| Functionality | 4 <p>Loops focuses on delivering email marketing essentials for startups. This includes excellent functionality for creating email series, developer-friendly APIs for sending transactional emails, and simple functionality for managing mailing lists. However, this means that compared to other marketing tools, Loops lacks a lot of functionality, e.g. running A/B tests, creating custom forms/ surveys, analytics.</p> | 8 <p>MailerLite has most functionalities that businesses would need within marketing automation, including email campaign management, email templates, automated sending, landing pages, and surveys. However, it's missing some advanced features – notably, the ability to make custom analytics dashboards. We'd also caution against MailerLite users because of the bugs we experienced during testing (which compromised the email campaign creation experience).</p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>A limited set of features, combined with ample, step-by-step guidance in the platform means Loops is intuitive and easy to use. For example, compared to most other tools, it is refreshingly simple to build a email series to new users.</p><p>However, as it's been designed for startups, do note that Loops is still more technical in nature, offering features like components for designing emails and requiring knowledge of coding for transactional emails/ certain customizations (e.g. dynamic images), which may be a bit daunting for non-technical users.</p> | 5 <p>MailerLite is extremely easy to pick up, making it an ideal choice for beginners to email marketing. Fair warning though – if you're looking to write rich text emails / emails from scratch, it's extremely time-consuming to add photos, edit text, and quickly write emails on the fly.</p><p><br></p><p>We also noticed a few times when elements or text was deleted without us noticing, meaning the software sadly isn't bug-free where it matters most!</p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>Loops is a simple, modern, uncluttered interface that is a joy to use. Key functionality and info are extremely easy to locate, and page loads are also lightning fast.</p> | 7 <p>Page load times on MailerLite are a bit slower than some of its counterparts - but not so slow as to be a dealbreaker for most people.</p><p><br></p><p>The interface in general is super pleasant and simple, and the drag-and-drop builder is also extremely simple and slick.</p> |
| Customisability | 2 <p>Loops only offers basic customisability. For example, you can only create segments based on their properties/ engagement with your campaigns - but not based on how they interact with your website/ app, nor bring in custom events.</p><p>For client-facing assets, compared to traditional drag-and-drop email builders offered by most marketing automation platforms, Loops's Notion-like editor only allows you to make light stylistic & formatting changes to emails. You're also unable to customise signup forms to collect info besides data.</p> | 6 <p>We haven't been able to give MailerLite a high score on customisability because its rich text email editor is simply too difficult and frictionful to use, meaning that you either have to opt for their nice pre-made templates, or find another app to use.</p><p><br></p><p>If you're looking to use exclusively templates, you shouldn't be too concerned about this drawback.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Because of its simple and intuitive interface, Loops is extremely easy to setup. Basic setup is blazingly fast (less than 10 minutes), and fully customizing should take less than 2 hours, with minimal help from customer support and self-serve help materials.</p> | 8 <p>We found MailerLite to be extremely easy to setup. Since it's so beginner friendly, there (a) wasn't much setup to be done, and (b) where there was, the toggles and customizations were minimal.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>Loops offer high-quality, sincere support. Within the app, you can directly email or book in 20-minute calls with Loops' Founders. Personalised live chat with Loops' developer team is also available during US business hours.</p> | 8 <p>We have seen great things about MailerLite's customer service chats, and their fast and helpful support agents. On top of this, they provide comprehensive video tutorials, FAQ and troubleshooting, and a useful community if you need advice.</p> |
| Integratability | 6 <p>For now, Loops only offers a slim set of core integrations required by startups e.g. Stripe, Webflow, Segment, HubSpot, Zapier. It's still missing common integrations seen in the category, e.g. with ecommerce platforms like Shopify. However, it does have a high-quality API for any custom integrations, especially with your own application.</p> | 8 <p>Like most of the marketing automation platforms that we tested, MailerLite supports almost all of the integrations that a small to medium business might need. Crucially, it boasts integrations with e-commerce, marketing, CRM, payment, and design platforms.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 6 <p>You can export your list of audience (contacts) into CSV format via self-serve. However, since Loops doesn't have a dedicated reporting module, it doesn't seem possible export campaign performance data out of Loops. Other info can be exported via Loops' API.</p> | 8 <p>MailerLite makes it easy to export your contacts and segments through a self-serve button in their interface. To export other information, you'd have to contact their customer service.</p> |
