Looking for a detailed Pabbly review?
Pabbly is a SaaS-based web app that streamlines and optimizes your email marketing experience.
From subscription management to payment billing and marketing automation, Pabbly offers a host of features to help you.
But is Pabbly THE app to solve all your email marketing woes?
To help you determine that, I’ll cover everything you need to know about Pabbly, including its features, pricing details, and drawbacks.
This Pabbly Review Contains:
(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section.)
- What Is Pabbly?
- What Are the Key Features of Pabbly?
- What Are Pabbly’s Pricing Plans?
- What Are Pabbly’s Drawbacks?
What Is Pabbly?
Pabbly is a popular email marketing and subscription management software. Co-founded by Pankaj and Neeraj Agarwal, www.pabbly.com offers an all-in-one service for email marketing and subscription management to cater to any business need.
Pabbly offers five tools that work as its core features. They are:
In addition to these five software tools, Pabbly has a robust email API infrastructure and a built-in SMTP server to streamline your business email operations.
What Is an Email API?
An email API lets you access email service functionalities via your website or app.
That way, whenever your customers complete a subscription, payment, or sign-up form on your website, they’ll instantly be notified by email.
What Is SMTP?
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an email communication protocol used to send outgoing emails from one email account to another. It uses an SMTP server to deliver emails to recipient email addresses.
But why do you need an external SMTP server like Pabbly to send emails?
Regular email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook limit the number of emails you can send daily.
For example, you can’t send more than 2,000 emails a day using G Suite — which may seem large enough. But if you’re an email marketer wanting to send email campaigns to more than 2,000 customers, this limitation will stunt both your reach and growth.
However, SMTP service providers like Pabbly have no such email sending restrictions. By using Pabbly, you can bypass the traditional mail sending restrictions and send as many bulk emails as you want.
Want to know more about SMTP? Read my detailed SMTP guide here.
What Are the Key Features of Pabbly?
Let’s take a look at the key features of the five Pabbly software tools:
1. Email Marketing
Along with a built-in email builder offering multiple templates, Pabbly’s Email Marketing software includes a free built-in SMTP server for bulk emails.
Additionally, Pabbly also provides integrations with 50+ external SMTP servers, including:
With its powerful Email Tracking feature, Pabbly also lets you track your outgoing email opens, click-throughs, bounce rates, unsubscribes, and more.
Pabbly’s Marketing Automation is another unique feature that helps you create automated workflows. From pre-scheduling emails/email campaigns to automated welcome emails for every new subscriber, pabbly.com makes sure your email marketing needs are always met.
Ajay’s Email Tip:Along with open rates, your emails’ engagement rates also matter in email marketing. Check out my detailed guide on how to start and end your emails to improve your recipient engagement. |
Pabbly’s Email Marketing software also contains several API-backed and easily embeddable subscription form templates for your website to maximize lead generation.
2. Email Verification
Sending emails to incorrect or invalid email addresses is not only a waste of time, but it also increases your bounce rate.
Pabbly’s Email Verification software helps you authenticate leads’/subscribers’ email addresses easily.
To verify email addresses, Pabbly follows a “slow” verification process of sending ping requests to the recipient’s email server. Once the ping request is received, the server lets you know whether the email address is authentic or not.
What’s a ping request?
A ping request is an internet program that helps users test reachability or verify something, such as an email ID.
Pabbly uses a slow frequency of sending ping requests to avoid the chance of getting inaccurate data or a request denial from the mail server.
This reduces the chances of receiving:
- False positives (inaccurate test results that verify the wrong email address)
- Catch-all addresses (email addresses that catch any email sent to an incorrect/non-existent email address)
Additionally, to help keep your email list clean, Pabbly also removes email addresses that have:
- Wrong/missing email syntax (like missing recipient/domain name or the “@” symbol, etc.)
- Inactive/invalid domains
- Duplicate emails
3. Subscription Billing
Pabbly’s Subscription Billing tool is a recurring billing and subscription management software.
It helps you manage:
- Customer subscriptions
- Recurring payments
- Billing
- Failed payments, etc.
With its robust API integration, the recurring billing software helps you create responsive subscription and billing website forms without a hassle. You can also embed customized checkout pages and add customer data auto-fills to your payment and subscription forms.
Along with a comprehensive Pabbly Subscriptions Dashboard, the billing software also offers detailed sales analytics, including:
- Monthly revenue
- ARPU (Average Revenue per User)
- Churn rate, etc.
The billing management and accounting software even ensures smooth customer payment collection via multiple payment gateway integrations with PayPal, Razorpay, and Stripe.
To minimize payment processing complications, Pabbly includes subscription billing features that are also compatible with multiple currencies, like USD, Euro, and INR.
Conveniently, the tax management system in Pabbly Subscription Billing allows you to add and manage taxes in your billing based on your customers’ countries and states.
But that isn’t all.
With Pabbly coupon management, you can create exciting coupons, discounts, and free trials for your customer.
Taking care of the whole customer payment journey, the subscription management software helps you with:
- Support for both recurring billing and one-time billing
- Invoicing, tracking payments, and maintaining invoice records
- Creating subscription plans
- Creating a client portal for users to manage their subscription and payments
- An integrated affiliate management system to manage affiliate marketers
4. Form Builder
Whether it’s for a payment, an event registration, or capturing a lead, Pabbly Form Builder (previously called FormGet) helps you create online forms for your website or email quickly and easily.
Through its simple drag-and-drop editor, you can add, remove, or customize any block you want to create your form.
You can also configure various aspects of your form in Pabbly Form Builder, like:
- Selecting product images
- Payment gateway
- Currency
Its custom payment gateway and multi-currency features allow you to collect payments easily through online payment forms.
For added flexibility, you can even integrate Pabbly’s forms with a Google Sheet or multiple platforms like WordPress and Zapier, among others.
5. Pabbly Connect
To help you automate and streamline your marketing and sales workflow, Pabbly Connect lets you sync more than 380 apps on its platform.
From CRMs and payment web forms to social media platforms and video conferencing apps, you can connect with almost any app through the Pabbly Connect platform.
Some of the notable apps you can integrate via Pabbly Connect include:
- Google Apps
- Microsoft Office 365 and OneDrive
- Salesforce
- QuickBooks
Additionally, you don’t have to be a developer to sync these apps. Just select your favorite app, configure them by adding filters, actions, and field mappings, and save!
If you need any assistance regarding the web app usage and integration, you can always contact the Pabbly support team.
What Are Pabbly’s Pricing Plans?
Pabbly offers 17 pricing plans, each including all features and software.
The only difference between the pricing tiers is the number of subscribers, customers, forms, credits, and tasks included at each level.
Here, I’ll cover the first four pricing tiers along with the features that each Pabbly tier contains.
A. Email Marketing
- Tier 1, $29/month plan: has a limit of 2,500 subscribers
- Tier 2, $37/month plan: has a limit of 5,500 subscribers
- Tier 3, $57/month plan: has a limit of 20,000 subscribers
- Tier 4, $79/month plan: has a limit of 30,000 subscribers
Standard Email Marketing Features Available in All Tiers
- Drag-and-Drop Email Builder
- External and Built-In SMTP
- Marketing Automation
- List Management
- Email Tracking
- Subscription Forms
B. Subscription Billing
- Tier 1: has a limit of 50 customers
- Tier 2: has a limit of 100 customers
- Tier 3: has a limit of 150 customers
- Tier 4: has a limit of 250 customers
Standard Subscription Billing Features Available in All Tiers
- Multiple Billing Model
- Client Portal Access
- Payment Gateways
- Dunning Management
- Create Checkout Page
- Global Tax Management
C. Form Builder
- Tier 1: has a limit of 2 forms
- Tier 2: has a limit of 4 forms
- Tier 3: has a limit of 6 forms
- Tier 4: has a limit of 8 forms
Standard Form Builder Features Available in All Tiers
- Unlimited Submissions
- Unlimited Payment Accounts
- Receive Unlimited Payments
- PayPal and Stripe Integration
- Custom Branding
- Webhooks
D. Email Verification
- Tier 1: has a limit of 6,500 credits
- Tier 2: has a limit of 15,000 credits
- Tier 3: has a limit of 30,000 credits
- Tier 4: has a limit of 45,000 credits
Standard Email Verification Features Available in All Tiers
- Minimize Bouncing
- Email Deduplication
- Boost Deliverability
- Domain Confirmation
- Spam-Trap Removal
- Anti-Greylisting
E. Pabbly Connect
- Tier 1: has a limit of 50,000 tasks
- Tier 2: has a limit of 60,000 tasks
- Tier 3: has a limit of 80,000 tasks
- Tier 4: has a limit of 120,000 tasks
Standard Pabbly Connect Features in All Tiers
What Are Pabbly’s Drawbacks?
Although Pabbly offers multiple features, it isn’t perfect.
Let’s have a quick look at two major drawbacks of Pabbly:
1. No Mobile Support
While Pabbly is a powerful web app compatible with Windows and Mac, it doesn’t have a mobile app.
Many Pabbly user reviews of the subscription feature highlight how inconvenient this can get.
For example, some of the apps that Pabbly integrates with, like FreshBooks and Zoom, already have both web and mobile apps in place.
However, if the connecting app (Pabbly) doesn’t have a mobile version, you won’t benefit from any of the integrated apps on your phone (even if those integrated services have mobile apps)!
2. Not-So-Friendly Built-In SMTP Service
Apart from third-party integrations, Pabbly has its own in-built SMTP service. And while you can use this SMTP for free once you purchase a Pabbly plan, it has certain limitations.
First, you have to request approval to use this feature — and your application could get rejected.
This makes using their built-in SMTP feature a bit confusing, as you might not know on what grounds they may have rejected your request. If your request is denied, you would have to spend money on a third-party integration and use that instead.
Moreover, even if your request is approved, you can only send 500 emails initially from their built-in SMTP server. This will increase over time if all goes well, but that’s all you have to start with — which isn’t something most email marketers can afford.
Wrapping Up
Pabbly is a great app to boost your email marketing and subscription management activities.
Irrespective of company size, the web app helps you track email engagement, verify email IDs, monitor sales analytics and payment analytics, and create customer offers with the Pabbly discount feature.
However, it isn’t perfect.
For starters, it doesn’t have a mobile app to help you manage your email campaigns on the go. And based on its user reviews, the several restrictions in Pabbly’s built-in SMTP makes it difficult to use.
But if Pabbly doesn’t seem like the right fit for you, don’t worry!
You can always opt for other SMTP providers instead. To learn more about them, check out my reviews for SMTP.com, Moosend, Inboxroad, Sendpulse, and SocketLabs.
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Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.
I didn’t find Pabbly to be that wonderful. They couldn’t get the forms to work on my WordPress site. I contacted their support and gave them every bit of information that they asked for. After that, it was like no one read what I had sent them. They just kept sending the same canned email. “did you receive our last e-mail?” There were no solutions provided after an initial solution that didn’t work. It was like they were pulling me along, so they didn’t have to refund me. Very frustrating. Even when sent a reply. I still kept getting the run-around. So I finally decided to cancel the service, and that was a debacle as well. You cannot cancel from your side, so you have to email their admin. I didn’t even get a response until the third time. Pabbly blamed me for not answering and giving the proper information and asked why I wanted to cancel. I pulled together all the emails and put them into a pretty little pdf explaining that I hope it would help them in the future. They never acknowledged the reply staying with their M.O. And asked me once again if I had anything to add. By this point, I called my bank and canceled my card, so they could not pull their subscription fee for the next month. Two days later, I finally got the email they had canceled my account. A day late and a dollar short.
Interesting comment Brandi. Their support has been very similar with me. They keep asking stupid questions like what is your email address (duh, the one I am sending this support request from!!). They couldn’t seem to understand my simple request (ie why does my custom field called TAGS in HubSpot not appear in mapping for Encharge). So, I sent them a video. Waited another day and their reply was “create a custom field in HubSpot called TAGS and then map it in Encharge”. When I replied asking them why they had told me to do what I had already both told them and shown them I had already done they just chose to ignore my email.
Lousy support.
Note also for anyone interested in the lifetime deal, you better aim at keeping your email address for life as they refuse to change it and support thereafter is only for 1 year…if you require beyond that you need to pay 1/3 of what you originally paid. Other LTDs are not like this.