Omnisend vs Sendlane: A detailed comparison of both tools

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Making an informed choice between email marketing powerhouses, Omnisend vs Sendlane, can be challenging. 

On a surface level, both platforms offer highly compelling features for an effective email marketing campaign. That’s why you must dive deeper to determine which works best for your business needs.

In a nutshell, Omnisend stands out for its user-friendly interface and robust automation capabilities. It helps you engage customers with personalized and timely messages.

Sendlane, on the other hand, offers deep analytics and multivariable segmentation, allowing for highly targeted campaigns. 

With overlapping feature sets and distinct pricing structures, it’s easy to see why deciding between Omnisend and Sendlane can be overwhelming.

To better understand these tools, we’ll dissect their strengths and weaknesses in this comprehensive comparison, diving deep into pricing, automation, list building and segmentation, and other features. Hopefully it will make it easier for you to decide which platform to pick — Sendlane or Omnisend.

Let’s get started!

Omnisend vs Sendlane: An overview

Both Omnisend and Sendlane are powerful email marketing platforms, but they cater to different types of users and business needs. 

Omnisend is a comprehensive solution designed with ecommerce businesses in mind. It offers deep integration with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, and more. 

Omnisend’s strength lies in its extensive automation capabilities, omnichannel marketing features, and a focus on driving sales through targeted campaigns.

Interestingly, Sendlane is a bit similar to Omnisend. For example, it also targets online vendors and ecommerce stores. However, while it directly integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, it relies on APIs to connect with other ecommerce platforms. 

Sendlane is particularly well-suited for businesses that need to send large volumes of emails and require advanced segmentation and targeting options.

Secondly, both platforms offer email and SMS marketing features, as well as robust automation workflows. However, their pricing models differ significantly. In making the decision between Omnisend vs Sendlane, you should definitely consider your budget. 

Omnisend offers a free plan that’s just as good as the paid ones, with paid plans starting from $16/month. This makes it an affordable choice, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses. 

On the contrary, Sendlane doesn’t offer a free plan. However, it does provide a 60-day free trial to allow new users enough time to evaluate its features. The platform’s paid plans start at $600/month, which indicates that Sendlane is keen to position itself as an enterprise-level solution. 

Whether you choose Omnisend or Sendlane, either option provides fast and responsive 24/7 live chat and email support. This way, you can rest assured that assistance is available whenever you need it. 

Here’s a comparative Omnisend vs Sendlane table to get a clearer picture of their features. 

Feature	Omnisend	Sendlane
Best for	Ecommerce	High-volume email senders
Free plan	✅	❌
Pricing	Starts from $16/month	Starts from $600/month
Email list building features	Multi-step forms, popups, landing pages, teasers, Wheel of Fortune, signup form	Forms, popups
Email marketing features	Email templates, email automation workflows, drag-and-drop email builder, reviews, and more	Email templates, email automation workflows, machine learning open predictability, reviews, and more
Marketing automation features	Email, SMS, push notifications, Google and Facebook retargeting	Email, SMS
Segmentation and targeting	Advanced segmentation options	Multivariable segmentation
Analytics and reporting	Advanced analytics and reporting features	Real-time analytics and segmented reports

Omnisend and Sendlane pricing

When comparing Omnisend vs Sendlane, their pricing structures reveal distinct approaches to email marketing services. 

Omnisend offers a contact-based pricing model, starting at $16/month for up to 500 contacts and scaling up to $1,546/month for up to 150,000 contacts on the Standard plan. With custom pricing available for over 150,000 contacts, Omnisend does a solid job of catering to businesses of various sizes.

In contrast, Sendlane’s pricing is based on email volume, not the number of contacts. In fact, there are no limits on contacts. Plans begin at $600/month for up to 500,000 emails and scale to 60 million emails at $18,000/month.

This takes us to the next vital question — who wins in terms of what you can get for free: Omnisend or Sendlane? 

Sendlane doesn’t have a free plan. However, it provides a 60-day trial period that’s limited to 100 contacts and 500 email sends. Meanwhile, Omnisend is far more generous, offering a free plan that allows you to explore all paid plan features, with only the following limitations:

• Up to 250 contacts
• 500 email sends per month
• One-time $1 worth of SMS credits 
• 500 web push notifications per month
• 50 published Shopify reviews 

It’s worth mentioning that Sendlane only includes SMS in paid accounts, starting at 2,500 SMS credits for $25. 

That said, Omnisend’s free plan doesn’t just give you a taste of SMS marketing. It offers the flexibility to purchase SMS credits separately, starting from $20/month. For free SMS credits equivalent to the plan’s price, invest in Omnisend’s Pro plan. 

Email marketing pricing winner: With its free plan and a pricing structure that caters to businesses of all sizes, Omnisend takes the win for this round. 

Email list building features

Building a thriving email list is essential for successful email marketing. While either platform provides a range of tools to capture leads and nurture subscriber growth, let’s see who takes the lead between Omnisend vs Sendlane in the variety of email list building features. 

With Omnisend, you get 100+ signup forms and landing page designs, all ready to be launched out of the box. Its suite includes versatile and easy-to-use forms, such as:

• Simple popups
• Embedded forms
• Multistep forms
• Teasers

You get eight ready-to-use landing pages, as well as the option to custom-build your own. Omnisend also provides engaging elements like the Wheel of Fortune signup form, shown below, to gamify the subscription process. 

On the other hand, Sendlane provides a range of forms, including inline, popup, and banner styles. We were able to use formats like checkboxes, drop-downs, and radio button selections to create fun and interactive forms. Similar to Omnisend, you can select the conditions that trigger your form to be displayed, as shown below. 

While Sendlane doesn’t offer landing pages or a library of signup forms, we were able to use its analytics, which provide data on the following metrics:

• Impressions 
• Clickthrough rate 
• Email and SMS conversion rate
• Customer lifetime value

With Omnisend, you get a lot more depending on the fields in your signup forms. Not only can you see the number of views and actual signups, you can also check performance by device used, location, language, user gender, and more. 

Granted, Omnisend doesn’t provide lifetime value data, but it allows you to A/B test your forms, which isn’t possible on Sendlane. 

Email list building features winner: Omnisend again takes the lead due to its extensive library of pre-designed forms and landing pages.

Email marketing features

Omnisend provides an impressive library of 250+ modern, occasion-specific templates, which are categorized for easy navigation. These templates are grouped by theme and goal and can be automatically customized with brand assets and colors. With Omnisend, you enjoy all types of email campaigns, including:

• Regular emails
• A/B test campaigns
• Automated emails (e.g. welcome emails) 
• Joint email & SMS campaigns

On the other hand, Sendlane offers only 50+ modern templates, but it also supports regular campaigns, A/B testing, and automation. 

Omnisend’s intuitive drag-and-drop email builder includes a product picker feature, as shown below, that pulls images and descriptions directly from the store. The product picker even displays available product variants to save you time. 

Sendlane also has a functional drag-and-drop email builder, although we found it a little tricky to align elements with it after deleting images. On the plus side, it has a product block that supports Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Miva, and custom store integrations. You can use it to manually (as shown below) or dynamically select products to include in your emails.

Email marketing features winner: Omnisend leads this category due to its ease of use and variety. 

Marketing automation features

On the automation front, Omnisend has 30 prebuilt and easily customizable workflows. Some contain emails only, while others include SMS as well. In addition to SMS, Omnisend automation workflows support integration with web push notifications and include:

• Welcome series
• Order confirmation 
• Browse abandonment
• Replenishment reminder
• Customer reactivation
• Cart abandonment
• Back in stock
• Cross sell

In terms of user-friendliness, Omnisend excels in this area, with an array of trigger, filter, and condition options. It also supports A/B test splits in automation. The image below shows Omnisend’s automation library where you can either pick a preset automation or create one from scratch. 

Sendlane offers nine ecommerce-focused automations, with 50+ prebuilt funnels that allow you to integrate both email and SMS marketing channels. They include:

• Welcome series
• Customer winback
• Cart abandonment 
• Product recommendation
• Browse abandonment 
• Post purchase
• Back in stock
• Reviews

Sendlane’s automation wizard is also user-friendly, offering advanced features, such as multiple triggers, audience splits, webhooks, and conditional splits. We were able to test up to four variables at once via multivariate testing. This allowed the best-performing email to be automatically sent out to your remaining audience. 

To conduct this test, you must turn on Automation Experiments by checking the Experiments checkbox in the settings as shown in the image below.

Marketing automation winner: A very close tie, with Sendlane inching slightly ahead because it offers multivariate testing and more prebuilt workflows.

Segmentation and targeting

Tailoring your email campaigns to specific audience segments is crucial for boosting engagement and sales. Here’s an Omnisend vs Sendlane comparison in this category. 

Omnisend offers an impressive array of 30 pre-built segments, which are ready to use out of the box. These include unique options like “Window shoppers” and “Deal hunters” for major events like Black Friday, “Active email subscribers,” and “Added product to the cart but didn’t place an order.”

Omnisend’s segmentation is robust, allowing users to combine multiple filters and tags with six segmentation options, namely:

• Channels
• Contact properties
• Shopping behavior
• Email campaign activity 
• SMS campaign activity 
• Web browsing activity

As for Sendlane, it offers powerful segmentation tools, despite not offering ready-to-go audiences. You can segment by:

• List 
• Contact tags
• Custom fields
• Engagement activity
• Automation participation

To create a new segment in Sendlane, click the Audience button and head over to the Segments tab. 

You can even segment by customer lifetime value, which isn’t possible with Omnisend. Notably, Sendlane includes Shopify-specific filters and a site visit option. However, we didn’t find some helpful on-site behavior filters like browse or cart abandonment. 

At the end of the day, the two tools offer advanced segmentation, though Omnisend’s prebuilt segments and numerous filters give it an edge. Sendlane required more manual setup, but it could be easier for those already leveraging lifetime value data in their marketing strategy.

Segmentation winner: Omnisend takes the lead in this category because of its extensive pre-built segments and comprehensive filtering options, which allow for more efficient targeting right out of the box.

Analytics and reporting

Without understanding campaign performance, it can be tricky to optimize your email marketing efforts. Indeed, the Sendlane vs Omnisend dilemma might be too close to call, with the two platforms offering robust analytics and reporting capabilities. Nonetheless, we’ll attempt to make a detailed comparison and bring you a winner. 

Omnisend’s analytics provide comprehensive reports, including standard campaign metrics, advanced reporting, and deliverability insights. Unique features include real-time analytics for immediate performance tracking and click map reports, which visually display where users are clicking in your emails. 

You can use different sorting options, view the unique or total clicks for the links in your email, and display the ‘Click summary’ with the ‘Click map’ feature.

Beyond basic metrics like opens and clicks, Omnisend offers sales and order numbers from each campaign and automation. You also gain access to advanced reporting that includes trend scales and performance by segment.

Sendlane also impresses with its analytical depth. We were able to get critical metrics from email campaigns and automations, such as:

• Contact list growth
• Signup form performance
• Attributed revenue

Sendlane goes a step further by providing email health metrics and breakdowns by email providers and devices. These are crucial for optimizing deliverability and user experience.

Analytics and reporting winner: Omnisend wins, with its far more advanced reporting features.

Wrap up

Choosing the right email marketing tool for your ecommerce business depends on understanding your specific needs.

In this Omnisend vs Sendlane comparison, we’ve seen that both of these tools offer powerful email marketing capabilities.

Omnisend shines with its seamless platform integrations, extensive automation capabilities, interactive list-building tools, and visual analytics. It’s also more budget-friendly, with plans starting at $16/month. 

Sendlane, while pricier, excels in high-volume sending, advanced segmentation, and email health metrics. Your choice depends on your business size, budget, and specific needs — deep ecommerce integration or high-volume sending.