Behavly vs Userlist

Userlist and Behavly are both built for SaaS teams that email their own users, and both send people down a path of emails, waits and branches. The difference is who does the writing and what the tool knows about each person. In Userlist, your team writes every message, and the workflow sends that same message to everyone who qualifies. In Behavly, an AI agent writes each email at send time for the one person receiving it, from what that person did in your product.

Behavly is our product. Every claim about Userlist below comes from userlist.com, read on October 24, 2026, and every claim about Behavly from its Help Center. Weighing more than these two? Our round-up of Userlist alternatives sets five more tools against it, and the full behavioral email tools roundup covers the category.

Why teams pick Behavly over Userlist

• Each Behavly Agent email is written for one person. Two people on the same step get different emails, each about what they did. On Userlist, your team writes one message per step and fills in fields like a first name.
• Nothing to plan before you start. One script tag records page views, clicks, pointer movement and scroll depth for each signed-in user, with no identify call and no event schema.
• Paths described in plain words. Say who the path is for and what each email should do, and Behavly lays out the emails, waits and branches.
• Every reader’s own language. Each email is written in the language of the person reading it, from 23, with no workflow per language.
• Sent from your own mailbox or email service. Emails come from your Gmail, Zoho or any IMAP/SMTP mailbox, or an email service such as Resend, Amazon SES or Postmark, and replies land next to everything the sender did on your site.
• A free plan. Try it on real users with no time limit; Userlist starts with a 14-day trial and a card up front.

Side by side

How Userlist works

You send Userlist your users, your companies and the events that matter, either from your backend through its Push API and libraries, or through a source you already run, such as Segment or PostHog. Each user can belong to several companies, and the link between them carries its own properties, such as a role.

Workflows start from an event, a segment, a form, a condition or a schedule. Your team then chains emails and in-app messages with conditions, splits, waits and goals, and writes each message by hand, with Liquid for names and other fields. Messages go out from Userlist’s own sending infrastructure.

How Behavly works

You paste one script tag into your site and your signed-in app. Behavly recognizes who is signed in from the session, so there is no identify call to wire up, and it collects what each person does on a single profile across their laptop and phone. Product actions you care about can be added with behavly.track, and your backend can send events like a failed payment with send_event.

You then choose who to follow up with: a group Behavly found in that activity, or one you describe in plain words, with the matching people shown before you save it. You describe the path, and Behavly lays it out as emails, waits and branches. It can run once for everyone in the group, keep running for each person who joins, or start whenever your product sends an event.

The writing happens last. When a person reaches an email step, Behavly writes that email from what they did, knowing every earlier email on the path, and in their language. If you want to read each one first, Hold Behavly-written emails for approval keeps them in Review until you release them. Then they go out from your own mailbox.

Where Behavly is ahead

• Nobody has to write the emails. Userlist sends the message your team wrote. Behavly writes a new one for each person, so the email can mention the board they built or the import that stopped halfway.
• Detail without an event plan. Page views, clicks and scroll depth are exactly what Userlist suggests leaving out. Behavly collects them from one script tag, and a path can branch on the pages someone visited.
• Emails that know the path so far. Each email reads the earlier ones on the path and whether the person opened or clicked them, then says something new instead of repeating them.
• Personal sending. Emails come from a real mailbox, read like a note from a person, and replies arrive next to what the sender did.
• Heatmaps for each person. See where one user clicked, got stuck and stopped scrolling, in the same tool that writes to them.
• Lower entry price. Behavly is free for your first 100 tracked contacts and $79 a month up to 2,500, against Userlist’s $149 minimum.

What you pay for

Userlist bills every user you send it, whether they log in or not, and has no free plan. Behavly bills tracked contacts, and every plan includes a monthly allowance of emails Behavly writes for you, so the writing is part of the price rather than your team’s time. Always-on and Trigger Campaigns are unlimited on every plan, Free included.

Moving over from Userlist

• Add the snippet first. Put Behavly’s script on your signed-in pages and let activity build for a couple of weeks, so the first emails have something to be written from.
• Bring your contacts. Import them from a CSV; each one picks up activity the next time they visit.
• Rebuild paths in words. Describe each Userlist workflow in a sentence and let Behavly lay it out, then preview a step for a real user.
• Export before you cancel. Userlist’s docs say cancelling deletes the account and its data shortly after the billing period ends.

If Sequenzy is on your shortlist too, see how Sequenzy and Behavly differ.