OptinMonster v/s Icegram Engage

OptinMonster is one of the most popular email optin and subscription form plugins for WordPress.

However, over the last few months, people have asked us: How does Icegram Engage compare to OptinMonster? Which one is better – Optin Monster or Icegram Engage? Or, if you are already using Optin Monster on your site, why should you switch to Icegram Engage?

So here’s a step-by-step comparison of OptinMonster and Icegram Engage’s features.

Focus: Optins vs. Engagement

As the name suggests, OptinMonster is focused on email optins. It promises to convert visitors to subscribers and customers. Everything in Optin Monster plugin is centered around getting more subscriptions for your email list.

• Comprehensive Marketing Tool: More than just a popup builder, OptinMonster is designed to boost email subscriptions, increase sales, and expand your business.
• User-Friendly Popup Maker: Helps with the swift creation of various engaging campaigns, including email subscription forms, sticky announcement bars, and gamified spin-the-wheel opt-ins.
• Visitor Experience Focus: Campaigns are designed to be non-intrusive and respectful of users’ browsing habits and enhance user experience.
• Smart Targeting and Personalization: Features include advanced targeting options and personalization, ensuring that marketing messages are effectively tailored to visitor behaviors.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Ensures all marketing messages and popups look great and function well on all devices, enhancing accessibility and engagement.

On the other hand, Icegram Engage serves a much larger purpose. Icegram Engage can be used not only for email optin forms but also for promotional messages, welcome messages, announcements, notifications, special offers, user engagement, conversion optimization and a lot more. Icegram Engage is a flexible framework that gives all the power to reach out to your visitors and engage them to take action.

Here’s what it has to offer:

• Powerhouse WordPress Plugin: Transforms website visitors into loyal subscribers and customers with a rich suite of marketing tools.
• Diverse Engagement Tools: Offers tools such as popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and e-commerce popups to capture user attention effectively.
• Advanced Targeting Options: Includes features such as A/B testing and a broad selection of mobile-responsive templates, facilitating refined audience engagement strategies.
• Effective Audience Engagement: Equips users with the necessary tools to effectively engage and convert their audience through targeted, dynamic content.

Price: Free or Paid?

Both Icegram Engage, Optin Monster are both well-known WordPress lead-generation plugins.

However, Optin Monster is primarily a Saas service. Hence even after downloading its WordPress plugin, you must still create an Optin Monster account to start using it. Optin Monster allows you to choose one of the three plans while creating the account.

Here are the three plans it has to offer:

• Basic ($49)
• Plus ($99)
• Pro ($199)

Thus, nothing is free in this case.

On the other side, Icegram Engage provides you with a plethora of freebies. These freebies are offered without even asking you to subscribe let alone create an account!

Once you download Icegram Engage on your WordPress website, you can start creating unlimited campaigns right away. You can use it’s four free message types.

This includes:

• Pop-ups
• Action bars
• Messengers
• Toast Notifications

You can try free themes and also make use of powerful targeting rules. Icegram Engage too has premium add-ons that increase the functionality of the free version. However, it doesn’t force users to buy these add-ons in any way.

Optin Types

Originally OM just provided a lightbox popup, but over time they have added more optin types to their package.

Icegram Engage includes four message types in the free, core package. And can be extended with many premium addons.

Display Positioning

Optin Monster has fixed position for each of its message types. Icegram Engage messages can be positioned at different places on the screen.

Message TypeOptin MonsterIcegram Engage

Hyper targeting: Delivering niche messages for Optin Monster and Icegram Engage

Both OptinMonster and Icegram Engage provide excellent targeting rules. You can show your messages throughout the site, or on specific pages. Optin Monster allows showing messages by blog categories also. Icegram Engage allows embedding messages anywhere on the site using shortcodes.

Design customization: The editor

Optin Monster provides a simple and handy visual editor. This makes design customizations easy for beginners. Icegram Engage has sufficient options for design customization and offers the native WordPress editor for further customizations. This is the same editor you would use for writing blog posts and pages. And it’s great for most purposes.

If you want full control, you can customize messages with your own CSS and JavaScript if you like. However, this advanced customization might seem complicated to people who don’t know HTML/CSS.

Pricing: Paid vs Free + Premium Add-ons

Optin Monster is a paid plugin. Here are the pricing plans:

• $49/yr: Basic version
• $99/yr: Plus version
• $199/yr: Pro versio

Icegram Engage is free. Some of its premium add-ons – which add notable features are priced in the range of $7-$27.

Split testing: Icegram Engage offers it too!

Optin Monster for some time now had a notch over Icegram Engage on account of the Split testing feature. But we are happy to break the news that Icegram Engage has launched that feature as well.

Check out the Icegram Engage Split Testing add-on right away.

Note: If Icegram Engage has blown you away… the Split Testing add-on just makes it better.

Conclusion

By now, you must have seen that Icegram Engage is a great alternative to OptinMonster – better in many aspects and catching up in the rest. OptinMonster has been around for a while and has an edge in some aspects. However, Icegram Engage has been successful in addressing the challenges of a highly crowded market.

Despite Optin Monster being a strong opponent, we built Icegram Engage because Optin Monster didn’t do a lot of what the users wanted.

With Icegram Engage, we intend to solve as many problems as we can, streamline all the frills and add value to our user’s workflows.

What’s your take?

Give it a try and let us know in the comments below!

Check out Icegram Engage now!

FAQ

• Do pop-ups harm SEO?

  Inappropriately using pop-ups can trigger a penalty from Google. To avoid a penalty, Google recommends using pop-ups that don’t make your website’s content less accessible and are easy to close. And that’s why we can assume that pop-ups can have an indirect effect on SEO if they degrade the user’s experience.

• How can I delete Optin Monster?

  If you wish to cancel your subscription, you can do so by logging into your account and proceeding with cancellation and termination through the billing section menu.

Additional resources