The 7 Best Hello Bar Alternatives That I Recommend

Looking for the best Hello Bar alternatives to build popups, banners, and opt-in messages on your website? You’ve come to the right place. In this post, I’ll consider the best popup-building tools to improve your conversion rates and transform both new and returning visitors into loyal subscribers and customers.

My top three contenders include:

• OptinMonster
• HubSpot Marketing Hub
• Elementor

Let’s unpack them below.

My Personal Top 3 Alternatives to Hello Bar

Here are my top three picks for the best form creation platforms that give Hello Bar a run for its money:

Best Overall	Best for Large Enterprises	Best for WordPress Users
Pricing: $7-$49/month	Pricing: $800-$3,600/month	Pricing: $4.99-$16.99/month
What I personally like: Noteworthy branding, affordable pricing tiers, seamless third-party integration, extensive popup customization options, robust documentation.	What I personally like: Unparalleled amount of form creation features, workflow and list criteria options, A/B testing, responsive layouts, omnichannel marketing, advanced segmentation and automation.	What I personally like: Extensive popup triggers, dynamic campaign logic, intuitive UI, rapid form iteration, and seamless WordPress integration.

How I Chose These Hello Bar Alternatives

Lead generation tools have a unique set of goals that straddle several different pain points: to identify potential buyers, to get them to share their information with your business, and to extend an offer when the time for conversion is just right.

Considering these factors, a strong lead generation tool should:

• Offer effective targeting and data segmentation abilities to deliver encouraging messages to the right audience, at the right time.
• Have a user-friendly interface that allows both experienced and rookie users to create, edit, and launch campaigns without unnecessary roadblocks preventing their creativity.
• Integrate well with other platforms, APIs, and SKDs to ensure seamless data syncing across multiple external systems and reduce the margin of error in new or ongoing marketing strategies.
• Support a wide range of lead capture forms, including popups, banners, chatbots, slide-ins, exit intent forms, discount boxes, countdown timers, and scroll-based triggers to engage audiences according to their on-page behaviors.
• Be cost-effective and work well at scale, offering free plans, tryout periods, and flexible pricing tiers to accommodate a variety of businesses of different sizes and headcounts.

Top 7 Vetted Hello Bar Alternatives

Hello Bar is a serviceable tool for building and displaying popups, static bars, site-wide banners, and exit-intent forms, but it lacks in other areas such as customization, user targeting, and cross-platform integration.

Here are seven carefully vetted alternatives to offset Hello Bar’s limitations and open up new opportunities for generating leads and driving sales.

1. OptinMonster (Best Overall)

Pricing:

• OptinMonster’s Basic plan starts at $7/month and includes 2,500 pageviews, unlimited campaigns, and the tool’s signature Lightbox Popups (plus a 60% discount for the first 12 months).
• With this pricing model, each user effectively gets up to seven months of OptinMonster’s services free of charge.

What I personally LIKE about OptinMonster:

• It features seamless integration with today’s popular content management systems (CMSs) and website builders, such as WordPress, Shopify, Zapier, and HubSpot. You can check if OptinMonster supports a specific platform integration via its integration checker tool.
• The platform provides extensive customization options, allowing users to build detailed opt-in forms, exit-intent popups, offer countdowns, and targeted forms, rounded off with robust configuration, design, and audience behavior settings.
• It allows for both complex and simple solutions through forms, with custom paths that prevent overwhelming your audience with unnecessary popups after they accept or deny converting.

What I personally DISLIKE about OptinMonster:

• The tool’s UI leans a bit more on the advanced side, with a complex set of options that new users might find too much on their first try. Advanced marketers and campaign managers should have zero issues navigating OptinMonster’s user interface.
• Its higher-tier pricing might dissuade small businesses and individual users from taking the platform’s additional features for a spin.
• Sometimes, occasional glitches may result in unexpected outcomes, but nothing that can’t be fixed through customer support, or, if you don’t mind troubleshooting, by yourself.

Despite mirroring a certain protagonist plucked straight out of the mobile gaming franchise Cut the Rope, OptinMonster is a serious platform packed with a powerful set of lead generation features. 

For example, its lightbox popup feature allows users to create, edit, and rearrange a variety of pre-made popup cards, with added options to filter and move them to meet specific campaign goals. This is further complemented by the platform’s drag-and-drop builder, which makes it intuitive to control both the appearance and behavior of popups as visitors interact with them.

On top of its core features, OptinMonster has an expansive integration library with some of the major marketing platforms like BigCommerce, Zapier, and Webhook, as well as smaller clients such as Bento, Omnisend, and EmailOctopus. To top it off, OptinMonster also supports seamless integration with any custom-built HTML websites that stick to basic web design best practices.

Lastly, OptinMonster provides robust documentation, complete with annotated screenshots and straightforward explanations to guide users through common setbacks and help troubleshoot new scenarios as they happen.

Ideal user base: Ecommerce stores, digital marketers, and website owners can greatly benefit from OptinMonster’s lead generation capabilities, which enable the creation of eye-catching popups and banners across a wide range of platforms and devices. Its use cases extend both to small teams and mid-level enterprises aiming to supercharge their digital campaigns through effective targeting, results-driven forms, and customizable opt-in solutions.

2. HubSpot Marketing Hub (Best for Enterprise-Level Marketing Solutions)

Pricing:

• HubSpot organizes its paid tiers into six categories: Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce. If you’re strictly looking for popup creation capabilities, it’s best to choose between the Marketing or Content plans, as the other tiers have additional features you probably won’t be using.
• The platform’s Professional plan within the Marketing product category starts at $800/month, and it includes three core seats, teams, marketing SMS, and omnichannel marketing automation, among other features.
• Conversely, its Professional plan, nested under the Content product category, starts at $450/month and it comes with three core seats, content embed features, A/B testing, memberships, case studies, and more.

What I personally LIKE about HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise users can gain access to workflows, list criteria, and contact filters through form submissions, unlocking advanced segmentation and automation options.
• Popups, forms, and sticky banners can be customized in multiple creative ways, including with activation triggers (when the form will show up on the page), display frequency (how often the form reappears after a dismissal), and scheduling (the specific time when the form appears or disappears from the page).
• It offers responsive layouts and the ability to hide CTAs or banners on small screens, optimizing the experience for users browsing your site on a mobile or tablet device.

What I personally DISLIKE about HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• It’s considerably more complex compared to the other tools on this list, presenting a serious learning curve due to its depth and extensive range of popup and banner-creation options. In fact, it can be fairly easy for new users to get lost in HubSpot’s multiple paid tiers, overwhelming feature set, and maze-like user interface (seasoned marketers may be less prone to UI- and UX-related drawbacks).
• As of July 2024, the old HubSpot popup tool has been sunset in favor of the new CTA tool. Because of this, users may be unsure where to find the new feature or how to create new popups.
• The tool has a limited ability to capture submissions from non-HubSpot forms, its success being highly dependent on technical factors such as iframe presence, JavaScript events, or form structure.

Between the HubSpot Marketing and Content Hubs, the platform presents robust popup, banner, and CTA creation capabilities, aimed to help both individual site owners and marketing teams drive engagement across HubSpot-hosted and external websites alike. Following the retirement of HubSpot’s legacy popup tool back in July 2024, users can now use the CTA creation tool instead—a move that serves both as a boon and a detriment to HubSpot’s brand.

For instance, users who’ve built their popup boxes using the old popup tool can edit, delete, and unpublish their existing popups, but they can no longer create new popups. So, if a specific form has a high conversion rate, you can no longer improve it to reflect the evolving behavior of online users. The legacy tool has been replaced with HubSpot’s new CTA builder, which supports the creation of sticky banners, customized popup boxes, and slide-in CTAs in a wide range of varieties and styles. These new forms can be optimized with additional design elements such as custom text, countdown timers, images, and layout adjustments for an optimal user experience. All forms are responsive and mobile-friendly.

Ideal user base: HubSpot Marketing Hub’s features are well-suited for large-market businesses, proven enterprises, and organizations focused on lead generation through personalized and compelling messaging at scale. Companies that want to automate workflows, seamlessly track user behavior analytics, and tightly monitor form submissions will greatly benefit from HubSpot’s all-encompassing, multi-pronged digital marketing offering.

3. Elementor Website Builder (Best for WordPress Users)

Pricing:

• The Elementor Website Builder plugin for WordPress is free, but its popup-building features are only available in the paid version (Advanced Solo and above).
• To get the popup builder, you must subscribe to the Advanced Solo, Advanced, or Expert plan (all paid plans fall under Elementor Pro), which start at $6.99/month, $8.25/month, and $16.99/month, respectively. The Essential version is $4.99/month, but it omits the popup builder, similarly to the software’s free offering through the WordPress plugin store.

What I personally LIKE about Elementor Website Builder:

• Popups can be activated by a large choice of user actions, including scrolling, page load, clicks, exit intent, and inactivity, giving you full control over how, when, and where they appear.
• Popups can be triggered manually through links, selectors, or after-form submissions, or dynamically via advanced triggers and pre-set campaign logic.
• Popup creation is managed through the Elementor builder interface, allowing users to easily select individual form elements via its intuitive drag-and-drop UI or choose a template from the tool’s vast library for rapid iteration and customization.

What I personally DISLIKE about Elementor Website Builder:

• The popup builder is only available to paid users via one of the Elementor Pro plans (Advanced Solo, Advanced, Expert), limiting its use-cases for users on the free plan.
• Elementor’s popup module lacks A/B testing or in-house analytics, requiring additional plugins to fill the gaps where the tool falters.
• Given the vast ecosystem of WordPress themes, plugins, and add-ons, some Elementor forms might appear misaligned on a select number of themes or stop functioning altogether on heavily modified websites.

Nested within the Elementor Website Builder plugin, the Elementor Popup Builder tool is a compact, powerful, and reliable module for collecting visitor data in a non-intrusive way. It marries form and function into what many would consider the first-and-only choice for WordPress users, enabling full control over the content, design, and layout of each individual form. You can create the forms from scratch or customize an existing template from the vast Elementor library.

The way popups show up can be controlled through three main components: triggers, conditions, and rules. Triggers specify the exact user action that activates the popup, conditions define on which pages or posts the popup will appear, while advanced rules further refine the popup’s behavior, such as its frequency of display, which device it targets, and whether it shows or not for logged-in users. Plus, popups can be manually activated through custom CSS selectors or linked elements, enabling an additional level of flexibility in your campaigns.

Ideal user base: Elementor Website Builder is specifically engineered with the WordPress user in mind, offering extensive form, banner, and popup functionalities to address most marketing-related individual and team needs across a variety of websites and devices. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, seamless widget integration, and WordPress-centric capabilities make Elementor the tool of choice for announcement, promotion, and special deal production, resulting, ideally, in a one-of-a-kind, reliable lead capture performance.

4. Privy (Best for Shopify Stores)

Pricing:

• Privy offers a 15-day free trial with a limit of up to 100 emails per day. There’s also a separate free plan that includes up to 100 email contacts, unlimited popups, and access to all popup types. However, you’ll have to check the Shopify app store or Privy’s homepage occasionally to catch the deal. No credit card or annual plan subscriptions are required to activate either the free trial or the free plan.
• The paid plans include Basic Convert at $12/ month, which bases the price on site monthly traffic, Convert at $24/month, which allows up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, Starter at $30/month with unlimited email sends, and Growth at $45/month which comes bundled with additional SMS contacts to U.S. and Canadian numbers. All paid plans are upgradable to accommodate higher pageviews and a planned or sudden increase in web traffic.

What I personally LIKE about Privy:

• Privy’s UI is straightforward and very simple to navigate, while its library has a wide range of pre-made templates that make using the tool akin to a productive walk in the park. Users can create and edit popups quickly or revert any unwanted changes if things aren’t going according to plan.
• The platform combines SMS, popup, and email marketing in a single environment, removing the need for multiple tools or plugins to achieve your goals.
• The platform offers excellent customer support, with live chat, personalized Zoom calls, and dedicated success managers (available after meeting or exceeding a certain criterion) who provide professional assistance when needed.

What I personally DISLIKE about Privy:

• Using too many popups, or having them configured in certain ways, can have a negative impact on your site’s performance and speed.
• While the popup selection is broad and plentiful, some users may find the designs stylistically contained, potentially leading to FOMO and a desire to explore other options.
• Occasional glitches or bugs may prove mildly annoying at best, and severely limiting in worst-case scenarios to your overarching conversion strategy. However, these issues are typically resolved with the aid of Privy’s support team.

Privy comes packed with an incredible range of popup display options given for a relatively new player on the market, including sticky banners, promotional overlays, and flyouts. These can be activated by various user actions such as time on page, scrolling, or exit intent. Each element is easy to create, while also being fully customizable—even if it’s selected from the existing template library. Given its intuitive setup and zero-code paradigm, the platform is equally accessible to non-technical users.

Additionally, Privy’s popup module integrates well with external email service providers, allowing users to build a seamless workflow from a single point of engagement.

Lastly, its customer support is extremely helpful, with team members working around the clock to provide stellar service to its customers irrespective of the amount or severity of the issues they may be facing.

Ideal user base: Privy is ideally suited to meet the needs of ecommerce businesses, with a strong emphasis on Shopify stores. This all-in-one solution supports lead capture, reduces cart abandonment, and enables automated SMS and email marketing, ticking all the right boxes for website owners and marketing teams alike. It’s a strong contender for small to mid-sized businesses to steadily grow their customer lists and create lasting impressions via surgically targeted campaigns.

5. Plerdy (Best for Users on a Budget)

Pricing:

• Plerdy offers a Free Forever plan, after which users can purchase the popup creation feature or choose to buy individual modules as separate add-ons.
• The platform’s paid plans include Startup at $21/month, Scale at $42/month, and Thrive at the sum total of $70/month, with each tier offering different popup display limits depending on the chosen plan.

What I personally LIKE about Plerdy:

• It supports Google Search Console (GSC) integration, cross-domain tracking, as well as session recordings categorized by click types.
• Leveraging its extended CRO analytics suite, Plerdy users can combine lead generation forms with heatmaps, conversion tracking, and session replays for a more complete picture of visitor behavior on their website.
• The SaaS platform offers more than 25 popup customization options, opening the doors for an extensive form iteration in terms of feedback collection and targeted audience messaging.

What I personally DISLIKE about Plerdy:

• Some users may encounter occasional performance hiccups, although these issues often depend on the number of forms and the specific configuration of your Plerdy account.
• While supporting A/B testing, Plerdy currently doesn’t support multivariate testing.
• It’s a nice problem to have, but Plerdy’s dashboard can feel a tad much to new users at first. The initial UI anxiety typically disappears after a few trial rounds.

Plerdy markets itself as an intriguing offering, straddling three crucial lines: budget-friendliness, effective functionality, and seamless integration with external platforms. The first point is where the tool eclipses its immediate competition, offering a plan that’s forever free—but with the added benefit of purchasing additional capabilities if and when required. This makes it a tempting option for individuals and teams working on limited funding, which, truthfully, includes most startups and independent bloggers.

In terms of core capabilities, Plerdy performs equally as well as its direct competitors. You can easily create surveys, sticky banners, one-click order forms, and callback requests via its drag-and-drop editor. The popup module also supports a variety of user activation triggers, including exit intent, scroll depth, and time delays, freeing up marketers to deliver critical messages at the right time.

Lastly, Plerdy integrates smoothly with Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) events, which is one more reason to take it for a spin if you’re already using either of these two platforms.

Ideal user base: Given that it’s free forever and it allows for separate feature purchases without affecting your overall bottom line, Plerdy is an excellent choice for beginner marketers, individual website owners, and budget-aware startups looking to maximize engagement without breaking the bank.

6. Landingi (Best for Pre-Made Popup Templates)

Pricing:

• The platform offers a free plan, but it doesn’t include the full form creation capabilities, and it also limits your use cases by the amount of traffic you’re getting on your website (100 visits monthly).
• To get access to Landingi’s From Builder feature, you’ll need to subscribe to one of its paid plans, including Lite at $24/month, Professional at $57/month, or Enterprise at $1,150/month.

What I personally LIKE about Landingi:

• Its no-code setup makes it an ideal choice for non-technical users.
• It features seamless integration with today’s popular content management systems (CMSs) and website builders, some of which include WordPress, WooCommerce, HubSpot, Kissmetrics, and certain Shopify plugins. You can check the full Landingi integration list here.
• The tool offers an extensive range of popup and banner customization templates to accomplish different campaign goals.

What I personally DISLIKE about Landingi:

• Small quirks on the builder side may cause the final result to look different on the front end.
• Users have to create their mobile forms separately, which can lead to hiccups like layout inconsistencies and difficulties with getting the right side padding dimensions on the page.
• You can’t group similar popups, forms, and CTAs into separate folders, making it difficult to organize everything—especially if you’re running multiple campaigns at the same time.

As a viable Hello Bar alternative, Landingi offers a massive selection of popup templates for every occasion under the proverbial sun (over 400!), including discounts, coupons, sales, birthday promotions, subscription forms, and exit intent offers. It also supports A/B testing and seamless integration with over 150 external marketing tools. Unfortunately, Landingi lacks advanced analytics capabilities. For that, you’ll have to rely on Google Analytics 4 (even at GA4’s current state) or another platform for deeper insights.

Overall, Landingi is a solid contender in the CRO and lead generation environment, positioning itself as a well-rounded and extremely capable platform to boost your campaigns, speed up your efforts, and accelerate your digital marketing strategy beyond starting expectations.

Ideal user base: Landingi is the optimal popup SaaS for solo bloggers, medium-sized organizations, and the occasional enterprise seeking to explore an extensive range of form creation options through the platform’s insanely rich template library.

7. Poptin (Best for Beginner Marketers)

Pricing:

• It has a free plan that supports a single domain, up to 1,000 visitors per month, and unlimited popup forms (playfully referred to as “poptins”).
• The tool’s paid tiers include Basic, Pro, and Agency, billed at $20, $47, and $95/month, respectively.

What I personally LIKE about Poptin:

• It provides a wide array of advanced targeting and trigger options, including by exit intent, time delay, on-click, traffic source, countries, time and date, specific website pages, new and returning visitors, and scrolling percentage.
• The tool integrates well with existing popular digital marketing platforms, including Zapier, SendGrid, and Brevo.
• It boasts a timely, responsive, and proficient support team available to users across both free and paid plans.

What I personally DISLIKE about Poptin:

• While fairly intuitive to use, Poptin could definitely benefit from more detailed and comprehensive guides and tutorials.
• Minor UI quirks may disrupt your workflow on a few occasions, but nothing that can’t be fixed by contacting customer support.
• Its simplicity doubles as a drawback for power users and large organizations looking for a greater level of popup adaptability and control, such as granular analytics or more detailed filtering options.

Poptin packs a ton of useful CRO and lead generation features in the free plan, aided by an intuitive codeless editor, which makes it easy for non-technical users to give it a try. In addition to basic forms like notification bars and video popups, Poptin offers gamified popups in the shape of spin-the-wheel carousels, scratch cards, and gift popups. These are known to increase page-level interactivity while improving your engagement levels with the incoming audience.

To top it off, Poptin’s advanced trigger feature is also included in the free plan. It allows you to produce unlimited popups to test how different visitors respond to your CTAs, helping reduce bounce rates and aiding in bringing dropped-off visitors back to the fold.

Lastly, with Poptin, you’ll get access to advanced analytics to track everything that’s going on behind the scenes, including popups views, visitor behavior, and conversions, completely removing the chance variable from the equation.

Ideal user base: Poptin is recommended for small businesses, beginner marketers, and emerging ecommerce shops looking for the digital equivalent of a Swiss Army knife at a reasonable price point. The software’s use cases extend to lead capture, boosting conversions, and reducing cart abandonment rates, all while creating stylish forms with the press of a button.

What’s the Best Hello Bar Alternative?

Currently, OptinMonster is the best Hello Bar contender by a mile. It’s quick to respond and easy to use, it offers an unparalleled amount of guides, tutorials, and documentation, it integrates seamlessly with most modern CRO and lead generation platforms (both big and small), and it does all that without blowing a cosmic-sized hole through your dedicated paying pocket.

It’s good for individual creators, small businesses, and large organizations in the hunt for a reliable and efficient form-building alternative, additionally fueled by its unique brand signature that makes OptinMonster easily recognizable across multiple audience segments and markets.