4 Best Drip Alternatives in 2024 (Free & Paid)

Drip is a widely popular email marketing automation tool targeted at e-commerce businesses. It’s known for its intuitive automation features and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. However, you might be looking for Drip alternatives that offer more features at a similar or lower price point.

In this article, we’ll review the top Drip alternatives with robust marketing automation tools, unique features, and affordable pricing plans. We’ll also explore their key features, whether these digital marketing tools offer a free plan, and which is an ideal fit for your business.

Read on to know more.

1. MailWizz

MailWizz Main Features

Self-hosted Email Marketing Software

Compared to Drip, MailWizz is a self-hosted email marketing tool that grants more autonomy and control over your data infrastructure. This is especially useful for email marketing since you want your customer data to be secure. You’ll also have diverse extensions and access to more customizations to boost your marketing efforts.

Affordable Price

MailWizz offers affordable, one-time licensing fees (Regular and Extended). Both plans provide extensive access to the platform’s email marketing tools, such as the ability to create automated email sequences, segment email lists, access to multiple builders, unlimited contacts, autoresponders for drip campaigns, and more.

Responsive Support Team

After gaining access to MailWizz, you’ll have priority support for onboarding, future update releases, and technical assistance for any concerns on the platform. Compared to other marketing software, MailWizz has a responsive support team where you can voice out feature suggestions and have them considered in future versions.

Price

MailWizz offers the following one-time license plans:

• Regular – The Regular license costs $79 and suits marketing professionals. It offers unlimited access to email marketing features, including multiple drag-and-drop builders for creating landing pages, emails, geolocation tracking, and more. You’ll also get six months of free support.
• Extended - The Extended license costs $275 and is ideal for SMEs. It offers everything from the Regular plan, including priority support and the ability to use MailWizz as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

See here to learn more about MailWizz’s licensing plans.

Why Choose MailWizz over Drip

MailWizz is an effective Drip alternative due to its diverse feature offerings for email marketing and at a more affordable price. Like Drip, it’s an effective marketing automation platform for personalized email campaigns. It also has a user-friendly interface and is self-hosted, eliminating data security concerns and allowing you to apply more customizations on the platform.

2. MailerLite

MailerLite Main Features

Intuitive Landing Page Builder

One of MailerLite’s key features as a Drip alternative is its easy-to-use landing page builder. Its drag-and-drop website builder with various content elements allows you to create landing pages for multiple campaigns in just a few clicks. The platform’s free plan enables you to create ten landing pages at no cost.

Robust List Management Tools

Like Drip, MailerLite has robust list management features, including creating segments for targeted communication with specific contacts. You can also create filters to track a subscriber’s time zone, activity, and whether they clicked on one of your emails, which is especially useful for automated email campaigns.

Competitive Pricing

MailerLite offers competitive pricing plans, starting at $10/month, which include unlimited email sends. It provides tools for workflow automation, segmentation and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. The platform also has tools for e-commerce businesses and bloggers, including RSS campaigns and third-party integrations with WordPress and Stripe.

Price

MailerLite has the following pricing plans (paid plans estimated at 500 subscribers). They offer a 10% discount for an annual subscription:

• Free – The Free plan is for users who want to explore MailerLite’s key features. It includes 1,000 subscribers plus 12,000 monthly email sends, access to email marketing features, a drag-and-drop editor, e-commerce integrations, reporting tools, marketing automation features, and 24/7 customer support for the first 30 days.
• Growing Business - The Growing Business plan starts at $10 monthly and is ideal for startups and SMEs. It offers everything from the Free plan plus unlimited monthly email sends, e-commerce features, access to customizable email templates, email automation features, and priority email support.
• Advanced - The Advanced plan costs $20 monthly and is suitable for medium-sized businesses. It includes everything from the previous plan, plus unlimited account users, social media management tools, advanced marketing automation and email marketing features, and AI content creation tools. You’ll also get live chat customer support.
• Enterprise - The Enterprise plan is recommended for businesses with over 100,000 subscribers and specific email marketing needs. It includes everything from the Advanced plan plus advanced deliverability consultations, onboarding, and account audits.

Why Choose MailerLite over Drip

MailerLite excels as a Drip alternative because of its ease of use, especially for beginners and small-time marketers. They offer free courses through MailerLite Academy, which cover the basics of implementing your email marketing strategy using the platform. Based on their pricing plans, MailerLite also comes off as the cheaper email marketing software of the two.

Cons of MailerLite

While MailerLite is a cost-effective email marketing tool, it lacks features like advanced CRM, automation, and contact management tools. The platform only provides standard reporting and lacks comprehensive analytics, like list growth and social tracking.

3. Campaign Monitor

campaignmonitor.com

Campaign Monitor Main Features

User-friendly Interface

Campaign Monitor offers a clutter-free interface where you can access all necessary tools for email marketing campaigns and marketing automation. The marketing platform also provides an intuitive interface for its drag-and-drop email builder and data segmentation tools.

Diverse Marketing Automation Features

The platform offers a wide range of marketing automation tools, such as autoresponders, RSS-to-email, transactional emails, and more. They also provide a visual journey designer, which lets you nurture customer relationships through specific triggers based on customer behavior.

Eye-catching Email Templates

Campaign Monitor offers over 120 pre-made email templates and 37 web fonts for personalized campaigns. You can also personalize your emails using their easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

Price

Campaign Monitor has the following pricing plans (at 500 contacts):

• Lite – The Lite plan costs $11 monthly and is for startups and small marketing teams. It has 2,500 monthly email sends and access to the platform’s basic email marketing features, including the drag-and-drop builder, template library, reporting and analytics tools, and more. It also offers tools for automated marketing campaigns, like transactional emails, contact segmentation, and dynamic email content.
• Essentials - The Essentials plan starts at $19 monthly and is ideal for growing businesses. It includes everything from Lite, including unlimited monthly email sends, priority email support, access to more email automation tools, and spam testing.
• Premier - The Premier plan costs $149 per month and is recommended for businesses looking for advanced segmentation and email marketing tools. It offers everything from Essentials, plus advanced link tracking, phone support, email template locking, and send time optimization.

Why Choose Campaign Monitor over Drip

Unlike Drip, Campaign Monitor offers an easy-to-use interface for email and marketing automation, like creating drip campaigns, automated workflows, and autoresponders. The platform provides more marketing features (e.g., transactional emails and SMS marketing) and in-depth reporting to view your campaign performance.

Cons of Campaign Monitor

One of the few noticeable cons of Campaign Monitor is its lack of advanced marketing automation features and reporting functionality, like detailed analytics. The platform doesn’t have a landing page builder, which might affect your ability to capture leads. Considering its features, the platform is also relatively expensive ($19/mo. for unlimited email sends at 500 subscribers) and doesn’t have a free plan.

4. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Main Features

Robust Marketing Automation Capabilities

As a marketing automation platform, ActiveCampaign offers solid features, including tools for automated segmentation, dynamic emails, and more. The marketing platform provides over 700 automation templates (called “recipes”) for various industries. It also offers tools for sales automation and lead generation through its CRM.

Easy Account Migration

The marketing automation platform offers free account migration services to its customers. This is especially useful if you’re migrating from a different marketing software and need to migrate large volumes of data.

Comprehensive Sales and Marketing Features

Besides being an effective omnichannel marketing platform, ActiveCampaign also has a built-in CRM, which provides a holistic view of your sales processes and their performance. It allows you to view key lead management data, like lead scoring. You can access the mentioned features (sales CRM and omnichannel marketing) through the Bundles plan.

Price

ActiveCampaign offers the following pricing plans:

• Lite – The Lite plan starts at $39 monthly ($29/mo. when billed annually) and is recommended for solopreneurs. It includes 1,000 contacts (at minimum) and a 10-times-contact monthly email send limit. It offers access to basic email marketing and automation features, like the drag-and-drop email designer, email templates, automation recipes, segmentation, and reporting tools.
• Plus - The Plus plan costs $70 per month ($49/mo. when billed annually) and is for small marketing teams. It has everything in Lite plus a landing page builder, Facebook social media management tools, lead scoring, SMS marketing, dynamic product recommendations in emails, and e-commerce integrations.
• Professional - The Professional plan costs $187 monthly ($149/mo. when billed annually) and is for growing businesses. It offers everything from Plus, including 2,500 contacts (at minimum) and a 12-times-contact monthly email send limit. It provides access to split automation, site messages, predictive sending, and Salesforce integration.
• Enterprise - The Enterprise plan starts at $323 monthly ($259/mo. when billed annually) and is ideal for large organizations. It offers everything in Professional, plus up to 15 times the contact monthly email send limit, custom elements, unlimited email testing, Single Sign-On (SSO), and custom reporting.

Why Choose ActiveCampaign over Drip

ActiveCampaign excels through its marketing automation features for various processes, including e-commerce automation, subscriber management, email campaigns, and more. Compared to Drip, the platform provides valuable insights in its reporting and analytics feature, increasing your success in data-driven campaigns. Also, ActiveCampaign has extensive integration options, spanning from e-commerce platforms to CRM apps.

Cons of ActiveCampaign

Since ActiveCampaign is a powerful email automation platform, it’s ideal for advanced users and large ecommerce businesses. So, if you’re looking for a beginner-friendly marketing platform with simpler automation for email campaigns, software like MailWizz is a more practical choice. The platform’s diverse features can also be overwhelming, and extras can cost you more, especially when you didn’t need them in the first place.

Conclusion

Drip is a popular email marketing platform due to its marketing automation and segmentation features. However, the platform’s powerful automation tools are often geared toward businesses with complex needs and may require a steep learning curve.

If you’re looking for a cost-effective email marketing platform with simpler marketing automation features, consider MailerLite and Campaign Monitor. If you want to boost sales at scale using an all-in-one marketing automation and CRM solution, ActiveCampaign might be for you.

However, if you prefer a self-hosted email marketing solution with intuitive automation features at an affordable price, we recommend MailWizz. It has advanced features on its core and only requires a one-time license fee, making it one of the best Drip alternatives on the market.

Check out MailWizz now and know more about how our core features compare against Drip, effectively helping you create campaigns that encourage business growth.