Omnisend vs MailerLite: Features, pricing & more

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Your answer to which is best between Omnisend vs. MailerLite comes down to whether you need advanced email and SMS automation, or you want email with website-building capabilities.

MailerLite has generous send limits for large lists and spreads your marketing footprint across email, websites, blogs, and landing pages, at the expense of ecommerce features that generate revenue across your customer journey.

Omnisend is for ecommerce and covers your email, SMS, and web push notifications in multichannel automations. Building unique customer experiences and tracking the revenue you generate from them comes naturally.

We have plenty more features, pricing information, and use cases to unpack. This article is the complete guide you need to pick the most suitable tool.

Omnisend vs MailerLite: Overview

Omnisend and MailerLite have both garnered impressive ratings from users. Omnisend boasts a 4.6-star rating on G2, while Mailerlite holds a 4.6-star rating. 

While MailerLite is lauded for its user-friendly interface and budget-conscious plans, users praise Omnisend for its powerful automation capabilities.    

Here’s an overview of their main features to help you decide which platform suits your marketing needs. 

Omnisend: Overview and best use cases

Omnisend is a better choice than MailerLite for all ecommerce stores because it’s an omnichannel marketing tool that natively integrates email, SMS, and web push notifications into automation flows, in addition to standalone campaigns for each of these channels.

It suits:

• Ecommerce stores of all sizes, from startups considering their first email marketing tool to established players looking to migrate from MailerLite or other platforms
• Small businesses that sell online, such as those selling products (including digital ones) alongside services
• Serious marketers interested in customer lifetime value, average order value, return on investment, and integrations with other tools

Omnisend’s value over MailerLite comes in a few different forms:

• Automations: Much more capable than MailerLite’s. Brings multichannel capabilities and a drag-and-drop builder to your workflow. Includes pre-built flows for (among others):
  • Welcome series
  • Abandoned cart, checkout, and browsing
  • Cross-sells
  • Back-in-stock
  • Order followup
  • Replenishment reminder
  • Product reviews
  • Customer reactivation
• Segmentation: Honestly brilliant with pre-built segments for common customer scenarios, such as added product to the cart but didn’t place an order, at risk to churn, window shoppers, and more. Also includes an AI segment builder. Here’s an example for “contacts who have purchased over $300 in the last three months in the USA”:

• AI features: Including the aforementioned AI segment builder for even the most complex ideas, an AI writing assistant, and AI brand assets. In comparison, MailerLite’s AI Writing Assistant is only included in its Advanced plan.
• Personalization: All customer touchpoints can include order, cart, browsing, and personal information, such as names, and adding these only requires dragging items into your emails or selecting a tag in editor dropdowns.
• Campaigns: For one-time and scheduled email, SMS, and web push campaigns to all customers or segments, as a means to share information and promote yourself during seasonal events
• 24/7 support: Via live chat and email across all plans. Only MailerLite’s custom-priced enterprise plan offers that.

Mailerlite: Overview and best use cases

If you have uncomplicated customer experience requirements across newsletters and automations, then MailerLite makes sense, suiting:

• Newsletter creators, bloggers, and podcasters with preexisting audiences, plus those wanting to build from scratch
• Coaches, consultants, and other service providers wanting to nurture leads and manage customer experiences via email
• Digital product sellers not requiring a complete store infrastructure (MailerLite’s website and blog builder could be sufficient)

Here’s why MailerLite suits these use cases:

• Pricing: For nothing, you can send 12,000 emails to 500 subscribers.
• Significant send limits: That 12,000 email send limit is scrapped and replaced with unlimited emails across all paid plans.
• Website, blog, and landing page builders: Let you build an ecommerce footprint with Stripe integration. Forms and email marketing sync automatically, providing you with a complete solution for small-scale sales.
• Newsletter rather than an automation focus: It’s big on newsletter features with a drag-and-drop editor, competitive reporting, campaign auto-resend, and unlimited templates (paid plans).
• Limited ecommerce features: No Facebook custom audiences, promotion popups, smart sending, or multiple automation triggers are available below the Advanced plan.

Pricing comparison

Let’s get to the good stuff first: how do MailerLite pricing and Omnisend pricing compare?

The good news is that both MailerLite and Omnisend offer a free tier and paid plans, with pricing varying depending on the number of recipients you have.

The generosity of the free plans is heavily in Omnisend’s favor, as MailerLite’s free plan does not provide access to the following:

• Newsletter templates
• Custom HTML editor
• Clickmaps
• Sending a repeated email to recipients who didn’t open the first one

In comparison, Omnisend’s free plan does include all of the features that are available on its paid plans, such as:

• Email templates
• Pre-built workflows and automations
• Popups
• Clickmaps
• Sending a repeated email to recipients who didn’t open the first one
• Discount coupon codes
• Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match
• Gamification signup form Wheel of Fortune

Additionally, Omnisend’s free plan includes 500 web push notifications per month, enabling you to message up to 250 contacts.

The Omnisend vs. MailerLite differences continue with the paid plans, too. Notably, Omnisend offers 24/7 chat and live support on all plans, including the Free tier and the Standard plan, which starts at $16/month.

The Pro plan offers a dedicated Account Expert once your monthly bill reaches $400. MailerLite’s paid plans provide 24/7 email and live chat support, but a dedicated manager costs an additional $100/month regardless of your existing monthly spend.

Both MailerLite and Omnisend’s pricing depends on the number of subscribers. Omnisend’s Standard plan costs $44/month for 2,500 subscribers, compared to MailerLite’s $25/month. However, Omnisend includes SMS, web push notifications, retargeting, and gamification.

There’s another crucial difference in pricing you need to know about if you need your email tool for transactional email and SMS, too, and that is that MailerLite requires an additional Transactional plan starting from free to $110/month:

Verdict: Draw. MailerLite has a lower entry price and is more affordable at scale. Omnisend is more expensive but offers better value with more advanced features and no restrictions.

For more information, use our email pricing calculator below to compare costs and features with MailerLite quickly. Simply input your desired number of contacts, select MailerLite from the list, and compare Omnisend with it.

Ease of use

Both Omnisend and MailerLite have intuitive interfaces. MailerLite’s dashboard provides an itinerary of tasks to complete after signing up, with a left-hand sidebar linking to settings pages for Subscribers, Campaigns, Automations, and more:

A brief scroll down the MailerLite dashboard reveals a performance overview, split across campaigns, automations, forms, and sites. 

Regarding the sidebar, there are no menu dropdowns; instead, clicks take you directly to the respective feature pages. The image below shows the Campaigns page as a new customer. As you can see, it provides guidance on the following steps:

The sites, automations, and forms dashboards also provide guidance. Clicking Create leads to new pages with additional walkthrough steps.

If you appreciate dark backgrounds, then you will love MailerLite’s look. Everything has polish, and it loads wickedly fast. Very Lite indeed.

Moving on to Omnisend, this is a step up in professionalism. The dashboard greets you by name and provides an immediate sales performance snapshot:

The sidebar features dropdown menus where appropriate, reducing the number of clicks required to find relevant settings compared to MailerLite.

Additionally, Omnisend has a light background with a dark sidebar and top menu, which is more legible than MailerLite’s completely dark configuration.

Creating your first segments, automations, and campaigns is equally intuitive via Omnisend and MailerLite. There isn’t much to choose from in terms of speed or ease of use. However, Mailerlite’s automation builder is not as good. Here’s an image of it:

Those side icons have no context and require a click to open a sub-menu. In Omnisend, all flow settings are available via the sidebar immediately:

Winner: Draw. You won’t have any problems learning either platform because both are intuitive to navigate and use. However, Omnisend offers a more intuitive interface for advanced features and is the best choice if you’re managing complex customer journeys.

Email marketing features

Omnisend’s email marketing suite is best for ecommerce campaigns and automations, while MailerLite’s is best for newsletters and creators.

For email templates, MailerLite and Omnisend offer a wide range of pre-designed, mobile-responsive templates. They’re suitable for various email campaigns, including welcome emails, newsletters, and promotional offers. 

You can customize these templates with your branding and messaging. However, Omnisend allows for more extensive customization within the templates, enabling you to build unique layouts with dynamic content blocks.

When it comes to building emails from scratch, both tools offer drag-and-drop email builders that make it easy to create professional-looking emails. Both platforms provide a wide range of layout options and content blocks, allowing users to personalize emails based on customer data. 

Omnisend’s email builder supports A/B testing, enabling you to experiment with different designs and content to optimize your campaigns. 

Additionally, the Product recommender item lets you auto-recommend products, such as recently viewed, similar to past purchases, and best-sellers:

Meanwhile, MailerLite’s Advanced plan includes custom HTML for creating complex email designs and an AI writing assistant. It is worth noting, however, that Omnisend offers both of these features across all plans.

In terms of automation, Omnisend’s options are highly focused on ecommerce and let you combine email and SMS into flows. It offers pre-built workflows for everyday ecommerce tasks, such as cart recovery and order confirmation. 

Because these options are highly customizable, you can create complex workflows tailored to your customer journey and build unique experiences.

MailerLite’s automation options are more general in focus. You can set up automated workflows triggered by various actions, such as subscribing to a list, making a purchase, or clicking a link, and pick from multiple pre-built flows:

Verdict: Omnisend wins. It has more pre-built flows, more advanced automation features, and helps you cover your entire customer journey.

Marketing channels

The names of the platforms provide insight into what they offer: Omnisend offers omnichannel features, whereas MailerLite is focused on email.

That’s not to say that MailerLite features are lacking. It packs most of what you’d expect an email marketing platform to offer, such as automations, landing pages, and signup forms — although in a generally basic way.

Omnisend goes multiple steps further, though. It’s the Swiss army knife of email marketing platforms, offering not only the usual features noted above but additional features, including:

• Push notifications
• SMS
• Advanced features for growing your email and SMS list
• Dynamic syncing of your contacts with your Facebook and Google ad accounts to retarget potential buyers

While MailerLite focuses primarily on email marketing, Facebook retargeting is available on the advanced plan.

Verdict: Omnisend wins. It handles email, SMS, and web push notification campaigns, and lets you combine email with SMS and push notifications in automations.

Ecommerce features

Segmentation features set Omnisend apart from MailerLite for ecommerce with pre-built segments for common buying scenarios and an AI segment builder. You can assign segments to flows and campaigns for appropriate targeting.

Omnisend provides a customer breakdown, too, showing average order value, the percentage of returning customers, total customers, and more:

Omnisend and MailerLite both integrate with other platforms (including Shopify and WooCommerce) in addition to third-party apps, including Zapier, to create automations.

They’re also both capable of adding products from your store into your campaigns, including individual products and products from categories.

With your email marketing platform linked to your ecommerce store, you can import your products, complete with images, descriptions, and prices. This makes building emails a breeze, especially when you need to quickly create a campaign — such as for the upcoming holidays.  

Omnisend, on the other hand, offers up its unique Product Picker, which makes it very easy for merchants to add their products (and all related info) to their campaign newsletters:

This feature also enables you to send tailored emails to specific segments of your audience, such as products related to purchase or browsing history, to particular individuals, increasing the likelihood of new sales.

One of the primary features required of an e-commerce-focused email marketing platform is the ability to send cart abandonment emails. MailerLite includes that feature when your account syncs with WooCommerce, Shopify, or another compatible platform.

Omnisend also offers automated cart abandonment emails, but whereas MailerLite will only send them to subscribers, Omnisend delivers to subscribed and non-subscribed contacts. 

Both platforms have premade flow templates, but Omnisend offers a more comprehensive selection of abandonment workflows:

Verdict: Omnisend wins. Its segmentation features enable you to drill down into your audience’s behaviors, preferences, and purchase history for targeted campaigns and flows. 

Email list building features

Having great campaigns is one thing, but they’re not going to drive any sales if you don’t have anybody to send them to. That’s why the best email marketing platforms also have tools to help you build your email list.

Neither Omnisend nor MailerLite is a slouch in this department, with both offering a variety of popups, landing pages, and forms. 

The popups can be deployed in multiple ways to take up minimal screen space or the entire page, and appear when the visitor scrolls to a certain point on the page or as they’re about to leave the site.

Both offer advanced customization options for popups, including adding your own logos and images, choosing from an extensive color palette, adding GDPR-compliant permission boxes, and segmenting subscribers based on which popup they subscribe through.

That’s where the audience-building features end for MailerLite and where Omnisend really comes into its own. In addition to the above, Omnisend has a Wheel of Fortune.

Instead of asking visitors to give you their email address in a text box, Wheel of Fortune adds an element of fun and rewards visitors with prizes that you choose – it could be free shipping, a discount, or anything else you want to offer.

The Wheel of Fortune form can also appear only when you want it to, whether that’s on product pages or when visitors are about to leave the site.

This helps give Omnisend the edge when it comes to tools for growing your list, but it has another show-stopping feature up its sleeve: letting visitors sign up with just their phone number. You can ask for both an email address and a phone number, or one or the other.

The advantage is that you can send marketing campaigns to subscribers who have only provided their phone numbers. In contrast, other email marketing platforms, such as MailerLite, require an email address.

Verdict: Omnisend wins. It has more form templates and supports, popups, embeds, and flyouts. Plus, its gamification features help you capture more subscribers.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing a customer base into distinct groups, an essential feature in email marketing platforms. Both platforms offer segmentation capabilities, but what are the differences between them?

Omnisend provides a head start with 32 pre-built segments, while also allowing the creation of custom segments from scratch. Meanwhile, MailerLite requires the manual creation of every segment.

Both platforms enable segmentation based on fundamental criteria, such as interests, demographics, and subscriber actions, including email opens and clicks. 

However, Omnisend offers more options for segmentation, including shopping behavior and web browsing activity, and it has an AI segment builder. 

The image below shows a prompt for a segment containing existing customers in the US over a year old who purchased at least three times in the last month:

Omnisend also has a customer lifecycle-based approach, dynamically assigning each customer to a stage, and providing an easy-to-understand lifecycle stage map that helps you prioritize and personalize retention strategies. 

When it comes to customization, Omnisend allows the addition of custom data to customer profiles, enabling the delivery of highly personalized messages.

On the other hand, MailerLite’s segmentation is more straightforward and doesn’t provide the same level of ecommerce integration as Omnisend.

Verdict: Omnisend wins. It has more pre-built segments, and its AI segment builder helps you narrow down and refine your customers for every email, SMS, and push notification. Additionally, its customer breakdown enables you to understand the value of all your customers.

Deliverability

The reason you put time and effort into building campaigns is for your audience to find them appealing, open them, and visit your store. For that to happen, they first need to see the emails.

It’s important to remember that multiple factors, including the reputation of your sending domain and the content of your email, influence deliverability.

Nonetheless, an email marketing platform’s deliverability score is a crucial consideration when choosing with whom to sign up.

MailerLite doesn’t disclose its deliverability rates, so its users must monitor their campaigns and track metrics such as the hard and soft bounce rates, unsubscribes, and the number of emails being marked as spam.

Conversely, Omnisend provides a comprehensive breakdown of your campaign’s deliverability statistics, including blocked messages and inactive email addresses. 

Omnisend also features a helpful program called Safe Send Volume, which helps you ‘warm up’ your contact lists. When migrating to a new email service provider or starting an account from scratch, you have no service reputation. 

As a result of this, you’re more likely to land in the spam folder. By warming up your list, you establish a positive reputation and prove to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that you can be trusted, which improves your deliverability.

The Safe Send Volume Program works by limiting the number of emails that you can send each day. This is one of the most effective methods for building a strong reputation, and the program automates the process for you.

As a bonus, Omnisend recommends segments to send emails to, which will inform you which are the most engaged parts of your audience. This should lead to better-performing campaigns in the future.

Verdict: Omnisend wins. Its built-in deliverability and list-cleaning tools help you reach customers more consistently than MailerLite. However, keep in mind that deliverability is influenced by many external factors, so that results may vary.

Customer support

Omnisend offers 24/7 customer support via live chat and email, available across all plans. In contrast, MailerLite offers live chat only in its Advanced plan and provides email support across all its paid plans, with the free plan receiving 14 days of email support.

Simply put, if you’re likely to require professional assistance for building segments, campaigns, and automations, and MailerLite’s most expensive plan isn’t a fit for you, then Omnisend is best.

Moving on from support availability, the overall ratings for both tools are excellent, as indicated by G2. Let’s compare their reviews for customer support:

• MailerLite: 61 positive remarks for customer support, 14 for poor customer support
• Omnisend: 100 positive comments for customer support, 18 for poor customer support

Based on these ratios, Omnisend edges ahead. MailerLite maintains an 81% positive support rating (61 positive vs. 14 negative), while Omnisend hits 85%

Verdict: Omnisend wins. It offers more support options in its free plan and has a higher satisfaction score on the review platform G2.

Omnisend vs. Mailerlite: Final verdict

Creating unique customer experiences through automations across email, SMS, and push notifications is Omnisend’s forte, as MailerLite doesn’t natively support push notifications, and SMS requires an additional Transactional plan.

Omnisend’s omnichannel functionality comes with every plan, and it uniquely bakes those channels into analytics, testing, and customer breakdowns, helping you understand your customers, their journeys, and make email and SMS among your top-performing channels.

MailerLite is not an ecommerce app, but it is a capable newsletter and basic automation tool that provides what you need to grow, sell to, and manage your customers. 

A pivot from Omnisend to MailerLite makes sense if you need a website builder and prefer your email marketing to be on the same platform. Otherwise, your ecommerce store will benefit more from Omnisend’s advanced capabilities.