Moosend vs GetResponse

Today I would like to discuss two of the most popular email marketing software providers, Moosend and GetResponse. Both are great products – but which one is right for you?

In this Moosend vs GetResponse article, I will cover the main features and ideas that each product has to offer in order that you can make an informed decision about which service is a better fit for your business needs.

Email Marketing Platforms

It doesn't matter what online business you own, be it an eCommerce store, review blog or even a YouTube channel, being able to capture, nurture and build an email list of subscribers is crucial in building a brand. 

An email list also allows for a secondary source of traffic, reminding potential customers, or subscribers about new products, articles or videos that have been released. 

Marketing Platforms such as GetResponse or Moosend allow business owners to do all of this, through list management tools, automation flows, templates and designers. 

Moosend Overview

Appearing around 2012, Moosend has been a silent runner, catering for those within the eCommerce space. Usually pitted against other platforms such as MailChimp for it's similarities in the space that they compete in. 

In recent years they have grow more popular, as their offerings, features and tools have become more well known. With automations and features including; 

• Automation Flows & Tagging
• Landing Page & Subscription Form Designer
• Email Templates
• Reports & Integrations

GetResponse Overview

Usually seen as one of the 'Big 4' GetResponse has been around since 2002, catering for marketers and bloggers. You will usually find GetResponse being compared with Aweber, ActiveCampaign or Maillite. 

GetResponse have a number of features, including;

• Autoresponder & Email Flows
• Analytics & Reports
• Landing Page Designer 
• Webinar Creation & Capture
• Conversion & Ecom Funnels 

UI - Look And Feel

Platforms have to be user friendly, and easy to navigate to ensure that user actually enjoy using the site.

If you have an unintuitive design, you hide buttons or tabs in strange places and you make it difficult for people to find exactly what they are looking for. 

Moosend

This particular platform has moved from the 'large', vibrant and bright style of navigation. With large  buttons that indicate where you are going.

Moosend has a side menu, with each tab on the left hand side being large, clear. The left hand side menu will stay, no matter which tab you choose.

Within those tabs, once again the campaigns, automations or landing pages are fairly spaced out, with a fair amount of information and bright, colourful buttons to show how to create new ones. 

Navigating, creating new automations or starting a new list is trouble free, and most users will find it simple to use. 

GetResponse

For those who have use GetResponse before, you may be familar with their set-up and style of UI. 

With each 'section' held within their own area, and only available via the main menu. Selecting any of the areas will then take you to the a separate screen that encompasses the whole page. 

Once within the relevant section, the menu will close, and GetResponse keep their top header, with a few relevant quick actions. 

As with Moosend, the areas are quite clear, though you do have to keep opening the menu to find your way to other areas such as campaigns or automations. 

Automation

A feature that not all email platforms have, or utilise. Automation can be a brilliant way to send out complicated email sequences, send out different types of emails or even funnels leads into customers or slowly remove them from your account. 

Both of these platforms offer automation, though GetResponse does lock their full automation behind a higher tier plan, that requires you to pay more per month. 

Moosend

The Moosend automation designer is a little different from other designers I have used, including the GetResponse or ActiveCampaign creator. 

There is no grid system or snap, and each action or decision simply sites below the other that kicked it off. 

The page is clear, with a fair number of actions/decisions being shown on the page at a time, though the '27 actions pending' that constantly shows at the top of the page, and the other banner makes the page quite crowded. 

To add a new action or conditional step is quick enough, with a huge number to choose from, including sending email alerts to slack, adding tags, subscribing to lists or filtering your contacts by their current weather conditions, waiting certain periods of time or deciding to split the flow to run A/B testing. 

I found the designer super easy, and you can build out a fully crafted sequence only takes around 10 - 15minutes, even for really complex ones.

GetResponse

Using a 'standard' snap and drag template designer, you actually drag the elements you want onto the automation creator, and link them up as you go. 

Every action or split option is available, again just being dragged onto a page allows you to then connect the dots.

If you are a 'basic' user, then you can only edit the pre-built templates that they offer.

The layout is better than Moosend, at least when it comes to how much you can see on a page, or how crowded the whole area is. With no banners or huge sections telling you to complete certain actions getting in the way. 

Though I find the designer itself feels crowded and slow. 

Designer & Email Templates

Certain industries require fancy looking emails, with images, rows, tables and graphics to help stand out. 

For example an eCommerce store might want to run a 4th July Sale, or send a Christmas themed newsletter, creating them would probably require a designer, or hiring someone to help with this. 

Having ready made templates removes that need, and of course extra cost. 

Moosend

Looking through the template offering from Moosend, you will find around 60 different templates, covering a wide range of industries and template styles. 

Their templates cover areas such as Black Friday, Sales, Articles, Food, Halloween, Promotional, Property and a ton more. 

Each template is fun and interesting, with images and icons designed to enhance the viewers experience and to increase the number of clicks or reads on your emails. 

Editing the emails and templates is easy, with Moosends designer being intuitive to use, much like the automation creator. 

The whole designer is drag and drop, with a number of elements to choose from. You can spend a fair amount of time playing around with this.

The left hand menu stays, changing which area you see, either element or settings depending on the part you are trying to play around with. 

Of course, you can just create a bog standard email, if you don't want fancy images or icons included. 

GetResponse

Much like it's counter part, GetResponse also includes a large number of templates to pick from, with over 100 on offer. 

They again range from largely graphical, image focused templates, to more product and action focused emails designs to use. 

You can preview, and then choose any of these designs to ensure you are happy before you get to editing and changing them. 

As with Moosend, the designer is drag and drop, though each element you click on replaces what you see on the right hand side. 

Meaning if you want to add new elements (an image, or text), you actually have to click to get back to the original screen (which slows everything down quite a lot). 

The actual designer itself is clunky, and it can feel like you are clicking on random areas to make some of the simple changes. It can feel like there is a lot of wasted space, and they could have used both a left and right menu (as with Moosend to be fair).

List Management

A huge and important part of having an email platform is that of the list management tools.

From being able to actually build a decent list (or multiple), removing the deadweight to tagging your subscribers to understand their actions. 

Both of these platforms have the ability to tag, score and build email lists. Utilising other areas of their platforms to achieve these activities.  

It's worth noting, you will need to pay extra to get access to tagging and scoring for GetResponse. 

Landing Pages & Subscription Forms

A lot of email platforms now provide access to landing page designers and subscription or signup form widgets/plugins. The reason is that you are more likely to use the platform if you can do all at once in one go. 

Both of these platforms give you the ability to import, use and edit landing pages to enable you to capture emails and leads, without needing an additional tool such as ClickFunnels.

Moosend

Much like their email templates, Moosend offer a variety of landing pages and subscription forms for you to import and get started with. 

Covering a number of different ideas, niches and capture styles. Each of these can be edited and updated to fit within needs. The editor you use to change or update these landing pages is the same as the email designer that you saw earlier. 

Once again, a drag and drop creator, with different elements that can be added or removed from the page. I have noticed on some templates it stops you from adding these, but it's mainly around the subscription form templates. 

GetResponse

The landing page builder is quite similar to their email designer, offering a drag and drop style builder. 

As with their email templates, there are a large number to choose from, including quick and easy lead capture pages, launch offers or product giveaways. They are well built, and really capture the eye. 

I find their designer fairly easy to use, though I do find it odd that they don't snap elements into place. Which means you can add images, countdown timers and more on top of each other, resulting in an ugly mess. 

As such, I would stick to just editing the elements they have, and not trying to make a page yourself. Whereas the Moosend designer snaps each elelement into place, offering more columns or rows to ensure each element has its place.

Integrations & APIs

Even though email platforms do try and have everything, sometimes other platforms do it better, for example I would rather use ClickFunnels to build a landing page than use GetResponses landing page designer. 

As such, they need to create API's and Integrations with a variety of tools to expand out their usability. 

Moosend

If you have read out my Moosend Review, you will probably know that this area is one of my biggest issues with Moosend, they really do lack integration or API access.

The majority of what they offer is through Zapier, which in my eyes is just a cop out and actually ends up causing more issues than it solves. For example you have to set up Moosend to Zapier and then Zapier to say ClickFunnels. 

If something goes wrong you have 3 platforms to check to ensure you haven't broken something. From their API section, they have zero decent integrations with any of the leading platforms such as Shopify or ClickFunnels, though they do have a simple one for WordPress.

GetResponse

Having been around for around 300 years, GetResponse have a large number of API and platform integrations available. Though, as with a lot of GetResponse features, you are going to need to pay more to unlock a large variety of these. 

With connections to Salesforce, ClickBank, ClickFunnels, Paypal, Shopify and many more, you can usually find a direct connection for your business. 

Of course, if you can't find something, then they do have access to Zapier, to further increase the number of integrations. 

Additional Features

Every email marketing platform is unique, each offering their own features that others don't. While writing this Moosend vs GetResponse article, it was obvious I couldn't group all of their offerings into easy to cluster headers. 

As such, here are a few unique offerings from these two platforms. 

Moosend

The areas that make Moosend unique are actually found within other features. For example Moosends increasing number of actions found within the automation flow builders, with access to Slack, Alerts and even splitting their flows based on weather conditions, something that I don't believe any other email platform offers. 

Their use of 'similar' targeting within the automation flows is also a brilliant advantage, allowing you to offer products or services to customers who have viewed, or purchased similar products. 

If someone has viewed or purchased Product X and then also liked Product Y, you can recommend Product X to those who have purchased Product Y. 

GetResponse

The biggest unique feature for GetResponse is their webinar tools, allowing you to create and run your own webinars (evergreen if you so wish) via their platform. 

This of course means you don't have to integrate with products such as Zoom or your webinar host of your choice. Potentially saving you hundreds of $'s per month. 

The other feature that GetResponse have is their 'funnels', in which you can bolt on different actions, recommend products or funnels leads towards purchases. A bit like the 'similar purchases' that Moosend offer.   

Pricing

Possibly one of the bigger differences when it comes to comparing these two tools, is that of the pricing that they have on offer.

Both of these platforms do have pricing 'tiers' though there is a difference in how they are implemented. 

Moosend

Moosend pricing is pretty easy and straight forward, with 1 main tier, and then their free account. They don't have 3 or 4 different tiers that increasingly unlock random tools or features, such as locking parts of automation behind a paywall or closing off half a landing page. 

For a lot of people, the free tier will probably do when they are just starting out, the big thing people will be missing is the landing page builder, but if you run a blog, or have a website already, then you can utilise the subscription forms that you can add to your pages.

The following pricing is for the 1,000 email list, paying annually.

Though for $8 per month to gain access to a decent landing page builder, is a pretty good offer. You also get access to the automations, spam testing, email templates, reports and integrations. 

The 'Enterprise' option would probably be useful for those with really big lists, or who may rely heavily on email marketing as their source of traffic. 

GetResponse

Unlike Moosend, there is no free account, they do offer a 30 day free trial, that gains you access to all the features. 

GetResponse has 4 separate paid tiers, each unlocking additional features or tools, and on occasion the number of people who can either attend, use or the amount you can create. 

All prices are for a 1,000 subscriber list, paying annually.

For the majority of people, they will need to be on the Plus account to get access to what I would see as a normal feature, such as tagging, or to be able to run and edit automations. 

Comparing this with Moosend, you will be paying over 3x as much per month, to gain access to roughly the same amount of content. Of course, you do can start running webinars, sales funnels and webinar funnels, which you can't do with Moosend. 

Moosend Vs GetResponse Review Conclusion

It's always difficult comparing two different tools, services or products, especially if they potentially cater for different markets, as they can really differ in what they offer. 

Comparing an OG and what I see as a newcomer, is also difficult. GetResponse has had years to integrate with multiple platforms, or nail down their designers, but as you can see throughout this whole article, is that the Moosend newcomer actually smashes them on a lot of the comparisons we have looked at. 

After using GetResponse for a number of years now, and Moosend for a few weeks, it's been interesting to pit them against each other.  I am really starting to believe that I will soon be ditching it for Moosend, due to the fact they offer so much more, for essentially free. 

Especially with the automations, better tagging and filtering that Moosend have to offer.