Customer.io vs. Ontraport

This tool is well-suited for companies looking to run email marketing campaigns or send out newsletters regularly to their users/customers. The workflow setup is especially useful for companies who want to send specific emails based on user behavior - i.e. they've not logged in recently, have bought a specific product, haven't opened any emails, etc. This could also be useful for freelancers like me since you can create different workspaces within Customer.io. I have configured it this way to handle email marketing for a few of my clients, and the software keeps everything organized and separate. This might not be the best tool for small businesses, considering the price. It may be better to start out with a cheaper email marketing tool, and then if/when necessary, scale-up with a tool like Customer.io.

Starting a business you have enough stuff to deal with. Ontraport takes the headache out of the tech side. Everything works together and you don't ever get left alone to figure things out. I would beg any new business to invest in Ontraport. Or if you want to grow and scale an existing business it would be great. I think it more for service-based business.

Incentivized

• Ease of use, a good tool for non programmers, or not so tech savvy people.
• Great support, willing to help a lot, by chat, calls, or screen sharing.
• Fast updates, it's a newer tool, but they are coming with fixes and updates fast.

Incentivized

• Campaign builder. The visual campaign builder is very easy to use and feels pretty modern.
• CRM: customizing what type of data I'd like WHERE has been great. Custom fields, being able to move them around.
• Task Management: one of the things that set ONTRAPORT apart from other similar automation platforms is the tasks. You can trigger automated tasks that cause your salespeople to take action, and the tasks stay in the queue until the salesperson takes that action and checks it off. This is great for putting together a web of accountability.

• I may be missing it in the UI, but a place to see the list of emails who qualify for a certain email.
• One easy to view chart of all our automated/lifecycle emails to see what a given user would see over their customer journey. (This is really just a feature request/idea - the product itself is really awesome.)

Incentivized

• Ontraport is a very powerful and robust system capable of a great many things. The time it takes to get to know the program is a little intimidating. Don't get me wrong, you can get started right away, but a year in I know I am still not making the most of all Ontraport can do. I am UK based so access to their advanced trainings means international travel, maybe some online events could be initiated.

My client was already using Ontraport and had a decent investment in the tool. As soon as we turn around the revenue situation with my client's products, we will be ditching OAP immediately, despite the significant re-implementation cost we are going to face moving to a new system. I am part of a high-end, professional marketing group, and the overwhelming sentiment with these other professionals is that one should run away from this as fast as humanly possible. I thought their words were just ungrounded opinion, and I deeply regret that I did not heed them more closely before sinking still more time and effort into OAP.

It is really difficult to leverage all the neat features without a developer. I actually think the base software could be really great for a small business if the price is right, but there are so many things you *can* do but have to know how to do them or have access to your website and the ability to code.

Incentivized

The software is just easy to use. The UI is fairly intuitive. The help system is pretty good. I find it is pretty quick to get my work completed and if I don't document my things well, I can always figure out how I did something when I need to make changes. When I have a problem the tech support is easy to deal with and when things need to get escalated they are resolved quickly.

Most of the time OP runs fine. But I've had to submit more support tickets this year do to messages, seq.'s or rules not running correctly. Also experienced slow response times moving in and around OP.

The techs are reasonably savvy, highly courteous and want to do right by their customers. Unfortunately, the product they are supporting is so deeply flawed that there's only so much they can do when your legitimate business requirements are simply not supported.

I went to their Ontrapalooza event, and it opened my mind as to how the software can be used.

If you know your business, ONTRAPORT is easy

We used Autopilot in the past. It worked well but the integration wasn't very good, considering they only used cookies. We have a very complex system right now to be able to track every customer, and it was expensive but worth it. Autopilot worked very well when we were starting, but then it didn't track purchases, it wasn't easy to change a customer attribute, and so on (this was a few years ago, probably they have improved a lot). It was more visual and better to create huge workflows. . Mailchimp was the first program we used. It's very basic but good at what it does: sending a newsletter to your small database. It has integrated very well with other services and we haven't used in a lot of time, but certainly was grown a lot so it must be doing things fine. I also tried Active Campaign but it was almost the same as Autopilot.

Incentivized

We used it because it was recommended by other coaching companies. It meets well the need we have which is mostly about creating different type of access based on when the clients joined our program. You can easily create automations and rules to be notified when clients evolve in the program. It allows us to send them our messages at the right moment.

Incentivized

With the new lower priced options, it's now easier for newer businesses to start with a more basic version and upgrade as they need more features.

• Helped increase our new user engagement with our cloud-based software
• Helped our sales team identify clients who had dropped off and stopped interacting with our software
• Helped our sales and customer service team track which clients were completing their full registration process
• Helped our marketing, sales, and customer service team identify key features and messaging with A/B testing for different campaigns

Incentivized

• ONTRAPORT has helped us as we continue to segment our users - we're able to quickly determine what messaging is working and what isn't.
• Their form loading is so slow at times that it negatively affects signup conversion rates on our website.
• They have an open API that let's us connect to other productivity and marketing tools without hiring programmers.

Incentivized