When it comes to choosing the right email and e-commerce platform, Drip and Omnisend are two of the top contenders. With powerful features for collecting contacts, sending campaigns, building ecommerce stores, and tracking results, these platforms aim to help small businesses grow. However, their strengths and weaknesses can vary greatly depending on your specific needs.
In this in-depth Drip vs. Omnisend comparison, we evaluate the two email marketing platforms across key criteria to uncover the best choice for different use cases.
We analyze market position, ease of use, customization, features, integrations, support, pricing, and reputation. Our goal is to arm business owners with comprehensive information so they can select the tool that aligns closest with their business goals, technical needs, and budget.
1. Understanding the Basics
Drip was founded in 2013 by co-founders Rob Walling and Mike Perham. As of 2023, Drip has over 1 million users and is considered one of the top marketing and e-commerce platforms, especially for small businesses.
Omnisend was founded in 2014 by Rytis Lauris. While a younger company, they’ve experienced rapid growth to over 90,000 users by focusing on comprehensive features and high-touch support.
Both platforms have engaged Facebook user communities that serve as spaces to ask questions, and share expertise with fellow users:
In terms of market position, Drip is broader and more well-known, whereas Omnisend has carved out a niche with advanced functionality to aid the email marketing efforts of product-based brands. Drip appeals to small businesses focused primarily on lead generation and email marketing, while Omnisend suits e-commerce brands selling physical or digital products directly through their websites.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Drip
Drip provides robust email marketing automation using workflows and tags. Workflows automatically move contacts through sequences based on behaviors like email opens, link clicks, and duration since the last email (link). Tags segment your audience dynamically based on the criteria you set.
For example, you could create and automate a 7-email nurture workflow that triggers when someone signs up for your newsletter. It would move them through the sequence only if they opened each email. You’d also tag contacts who click on certain links to segment engaged subscribers.
Drip’s marketing automation stands out in the ease of building sequences visually. You simply connect triggers, actions like emails, and conditional logic with a drag-and-drop workflow builder. Advanced marketers may desire more complex options, but the solution excels for simplicity.
Workflows integrate natively with many e-commerce platforms, facilitating post-purchase automation like order confirmations and cart abandonment retargeting after X days. Drip also offers basic popup and landing page builders to convert traffic (link).
Omnisend
Omnisend provides even more advanced automation for emails, SMS marketing, web push notifications, Facebook chat, and more. Robust filtering and segmentation options help target the right groups.
For example, you could set up a 5-message SMS follow-up sequence for people who booked appointments or demo calls via online scheduling software. Or abandon cart flows reminding people about items left in their carts and offering coupons to complete their purchases.
Omnisend enables multi-channel automation through a streamlined drag-and-drop visual builder, unlimited follow-up sequences, and integration with 700+ apps via Zapier (link). Segmentation options stand out for flexibility, including the ability to filter by customer lifetime value thresholds.
Winner: Omnisend
This Omnisend Drip comparison shows that while both platforms offer excellent automation for core email needs, Omnisend pulls ahead with more advanced multi-channel options specifically focused on converting and retaining e-commerce customers post-purchase.
The more flexible segmentation also helps retailers and product companies target higher lifetime value shoppers for VIP treatment.
Email Templates
Drip
Drip provides professionally designed email templates covering core campaign types like welcome series, product announcements, newsletters, opt-in form templates, and many other options to deliver stunning campaigns without starting from scratch. Templates come optimized for mobile and include sections for headers, images, text, and calls to action.
While template selection is more limited compared to other platforms, focusing on commonly used options allows for polished looks out of the box. You can customize colors, fonts, and layouts to match your branding. Drag-and-drop editing makes building templates simple, though advanced styling would require HTML knowledge.
Drip’s templates offer enough flexibility for basic customization without overwhelming non-designers. The clean designs fit nicely with a wide range of brand aesthetics. You even get suggestions for different subject lines and subject line options for effective emails that get opened, read, and drive sales.
Omnisend
Omnisend truly shines when it comes to email template design. With over 250 mobile-optimized templates, the selection dwarfs competitors. Categories span e-commerce, welcome flows, holidays, announcements, referrals, and more.
The templates don’t just look nice – they convert. Each undergoes testing and optimization for metrics like opens, click-through rates, and the ROI of each email.
While very customizable, most brands won’t need to touch code. Unlike Drip, Omnisend’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor lets you easily visually customize fonts, colors, padding, layouts, and blocks. However, developers can also work directly with HTML and CSS.
Omnisend’s combination of designer-quality templates exceeding the needs of most brands paired with flexible editing options makes template creation and customization intuitive.
Winner: Omnisend
The Drip vs Omnisend comparison shows that while Drip provides professionally designed responsive templates covering essentials for lead gen, Omnisend offers greater volume, variety, and conversion optimization specifically for e-commerce. The visual customization strikes the perfect balance of polish and flexibility for retail brands.
Segmentation
Drip
Drip enables segmenting your subscriber list based on email and website behaviors, custom fields, tags, and basic subscriber info like location, plan, and lifetime value.
You can create segments to target people who opened an email but didn’t click or visitors from social media. Drip automatically tracks behaviors over time, letting you base segments on criteria like “Visited a blog post in the last 30 days” or “Added to cart more than twice”.
While behavior tracking out of the box is extensive, advanced marketers may want more flexible property-based rules to combine multiple parameters.
Overall, Drip strikes a nice balance between easy segmentation without extensive marketing knowledge and options to target based on engagement.
Omnisend
Omnisend stands out for flexible, powerful segmentation capabilities based on granular e-commerce data and customer properties.
You can create segments like customers who spent over $500 a lifetime, added specific products to a cart, read certain blog posts, clicked an email CTA, and much more. Combine multiple traits with and/or logic to target hyper-specific groups.
For example, target women between 25-35 with abandoned cart recovery of abandoned purchases over $100 in the last 7 days and offer 20% coupons. Or VIP customers who click email CTAs about clearance items.
This Omnisend Drip review shows that Omnisend opens a world of personalization based on each contact’s granular behaviors and attributes. No code is required.
Winner: Omnisend
While Drip provides solid behavioral segmentation, this Drip vs Omnisend review shows that Omnisend’s fine-grained filtering based on product and order data paired with flexible multi-trait logic allows superior personalization for e-commerce. The visual nature of the app makes it easy without touching code.
Analytics
Drip
Drip provides extensive marketing analytics accessible through intuitive dashboards and reports. View high-level metrics like emails delivered, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, revenue, and ROI over time. Or drill down into performance by campaign, segment, email type, and other filters.
Dashboards showcase key benchmarks and trends in easy-to-digest graphical formats. More advanced people can access the raw data behind charts to export for further analysis to help you make more money from your email campaigns.
Useful reports help uncover great insights like your most engaging email content topics, best-performing campaigns, the highest converting days/times to send campaigns, and subscriber engagement over time. Site tracking shows basic web traffic sources and high-level sales data to better open rates and improve campaigns.
Overall, the Omnisend Drip comparison shows that Drip furnishes marketers with the in-depth email analytics needed for optimization without requiring data science expertise.
Omnisend
Omnisend takes email and e-commerce analytics to the next level with pre-built reports, custom dashboards, and integration with Google Analytics and other software.
Intuitive reports cover email engagement, contact history, revenue performance, site/form analytics, and other metrics for your campaigns. Dashboards allow custom combinations of 100+ widgets showing granular metrics segmented by product, order status, traffic source, etc. Omnisend also offers an advanced SQL query builder for analysts.
Marketers appreciate actionable insights, such as understanding each subscriber’s lifetime value to guide win-back offers after churn or personalize recommendations for high-value customers. Quantifying impact and optimizing campaigns becomes easy.
Winner: Omnisend
Both solutions provide excellent email analytics for successful campaigns, but this Omnisend Drip review shows that the former pulls ahead with deep e-commerce data and seamless integration with Google Analytics for complete multi-channel visibility. The software makes it easy for marketers to track meaningful KPIs tailored to optimizing revenue.
Unique Features
Drip
One of Drip’s standout features is its extensive marketplace of integrated apps and plug-ins called Drop-Ins. With over 500 additions, you can integrate Drip to apps and services for chat, surveys, webinar software, membership management, online courses, and more.
This facilitates automating multi-channel experiences. For example, use a Drop-In to automatically enroll webinar registrants into a post-webinar email course nurturing sequence. Or trigger SMS messages when appointments are booked via a calendar tool.
The Drop-Ins ecosystem provides incredible extensibility to track offline interactions and combine email with other channels – no coding required.
Omnisend
Omnisend is specifically designed around advanced e-commerce merchant needs out of the box. That includes features like:
- Built-in assistance for subscriptions, bundles, dynamic payment links, and split-testing checkout pages/flows
- Visual workflow builder with 400+ predefined automation for cart abandonment, SMS receipts, win-back offers, and more
- Real-time sync with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce
- Predictive forecasts estimating future revenue
The software seamlessly handles e-commerce scenarios that require added development, apps, or help tickets on other platforms. This saves brands significant time, money, and headaches.
Winner: Tie
Drip’s drop-in marketplace provides unrivaled app extensibility, while Omnisend removes heavy lifting for core e-commerce use cases. Which has more valuable unique features depending on your specific needs, including split testing and predictive forecasts. Both tools innovate in areas important to their target customer base.
3. Ease of Use
Drip
Drip prides itself on an intuitive user interface optimized for simplicity. The visual design provides clear pathways guiding you through key workflows like building emails, automation funnels, forms, and reports.
While advanced options live under the hood, most customers won’t need to dig deeper. Useful tooltips explain features so marketers of any skill level can get started.
Drip also offers a library of documentation articles and video tutorials covering the fundamentals, best practices, and troubleshooting of the email tool. Between the self-guided education and product design catering to usability, first-time email marketers report getting a campaign launched within an hour.
For those who do want more customization, Drip requires starting to tweak HTML and code. The interface focuses on serving beginners and intermediate marketers out of the box.
Omnisend
Omnisend balances power and complexity with usability through smart interface design. While robust features live directly in the platform, clean menu organization and guidance simplify getting started.
The dashboard highlights the next steps to set up key components like your audience dashboard, automation, segmentation, email editor, and reports. Hand-holding continues in tooltips, help widgets and an interactive product tour.
While enabling personalization at scale, Omnisend also allows marketers to ignore advanced options. Setting basic triggers and sending beautiful campaign templates can be done in minutes. But with time, you can uncover capabilities facilitating granular segmentation and complex automation without coding.
Ultimately Omnisend grows with the user while maintaining simplicity as a priority.
Winner: Omnisend
Both Drip and Omnisend focus on usability – but with Omnisend’s guided learning pathway and staggeringly powerful features, you can grow to edge ahead of the competition. Marketers find immediate simplicity yet untapped capability over time.
4. Email Deliverability
Drip
Drip emphasizes deliverability through proprietary algorithms, redundant IP warming, and integration with major ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. This foundation provides a “deliverability safety net” even before building their sender reputation.
Drip also enables customization like linking domains to send reputation, managing dedicated IPs, and monitoring factors like spam test scores. Useful reports identify issues jeopardizing inbox placement.
While Drip handles best practices behind the scenes, marketers appreciate transparency in optimization areas and email metrics. Deliverability ultimately influences long-term success.
Omnisend
Omnisend bakes deliverability directly into its infrastructure, leveraging a proprietary algorithm combining engagement data, reputation monitoring, and predictive optimization per subscriber.
The platform handles the heavy lifting of warm-up, domain/IP management, spam filter analysis, and identifying toxic senders/segments. Omnisend proactively surfaces deliverability risk factors and mitigation suggestions as well.
Few competitors match the combination of deliverability technology with transparent guidance helping marketers understand the impact on subscriber experience. This prevents easily correctable mistakes while ensuring the sender’s reputation.
Winner: Omnisend
Both platforms focus on maximizing inbox placement, but Omnisend’s predictive optimization and actionable deliverability insights tailored for each subscriber enable next-level performance and trust. Proactive visibility prevents sabotaging the hard-won sender’s reputation.
5. Customer Support and Community
Drip
Drip provides email-based customer service with relatively fast response times under 24 hours during weekdays. Support covers technical issues, platform questions, and guidance for best practices.
While phone assistance comes at higher pricing, the team monitors community spaces to address additional member questions. An engaged user community exists on Facebook where members trade expertise.
However, some customers report frustration in getting urgent or complex issues resolved. Email-only customer service lacks personalized guidance explaining how platform capabilities apply to unique goals and the team takes significantly longer to answer queries compared to other email providers.
Omnisend
Omnisend distinguishes itself with tailored customer service including email, chat, phone, and even 1:1 video calls. The team specializes in addressing e-commerce-specific needs with an emphasis on education.
For example, agents may explain how automation can increase average order value or which metrics indicate repeat purchase rate. This high-touch approach aims to elevate member success.
An exclusive online community also exists offering an academy, expert coaching calls, and mastermind groups facilitated by the Omnisend team. The comprehensive resources explain both strategic and tactical best practices.
Winner: Omnisend
While Drip members often help each other, Omnisend’s superior customer service through tailored communication channels combined with an unprecedented e-commerce-focused community offers next-level guidance that many competitors lack. The emphasis on education stands out which means Omnisend wins this section of the Drip vs Omnisend review.
6. Integrations
Drip
Drip shines when it comes to the ecosystem of integrations via its drop-in marketplace. With over 500 apps and plugin extensions, you can add virtually any marketing, sales, or software tool.
Connection is easy and facilitates the building of seamless multi-channel automation thanks to pre-built triggers, actions, and flows between apps. For example, use a Drop-In when someone books a Calendly call to enroll them in an automated post-call drip campaign. Or connect email signup forms to your CRM to track subscriber lead quality.
No matter what stack you use for webinars, chat, membership sites, online course platforms, etc, odds are Drop-Ins help them speak to each other under one roof.
Omnisend
While Omnisend offers hundreds of integrations, it specializes in plug-and-play connections with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. Real-time syncing links up data flows related to customers, orders, products, and more.
Omnisend also enables turnkey integration with platforms like Klaviyo or via API and Zapier to more niche tools. The options mainly focus on facilitating common e-commerce scenarios versus a wider tech stack.
Winner: Drip
For non-e-commerce use cases, Drip’s Drop-In ecosystem provides superior scope for connecting your martech and sales stacks. Omnisend simplifies core shop/CMS tool integration for product brands. Which has the best integrations depends on your needs.
7. Pricing
Drip
Drip has a simple pricing structure based on the number of contacts in your list. The lowest plan costs $39/month for up to 2,500 people. You can sign up for a free trial on the platform to test out the software before committing to a paid plan.
All plans include unlimited emails, and access to core features like automation, analytics, and integrations. Higher tiers offer more contacts, additional CRM and e-commerce integrations. You can compare multiple versions and use each version generated to see which one has better open rates and how much revenue you can expect.
Overall, Drip’s platform offers competitively priced and its free tier provides excellent capabilities for early-stage businesses.
Omnisend
Omnisend bases pricing on emails sent per month plus add-ons. Plans span from free to enterprise-level volumes. The free plan has a strong feature set and generously supports 15,000 emails monthly including many advanced features.
Paid upgrades bring priority customer service, SMS capabilities, predictive analytics, custom integrations, and more. Add-ons like additional domains, SMS bundles, and dedicated IP addresses cost extra based on usage or flat add-on fees.
Overall Omnisend offers premium capabilities related to advanced automation and deliverability even at low volumes. But costs scale higher at mid-tier and enterprise plans.
Winner: Tie
This Drip vs Omnisend comparison shows that Drip shines for high email volume senders who qualify for tiered discount rates. Omnisend packs more features into entry-level plans but scales more expensively. Comparing true costs depends heavily on monthly email volume and desired functionality.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Drip
Drip earns positive reviews for its intuitive email marketing platform catering to small business owners. Some praise the straightforward workflow automation, segmented broadcasting for increased leads, and actionable reporting.
Many note Drip’s affordable pricing and quality support helping non-technical founders get started. Complaints focus on occasional glitches in workflows, the inability to tweak HTML templates, and support response times for complex issues.
Overall, Drip is well-received as an easy-to-use mainstream email solution. But customers requiring advanced personalization, custom development, or faster problem resolution see limitations vs larger enterprise tools.
Omnisend
Omnisend garners rave reviews for its feature-packed, specialized e-commerce focus combining excellent support. Satisfied brand owners highlight granular customer segmentation, creative templates, and guidance maximizing sales through automation.
Some users find the interface overwhelming at first glance before tailored onboarding simplifies capabilities. Top complaints revolve around higher cost scaling for mid-market and enterprise-level email volumes.
For product brands selling online, Omnisend provides beloved industry-specific functionality with the support to match. Larger general marketers may find better values elsewhere.
Winner: Omnisend
When it comes to reviews and reputation specifically from ecommerce brands, Omnisend stands out with superior satisfaction related to actionable insights, customer-centric automation, and supportive community resources.
9. Drip vs Omnisend: FAQ’s
Drip FAQs
- Can I send emails to my own contacts database with Drip?
Yes, Drip offers both API and CSV import options to upload your own contacts and customer data. This facilitates sending emails to existing audiences and tracking engagement over time. - Does Drip have e-commerce features?
Drip focuses on core marketing and email automation versus specialized e-commerce functionality. They integrate with platforms like Shopify for basic post-purchase automation but don’t offer extensive store-specific features. - Is Drip fully GDPR compliant?
Yes, Drip helps users follow global data and privacy regulations including GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CASL covering email consent, processing agreements, data access requests, and more.
Omnisend FAQs
- Does Omnisend integrate with Shopify?
Yes, Omnisend offers deep native integration with Shopify including real-time syncing of store data to facilitate automation based on customer behavior. - Can I design my own email templates?
Omnisend provides an easy drag-and-drop designer to customize any of their professionally designed email templates. You can modify colors, fonts, blocks, and code without technical expertise. - Is Omnisend suitable for mid-market brands?
While Omnisend scales to any size, its specialization around supporting e-commerce functionality often resonates better with emerging and mid-market brands selling directly to consumers. Larger enterprises may require more general marketing capabilities.
Final Thoughts
Choose Drip if…
You’re a small business focused primarily on email marketing, lead generation, and basic sales automation. Drip’s affordable pricing, intuitive workflow builder, and ecosystem of over 500 marketing integrations cater to non-technical users. If you don’t need advanced e-commerce capabilities, Drip can help you grow without breaking the bank or getting overwhelmed.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more powerful email marketing platform, then you’ll need to find a Drip alternative that fulfills all your required checkboxes.
Choose Omnisend if…
You are an e-commerce brand selling products directly to consumers online. Omnisend specializes in advanced email and SMS automation centered around driving repeat purchases and increasing lifetime value. With tailored coaching and professional templates optimized for conversions, it provides the ultimate toolkit for product brands managing a retail site or store.