OptinMonster 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
Both sides assessedOptinMonster compared with Sumo
Sumo is the closest thing to a free entry point in this category and covers the basics, list building popups, welcome mats, and share tools, with minimal configuration. OptinMonster costs real money and justifies it with the rules engine, revenue attribution, and campaign variety Sumo does not attempt. The honest split is by traffic value: if a popup on your site is worth a few dollars a month, Sumo is the right size; if it is worth a few hundred, the targeting depth pays for itself immediately.
Sumo compared with OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the more capable product and the more expensive one: a larger and better-maintained template library, richer campaign types, page-level targeting, and a roadmap that keeps moving. Sumo answers on price and simplicity, with a free plan OptinMonster does not offer and a flat $19 tier that includes exit intent, A/B testing, and ecommerce features. If design control and depth matter, pay for OptinMonster; if the job is a clean opt-in on a blog or a small store, Sumo does it for less.
Choose OptinMonster if
Content sites, ecommerce stores, and agencies that already have meaningful traffic and want granular control over which visitor sees which offer, and that will pay for a targeting engine rather than settle for a generic popup builder.
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 | OptinMonster | Sumo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Lead Capture | Lead Capture |
| Starting price | $7 per month billed annually ($84 for the first year, then $210 per year at list price) | Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Annual subscription priced by monthly campaign impressions and the number of sites, with feature gating as the primary upgrade driver rather than volume alone. Advertised prices are a 60 percent introductory discount valid for the first 12 months; renewal is at list price. Monthly billing exists but is substantially more expensive per month. There is no free plan and no free trial. | 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 | No | 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 | No | 14 days on paid plans, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee |
| Best for | Content sites, ecommerce stores, and agencies that already have meaningful traffic and want granular control over which visitor sees which offer, and that will pay for a targeting engine rather than settle for a generic popup builder. | 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 | Under an hour to a first live campaign. Installing the script or plugin takes minutes, building a campaign from a template takes about twenty, and connecting an email platform is an OAuth or API key step. Configuring a well-segmented rule set across a real site is a longer project, typically a day of thought rather than a day of work. | 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 for building a campaign, moderate for the rules engine. The editor is conventional drag and drop. The skill that takes time is display-rule discipline: deciding what each audience segment should see, setting cookie durations so people are not shown the same thing repeatedly, and resisting the urge to run five campaigns at once on the same page. | 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 | Any website (JavaScript embed script), WordPress (official plugin), Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, Wix, Google Tag Manager | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Showit, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA | GDPR |
| Founded | 2013 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | West Palm Beach, Florida, United States (fully distributed team) | Austin, Texas (Sumo Group); Formilytics LLC now operates the product |
| Ownership | Owned by Awesome Motive, Inc.; bootstrapped and privately held | Acquired by Showit (December 2023) and operated by Formilytics LLC |
Strengths and limitations
OptinMonster
Strengths
- The deepest display rules engine in the small-business lead capture category, combining page, behavior, referrer, cookie, JavaScript, geographic, and visit-history conditions with and/or logic.
- Exit intent that has been refined over a decade, including mobile handling that does not depend on a cursor.
- One global script or plugin covers a whole site, so campaigns can be launched and changed forever after without a code deploy.
- Unlimited campaigns and unlimited subscribers on every tier; the meter is impressions, not list size, which is unusually friendly for a growing list.
Limitations
- No free plan and no free trial. Evaluation requires paying up front and relying on a 14-day refund, which is out of step with the rest of the category.
- Renewal pricing is roughly 2.5 times the advertised introductory rate, and the discount framing makes that easy to miss at purchase.
- Exit-Intent technology, the feature the product is best known for, is locked to the third tier; A/B testing is locked to the second. The advertised $7 plan is not a usable version of the product for most buyers.
- Impression-based metering means bot and crawler traffic can consume the allowance without producing a single lead, a complaint that recurs in user reviews.
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
OptinMonster
Annual subscription priced by monthly campaign impressions and the number of sites, with feature gating as the primary upgrade driver rather than volume alone. Advertised prices are a 60 percent introductory discount valid for the first 12 months; renewal is at list price. Monthly billing exists but is substantially more expensive per month. There is no free plan and no free trial.
- Basic$7
- Plus$19
- Pro$29
- Growth$49
Judged on first-year cost, OptinMonster is inexpensive for what it does: a $348 Pro plan that recovers a handful of abandoned carts a month pays for itself many times over on any store with real order values. Judged on renewal cost and gating honesty, it is a harder sell, because the plan most buyers need is $870 a year at list and the cheapest tiers withhold the two features (exit intent and A/B testing) that make the category work. Against free or near-free popup plugins the case rests entirely on the display rules engine; if you will never write a rule more complex than 'show on all pages after 5 seconds', you are paying for capability you will not use. If you will segment by referrer, cart value, geography, and visit count, nothing at this price point matches it.
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
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is still the reference product in onsite lead capture, and the reason is not the popups, which anyone can build, but the rules engine behind them. Being able to say show this offer only to Google Ads traffic on product pages, only when the cart is above a threshold, only on a second visit, and only as the visitor leaves, is a genuine capability gap over the cheaper tools, and for a store or publisher with real traffic it pays back quickly. The company is bootstrapped, profitable, and unlikely to disappear. The reservations are commercial rather than technical: no free plan and no trial in a category where free plans are standard, a renewal price roughly 2.5 times the advertised one, and gating that puts exit intent (the thing people buy it for) on the third tier. Go in knowing the real price is the Pro or Growth renewal figure, not the number on the pricing page, and it is a sound purchase. Go in expecting the $7 plan to be the product and you will be disappointed within a week.
Read the full OptinMonster 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 profileOptinMonster 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.