Poptin 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 Poptin
The closest match on price and posture. Both have real free plans and both sell a flat, low-cost paid tier with exit intent and A/B testing. Poptin's editor and template selection are more modern and its free plan is more generous on visitor volume, while Sumo counters with the countdown and social proof formats, the ecommerce monetization layer, and the Showit and WooCommerce integrations. For a straightforward popup on a budget, Poptin is usually the fresher choice.
Choose Poptin if
Small businesses, ecommerce stores, and especially agencies that want serious popup targeting and A/B testing without paying for a tier upgrade to get it, and that would rather manage many client sites from one account than buy one licence per site.
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 | Poptin | Sumo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Lead Capture | Lead Capture |
| Starting price | Free forever for 1,000 monthly visitors on one domain; paid Poptins plans from $25 per month billed annually (free plan available) | Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Two parallel plan families. The Poptins family is priced by unique monthly visitors to sites carrying the snippet, with domain count and support level as the other differences; every feature is included on every tier including the free plan. The Emails and Poptins family adds the contact, campaign, and automation module and is priced by active contacts, with unlimited sending. Annual billing saves 20 percent. | 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 | 1,000 unique monthly visitors, 1 domain, unlimited poptins, unbranded, subaccounts and user management, and every popup, trigger, targeting, and A/B testing feature | 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 time-limited trial; the free plan is the trial and requires no credit card | 14 days on paid plans, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee |
| Best for | Small businesses, ecommerce stores, and especially agencies that want serious popup targeting and A/B testing without paying for a tier upgrade to get it, and that would rather manage many client sites from one account than buy one licence per site. | 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 | A first popup live in well under an hour: install the snippet or the platform plugin, pick a template, set a trigger, connect a destination. Most of the elapsed time goes into the offer and the copy, not the tool. Multi-site agency setup takes longer because subaccounts and user permissions have to be planned before clients are onboarded rather than after. | 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 the builder, moderate for the targeting engine. The trigger list is short enough to learn in one sitting; the targeting rules are numerous, combine in ways that are easy to get subtly wrong, and reward testing the rule set on a staging URL before going live. The email and automation module carries the usual learning cost of any workflow builder. | 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 via JavaScript snippet, WordPress plugin, Shopify app, Wix app, BigCommerce app, Squarespace, Webflow, Weebly, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Google Tag Manager | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Showit, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, Double opt-in and consent tracking, Cookie-consent friendly targeting | GDPR |
| Founded | 2017 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Tel Aviv, Israel | Austin, Texas (Sumo Group); Formilytics LLC now operates the product |
| Ownership | Independent and founder-owned; the two co-founders remain co-CEOs | Acquired by Showit (December 2023) and operated by Formilytics LLC |
Strengths and limitations
Poptin
Strengths
- Every feature is on every plan, including the free one, which removes the tier-shopping exercise that dominates this category.
- Breadth of triggers and targeting rules, particularly the Shopify signals (cart contents, customer tag, login status, order history), rivals tools that cost several times more.
- Subaccounts, user permissions, and unlimited domains make it a genuine multi-client tool rather than a single-site widget.
- 70-plus native integrations plus webhooks mean most lead destinations do not need a Zapier task charge per lead.
Limitations
- The visual editor is the recurring complaint in reviews: elements, particularly the close button, do not always hold the position they were given, and small rendering glitches surface on complex layouts.
- Field mapping to some integrations is incomplete; SendGrid in particular has been cited by reviewers as not supporting the mapping they needed.
- Lead management inside Poptin is thin compared with the capture side, which pushes most users to sync out rather than work leads in-product.
- Visitor-based pricing punishes high-traffic, low-conversion sites, and the cookie-based count inflates against a real human count across devices.
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
Poptin
Two parallel plan families. The Poptins family is priced by unique monthly visitors to sites carrying the snippet, with domain count and support level as the other differences; every feature is included on every tier including the free plan. The Emails and Poptins family adds the contact, campaign, and automation module and is priced by active contacts, with unlimited sending. Annual billing saves 20 percent.
- Free$0
- Basic$25
- Pro$59
- Agency$119
- Growth (Emails and Poptins)From $19
Poptin is priced against traffic rather than against ambition, and for a small business that inverts the usual calculation. A store doing 40,000 visitors a month gets exit intent, gamified wheels, Shopify cart targeting, A/B testing, and unlimited popups for $59, where several competitors would charge similar money and still gate the cart trigger or the split test behind another tier. The free plan is the strongest argument in the product: 1,000 visitors is not much, but it is enough to run a real A/B test on a small site and see the lift before paying anything. The economics turn against you at volume, since a high-traffic, low-intent content site pays for every visitor regardless of how few convert, and the email module's per-contact pricing stacks a second meter on top. Judged as a capture tool for sites under about 50,000 monthly visitors, it is among the better value propositions in the category.
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
Poptin
Poptin's positioning is a single decision applied consistently: charge for volume, not for capability. Exit intent, every targeting rule, A/B testing, gamified popups, the coupon engine, and 70-plus integrations are on the free plan, and the tiers above it buy visitors, domains, and support. In a category built on tier-shopping, that is worth real money to a small business, and it is worth more to an agency, where unlimited domains and subaccounts turn one $119 subscription into infrastructure for a whole client roster. The honest cost is polish: the editor is the recurring complaint in third-party reviews, some integration field mappings are incomplete, lead management in-product is thin, and the email module is new enough that it should not yet replace a dedicated ESP for a serious newsletter. Buy it for targeting depth per dollar and for multi-site management, expect to fight the editor occasionally, and keep your existing email platform on the other end of the integration until the new module has more mileage.
Read the full Poptin 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 profilePoptin 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.