Aweber Vs GetResponse 2021 | The Ultimate Comparison Guide?
Aweber and GetResponse are both email marketing service providers.
That doesn’t mean they take the same approach to delivering your results, however.
Aweber claims to “be” email marketing.
I’m not really sure what that means, but it’s a bold claim, so good for them:
With over 20 years of heritage behind them (launched in 1998), the Aweber team certainly helped to introduce email marketing to the world. Currently, there’s more than 100,000 small businesses and entrepreneurs using the tool each day.
GetResponse is the same age as Aweber, launched in 1998, which indicates that their “About” page is a bit outdated…
Still, GetResponse has more than 350,000 customers spread across 183 countries — so the company must be doing something right.
They claim to be the world’s easiest email marketing tool — another bold claim:
Getresponse Worlds Easiest Email Marketing
At first glance, the two companies are pretty similar. Heck, they were even started in the same year. However, as you’ll see during this Aweber vs GetResponse review, there’s more to most email marketing tools than meets the eye.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Pricing
Let’s start simple.
Ultimately, unless you’ve got oodles of cash to push into your marketing budget, then you’re going to need to take pricing pretty seriously.
After all, an email autoresponder is pretty great, but no-one wants to spend thousands of dollars on software when they could be using it for staff pizza parties and a new foosball table, right?
So let’s start by checking out GetResponse’s pricing structure.
First of all, you get a handy range of features to choose how many subscribers you have, and how often you want to pay your bill. If you pay 12 or 24 months at a time, you get a hefty discount.
One Pepperoni to go please!
Starting with the basic of 1,000 subscribers, there are 3 fundamental plans:
Basic: $15 per month for unlimited emails, landing pages, automation templates, surveys, forms, Facebook ads, and exit pop-ups.
Plus: $49 per month for everything in Basic, plus list-building funnels, sales funnels, webinars for 100 attendees, e-product sales, a simple CRM, and collaborative tools.
Professional: $99 per month for everything in Plus, as well as an automation builder, contact tagging and scoring, webinars, paid webinars, webinar funnels, and collaboration for up to 5 people.
Now here’s the thing I don’t get about GetResponse pricing.
You need to be on the high-tier pricing package to get (usually basic) functionality like contact scoring and tagging. Tagging your contacts is pretty much a must-have for any auto-responder.
Somehow, you can get seemingly more advanced features like a simple CRM solution, collaboration tools, and exit popups at a lower price tag. What’s that all about?
As you probably guessed, the more contacts you have, the more expensive your package becomes. Here’s what you’re looking at if you’re lucky enough to have up to 100,000 subscribers:
Got even more than 100,000 subscribers?
Then you’re going to need to upgrade to an enterprise offering.
That means tailor-made functionality for a custom (and probably pretty significant) price.
The good news?
If you’re a non-profit you can get up to 50% off with GetResponse for NonProfits — so that’s great news for charities that need extra help.
There’s also the option to sign up for a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Now that’s something I love to see.
What’s more, with the free trial, you don’t just get a lame diluted version of GetResponse. You can test out everything from advanced analytics, to automated tools.
Now enough about GetResponse, let’s check out Aweber’s pricing.
First things first, Aweber also gives you a free trial for 30 days — which is fantastic news.
You also get access to a bunch of great features, including access to Aweber’s handy email experts which are available to teach you how to get the most of your new tool. That’s a level of support that I’ve never seen from free trials with other tools.
You don’t get as many contacts on the free trial as you do with GetResponse. However, 500 subscribers is still enough to get a good test on the email marketing service.
Once your free trial has dried up, you’ve got a massive range of 5 basic plans to sign up to.
According to Aweber, you get access to every single feature in the toolkit from day one — so the only thing you’re paying extra for is the number of subscribers you have.
Honestly, I usually prefer this kind of pricing.
The packages include:
$19 per month for up to 500 subscribers
$29 per month for up to 2,500 subscribers
$49 per month for up to 5,000 subscribers
$69 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers
$149 per month for up to 25,000 subscribers
It means that you can start off with a basic package and ramp up as your business grows. In other words, your email marketing tool grows with your organization.
Like with GetResponse, if you need something bigger and more bespoke, then you’ll need to contact the Aweber team for an enterprise quote.
There are no long-term contracts to worry about, so you can upgrade (or even downgrade) whenever you like.
Winner
In terms of cost alone, GetResponse is about $4 per month cheaper than the Aweber equivalent plan for 1000 subscribers. Plus you get a massive discount of 18% or 20% if you pay for one or two years up-front.
Here’s the thing with Aweber though — you get all of the features from day one. So, you’re not paying for more than you need, just because you need extra features.
I would give Aweber the trophy for that alone. Yes, you may be paying a little extra, but you’ll get the features you need without having to upgrade to premium plans before you’re ready.
For super cheap pricing all around, try MailerLite (review) with it’s budget friendly packages.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Email Templates
Now that you know what kind of price you’re budgeting for let’s take a look at some functionality.
Templates are a must-have for your auto-responder strategy because they make sure you can present a professional image for your business, even if you’ve never done a day of coding.
Ultimately, your preference of GetResponse vs Aweber templates is probably going to be a personal thing, but in my opinion, GetResponse is absolutely the best.
When you click onto the “Create Newsletter” option in your dashboard, you get to pick between HTML or drag-and-drop email editor.
In other words, GetResponse can do most of the hard work for you, or you can show off your coding skills. Whatever works best.
If you’re looking to save time and hassle, you’re probably gonna click on the “Drag and drop” email editor.
This gives you access to what seems like unlimited email templates. It’s probably only a few hundred but would you look at all of these filtering options:
If you’re a nerd like me, that’s just exciting!
The templates available are attractive, clean, and modern-looking, too — for the most part. There’s a handful in there that do look a little old-fashioned, but hey — you can’t win them all.
Plus, once you click on a template, you’ve got the option to edit it however you like with that drag-and-drop builder we mentioned.
Maybe you want to change some background colors, update your buttons, or add some social media tags in like I did here:
So, how does Aweber measure up to GetResponse templates?
Well, once again you get a bunch of template options, starting with some simple, bare-bones options for people who prefer to build from scratch.
However, when you scroll down to some of the more colorful options, things start to get a bit outdated, in my opinion.
These are the kind of stuff you’d see back in the early 2000s, not now in 2019:
But hey, I’ll give them a break long enough to test out the drag-and-drop editor.
Again, you can change things like the background colors, fonts, and buttons.
However, I couldn’t find any options to add social media buttons in here.
Overall, the experience feels so much more basic with Aweber, which is a bit disappointing.
Winner
For me, GetResponse offers more templates to choose from that fit with the modern email landscape, and a smoother drag-and-drop builder for editing. Aweber is fine, but it seems like it’s in desperate need of an upgrade.
For some awesome template options, I really love ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Ease Of Use And UI
Since we’ve already mentioned templates and email building, let’s take a closer look at how easy it is to use both Aweber and GetResponse.
After all, you want to feel comfortable using whatever email tool you have.
Get Response starts with simple functionality from the moment you log in. After all, it wants to be the easiest email marketing tool in the world.
Setting up your list is as simple as either loading a CSV file or entering the addresses you want to include step-by-step.
Additionally, the dashboard is significantly more feature-rich than Aweber. That makes sense when you consider the fact that GetResponse has evolved to offer a lot more than “just” email marketing service.
Not only do you get more options to click on, but they’re also neatly organized in your UI. I hate logging into an email dashboard and feeling like I’ve been hit with an avalanche of buttons and data. You just don’t get that with GetResponse.
Even better?
The handy “Quick Actions” on the home page are a fantastic way to begin building emails and setting up marketing automation features from the minute you log in. There’s no need to search through a navigation panel for the tools you need.
Aweber also offers a simple enough experience when you log in for the first time.
You can add people to your list one at a time or load up a CSV file to access contacts in bulk.
Let’s face it, who wants to spend hours entering emails one by one?
Managing subscribers is easy peasy too. You can even customize a confirmation email that your customers will receive when they sign up with you.
That’s awesome if you’re looking to implement double opt-in to keep your email list clean.
Like GetResponse, the Aweber interface is straightforward enough too.
The homepage provides some basic data about your subscribers, recently sent “broadcasts” (newsletters), and so on.
It’s not quite as comprehensive as GetResponse, but it’s clean and simple — just how I like my email marketing tools (and my men):
Winner
GetResponse lives up to its claims of being the easiest email marketing tool here — at least in my opinion. I love the way the user interface feels — simple and straight to the point. Plus, the Quick Actions options are fantastic for when you’re in a hurry to get started.
Since I don’t have a great deal of patience, it was great that I didn’t have to spend forever looking for tools.
ConvertKit (review) offers a really simple and straightforward UI if you’re looking for simplicity above all else.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Autoresponders
Let’s get to the meat of this email marketing pie.
Autoresponders, as you know, are emails that you automatically send to subscribers based on pre-set intervals that you choose. For instance, you could send a welcome message 10 seconds after someone signs up to your page, then a marketing message 10 days later.
Both Aweber and GetResponse offer awesome autoresponder functionality.
You can send newsletters and broadcasts based on the triggers that matter most to you. However, in my opinion, GetResponse provides a much stronger autoresponder experience, and here’s why.
First, setting up an Autoresponder is a piece of cake.
All you do is click on “Create an autoresponder” and decide when you want to send your emails.
Getreponse Autoresponder Options
Now here’s where things get interesting.
Once you’ve started creating autoresponders, you can also create “auto funnels.”
These are drip sequences of emails you can use, combined with landing pages and sign-up pages, to sell products, build an email list and more.
The deeper you dive into GetResponse’s automated email marketing tools, the more you discover about the things you can do to set up automation flowcharts, unique drip campaigns, and more.
You can drag and drop your entire email campaign into existence, letting GetResponse know what to do whenever a user clicks on a link, opens an email, or takes another action.
Triggers include:
Email Opens
Link Clicks
Product Purchases
Abandoned Carts
URLs visited
There’s also a bunch of pre-made templates to get you started based on the goals you want to accomplish:
Once you click on a model — like this consent-based welcome template, you can add conditions, actions, and tags however you like.
That means you can extensively customise subscribers based on how people interact with you.
In comparison, Aweber doesn’t come close.
First of all, it was difficult for me to find an autoresponder in the first place. Probably because they call it a “Follow up Series”:
The drag and drop functionality you can use to build your autoresponders is great, but it doesn’t feel nearly as advanced as the options you get with GetResponse.
The process isn’t as sophisticated or as visual. Plus, you can’t get as in-depth with your drip campaign. For instance, with GetResponse, you can email people who have added products to their cart and remind them that something is waiting for them.
With Aweber, you can just send basic messages to keep your audience connected. It’s more nurturing, less marketing.
Now, if you’re just looking for a way to keep your audience connected — that’s all well and good.
However, GetResponse gives you the power to connect with and nurture your customers, will improving your chances of a purchase too.
In my opinion, that’s just good value for money.
Winner
GetResponse comes out on top with the autoresponder and marketing automation functionality.
You can get a lot more done with the tools and target a range of customers to improve your conversion rates. Plus, I just like the style of the funnel building strategies more too.
For a even more impressive autoresponder strategy, ActiveCampaign is hard to beat.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: A/B Testing
How well do you know your target audience?
Even if you think you’ve got your finger on the pulse, the chances are that you’ll need to do a little split testing before you figure out what speaks to each of your customers.
A/B testing is how you separate the awesome emails, from the sub-par ones.
GetResponse allows you to test up to 5 variations of each email. So A/B/C/D/E testing…
You can change your subject line, content, from field, and delivery time to make sure that you’re getting the right response from your audience.
Plus, once you’ve picked exactly what you want to test, you get to track the performance of up to 5 messages at a time.
You’ll be able to track the performance of your campaigns on your UI.
Aweber, on the other hand, lets you test up to 3 variants of your newsletters against each other. That’s still pretty good for a basic email marketing tool — but it’s still not as good as GetResponse.
One pretty cool thing is that you can decide exactly how much of your subscribers will be exposed to each email variant.
That means that if you want to test out a pretty radical new campaign on only a handful of subscribers, you don’t have to do a 50/50 test.
Plus, tracking your split tests is easy enough, because all of the details show up on your UI homepage.
Additionally, while you can only test 3 emails against each other at any given time (2 fewer than GetResponse), you can test a range of different features, including body copy, call-to-action placement, the time you send the message and pre-header text.
In other words, Aweber doesn’t let you test as many options at a time, but it does give you more things to look at when you’re trying to build the perfect email.
Winner
Although GetResponse wins by giving you more emails to test at the same time, Aweber provides more functionality when it comes to exploring the impact of your CTA button, gifs, images, and more. With that in mind, I’d name Aweber the winner here.
For more advanced A/B testing, try something like Campaign Monitor (review).
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Analytics
The next step up from A/B testing is email analytics.
I love the smell of fresh data in the morning — how about you?
Aweber and GetResponse offer solid reporting features, including click rates, open rates, unsubscribe rates and more.
Perhaps the most appealing thing about GetResponse is how easy it is to navigate your reports and analytics. You can look at everything from your auto-responders to your marketing automation and get individual insights for each campaign.
GetResponse makes it easy to track everything from open rates to goals reached, CTRs, and so much more. You can even check what kind of device your customers are using to open their emails, to determine whether you should focus more effort on mobile marketing.
To support your conversion efforts, GetResponse also provides tracking codes so you can keep an eye on the number of sign-ups, sales, and visits that come from a link in your email campaigns.
Once you gather your data, GetResponse allows you to organise it however you like — into both charts and tables.
Oh — and there’s one-click segmentation to help you automatically create sub-segments of the customers that open your emails the most, or the people who don’t open your mails at all. This makes it much easier to clean up your list.
Aweber, on the other hand, also offers a serious selection of reports to browse through.
Here are just some of the things you can look at:
One thing you don’t get with Aweber that you doo with GetResponse, however, is Google Analytics integration. That means you can’t combine your SEO reports with your email marketing efforts.
Still, Aweber makes analytics super intuitive and simple.
You can track how many people click on your emails, who your most valuable customers are, and even which emails make you the most revenue.
Like GetResponse, Aweber even lets you segment your audience based on their actions in an email campaign.
Winner
GetResponse is just slightly ahead of Aweber here, based on how intuitive its reporting dashboard is and the fact that you can integrate with Google Analytics. However, Aweber certainly doesn’t fall far behind.
For really in-depth analytics, it’s hard to go wrong with an option like Klaviyo, with it’s high-level reporting features.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Segmentation
Now we come to the main reason I would probably choose GetResponse over Aweber.
While both of these tools allow you to create segments for your subscribers pretty easily, GetResponse just makes it so much easier to deliver really personalized campaigns.
I mean — this is as close as you’re going to get to those conversations that shop owners have with their clients in mom and pop stores.
With GetResponse, if you had a mailing list of car owners segmented by color and another list of people who own motorcycles too, you could create a list based on people with blue cars and green motorcycles over the age of 35 who joined your list in the last month.
All you need to do is tick the relevant segments on your list and hit send.
If you go to Aweber and try to do the same thing, you’d need to build a new segment every time you want to send an email to a blue car owner, people who joined in the last month, and people with green motorcycles. It’s just a lot more manual effort overall.
GetResponse also makes it easier to exclude segments from your list if you want to specifically avoid sending a specific message to a portion of your audience. With Aweber, you can exclude an entire list from a mail, but not a segment.
Another segmentation feature you get in GetResponse, but not in Aweber, is a basic CRM tool. This comes as part of the Essential package, and allows you to manage your sales pipelines, track customer activity, and subscriber journeys.
When linked up to your autoresponders, the customer relationship management tool makes it easier to create very sophisticated pipelines for your customers.
The GetResponse CRM isn’t nearly as immersive as something like Salesforce. You can’t track website activity, and there’s no way to track deal history with each of your contacts.
However, since the average email tool doesn’t come with this kind of functionality built-in, the CRM does make GetResponse stand out.
Winner
GetResponse makes it way simpler to build the kind of personalized email drip funnels that you need to transform leads into dedicated customers.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has some of the most advanced email funnels on the market.
Aweber Vs GetResponse: Customer Support
Before we bring this review to a close, let’s look at one last thing: customer service.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m spending hundreds of dollars per month on an email marketing tool, I expect pretty good customer support as part of the deal.
GetResponse offers a Live chat function that you can access in the corner of your UI at any point when building an email. I sent through a message to “Karalina” under the name “Mark,” to see how quickly I’d get a response.
It took about 2 minutes for the message to be “read,” then another 2 minutes to get an answer to my question, complete with a handy link of instructions to help me.
You can also contact GetResponse via email, snail mail, or even social media.
Unfortunately, there’s no phone support available if you want to talk to someone.
On the plus side, you do have access to endless videos, podcasts, infographics, blogs, and guides if you need extra assistance on the GetResponse resource page. There’s even a “GetResponse University” with specific marketing courses:
Aweber also has a chat function, where I was number 2 in the queue for about 5 minutes.
Then number 1 in the line for another 15 minutes…
Yawn…What happened to “instant” messaging?
Just when I was about to lose the will to live, I got a response asking me to repeat the question I’d already sent — kind of annoying. Even after sending that, the “customer specialist” — who I now suspected to be a bot, responded with a completely unrelated message:
What?
So, yeah, Instant Messaging is available — but it’s not great.
Other ways to get in touch include toll-free numbers in the US and International calls, as well as email and snail mail.
Overall, that means that you do have more ways to contact Aweber than GetResponse. Additionally, 24/7 expert support is included with your package — even if you’re using the free trial.
Winner
Aweber and GetResponse have both won “Stevie” awards for customer service — so they’re both pretty dependable when it comes to giving you the guidance you need.
Aweber just has more options, making it the winner here.
Weber Vs GetResponse: The Verdict
Both GetResponse and Aweber provide plenty of tools to help businesses create emails, communicate with their lists, and deliver highly effective nurturing campaigns.
However, I can safely say that GetResponse comes out as the winner in this comparison.
GetResponse a more immersive solution than Aweber, and it comes with a wider range of marketing tools to help you improve your conversions — rather than “just” nurturing leads.
Pick GetResponse If:
1. You want a competitive price that’s a little cheaper than Aweber
2. You’re looking for discounts for paying up-front, or you’re a non-profit
3. You need exceptional marketing automation and autoresponder options
4. You need a comprehensive way of managing your email segments
5. You love sending highly personalized emails with CRM functionality built-in
6. You’re looking for a tool that’s intuitive and easy to use
You want modern and easy-to-customize email templates
Pick Aweber If:
1. You want a complete range of features no matter which package you choose
2. You’re looking for excellent A/B testing and analytics
3. You need the peace of mind that comes with 24/7 support
4. Phone support is important to you
5. You find multiple integrations important
6. Read our Aweber review.
Keep in mind that both options come with a free trial, so there’s nothing to stop you from testing out both GetResponse and Aweber before you decide on one over the other.
In fact — I’d recommend you do that!
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