OptinMonster Review: Features, Pros, Cons and Alternative

OptinMonster has long been one of the most popular plugins for creating email opt-in forms and subscription campaigns on WordPress.

But many users are asking: Is OptinMonster still the best choice? What are its strengths and weaknesses? And if it’s not the right fit, what’s a better alternative?

This review breaks down OptinMonster’s features, pricing, and usability—while also showing how Icegram Engage offers a more complete and cost-effective solution.

OptinMonster: What It Does?

As the name suggests, OptinMonster is focused on email opt-ins. It promises to convert visitors to subscribers and customers. Everything in the OptinMonster plugin is centered around getting more subscriptions for your email list.

Here’s what OptinMonster offers:

• Comprehensive Marketing Tool: More than just a popup builder, OptinMonster is designed to boost email subscriptions, increase sales, and expand your business.
• User-Friendly Popup Maker: Helps with the swift creation of various engaging campaigns, including email subscription forms, sticky announcement bars, and gamified spin-the-wheel opt-ins.
• Visitor Experience Focus: Campaigns are designed to be non-intrusive and respectful of users’ browsing habits and enhance user experience.
• Smart Targeting and Personalization: Features include advanced targeting options and personalization, ensuring that marketing messages are effectively tailored to visitor behaviors.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Ensures all marketing messages and popups look great and function well on all devices, enhancing accessibility and engagement.

How Icegram Engage Compares to OptinMonster?

While OptinMonster focuses narrowly on opt-ins, Icegram Engage serves a much larger purpose.

Icegram Engage can be used not only for email opt-in forms but also for promotional messages, welcome messages, announcements, notifications, special offers, user engagement, conversion optimization and a lot more. It’s a flexible framework that gives all the power to reach out to your visitors and engage them to take action.

Here’s what Icegram Engage has to offer:

• Powerhouse Plugin: Icegram Engage, is a full-featured WordPress plugin. Transforms website visitors into loyal subscribers and customers with a rich suite of marketing tools.
• Diverse Engagement Tools: Offers tools such as popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and e-commerce popups to capture user attention effectively.
• Advanced Targeting Options: Includes features such as A/B testing and a broad selection of mobile-responsive templates, facilitating refined audience engagement strategies.
• Effective Audience Engagement: Equips users with the necessary tools to effectively engage and convert their audience through targeted, dynamic content.

In short, Icegram Engage isn’t just about capturing leads—it’s about engaging visitors wherever they are on your site.

Pricing: Free or Paid?

Both Icegram Engage, OptinMonster are both well-known WordPress lead-generation plugins.

However, OptinMonster is primarily a Saas service. Hence even after downloading its WordPress plugin, you must still create an OptinMonster account to start using it.

OptinMonster allows you to choose one of the three plans while creating the account.

Here are the four plans it has to offer:

• Basic: $7/month
• Plus: $19/month
• Pro: $29/month
• Growth: $49/month

In short, nothing is free in OptinMonster…

On the other side, Icegram Engage provides you with a plethora of freebies. These freebies are offered without even asking you to subscribe let alone create an account!

Once you download Icegram Engage on your WordPress website, you can start creating unlimited campaigns right away. You can use it’s four free message types.

This includes:

• Pop-ups
• Action bars
• Messengers
• Toast Notifications

You can try free themes and also make use of powerful targeting rules. Icegram Engage too has premium add-ons that increase the functionality of the free version. However, it doesn’t force users to buy these add-ons in any way.

Opt-in Types: What You Get?

Originally OptinMonster just provided a lightbox popup, but over time they have added more opt-in types to their package.

Icegram Engage includes four message types in the free, core package. And can be extended with many premium addons.

Note: OptinMonster is a paid-only tool, while Icegram Engage comes with a free plan too. So, whenever I mention features available in the free version of Icegram Engage, I’ll call them out specifically. Everything else can be assumed to be part of the paid plans for both plugins.

To conclude, OptinMonster offers a solid range, but Icegram Engage includes more formats by default.

Display Positioning

You might be wondering—why does the position of a message even matter?

Simple: people crave variety. If your message always pops up in the same spot, chances are your audience will start ignoring it.

Optin Monster has a fixed position for each of its message types. While Icegram Engage messages can be positioned at different places on the screen.

Targeting Rules

Both OptinMonster and Icegram Engage provide strong targeting options. You can show your messages throughout the site, or on specific pages.

• OptinMonster: Supports page-level targeting, categories, exit intent, device targeting.
• Icegram Engage: Offers shortcode embedding, targeting rules, and now also A/B testing via an add-on.

Design Customization

OptinMonster provides a simple and handy visual editor. This makes design customizations easy for beginners. Icegram Engage has sufficient options for design customization and offers the native WordPress editor for further customizations. This is the same editor you would use for writing blog posts and pages. And it’s great for most purposes.

If you want full control, you can customize messages with your own CSS and JavaScript if you like. However, this advanced customization might seem complicated to people who don’t know HTML/CSS.

A/B testing

Both OptinMonster and Icegram Engage provide this feature. You can easily create A/B tests and increase your chances of success using this feature.

Read more about Icegram Engage’s A/B Testing feature here.

Conclusion

By now, you must have seen that Icegram Engage is a great alternative to OptinMonster – better in many aspects and catching up in the rest. OptinMonster has been around for a while and has an edge in some aspects. However, Icegram Engage has been successful in addressing the challenges of a highly crowded market.

Despite Optin Monster being a strong opponent, we built Icegram Engage because Optin Monster didn’t do a lot of what the users wanted.

With Icegram Engage, we intend to solve as many problems as we can, streamline all the frills and add value to our user’s workflows.

What’s your take? Give it a try and let us know in the comments below!

FAQ

Do pop-ups harm SEO?
Inappropriately using pop-ups can trigger a penalty from Google. To avoid a penalty, Google recommends using pop-ups that don’t make your website’s content less accessible and are easy to close. And that’s why we can assume that pop-ups can have an indirect effect on SEO if they degrade the user’s experience.

How can I delete OptinMonster?
If you wish to cancel your subscription, you can do so by logging into your account and proceeding with cancellation and termination through the billing section menu.

What is OptinMonster and how does it work?
OptinMonster helps you create popups, floating bars, and other lead generation campaigns. You set targeting rules, and the tool shows offers to the right visitors at the right time.

Can I use OptinMonster if I’m not tech-savvy?
Yes. The drag-and-drop editor and prebuilt templates make it simple even for beginners with no coding experience.

Is OptinMonster worth the price?
It depends on your goals. OptinMonster has powerful targeting and integrations but comes at a higher price than many alternatives.

Does OptinMonster work with WordPress and other platforms?
Yes. There’s a dedicated WordPress plugin, and you can also embed it on Shopify, BigCommerce, and custom websites.

How does OptinMonster integrate with email marketing tools?
It connects with major providers like Mailchimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, and Constant Contact, so new leads are automatically added to your email list.

Is OptinMonster mobile-friendly?
Yes. Campaigns are responsive by default, and you can even design mobile-only popups for better user experience.

Can I use OptinMonster on multiple websites with one subscription?
This depends on the plan. Basic covers one site, while higher tiers allow use across multiple domains.