Is EngageBay or Ortto cheaper?

EngageBay starts at $0 (Free), then $14.99 per user per month (Basic) (free plan available). Ortto starts at Around $237 per month on annual billing at the 10,000-contact band (Starter) (14 days trial).

EngageBay vs Ortto

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

Editorial assessment

EngageBay compared with Ortto

Ortto is a genuinely event-capable platform with a customer data platform underneath, journey-based automation, and a far better designed interface, priced from around $509 a month on its automation plan. EngageBay is list-driven and costs a fraction of that. If you have product events worth acting on, Ortto is a different class of tool; if you do not, you are paying for an engine you cannot feed.

Choose EngageBay if

Small businesses and agencies under roughly 25 people who want marketing automation, a CRM, and a helpdesk from one vendor on one contact database, whose triggers are forms, tags, and deal stages rather than in-product events, and whose budget for the whole stack is a few hundred dollars a month.

Choose Ortto if

Mid-market and scaling B2C or B2B companies that want a customer data platform, multi-channel journeys, and reporting from one vendor and can carry a three-figure monthly bill, particularly teams currently paying separately for a marketing tool, an analytics tool, and a chat widget.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	EngageBay	Ortto
Category	Automation	Automation
Starting price	$0 (Free), then $14.99 per user per month (Basic) (free plan available)	Around $237 per month on annual billing at the 10,000-contact band (Starter) (14 days trial)
Pricing model	Per-user subscription with an account-level contact cap and a branded-email allowance layered on top, in four tiers, discounted 8 percent annually and 15 percent biennially.	Contact-based subscription across Starter, Professional, Business, and Enterprise tiers, with prices banded by contact volume, sending included, and month-to-month available on Professional while Business and Enterprise require an annual commitment.
Free plan	Free covers 250 contacts and 1,000 branded emails a month, including email marketing, autoresponders, sequences, lead grabbers, one landing page, CRM, live chat, and helpdesk.	No
Free trial	No separate trial is needed; the free plan is the evaluation path and does not expire.	14 days
Best for	Small businesses and agencies under roughly 25 people who want marketing automation, a CRM, and a helpdesk from one vendor on one contact database, whose triggers are forms, tags, and deal stages rather than in-product events, and whose budget for the whole stack is a few hundred dollars a month.	Mid-market and scaling B2C or B2B companies that want a customer data platform, multi-channel journeys, and reporting from one vendor and can carry a three-figure monthly bill, particularly teams currently paying separately for a marketing tool, an analytics tool, and a chat widget.
Setup time	A day to import contacts, connect a sending domain, and publish a first form. A week to have real workflows running if you are migrating existing sequences. The suite breadth means the temptation is to configure everything at once, which is how implementations stall.	A week to a first journey for a marketing team using the no-code connectors, longer if custom activities need to be instrumented by engineering. The CDP setup is the work; the journey builder is the easy part.
Learning curve	Low for anyone who has used HubSpot or Mailchimp, because the concepts map directly. The workflow canvas is the only part that needs a deliberate hour, and the main confusion is the interaction between lists, tags, and segments, which overlap more than they should.	Moderate. The journey canvas is approachable and the reporting is comprehensible, but the platform is wide, and teams routinely use a third of it. Decide up front which of the five channels and which reporting surfaces you are actually adopting, or the tool sprawls.
Platforms	Web application, iOS and Android mobile apps, REST API, Browser-based email and landing page editors	Web app, REST API, Mobile push SDKs, JavaScript tracking and chat widget, Webhooks
Compliance	GDPR tooling including consent capture and data deletion requests, CAN-SPAM compliant unsubscribe handling	GDPR, CAN-SPAM, SOC 2
Founded	2018	2015
Headquarters	Wilmington, Delaware, United States, with engineering in India	Sydney, Australia
Ownership	Bootstrapped	Acquired by Canva in April 2026; previously venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

EngageBay

Strengths

Breadth per dollar is the best in this category: marketing automation, CRM, and helpdesk on one contact record for less than most vendors charge for email alone.
The free tier is a real product rather than a demo, including CRM, live chat, helpdesk, and capture forms at 250 contacts.
Contact caps are generous relative to price, and Pro's 50,000-contact allowance is priced where contact-metered competitors charge several times more.
Bringing your own sending provider is supported and documented, which decouples your volume economics from EngageBay's plan allowances.

Limitations

No product event stream and no real-time segmentation engine, so behaviour-triggered lifecycle messaging in the modern sense is not achievable here.
The per-user meter combined with account-level contact caps produces awkward pricing for teams with many light users or very large lists.
The visual automation builder starts at Growth, four and a half times the advertised entry price.
Deliverability tooling is minimal: no seed testing, no inbox placement reporting, and no dedicated IP story on self-serve plans.

Ortto

Strengths

Genuine breadth for one subscription: CDP, journeys, five messaging channels, forms and surveys, live chat, a knowledge base, and a real reporting layer.
The journey builder is a direct descendant of Autopilot's, which was one of the most legible visual canvases the category ever produced, and it still reads well.
Because the data platform and the messaging platform are the same product, audiences and reports are computed from one dataset instead of two that disagree.
Extensive no-code integrations, so a marketing team without engineering support can connect Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, and Zendesk themselves.

Limitations

Expensive for what a small team typically uses. At entry volumes Ortto costs several times Drip, Vero, or Encharge for what many buyers will use as an email automation tool.
Mobile push, transactional email and SMS, dedicated IPs, landing pages, lead scoring, and NPS are all locked behind Professional, roughly doubling the price.
Contact-count billing means dormant records cost money, which is the standard trap of profile-metered platforms and rewards ruthless list hygiene.
The Canva acquisition introduces genuine roadmap uncertainty; Ortto now exists to strengthen Canva Grow, and standalone customers are no longer the only constituency.

Pricing compared

EngageBay

Per-user subscription with an account-level contact cap and a branded-email allowance layered on top, in four tiers, discounted 8 percent annually and 15 percent biennially.

Free$0
Basic$14.99
Growth$64.99
Pro$119.99

Modelled at 5,000 contacts with two seats, Growth costs about $130 a month for automation, email, landing pages, forms, CRM, and helpdesk together, which no single-purpose competitor comes close to on breadth per dollar. Modelled at 50,000 contacts with two seats, Pro is about $240 a month, and the comparison against HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional at $800 plus a $3,000 onboarding fee is not close. The catch is the per-seat multiplier: add a sixth user and EngageBay stops being the cheap option, because you are paying full price again for someone who logs in twice a week. Buy it small.

Ortto

Contact-based subscription across Starter, Professional, Business, and Enterprise tiers, with prices banded by contact volume, sending included, and month-to-month available on Professional while Business and Enterprise require an annual commitment.

Starter~$237
Professional~$509 annually, ~$599 month-to-month
Business~$999
EnterpriseCustom

Ortto's value case is consolidation, and it only works if you actually use the breadth. If Ortto replaces a marketing automation tool, a chat widget, a form builder, and an analytics dashboard, then a few hundred dollars a month for one unified contact record is straightforwardly good economics and the reporting quality alone justifies part of it. If you use it as an email tool with a journey builder, you are paying several times what Drip, Vero, or Encharge charge for the same outcome. The Professional gate is the sharpest edge: mobile push and transactional sending sit behind roughly a doubling of price, and OneSignal gives away push entirely. Judge Ortto on how many other subscriptions it cancels, and be honest about that number before signing anything annual.

Editorial verdict on each

EngageBay

Best Value

EngageBay is the correct answer to a narrow but very common question: how does a business with fewer than 25 people get marketing automation, a CRM, and a helpdesk on one database without spending four figures a month. It is not the best tool in any single one of those categories and it never claims to be. What it is, is coherent, cheap, self-serve, and bootstrapped by a company with no reason to reprice you. Buy the Growth plan, not the $14.99 headline, because that is where the automation builder lives. Do not buy it if your lifecycle triggers are product events rather than form fills, because that architecture simply does not exist here, and no amount of price advantage compensates for a trigger you cannot fire.

Read the full EngageBay profile

Ortto

Ortto is a consolidation play and should be judged as one. Buy it when you are cancelling a marketing automation tool, a chat widget, a form builder, and an analytics dashboard at the same time, because one contact record feeding journeys, five channels, and real reporting is genuinely worth a few hundred dollars a month. Do not buy it as an email tool: at that job it costs several times Drip, Vero, or Encharge and you will use a third of what you pay for. The Professional gate is the practical sting, since mobile push and transactional sending sit behind roughly a doubling of price, and contact-count billing means dormant records cost money forever. The Canva acquisition in April 2026 removes the survival question and adds a roadmap one, so prefer month-to-month over an annual commitment while the new owner's intentions become clear. For a five-person startup, this is not the first lifecycle tool to buy. For a thirty-person marketing team drowning in disconnected subscriptions, it is one of the more convincing single-vendor answers available.

Read the full Ortto profile

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