Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. ConvertKit

Bronto is a very professional application in the email marketing use space. It has a straightforward and simple interface but it is still a powerful and customizable experience. Most tasks are easy, and you can usually find a way to do things outside the norm with ease. It is a good platform for users new to the email marketing world but grows with their needs and abilities.

Incentivized

For us, it started with a smaller use case of captured leads, nurture them overtime to convert for services. Later we expanded our use case and started using integrations and automations to improve the conversions and automate some tasks as well. Based on that I totally feel someone who is creator and trying to diversify the income across building audience, community, paid Newsletter etc will suits the best. If you are just using it for email campaigns then it might not justify the price tag considering there are other cheaper alternatives that's available in the market.

Incentivized

• Chat support. They are the professionals behind those keyboards. Not asking someone else. Them. Right there. Get your answers fast and accurate.
• Detailed tracking information. Sends, delivered, clicks, conversions. Anything and everything you want to know about how your emails are doing is tracked. I keep my own reporting separate in an excel sheet, but they have great reporting.
• Automated messaging rules. Set and forget emails that hit the customer with the right information exactly when needed. The workflows allow for some REALLY cool & complex set ups too.

Incentivized

• Emails landing in subscribers inbox.
• Free mailing address that customers can use.
• Robust tagging system for managing funnels and targeting users with optimized emails.
• Broad integrations available for other platforms and optin form plugins.

Incentivized

• Reporting has been much improved in the last 12 months but still has room to improve. Often the view and format of reports varies depending on where you are looking at the data.
• Although the feature IS coming, we have been looking for transactional messaging for our CRM since we signed with Bronto. Given we use Netsuite, who owns Bronto, we expected this feature much sooner.
• More real-time and personalized content within Bronto would be welcomed.

Incentivized

• When I first started using ConvertKit, I found it hard to create a landing page. I am pretty technical but when I had to customize my page using HTML, I got lost. I thought I could get up and running within an hour (build the page, create the list, and set up automation), but I soon realized I had to upgrade to use automation and setting up took me more than 3 hours. The learning curve had me stuck. I got frustrated and reached out to support.
• ConvertKit is not for a non-tech person. There are not enough templates to get up and running within an hour.
• ConvertKit is simply email marketing and landing pages for list building. It could offer a little more.
• The analytics can be a bit more in depth.

Incentivized

As with anything, it's not perfect but it's more than suitable for our needs. I'd like to see continued growth and updates from Bronto and I'm excited to see what they have planned for their users down the road. Our clients (and my superiors) have been very happy with the performance of the software so far. It's going to be a great year for us

Incentivized

Usability is great. Very intuitive drag-and-drip metaphor for building automations. And the UI is very user-centric. It constantly prompts you with suggestions and next steps such that you hardly have to refer to the (excellent) documentation.

Can be summed up in three words that 'It just Works'. Crafted for creators and artists in mind, it offers all they need for start building up list. Free tier is really a good move to test out stuff. I am staying with them considering their good email delivery and simple interface and easy integration with our website software. WYSIYG Editor, Standard reporting but not deep level analytics gives all the basic tools needed to support the business.

Incentivized

I never experienced any downtime.

No issues.

They used to be good, but they've evolved into a monolithic bureaucratic nightmare after the Netsuite / Oracle acquisition. Can't talk to anyone that actually knows the system and support tickets seem to go days or weeks without responses and resolution.

Incentivized

They have lots of videos on list importing / segmentation / report customization etc. when you sign on they give a link to online tutorials and documentation which is very helpful. They have very helpful PDFs on how to import / set up platform

Easy to set up.

Bronto Marketing Platform is much more of an enterprise solution than I believe many of these other options are within the email marketing campaign world. Their amount of features, data collection, and management and even help support was impressive. This was especially true during our launch efforts with the initial release of using their tool. If budget costs could be a concern, then you can be successful with some of the smaller options available. Still, the Bronto Marketing Platform makes it pretty easy to define some exact costs and actual ROI for improving your email campaign efforts that can help justify the expense of the tool above others.

Incentivized

The other products I have used are not available on TrustRadius. I used ConvertKit before I used these other products because I need an all in one platform.

Incentivized

• Our email list was aging, and based on Bronto recommendations to clean out our list, we were able to increase our average open rate from 21% to 28% over the course of 12 months.
• We were able to increase our list size by about 25% over the course of 24 months by cleaning our lists and subsequently starting the pop-up manager on our site.
• We're able to maintain a healthy click rate- about 30%, with the straightforward template options in the WYSYWIG editor.

Incentivized

• Greatly limits the number of client questions we receive
• Improves our customer service
• Tracks the number of leads we get over a period of time

Incentivized