The 7 best CM Commerce alternatives for 2024 (free and paid)

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People often think that email marketing is dead.

That’s not true. Marketers enjoy an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing. And Omnisend marketers are getting double that — $72 for every dollar they spend on Omnisend.

This is why new email marketing platforms are coming up every day.

One of the best ones is definitely CM Commerce, which is trusted by over 20,000 entrepreneurs. Its features include marketing automation, personalization, behavior-based segmentation, visual product reviews, and more.

However, its email templates aren’t as customizable as some of its competitors. Moreover, prices get pretty steep as your subscriber count grows.

So, we’ve compiled a list of seven CM Commerce alternatives for various needs and budgets.

What does CM Commerce have to offer?

Let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of CM Commerce.

Pros

• An affordable Starter plan makes it lucrative for small businesses.
• Seamless integration with Shopify.
• An intelligent marketing bot ‘Maggie’ for email automation.
• An intuitive dashboard for effective reporting and analytics.

Cons

• The platform prioritizes convenience and speed instead of design.
• Limited support on weekends and public holidays.
• Pretty expensive if you have a big subscriber list.
• Lacks features like a landing page builder and real-time analytics.

CM Commerce alternatives: an overview

As you keep reading, you’ll learn about the features and affordability of the best alternatives to CM Commerce in depth. Here’s quick glance:

Alternative	Best for	Free plan	Paid plans	Extra marketing features
Omnisend	Ecommerce businesses	Yes	From $16/mo	SMS marketing, push notifications, Google & Facebook custom audiences, landing pages, popups
Campaign Monitor	Small businesses	No	From $9/mo	SMS marketing
Brevo (previously Sendinblue)	Bloggers, non-profit organizations	Yes	From $25/mo	SMS marketing, live chat, Facebook ads
Mailchimp	Solopreneurs, growing startups	Yes	From $13/mo	Landing pages, social posts
Constant Contact	Email marketing beginners	No	From $12/mo	Social posting, surveys and polls
ActiveCampaign	Both B2B and B2C users	No	From $49/mo	Landing pages, signup forms, social ads
Drip	Marketers & small businesses	No	From $39/mo	Onsite campaigns

For more information, use our email pricing calculator below to quickly compare price rates and features with other top platforms. Input your desired number of contacts, choose up to two other email marketing providers from the list, and see how Omnisend stacks up against them.

1. Omnisend

Shopify rating: 4.8/5

G2 rating: 4.5/5

Capterra rating: 4.7/5

Whether you want an easy way to build personalized email campaigns or access to a free plan packed with features, Omnisend makes for a great CM Commerce alternative.

Omnisend’s free plan

Omnisend’s free plan allows you to:

• Reach up to 250 contacts with unlimited contact list size
• Send up to 500 emails/month
• Send up to 60 SMS and 600 push notifications per month

What’s more, with this free plan, you get access to advanced features, such as:

• Unlimited segmentation
• Forms
• Marketing automation
• Email builder
• Campaigns
• Sales and performance reports

CM Commerce doesn’t currently offer a free plan. At most, you can opt for a 30-day free trial and test its paid plans.

Omnisend’s email marketing features

Both Omnisend and CM Commerce propose most of the features that an email marketing tool should have. However, there are several key differences:

1. Marketing automation:
   Omnisend flaunts advanced marketing automation features, including filters, triggers, conditions, and automation workflows. On the other hand, CM Commerce has a marketing bot ‘Maggie’ for automation.
2. Email builder:
   Omnisend’s brand-new email builder comes with 25 modern templates, A/B testing, and ecommerce-focused capabilities, such as product listing, discount blocks, and product recommendations. Although building an email is very quick on CM Commerce, it is quite limiting.
3. Segmentation and targeting:
   Omnisend offers 23 pre-built segments, conditional splits, web-tracking filters, and six segmentation options, along with customer lifecycle-based segmentation. CM Commerce’s bot, Maggie, uses data insights to better segment your audience and suggests useful subscriber lists
4. Deliverability:
   To optimize your email campaign, you can use Omnisend’s deliverability reports under the platform’s Reports tab. Here, you’ll see clearly laid-out deliverability best practices based on your store’s current setup.

Channels used

Omnisend is one of the strongest CM Commerce alternatives when you’re considering compatibility with other channels. In addition to email, you can easily access SMS and push notifications, and retarget users who abandoned their carts with social ads.

In contrast, CM Commerce is built solely for ecommerce email marketing. All you can do is sync your Facebook audience.

Paid plans comparison

	Omnisend		CM Commerce
Standard	Starts at $16/month	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Pro	Starts at $59/month	Growth	Starts at $29/month

Although paid plans for both tools are priced similarly, you get access to a lot more features across multiple channels with Omnisend.

Customer support

Omnisend’s award-winning customer support offers 24/7 email and chat support for all users—including those on the free plan. It covers all time zones and will respond to your query in three minutes or less.

Conversely, CM Commerce encourages users to head to its online help center and find answers themselves. Email and messaging support are available on weekdays. Phone support and priority email responses are only offered under the most expensive tier.

2. Campaign Monitor

G2 rating: 4.1/5

Capterra rating: 4.5/5

Campaign Monitor is pretty similar to CM Commerce, but if you want to complement email marketing with SMS, it’s worth a closer look.

Campaign Monitor’s free plan

Just like CM Commerce, Campaign Monitor does not come with a free version. The best you get is a ‘free account’ to test its features and send a campaign to up to five people.

Campaign Monitor’s email marketing features

With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and professionally-designed email templates, CM Commerce makes designing emails a breeze.

You can also send out emails to multiple segments or lists at once, something many CM Commerce alternatives don’t offer.

Campaign Monitor also offers email autoresponders and trigger-based messaging. Its intuitive visual journey designer helps dispatch the right emails at the right times.

Talking of unique tools, there’s Link Review, which automatically scans your emails for any broken or outdated links.

Finally, to maximize ROI, you can combine your SMS and email marketing efforts — a capability that’s missing in CM Commerce.

Paid plans comparison

	Campaign Monitor		CM Commerce
Basic	Starts at $9/month	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Unlimited	Starts at $29/month	Growth	Starts at $29/month
Premier	Starts at $149/month

Both CM Commerce and Campaign Monitor are similarly priced.

However, Campaign Monitor’s email features are a bit more advanced, and they include SMS marketing in their plans.

Customer support

Campaign Monitor’s built-in support chatbot will provide quick answers to your queries. Moreover, it offers email-only support with the ‘Basic’ and ‘Unlimited’ plans. Like CM Commerce, to avail of phone support, you must subscribe to the Premier plan.

3. Brevo (previously Sendinblue)

G2 rating: 4.5/5

Capterra rating: 4.5/5

Brevo is a powerful platform with email, SMS, live chat, chatbot, as well as WhatsApp marketing capabilities. With close to 500,000 users, Brevo is both reliable and effective. 

Let’s find out why.

Brevo’s free plan

With Brevo’s free plan, you can send up to 300 emails a day which is pretty generous, use its email editor and beautiful templates, conduct basic reporting, as well as give SMS and push notifications a shot.

Brevo’s email marketing features

Brevo’s features cover email automation, email templates, email tracking, as well as behavioral targeting tools, and diverse customization options.

It is a great CM Commerce alternative if you’re looking for compatibility with other marketing channels and strong integrations.

If you own an ecommerce business, you can benefit a lot from Brevo. Features like customer purchase history and behavior-based segmentation, transactional emails, and order confirmation shipping notifications are designed for ecommerce businesses.

Paid plans comparison

	Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)		CM Commerce
Starter	Starts at $25/month	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Business	Starts at $65/month	Growth	Starts at $29/month
Enterprise	Custom pricing

There is one major difference between Brevo and CM Commerce’s pricing plans.

While Brevo bases its pricing on the number of monthly emails, CM Commerce draws from the number of subscribers on your list.

Although Brevo is costlier, it offers a lot more features.

Customer support

Brevo utilizes several channels to offer top-notch customer support.

However, phone and live chat support is only available with top-tier plans. What we find a bit odd is that the paid Starter plan users have access to just email support, which you also get with the Free version.

4. Mailchimp

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Capterra rating: 4.5/5

Mailchimp offers a wide range of features and integrations, and is pretty sophisticated. It’s a great alternative for those who have experience using an email marketing platform before and have slightly bigger budgets.

Mailchimp’s free plan

Mailchimp offers a free plan along with a free 30-day trial of two of its paid plans.

Users can send 1,000 emails to up to 500 subscribers per month. Although the plan used to be a lot more generous, it covers some great features even today.

Mailchimp’s email marketing features

If you want lots of beautiful templates, Mailchimp is one of the best CM Commerce alternatives. It comes with a clean email campaign wizard, 70+ customer journey templates, a comprehensive landing page builder, and analytics.

It is also known for offering hundreds of integrations, including connections to social channels and Google Analytics.

One of its coolest features is the dynamic content blocks with which you can easily personalize your emails. What’s more, Mailchimp doubles up as a great mass email service.

Paid plans comparison

	Mailchimp		CM Commerce
Essentials	Starts at $13/month for 500 contacts	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Standard	Starts at $20/month for 500 contacts	Growth	Starts at $29/month
Premium	Starts at $350/month for 500 contacts

One reason why users turn away from Mailchimp is its confusing paid pricing plans. Prices increase based on both the number of contacts and emails.

Mailchimp is also pretty expensive compared to some other CM Commerce alternatives.

Customer support

Mailchimp’s customer support has a good reputation. It’s included in all its plans, although the free version only comes with email support for 30 days.

The platform also offers a range of tutorials, blog posts, and YouTube videos to guide both beginners and experts.

5. Constant Contact

G2 rating: 4/5

Capterra rating: 4.3/5

Constant Contact has powerful features and is pretty straightforward to use. Unlike CM Commerce, it also supports SMS marketing, landing pages, and social ads

Constant Contact’s free plan

Unfortunately, Constant Contact doesn’t include a free plan. But you can test any of its three paid plans for free for 14 days.

Constant Contact’s email marketing features

Constant Contact is a great CM Commerce alternative for beginners. As soon as you sign up, it will guide you to create your first email marketing campaign.

The platform comes with decent customizable templates, A/B testing, and dynamic content blocks. However, its designs are basic and the scope of automation is also narrow.

However, it does flaunt some unique features, such as:

• Event management
• Appointment scheduling
• Digital product downloads

Paid plans comparison

	Constant Contact		CM Commerce
Lite	Starts at $12/month	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Standard	Starts at $35/month	Growth	Starts at $29/month
Premium	Starts at $80/month

Constant Contact is a pretty expensive tool. In addition, compared to some other CM Commerce alternatives on this list, its features are also limited.

Customer support

Constant Contact gives the option of live chat, phone support, and email assistance. Opt for the Standard or Premium plan, and you’ll also have an onboarding call.

What’s more, this CM Commerce alternative has a fairly extensive knowledge base and a lively community forum.

6. ActiveCampaign

G2 rating: 4.5/5

Capterra rating: 4.6/5

ActiveCampaign is an excellent marketing automation software solution for B2B businesses and ecommerce stores. It’s highly sought-after, thanks to a combination of email marketing, automation, and CRM.

ActiveCampaign’s free plan

Like many other CM Commerce alternatives, ActiveCampaign also doesn’t come with a free plan. You only get a 14-day limited access free trial.

ActiveCampaign email marketing features

ActiveCampaign has all the important features including email and landing page builders, 250+ customizable templates, A/B testing capabilities, mobile-friendly signup forms, and a straightforward email segmentation process.

One of its features we really like is the Automations Map. This helps you visually track and improve your automation performance.

Moreover, ActiveCampaign goes beyond basic reporting. For instance, its Deal Funnel Report will tell you how many deals are in your sales or marketing pipeline.

Paid plans comparison

	ActiveCampaign		CM Commerce
Plus	Starts at $49/month	Starter	Starts at $9/month
Professional	Starts at $149/month	Growth	Starts at $29/month
Enterprise	Custom plan for growing teams

Note: The prices listed for ActiveCampaign are for yearly billing.

Customer support

ActiveCampaign comes with 24/7 email and live chat support for all users.

Although a bit difficult to use, ActiveCampaign comes with several self-help docs and resources that help you get started.

7. Drip

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Capterra rating: 4.4/5

What makes Drip a good CM Commerce alternative? It has a broader scope and aims at helping ecommerce platforms nurture real relationships using the power of email, onsite messaging, and customer-first strategies.

Drip’s free plan

One of the biggest drawbacks of Drip is the lack of a free plan. But in its 14-day free trial, you get to try all features except unlimited email sends.

Drip’s email marketing features

Drip’s robust email marketing automation is its most attractive feature. The tool makes it simple to segment email lists based on different factors.

To see what your customers prefer, you can A/B test different elements of the email design and workflow. You can also collect data from your site, store, and emails to see what’s working.

However, one major thing it lacks is a landing page builder.

Paid plans comparison

	Drip		CM Commerce
Paid	Starts at $39/month (2500 subscribers)	Starter	Starts at $9/month
		Growth	Starts at $29/month

Unlike CM Commerce, Drip has just one plan where the pricing increases with the number of subscribers you have. Unfortunately, the starting price is high. It doesn’t have cheaper options for those with a smaller subscriber list.

The good part? You can send as many emails as you want.

Customer support

With Drip, all paying customers get email support from 9 am to 5 pm CT, Monday through Friday. Live chat support is only available to those paying over $99/month.

Wrap up

While CM Commerce is a great email marketing software solution, it may not be ideal for your needs. So, you should definitely consider alternatives.

Platforms like Omnisend and Drip are great for ecommerce businesses, Mailchimp is more versatile, and ActiveCampaign is great for automation.

We strongly recommend Looking at CM Commerce alternatives that come with a free plan and taking them for a spin. Also, keep your long-term goals in mind and go for an omnichannel marketing platform if need be.

Besides offering both these things, Omnisend lets you access most of its advanced features for free.