Today in this post, I will provide a detailed comparison of Convertbox and Optinmonster.

If you are a blogger, marketer, eCommerce site owner, or have an agency looking for the best software for lead generation, ConvertBox and OptinMonster would be on top of your list.

ConvertBox comes at a one-off fee of $495. And OptinMonster? Its feature-rich plans cost $49/mo (Pro plan) or $82/mo (Growth plan).

However, there are some extra features that make OptinMonster worth it for use-cases.

In this post, let’s see how these tools stack against each other.

Let’s go through a quick breakdown of all its features in the table below.

What do we like about ConvertBox over OptinMonster?

• ConvertBox is very simple to use. It doesn’t need any learning curve. The tool is developed considering ease of use in mind. On the other side, as OptinMonster has a lot of features, you have some learning curve to get a hold of the platform.
• ConvertBox has one-time pricing, and it costs $495/lifetime. You can pay once and use it for a lifetime. On the other side, OptinMonster has a subscription-based model that costs you more. If you need advanced features, you have to spend 82/mo (This will have a significant impact when added up each month.

What do we like about OptinMonster over ConvertBox?

• Compared to ConvertBox, OptinMonster provides more opt-ins and templates. ConvertBox has over 25+ templates, while OptinMonster has over 80+ templates. Some unique opt-ins you will get with OptinMonster are gamified wheels and content lockers.
• To make the campaigns engaging, OptinMonster has over 26 attention-grabbing animations and sound effects . If a user has landed on your website and is inactive, these animations and sound effects would help to re-engage.
• OptinMonster is equipped with an inactivity sensor that identifies user behavior and displays appropriate campaigns to re-engage them. It helps in recovering lost sales, and bring in new signups and leads. You can show campaigns such as –
  • Time-limited discounts.
  • Invitation opt-in to sign up for special offers.
  • Show opt-ins to encourage users to complete the purchase.
• To help you avoid annoying visitors with the same popups again and again, OptinMonster has a smart success feature. If a user has already visited your website, OptinMonster detects it and suggests you show something new. ConvertBox lacks this.
• To avoid spam and to increase the email deliverability rate, OptinMonster has a TruLead feature that is built-in. With this, the tool automatically filters out bad leads like spam bots, temporary email addresses, and unqualified email submissions. ConvertBox lacks this feature, and you may need to use external email service providers or services like Clearout to validate the emails.

Upfront bottom line

For most people, ConvertBox is a better option than OptinMonster. The upfront cost of $495 gives you lifetime access, and it offers a simple and easy-to-use interface with a short learning curve.

On the other hand, OptinMonster has a subscription-based model that can end up costing a lot more in the long run, especially if you need advanced features.

However, if you’re running a large e-commerce business and have found that unique features like gamified wheels drive conversions in your niche, then OptinMonster may be the better choice. OptinMonster has over 80 templates and more opt-in options than ConvertBox, which has 25+ templates.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a simple and cost-effective lead generation tool, ConvertBox is the way to go. But if you’re running a larger business and need advanced features, OptinMonster may be worth the investment.

Quick overview

Both ConvertBox and OptinMonster are the best lead-generation tools available. But they are targeted toward different use cases.

ConvertBox is a very simple yet powerful platform with a one-time fee. It is targeted toward small to medium-sized businesses.

While OptinMonster is a subscription-based cloud platform that is more expensive than ConvertBox (if advanced features matter most, you have to go with higher plans).

OptinMonster is more powerful and feature-rich than ConvertBox. It is suited for small-medium-large businesses. It has unique features like success tracking scripts, TruLead, real-time behavior automation, and smart success, which helps in increasing conversions.

Opt-in types

With ConvertBox, you will get various opt-ins like –

• Sticky bars
• Callout modal
• Center modal
• Full page popups
• Large embed forms
• Small embed forms

While OptinMonster has –

• Lightbox popups
• Fullscreen welcome popups
• Slide-in scroll boxes
• Floating bars
• Sidebar forms
• Inline forms
• Content lockers
• Coupon wheel optins
• Playbooks

With so many options available, OptinMonster gives you more flexibility in creating the opt-ins you imagine. In contrast, ConvertBox is quite restricted in this regard, and you will end up creating them from scratch.

OptinMonster’s coupon wheel optin helps you create spin-a-wheel campaigns that are gamified to offer free eBooks, coupons, discounts, book coaching sessions, etc. You can implement this as a marketing strategy to increase sales and conversions.

One notable thing about OptinMonster is it has unique playbooks. These are ready-to-use campaigns that replicate the same strategies, rules, and structure that successful brands have used in their marketing. So, they are proven to give you the best results.

Imagine how cool it is if you get a chance to replicate your competitor’s campaigns that are already proven to work. By following the same, you, too, can beat the competition and increase your sales.

Each of these campaigns has –

• Structure
• Design
• Copy
• Display rules

All these campaigns are tested by OptinMonster’s customers, so you don’t have to worry. Just import, use them, and get the results.

Content lockers

You can use this to lock the most in-demand content or offer premium content for free in exchange for subscribers’ emails (i.e. lead magnets).

This is best for lead generation as it acts as an irresistible incentive to sign up. If you are a blogger, a publisher, or a business owner, I recommend you use this gated content strategy to monetize your site. You can read a case study on how Photowebo increased conversions by 3806% by using gated content.

Apart from the above, you can create callout modals, sticky bars, slide-ins, embed forms, and full-page popups with both tools.

Winner: OptinMonster. It has more opt-in templates that look highly professional than ConvertBox. Also, the best thing is it provides ready-made campaigns that are designed by some of the great brands. You can just duplicate and customize as needed.

Campaign triggers

ConvertBox gives several triggers like –

• Time on the page
• Scrolling the page
• Period of no activity
• Page abandonment
• Clicking a link on the page

While OptinMonster gives –

• Exit-intent technology – This is similar to page abandonment in ConvertBox. Display the optins to engage with visitors who are about to leave the page.
• Scroll trigger – Show the opt-in after the user has scrolled X% of the page.
• Inactivity sensor – OptinMonster detects inactive users on your site and shows an offer to re-engage them.
• Timed display control – Trigger the popup if the user has reached a specific time that you set for the campaign to show up.
• HTML elements – For eCommerce store owners, this would be really helpful. You can create HTML triggers for each of the product IDs to execute the campaigns. Based on the product purchases you can show personalized upsells, cross-sales, or downsells to increase conversions.

• JavaScript variables – Similar to HTML, you can trigger the JavaScript code to display customized campaigns for visitors.

Except for the HTML and JavaScript variable triggers, remaining all are available in both tools. OptinMonster just gave unique names to them. That’s it.

With both these tools, you have the flexibility of combining multiple trigger rules to make the campaigns more powerful.

Targeting rules

Incase of ConvertBox, you have several targeting options like –

Integrating ConvertBox with CRM or email service providers unlock more targeting options. You can target visitors based on the tags and lists they are in –

Here are a few of the rules –

1. Is on the list in INTEGRATION
2. Is NOT on the list in INTEGRATION
3. Has tag in INTEGRATION
4. Does NOT have a tag in Integration.

ConvertBox also calls these intelligent targeting rules. These help you to show the right ConvertBox, at the right time. Even you can combine multiple rules with conditional AND/OR logic to show opt-ins for the relevant audience.

All these targeting rules are also available in OptinMonster. But added to these, it has additional targeting options like

• Referrer detection
• Page-level targeting
• Cookie retargeting
• Device-based targeting
• Ad block detection – OptinMonster bypasses AdBlockers and helps you send your targeted messages to the end user. You can ask visitors to whitelist your site so that you can recover the lost revenue. This is lacking in ConvertBox.

• Custom domains – This is another way to get rid of adblockers. OptinMonster’s API lets you connect your custom domain and display your optin campaigns. Adblockers won’t be able to detect OptinMonster URLs, and hence they can’t block your campaigns. In the case of ConvertBox also, you can connect your custom domains to fight against ad blockers.

Winner: OptinMonster. Even though both tools provide enough targeting rules to display the popups, OptinMonster has an edge over ConvertBox with its ad block detection, smart success technology, and on-site follow-up campaigns. If you are a small business owner, ConvertBox’s intelligent targeting rules would be more than enough for you to drive leads and traffic.

Design and customization

Both these tools have a dedicated drag-and-drop builder to create the campaigns as you visualize. You can add images, dividers, buttons, videos, countdown timers, and more to create campaign pages.

In addition, you can customize the message, colors, images, fonts, and everything else to match the theme of your website.

Compared to ConvertBox, OptinMonster gives you more templates. With the latter, you can filter the templates based on the device, goals, and categories.

Goals in OptinMonster refer to the intent for which you are creating campaigns. It includes –

• Grow email list.
• Target abandoning visitors.
• Redirect traffic.
• Offer time-sensitive offers.

What if you want to gamify the actions by adding scores ?

This is really good for segmenting the audience based on the scores. With ConvertBox you have the flexibility to add quiz scores at each campaign step. You can then create various lists to segment them based on their final score.

What about OptinMonster?

As of now, OptinMonster doesn’t have the flexibility to create quizzes inside the tool. But you can integrate it with WPForms and embed the HTML code to add them inside of OptinMonster’s campaigns.

To beautify or style these forms, OptinMonster gives the flexibility to add custom Javascript code that you just need to paste inside the builder.

Finally, you can integrate ConvertBox and OptinMonster with any of the email service providers to further automate the lead generation tasks.

Bottomline: OptinMonster. It gives more design freedom compared to ConvertBox. It has a powerful page builder, more opt-in templates, supports custom coding, etc. While ConvertBox just has a basic builder with flexible design options and limited blocks.

A/B split testing

Both ConvertBox and OptinMonster have built-in split testing features for you to run effective marketing campaigns with variations and see which gives better results.

Using the drag and drop popup builder, you can create a test variation with different content, headlines, layouts, styles, campaign triggers, and more.

With ConvertBox you have two types of split tests.

1. Cookied split test – Visitors see only one variation at a time, regardless of how many variations you have. This is best if you are testing out discount offer optins and want to show different variations to different visitors.
2. Regular split test – Visitors see the options randomly, and each visitor may be shown more than one of your variations.

In – case of OptinMonster, it randomly shows each of your variations to visitors until the winner is decided.

Both tools give detailed stats to analyze the campaign performance. Refer to the screenshots above to see all the metrics.

Notable features

Monster effects

OptinMonster has something called monster effects which gives CSS animations and sound effects to create attention-grabbing campaigns. As of now, there are 26 CSS effects available.

Also, you can use sound effects to complement with OptinMonster’s inactivity sensor. Whenever the tool identifies user inactivity, you can trigger an opt-in to make them reengage.

ConvertBox lacks this feature. But you can do this manually by adding a custom code script to trigger automation.

TruLead

Are you frustrated with spam emails that hurt your email deliverability rates?

OptinMonster has a solution for this.

Its trulead feature (lead verification system) detects and automatically filters out spam bots, bad emails, and temporary email addresses. Before sending the emails to the connected email service provider, the tool detects spam and rejects it. This way, you only can verify leads in your system.

This trulead algorithm allows you to block –

• Specific IP addresses.
• Characters, strings, or patterns in an email address.
• Temporary email addresses.
• Role-based emails (help@, support@, contact@, etc).
• Free email addresses.

This way you can avoid all the bad emails that hurt your email deliverability.

To accomplish this with ConvertBox, you may need to integrate it with services like Clearout or email service providers that come with email validation features.

Reports and analytics

Both ConvertBox and OptinMonster give detailed reports with various metrics to analyze your campaign performance.

For each opt-in, ConvertBox gives –

• Views
• Interactions
• Interaction rate
• Leads
• Lead conversions

You can analyze these stats over weeks/months/over any custom time period.

You can also see the stepwise stats breakdown to see what elements are converting well. For example, you can analyze how many clicks/interactions your CTAs are getting. Based on the results, you can even conduct split tests and see what converts well (you can try out different colors, texts, images, styles, etc).

Similar to this, OptinMonster also has a dedicated dashboard where for each campaign, you will get impressions, conversions, and conversion rates. Using the date range filter, you can view the overall performance of your campaigns.

To get even more detailed reports and analytics, you can integrate both of them with Google Analytics.

With both these tools, you need to connect each of the campaigns to Google Analytics. As of now, there is no option for bulk integration. When you turn on the Google Analytics integration, they will automatically detect and send events tracking code to Google Analytics.

What’s more?

The best thing about OptinMonster is that it has a built-in conversion analytics feature, so you don’t need to integrate with any of the third-party tools. This data helps you track and measure conversion goals and the success of your optin campaigns.

OptinMonster monitors each of your pages. It gives details on the number of visitors, clicks, and conversions the pages are driving for you.

If you are into eCommerce, this would be really helpful to see which products are converting.

Winner: OptinMonster. It has more detailed analytics and gives more metrics than ConvertBox. Its conversion analytics helps eCommerce store owners to run campaigns to increase sales and conversions.

Pricing : ConvertBox vs OptinMonster

ConvertBox is currently running a lifetime deal that costs $495. Just pay once and use it for lifetime. There is a risk-free 30 days money-back guarantee available.

There is also a Pro account available that comes with additional features like –

• 500,000 views/month
• Use on 50 sites
• Manage logins 5 sub-users
• Use ConvertBox for clients

To avail these features, you just need to pay an additional $95. This will cost $590/lifetime.

ConvertBox has only this lifetime pricing. There are no recurring or subscription plans available.

OptinMonster’s lowest pricing plan starts at $16/mo. This plan supports 1 site usage and 2500 pageviews.

If you need advanced integrations, split testing, 2 site usage, and 10,000 page views, you need to go with the Plus plan that costs $32/mo.

To avail of optional add-ons like custom domains, social proof widgets, and lead generation, you have to go with its Pro plan at $49/mo.

Winner: ConvertBox. Its lifetime is affordable, and you can save huge with this. While with OptinMonster, you have to pay on a monthly basis, adding up the cost.

FAQs on ConvertBox vs OptinMonster

Do both of these tools offer trials?

No. But ConvertBox is backed with 30 day money-back guarantee while OptinMonster has 14 day money-back guarantee. You can get started and if you don’t like it, then ask for a refund.

For how long does ConvertBox’s lifetime deal lasts?

On their official website, they have announced it may end anytime without notice. So you grab the deal as quickly as you can.

Does OptinMonster have a free plan?

No. It neither has a free plan nor a free trial option.

Conclusion: Winner?

ConvertBox and OptinMonster both are good choices for building an email list.The superiority of one over the other depends on the specific use cases.

Go with ConvertBox if you –

• Need an easy-to-use solution.
• Have a small business, and basic features are enough for you.
  • Need an affordable lifetime solution.
• Need the ability to create multi-step funnels combined with intelligent targeting rules to create powerful campaigns.

Go with OptinMonster if you –

• Are okay to invest money on higher subscription plans to avail of advanced features.
• Need features like gamified popups, ad block detection, smart success, trulead, etc.
• Need the ability to track the real-time behavior of visitors and want to display the campaigns that are relevant to them.

I hope this comparison between OptinMonster and ConvertBox will be useful to you.