Omnisend vs. Bronto–a feature-by-feature comparison

Oracle has declared “end of life” status for the Bronto Marketing Platform. Finding a replacement for Bronto leaves ecommerce businesses looking for an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated marketing platform. Luckily for Bronto customers, Omnisend was built with the same goal in mind: to help ecommerce businesses engage with their customers and drive revenue through email marketing.

However, in some cases, these tools apply different approaches and focus on different needs—and comes with a much different cost. These things are vital to consider when choosing your new ESP. So let’s go ahead and learn about the main differences between these two service providers.

A quick feature comparison

Omnisend vs Bronto: Who is each tool built for?

When switching to a new email service provider, you should pay attention to which business needs the tool is ready to address, and who their ideal clients are.

Bronto focuses on medium and large companies, meaning that it offers a sophisticated solution with many advanced features—for a price. Because these software solutions usually don’t give you a free trial, the process of migration can be more complex and require a more hands-on approach. You can see that even on their homepage—the only way to get on their platform and to see how it looks and works is by booking the demo.

When it comes to integrating with ecommerce platforms, Bronto has connectors with NetSuite, Salesforce, Shopify and Magento. So if your business is hosted on these platforms, your migration won’t be overly complicated. But if your company uses a different platform, you will need some knowledge of API and how to move all your customer data to Bronto. If you are a tech-savvy person or have one behind your back, it won’t be a problem. Even so, you should take this into consideration.

Omnisend, on the other hand, was built for small-to-medium ecommerce brands. And although the feature set is ready to serve already developed businesses, it’s one of the easiest to set up and use platforms on the market.

You can get familiarized with the Omnisend platform before booking a demo, and the platform offers a free 14-day trial and 15,000 email credits with no commitment or credit card reauired. This can help you to look around and try the features for free before taking the next step.

Marketing automation

Both platforms offer sophisticated, segment-based marketing automation. You can launch customer lifecycle messages, like cart, browse and product abandonment, welcome, anniversary messages, etc. However, with Bronto, access to some of these, such as cart and browse, may come with an additional cost.

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At this point, there are only a few differences between these platforms:

1. Omnisend can provide you with more channels for your messages (email, SMS, web push notifications), while Bronto supports only email and SMS.
2. Bronto’s automation features were developed a while ago, so in some aspects, the interface can look a bit outdated. Omnisend’s interface and usability, on the other hand, is fresh and up to date.

So, marketing automation isn’t the main differentiator when comparing Omnisend to Bronto. It’s more a matter of taste, cost, and the channels you expect to employ in your communication strategy.

Email campaigns

Both tools are built for sending emails, so they both have email editors, a library of templates, and other common email elements.

With Bronto, you can choose whether you want to code your email template or pick from the existing offerings. This follows all the testing possibilities that are necessary if you want to code the template yourself.

Omnisend, instead, focuses on ease-of-use with their email builder and provides only a visual template editor. Here, you can use existing templates or build your own and modify them with our visual, award-winning drag-and-drop editor—it’s user friendly, and full of interactive elements and coupon code elements.

Now, think about how often your team wants to edit the email template code. Is this functionality important for your business? The answer might help you when making your final decision.

List building

On both platforms, you can find preset sign-up forms, double opt-in functionality, checkboxes for consents, exit-intent forms, and all the necessary tools for collecting new subscribers and complying with email laws.

While the offerings are on par, Omnisend also offers an interactive Wheel of Fortune sign-up form which helps businesses to boost their sign-ups. With Bronto, you’ll have to pay extra to an alternative provider that either integrates with Bronto or manually export and import those collected email addresses.

Customer support and resources

Both tools provide flexible and highly-accessible customer support. At Bronto, you can get either 24/5 or 24/7 live chat support depending on your pricing plan, both of which include their knowledge base and educational videos. If phone support is a requirement, they also offer a Professional Support subscription plan available for purchase.

Omnisend provides 24/7 support via live chat, email, and Facebook messenger for all paid plan users. Users on the free plan receive support via email. Regardless of the plan, all Omnisend customers have access to onboarding videos, educational webinars, and our easy-to-understand knowledge base articles.

Price comparison

It’s hard to compare prices because Bronto only offers custom pricing and yearly contracts. Because of this, self-service is not an option. In order to experience the platform and obtain pricing is to speak to a sales representative. While custom pricing will vary, by looking at customer reviews you should expect it to be on the higher-end of marketing platforms.

Omnisend, on the other hand, plays with an open hand. This platform has four different plans, and businesses can choose according to their needs:

• Free plan: includes sign-up forms, sales reporting, and 500 emails per month
• Standard plan: includes audience segmentation and email marketing automation features for only $16/mo
• Pro plan: includes free SMS/MMS credits based on your plan’s value, marketing automation with multiple channels integrated, Google ads, and much more for $59/mo.

Omnisend’s price increases as the number of subscribers grows. If you sign up for an annual subscription, prices become significantly lower. Here’s what it looks like:

Omnisend vs. Bronto: Final remarks

Although both platforms are built to perform similar email marketing and automation tasks, their approach and functionality differ.

Bronto’s solution may be a better fit for medium-to-large businesses with dedicated teams for integrations, data management, etc., who are comfortable with year-long contracts.

Omnisend, on the other hand, is the best fit for nimble teams and growing businesses who want seamless integrations, and easy migration, and many of the same advanced features of enterprise marketing platforms. Helping ecommerce businesses increase sales and not their workload is the main priority for Omnisend.