The number of people who are using email is estimated to balloon to 4.1 billion by the end of 2021, which is about half the global population. So many companies – if not all – are investing time, money and effort into email marketing. It is big for a reason because it is proven to be effective in driving click-throughs, building relationships, and increasing sales.

Who doesn’t want to be one of the firsts to know if a new product is released by their favorite brand? Wouldn’t you look forward to a 25% discount? Email marketing makes it easy for customers to keep track of the latest promos and offers, encouraging them to come back and increasing your customer return rate. 

There are now countless powerful email marketing solutions that can help you execute and achieve your business goals. The question is – which is best suited for your business needs and budget? In this article, we look into Kartra and AWeber. 

About Kartra

Kartra is a comprehensive all-in-one digital marketing software that can promote and help sell your products online. You can use it to launch products – both physical and digital, and content materials with its email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, analytics tagging, sales funnels, segmentation, calendar tools, capabilities, and many more features.

Kartra is an all-inclusive tool that will help you manage your business process from one centralized platform. With Kartra, there would be no extra need to outsource any other third-party tools and you can choose to eliminate the idea of hiring a physical team of web developers, designers, system integrators, as well as maybe even copywriters. 

Kartra houses everything you need to craft a thriving digital business. It is an ideal platform for small, medium as well as large-sized enterprises. It can be used both by an absolute novice or an expert marketer who manages multiple leads all at once.

Who is Kartra for?

If you run a small business or you are still planning to put up one, Kartra can help your business become bigger and better, as it is excellent in lead generation. If you want to establish and grow your number of loyal followers as well as capture new leads, you can easily promote your membership site with Kartra.

Additionally, if you want to focus on email marketing, lead capturing and building, creating landing pages, and blogging, using multiple tools can be overwhelming since you will need to pay for each feature and run them individually. Kartra gives the easiest and hassle-free way to improve your email list and even your audience engagement using a standalone software.

Kartra Features

Kartra houses powerful wide-ranging features and functionalities that will help you run your entire online business seamlessly.

• Kartra Email Marketing and Automation Tools
• Email Campaign Management
• WYSIWYG Email Editor
• Lead Notifications
• Lead Segmentation
• Marketing Automation
• Mobile Optimized Emails
• Personalization
• Product Configurator
• Real-Time Editing
• Refund Management
• Reporting/Analytics
• Abandoned Cart Saver
• Affiliate Tracking
• Analytics
• Analytics/ROI Tracking
• CRM
• Contact Import/Export
• Customizable CTAs
• Customizable Fields
• Discount and Coupon Management
• Responsive
• Segmentation
• Source Tracking
• Tax Management
• Templates
• Website Visitor Tracking
• Drag & Drop
• Drip Campaigns
• Dynamic Content
• Form Creation
• Landing Pages/Web Forms
• Lead Engagement
• Calendar Tools

About AWeber

AWeber is a renowned email marketing software, founded by software engineer Tom Kulzer in 1998. AWeber is an ideal tool for small business, offering basic yet powerful and affordable email marketing solutions, as well as excellent customer support. 

AWeber offers a wide range of useful features like a drag-and-drop email builder, reporting, data integration and storage, A/B testing and segmentation, pre-stocked images, and other essential tools that can help your business flourish and thrive. (READ: Everything you need to know about AWeber)

Who is AWeber for?

AWeber is ideal if you run a small business and you wish to have a plain and simple but affordable email marketing tool that also has outstanding customer support. AWeber is a solid platform choice also if you are willing to invest in a more vigorous email marketing tool that houses a powerful email marketing solution. Lastly, if you are a small-to-medium business owner who is looking for a cutting-edge email automation and in-built customer relations management (CRM).

AWeber Features

• Email deliverability tracking
• Email scheduling
• Email subscriber segmentation
• Follow-up autoresponder
• HTML email templates
• API
• Activity tracking
• Click-through tracking
• Contact database
• Customizable branding
• Manage subscribers
• Opt-in email marketing
• Subscriber management
• WYSIWYG editor
• Design management
• Drag & drop interface
• Email automation
• Email blog articles

(READ More: What is AWeber and how does it work?)

Pros and Cons

Now let’s see both platforms’ weaknesses and strengths to help you more in making a decision.

Kartra Pros

• Kartra is a complete marketing software that caters to solutions to your every marketing need.
• It has a simple yet very flexible drag-and-drop feature.
• The platform is very ideal for novices and startup businesses.
• Kartra is the best tool for any business regardless of size and shape.
• It houses one-of-a-kind features that easily work and integrate.
• The platform gives valuable money savings from merging various features onto a single platform.
• Kartra also provides a very responsive support team that will attend to all your queries 24/7.
• It has an intuitive and reliable video hosting capacity; meaning you don’t need to outsource another software dedicated to hosting your videos.
• Kartra also offers many videos that you could learn from.

Kartra Cons

• Kartra offers tons of features that’s why learning the entire platform might take some time to fully master it.
• The platform may be costly especially if you just newly launched your online business, but if you need various tools then Kartra is worth investing for.

Aweber Pros

• AWeber is way cheaper compared to competitors in the market.
• The platform comes with unlimited email lists and sends.
• It provides 24/7 customer support through live chat, phone, and email.

Aweber Cons

• AWeber is not as tough as many of its competitors that provide email marketing solutions.
• The automation functionality of Aweber is very limited, especially to sequence emails.
• The contacts in your email listing who unsubscribed or on multiple lists will be counted to your overall subscriber quota. 

(READ More: AWeber Pros and Cons)

Pricing

If you still can’t decide, let’s see which platform gives more value for money.

Kartra Pricing

• The Starter Plan is $99 per month or $79 per month if you opt to bill annually.
• The Silver Plan is $19999 per month or $14999 per month when you decide to bill annually.
• The Gold Plan is $299 per month or $229 per month when you billed annually, this will make you save $840 annually.
• The Platinum Plan costs $499 per month or $379 per month if you opt to bill annually.

Aweber Pricing

• The Free Plan is $0 per month.
• The Pro Plan is $19.99 per month or $16.33 per month when billed quarterly or $16.15 per month when billed annually.

Integrations

Here are some of the third-party apps that integrate well on both platforms that are essential in making your online business successful.

Kartra Integration and API

While Kartra almost provides the entire essential business tool that would need to successfully launch your e-commerce business to get a highly optimized sales funnel, you can integrate it with the following tools to improve its performance:

• Payment Gateway Integrations– PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, Braintree.
• Email Marketing Integrations- Postmark, SendGrid, Elastic Email, MailGun.Membership Integrations- Digital Access Pass (DAP), Wishlist Member, WPFusion, Kajabi, aMember, OptimizePress, S2Member.
• SMS- Plivo, Nexmo, Twilo.

Aweber Integrations

AWeber comes with an outstanding integration ability as it can easily integrate with more than 140 various services and website such as WordPress, PayPal, Facebook, and many more:

• 3dcart
• Acuity Scheduling
• Apiant
• Formstack
• Google Analytics
• Shopify
• ThinkificAutomate.io
• Clickbank
• Twitter
• WooCommerce
• ClickFunnels
• Dasheroo
• Facebook

The Verdict: AWeber vs Kartra

Karta and AWeber are both powerful platforms that can help make your business successful. There are so many digital softwares offered today in the market but Kartra and AWeber definitely are some of the standout platforms. 

If you are looking for a comprehensive all-in-one inclusive tool, Kartra is the way to go as it provides everything you may need to improve your business. All you have to do is to focus on creating sales as Karta covers most of the critical parts for your business including email marketing. If you want to manage almost every aspect of your business in one space, Kartra can drive sales and run email marketing campaigns.

However, if you are only looking for a dedicated email marketing solution that has powerful automation, AWeber is definitely a great option.