Thrive Leads, OptinMonster, Convert Pro, Bloom, Sumo…blah blah blah.
I don’t even use these. I hate the idea of pop-ups. This post has zero credibility whatsoever. But am happy to tell you what little I’ve experienced and what most people (that I trust) say about them.
- Thrive Leads – bloated and laggy as heck. Do not use if your site has lots of traffic. It’s marketed well to newbies and “digital marketers”, but it’s not built for enterprise use.
- OptinMonster – very popular and professional, but expensive. Just about all small businesses will find ways to avoid that cost. The UI can also be annoying/naggy. However, it’s a mature plugin and works!
- Convert Pro – an attempt at the email plugin market by the guys behind the popular Astra theme. It’s the new kid on the block and very attractive for its low pricing (lifetime available) and features. Some love it. Some complain that it’s still buggy, bad designer, or lacking features they need.
- Bloom – made by the folks behind DIVI theme/pagebuilder (which I absolutely hate). Sorry, I can’t recommend them based on that alone.
- Sumo – seems ultra-professional. Has a free plan but can get pricey after that. Also on Shopify as well. I feel some people love their professional vibe. Others complain it feels generic and can’t be customized as much.
What about the other plugins?
I feel some are focused on an easy integration with your email service. Others more on customized pop-up design/location. Others on customized triggering/actions. You should decide what you need most.
My personal advice
- Don’t use Thrive Leads no matter what – it’s slow, bloated, and only a matter of time before you (or your developer or webhost) can’t stand it anymore. If you absolutely must, I suppose it’s ok only for smaller sites with little traffic.
- Try Convert Pro – see how it works for you. Maybe it’s good enough. If not, check out OptinMonster.
Curious to know what the pros are using? Most are either between Convert Pro (low pricing) or OptinMonster (reliable) but typically hate OptinMonster because of the backend nags.
Thank you, Johnny! I always value your opinion and was especially eager to read your thoughts on this one
I have lifetimes for both Thrive and Convert Pro. I had been using Thrive mainly because of its “lazy load forms” feature which is claimed to speed up page load times while also being more compatible with caching plugins. I hadn’t seen this feature in any other pop-up plugins.
I want to love and have tried Convert Pro several times but their form designer drives me crazy.
From a performance perspective, what do you think about using a pop-up plugin vs calling a script hosted by the email provider?
Thrive is awful because the queries and processing that it loads on every page request (frontend or backend). Every time I clean out a site’s autoloads tables, Thrive Leads is always one of the worst offenders. They enable little “performance” features for users to feel like they’re addressing that but ultimately, their underlying processes are still much heavier than other plugins. Follow my guide for cleaning autoloads and you’ll see what I mean.
As for lazyloading forms, I’m kind of annoyed about that as you shouldn’t ever need to lazyload a form. Having to lazyload it means it was too heavy in the first place. Or another way of putting it. Imagine a laptop that offered to split into 2 pieces for easier carrying up the stairs (one at a time). It’s a silly feature as it shouldn’t have been that heavy in the first place.
I don’t use either TL or CP but your comments on CP form designer sounds about right with what I’ve heard. Hahaha.
Performance wise, a simple script hosted by the email provider should theoretically beat a plugin. Why? Because the email service provider does only the design, click action, simple tracking if any. Whereas a plugin does so much more than that. However…sometimes a local plugin can be faster because the scripts are loaded locally and may even be cached/deferred or performance-optimized in other ways whereas an externally-loaded script can take forever.
Personally, I have everything on my sites hardcoded. Whenever a popup is needed, I don’t use plugins or extra scripts. Whatever JS or CSS styling is added natively to the child theme so no extra requests are made.
Hello Jonny. I am the developer of MailOptin, a relatively new email popup plugin compared to the ones listed in this post.
I will love for you to take a look and give your honest opinion. Reach out to me for a review license.
I really hope you take me up on my offer.
Love reading your posts.
Hi Collins,
Thanks for your comments and your generous offer. I wrote you an email and will be curious to test out MailOptin on some live sites.