ConvertKit vs Drip (2023)
- January 08, 2023
Unlike most email marketing tools that claim to work for all kinds of businesses, ConvertKit and Drip target specific niches. Convertkit goes after content creators whereas Drip intends to attract e-commerce business owners. As a result, some of their features are a bit customized to suit their target industry better. Nonetheless, anyone can use them as both are amazing software.
This article will be a feature-by-feature comparison of ConvertKit and Drip that will give you a winner at each step as well as an overall champion at the end. But first of all, let’s go through the history of each tool.
ConvertKit
Nathan Barry launched ConvertKit in 2013 in Idaho, United States. Currently, they have 67 team members across 54 cities and claim to have served more than 250,000 people.
Drip
Drip was started in 2012 by Rob Walling but was acquired by LeadPages in 2016. It is used by 27,000 marketers around the world and claims to have helped them generate nearly $1 billion in gross merchandise value since 2018.
1. ConvertKit vs Drip: Form & Page Builder
The first thing you require before you can implement an email marketing strategy is a list of people who have agreed to receive emails from you. And you need forms to collect their information. What’s better than having that feature in your email marketing solution and automatically adding your subscribers to separate lists and sequences depending on the form they filled?
ConvertKit
With ConvertKit, you can display forms in four different formats – Inline, Modal, Slide-in, and Sticky Bar. However, the templates and customizability are a bit limited. The page builder is also quite average.
Drip
The Drip form builder doesn’t come with a lot of formats, templates, or customizability either. However, the interface is pretty good. But one major disadvantage in the case of Drip is that it does not provide a page builder.
Winner - ConvertKit
Although none of these two solutions provide high-quality form and page-building features when compared to each other, ConvertKit easily triumphs Drip. Not only does it come with a page builder (which Drip does not), it also provides more options and a better form building experience.
2. ConvertKit vs Drip: Lead & Customer Management
Lead and Customer Relationship Management refers to the process through which businesses organize the interaction with their leads and customers. This allows them to learn more about their audience and figure out the best message to send them, hence helping them retain customers and increase conversions.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit provides a great system to manage your subscribers. You can track all your interaction with a lead at a single glance. You can see their tags, automations, purchases, and much more.
Drip
If ConvertKit is good, Drip is great. It provides advanced features like the ability to view leads’ website sessions, lifetime value, and much more. Moreover, since the interface is amazing, it becomes easier for you to analyze each lead’s data and interaction.
Winner - Drip
Even though both are great tools, Drip beats ConvertKit when it comes to lead and customer management. It tracks more details of your leads that help you with better follow-ups. It also comes with a pruning option that lets you unsubscribe people from your lists who are no longer engaged. This improves your list health and maintains higher deliverability.
3. ConvertKit vs Drip: Campaigns and Automations
Sales on automation are what most business owners desire and email marketing is one of the simplest ways to achieve that. You can set up automated sequences to send to your leads and see sales flowing in with every campaign that is sent out. All you need for that is regular growth of your email list with high-quality leads and an email marketing solution.
ConvertKit
Campaigns and automations are easy to set up in ConvertKit with the help of a visual automation builder. You can view each stage your leads will go through and easily track the drop-off points to improve them.
Drip
Drip also comes with a visual automation builder which is not only very powerful but a lot of fun to use as well. It’s intuitive, has a great design, allows you to use color codes, and a lot more. It makes the creation of complex automations simple and easy.
Winner - Drip
Drip has one of the best automation builders and ConvertKit is not very close. It doesn’t provide a drag and drop email builder for your campaigns and its automations are not as powerful as Drip.
4. ConvertKit vs Drip: Deliverability
A lot of people don’t know about this or choose to ignore it but deliverability should be one of the determining factors when you choose an email marketing software for your business. It is the rate at which your emails land in the inbox of your recipients and depends on various factors, one of which is the email tool you use.
Winner - Drip
Over the years, Drip has proven to provide the highest deliverability among all email marketing tools. It has beaten the likes of ActiveCampaign, ConstantContact, and Aweber. ConvertKit is still average compared to them and does not even comes close to Drip.
5. ConvertKit vs Drip: Pricing
ConvertKit provides a forever free plan whereas Drip starts at $19. However, ConvertKit unlocks some important features only in its paid plans that start at $29 and $49 respectively. The prices of both the tools increase with an increase in the number of contacts.
ConvertKit
Drip
Winner - Drip
Even though, ConvertKit provides a free plan, it charges more than Drip for same number of contacts in its paid plans. Another benefit with Drip is that it offers a single pricing package where all the features are unlocked whereas in the case of ConvertKit, you need to buy their higher plan to get access to all the features.
ConvertKit vs Drip: Conclusion
Drip is the better choice for email marketing over ConvertKit in all cases. Not only does it come at a lower price, but it also provides much more advanced features as well.
Now, you may find blogs and videos that suggest the opposite and claim ConvertKit to be the winner of this battle. But here’s the truth: They are biased. They are affiliates of ConvertKit and want to earn a commission out of your purchase. They don’t care about helping you choose the right software for your business.
But we do. We are a digital marketing agency and our main revenue comes from providing services to our clients. We just write these blogs to help businesses save time, money, and effort that goes into researching and changing tools over and over again.
Now, I will be honest and agree that we are also agency partners with these software programs. We earn a commission if you purchase Drip or even ConvertKit from our link but at no extra cost to you. However, unlike others, we don’t focus on profit. Even though we earn a higher commission if you purchase ConvertKit, we still recommend you Drip as it is genuinely the better option among the two.
Copyright © 2023 Frazile. All Rights Reserved.