Sumo vs Wisepops
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 Wisepops
Different buyers. Wisepops sells design quality, onsite messaging beyond opt-in, and behavioral personalization to marketing teams at established brands, priced accordingly and with no free plan. Sumo sells a cheap, flat-priced capture tool to creators and small stores. A team that cares about how the popup looks and about segmenting the offer will find Sumo's templates and rule engine limiting; a team optimizing for cost will find Wisepops hard to justify.
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.
Choose Wisepops if
Shopify stores with real traffic (roughly 50,000 pageviews a month and up) that want one well-built tool covering popups, in-page personalization, product recommendations, and web push, with revenue-attributed testing instead of opt-in counts, and mid-market ecommerce or media teams willing to buy a strategist-led engagement alongside the software.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Sumo | Wisepops |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Lead Capture | Lead Capture |
| Starting price | Free forever; paid plans from $19 per month billed annually ($228 per year) (free plan available) | About $49 per month for 50,000 pageviews via the Shopify App Store; direct plans from about 499 euros per month, quoted only after a demo (14 days trial) |
| 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. A permanently free plan exists and paid plans carry a 14-day free trial. | Metered by monthly pageviews on the site where the script is installed, not by popup impressions, campaigns, or contacts. Campaigns are unlimited on every plan. Two distinct routes exist as of August 2026: published self-serve plans through the Shopify App Store, and a demo-gated, strategist-led subscription for everyone else, quoted after a seven-day traffic audit. Annual billing is roughly two months free. |
| 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 | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on paid plans, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee | 14 days, with full access |
| Best for | 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. | Shopify stores with real traffic (roughly 50,000 pageviews a month and up) that want one well-built tool covering popups, in-page personalization, product recommendations, and web push, with revenue-attributed testing instead of opt-in counts, and mid-market ecommerce or media teams willing to buy a strategist-led engagement alongside the software. |
| Setup time | 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. | Under an hour for the script, whether pasted into a template, deployed through Google Tag Manager, or installed as the Shopify app, which handles the tag automatically. A first campaign can be live the same day; a properly segmented program with visit-count rules, frequency caps, and control groups takes a week or two of iteration. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low for the editor, moderate for the targeting engine. The rules are the product, and the difference between a mediocre and a good Wisepops setup is almost entirely in display conditions, priority ordering, and frequency caps rather than in design. Reading experiment results honestly, particularly resisting the urge to call a control-group test early, is the skill that takes longest. |
| Platforms | Web (JavaScript snippet), WordPress plugin, Showit, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager | Web (JavaScript snippet), Shopify and Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, WordPress, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Webflow, Squarespace, Instapage, Google Tag Manager, Mobile web and browser web push |
| Compliance | GDPR | GDPR, CCPA |
| Founded | 2014 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas (Sumo Group); Formilytics LLC now operates the product | Paris, France |
| Ownership | Acquired by Showit (December 2023) and operated by Formilytics LLC | Bootstrapped and independent; no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Wisepops
Strengths
- One of the best-regarded editors in the category; reviewers repeatedly describe non-technical people building good campaigns quickly, and the 4.9 average on the Shopify App Store reflects it.
- Genuinely multi-channel: popups, in-page Embeds, an onsite Feed, product recommendations, and web push share one script, one visitor profile, and one targeting engine.
- Control-group experiments and revenue attribution answer the question most popup tools dodge, which is whether the campaign added money or just intercepted it.
- Shopify targeting reaches live cart contents, cart value, and purchase history, and Klaviyo segment targeting stops the common waste of asking existing subscribers to subscribe.
Limitations
- Pageview metering, not impression metering, is the concrete cost problem: you pay for every page the script loads on, including pages with no campaign and traffic from bots, which the vendor's own documentation admits can overstate real activity.
- The free plan is gone. A tool that was once a reasonable free starting point now has a paid floor and a 14-day trial.
- Pricing is not published on the vendor's own site. Reaching a number for a non-Shopify site requires a demo, a seven-day audit, and a sales conversation, which is a poor fit for a small business that wants to compare options in an afternoon.
- Self-serve purchase is effectively Shopify-only. A WooCommerce, Webflow, or custom-stack business of the same size cannot buy the same plan at the same price.
Pricing compared
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.
Wisepops
Metered by monthly pageviews on the site where the script is installed, not by popup impressions, campaigns, or contacts. Campaigns are unlimited on every plan. Two distinct routes exist as of August 2026: published self-serve plans through the Shopify App Store, and a demo-gated, strategist-led subscription for everyone else, quoted after a seven-day traffic audit. Annual billing is roughly two months free.
- Essential (Shopify self-serve)From about $49
- 500k pageviews (Shopify self-serve)$299
- Direct plans (demo required)From about 499 euros
Judged on the Shopify self-serve plans, Wisepops is priced in line with the serious end of the lead-capture category and delivers considerably more than a popup builder for the money: recommendations, web push, Embeds, the Feed, and control-group measurement are all included rather than sold as modules. A store doing 100,000 to 500,000 pageviews gets good value, particularly if it retires a separate recommendations or push app in the process. Below about 50,000 pageviews the pageview meter is simply the wrong shape and cheaper per-contact tools will win. Off Shopify, the calculus is different and harder to defend for a small business: roughly 499 euros a month with a mandatory demo puts Wisepops in mid-market territory, and the strategist that justifies the price is worth something only to a team large enough to act on the advice.
Editorial verdict on each
Sumo
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 profileWisepops
Wisepops is the best-built product in the lead-capture category and no longer the easiest one to buy. On craft it is hard to fault: a genuinely pleasant editor, targeting rules that reach live cart contents and Klaviyo segments, four channels beyond the popup, and control-group experiments that report revenue instead of opt-in rate, all from a bootstrapped team of under twenty with support reviewers actually praise. The catch is commercial. The free plan is gone, the vendor's own pricing page publishes no tiers and routes you to a demo and a seven-day audit before quoting from roughly 499 euros a month, and the only self-serve door left is the Shopify App Store, where plans run from about $49 to $299. That makes the recommendation conditional rather than general: a Shopify store doing 100,000 pageviews a month or more should shortlist Wisepops and will likely get more than it pays for, especially if it retires a separate recommendations or push app. Everyone else, particularly non-Shopify businesses under a few hundred visits a day, should read the pageview meter carefully, note that it counts pages where nothing fires, and compare against a tool that still publishes what it costs.
Read the full Wisepops profileSumo profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Wisepops last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.