Bento vs Loops
Both put marketing and transactional email on one bill. The gap is $44 and who it is built for. Both prices were read from their own pricing pages on 28 August 2026.
Which should you pick?
Both of these put marketing and transactional email on one bill, which is what makes them worth comparing: most founders otherwise pay two vendors for one job. The gap is $44 a month and who it is built for. Loops is API-first, every feature is on every paid plan, and the free tier carries a thousand subscribers, so a technical founder can ship the whole email layer without making a tier decision at all. Bento starts at $5, adds chat, and prices on active users rather than list size, which is cheaper early and climbs faster later. Pick Loops if you want one bill, one API and no arithmetic. Pick Bento if you are counting costs at the start and would rather pay for the people actually engaging than for everyone who ever signed up. Both have a free tier, which is unusual in email and worth spending before you commit.
Bento and Loops, side by side
| Bento | Loops | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then $5/mo | Free, then $49/mo |
| Free tier | 100 transactional emails/month free | Up to 1,000 subscribed contacts, 4,000 combined sends/month, full features, with a Loops footer |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Plans | 3 | 7 |
| Open source | No | No |
| Free tier | 100 transactional emails | Yes, 1,000 subs |
| Automations | Yes, unlimited included | Yes, all plans |
| Transactional email | Yes, from $5/mo | Yes, included, unlimited |
| Landing pages | Forms only, no pages | No |
| Paid newsletters | Not built-in | No |
| API/dev friendly | Yes, API and SDKs | API-first, React Email support |
Rows where both are the same are dimmed, so what is left is the actual difference.
What Bento is good at
- Combines marketing, transactional email, and chat
- Usage-based pricing scales with active users
- Deep event tracking and behavior automation
Where it falls short
- Pricing climbs fast at high volume
- Smaller template library than larger rivals
What Loops is good at
- Transactional and marketing email unified, no separate ESP bill
- Every feature available on every paid plan
- API-first with clean docs and React Email templates
Where it falls short
- No annual billing discount, monthly-only pricing
- Contact pricing jumps in large steps between tiers
- Younger product, smaller integration ecosystem than incumbents
Neither of these? All 15 email marketing tools, compared on what they actually cost.