison

While Flodesk doesn’t offer a free plan, you can still test its features through a generous 30-day free trial. You’ll have access to all the tool’s features during this trial period.

Omnisend does offer a free plan, although it’s not as generous as some other platforms offer, you can test it out with a sample list. It provides 500 monthly emails, 60 SMS, 500 web push notifications, and the capacity to add up to 250 contacts.

Omnisend’s free version offers excellent features, making it valuable for those with tight budgets. Here are some of the inclusions:

• Email and SMS automation
• A/B testing
• Advanced segmentation including customer lifecycle stages
• Prebuilt popups and signup forms
• Landing page builder
• 24/7 live chat and email support
• Unique tools such as the Product Recommender and discount coupon codes
• Performance reports for all channels

Now, let’s discuss the paid plans.

Paid plan comparison

Flodesk provides three paid plans, while Omnisend offers two.

With Omnisend, as you move up the pricing tiers, the cost will increase, and you’ll gain access to higher subscriber allowances. Here’s an overview of the costs:

For users with a small subscriber list, Flodesk might seem relatively expensive. However, the platform may become more worthy as the subscriber list grows. Nonetheless, it’s essential to note that Omnisend offers access to many more features.

If you own an ecommerce business, you may find that Flodesk lacks extensive capabilities. Similarly, if you want to implement omnichannel marketing strategies, Omnisend is the better choice.

Flodesk is an excellent platform for those focusing solely on email marketing and creating visually appealing campaigns. Ultimately, whether you should choose Omnisend or Flodesk depends on your specific needs and priorities.

Flodesk vs Omnisend: Which one wins?

Before announcing the overall winner of the Omnisend vs Flodesk comparison, let’s quickly recap everything we’ve discussed in this article:

Picking between Flodesk and Omnisend should be easy, given their distinct differences in features and pricing models.

Flodesk is an excellent option for creative professionals or those who value visuals. It’s also great for businesses with growing subscriber lists. However, if you seek a more advanced solution with omnichannel marketing capabilities, Omnisend emerges as the better platform.

Still, trying to figure it out?

Take advantage of the free plans and trials offered by both platforms. Experiment with them to make a better-informed decision based on your firsthand experience.

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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.