OptinMonster is widely considered the best email marketing and lead generation tool for WordPress users. However, for some website owners its impressive features list is overkill. While for others, the price tag is just too expensive. If you’d like to grow your email list or harness the power of pop-ups and optin forms, but aren’t ready for OptinMonster just yet, this collection of the best OptinMonster alternatives will give you some other options to consider.
What’s So Great about OptinMonster Anyway?
Before we get to the best OptinMonster alternatives, you might be wondering what’s so great about this tool anyways. That’s a good question to ask if you haven’t used OptinMonster before.
After starting out life as regular WordPress plugin, OptinMonster is now a hosted service that can be used on any website, not just those powered by WordPress. As well as moving to a new platform, OptinMonster has gained many impressive new features since it initial release a few years ago.
Now with OptinMonster, you can create a wide range of pop-ups and form to help your website generate more leads. Whether you want to grow your email subscriber list, display custom messages in pop-ups, or increase your website’s goal conversion rates in some other way, OptinMonster can help.
Not only can you create pop-ups, full-screen welcome gate forms, slide-in forms, floating bars, and a whole lot more, you can also optimize your pop-ups and optins using the integrated split-testing tool. By comparing multiple variations of a form or message against each other, you can find the winning combination of text and design for your audience.
OptinMonster was also one of the first WordPress pop-up plugins to feature the exit intent trigger. This clever technology will only trigger a pop-up when a visitor is about to leave your site. If they are heading for the back button, or browser address field a pop-up will be displayed. Hopefully, they won’t be as annoyed as the form had just popped up as they arrived, and will be more likely to submit their email and join your list. However, as we’ll soon see in this collection of the best WordPress optin pop-up plugins, there are now many OptinMonster alternatives that include the exit intent trigger.
Before this turns into a full-blown OptinMonster review, let’s just say that this is a powerful and impressive tool to help you generate more leads from your website. It’s only real downside is its pricing and that’s where this collection of the best OptinMonster alternatives come in.
The Best OptinMonster Alternatives
While there isn’t really another plugin like OptinMonster, at least in terms of quality and features, there are many that come close.
Depending on which features of OptinMonster you want to use, you might be able to find free OptinMonster alternatives that meet your needs. For others, you might need to invest in a premium optin plugin to gain access to the functionality you project demands.
However, with premium plugins that compare well to OptinMonster available for as little as $25 (such as Ninja Popups), adding professional pop-ups and optin forms to your website needn’t break the bank.
Bloom from Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes make some of the best WordPress themes around. However, they also have a small but impressive portfolio of WordPress plugins. One of those plugins is the listing building tool Bloom. Once Bloom is active on your website, you can start creating custom forms that can be displayed in pop-up windows, as slide-ins, or embedded into your content. The pre-built form designs are of a very high standard. However, you can easily tweak then through the form designer.
As well as the ability to customize your form designs, you get a good amount of control over how they work on your site. You can also split test your forms and settings to optimize them for the best results. The only area where Blooms is lacking, at least compared to OptinMonster, is the absence of the exit intent trigger. However, you can set pop-ups and other forms to be trigger when a user scrolls to a certain point on a page or have been on your site for a set period of time.
Best Features of Bloom:
- Stylish form designs for growing your list.
- Form customizer to create personalized pop-ups.
- Good selection of form types include pop-ups, in-content, and slide-in forms.
- Lots of form triggers and settings to control when and where forms are displayed.
- Advanced reporting and split testing tools to enable form optimization.
Price: $89 for Bloom and 87 WordPress themes and 5 other plugins.
This powerful OptinMonster alternative can be yours if you join the Elegant Themes club on their $89 developer plan. This price also includes the excellent Divi and Extra WordPress themes as well as some other useful plugins, making it a great value offer and an affordable alternative to OptinMonster. For more information, be sure to check out our hands-on Bloom plugin review.
Thrive Leads from Thrive Themes
It’s fair to say that Thrive Leads is one of the main competitors to OptinMonster. In fact, the Thrive Leads feature list makes this plugin one of the best email optin form and lead generation tools available for WordPress today. However, it’s not without its downsides. Although Thrive Leads has more templates for your forms and pop-ups compared to OptinMonster, the quality of the designs aren’t all as strong as those from its main rival, although, there are some good ones in the library. If you’re looking for the finished article, Thrive Leads probably isn’t it, as you will need to do quite a bit of work to get the majority of the designs up to spec.
However, the Thrive Leads list building WordPress plugin does include a powerful editor. Through this tool, you can customize the design and content of your forms and pop-ups, giving you almost unlimited control over them. Compared to OptinMonster, Thrive Leads isn’t lacking when it comes to reporting tools either. You’ll always have a clear idea of which of your forms are performing well on your site, as well as which ones need more attention. When it comes to creating the perfect optin forms and other types of pop-ups for your WordPress website, like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads also includes a split testing tool.
Best Features of Thrive Leads:
- More affordable than OptinMonster.
- All the best pop-up triggers including exit intent.
- Powerful drag-and-drop form builder tool.
- Detailed reporting, analytics, and split testing tools.
- Large library of form and pop-up window designs.
Price: $67 for just the plugin or $19 per month for all Thrive products.
When it comes to Thrive Leads vs OptinMonster, many people are happy to choose the former tool and don’t see doing so as a compromise in any way. In fact, you’ll often see Thrive Leads at the top of lists containing the best email optin and pop-up WordPress plugins.
Ninja Popups
Ninja Popups is one of the most affordable OptinMonster alternatives. Sold through the Envato CodeCanyon marketplace, Ninja Popups has racked up an impressive 25,000+ sales at the time of writing this email optin form plugin comparison. Despite the low price of Ninja Popups, this list-building tool isn’t lacking in features or functionality.
Like the best OptinMonster alternatives, Ninja Popups has all the best pop-up triggers. This includes timed triggers, triggers based on user activity, and of course, the effective exit intent trigger. When it comes to form templates, Ninja Popups isn’t lacking here either. There are currently 60 new pop-up themes to work with, all of which can be customized through the drag-and-drop visual editor.
Best Features of Ninja Popups:
- Impressive selection of customizable form templates.
- Powerful form triggers including exit intent.
- Optimize your forms with the A/B testing tool.
- Drag-and-drop form designer tool.
- Content locker and social media opt-in forms.
Price: $25 including lifetime access to updates.
If you want to grow your email list and generate more leads from your WordPress website, Ninja Forms is the affordable option that has plenty to offer.
WP Subscribe Pro
WP Subscribe Pro is a good value alternative to OptinMonster from MyThemeShop. Known for making some of the fastest loading WordPress themes around, MyThemeShop also has a useful portfolio of plugins to help upgrade your WordPress website, including one of the best WordPress review plugins available.
This email list building plugin makes it easy to display a range of nicely presented optin forms on your WordPress website. There’s also a good selection of animation effects to help grab the attention of your visitors, while the library of triggers will ensure your pop-ups work in the way that you want.
Best Features of WP Subscribe Pro:
- Different high-quality form designs to choose from.
- Unlimited color options.
- Exit intent and other pop-up triggers.
- Detailed settings to control pop-up behaviors.
- Option of displaying related posts in a pop-up window.
- Selection of other optin forms including before and after post content and a sidebar widget.
Price: $39 or $87 for 93 premium WordPress themes and 16 premium plugins.
There’s also a lite version of this plugin available. Although not as feature rich as the premium version, WP Subscribe could be a good free OptinMonster alternative for anyone on a budget. If you’re looking for a new theme for your website, the affordable multi plugin and theme package from MyThemeShop is hard to beat.
Convert Plug
Convert Plug is not only a feature-rich OptinMonster and Thrive Leads alternative; it’s also one of the most affordable pop-up plugins for WordPress. Described as an all round lead generation plugin, Convert Plug won’t just help you grow your email list, but it will also help you make more sales, get more page views, and generally help improve your site’s goal conversion rates – whatever they may be.
Best Features of Convert Plug:
- Good range of pop-up triggers including exit intent
- Split testing tool to optimize your pop-ups.
- Multiple pop-up display locations.
- Easily display custom content in pop-up windows.
- Large library of high converting pop-up templates.
- Customization options for all pop-ups.
Price: $21
If you’ve not seen Convert Plug in action before, you should really check out what this great value optin form plugin can do.
Exit Popup
If you aren’t sure how a plugin like OptinMonster can help you with your website goals, the free Exit Popup allows you to try out pop-ups and optin forms without investing any money. This plugin’s pop-ups can be used to display almost any content of your choice, including text, images, videos, and of course, forms. It’s not quite a fully featured OptinMonster free alternative, but it’s worth a look for those with basic needs.
Best Features of Exit Popup:
- Set pop-ups to open on a range of triggers including exit intent.
- Use HTML to display custom content in your pop-ups.
- Control how and when the pop-ups are displayed.
Price: free
For a free introduction to how exit intent pop-ups and other OptinMonster substitute plugins work, Exit Popup is a good option.
Icegram
Icegram was created to help you capture leads and improve conversions. With a popular free version and a powerful premium option, Icegram gives you plenty of possibilities when it comes to adding those sought after OptinMonster-style features to your WordPress website. This is probably the best OptinMonster free alternative you’re going to find, so if you don’t want to spend any more money on your WordPress webiste, why not check out Icegram.
Best Features of Icegram:
- Multiple pop-up options and modes.
- Selection of pop-up triggers including exit intent.
- Detailed pop-up targeting settings.
- Library of add-ons available to upgrade Icegram.
- Free and premium versions available.
Price: from free
With pop-ups, action bars, toast notifications, and messenger-style popups, the free version of Icegram gives you plenty of options for experimentation.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many good OptinMonster alternatives for WordPress users. However, for many website owners, OptinMonster is still the best way to capture leads and increase conversions. But if OptinMonster is too expensive or simply has too many features, tools like Bloom, Thrive Leads, and WP Subscribe Pro have plenty offer for often a fraction of the price.
Which WordPress optin form pop-up plugin will you use on your website? Let us know in the comments below.
