Drip vs Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) Comparison: Which One Is Right For You?

If you need to send engaging, highly effective promotional emails for your business, you need software that’s powerful, reliable and designed with your specific needs in mind. Drip (Visit Website) and Keap (Infusionsoft) (Visit Website / Read Our Review) are two of the most popular email marketing and marketing automation platforms available today. While these two platforms share a lot of common features, they’re made for really different audiences:

• Drip is designed with solo entrepreneurs and small teams in mind, with a simple UI and feature set that’s easy to learn and equally easy to use.
• Keap (Infusionsoft) is designed from the ground up for mid-sized and large businesses, with a feature set and interface that’s designed for power and function instead of simplicity.

Below, I’ve compared Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) using a variety of factors, from ease of use and cost to features like landing pages, opt-in forms and marketing automation. I’ve also listed a winner for each category to make it easy for you to find the best tool for your specific marketing needs.

How do Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) compare in terms of features?

From a raw features perspective, Drip isn’t much of a match for Keap (Infusionsoft). However, it wins by a mile when it comes to cost effectiveness and usability, especially for solo entrepreneurs and small business users.

Opt-in Forms & Landing Pages: Infusionsoft Wins, While Drip Lacks Features

Winner: Keap (Infusionsoft), which includes a useful WordPress form builder and a powerful landing page design tool.

Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) both include stylish and responsive opt-in forms. However, Infusionsoft also includes a landing page builder — something that’s missing from Drip.

Drip: Simple, Effective Opt-in Forms, But No Landing Pages

Drip’s opt-in form builder is one of the easiest to use of any email marketing software out there, making it a great choice for bloggers, small business users and other people that don’t want to waste time with complicated HTML and CSS editors.

The form builder included with Drip lets you quickly and easily create opt-in forms to capture data like names and email addresses. The forms look good, load quickly and adjust to fit any screen resolution, including mobile devices and tablets.

There are several different opt-in form templates included with Drip. In a few clicks, you can create a live chat-style opt-in window, an exit-triggered modal pop-up, a lightweight form for articles and blog posts and even a simple sidebar widget opt-in form.

If you run a WordPress blog or a simple website and just want to add opt-in forms with as little fuss as possible, Drip is a good choice. It even has a WordPress plugin to make adding opt-in forms to your website quick and easy.

The only downside of Drip in this category is that it doesn’t include a landing page builder. If you want to add your Drip forms to landing pages, you’ll need to buy and integrate a third party tool like Instapage or Leadpages.

Overall, Drip wins when it comes to quickly and easily making opt-in forms that look great and perform well. However, its lack of a landing page builder is a major downside that means you’ll need to spend some extra money for a Leadpages or Instapage membership.

Keap (Infusionsoft): Great Opt-in Forms and a Powerful Landing Page Builder

Keap (Infusionsoft) is very hard to beat when it comes to opt-in forms and landing pages. It has a great landing page builder that lets you customize every aspect of your PPC landing pages, from color and font sizes to embedded content, form fields and more.

It also comes with several landing page template packs that you can download and install from the Infusionsoft Marketplace.

The landing pages included with Infusionsoft look great and perform well. You can also add cool, conversion-boosting features like pre-populating form fields with user data to make filling in your forms faster and easier.

Keap (Infusionsoft) also comes with a variety of opt-in form templates, letting you add modal popups, sidebar forms, fly-in forms and other types of opt-in forms to your website.

There’s even an official WordPress plugin that lets you create new opt-in forms directly from the WordPress dashboard, which can be a massive time-saver if you need to add different forms to each post or website page.

Overall, Keap (Infusionsoft) is definitely the better choice if you need a powerful, versatile landing page builder and a wider variety of customization options than what’s offered in Drip.

Email Marketing Automation: Simplicity vs. Power and Versatility

Winner: Keap (Infusionsoft), which has a wider range of features than Drip. However, Drip wins by a mile on ease of use, making it a better option for beginners.

Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) both include all of the features most businesses will need to create and manage their email marketing automation. However, Infusionsoft offers a wide range of tools that pro-level users will appreciate, whereas Drip sacrifices sheer power for simplicity.

Drip: A Perfect Choice for Bloggers, Solo Entrepreneurs, and Small Businesses

If you want an email marketing automation platform that’s extremely easy to use and powerful enough for 99.99% of bloggers, solo entrepreneurs and small businesses, Drip is the superior choice.

While Drip doesn’t match Infusionsoft in terms of sheer features, it includes everything you’ll need to create and manage your email marketing and marketing automation campaigns.

There’s an email sequence builder (although here they’re called “drip campaigns”), as well as the option to send out email broadcasts.

There’s also an automation workflow builder that includes 18 different automation triggers and 16 different actions, letting you program emails to go out when your customers visit a specific URL or buy a certain product.

You can also program other common actions, such as moving users to specific lists based on their on-site behavior and score your leads based on their activity level.

Drip also includes useful analytics tools that let you keep a close eye on your email campaign’s key performance indicators.

One thing to know about Drip is that it doesn’t include any HTML email templates. It’s text only, which is actually a good thing for conversions but might be an annoyance if you want to send more conventional-looking HTML emails.

Basically, Drip is the tool you should get if you want to be able to create a marketing automation campaign without having to read page after page of documentation or complete an instructional course. It’s lightweight, easy and designed so that anyone from any background can use it.

Keap (Infusionsoft): Bigger, More Powerful and More Complicated

If Drip is the bicycle of marketing automation — something that anyone can use after a little bit of practice — then Infusionsoft is a small airplane. It’s bigger, faster, more powerful and much more complicated to pilot, so much so that you need to take a training course before you can use it.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Infusionsoft is packed with features and has far more power as a marketing automation tool than Drip. It just also has a much steeper learning curve.

The email marketing and marketing automation features in Infusionsoft let you automate a huge amount of your follow-up process. You can send personalized emails based on things like email opens, form submissions, page visits, payments and a huge variety of other triggers.

You can also do all of the traditional email marketing stuff, like creating autoresponders, sending mass email broadcasts and queuing up monthly newsletters.

The marketing automation features in Infusionsoft are a little more complicated to use than the ones you’ll find in Drip. Still, you’ll be able to learn your way around the platform pretty quickly, especially if you take one of the more comprehensive training courses.

When it comes to traditional email marketing features, Infusionsoft gets a great score. You can send text-only emails if you like, or use a huge range of email templates (plus an email builder for creating your own custom templates) to give your emails a more professional look.

Again, it’s the same as usual — Drip wins out on ease of use and accessibility, while Infusionsoft is the tool you’ll want to choose if you need power, versatility and overall performance.

Other Features: Keap Includes a CRM, Affiliate Management & More

Winner: Keap (Infusionsoft), which includes a huge range of features that would otherwise require a monthly subscription fee.

While Drip is designed purely for email marketing automation, Infusionsoft has a huge range of extra features that make it great as an all-in-one business marketing platform.

In addition to email marketing and marketing automation, Infusionsoft includes tools for sales automation and affiliate management. There’s even a built-in CRM, letting you keep track of your subscribers and sales leads as they move along the funnel.

Pros & Cons of Drip

Drip is a great marketing automation tool — in fact, it’s one of my favorites. It’s easy to use, as powerful as most solo entrepreneurs and small businesses will need, lightweight and cheap to purchase. It also has a few small downsides, but they probably won’t bother you much.

Pros

• Drip is easy to use, although not quite as easy as software like ConvertKit. It only takes a few hours to master Drip, even if you have no experience with marketing automation.
• Drip has some of the fastest-loading, best-looking opt-in forms of any email marketing automation platform on the market, making it a great option for bloggers.
• Although it isn’t designed purely as an email marketing tool, you can also use Drip for conventional email marketing autoresponders and broadcasts.
• Because Drip only offers plain text emails, there’s a much lower risk of your emails ever being accidentally flagged as spam. Emails sent using Drip also look more personal and authentic than “professional” looking template emails.
• Drip offers a free trial version with support for up to 100 recipients, giving you a chance to test its features out before you become a paid user.
• The analytics tools in Drip let you keep track of your campaign’s performance with ease, with live data on clicks, conversion rate and other KPIs.

Cons

• Drip doesn’t have a landing page builder, meaning you’ll need to use Instapage or Leadpages to create landing pages for your campaign.
• Drip also doesn’t offer HTML email templates, which makes it a less-than-ideal choice if you want your emails to have a more professional, corporate look.

Overall

Drip is a great piece of email marketing automation software that’s perfect for small business users and solo entrepreneurs. It’s easy to use, powerful enough and designed to make email marketing automation manageable for almost anyone.

Pros & Cons of Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

While Drip is easy to use and lightweight, Infusionsoft is a more powerful and comprehensive marketing automation platform that offers a larger range of features, albeit at the cost of user friendliness.

Pros

• Unlike Drip, which only offers opt-in forms, Keap has a powerful landing page builder and a good selection of templates to choose from.
• Keap also includes a CRM and sales automation toolkit, making it ideal for mid sized businesses with multiple departments that work alongside each other.
• From a power and versatility perspective, Keap’s marketing automation tools are very hard to beat.
• Keap (Infusionsoft) also works great as a conventional email marketing tool, with features like autoresponders, email broadcasts, HTML and plain text emails and an email template editor.
• Since Infusionsoft includes an affiliate management system, it’s a great option for online product sellers that want to market through other bloggers and affiliates.

Cons

• Compared to Drip, Keap (Infusionsoft) is a pricey piece of software, with plans starting from $99 per month and increasing to $299 per month as you add sales automation, e-commerce and other features.
• Infusionsoft is quite a challenging platform to use, with a mandatory training program that you’ll need to purchase when you can sign up.
• There’s no free trial of Keap available, meaning you’ll need to sign up as a paying customer if you want to test it.

Overall

While Drip is aimed at solo entrepreneurs and small businesses, Infusionsoft is designed with mid-sized businesses and agencies in mind. If you want pro-level features and don’t mind an application that’s a little more challenging to use, you’ll prefer Infusionsoft.

Pricing

Drip starts from $41 per month when paid annually, which gives you access to all of the tool’s features and a maximum subscriber count of 2,500. Emails, lists and workflows are unlimited, meaning you can send as much content as you want to your subscriber base.

Pricing information for lists of 5,000 customers or more are only available by contacting Drip’s sales team. From a pricing perspective, Drip is cheaper than Infusionsoft but more expensive than platforms like ConvertKit and MailChimp.

There’s also a free version of Drip available, giving you a chance to look around the UI and try the software before you become a paying customer.

Keap (Infusionsoft) starts from $99 per month, which gives you full access to the CRM and marketing automation features, as well as up to 500 contacts and 2,500 emails per month. To access the full range of Infusionsoft features, you’ll need to spend $299 per month or more.

To use Keap (Infusionsoft), you’ll also need to pay for a one-off Kickstart training package. These start from $999 and cover everything from the basics of using Infusionsoft to advanced one-on-one coaching in how to use the software to achieve your specific marketing goals.

Overall, Drip is a lot more affordable than Infusionsoft, especially for people with smaller lists and less intensive email marketing needs. On the other hand, the monthly cost of Keap (Infusionsoft) shouldn’t be a big deal for any mid-sized business or digital marketing agency.

Support

Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) both offer good support, although Infusionsoft definitely wins in one-on-one assistance:

• Drip has an online Getting Started course that covers the entire platform, as well as live chat support for customers. There are also live training webinars for new users and the Marketing Automation School eBook, which is great for learning the basics.
• Keap (Infusionsoft) has an online help center with resources covering every aspect of its email, sales and CRM platforms. There’s also 24/7 live chat support and free phone support for users in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia.
  There are also several unofficial Infusionsoft Facebook groups where you can post your support questions, such as Infusionsoft Masters and Keap (Infusionsoft) Certified Partners.

Final Verdict

Drip and Keap (Infusionsoft) are both great marketing automation platforms. The best option for you ultimately depends on the type of business you run:

What Software Do You Use to Power Your Business?

I’m always interested in learning about new marketing tools, especially from people that rely on them to run and grow their companies.

What marketing, sales and business tools can’t you live without? If you have an application that you use on a daily basis to grow your business and generate more revenue, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to my “to test and review” list.