Privy vs. Omnisend: Full Feature & Price Comparison

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Email marketing is a must-have component of any digital marketing strategy—and this goes double for ecommerce merchants. This makes choosing your email marketing platform a critical decision that requires a lot of information and realistic introspection into your business’ needs, especially when you’re smaller and looking to grow.

Privy and Omnisend are both well-established email marketing tools, but which one is better for your ecommerce business? In this piece, we’ll perform a complete Privy vs Omnisend comparison on the points that matter the most: features, pricing, and value.

First, here’s a quick feature comparison tables:

• Jump to Privy vs Omnisend Channel Comparison Table
• Jump to Privy vs Omnisend Feature Comparison Table
• Jump to Privy vs Omnisend Pricing Tables

Privy vs Omnisend Channel Comparison Table

Channels	Omnisend	Privy
Email	✔	✔
SMS	✔	✔
Google & Facebook Custom Audiences	✔	✘
Web Push Notifications	✔	✘

When it comes to channels, Privy offers email and SMS (but with conditions). Email marketing falls under Privy’s email plan, and their SMS offer comes with a separate Privy Text plan. It’s also worth noting that at the moment, SMS is uniquely available for cart abandonment.

This means that there are only two kinds of SMS you can send:

• SMS automatically triggered when a contact signs up to receive SMS
• SMS automatically triggered when a customer abandons their cart

Omnisend, on the other hand, offers email and SMS starting from their Standard plan, however, there aren’t caveats to using SMS. As long as you have the opt-in permission, you can send stand-alone campaigns, or add SMS to send alongside email in any automation workflow you like, which makes getting started and integrating it into your marketing strategy easy and seamless.

Note: With Omnisend’s Pro plan, you get free SMS credits equal to the price you pay for your plan. We’ll go over that a bit more later.

Omnisend also takes channels a step further offering web push notifications and retargeting through Google and Facebook Custom Audiences.

Privy vs. Omnisend Feature Comparison Table

Features	Omnisend	Privy
Email	Campaigns + unlimited automations	Campaigns + 3 automation types
Automation	Full automation workflows + custom-built workflows for anything you need	Only cart abandonment, win-back, and purchase followup
SMS	All automation workflows + stand-alone campaigns	Only for cart abandonment
Segmentation	Advanced	Basic
A/B Testing	Yes	Yes
Popups	Timed, scroll-based, exit intent	Timed, scroll-based, exit intent
Landing pages	Yes	No

Feature for feature, Privy and Omnisend are very different platforms. Privy is more geared towards smaller businesses with certain limitation ceilings in place. Omnisend, while well-adapted for smaller businesses, truly shines with growing ecommerce companies who can unlock the full potential of their features.

We’ll compare Privy and Omnisend by feature.

Privy vs. Omnisend: Who Does Email Marketing Better?

Privy: Privy’s email marketing comes with their Email Plan and includes stand-alone newsletters, abandoned cart, win-back, and purchase follow-up automations. Creating everything in the platform is done with a visual drag and drop builder.

In each automation type, you can create one email that will go out to your customers when they abandon their cart, have lapsed for a certain amount of time, or have completed an order.

For cart abandonment, you can create an abandonment email based on the amount left in the cart. Setting a maximum amount allows you to create different cart abandonment messages based on the value ranges.

The same sort of system applies to Privy’s win-back and order follow-up emails. You design each email manually and then you can set up Trigger Settings to automatically send the email within a certain time frame. In theory, this means you could create several emails that send depending on when the customer last ordered.

While Privy’s automation allows you to create several emails, you’ll need to do them all manually. Segmentation doesn’t really apply for behavior-triggered messages, meaning you can’t layer segmentation based on demographics or campaign engagement for precise targeting. You can only base those triggers on very basic actions.

Omnisend: Omnisend’s platform, on the other hand, is ecommerce-focused and built around email marketing and automation. Like Privy, they use a drag-and-drop visual builder for emails that allows you to save content blocks, create and save your own templates, and build your emails quickly. Of course, you can always use one of the pre-built templates they provide.

However, where Omnisend really shines is in their marketing automation workflows. With online businesses generating 32% of their email revenue from automated messages, these are too important to ignore. Unlike Privy, Omnisend offers several options for workflows that matter the most for online sellers, even providing templates to help you get started quickly.

Marrying feature sophistication with ease-of-use, Omnisend’s automation builder is visual. You can follow the exact track of messaging your customers will receive from beginning to end and decide exactly what message they get and when they get it.

Omnisend lets you add different channels into your automation workflows, meaning you can easily add in SMS or push notifications alongside email. If you have a customer who hasn’t opted-in for that channel, it will automatically skip them and send them a back-up email instead.

Email List Building: Privy Features vs Omnisend Features

Privy: Privy’s platform feels geared towards list building features. They have customizable popups, forms, flyouts, and boxes that you can create with their drag and drop builder.

However, there’s only so much you can collect and customize in Privy’s builder. There’s no option to collect custom information with your pop-ups, meaning you’re limited to Email, Name, and Phone number (plus opt-ins).

Omnisend: Omnisend offers popups, static forms, dynamic animated sign-up forms, and landing pages for you to capture information from your customers. Similar to Privy, Omnisend employs a visual builder for creating forms.

Omnisend also offers more customization options than you find in Privy, including custom fields so you can ask for the information that makes the most sense for your online shop.

Omnisend also offers email list building features as standard alongside any of their plans, including their free plan.

Pricing: Where do Privy and Omnisend Stand?

To compare prices and features between both Privy and Omnisend, we’ve created two charts that compare Privy’s Starter Plan with Omnisend’s Standard, as the two align the closest.

Price comparison	2,000 contacts	4,000 contacts	6,000 contacts	8,000 contacts
Omnisend Standard Plan	$30/month	$60/month	$90/month	$96/month
Privy Starter Plan	$30/month	$60/month	$90/month	$120/month

Between both plans, here is a rundown of how the features compare:

Pricing	Omnisend Standard Plan	Privy Starter Plan
Price per Month	$16	$30
Campaigns	Yes	Yes
Automation	Yes	Yes* (only certain kinds)
Popups	Yes	Yes
Reporting	Yes + advanced sales reporting	Yes
Segmentation	Advanced	Basic
Support	24/7 email + chat	Email

To compare pricing between Privy and Omnisend, it’s important to understand that they have two very different pricing systems. Think about not just what you need right now, but what you’ll need to grow in the future when you’re deciding which email service provider is right for your ecommerce store.

Privy has three separate plans, each for the specific feature you want.

• Privy Convert: Popups, forms, and email capture. Starts free up to 5,000 page views.
• Privy Email: For email campaigns, cart abandonment, and follow-up automations. Starts at $13 per month.
• Privy Text: For cart abandonment texts. Starts at $10 per month (per 100 contacts, which gives you 600 texts you can send).

Privy also offers a Starter Plan, which combines Convert and Email, so you get both list building features and emails for $30 a month. However, Privy’s Starter Plan is only available to merchants with less than 50,000 page views per month.

Privy Convert is paid at anything over 5,001 page views. Privy Email and Privy Text increases in price as you increase your contacts.

Omnisend’s pricing falls into four plans: Free, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise.

• Omnisend Free: Includes emails, pop-ups, forms, boxes, and reporting, and 15,000 emails per month with no contact or page view limit.
• Omnisend Standard: Starts at $16 per month and includes SMS, automation workflows, audience segmentation, and 24/7 email and chat support.
• Omnisend Pro: Starts at $99 per month, and includes push notifications, Facebook Custom Audiences, Google Customer Match, and Priority support.
• Omnisend Enterprise: Custom pricing, includes email account migration, a dedicated account manager, deliverability support, and a custom IP address.

It’s also worth noting that Omnisend’s Pro plan offers free SMS credits equal to the price you pay for your plan. Each plan has a starting price which increases as you increase your number of contacts.

Pricing plans	What’s Included	Price per month
Privy Convert	Pop-ups, forms, email capture	$0**($20/month at 5001 pageviews)
Privy Email	Email campaigns, cart abandonment, follow-up automations	$13
Privy Text	Cart abandonment texts	$10**(per 100 contacts/600 sends)
Privy Starter Plan (convert + email)	Privy Convert + Privy Email	$30
Omnisend Free plan	Email campaigns, sign-up forms, boxes, & pop-ups, reports	$0
Omnisend Standard	Free + SMS campaigns, automation, segmentation, 24/7 email & chat support	$16
Omnisend Pro	Standard + web push notifications, Facebook custom audiences, Google customer match, priority support, advanced reporting	$99
Omnisend Enterprise	Pro + email account migration, dedicated account manager, deliverability support, custom IP address	Custom pricing

Wrap up

While looking through the features and pricing of both platforms, it’s clear that Privy and Omnisend focus on different kinds of customers.

Privy is good for those who need basic email and list building that will get you started. However, Omnisend is more adapted to ecommerce businesses and provides more features to help them increase sales.

Regardless of what you choose, it’s important to be well-informed about your choice in email service providers and to think of them as a business partner invested in your store’s success—the growth potential email and SMS marketing provide is too important to take this decision lightly.

Special thanks to our friends at Omnisend for their insights on this topic.