Icegram Express vs. The Newsletter plugin: A Complete Feature Review

With endless tools available in the market, trial and error isn’t always an option. The right email plugin can determine how efficiently you connect with your audience, manage subscribers, and track performance, directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Two of the most prominent tools making waves:

• Icegram Express: Lightweight, beginner-friendly, and fast.
• The Newsletter Plugin: Feature-rich, automation-heavy, and detailed.

Join us as we navigate the best and the not-so-good aspects of both plugins.

Icegram Express vs. Newsletter Plugin: Quick intro

Before we dive into the features and what they have to offer, let’s begin by understanding what these tools are and what they have to offer.

Icegram Express

Icegram Express is a lightweight WordPress plugin that helps you send newsletters, manage subscribers directly from your dashboard, and a lot more. The tool focuses on simplicity and speed.

Being a lightweight WordPress plugin built for simplicity and speed, it allows you to:

• Send newsletters
• Manage subscribers directly from your WordPress dashboard
• Create professional emails without extra clutter

Newsletter Plugin

The Newsletter plugin is a feature-rich email marketing tool for WordPress that enables you to create, send, and automate advanced email campaigns with segmentation and detailed analytics.

Here are some of the features it offers:

• Create, send, and automate advanced campaigns
• Use segmentation and subscriber profiles
• Access detailed analytics and reporting

Icegram Express vs. The Newsletter Plugin

Check out what each tool has to offer:

Setup & user experience

Icegram Express

It’s easy to design and set up Icegram Express within minutes, and it is pretty straightforward.

After activation, it has a simple onboarding flow that allows you to start collecting subscribers, create your first email, and send it. Everything can be done without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Moreover, the interface is clean, intuitive and made for users who are looking for a tool that offers clarity.

This implies that it is a beginner-friendly tool that doesn’t require prior experience using email marketing tools.

Newsletter Plugin
The Newsletter plugin the setup experience turns out to be quite feature-dense, which means there are more configuration options presented to the users upfront.

The configuration options include setting up custom subscriber profiles, autoresponders, and advanced segmentation. While it hands over all the control to the users, it can also lead you to feeling overwhelmed if you have limited email capabilities or are just at the beginning of your email marketing journey.

Hence, if you are looking to take on advanced workflows and detailed customization, the Newsletter plugin is something that you might want to try, though it can have a steeper learning curve.

To make things easier, Newsletter Plugin assists its users with guided onboarding, which leaves less room for errors.

Email design & campaign creation

Icegram Express
Icegram Express focuses on simplicity and speed when it comes to designing and sending email campaigns. It offers a set of clean, mobile-friendly email templates that you can quickly customize using the built-in visual editor.

Users can also insert images, buttons, links, and shortcodes that turn out to be a good toolkit for professional newsletters without getting lost in design tools.

Another exceptional feature is the Smart Tags. It paves the way for personalization. Besides that, Smart Addons helps you include dynamic content like the latest blog posts or product updates.

Newsletter Plugin
The Newsletter plugin helps you compose emails through the drag-and-drop email composer, which offers a much more flexible layout structure.

This allows you to create complex layouts, using pre-built blocks for posts, products, images, columns, and even WooCommerce elements. Moreover, it also supports HTML editing for custom-coded designs.

This makes it quite easy for marketers to create aesthetic emails that align well with the brand while having precise control over layout and styling.

On the flipside, the Newsletter plugin offers a greater depth in terms of design and customization options that are far and wide. This makes the tool better suited for advanced formatting, block-based design, or campaigns that are centered towards e-commerce.

Performance & deliverability

Icegram Express
Icegram Express works efficiently even on shared hosting or resource-limited servers. It doesn’t bloat your WordPress backend and uses optimized code to ensure smooth operation.

This makes working efficiently even when sending emails to thousands of subscribers. To add to the list, it also supports SMTP integrations, helping you to connect with trusted email services like SendGrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun, or your own SMTP server to ensure your emails land in inboxes, not spam folders.

Newsletter Plugin
The Newsletter plugin, while feature-rich, is more resource-intensive. It comes with background sending, batching, and cron-based delivery options, which help handle larger lists.

However, there is a catch to this as well.

Doing all this might require meticulous server configuration and scheduled task management to achieve better results. Similar to Icegram Express, it also supports SMTP and can be connected to external delivery services. When all this adds up, it helps improve inbox placement and email speed.

• Resource-intensive but powerful
• Background sending, batching, cron-based delivery
• Requires a stronger server setup for best results
• Supports SMTP and external delivery services

On a common ground, both tools help reduce bounce rates and improve email deliverability. To make all this possible, it includes double opt-in, unsubscribe links, and support for authenticated sending.

The differentiating factor is when Icegram Express stands out for its quick performance and minimal server load. This makes it an ideal tool for anyone who wishes to access a tool without tweaking its technical settings.

Common Ground: Both reduce bounce rates and support authenticated sending.

Analytics & reporting

Icegram Express
Icegram Express provides essential email performance metrics in a clean, easy-to-understand format.

This includes email open rates, click-throughs, bounces, and unsubscribes directly within your WordPress dashboard. Moreover, the dashboard that helps with reporting is ideal for users looking for quick insights without getting caught up in a net of intricacies.

To add another layer of value, you can add Smart Addons to enable link click tracking and UTM tagging for deeper tracking through Google Analytics.

Newsletter Plugin
The Newsletter plugin also dives in detail with its campaign-specific metrics, subscriber engagement data, and performance breakdowns over time. Users who have opted for the advanced features can also integrate the tool with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and other tracking tools to gain a more comprehensive view of user behavior.

While both plugins offer the basic analytics required to track your campaign, the approach slightly differs.

Pricing & add-on features

Here are the pricing and the add-on features for The Newsletter Plugin and Icegram Express:

Newsletter Plugin
This is what is included in their premium plan:

• WP users integration
• Contact Form 7 connect
• Ninja Forms Connect
• Forminator Add-on
• Elementor Forms Add On
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Fluent Forms Connect and a lot more.

Here are the pricing plans for the Newsletter plugin:

• Essential plan: $69
• Professional plan: $99
• Agency: $ 299

To know more about what each plan entails, check out their pricing here.

Now, moving on to the Icegram Express pricing. Here are its pricing plans and what they offer.

Here are the pricing plans:

• Starter plan: $0 (free forever)
• Pro plan: $129 (per year)
• Max plan: $229 (per year)

Learn more about Icegram Express’ pricing here.

Use cases: Which one should you choose?

Choose Icegram Express if…

• You want a fast, lightweight plugin
• You’re a beginner or small business owner
• You don’t want to spend time configuring advanced features
• You value simplicity and speed over complex automation

Choose the Newsletter Plugin if…

• You need advanced segmentation and automation
• You run content-heavy or e-commerce websites
• You require drag-and-drop layouts and deeper customization
• You have the resources to handle a more technical setup

Icegram Express vs. The Newsletter Plugin: A complete analysis

Wondering which tool is the right fit for you?

Check out the thorough breakdown of why you should use either of the tools and why you should move on!

Let’s learn more about each tool in detail!

Icegram Express

Icegram Express offers essential email marketing functionality while also being a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use plugin. This means barely any learning curve, while you get the hang of it.

It’s ideal for solopreneurs, bloggers, coaches, and small businesses who wish to stay connected with their audience through regular newsletters or updates. All this without the need to set up complex automation flows or manage dozens of plugin settings.

All this without slowing down your WordPress site or overwhelming you with options. You can manage subscribers, design responsive emails, and send them. Everything happens right from your WordPress dashboard, with minimal setup, no technical expertise required, and without weighing you down with excess features.

For those just starting out, Icegram gives you core tools such as segmentation, email scheduling, template customization, and SMTP support.

Newsletter Plugin

The Newsletter Plugin works well for users who run automated, highly segmented campaigns with custom triggers, behaviours and audience groups.

It will also work well with content-heavy websites or e-commerce stores. You can automate post digests, send product updates, and create custom flows based on user activity, from within WordPress itself.

The plugin also offers a drag-and-drop composer, detailed analytics, and a wide range of extensions, which make it a great choice for marketing teams or site owners. This allows them to manage more complex campaigns.

Furthermore, it also offers integrations with tools such as WooCommerce, Google Analytics, and SMTP providers for tighter control and deeper insights.

In a nutshell, this is the tool for you if you wish to work with more settings and build multi-step automations along with granular segmentation across various touchpoints in a customer journey.

Pros and cons: In a nutshell

Just in case you were short on time and couldn’t read all of the above content, here are all the details at a glance!

What better than a clear and complete picture, isn’t it?

Conclusion

Wasn’t that what we call a neck-to-neck competition?

I say, after a close and detailed comparison of both tools, they might look similar, but they can cater to the requirements of specific customer segments.

While your daily operations could be different, so can be your requirement to deliver results.

The right email marketing tools depend on the requirements that you are looking for.

I’d say, if you are looking for a tool that fits your processes perfectly, why not check out Icegram Express?

FAQ

Can I migrate my email list from the Newsletter plugin to Icegram Express?
Yes, you can easily export your subscribers from the Newsletter plugin and import them into Icegram Express using a CSV file. We’ve kept the import process clean and beginner-friendly, so you don’t need to worry about losing subscriber data or formatting issues.

Does Icegram Express support multilingual campaigns like the Newsletter plugin?
Yes. Icegram Express is fully translation-ready and works well with multilingual plugins like WPML and Polylang. While the Newsletter plugin also supports multiple languages, Icegram Express keeps the setup lighter and more streamlined, especially if you’re managing just a few translations.

Can I run A/B tests with Icegram Express like I can with the Newsletter plugin?
A/B testing isn’t built into Icegram Express just yet, but many users manually send different versions to segments for quick comparisons. The Newsletter plugin offers this via premium add-ons, but if you’re looking for simplicity over advanced testing, Icegram Express still gets the job done effectively.

Can I integrate Icegram Express with tools like Zapier or CRMs as with the Newsletter plugin?
Yes, integrations are available through webhooks, API, and Smart Addons. While the Newsletter plugin provides some built-in integrations, Icegram Express allows you to connect with third-party tools without compromising performance or ease of use.