Ortto

Name: Ortto
Brand: Ortto
Price: 23710000 USD

A CDP, a journey builder, and analytics in one Australian platform, now owned by Canva

Ortto is a unified customer data and marketing automation platform that combines a customer data platform, a visual journey builder, email, SMS, mobile push, in-app messages, forms and surveys, a live chat inbox, and a reporting and dashboard layer into one product, billed on contact volume across Starter, Professional, and Business tiers; it was formerly known as Autopilot and was acquired by Canva in April 2026.

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Overview

Ortto is the second act of Autopilot, the Sydney-built marketing automation tool that Michael and Chris Sharkey launched in 2015 and grew into a well-known visual journey product before returning from San Francisco in 2018 to rebuild it. The rebuilt platform arrived in 2021 and took the Ortto name in March 2022. The premise of the rebuild was that a marketing automation tool without its own customer data platform is always messaging on stale, partial information, so Ortto put the CDP, the journeys, and the analytics in one system rather than integrating three.

Functionally that makes Ortto broader than almost anything else at its price point. Contact data, custom activities, lead scoring, dashboards, and custom reports sit alongside a journey builder that sends email, SMS, mobile push, in-app messages, forms, and surveys, and there is a live chat and team inbox with AI responses, messenger calls, screen sharing, and a knowledge base bolted on the side. That last part is unusual: most marketing automation vendors do not also try to be your support desk.

The company reported more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries and raised roughly US$35M from Blackbird Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. In April 2026 Canva acquired Ortto alongside the AI company Simtheory, folding it into Canva Grow, with the Sharkey brothers joining Canva in leadership roles across its AI and marketing technology teams. Terms were not disclosed. Ortto continues to sell and operate under its own name and pricing.

That acquisition is the central fact for a buyer to weigh. It removes any concern about the vendor running out of money and it plausibly means investment in the product. It also means Ortto's roadmap now serves Canva's ambition to own the marketing and content lifecycle, which is not necessarily the same as serving a standalone Ortto customer, and history in this industry is not kind to acquired platforms whose new owner has a bigger strategy. Buy it for what it does today, on a monthly plan if the option is available to you.

Best for

Mid-market and scaling B2C or B2B companies that want a customer data platform, multi-channel journeys, and reporting from one vendor and can carry a three-figure monthly bill, particularly teams currently paying separately for a marketing tool, an analytics tool, and a chat widget.

Not the right fit for

Early-stage startups on a small budget; Ortto's entry pricing runs into the hundreds of dollars a month at modest contact volumes, which is several times what Drip, Vero, or Encharge cost for the same list size.
Teams that only need email; you are paying for a CDP, analytics, chat, and five channels, and if email automation is the whole job the money is largely wasted.
Buyers who need mobile push or transactional messaging cheaply; both are Professional-tier features, roughly double the Starter price, which is a steep gate for capability that OneSignal gives away.
Anyone who needs certainty about a five-year roadmap; Ortto is now a Canva subsidiary being folded into Canva Grow, and acquired platforms serve their owner's strategy first.
Companies with large dormant databases; billing keys on contact count, so contacts you never message are still billable, which is the standard trap of profile-metered platforms.

How it works

1
You bring contacts and their behavior into the CDP. Data arrives through no-code integrations with tools like Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, and Zendesk, through the API, through forms and tracked website activity, or through data imports. Custom activities let you record product events beyond the standard clicks and opens, and lead scoring assigns weight to those activities.
2
Contacts are organized into audiences built from any combination of profile fields, activities, engagement, and score. Because the data layer and the messaging layer are the same product, an audience recomputes as data changes rather than being a snapshot exported from somewhere else.
3
Journeys are built on a visual canvas: an entry trigger such as an activity, an audience entry, a form submission, or a date, followed by message steps across email, SMS, push, and in-app, plus delays, conditional branches, goal-based exits, and actions that update contact data or fire a webhook. Professional adds transactional email and SMS, dedicated sending IPs, dynamic content, and landing pages.
4
Measurement lives in the same place. Custom reports and dashboards run over the CDP, so campaign performance, attribution, and product activity are queried against one dataset rather than assembled from a marketing tool and an analytics tool that disagree. Ortto AI layers content generation and suggestions across the platform.

Feature breakdown

25 features in 5 modules

Customer data platform

The foundation the rest of the product is built on, and the reason Ortto costs what it does.

Unified contact records: Profile fields, activity history, engagement, and scores live on one record, so segmentation and personalization draw on the same dataset that reporting does.
Custom activities: Record arbitrary product events against a contact, which is what turns Ortto from a list tool into something that can react to behavior in your application.
Lead scoring: Weighted scoring across activities and attributes, available on the Professional tier, for teams routing contacts to sales based on engagement.
No-code integrations: Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, Zendesk, and a long list of others connect without engineering work, which is how most Ortto accounts get their data.
Data streaming and webhooks: Professional-tier outbound data streaming and webhooks so contact and activity data can flow into your own warehouse or systems rather than being trapped.

Journeys and automation

The visual builder inherited and rebuilt from Autopilot's original strength.

Visual journey canvas: Drag-and-drop multi-step journeys with triggers, message steps, delays, branches, and actions, which was Autopilot's signature and remains one of the more legible builders in the category.
Activity and audience triggers: Journeys start on a recorded activity, an audience entry, a form submission, a date, or an API call, so behavior drives entry rather than a manual list add.
Conditional branching: Split on any contact field, activity, or score so one journey serves several segments without duplicating the whole flow.
Delays and goal-based exits: Wait steps plus exit conditions that remove someone from a journey when they do the thing it was trying to make them do.
A/B testing: Split testing within campaigns and journeys, included from the Starter tier.
Data actions inside journeys: Steps that update contact fields, adjust scores, or call webhooks, so a journey can change state in Ortto and in external systems rather than only sending messages.

Channels

Six surfaces, with the useful ones split across tiers.

Email with included sending: Email marketing with a drag-and-drop builder and sending infrastructure included, so there is no separate ESP contract underneath.
SMS: Available from Starter, with branded SMS sender ID reserved for Professional.
Mobile push: Push notifications as a journey channel, gated to the Professional tier, which is the single most consequential feature split in Ortto's plan structure.
In-app messages: In-product messaging alongside the outbound channels, so onboarding nudges and announcements can appear where the user already is.
Forms, popups, and surveys: Capture surfaces including NPS on Professional, feeding straight into the CDP rather than into a separate form tool.
Transactional email and SMS: Professional-tier transactional sending with dedicated email IPs, which lets Ortto handle receipts and password resets alongside marketing.

Analytics and reporting

The layer most competitors leave to a separate tool.

Custom reports: Build reports over CDP data rather than only over campaign metrics, so questions about product behavior and messaging performance are answered in one place.
Dashboards: Shared dashboards for marketing and revenue metrics, which reduces the number of teams exporting CSVs into spreadsheets.
Campaign and journey analytics: Per-message and per-step performance with conversion tracking against journey goals.
Attribution reporting: Multi-touch views of which campaigns and channels contributed to conversions, drawing on the same unified dataset.

Support and engagement suite

The part that makes Ortto unusual, for better and worse.

Team inbox and live chat: A shared inbox with website live chat, which very few marketing automation vendors attempt and which can genuinely replace a separate chat tool for a small team.
AI-powered responses: Ortto AI drafts replies and content across the platform, from chat responses to campaign copy.
Messenger calls and screen sharing: Voice and screen sharing inside the chat widget, which is closer to a support product than a marketing one.
Knowledge base: Hosted help content connected to the chat widget, completing the support side of the suite.

Use cases

4 documented

Scaling B2C brand paying for four tools

Marketing automation, a chat widget, a form builder, and an analytics dashboard are four subscriptions and four datasets that never agree.

Ortto consolidates all four onto one contact record, so the audience a campaign targets and the number a dashboard reports are computed from the same data, and three renewals disappear.

Marketing team without engineering support

Every data integration requires a developer, so the CRM, the ecommerce platform, and the ad accounts never quite connect.

No-code connectors to Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, and Zendesk bring the data in without a ticket, and journeys are built on a visual canvas a marketer owns end to end.

Product-led company adding mobile push

Email journeys work but the mobile app is a dead channel, and running push through a separate vendor would split the customer record in two.

Professional adds mobile push as a journey step against the same CDP profile, so one journey can send email, SMS, in-app, and push without reconciling two audiences.

Team that needs reporting leadership will actually read

Campaign performance lives in the marketing tool, product activity lives in analytics, and the monthly report is assembled by hand.

Custom reports and dashboards run over the unified dataset, so the marketing report and the product report are the same query rather than two arguments.

Pricing

from Around $237 per month on annual billing at the 10,000-contact band (Starter)

Contact-based subscription across Starter, Professional, Business, and Enterprise tiers, with prices banded by contact volume, sending included, and month-to-month available on Professional while Business and Enterprise require an annual commitment.

Plan	Price	Includes
Starter	~$237 per month at the 10,000-contact band, billed annually	Visual journey builder Email and SMS marketing A/B testing Forms, popups, and in-app messages AI suggestions and standard reporting No mobile push, no transactional sending, no landing pages, no lead scoring. Verify the exact band price for your contact count on Ortto's calculator.
Professional	~$509 annually, ~$599 month-to-month per month at the 10,000-contact band	Everything in Starter Mobile push and dynamic content Landing pages, NPS, and lead scoring Dedicated email IPs and transactional email and SMS Custom roles, data streaming, and webhooks The tier most Ortto customers actually need, because push and transactional sending are here. It is also roughly double Starter.
Business	~$999 per month at the 10,000-contact band, annual commitment	Higher limits across the platform Advanced administration Annual commitment required
Enterprise	Custom annual contract	Priority support and a dedicated success manager Professional onboarding Deliverability consultant Service level agreements Multiple workspaces

Billing notes

Pricing is banded by contact count rather than quoted as a per-contact rate, and the figures here are at the 10,000-contact band. Check Ortto's own calculator for your exact volume before budgeting.
The meter is contacts stored, not messages sent, so a large dormant database is billable whether or not you ever email it. Prune before you sign, not after.
A 5,000-contact account sits a band below the figures quoted here and is correspondingly cheaper, but it is still an order of magnitude above what Drip or Vero charge at the same list size.
A 50,000-contact account is several bands up and, on Professional, lands comfortably into four figures a month, at which point the comparison set becomes Customer.io and the enterprise platforms rather than the SMB tools.
Professional can be paid month-to-month; Business and Enterprise require an annual commitment. Given the Canva acquisition, monthly is the prudent choice if it is available at your volume.
Sending is included, so unlike Knock, Courier, Novu, or Dittofeed there is no separate ESP or SMS provider invoice underneath the platform fee. SMS carrier costs still apply.
Mobile push, transactional sending, dedicated IPs, landing pages, and lead scoring are all Professional-tier gates, so the Starter price is rarely the real price for a team with a mobile app.

Value assessment: Ortto's value case is consolidation, and it only works if you actually use the breadth. If Ortto replaces a marketing automation tool, a chat widget, a form builder, and an analytics dashboard, then a few hundred dollars a month for one unified contact record is straightforwardly good economics and the reporting quality alone justifies part of it. If you use it as an email tool with a journey builder, you are paying several times what Drip, Vero, or Encharge charge for the same outcome. The Professional gate is the sharpest edge: mobile push and transactional sending sit behind roughly a doubling of price, and OneSignal gives away push entirely. Judge Ortto on how many other subscriptions it cancels, and be honest about that number before signing anything annual.

Strengths & limitations

Strengths

Genuine breadth for one subscription: CDP, journeys, five messaging channels, forms and surveys, live chat, a knowledge base, and a real reporting layer.
The journey builder is a direct descendant of Autopilot's, which was one of the most legible visual canvases the category ever produced, and it still reads well.
Because the data platform and the messaging platform are the same product, audiences and reports are computed from one dataset instead of two that disagree.
Extensive no-code integrations, so a marketing team without engineering support can connect Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, and Zendesk themselves.
Sending is included across email and SMS, with dedicated IPs and a deliverability consultant available at the top tiers.
Now owned by Canva, which removes any question about the vendor's financial survival and plausibly means continued investment.
More than 11,000 customers across 190 countries and consistently solid third-party review scores, so this is a proven product rather than a promising one.

Limitations

Expensive for what a small team typically uses. At entry volumes Ortto costs several times Drip, Vero, or Encharge for what many buyers will use as an email automation tool.
Mobile push, transactional email and SMS, dedicated IPs, landing pages, lead scoring, and NPS are all locked behind Professional, roughly doubling the price.
Contact-count billing means dormant records cost money, which is the standard trap of profile-metered platforms and rewards ruthless list hygiene.
The Canva acquisition introduces genuine roadmap uncertainty; Ortto now exists to strengthen Canva Grow, and standalone customers are no longer the only constituency.
Pricing is banded and calculator-driven rather than a simple published rate, so modelling the cost of growth requires going through their tooling.
The support and chat suite is broad rather than deep, and a team with serious support volume will still want a dedicated help desk.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

Ortto vs Drip

from $39 per month for up to 2,500 subscribers

Drip is a focused ecommerce email and automation tool at $39 a month for 2,500 contacts with a 14-day trial and deep Shopify integration. Ortto is a far broader platform at several times the price, with a CDP, push, in-app, chat, and real reporting. An online store that wants cart recovery and revenue attribution should take Drip and spend nothing else; a company consolidating marketing, data, and analytics should look at Ortto.

Full Ortto vs Drip comparison

Ortto vs Customer.io

from $100/mo (Essentials)

The closest competitor on capability. Customer.io is stronger on real-time behavioral data, developer control, and compliance, with a $100 monthly floor and profile-based billing, and it does not try to be your chat widget. Ortto bundles analytics, forms, and support tooling that Customer.io leaves to other vendors. Product-led SaaS teams with engineering resource usually prefer Customer.io; marketing-led teams consolidating several tools usually prefer Ortto.

Full Ortto vs Customer.io comparison

Ortto vs Vero

from $54 per month, or $49 per month billed annually

Both are Australian and both are event-capable, but the price gap is enormous: Vero starts at $54 a month for 5,000 profiles with journeys, email, and push, against Ortto's several hundred. Ortto gives you a CDP, analytics, chat, and in-app messaging that Vero does not attempt. Teams that need only behavior-triggered email and push should take Vero; teams replacing four subscriptions should take Ortto.

Full Ortto vs Vero comparison

Ortto vs Mautic

from $0 in licence fees; realistically $20 to $150 per month in hosting plus sending costs

Mautic is free open-source marketing automation you host yourself, with campaigns, email, landing pages, and lead scoring but real operational cost and no included deliverability. Ortto is a hosted, polished, expensive platform with a CDP and analytics on top. Organizations with sysadmin capacity, data sovereignty requirements, or no software budget should run Mautic; organizations that would rather buy an outcome than operate a server should pay for Ortto.

Full Ortto vs Mautic comparison

Ortto vs Encharge

from $79/mo (Growth, 2,000 subscribers, billed annually)

Encharge does SaaS lifecycle email with a flow builder from $79 a month and stays deliberately narrow. Ortto is a platform play with five channels, a CDP, and reporting at several times the cost. If email automation on product events is the entire job, Encharge does it for a fraction of the money; if the job includes push, in-app, chat, forms, and executive reporting, Encharge cannot reach and Ortto can.

Full Ortto vs Encharge comparison

Implementation & onboarding

Setup time: A week to a first journey for a marketing team using the no-code connectors, longer if custom activities need to be instrumented by engineering. The CDP setup is the work; the journey builder is the easy part.
Learning curve: Moderate. The journey canvas is approachable and the reporting is comprehensible, but the platform is wide, and teams routinely use a third of it. Decide up front which of the five channels and which reporting surfaces you are actually adopting, or the tool sprawls.
Onboarding: Self-serve with a 14-day free trial on Starter and Professional. Enterprise adds professional onboarding, a dedicated success manager, and a deliverability consultant. Documentation and a help centre carry self-serve customers.
Migration notes: Contacts and fields import straightforwardly and the no-code connectors reduce the integration burden considerably. Activity history from a previous platform generally does not transfer, so behavior-based audiences start shallow. Because sending is included, migrating means moving sending reputation: authenticate your domain, warm gradually, and consider a dedicated IP on Professional if your volume justifies it. Prune your contact list before importing, since every contact you bring across is billable from day one.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web appREST APIMobile push SDKsJavaScript tracking and chat widgetWebhooks
API: REST API for contacts, activities, and messaging, plus outbound webhooks and Professional-tier data streaming for pushing platform data into your own systems.
Compliance: GDPRCAN-SPAMSOC 2
Data residency: Discussed as part of enterprise arrangements rather than offered as a published self-serve option.
SSO: Custom roles are available from the Professional tier; single sign-on is an enterprise-level arrangement.
Security notes: Custom roles and permissions from Professional, multiple workspaces at Enterprise, and dedicated sending IPs for customers whose volume justifies isolating reputation. As a Canva subsidiary since April 2026, Ortto now sits inside a much larger organization's security and compliance apparatus.

Support & resources

Channels: Email supportIn-app chatPriority support, a dedicated success manager, and a deliverability consultant on Enterprise
Documentation: Comprehensive knowledge base at help.ortto.com covering the CDP, journeys, every channel, reporting, integrations, and billing.
Community: Moderate; Ortto has an established customer base of more than 11,000 companies but no large public user forum.

Company

Founded: 2015
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
Ownership: Acquired by Canva in April 2026; previously venture-backed
Founders: Michael Sharkey, Chris Sharkey
Employees: Not disclosed
Funding: Approximately US$35M raised from Blackbird Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners before the Canva acquisition.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Venture funding	~US$35M total	2015 to 2021	Backed by Blackbird Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners across rounds raised as Autopilot.
Acquisition	Undisclosed	2026	Acquired by Canva in April 2026 alongside AI company Simtheory, folded into Canva Grow, with founders Michael and Chris Sharkey joining Canva in leadership roles.

Timeline

2015Michael and Chris Sharkey launch Autopilot Journeys, a visual marketing automation tool that becomes known for the legibility of its journey canvas.
2018The founders return from San Francisco to Sydney to rebuild the product around a unified customer data platform rather than a standalone automation tool.
2021The rebuilt unified customer journey platform launches, combining CDP, journeys, messaging, and analytics in one system.
2022Autopilot rebrands as Ortto in March, and the company reports growth across a customer base that reaches more than 11,000 companies in 190 countries.
2024Expands the platform with a team inbox, live chat, messenger calls, screen sharing, and a knowledge base, moving into customer support territory.
2026Canva acquires Ortto in April alongside Simtheory, folding the platform into Canva Grow, with the Sharkey brothers joining Canva's AI and marketing technology leadership.

Integrations

Salesforce
Shopify
HubSpot
Google Ads
Facebook and Meta advertising
Zendesk
Stripe
Segment
Zapier
Slack
REST API, webhooks, and data streaming

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is Ortto?

Ortto is a unified customer data and marketing automation platform. It combines a customer data platform, a visual journey builder, email, SMS, mobile push, in-app messages, forms and surveys, a live chat and team inbox, and a custom reporting and dashboard layer into one product. It was previously called Autopilot and was acquired by Canva in April 2026.

How much does Ortto cost?

Pricing is banded by contact count. At the 10,000-contact band, Starter is around $237 a month on annual billing, Professional around $509 annually or roughly $599 month-to-month, and Business around $999 on an annual commitment. Enterprise is quoted. There is a 14-day free trial and no free plan. Check Ortto's own calculator for the exact figure at your contact volume.

What does the Professional tier add and is it necessary?

Professional adds mobile push, transactional email and SMS, dedicated sending IPs, dynamic content, landing pages, NPS, lead scoring, custom roles, webhooks, and data streaming. For most teams with a mobile app or transactional sending needs it is not optional, which means the real entry price for Ortto is roughly double the Starter figure.

Is Ortto event-driven or list-driven?

Event-capable. Contacts carry custom activities recorded from your product or integrations, and journeys can be triggered by those activities as well as by audience entry, form submission, dates, or API calls. It is not as purely event-native as Customer.io or Vero, and much of Ortto's data arrives through no-code connectors rather than a bespoke event stream, which is precisely why a marketing team can operate it without engineering.

Do I bring my own ESP or sending domain?

Sending is included for both email and SMS, so there is no separate ESP contract underneath. You authenticate your own sending domain, and Professional adds dedicated email IPs for customers whose volume justifies isolating reputation. Deliverability is shared: Ortto runs the infrastructure and offers a deliverability consultant at Enterprise, while list hygiene, consent, and content remain your responsibility.

What does the Canva acquisition mean for Ortto customers?

Canva acquired Ortto in April 2026 alongside Simtheory, folding it into Canva Grow, with founders Michael and Chris Sharkey joining Canva's leadership. Ortto continues to sell and operate under its own name and pricing. The upside is financial stability and likely investment; the risk is that the roadmap now serves Canva's platform strategy rather than standalone Ortto customers. If your volume allows a month-to-month Professional plan, take it over an annual commitment while this plays out.

Can a marketer run Ortto without engineering help?

More than almost anything else in this category, yes. The no-code integrations bring data in from Salesforce, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, and Zendesk without a developer, and journeys, audiences, messages, forms, and reports are all built in the interface. Engineering is only needed if you want custom product activities recorded through the API, which is where the deeper behavioral targeting comes from.

How does journey branching and exiting work?

Journeys support conditional branches on any contact field, activity, or score, delay and wait steps, A/B tests, actions that update data or fire webhooks, and goal-based exit conditions that pull someone out of the sequence once they convert. That last part is what separates a journey from a scheduled drip and Ortto handles it properly.

Does Ortto sync with a data warehouse?

Partly. Professional includes outbound data streaming and webhooks so contact and activity data can be pushed into your own warehouse or systems, and Segment is supported for inbound. What Ortto does not offer is Vero-style direct warehouse querying, where an audience is a SQL statement against Snowflake or BigQuery. If warehouse-native audiences are your requirement, look at Vero or Customer.io's Data Pipelines instead.

Is Ortto worth it for a small startup?

Usually not. At entry contact volumes Ortto costs several times what Drip, Vero, or Encharge charge, and the value only lands if you genuinely use the breadth: the CDP, the analytics, the chat widget, the forms, and multiple channels. A five-person startup that needs behavior-triggered email should buy something cheaper and revisit Ortto when it is consolidating four subscriptions rather than buying its first one.

Editorial verdict

Ortto is a consolidation play and should be judged as one. Buy it when you are cancelling a marketing automation tool, a chat widget, a form builder, and an analytics dashboard at the same time, because one contact record feeding journeys, five channels, and real reporting is genuinely worth a few hundred dollars a month. Do not buy it as an email tool: at that job it costs several times Drip, Vero, or Encharge and you will use a third of what you pay for. The Professional gate is the practical sting, since mobile push and transactional sending sit behind roughly a doubling of price, and contact-count billing means dormant records cost money forever. The Canva acquisition in April 2026 removes the survival question and adds a roadmap one, so prefer month-to-month over an annual commitment while the new owner's intentions become clear. For a five-person startup, this is not the first lifecycle tool to buy. For a thirty-person marketing team drowning in disconnected subscriptions, it is one of the more convincing single-vendor answers available.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.