Hello Bar vs Sumo
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 assessmentSumo compared with Hello Bar
The nearest peer in age and ambition, since both began as free one-click list-building widgets for bloggers and both now sell a low flat paid tier. The meters differ in a way that decides it: Hello Bar's free plan is capped at roughly 5,000 popup views in total rather than per month, and its paid plans start at $29 against Sumo's $19. Hello Bar earns the premium if you want the top-of-page notification bar it invented or the browser push companion; for a plain email form that runs for years, Sumo is the cheaper home.
Choose Hello Bar if
Small businesses, bloggers, and marketing teams on WordPress or a hosted site builder that want email capture and announcement bars working the same afternoon, without learning a funnel builder or paying by subscriber count.
Choose Sumo if
Bloggers, creators, course sellers, and small WordPress or Showit sites that want a capable opt-in popup and form tool with a real free plan and a flat, low, non-traffic-scaled price when they outgrow it.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Hello Bar | Sumo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Lead Capture | Lead Capture |
| Starting price | Free (about 5,000 lifetime popup views); paid plans from $29 per month (free plan available) | Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription metered on popup views, the number of times your campaigns are displayed. Popups, campaigns, and captured subscribers are unlimited on every paid plan; what steps up between tiers is the view allowance, support level, seat count, and access to the premium CRM integrations. Annual billing is discounted by roughly a fifth. | Flat monthly subscription by plan, with limits on number of sites, pageviews per site, and emails sent per month rather than on subscriber count. Annual billing is meaningfully cheaper than monthly. A permanently free plan exists and paid plans carry a 14-day free trial. |
| Free plan | Starter: unlimited popups and subscribers capped at roughly 5,000 total popup views, pre-built themes only, no A/B testing, Hello Bar branding on every unit | One site, 100 conversions, 500 emails per month, opt-in forms with customizable design, social sharing, basic visitor targeting, and analytics, with BDOW! branding on forms |
| Free trial | Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; no credit card required to start | 14 days on paid plans, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee |
| Best for | Small businesses, bloggers, and marketing teams on WordPress or a hosted site builder that want email capture and announcement bars working the same afternoon, without learning a funnel builder or paying by subscriber count. | Bloggers, creators, course sellers, and small WordPress or Showit sites that want a capable opt-in popup and form tool with a real free plan and a flat, low, non-traffic-scaled price when they outgrow it. |
| Setup time | Fifteen minutes to a live campaign on a mainstream platform: install the script or the WordPress plugin, pick a goal and template, edit the copy inline, set a trigger, publish. Connecting an email provider adds a few minutes; a webhook integration adds an hour of developer time at most. | Under an hour. Create a free account, install the WordPress plugin or paste the script into the site template (or enable the native Showit or Shopify connection), pick a template, set display rules, and connect an email provider. A first live form in fifteen minutes is realistic. |
| Learning curve | Low. The builder is goal-first and the editor is direct manipulation, so a non-technical owner can ship a campaign without documentation. The part that takes judgment is targeting: unrestricted campaigns burn view allowance and annoy readers, and the discipline of limiting a unit to the right pages and visit counts is learned rather than obvious. | Low. The builder is conventional and the display rules read in plain language. The part that takes longest is not the tool but the discipline of testing one variable at a time and matching each offer to the page it appears on. |
| Platforms | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Blogger, Mobile web | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Showit, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager |
| Compliance | GDPR | GDPR |
| Founded | 2011 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | San Diego, California, United States | Austin, Texas (Sumo Group); Formilytics LLC now operates the product |
| Ownership | Privately held; acquired by Crazy Egg in 2012 and operated within Neil Patel's group of marketing tools | Acquired by Showit (December 2023) and operated by Formilytics LLC |
Strengths and limitations
Hello Bar
Strengths
- Genuinely fast from install to a live campaign; a bar or exit-intent modal is publishable within an hour of pasting the script.
- Priced on views rather than subscribers, so a large existing email list costs nothing extra to keep growing.
- A/B testing is included on every paid plan instead of being reserved for a top tier, which is not the norm in this category.
- Six unit types including the original top bar, so announcements, calls, and email capture are all served by one tool.
Limitations
- The free Starter plan's 5,000 popup views are a lifetime allowance rather than a monthly one, which is easy to misread and exhausts quickly on a real site.
- No multi-step or two-step optin funnels, no dynamic content replacement, and no cart-value or behavioral personalization; campaigns are one offer shown once.
- No gamified formats such as spin-to-win wheels, which are a standard expectation for ecommerce optins.
- The premium CRM integrations are gated to the $99 Elite plan, so a small team needing a proper CRM connector pays for view volume it will never use.
Sumo
Strengths
- A genuinely usable free plan with no time limit, which is why Sumo became the default popup tool for a generation of bloggers.
- Flat pricing that does not escalate with subscriber count, unusual in a category where list growth normally raises the bill every year.
- The full catalogue of form types (popup, welcome mat, smart bar, scroll box, click trigger, inline, countdown, social proof) in one dashboard rather than split across products.
- Deep targeting rules for the price point, including cookie and query-parameter conditions that many cheaper tools omit.
Limitations
- A small, dated template library that reviewers repeatedly single out; layouts, buttons, and mobile views are hard to alter beyond the presets.
- No personalization or product recommendation logic, so every visitor matching a rule sees the same manually configured offer.
- Paid plans cap at 25,000 pageviews per site and three sites total, which rules out high-traffic publishers and agency portfolios.
- Public WordPress.org reviews over several years report broken logins, incompatibility with current WordPress versions, and unresolved support tickets; the most recent reviews on that listing are poor.
Pricing compared
Hello Bar
Flat monthly subscription metered on popup views, the number of times your campaigns are displayed. Popups, campaigns, and captured subscribers are unlimited on every paid plan; what steps up between tiers is the view allowance, support level, seat count, and access to the premium CRM integrations. Annual billing is discounted by roughly a fifth.
- Starter$0
- Growth$29
- Premium$49
- Elite$99
At $29 a month for 50,000 views with A/B testing included and no charge per subscriber, Hello Bar is priced sensibly for a small site and unusually well for anyone with a large list, since the meter ignores list size entirely. The awkward spot is the middle: a moderately busy site can burn 150,000 views without generating enough leads to justify $49, because views are consumed by everyone who sees a unit rather than everyone who acts on it. The free plan is a trial in all but name given the lifetime cap. Judged on capability per dollar it sits below OptinMonster on features and above Poptin on polish, and it wins mainly on how quickly a non-technical owner gets a working campaign live.
Sumo
Flat monthly subscription by plan, with limits on number of sites, pageviews per site, and emails sent per month rather than on subscriber count. Annual billing is meaningfully cheaper than monthly. A permanently free plan exists and paid plans carry a 14-day free trial.
- Free$0
- Pro$19 annually, $25 monthly
- Plus$39 annually, $49 monthly
On price per capability BDOW! is one of the better deals in lead capture: $19 a month buys exit intent, A/B testing, branding removal, webhooks, and a full ecommerce offer layer that OptinMonster and Privy gate behind higher tiers or usage bands. The catch is the ceiling. Twenty-five thousand pageviews per site, three sites at the top, a small template library, and no personalization mean the tool stops scaling well before the price becomes the problem. Judged as a cheap, flat-priced opt-in tool for a WordPress, Showit, or small WooCommerce site, it is good value; judged as a conversion platform, it is underpowered next to the current leaders.
Editorial verdict on each
Hello Bar
Hello Bar invented the notification bar and has spent fifteen years resisting the temptation to become a funnel builder, which is the most useful thing about it. Fifteen minutes gets a small business owner a working exit-intent modal or a scheduled sale bar, A/B testing is included at $29 rather than dangled from a top tier, and pricing on views rather than subscribers means growing a list costs nothing extra. The trade-offs are real and specific: the free plan's 5,000 views are a lifetime allowance and not a monthly one, the premium CRM connectors sit behind the $99 plan, live chat expires after 90 days on the entry tier, and there is no gamification, no multi-step optin, and no revenue reporting. Buy it if simple, fast, and reliable describes what you want from lead capture; look at OptinMonster if the optin strategy itself is the work, or at Privy if the site is a Shopify store.
Read the full Hello Bar profileSumo
Sumo's history is more interesting than its present. It normalized the free email capture popup, made list building a default habit for a generation of bloggers, and then changed hands and names twice, arriving as BDOW! under the website builder Showit. What is left is a decent, cheap, honest tool: every form type in one dashboard, targeting rules deeper than the price suggests, one-click A/B testing and an ecommerce offer layer both included at $19 a month, and a free plan that still does real work. What is also left is a small template library that reviewers keep flagging, a 25,000 pageview per site ceiling, a three-site maximum, and a support reputation that has not recovered. Buy it if you are a creator, a WordPress or Showit site, or a small store that wants capture working this afternoon for close to nothing. Look at OptinMonster, Poptin, or a Klaviyo-native form if design control, scale, or responsive support is the thing you cannot compromise on.
Read the full Sumo profileHello Bar profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Sumo last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.