Is Emotive or Postscript cheaper?

Emotive starts at $100 per month plus $0.015 per SMS on Starter (14 days trial). Postscript starts at $0 per month on Starter with a $49 minimum spend, then $100 per month on Growth (free plan available).

Emotive vs Postscript

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Emotive compared with Postscript

Postscript is Shopify-only with far deeper segmentation, 65-plus native triggers, an AI testing layer, and the largest engineering team in this category. Emotive covers Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce and bundles human copywriting through TextPros. If you are on Shopify and have someone to run the channel, Postscript is the better software. If you are on any other cart, or you have nobody to write the messages, Emotive is the practical choice and Postscript is simply unavailable to you.

Postscript compared with Emotive

Both are ecommerce SMS platforms with published self-serve pricing and both lean on two-way conversation rather than pure broadcast. Postscript is Shopify-only with far deeper native segmentation and a much larger engineering organization behind it; Emotive supports Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento and bundles human copywriting help through its TextPros service. Choose Postscript if you are on Shopify and want the deepest data integration in the category. Choose Emotive if you are on another cart or you want a vendor that will write the messages for you.

Choose Emotive if

Ecommerce brands on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce that want SMS to be a two-way selling channel rather than a broadcast list, especially merchants with no in-house copywriter who value the bundled TextPros human service and want compliance handled at the popup level.

Choose Postscript if

Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants doing enough revenue that a dedicated SMS channel earns its keep, particularly stores with repeat purchase behavior, subscriptions on Recharge, or a Klaviyo email program already running that they want SMS to sit alongside rather than replace.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Emotive	Postscript
Category	SMS	SMS
Starting price	$100 per month plus $0.015 per SMS on Starter (14 days trial)	$0 per month on Starter with a $49 minimum spend, then $100 per month on Growth (free plan available)
Pricing model	Monthly platform fee tiered by subscriber list size, plus per-message SMS and MMS rates that fall as the tier rises. Monthly contracts with minimum spend requirements increasing by tier.	Monthly platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, plus usage. Carrier pass-through fees apply on top of every message on every tier. No per-seat charge and no credit bundles.
Free plan	No	Starter carries a $0 platform fee but a $49 minimum monthly spend, so it is a low floor rather than a genuinely free plan; it includes campaigns, automations, unlimited segments, a toll-free number, and two opt-in keywords.
Free trial	14 days	$100 in credit valid for 30 days, applied against message and carrier fees
Best for	Ecommerce brands on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce that want SMS to be a two-way selling channel rather than a broadcast list, especially merchants with no in-house copywriter who value the bundled TextPros human service and want compliance handled at the popup level.	Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants doing enough revenue that a dedicated SMS channel earns its keep, particularly stores with repeat purchase behavior, subscriptions on Recharge, or a Klaviyo email program already running that they want SMS to sit alongside rather than replace.
Setup time	Store connection and signup modals go live within hours, with the vendor claiming popups deploy in under three minutes. Real sending waits on carrier registration: 10DLC or toll-free typically clears in one to four weeks, and a dedicated short code takes eight to twelve. Plan on two to four weeks from signup to a compliant production program and start registration on day one.	The app installs and connects to Shopify in under an hour, but you cannot send until carrier registration clears. Toll-free verification typically takes one to three weeks, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration usually one to four weeks, and a dedicated short code eight to twelve weeks. Plan on two to four weeks from install to first campaign, and start registration on day one.
Learning curve	Low, deliberately so, because TextPros absorbs much of the work that produces the learning curve elsewhere. A merchant who would otherwise spend a month learning flow design gets staff who build it. The tradeoff is that you may end up less fluent in your own channel, which matters if you ever leave.	Low for campaigns, moderate for automations. The flow builder is approachable but the value sits in the 45 segment filters and 85 trigger filters, and getting real leverage from those means understanding your own Shopify data well enough to know which ones matter. Most merchants get abandoned checkout and welcome flows live in week one and spend a quarter learning the rest.
Platforms	Web application, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, US SMS and MMS delivery, Short code, 10DLC, and toll-free numbers	Web application, Shopify and Shopify Plus app, US and Canadian SMS and MMS delivery, Toll-free, 10DLC, and dedicated short code
Compliance	TCPA, CCPA, and CTIA compliant signup capture, Emotive Litigator Filter screening known serial TCPA plaintiffs, A2P 10DLC and toll-free registration handled, Automatic STOP and opt-out suppression, Dedicated compliance team providing guidance	TCPA-aligned consent capture and record keeping, CTIA messaging principles and best practices, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration, Toll-free verification, Carrier quiet hours enforced by recipient time zone
Founded	2018	2018
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California, United States	Scottsdale, Arizona, United States
Ownership	Owned by Privy since July 2025. Privy was itself acquired by Attentive in June 2021 and divested back to independence in 2023.	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Emotive

Strengths

Supports Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, which makes it the strongest ecommerce SMS option available to merchants who are not on Shopify.
TextPros bundles real human copywriting, creative, and strategy at no additional charge, which directly addresses the reason most small ecommerce SMS programs stall after the first month.
Built around two-way conversation rather than broadcast, with conversational flows that branch on replies rather than only pushing sequential promotions.
The Litigator Filter screens known serial TCPA plaintiffs out of the sending list automatically, a specific and unusual control that reduces the single most expensive risk in SMS marketing.

Limitations

Ownership has been unstable. Emotive was acquired by Privy in July 2025, and Privy itself was bought by Attentive in 2021 and divested back to independence in 2023, which is a lot of corporate churn beneath a revenue channel.
Post-acquisition product direction is genuinely uncertain: the acquisition messaging describes real-time one-to-one conversations as coming to the merged platform, which implies integration work still underway rather than finished.
Tiers are set by list size rather than send volume, so growing your subscriber base can raise your platform fee even if sending does not increase.
Minimum spend requirements exist per tier but are not clearly published, which is the least transparent part of an otherwise open pricing page.

Postscript

Strengths

Shopify-native data model means segments and triggers read order history, line items, discounts, and subscription state directly, with no field mapping and no sync lag to debug.
Compliance is a product feature rather than a disclaimer: quiet hours by recipient time zone are the default, an in-house legal team tracks rule changes, and consent records are stored per subscriber with source and timestamp.
Subscriber collection is unusually deep, and the Onsite Opt-in Network genuinely lifts opt-in rates on stores with no existing list because it recognizes shoppers already in Postscript's base.
Pricing tiers buy a lower per-message rate rather than gating features, so the cost model is transparent arithmetic you can run before signing up.

Limitations

Shopify only. There is no path for WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or headless commerce, and replatforming means replacing Postscript.
No email channel, so you run it beside Klaviyo, Kit, or similar and reconcile attribution across two systems with different windows.
API access is gated to the $500 Professional tier, which pushes developer-led merchants into a price bracket they may not otherwise need.
The $49 minimum spend on Starter means the entry price is not actually zero, and the platform-fee tiers only pay for themselves at meaningful volume.

Pricing compared

Emotive

Monthly platform fee tiered by subscriber list size, plus per-message SMS and MMS rates that fall as the tier rises. Monthly contracts with minimum spend requirements increasing by tier.

Starter$100
Pro$200
Advanced$300
EnterpriseCustom

Judged purely on software, Emotive is priced roughly in line with Postscript: a platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, landing at $0.008 SMS on Advanced against Postscript's $0.007 on Professional, with Emotive charging $300 a month where Postscript charges $500. Judged including TextPros, it looks better, because a merchant with no copywriter is otherwise paying an agency or leaving the channel to rot. The list-size tiering is the awkward part, since a growing list can raise your platform fee without raising your revenue, and the minimum spend requirements are not clearly published. The competitive posture, offering to beat any price and buy out contracts, suggests real negotiating room. For a non-Shopify merchant the calculation is simpler, because Postscript is not available to them and the realistic alternatives are considerably weaker. For a Shopify merchant, the question is whether the human service is worth more than Postscript's much deeper segmentation and AI layer, and for most sophisticated stores it is not.

Postscript

Monthly platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, plus usage. Carrier pass-through fees apply on top of every message on every tier. No per-seat charge and no credit bundles.

Starter$0
Growth$100
Professional$500
EnterpriseCustom

Postscript is priced for stores where SMS is a real revenue line, not an experiment. On Growth at $100 plus roughly $0.013 all-in per SMS segment, a 25,000-message month costs about $425, which is defensible if attribution shows the channel returning multiples of that and indefensible if it does not. The genuinely good part of the structure is that the platform fee buys a rate reduction rather than a feature unlock, so the decision is arithmetic rather than a negotiation. The bad part is API access sitting behind the $500 Professional tier, which is a strange gate for a platform whose whole pitch is data-native integration. Against general-purpose texting tools charging per credit, Postscript looks expensive at low volume and clearly cheaper at high volume, which is exactly what you would expect from a platform built for stores that send a lot.

Editorial verdict on each

Emotive

Innovation

Emotive earns its place for two specific reasons rather than for being the best ecommerce SMS software. First, it supports Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce alongside Shopify, which makes it the strongest option available to the large population of merchants that Shopify-only tools like Postscript cannot serve. Second, TextPros bundles real human copywriting and strategy at no extra charge, which fixes the actual reason most small ecommerce SMS programs stall. Add compliant popup capture, a litigator filter almost nobody else offers, honest multi-touch attribution, and published self-serve pricing that falls to $0.008 per SMS on the $300 tier, and the package is genuinely competitive. The reservations are about the company rather than the product. Emotive has changed hands once and its new parent twice in five years, list-size tiering can raise your bill without raising your revenue, minimum spend requirements are unpublished, and the vendor's performance claims are loud and unverifiable. If you are on Shopify with someone capable running the channel, Postscript is the deeper tool. If you are on any other cart, or you need someone else to write the messages, Emotive is the right answer.

Read the full Emotive profile

Postscript

Category Leader

Postscript is the strongest SMS platform in the Shopify ecosystem and it is not close, provided you are actually on Shopify and actually sending enough to justify the structure. The native data model, the depth of the segment and trigger filters, the quality of the subscriber collection tooling, and the fact that quiet hours and consent records are defaults rather than settings all reflect a team that has thought about this problem for eight years. The pricing is honest arithmetic: a platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, with carrier fees disclosed rather than hidden. The reasons to look elsewhere are structural rather than qualitative. You cannot use it off Shopify, it does not send email, API access sits behind a $500 tier, and the $49 minimum spend means a small store is subsidizing capacity it will never use. If you run a Shopify store where SMS is a revenue line rather than an experiment, start here. If you run anything else, this product is not for you and no amount of feature depth changes that.

Read the full Postscript profile

Emotive profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Postscript last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.