Userlist vs Loops for SaaS: Pricing and Fit (2026)

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

Both products were built for software companies that find mass-market email tools clumsy, and both include transactional email in the plan. They disagree about what a recipient is. Userlist's plan table describes people, company profiles with activity feeds, company segments and many-to-many relationships between the two. Loops' pricing page describes subscribed contacts and nothing above them. Everything else about the matchup, including price, follows from that difference.

If your emails say "your team" or "your workspace", that choice matters from day one. If they say "you", it mostly does not.

What each costs at 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 users

Userlist shows its price for a block of up to 10,000 users and quotes a per-1,000 step beyond that. Its page also reads $229 for up to 18,000 users and $369 for up to 32,000 on Basic, which are exactly $10 per extra 1,000 from the $149 base, so the step is consistent through that range. Loops' slider returns a figure with its exact subscriber count. The Userlist figures at 25,000 and 50,000 below are worked from the stated step, not read from the page.

Userlist's page says its rates fall as lists grow, so the worked 50,000 figures are ceilings, not quotes. Even at those ceilings the pattern is clear: at 5,000 users Basic costs $101 a month more than Loops, which is 12 x $101 = $1,212 a year; at 10,000 it is $50 a month, or $600 a year; at 25,000 it is $101 a month again.

Two details change the arithmetic. First, Userlist counts everyone it stores. Its pricing FAQ says it counts all users in the account, active or not, because it keeps analysing their behaviour, and that you can remove users through the API if you carry abandoned accounts. A product with 12,000 sign-ups of which 6,000 are dormant is a 12,000-user account, which is $169 on Basic (the $149 base plus 2 x $10 for the extra 2,000 users). Loops counts only subscribed contacts, so a dormant but subscribed user is billable there too, but anyone who unsubscribed is not.

Second, Userlist's message allowance is a floor, not a ceiling. Its billing documentation says every plan includes 5 times your tracked user count in messages, with a minimum of 500,000 per billing period, and charges $1 per 1,000 additional messages. A 10,000-user product could send 50 messages per user before hitting the 500,000 floor, so the overage only matters for notification-heavy products. Loops lists no per-send charge on paid plans.

If you qualify for Userlist's startup offer, 50% off the first 12 months for new accounts that raised under $500,000 in total, the 10,000-user Basic price is $74.50 for a year, which beats Loops' $99 by $24.50 a month ($294 over the year) and then reverts to $149 in year two. The offer needs a request during the trial.

What the account model buys you

Userlist's plan table lists company-level data integration, many-to-many relationships, company profiles with an activity feed, company segments and company-triggered campaigns, and its Basic card says the plan "now includes company accounts". Many-to-many matters for agencies, consultants and anyone who belongs to more than one workspace: one person can sit in two companies without becoming two contacts. A company-triggered campaign lets a whole account enter a sequence once, so five teammates at one customer do not each trigger a separate "your trial ends soon" message.

Basic comes with limits that suit early stage: 20 custom properties, 20 custom events, and 5 team seats. Professional lifts those to 50 properties, unlimited events and 10 seats, and adds A/B split testing, conversion goals, advanced logic controllers, outbound webhooks and advanced integrations, with group training for the team. That is the $349 tier at 10,000 users. A product with a dozen event types and a rich onboarding flow can fit in Basic, but a team that wants to experiment with subject lines will move up.

Loops takes the opposite approach. Its pricing page says all features are included on every plan, so there is no tier to outgrow, and the free plan includes everything with a small "Powered by Loops" footer, 10 emails per second and a cap of 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days to your 1,000 newest contacts. Paid plans lift the caps and the footer. The trade is that company-level logic, if you need it, must be modelled by you in contact properties, and the Loops pricing page does not describe a company object.

Getting set up, and getting out

Userlist's pricing page sketches the path it expects: a discovery demo, a roadmapping session to plan the integration, segments and workflows, a data integration where your developers implement the tracking plan through the API, segment setup, content planning, broadcasts, and finally measurement with split tests and conversion goals. If both user and company data have to flow in correctly, expect the data integration step, not the email design, to be the long pole.

Moving from Userlist to Loops, export users and companies. Companies have nowhere obvious to live in Loops, so decide which company fields you still need per person (plan, role, seat count) and write them as contact properties. Rebuild each workflow, import only the people who are subscribed, since that reduces the bill, and keep Userlist running until the first full cycle of mail has gone out. Moving from Loops to Userlist is the more work: someone has to define the users, companies and relationships in the API, and the 20-event limit on Basic means choosing the events that matter.

For a wider view, Userlist vs Customer.io pits the account model against a bigger event platform, Customer.io vs Loops covers the flat-contact side, and Userlist alternatives and Loops alternatives list other options. If your team sells to businesses, email platforms for B2B SaaS goes deeper on the account question.

Recommendation

Choose Loops if your users are individuals: it costs $48 to $249 across the range read here, the free plan is real, and nothing about seats or sends adds to the bill. Choose Userlist if your customers are companies and your onboarding emails depend on how several people at one company behave. You pay $149 at 10,000 users for Basic, or $349 for Professional, and you get company accounts, a plan-included message allowance and a guided setup. If you cannot decide, price year one with the startup discount if you qualify, and revisit when it ends; the full comparison hub has other pairings.