9 Best Popup Plugins for WordPress (Compared)

Looking for the best WordPress popup plugins?

Popup plugins are used for a variety of purposes including lead generation, sales, upsells, gaining new subscribers, and growing your social media following. In addition, they’re extremely effective in reducing cart abandonment.

A good popup plugin lets you develop targeted campaigns using customized popups, announcement bars, gamified bars, floating bars, and more to generate more sales on your site and engage with your users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the top WordPress popup plugins so you can decide which one is best for your business.

What is a WordPress Popup Plugin?

WordPress popup plugins allow you to create and display popups on your site to convert visitors into subscribers and customers. You can use them to design customized optin forms, popups, and other types of lead capture forms. This means that you can target specific audiences by triggering the forms based on user behavior such as scrolling, time on page, and exit intent.

We’ve already mentioned that WordPress popup plugins are an extremely effective tool for generating leads, boosting sales, and growing your subscribers. They’re also great for reducing checkout abandonment.

What to Look for in a WordPress Popup Plugin

Because there are so many popup plugins for WordPress available, you’ll want to consider a few key elements before choosing one for your site. We highly recommend basing your decision on the following:

• Ease of use
• Supports integrations with other WordPress plugins
• Popup form templates
• Popup form builder
• Offers different campaign types
• Customizable triggers

Most importantly, you’ll want to ensure that you’re not overwhelming your users while they’re on your site. This means that selecting a popup plugin that allows you to control when the popups are activated is crucial.

Best WordPress Popup Plugins Compared

Below is a quick side-by-side comparison of the top WordPress popup plugins to give you an idea of the pros and cons of each plugin before we dive deeper into the reviews.

Plugin	Price	Pros	Cons
OptinMonster	$9/mo. (billed annually)	✓ Exit Intent Technology ✓ Advanced Targeting ✓ Easy to use	✕No free version
TrustPulse	$5/mo. (billed annually)	✓ Real time event tracking ✓ Easy to setup ✓ Smart Targeting	✕Limited sessions
ThriveLeads	$99/yr.	✓ Analytics	✕Difficult setup
HubSpot	Free	✓ Free	✕Limited email templates
Popup Maker	Free or $87/yr.	✓ Free ✓ Click-based triggers	✕No free analytics ✕No free exit intent popups
UserFeedback	Free or $49.50/yr.	✓ Smart Targeting ✓ Analytics	✕ Limited Free Version
Elementor Pro	$59/yr.	✓Good for Elementor page builder users	✕No analytics ✕No tracking
Sumo	Free or $39/mo.	✓ Pre-made templates ✓ User-friendly dashboard Reporting	✕Traffic limit
Icegram Engage	Free or $129/yr.	✓ Free	✕No drag and drop popup builder ✕Exit intent feature is not free ✕Targeting feature is not free

Which is the Best WordPress Popup Plugin?

Now that you’ve had a chance to get a general understanding of the pricing, pros, and cons of the top popup plugins available, let’s explore each of them further.

In this Article

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a powerful conversion optimization toolkit that is used on over one million sites to create high-converting popups, announcement bars, floating bars, spin a wheel, and more with smart targeting and personalization.

Its advanced Exit-Intent® technology, combined with several other features, make it the best popup plugin available.

Using OptinMonster, you can create tons of different types of popups that can be used everywhere on your site. As a result, you can turn visitors into subscribers and paying customers.

One of the best parts about OptinMonster is that it’s a SaaS service (Software as a Service), which makes it possible for you to use one account on multiple sites.

From the dashboard, you can choose from tons of campaign types depending on your needs and then use the plugin’s drag and drop builder to customize your popup.

The plugin’s user-friendly drag and drop builder features blocks that let you customize all of the elements of your popup without having to write a single line of code.

You can even edit the popup’s display settings to control when campaigns are activated on your site.

OptinMonster also includes the following features:

• Easy to use: The drag and drop builder allows simple setup and customization.
• Advanced Targeting: Features page level targeting in addition to advanced display rules like referrer detection, geolocation, and more.
• Campaigns: Create popup campaigns for lightbox popups, floating notification bars, countdown timers, content lockers, full screen welcome mats, and slide-in scroll boxes.
• Exit Intent Technology: Detects a user’s mouse behavior and shows them a targeted message as they are leaving.
• And more…

Pricing: Starts at $9/mo. (billed annually).

2. TrustPulse

Social proof is an up-and-coming way to gain the trust of your visitors, resulting in more sales and subscribers.

With TrustPulse, the best social proof app available, you can show user activity and purchases in real time via popup notifications on your site to help encourage other users to complete their transactions.

The app allows you to easily select your campaign type, design and customize your popup notification, and configure its display settings all from the dashboard.

Additional features of TrustPulse include:

• Real-Time Event Tracking: Show a live stream of any action on your site including purchases, demo registrations, and enewsletter signups.
• “On Fire” Notifications: Show the number of people who have taken action on your site within a given timeframe.
• Easy setup: Easily connect your WordPress site to your TrustPulse account.
• Smart Targeting: Control when and to whom you show your social proof notifications.

Pricing: Starts at $5/mo. (billed annually).

3. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a lead generation popup plugin for WordPress developed by the WordPress theme company, Thrive Themes.

Thrive Leads lets you design popups and optin forms directly from your WordPress admin dashboard to help grow your email list.

Thrive Leads features include:

• Drag and Drop Editor: Create the perfect popup form in minutes.
• Advanced Targeting: Display relevant, targeted offers for your visitors based on posts, categories, tags and more. 
• Analytics: Get actionable reporting so you can see where your most valuable traffic is coming from.

Pricing: You can get Thrive Leads as part of the Thrive Themes Suite for $299/yr. or just the standalone plugin for $99.00/yr.

4. HubSpot

As part of its Marketing Hub software, HubSpot offers its own WordPress plugin that lets you create popups and other types of forms to generate leads.

In the HubSpot dashboard, you can use the plugin’s intuitive drag and drop builder to design popup forms for your WordPress site in minutes.

HubSpot also includes tools for you to implement live chat, CRM (contact management), email marketing, and analytics on your site.

Pricing: Free

5. Popup Maker

Popup Maker is another free popup plugin for WordPress with over 700,000 active installations.

The plugin offers several different campaign types and ways to display your popup forms on your site. It lets you create your popup form directly in the WordPress admin dashboard.

Additional features of Popup Maker include:

• Triggers: You can add click-based triggers to your navigation menu, buttons, sidebars, images, sidebars, and more.
• Form builder integration: Integrate your popups seamlessly with popular contact form plugins like WPForms.

Pricing: Free. You can also get access to the Exit Intent feature by purchasing the most expensive premium plan, which costs $247/yr.

6. UserFeedback

UserFeedback is a popup plugin for WordPress that lets you collect feedback from your website visitors in real-time.

It offers 20+ popup templates including website feedback, satisfaction surveys, and post purchase reviews, to name a few.

The plugin’s setup is a breeze, allowing you to have your popups up and running on your site in minutes.

Additional features of Userfeedback include:

• Custom fields: Ask multiple-choice questions, free form questions, email capture, star ratings, Net Promotor score, and more by adding custom fields.
• Smart Targeting: Run surveys or other popups on specific pages or posts.
• Popup Scheduling: Schedule popup forms to display during a specified timeframe.
• And more…

Pricing: Starts at $49.50/yr. There’s also a free version of UserFeedback.

7. Elementor Pro

Elementor Pro is a well-known page builder plugin for WordPress that also features popup building capabilities.

It’s best suited for those looking for a lot of design options for their popup forms in addition to a visual page and popup builder that is easy to use.

Similar to OptinMonster, the plugin includes a ton of pre-built popup form templates for you to choose from to create popups in minutes.

Pricing: Elementor Pro starts at $59/yr.

8. Sumo

Sumo is a powerful plugin for WordPress that helps you grow your email lists, boost conversions, and gain more social media followers with timed popups across your site.

Similarly to OptinMonster, Sumo is a standalone solution that offers several different types of popup forms to meet your specific needs. It allows you to create, customize, and publish popup forms directly from its user-friendly dashboard.

One of the best parts about Sumo is that it also provides charts and graphs that give you weekly and monthly reporting insights so you can see how your popups are performing.

While the free version lets you create forms, you’ll need to purchase the premium version if you want to customize your forms based on where your visitors come from. In addition, the pre-made popup form templates are also only available with the premium version of the plugin.

Pricing: Free or $39/mo. for the premium version.

9. Icegram Engage

Icegram Engage is a popup plugin for WordPress that lets you create popups, banners, exit trigger messages and more directly from your WordPress admin dashboard.

While the plugin offers a free version, you’ll need to purchase a premium plan to get additional features such as exit intent targeting, user behavior targeting, and reports.

One thing to note is the plugin does not offer a drag and drop form builder, which makes its interface challenging to use.

Pricing: Free. The least expensive premium plan costs $129/yr.

Which is the Best Popup Plugin for WordPress?

After comparing each of these WordPress popup plugins, we’ve determined that OptinMonster is hands down the best solution to boost conversions and generate leads.

OptinMonster offers tons of different campaign types, pre-made popup form templates, and a user-friendly interface.

Its Exit Intent technology and advanced targeting features provide you with all the necessary capabilities to convert your visitors into customers and subscribers without overwhelming them while they’re on your site.

There you have it!

We hope this article has helped you find the perfect WordPress popup plugin to help you convert and monetize the traffic on your site.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out how to reduce cart abandonment using an exit intent popup.

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