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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Customer.io

    Score9.1 out of 10
    Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
    Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and more through a visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io boasts users among over 5,300 companies, sending over 17 billion messages per year.

    $100

    per month

    Validity Engage

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/AValidity Engage is an email marketing platform for high-volume enterprise marketing teams. It covers competitor intelligence, contact validation, design and testing, deliverability, and live email monitoring.N/A
    Pricing
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsEssentials: For startups and small teams engaging customers on their mobile and web apps. - Up to 5,000 profiles*, Send Emails, Push, In-App, and SMS, Visual Workflow Builder, Segmentation, Two Workspaces, Email Support, Customer Community Premium: For high-growth companies looking for greater control over their messaging outcomes. - Everything in Essentials, Custom Data + Message Volume, Premium Product Features, Additional Workspaces, 90-day Onboarding Program, Premium Email & Chat Support, Managed Deliverability, Dedicated IPs, Parcel Pro Licenses, HIPAA Compliance Enterprise: For at-scale companies looking to create world-class customer experiences. - Everything in Premium, Managed Infrastructure*, Customer Success Manager, Quarterly Success Reviews, Technical Account Manager*, Audit Logging & Data Governance*, Parcel Business Licenses, Migration Support*, *Available by consultation.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Considered Both Products
    Customer.io
    Chose Customer.io
    Customer is much more flexible and enables a greater amount of personalization.
    Incentivized
    Validity
    Chose Validity Engage
    I have not used any product like Litmus before. Litmus has been our primary source for proofs.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    99%
    Would buy again
    295 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    215 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    296 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    175 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    176 Answers
    Features
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Email & Online Marketing
    Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Customer.io and Validity Engage
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Validity Engage
    6.8
    378 Ratings
    17% below category average
    WYSIWYG email editor00 Ratings9.260 Ratings
    Dynamic content00 Ratings8.760 Ratings
    Ability to test dynamic content00 Ratings8.1240 Ratings
    Landing pages00 Ratings2.64 Ratings
    A/B testing00 Ratings6.511 Ratings
    Mobile optimization00 Ratings9.4353 Ratings
    Email deliverability reporting00 Ratings8.6274 Ratings
    List management00 Ratings7.08 Ratings
    Triggered drip sequences00 Ratings1.02 Ratings
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Customer.io and Validity Engage
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Validity Engage
    7.1
    257 Ratings
    7% below category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings7.229 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings7.5254 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings6.5182 Ratings
    Pre-Send Testing
    Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Customer.io and Validity Engage
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Validity Engage
    8.5
    358 Ratings
    4% above category average
    URL Validation00 Ratings9.3270 Ratings
    Link Tracking00 Ratings9.2235 Ratings
    Image Validation00 Ratings7.65 Ratings
    Inbox Display00 Ratings8.56 Ratings
    Email Accessibility Tools00 Ratings6.73 Ratings
    Spelling and Grammar Check00 Ratings7.31 Ratings
    Spam Testing00 Ratings9.5269 Ratings
    Email Previews00 Ratings9.6355 Ratings
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    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Small Businesses
    Simplify360
    Score7.8 out of 10
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    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Braze
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Campaign Monitor by Marigold
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP Service Cloud
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Emma by Marigold
    Score8.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (20 ratings)
    9.2
    (430 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (32 ratings)
    Usability
    9.2
    (12 ratings)
    7.9
    (22 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.6
    (8 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (8 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    2.1
    (13 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    3.9
    (7 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.0
    (8 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    3.6
    (5 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.5
    (4 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Customer.ioValidity Engage
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Customer.io
    Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    Proofing your emails is necessary. This is a tool that allows you to see how your email not only renders on multiple devices but how it performs. Some email building platforms will tell you their drag and drop templates are ready to go, however they stop short of analyzing accessibility, checking links, load speed among other things. I've also experienced drag and drop template issues as new email clients are released. Litmus provides peace of mind that you did your due diligence on crafting your email. While Litmus does provide some reporting you will not see every typical analytic an email report offers. However, you can use your Litmus data to enhance your email reports which in turn creates a robust view of email performance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Customer.io
    • Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
    • Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
    • We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
    • Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
    • Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
    • Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
    • We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    • We haven’t explored the personalization features in depth yet, aside from using the Add-to-Calendar option, but we're excited to dig in further. Tools like live polls offer an easy way to boost engagement in our product marketing emails, and we see a lot of potential in using these templates to enhance personalization moving forward.
    • Litmus’ continuing education resources have been really helpful. I recently read an article on email deliverability that offered practical insights my team can apply moving forward. I especially appreciate how Litmus uses real examples and stats from the brands they work with—it makes the content feel actionable and relevant.
    • Online Training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Customer.io
    • Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
    • Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
    • Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.
    Read full review
    Validity
    • I've not seen many limitations but I have noticed that sometimes emails sent from our CRM take too long to land in Litmus, or sometimes don't land at all.
    • As a beginner it was quite difficult for me to make my way around the platform - I thought "Create new" CTA was actually creating something new, maybe "Import from CRM" would have been more understandable. There were a few others but I remember this one.
    • In the Emails section, whenever I hover over an email, I want to be able to copy the subject line instead of getting the different CTAs appear intrusively (Summary, Builder, Previews & QA, Proof, Analytics, Monitor) - maybe these could appear on the bottom of the textbox, instead of them being imposed on top?
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    It's one the best tools that we've found for this type of tool but we would like some additional features like spell check so if there's a platform that features that with everything else Litmus has, then we'd potentially look to move over to that platform instead. However, we are overall pretty help with the platform
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Customer.io
    Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Customer.io
    My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    Absolutely fantastic support. It runs circles around the competition. They regularly reach out and chat, even if it's just to see if there's any issues we need to discuss. They clearly want the business and don't forget you once you sign the contract which is an issue with other similar services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    It was very informative one on one session for me. I was able to use Litmus without any issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    It has all the required information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Customer.io
    Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    This is not applicable to my role as I have used Litmus to test emails since I have started. Because of the ease of use, timeliness, consistent quality, and affordability that Litmus offers, I haven't found the need to look at similar products or organizations. If all of these features continue to stay strong, I don't plan on changing providers
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Validity
    With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Customer.io
    • Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
    • Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
    • Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Validity
    • Litmus saves our team so much time by making the QA and email review process so much easier, streamlined, and efficient.
    • We often send out campaigns out to thousands of members, and Litmus gives us the assurance and peace of mind that everything is working as it should before it gets sent out.
    • Decreases the number of email review cycles we go through.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Customer.io Screenshots

    Screenshot of data-driven or manual segments that can be created in the no-code builder for recipient lists, campaign triggers, filters, and conversion goals.Screenshot of the code editor for email, that helps navigate code and iterate.Screenshot of account performance, visible at a glance from the Dashboard view.Screenshot of drag and drop messages, time delays, and branches where desired, to build cross-channel campaigns.Screenshot of triggered campaigns based on forms submissions, customer attributes, customer actions, and dates.Screenshot of localization for global audiences. One message can be delivered in multiple languages.

    Validity Engage Screenshots

    Screenshot of Litmus Personalize Essentials, with live polls to give subscribers a voice and drive email engagement.Screenshot of Litmus Email Guardian, featuring 24/7 link monitoring to safeguard emails.Screenshot of Litmus' integrated insights reports, that can automatically combine metrics from Salesforce Marketing Cloud with subscriber engagement insights from Litmus.Screenshot of campaign preview, available in 100+ popular email clientsScreenshot of Litmus' inbox previewing and feedback tools, that help users to spot and fix issues early.