Loops alternatives for SaaS teams in 2026

The best Loops alternatives in 2026 are Bento, Customer.io, Sequenzy and Behavly, with Userlist, Encharge and Brevo for narrower needs.

• Bento: best for a similar email tool with a lower entry price and an AI assistant included.
• Customer.io: best when you need SMS, push and in-app messages next to email.
• Sequenzy: best for AI that writes whole flows, priced per email instead of per contact.
• Behavly: best for follow-ups written for one person from what they did in your product, sent from your own mailbox.
• Userlist: best for B2B products that email at the company level.
• Encharge: best for lifecycles driven by billing events.
• Brevo: best for getting into email plus SMS at the lowest price.

Why teams look for a Loops alternative

Loops is well liked, and for good reasons. Pricing is simple: you pay for subscribed contacts, paid plans have unlimited sends and no seat fees, and transactional email is included.

The free plan is generous. Marketing, product and transactional email live in one tool, and developers get an API, a CLI and an MCP server. If that covers what you need, Loops is hard to beat on price, and switching may not be worth the effort.

When teams do look elsewhere, it’s usually for one of these reasons:

• Email is the only channel. There’s no SMS, push or in-app messaging.
• You write every email. Loops documents no built-in AI writer. Copy comes from your team, or from an external AI agent working through its MCP server, CLI or agent skills.
• Behavior has to arrive as events. Workflows start when a contact is added, updated or joins a list, or when an event comes in. Events come from your code or an integration such as Segment, RudderStack or PostHog. What people do in your app reaches Loops only if you send it.
• Cost follows every subscribed contact. Active or not, each subscribed contact counts toward your tier. The free plan sends only to your 1,000 newest contacts, up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days. It also adds a “Powered by Loops” footer.

Loops alternatives at a glance

Entry prices from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked October 10, 2026, billed monthly unless marked.

What 5,000 and 10,000 contacts cost

Entry prices hide where each tool ends up. Here is the monthly price for the same audience, using each vendor’s published numbers.

Behavly: best for follow-ups written for each user from what they did

Behavly is our product, so weigh this one accordingly. It’s an AI agent for SaaS teams. It tracks what each signed-in user does in your product, builds the follow-up paths you describe, and writes every email from that person’s own activity.

Two jobs that Loops leaves with you work differently here. The first is wiring events, since Loops waits for the ones you send. Behavly’s script tag already records each signed-in person’s page views, clicks, scrolling and pointer movement, merged across devices, with no identify call. Product actions, such as project_created, go in with behavly.track.

The second is writing. Every email is written for one person from what they did, in any of 80 languages. You can still send your own copy, or a designed template, exactly as written.

Send a one-time campaign to a group, or run a Behavly Agent: an always-on path people enter as they qualify. It holds emails, waits, and branches on whether someone opened, clicked, logged in, visited a page, replied or did an action in your product. Describe the path in words and Behavly lays it out for you to check.

Emails leave from your own mailbox over IMAP/SMTP. Replies come back to Behavly’s Inbox, with the sender’s activity beside them.

Tracking, heatmaps and per-person writing come with every plan. That’s also why Behavly costs more per contact than Loops.

Where it’s strong

Each email is about what that person did, not a template filled with merge tags. Tracking and heatmaps of your own site are built in, so you don’t have to instrument events before the first campaign. Emails arrive from a real person’s address, and replies land next to that person’s history, with AI reply drafts. You approve the emails before they go out. Approval is on by default for one-time campaigns, and Hold Behavly-written emails for approval does the same on an Agent. Any email step on a path can be A/B tested.

Where it falls short

Email only: no SMS, push or in-app messages. Not built for newsletters to a big list, or for transactional email such as password resets and receipts. Because it sends from your own mailbox, it suits one-to-one style follow-ups at lower volume. Mailboxes connect over IMAP/SMTP with an app password rather than one-click Google or Microsoft sign-in. Far fewer integrations than Loops, with no Stripe, Segment, HubSpot or Zapier connection. And it costs more per contact: Starter is $79/month for 2,500 tracked contacts, where Loops is $49/month for 5,000. Always-on Agents need a paid plan.

Pricing

Free (100 tracked contacts, 50 AI emails a month, no credit card). Starter $79/month (2,500 tracked contacts, 2,000 AI emails, 1 Agent). Growth $249/month (10,000 contacts, 8,000 AI emails, 5 Agents). Scale $699/month (40,000 contacts), sold through a conversation.

Bento: best for a lower entry price with an AI assistant included

Bento is an email platform for indie and small SaaS and ecommerce teams. People and events come in through a JavaScript SDK (bento.identify, bento.track), server SDKs and an Events API. Flows branch on tags, fields, segments or Liquid expressions.

Its AI assistant, Tanuki, builds flow drafts, writes and edits email content and creates segments. Its Ask mode waits for your approval.

Where it’s strong

Pricing counts active users: subscribed users, or anyone with an event in the last 30 days. Marketing email is unlimited under a fair-use policy, and there are no seat fees. The AI assistant is included with unlimited usage. Transactional email is very cheap: the first 100 a month are free, then $5/month for up to 12,500.

Where it falls short

Push, SMS, WhatsApp and live chat need the $30/month Chat add-on. Segment works through a destination function rather than a native catalog app. A/B testing is documented for broadcasts only. It costs more than Loops as you grow: Bento’s own example bill at 25,000 active users is $229, against Loops’ $199 for 25,000 contacts. There’s a 30-day trial but no free Marketing plan.

Pricing

$29/month for up to 5,000 active users, then $0.01 per active user up to 50,000.

Customer.io: best for email, SMS, push and in-app in one platform

Customer.io is a full engagement platform for product and growth teams with engineering support. Data comes in through APIs, SDKs (including iOS and Android), webhooks and Segment. A visual journey builder with true/false, multi-split and random-cohort branches runs on every plan. Email, SMS, push, in-app, WhatsApp and LINE are all included on the entry plan, alongside transactional email.

Where it’s strong

The broadest channel set on this list, on every plan. Mature journey logic, with A/B and multivariate testing included. Flexible data ingestion and unlimited seats. An AI Agent, labeled beta, helps draft and refine messaging and can build journeys from a conversation.

Where it falls short

It starts at $100/month, about twice Loops’ entry price, and bills every identified profile and object, not only active users. Salesforce, HubSpot and data-warehouse integrations need Premium, which starts at $1,000/month billed yearly. Your team still designs the journeys and owns the copy. There’s no free plan. There is a 14-day trial, and a startup program gives a year free to companies that have raised under $10M.

Pricing

Essentials from $100/month (5,000 profiles, 1M emails), $145 at 10,000 profiles. Premium from $1,000/month billed yearly.

Sequenzy: best for AI-written flows priced per email

Sequenzy is a newer email platform aimed at early-stage SaaS. Give it your website and it writes whole sequences and campaigns: the trigger, the timing, the subject lines and the copy.

Events come from Stripe, PostHog or Clerk, or a POST from your backend. Its automation builder handles branches, delays and conditions. Through its MCP server, an AI agent can build a segment and write the emails, and nothing sends until you approve it.

Where it’s strong

Priced per email with unlimited contacts and team members, so a large list of quiet contacts costs nothing extra. A free tier with 2,500 emails a month and every feature. Stripe-driven triggers and revenue attribution. Subject-line A/B tests that pick their own winner. Transactional email through a REST API or SMTP relay.

Where it falls short

It’s a newer platform, which its own blog lists as a con, along with having no native Segment catalog destination yet. The AI writes per flow and segment; it isn’t described as writing a separate email for each recipient. Unlike Loops’ unlimited sends, the bill follows how much you send.

Pricing

Free (2,500 emails a month). $19/month for 15,000 emails, $49 for 60,000, $99 for 120,000.

Encharge: best for lifecycle email driven by billing events

Encharge is a lifecycle email tool for SaaS teams that want billing- and behavior-driven flows without heavy engineering. It connects to Stripe, Chargebee, Chargify, Paddle and Recurly, and segments on website and email interactions.

Its flow builder has lead scoring and A/B tests on a single email, a sequence or a whole flow. Its Magic Writer generates subject lines, outlines and whole emails inside the editor.

Where it’s strong

Deep billing integrations. Whole-flow A/B testing. AI writing help in both of its editors. Unlimited flows and team members.

Where it falls short

Product-event tracking (the Ingest API and event segments), Segment and transactional email are Premium only, from $159/month or $129 billed yearly. Monthly sends are capped at 10 or 12 times your subscribers, with overages beyond that. Email only, and no free plan.

Pricing

Growth from $99/month, or $79 billed yearly (2,000 subscribers). Premium from $159/month, or $129 billed yearly.

Userlist: best for B2B SaaS that emails at the company level

Userlist is built around the B2B data model: users and the companies they belong to, with many-to-many relationships. Campaigns can trigger on company data. It sends marketing, lifecycle and transactional email plus in-app messages. Data comes from its HTTP API, libraries for JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Rails and Laravel, Segment or RudderStack.

Where it’s strong

Company-level data and company-triggered campaigns. Email and in-app messages in one tool, with transactional email included from Basic. Hands-on onboarding, starting with a 60-minute roadmapping session. Companies that have raised under $500k get 50% off for 12 months.

Where it falls short

Entry is $149/month, and every user counts, active or not. Basic caps custom events at 20, and A/B testing and conversion goals need Professional at $349/month. No SMS or push, and we found no AI writing features. The 14-day trial asks for a card upfront.

Pricing

Basic $149/month for up to 10,000 users, plus $10 per additional 1,000. Professional $349/month for up to 10,000 users. Annual billing saves 20%.

Brevo: best for low-cost email, SMS and transactional email

Brevo is a broad marketing suite for small and midsize businesses, priced on monthly email volume rather than on contacts above its smallest tiers. Email and SMS are on every plan, with SMS credits sold separately. Transactional email through a REST API, SMTP and webhooks is included everywhere. There are 150+ integrations, including Stripe and Zapier.

Where it’s strong

A free plan and a very low entry price. Transactional email on every plan. A wide channel catalog. Volume pricing, so a big list you rarely email stays cheap: Standard sends 20,000 emails a month to up to 500,000 contacts for $69.

Where it falls short

The $9 and $18 tiers cap contacts at 500. The behavioral parts, marketing automation and web and event tracking, start at Standard. WhatsApp, mobile push and multiple seats need Professional at $499/month, a big jump from Standard. Segment and warehouse integrations are Enterprise-managed.

Pricing

Free (300 emails a day). Starter $9/month and Standard $18/month (5,000 emails, 500 contacts); Standard with 15,000 emails and 2,500 contacts is $49. Professional $499/month (150,000 emails).

How to choose

Before you move, check three things: how many subscribed contacts were active last month, which Loops emails are transactional, and which events your code already sends. Together they decide what a tool priced on active users, sends or tracked contacts will cost, and how much rewiring the switch needs. For one tool side by side, see Behavly vs Loops.