Constant Contact vs Drip

Trying to choose between Constant Contact vs Drip as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.

Constant Contact vs Drip comparison
  • 2.2 TrustPilot
  • 4.3 Capterra
  • 4 G2

Average 3.5 / 5

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Constant Contact

Online marketing platform offering a range of features from email marketing and automation to SMS marketing and CRM.

Pricing

Starts at $12/month for up to 500 contacts and 5,000 email sends

Key features

  • Drag-and-drop email templates
  • AI Content Generator
  • Event management
  • CRM
  • Automation
  • Reporting
  • Web sign-up forms
  • SMS and social media marketing
  • Polls & surveys
  • Landing page builder
  • 5,000+ integrations

Support

Live chat and phone for all the plans during the office hours. Self-service and community support.

  • 4.4 GetApp
  • 4.4 Capterra
  • 4.4 G2

Average 4.4 / 5

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Drip

Drip is a multi-channel marketing automation tool for e-commerce.

Pricing

Dynamic, depends on the contact list and email volume, starts from $39 for 1–2500 people in the list + unlimited sends

Key features

  • Marketing automation
  • Intuitive email builder
  • Onsite campaigns
  • Campaign analytics
  • Smart segmentation

Support

Email and live chat, designated schedule, the availability of these channels depends on your pricing plan

General info about company

Constant Contact

The company was founded in 1995 by Randy Parker and was later sold to Endurance International in 2015. In 2021, it was acquired by ClearLake Investments. Headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Drip

Drip was founded in 2012 in Minneapolis, the US, and acquired by Leadpages in 2016. The company’s main goal is empowering small e-commerce businesses.

Difficulty

Constant Contact

Beginner-friendly. Basic tutorials are built into the interface.

Drip

The main focus of Drip is sales funnel automation, and the automation UI is tricky, which makes the platform less beginner-friendly than its competitors

Best for

Constant Contact

Small businesses, nonprofits, and event organizers. Some features are aimed at sales and marketing directors.

Drip

Community-focused DTC and e-commerce businesses

Free plan

Constant Contact

No free plan. Depending on the location, users can get a 14 or 60 day free trial with access to the core features and send up to 100 emails. No credit card required.

Drip

Drip doesn’t offer a free plan but there’s a 14-day free trial with no credit card required for registration.

Pricing

Constant Contact

Based on number of contacts and email sends. Overage fees of $0.002 per email apply.

For up to 500 contacts, billed monthly:

Lite $12

  • 1 user
  • 1 GB storage
  • Monthly email sends: 10x your number of contacts.

Standard $35

  • 3 users
  • 10 GB storage
  • Monthly email sends: 12x your number of contacts.

Premium $80

  • Unlimited users
  • 25 GB storage
  • Monthly email sends: 24x your number of contacts

 

Other pricing features:

  • Everyone: 15% off for 12-month prepay
  • Nonprofits: 20% off for 6-month prepay and 30% off for 12-month prepay
  • Full refund for closing account within 30 days of signing up. Conditions apply.
  • Free trial
  • Customized solutions for agencies, organizations in need of 5+ accounts, franchises, and member-based associations.
  • Lead Gen & CRM starting at $449/month
  • SMS Marketing, starting at $10/mo USD for 0-500 messages with any paid plan. Available only for US customers.

Drip

Dynamic pricing depends on list size and sending volume.
$39–89/month: up to 5,000 contacts, unlimited email sends, full functionality, free migration, email support
$99–409/month: up to 30,000 contacts, unlimited email sends, full functionality, free migration, email and chat support
$489–1899/month: up to 170,000 contacts and up to 2,040,000 email sends, full functionality, free migration, email and chat support, dedicated Customer Success manager
Custom pricing: custom number of contacts, up to 120,000,000 email sends, all the product features, support, and a dedicated manager included in the previous tier

Support

Constant Contact

  • Live chat and phone for all the plans during the office hours.
  • Live chat: Mon-Fri 3 am-8pm ET
  • Phone: Mon-Fri 8am-8pm ET, Sat 10 am-6pm ET
  • Knowledge Base
  • Product Help Center
  • Community Forums

Drip

Email support:

  • Available for all paying customers
  • 9 am to 5 pm CT, Monday through Friday

Live chat support:

  • Available for Drip customers on the $99/mo + plans
  • 9 am to 5 pm CT, Monday through Friday

Features

Constant Contact

  • Drag-and-drop email templates
  • Dynamic content in email
  • Reporting (engagement, campaign comparison, open rate by device, heatmap*, revenue*)
  • Automations (pre-built and custom templates)
  • AI Content Generator
  • Marketing CRM
  • Web sign-up forms
  • Polls & surveys
  • Landing page builder
  • Social media posting
  • Event management, including selling services and merch with the tickets and accepting payments
  • Scheduled email sends
  • Contact segmentation
  • Social media ads manager
  • Facebook retargeting ads*
  • Google Ads Manager*
  • SEO recommendations*
  • 5,000+ integrations
  • SMS marketing (US only)**
  • Subject line A/B testing

_____________________
*Available only with Premium
**Charged separately

Drip

  • Point-and-click email editor
  • Dynamic content in emails
  • A/B testing
  • Email automation
  • Free migration service
  • List segmentation and contact tagging
  • Pop-ups and signup forms
  • Email analytics including conversion rates and revenue
  • SMS marketing

Templates

Constant Contact

  • Over 200 mobile-responsive templates
  • Drag-and-drop editing

Popular templates:

  • Newsletter
  • Holiday-themed
  • Retail
  • Industry-specific
  • Customizable Standard template to any occasion

Drip

  • 51 ecommerce email templates for holidays, promotion, and other occasions
  • 4 empty templates with different amount of columns
  • 1 plain text email template

Integrations

Constant Contact

Over 5,000 integrations, including Google and Facebook Ads, WordPress, Canva, Vimeo, SalesForce, Eventbrite, Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce, social media

Drip

150+ integrations with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, CRMs like Zoho CRM, other ESPs like MailerLite, numerous event management tools, sales software including TikTok Lead Generation, social media, SMS marketing tools, and more

Devices

Constant Contact

  • iOS
  • Android
  • Web

Drip

  • Web app only but it’s optimized for mobile browsers

Languages

Constant Contact

Danish Danish Dutch Dutch English English French French German German Italian Italian Portuguese Portuguese Castilian Spanish Castilian Spanish Latin American Spanish Latin American Spanish Swedish Swedish

Drip

English English

Automation

Constant Contact

  • Automated email and SMS messages.
  • Automation Path Builder with a library of plug-and-play path templates and ability to create a custom path.

Some path templates are compatible with Shopify and WooCommerce, including:

  • Welcome email series
  • Abandoned cart messages
  • Win-back series
  • Thank you series
  • Request a review

Drip

39 automation templates from welcome to post-purchase designed for different e-commerce platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce. Drip also allows you to use the API of your custom e-commerce website built from scratch. The “Rules” feature allows users to create custom automation sequences with custom event triggers.

Pros

Constant Contact

  • Ease of use
  • Diverse template library — more than 200 mobile-ready email templates categorized by tag
  • Over 5,000 Integrations with filters by category
  • Sharing newsletter content on social media in one-click
  • Niche features for event organizers
  • Automated contact list segmentation based on engagement

Drip

  • Good tools for list management and targeted campaigns
  • All the metrics in one place
  • Designed with e-commerce in mind
  • Powerful automation

Cons

Constant Contact

  • Steep price tag for the users who have more than a couple hundred subscribers and going beyond basic functionality. Some features are not included in the plans and cost extra, like SMS
  • Automation can’t include multiple channels, actions and conditions. Selection of triggers is also limited
  • A/B testing is limited to subject lines
  • No customization options for sign up forms
  • Only five templates for landing pages
  • No geographical breakdown of the regions that are engaging more, or the time that subscribers open emails
  • No RTL language support
  • Account can be canceled only by phone

Drip

  • Complex learning curve for new users
  • Expensive compared to other ESPs
  • No drag-and-drop automation workflow builder
  • Slightly convoluted for one-off or otherwise not behavior-based campaigns

Reviews from experts

Constant Contact

Pros: The email templates are easy to use, and I've been able to train multiple users in our organization to use it, who don't have a background with tools like this. As an email tool, I'm very happy.
Cons: As a social tool, I'm disappointed. Right now you can't post to Twitter (X) at all. You can't upload videos to share as Reels, and if you want to edit copy for each social media platform you have to make separate posts.

Lauren K.

Lauren K.

Director of Marketing in the company with 51-1000 employees

Pros: Constant Contact is very intuitive and user-friendly. People with no email experience can easily jump in and create nice-looking emails. <...>
Cons: Since I started using Constant Contact in 2019, the platform is virtually the same. <...> Unfortunately, we have used Constant Contact to its capacity. Our emails cannot improve or change with the features that are currently available. It would be nice to see more customization in emails and better analytics reporting!

Erica F

Erica F

Marketing Specialist at a non-profit, with a team of 11-50 employees

Drip

If you're looking to take your email program to the next level with automation, you definitely need to consider Drip. Their support team is always timely and helpful whenever we've needed guidance on the platform or using the API.
They are constantly improving their tools. It never feels stagnant or lacking in critical features. Their prebuilt workflows make getting started very easy and you can start driving more revenue almost immediately.

Charles Combs

Charles Combs

Head of Marketing at Molly Mutt

One thing I’m really missing in the workflows is the ability to A/B test your emails.
Actually, you can set up A/B testing, but you have to hack your way with liquid language. While this is no problem for really advanced users, 90% of the users won’t know how to do this.
I personally prefer to build everything that is automation related inside workflows. Even with simple sequence emails I can do in campaigns, I prefer to do them in workflows. It just depends on how advanced you want to get with automation.
If you want simple email series, without any branching logic (like if the user does this, send this), use campaigns. If you want to go more advanced than this, use workflows.

Zoran Orak

Zoran Orak

Email marketing consultant, author of an email marketing blog

*This information is current as of 02/13/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.