When it comes to choosing the right email marketing and automation software for your business, Drip and Zoho are two platforms worth considering. Selecting the best solution is key since having the right tools in place can help you drive sales, boost engagement, and grow your customer base.
In this comprehensive Drip vs Zoho comparison, we evaluate both platforms across 10 important criteria to help you determine which email marketing platform is the best fit for your business needs and budget. We analyze crucial factors ranging from market position and ease of use to specific features like e-commerce capabilities, analytics, reliability, and more.
Our goal is to provide an objective side-by-side analysis so you can confidently choose the top software for automated email marketing and customer engagement.
As you grow your business in competitive markets, leveraging a solution that aligns with your goals for sales, leads, and customer retention is essential. Read on as we explore how Drip and Zoho stack up on the key elements that matter most to small business owners and marketers.
1. Understanding the Basics
Drip was founded in 2013 by co-founders Rob Walling and Mike Perham as an easier way for small businesses to sell online courses without needing to build a complex system themselves. Today, over 10,000 companies use Drip to power their email automation, landing pages, and checkout.
Drip is well-known within the entrepreneur community for its WordPress integration and simplified workflows. Join the Drip user’s Facebook group to connect with 15,000+ like-minded business owners.
Zoho entered the email marketing automation space in 2017 when it acquired email marketing provider Freshworks. Zoho is a large multinational company that offers a suite of business software. While Zoho doesn’t advertise user numbers, it’s safe to assume at least tens of thousands rely on its solutions. Zoho has an established reputation for affordable and capable software-as-a-service products.
Both companies have been around for over a decade and offer popular marketing automation solutions for a range of business sizes and budgets. Next, we’ll look at how easy their platforms are to use on a day-to-day basis.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Drip
Drip provides an intuitive visual automation builder to create multistep workflows and campaigns. You can easily string different actions together such as sending emails, adding tags, waiting a set duration, updating custom fields, and more.
Prebuilt automation templates help you get started for common scenarios like welcoming new subscribers, activity-based triggers, abandoned carts, and post-purchase nurturing.
Advanced features like segmentation, custom field creation, tags and filters, RSS actions, and Zapier integration allow you to create highly customized and complex automation if needed. For example, you could set up a workflow to add a tag anytime someone clicks a link in an email, and then send a follow-up based on that.
Overall the automation builder strikes a nice balance between simplicity for beginners and advanced functionality for power users.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns makes it straightforward to map out multi-touch attribution models through intuitive drag-and-drop workflow building. Options include sending emails, SMS marketing software, push notifications, adding contacts to groups, updating fields, waiting times, and connecting other apps.
While the interface looks a bit dated, Zoho makes up for it in depth. Features like A/B testing, blueprints, serious segmentation, dynamic content, and API access cater to savvy marketers. You can take advantage of built-in CRM data for personalization too.
Similar to Drip, Zoho delivers on allowing both simple and incredibly sophisticated automation as needed. It may involve a slightly steeper learning curve but the results speak for themselves.
Winner: Tie
The Zoho Campaigns Drip comparison shows that both platforms offer excellent workflow automation for marketing campaigns with strong capabilities for a beginner, expert, and sales team alike.
Drip stands out for its simplicity while Zoho wins on depth, but overall they deliver equal value for different industries. Choosing between the two platforms when it comes to building automated sequences comes down to individual user preference.
Email Templates
Drip
Drip provides a solid library of professionally designed, mobile-optimized email templates to choose from. Templates are organized by category making it easy to quickly start campaigns like welcome series, product launches, newsletters, and more.
While the template selection is not as robust as some competitors, the designs are modern and aesthetically pleasing. You can preview templates and then customize colors, fonts, and content elements like images, buttons, and text blocks within the easy drag-and-drop editor.
Other email builder features include saving templates, using your HTML, adding variables, and copying templates between accounts. Overall it covers the basics well for template needs.
Zoho
One of Zoho Campaign’s biggest advantages is its expansive gallery of templates covering every major email campaign type. Zoho supplies 700+ pre-built email layouts all formatted to look great across mobile and desktop.
The template editor makes customizing templates simple with options to tweak content blocks, image sizing, colors, and more. More advanced users can work in the HTML editor. Helpful testing tools allow you to preview on various devices.
Zoho outshines competitors when it comes to the breadth and depth of professionally designed email templates. This can save you significant time while still achieving high quality.
Winner: Zoho
While Drip offers a solid collection of email templates, Zoho Campaigns is the clear winner here with 5x more options covering vastly more use cases. The combination of quantity, quality, and customization tools makes Zoho hard to beat for ready-made email design and content.
Segmentation
Drip
Drip enables segmenting your contacts database in a variety of ways to target campaigns. Options include tags, custom fields, location, signup date, email activity like opens/clicks, and more. You can create complex segments using AND/OR logic to narrow or expand your audience.
While Drip covers the fundamentals of list segmentation well, there is room for more advanced segmentation compared to other ESPs. Still, for most small business needs, you can successfully divide lists using the built-in tools.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns provides robust segmentation capabilities for both basic and advanced needs. Ways to filter contacts include attributes like demographics, order history, campaign activity, device information, geo-location, and user scoring models. An intuitive query builder makes it simple for anyone to create segments.
Zoho also enables creating custom fields, tagging, and integration with Zoho CRM data for additional intelligence to layer into your segmentation strategy. Overall Zoho Campaigns delivers enterprise-grade list division features to execute sophisticated personalization.
Winner: Zoho
While Drip provides the basic list segmentation tools most small businesses need, Zoho Campaigns beats them when it comes to advanced segmentation capabilities thanks to its CRM-style interface and intelligence. The capacity to leverage dozens of data points easily to build segments makes Zoho the winner.
Analytics
Drip
Drip provides a suite of reports and analytics to help you understand your audiences and campaign performance. Reports range from email-specific metrics like open, clickthrough, and unsubscribe rates to sales tracking and conversion data. You can filter reports by date ranges, campaigns, and segments.
Useful features include A/B testing capabilities, real-time monitoring of sends, sharing reports with others, and data exports. The analytics are comprehensive enough for most small business needs although larger brands may need more robust solutions.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns touts enterprise-grade analytics with 130+ pre-built reports focused on email deliverability, subscriber engagement, and conversion tracking. Dashboards allow customization to focus on key metrics for your business.
Insights go beyond typical email and campaign analysis to include metrics calculated from the integrated Zoho CRM data. This delivers a very thorough 360-degree view of customer interactions and ROI all tied back to real revenue and pipeline figures.
The depth of data available positions Zoho strongly for businesses that take analytics seriously. The combination of breadth and depth across modules is incredibly valuable.
Winner: Zoho
Drip and Zoho both provide solid email marketing analytics, but Zoho is the winner for businesses that rely heavily on data-driven decisions and insight. By connecting campaign metrics with real pipelines and revenue from CRM, Zoho Campaign analysis capabilities are incredibly deep.
Unique Features
Drip
A standout Drip feature is its innovation on e-commerce tools that set it apart from other marketing automation platforms. Customers praise the seamless cart, checkout, and fulfillment capabilities with easy WordPress integration. Drip makes it simple to sell products directly from your email campaigns and website.
Other unique aspects are a focus on lead scoring to identify sales opportunities and WARM expansion to personalize the first 30 days with new customers. These capabilities streamline critical business functions in one place. Drip aims to provide all the tools an entrepreneur needs to sell online in one platform.
Zoho
Zoho differentiates itself by providing an all-in-one integrated CRM and marketing platform connected to areas like email, forms, social media, web analytics, surveys, and more. This creates a central hub to understand customer interactions with data unified between modules. Features are deeply interwoven together through common interfaces and shared data sources leading to powerful functionality.
The platform also offers deep functionality across modules so capabilities go significantly beyond basic features. Examples include in-depth contact timeline history, lead assignment workflows, lifecycle stage mapping, and unified data analytics. Zoho is positioned as an end-to-end customer engagement ecosystem suitable for larger enterprises.
Winner: Tie
Drip stands out for its purpose-built ecommerce tools while Zoho wins on depth and breadth of integrated CRM and marketing functionality. Both platforms offer unique features that lend themselves to different business needs. Declaring a single winner is difficult since the differentiation provides unique appeal for different users.
3. Ease of Use
Drip
Drip prides itself on a simplified user experience so beginners can start building campaigns quickly. The visual interface guides you step-by-step when setting up elements like landing pages, automation, and e-commerce. Many users praise how intuitive workflows are compared to overly complex platforms that can overwhelm new users.
The dashboard organizes your central tasks prominently with easy access to subscriber and message performance analytics. Some more advanced features like segmentation can involve a learning curve but overall Drip is quite user-friendly for small businesses. Drip’s product ethos focuses on usability and good enough features for most.
Zoho
While packed with deep functionality, Zoho Campaigns suffers from an outdated visual design that feels unintuitive initially. There can be a steep learning curve in understanding how to leverage the platform’s sophisticated capabilities compared to Drip’s simplicity. This creates a poor first impression for onboarding new users.
However, Zoho makes up for its complexity with strong documentation, training resources, and customer support. If you invest time mastering Zoho Campaigns, the platform performance is incredibly robust despite poor UI. Most criticize the interface rather than core usability after ramping up. But ease of use suffers until achieving familiarity.
Winner: Drip
Drip wins clearly on user experience with an interface intentionally designed to guide beginners smoothly through common email marketing tasks. While Zoho Campaigns offers greater functionality depth for savvy users, the platform complexity comes at the cost of approachability, especially for email marketing newbies.
4. Email Deliverability
Drip
Drip provides sound deliverability through ISP relationship building, sender reputation monitoring, inbox placement testing, and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Useful deliverability features include link wrappings to avoid blacklisting, unsubscribe management, bounce and complaint handling, and sending reputation monitoring.
Drip also enables domain authentication including SPF/DKIM setup to verify your identity.
While deliverability capabilities cover the fundamentals well, advanced users may want more granular controls compared to dedicated ESPs to optimize for their niche. But for most small businesses, Drip gets the core job done without needing to focus on deliverability. Drip aims for “good enough” capability but doesn’t cater to perfectionists.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns offers enterprise-grade deliverability combining high volume capacity with optimization features like IP warming, reputation monitoring, advanced error address management, and more.
Zoho sends over 35 billion emails per year giving them significant clout and relationships with ISPs to ensure strong inbox placement rates. Useful tools like email rendering, spam testing, and sending domain management provide robust deliverability.
The company is also serious about compliance with internationally recognized regulations and site security certifications providing peace of mind. Zoho has the experience and feature set to perfect deliverability even for the most demanding expert.
Winner: Zoho
While both platforms satisfy email deliverability requirements for many small businesses, Zoho Campaigns edges out Drip when it comes to advanced feature needs. Zoho’s enterprise credibility stemming from high volume sends optimized through years of experience makes them hard to match for deliverability.
5. Customer Support and Community
Drip
Drip provides email support, knowledge base articles, live chat, phone support, and community forums to help users. They also offer free weekly live training webinars allowing you to learn directly from staff experts. Support receives high marks for being responsive and helpful.
While phone support is only offered on higher tier plans, Drip’s stellar support team, sufficient self-help content, active community forum, and product webinars cover most needs for ongoing education. Join the Drip Facebook User Group to connect with over 5,000 members.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns supports customers through 24/7 email and live chat, an extensive knowledge base and documentation, phone assistance, and an online community to discuss best practices and interact directly with staff experts. Users compliment helpdesk responsiveness across channels.
Besides direct support, Zoho also provides a wealth of educative content like blogs, videos, guides, and local meetup events to continually develop skills. For those wanting to engage with other users, visit the Zoho Campaigns Facebook Group with over 15,000 members discussing the platform daily.
Winner: Tie
Both Drip and Zoho Campaigns offer excellent customer support via a wide range of contact options supplemented by active user communities that make it easy to get help when needed. Each platform provides sufficient self-service learning content as well for continued education.
6. Integrations
Drip
Drip connects with hundreds of popular third-party platforms via Zapier including leading CRMs, email services, payment processors, webinar software, and marketing & sales tools. Native integrations also exist for specific use cases like affiliate management, course platforms, and website analytics.
Some limitations exist though if you require complex custom API integration capabilities since Drip focuses on core functions over customization.
Overall Drip covers integration needs for most small business software ecosystems thanks to the flexibility provided by Zapier. The combination of Zapier plus key native integrations checks important boxes for common platforms used by their target customer base. However, large enterprises may find restrictions.
Zoho
One of Zoho’s biggest value propositions is its ecosystem of 40+ integrated apps covering CRM, email marketing, payments, commerce, surveys, and more. Data and workflows freely connect between Zoho modules for unified customer experiences and analysis. This end-to-end scope is incredibly rare in the software industry.
Zoho Campaigns also has hundreds of third-party app integrations available through Zapier or custom APIs allowing it to be the marketing hub for virtually any external software needed. Few other platforms can match the breadth and depth of integrations possible across so many systems.
Winner: Zoho
Both platforms satisfy integration requirements for many users through Zapier and common native connections. However, Zoho dominates the competition when it comes to readily unified first-party apps covering the entire marketing and sales stack. More flexible API options cement Zoho’s status as an integration leader.
7. Pricing
Drip
Drip pricing starts at $39/month for up to 500 contacts making it approachable for early-stage and bootstrapped businesses. The Growth plan at $199/month suits most small companies allowing 25,000 contacts and full e-commerce features. Enterprise quotes are available for larger needs.
Overall Drip is very affordable compared to competitors while still delivering robust capabilities sufficient for scaling from zero to seven figures in revenue. They avoid nickel-and-diming users with add-on fees. Learn more about Drip’s pricing.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns has a forever-free plan and 2 premium plans:
- Standard – $3/month for up to 1,000 contacts and an unlimited number of emails.
- Professional – $4.50/month, up to 5,000 contacts, and advanced segmentation.
The Standard plan includes basic features like emails, automation, and reports. The premium plan adds more contacts, sequences, custom domains, and premium features.
Zoho Campaigns charges an affordable price and offers volume discounts if you pay annually. There is also a free plan for up to 2,000 emails per month. Overall, Zoho Campaigns provides strong value with competitive pricing.
Winner: Zoho
This Zoho CRM Drip review shows that both platforms offer competitive and fair SaaS pricing models. However, Zoho’s sales CRM manages to package incredibly deep functionality into each tier while maintaining affordable entry points for any budget. The transparency and value delivered make Zoho hard to beat.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Drip
Drip earns glowing reviews from industry experts and users highlighting the platform’s simplicity, automation capabilities, and seamless e-commerce integration. Typical praise calls Drip an intuitive, beginner-friendly solution for quickly launching email marketing campaigns and selling products.
However, some customers believe core reporting lacks sophistication compared to high-end systems. But Drip continues improving with a strong product roadmap. Overall, reviews cement Drip as a top choice for lean entrepreneurship.
Zoho
Zoho Campaigns draws universal acclaim for its feature-packed capabilities that compete with the best enterprise solutions at affordable rates. Analysts applaud the CRM-inspired approach, segmentation power, and cross-channel integration.
The most common complaints focus on legacy design elements and initial learning curve complexity compared to streamlined competitors. But reviewers agree you receive incredible platform depth at scale in exchange.
Winner: Tie
Both platforms earn impressive market validation and recommendations stemming from their respective strengths catering to different needs. Drip is regarded as the intuitive option for new entrepreneurs while Zoho wins on satisfaction from complex businesses wanting value-priced sophistication.
9. FAQ’s
Drip FAQs
- What types of businesses use Drip?
Drip caters to small e-commerce brands, online course creators, freelancers, agencies, and entrepreneurs wanting to automate marketing campaigns and simplify selling. - Is Drip easy to use?
Yes, Drip prioritizes an intuitive interface and simplified workflows so beginners can quickly create landing pages, email campaigns, checkout forms, and automation without technical skills. - Does Drip offer email marketing features?
Yes, Drip provides full-featured email marketing capabilities like templates, segmentation, automation, analytics, deliverability optimization, and more. - Can Drip build sales funnels?
Yes, Drip enables customizable lead capture and sales funnel construction using landing pages, multi-step flows, payment processing, and automation to convert visitors.
Zoho FAQs
- What types of businesses use Zoho Campaigns?
The platform scales to serve SMBs up to large enterprise-level companies across many industries wanting sophisticated marketing automation coupled with integrated CRM. - Is Zoho Campaigns easy to use?
The breadth of capabilities does translate into steeper learning curves than simpler software. But invested users praise its performance once mastered. Zoho helps the onboarding process through training. - Does Zoho offer email marketing features?
Yes, email marketing is a core Zoho strength that rivals leading dedicated ESP platforms in scope, allowing complex multi-channel campaigns. - Can Zoho Campaigns integrate with other systems?
Yes, Zoho earns industry-wide praise for its 40+ unified business apps and hundreds of third-party integrations. APIs enable custom connections too.
Final Thoughts
Choose Drip if…
You’re an entrepreneur focused on directly selling products or services through targeted marketing campaigns. Drip simplifies email automation, landing pages, and embedded cart/checkout capabilities in one platform allowing bootstrapped founders to quickly establish an online business presence and start generating revenue.
Read my article about the best Drip alternatives if you want a broader view of all your available email marketing platform options.
Choose Zoho Campaigns if…
You need to coordinate sophisticated marketing across multiple channels tied directly into your central CRM database for sales teams and support agents businesswide. Zoho Campaigns delivers enterprise-grade functionality scaled to your growth unifying cross-channel customer experiences through automation.
Finding the right email and marketing automation solution tailored to your business needs and budget is crucial as you look to acquire and retain customers in competitive markets. If you have any other questions about Drip versus Zoho Campaigns and which platform would serve you best, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section below!