Popup Maker 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.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedPopup Maker compared with Sumo
Both began as free list-building tools for bloggers. Sumo is platform-agnostic, sends email itself, and limits its free and paid plans by sites, pageviews, and emails. Popup Maker is WordPress only and sends nothing, but its free plugin has no traffic limit, and its paid tiers add exit intent and targeting without a meter. For a WordPress blog that already has an email platform, Popup Maker is the more capable free option.
Sumo compared with Popup Maker
Popup Maker is the more capable free option for a WordPress blog: the core plugin has no traffic limit and supports delay, click, and form-submission triggers with content targeting, and Pro adds exit intent and advanced targeting for $99 a year per site. Sumo works on any platform and sends email itself, which Popup Maker does not. Choose Sumo if you want capture and email in one free tool on any site; choose Popup Maker if you run WordPress and already have an email platform.
Choose Popup Maker if
WordPress sites, especially content sites, membership sites, course creators on LifterLMS, and WooCommerce stores, that want popups without a traffic-based bill and are happy for lead capture to run through the form plugin they already use.
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 | Popup Maker | Sumo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Lead Capture | Lead Capture |
| Starting price | Free core plugin; Pro from $99 per year for one site ($59.40 in the first year with the 40 percent launch discount), annual billing only | Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year) |
| Pricing model | Freemium WordPress plugin. The core plugin is free on WordPress.org. Paid Pro and Pro+ licenses are annual, per site count, and auto-renew; there is no monthly option and no traffic or impression meter on any plan. A one-time lifetime license is sold on a separate page. | 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 | Free core plugin on WordPress.org with unlimited popups and impressions, auto-open, click, and form-submission triggers, content targeting, and form plugin integrations; no exit intent or scroll trigger | 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 | WordPress sites, especially content sites, membership sites, course creators on LifterLMS, and WooCommerce stores, that want popups without a traffic-based bill and are happy for lead capture to run through the form plugin they already use. | 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 | Minutes to install and a first popup within the hour. Install from the plugin directory, create a popup, pick a theme, set a trigger and conditions, and paste in a form from your form plugin. Pro and Pro+ add a license key and extension install. | 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 WordPress users, moderate for anyone new to WordPress. Themes, triggers, conditions, and cookies are four separate concepts, and the cookie settings are the part new users most often get wrong, which the vendor's documentation covers directly. | 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 | WordPress plugin (WordPress 6.7 or later, PHP 7.4 or later), WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Showit, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager |
| Compliance | GPL-licensed open source core, Data stored in the site's own WordPress database | GDPR |
| Founded | 2014 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | East Palatka, Florida, United States | Austin, Texas (Sumo Group); Formilytics LLC now operates the product |
| Ownership | Privately held by Code Atlantic LLC | Acquired by Showit (December 2023) and operated by Formilytics LLC |
Strengths and limitations
Popup Maker
Strengths
- No traffic meter on any plan, so the cost is flat whether the site serves ten thousand or ten million pageviews.
- A genuinely useful free plugin with unlimited popups and impressions, installed on more than 700,000 sites per WordPress.org.
- Among the most reviewed WordPress plugins in the category: 4,508 ratings on WordPress.org averaging 98 out of 100, with 4,278 five-star reviews.
- Deep WordPress fit: targeting by post type, taxonomy, user role, and login status, and integrations with nearly every major form plugin.
Limitations
- WordPress only; there is no version for Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or custom sites.
- No A/B testing is listed on any plan, which leaves offer testing to manual comparisons of analytics.
- Exit intent and scroll triggers require Pro, so the free plugin is closer to a modal tool than a full lead capture tool.
- The editor is WordPress-native rather than a drag-and-drop canvas, so design flexibility depends on the block editor and theme settings.
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
Popup Maker
Freemium WordPress plugin. The core plugin is free on WordPress.org. Paid Pro and Pro+ licenses are annual, per site count, and auto-renew; there is no monthly option and no traffic or impression meter on any plan. A one-time lifetime license is sold on a separate page.
- Free$0
- Pro$99
- Pro+$249
- Pro Lifetime$299
For a WordPress site, this is the best price-to-traffic ratio in the category by a distance, because traffic does not enter the price at all. The free plugin handles click-to-open popups, announcements, and content-targeted signup offers with no bill, and $99 a year buys exit intent, scroll triggers, analytics, and advanced targeting for a site of any size, where a hosted tool metered on pageviews would charge that much in a month or two at scale. Pro+ at $249 a year is the cheapest path in the category to popup-level revenue attribution for WooCommerce. The costs are elsewhere: no A/B testing, no life outside WordPress, a builder that is less visual than the hosted tools, and lead handling that depends on the form plugin you pair it with.
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
Popup Maker
Popup Maker is the obvious first stop for any WordPress site, for a reason no hosted competitor can match: traffic never enters the price. The free plugin handles click-to-open popups, announcements, and content-targeted signup offers at no cost on a site of any size, $99 a year adds exit intent, scroll triggers, analytics, and serious targeting, and $249 a year adds WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and LifterLMS revenue attribution that hosted tools charge far more for. Its 700,000-plus installs and near-perfect WordPress.org rating show it works. The trade-offs are real, though: it lives only on WordPress, it has no A/B testing, the builder is less visual than the hosted canvases, and lead capture depends on the form plugin you pair it with. For a high-traffic WordPress site that wants exit intent without a meter, buy Pro. For anyone who tests offers systematically or runs on Shopify, look elsewhere.
Read the full Popup Maker 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 profilePopup Maker profile last reviewed 2026-09-26; Sumo last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Lead Capture & Popups
16 trackedLead capture tools convert existing website traffic into contacts using popups, slide-ins, banners, and gamified offers, triggered by behavior such as exit intent, scroll depth, or time on page.
A goal first builder with inline editing puts a live campaign up in fifteen minutes, and no documentation is needed to ship it.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Popup Maker and Sumo?
Both began as free list-building tools for bloggers. Sumo is platform-agnostic, sends email itself, and limits its free and paid plans by sites, pageviews, and emails. Popup Maker is WordPress only and sends nothing, but its free plugin has no traffic limit, and its paid tiers add exit intent and targeting without a meter. For a WordPress blog that already has an email platform, Popup Maker is the more capable free option.
Is Popup Maker or Sumo cheaper?
Popup Maker starts at Free core plugin; Pro from $99 per year for one site ($59.40 in the first year with the 40 percent launch discount), annual billing only. Sumo starts at Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Popup Maker pricing model: Freemium WordPress plugin. org. Paid Pro and Pro+ licenses are annual, per site count, and auto-renew; there is no monthly option and no traffic or impression meter on any plan. A one-time lifetime license is sold on a separate page. Sumo pricing model: 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.
Does Popup Maker or Sumo have a free plan?
Popup Maker has a free plan. Free core plugin on WordPress.org with unlimited popups and impressions, auto-open, click, and form-submission triggers, content targeting, and form plugin integrations; no exit intent or scroll trigger. Sumo has a free plan. 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. Trial terms: 14 days on paid plans, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Who should choose Popup Maker?
WordPress sites, especially content sites, membership sites, course creators on LifterLMS, and WooCommerce stores, that want popups without a traffic-based bill and are happy for lead capture to run through the form plugin they already use.
Who should choose Sumo?
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.
What are the best alternatives to Popup Maker and Sumo?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in Lead Capture & Popups. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Hello Bar (Ease of Use). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
