Encharge Alternatives for SaaS Teams in 2026

Prices checked 7 October 2026; each price links to the vendor page it came from.

Why teams leave Encharge

The Encharge pricing page has two self-serve plans and one custom plan. At 2,000 subscribers, Growth is $99 a month ($79 if you pay yearly) and Premium is $159 ($129 yearly). Moving the subscriber slider takes Growth to $179 at 5,000, $249 at 10,000 and $389 at 25,000, and Premium to $269, $399 and $649 at the same stops. Enterprise is a conversation with sales, and the page positions it for lists above 50,000 subscribers.

For a SaaS product the plan split matters more than the slider. Growth lists the flow builder, advanced segmentation, behavior-based emails, webhooks, and Zapier, Stripe and Chargebee integrations. Premium adds the HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, Shopify and WooCommerce integrations, transactional email, API events with event-based segmentation, and custom objects. A product that wants to push its own events into Encharge, or to send password resets through it, is on Premium. That is $60 a month more than Growth at 2,000 subscribers, $90 more at 5,000, $150 more at 10,000 and $260 more at 25,000.

Send limits are the second pressure point. Growth allows monthly email sends of ten times the subscriber limit and Premium twelve times, with a footnote that overages apply; the page puts them at $100 for every 100,000 emails. A 5,000-subscriber Growth account may therefore send 50,000 emails a month, and a weekly product newsletter plus a three-email onboarding flow can pass that without anyone noticing. Sending 150,000 would be 100,000 over the allowance, a $100 overage on top of the $179 plan.

There is also no permanent free plan. The page offers a 14-day free trial and nothing after it, so a product with no revenue yet pays from its first real month. Loops, Resend and Brevo all publish a free tier, so a pre-revenue product can run lifecycle email there at no cost while Encharge starts at $79 to $99.

None of this makes Encharge a bad product. If you are on Growth with 2,000 subscribers, $99 is hard to beat and nothing below is dramatically cheaper; Customer.io Essentials, for instance, starts at $100. The savings appear from roughly 5,000 subscribers upward, or when you are paying for Premium mainly to unlock API events and transactional sending.

The alternatives, one by one

1. Customer.io: the closest replacement for event-driven flows

If Encharge flows are triggered by what people do in your product, Customer.io is the nearest equivalent. Its pricing page lists a visual workflow builder, email, push, in-app and WhatsApp channels, and marks transactional email as included on every plan. Essentials is $100 a month for 5,000 profiles, $145 for 10,000 and $235 for 20,000, billed monthly, with one million emails a month in the plan.

Set that against Premium, not Growth. At 5,000 subscribers Encharge Premium is $269 against $100, and at 10,000 it is $399 against $145: gaps of $169 and $254 a month, roughly $2,000 and $3,000 a year, if your subscriber count maps one-to-one onto profiles. Two catches on the same page: profiles include objects such as companies, and managed deliverability is marked as not included on Essentials. Customer.io's billing documentation says a profile that exists at any point in the month counts toward the bill even if you delete it, so prune dead contacts before you import. The pricing page also lists a Startup Program with a year free for companies that raised under $10M. Our Encharge vs Customer.io comparison goes through the two head to head.

2. Userlist: when the company is the unit you message

Userlist keeps users and companies as separate records, which suits a product where every member of a workspace gets onboarding emails but the decision to upgrade is made by one account owner. Its pricing page reads Basic at $149 a month for up to 10,000 users and Professional at $349, with $10 and $12 respectively for each extra 1,000. Professional is where A/B split testing, conversion goals and the advanced workflow features start.

The entry price is higher than Growth at 2,000 subscribers ($99) and lower from about 5,000 up: $149 against $249 at 10,000. The billing rule deserves attention. Userlist's docs say each invoice reflects the peak number of tracked users in the previous cycle, so a one-time import of dead accounts raises the next bill even if you delete them afterwards. Each plan includes a monthly message allowance of five times your tracked users with a 500,000 floor, and extra messages are $1 per 1,000. It is not the tool for a sales team living in a CRM, because it is not trying to be one.

3. Loops: the lightest move, and the cheapest at 10,000

Loops prices by subscribed contacts: $48 at 4,788, $99 at 9,998, $198 at 24,339 and $249 at 49,989 on the pricing page slider. Unsubscribed contacts do not count, paid plans have unlimited sends and no per-seat fee, and transactional email is included without a separate charge. That last point closes the Premium gap on its own: Loops bundles transactional sending into its $99 plan, while Encharge sells it only on Premium, which is $399 at 10,000 subscribers.

The free plan allows 4,000 sends in a rolling 30 days to your 1,000 newest contacts, with a small "Powered by Loops" footer. The trade-off is scope. If you rely on Encharge's Salesforce or HubSpot sync, check that Loops has an equivalent before you plan the move, because its pricing page does not list one. For a founder-run SaaS that mainly needs onboarding, trial and win-back emails, that is rarely a blocker. The Customer.io vs Loops page covers the choice between the two lifecycle options.

4. ActiveCampaign: lead scoring and a sales handoff

ActiveCampaign suits an Encharge account that exists mainly to qualify product-led leads for a salesperson. On its pricing page, with annual billing, Plus reads $95 at 2,500 contacts, $145 at 5,000, $189 at 10,000 and $389 at 25,000; Pro reads $149, $205, $375 and $629 at the same stops. Sends are capped at ten times the contact limit on Starter and Plus and twelve times on Pro.

Starter at $39 for 2,500 contacts looks cheap next to Encharge, but its listed limit of five actions per automation makes it a poor fit for a multi-step trial flow, so price Plus. Transactional email is sold as an add-on. Product events have to be mapped into contact fields, which is more work than an event-first tool needs. There is more on this in our ActiveCampaign alternatives guide.

5. HubSpot: only if the CRM already runs the funnel

HubSpot is a different kind of answer: it replaces the Encharge-to-CRM sync by putting email on the CRM record itself. The Marketing Hub page lists a free tier with one automated action, Starter at $7 with up to ten, and Professional at $800 a month with unlimited actions and up to 300 workflows. Marketing Hub is priced per seat.

The honest comparison is Encharge Premium at $399 for 10,000 subscribers against HubSpot Professional at $800, since Starter's ten-action ceiling is too small for real flows. Pay that gap when your sales team lives in HubSpot and needs email activity on the deal. If sales is a side activity, the money buys a suite you will not use.

6. Resend: one vendor for sending and a small lifecycle program

Resend's marketing tab is free at 1,000 contacts with unlimited broadcasts, 10,000 automation runs and three segments. Paid marketing reads $40 at 5,000 contacts, $80 at 10,000 and $180 at 25,000, and automations beyond the allowance are $0.0015 per run. Transactional sending is priced separately: Pro is $20 a month for 50,000 emails.

For an engineering-led team paying Encharge Premium mainly for transactional email and API events, that is the cheapest single-vendor route. The cost is that your code, not a Stripe or Chargebee connector, forwards billing events into the automation. A welcome series, trial reminders and a win-back are well within that model; a many-branch flow with CRM writes is not. See Loops vs Resend for how the two light options differ.

7. Postmark: for the transactional slice only

Postmark does no lifecycle marketing, which is exactly why it appears here. If Premium is on your bill for transactional email, keep Growth and move receipts and resets to Postmark, where Basic reads $15 at 10,000 emails, $55 at 50,000 and $115 at 125,000. At 2,000 subscribers that is $99 + $15 = $114 against $159 for Premium; at 10,000 it is $249 + $15 = $264 against $399. The saving disappears if you also rely on Premium's API events, custom objects or CRM integrations, so list what Premium does for you first. Postmark's own alternatives are covered on the Postmark alternatives page.

8. Brevo: a big list that rarely gets mailed

Brevo's pricing page sets the price by monthly email volume rather than by contacts. The free plan allows 300 sends a day, Starter starts at $9 a month at 5,000 emails, and Standard starts at $18 and adds automation, A/B testing and advanced reports. Work out your volume before you compare: Encharge's Growth allowance at 25,000 subscribers is 250,000 emails a month, while a list that gets two or three emails a month sits far below that. Brevo is a campaign-first product, so product-event segmentation is the thing to test before you commit.

What each option costs at 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 people

The table uses each vendor's own price stops, so the volume units differ: subscribers, profiles, users or contacts. Cells say which stop was read when there is no exact match.

Read it across: at 5,000 people the gap between Growth ($179) and the cheapest paid option with a flow builder is smaller than it looks, because Loops and Resend are lighter products and Customer.io is $79 lower on a profile count that may not match your subscribers. At 10,000 the spread widens to $249 for Growth against $80 to $189 elsewhere, and at 25,000 Resend ($180) and Loops ($198) cost about half of Growth's $389. ActiveCampaign's annual-billing price matches Encharge's monthly Growth price at 25,000, which is a reminder to compare billing terms and not only list prices.

Plan for what the table leaves out. Transactional sending is included in Customer.io and paid Loops, a separate $15 or more with Postmark or Resend, and an add-on at ActiveCampaign. Encharge sends beyond the plan allowance cost $100 per 100,000, a line the others price differently: Userlist charges $1 per 1,000 messages beyond its allowance, which works out to the same $100 per 100,000 once you exceed it.

Which one for which situation

• You are on Premium for API events and transactional email, and want the lowest bill: Customer.io, which includes both and reads $145 at 10,000 profiles.
• Your product has workspaces and the buyer is not the user: Userlist, because it models companies directly, as long as you can live with billing on peak tracked users.
• A founder runs lifecycle email and you want the fewest moving parts: Loops, where $99 at 9,998 subscribers includes transactional sending.
• Salespeople follow up on trial users from a CRM: ActiveCampaign Plus, or HubSpot Professional if sales already works there and the $800 is justified.
• Engineers own email and your flows are three or four emails long: Resend, with Stripe events forwarded from your own code.
• You only need transactional mail out of Premium: stay on Growth and add Postmark.

Migrating off Encharge

The steps below follow what an Encharge account contains. For the general checklist, our guide to migrating email platforms covers the parts that are the same everywhere.

1. List what you use. Write down each flow, segment, tag and custom field, and which integrations feed them. The Stripe and Chargebee connectors on Growth usually write tags or fields that flows react to, and on Premium the API events, custom objects and CRM syncs do the same. Each one needs an equivalent trigger in the new tool.
2. Export people. Per Encharge's export help page, open the People page, choose All people, click Export All and confirm; you can also export a single segment or hand-picked rows. You receive a CSV with all of the people's fields, and you are emailed when it is ready.
3. Clean the file before it moves. The same page says anonymous people are included in the export and that no user activity is. Remove anonymous rows so you do not pay for them in a per-profile or per-user tool, and do not expect open or click history to arrive. Any segment built on past email activity has to be rebuilt from new data.
4. Carry suppression across. Take the unsubscribed and bounced states from the CSV and import them as unsubscribed. Loops, for example, marks every uploaded contact as subscribed by default unless the file has a Subscribed column set to false, which is how a migration quietly re-mails people who opted out.
5. Rebuild flows by hand, most valuable first. Encharge's pricing page describes a visual flow builder and nothing that exports flows as portable files, so budget for rebuilding each one. Start with trial-to-paid and failed-payment flows, then onboarding, then newsletters and win-backs.
6. Re-point the triggers. Connect Stripe or Chargebee in the new tool, or forward events from your code, and replay one test customer through a trial, an upgrade and a cancellation before real users are involved.
7. Move transactional email early if Premium carries it. Authenticate the new sending domain with its own DKIM records, merge SPF includes into a single record, and cut over password resets last because a failed reset locks a customer out.
8. Drain, don't cut. Send new signups into the new tool on a chosen date and let people already inside Encharge flows finish there. Cancel only after the longest flow has emptied. If you are billed yearly, find out when the term ends first.

Our pick

For most SaaS products leaving Encharge, Customer.io is the first to price: it matches the event-driven model, includes transactional email, and reads $145 at 10,000 profiles against $399 for Premium. The runner-up depends on your size. A founder with a handful of flows should price Loops; a B2B team with workspace-level decisions should price Userlist. If transactional email is the only reason you pay for Premium, skip the migration entirely and add Postmark to Growth. Related reading: email for product-led SaaS and Userlist vs Loops.