OptinMonster vs Popup Maker: Hosted Meter or WordPress Plugin

The short answer: on a WordPress site that needs an exit popup, Popup Maker Pro costs $59.40 for the first year and $99 a year after, with unlimited impressions on every plan (Popup Maker pricing, checked on 26 October 2026); the matching OptinMonster plan, Pro, costs $444 and then $870, metered at 25,000 impressions a month (OptinMonster pricing). Choose Popup Maker if your job is popups on WordPress sites you control, built around the form plugin you already run. Choose OptinMonster if your job spans sites that are not all on WordPress, or you want forms and email connections built in rather than assembled from plugins.

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Rule of thumb before the feature lists:

1. Put two years on one line. Popup Maker Pro is $59.40 + $99 = $158.40 over two years for one site; OptinMonster Pro is $444 + $870 = $1,314 for up to three (Popup Maker pricing, OptinMonster pricing). Popup Maker's first-year figure is a launch offer marked limited time, so plan on the $99.
2. Start from the form you already have. Popup Maker opens or closes popups around submissions from Gravity Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, Mailchimp for WordPress and others, and its free version takes a form pasted from your email service (plugin listing). OptinMonster brings its own form, with Mailchimp, MailerLite and similar connections on Basic (monthly pricing).
3. Decide the measure now. One conversion goal, read against a share of visitors who see nothing. How to size that share is in the popup holdout use case.

Line by line

The three that decide it

Where the popup lives

OptinMonster is a hosted service whose only stated requirement is a site where you can add custom JavaScript (pricing FAQ), and its homepage lists Shopify, Wix and Squarespace among the platforms it serves (homepage). Popup Maker is a plugin inside WordPress, and its listing promises no monthly fees, no traffic limits and data that stays on your server (plugin listing). An agency with clients on four platforms has its answer already.

What the free plugin leaves out

The free plugin targets posts, pages, categories, tags and custom post types, and opens popups automatically, on a click or after a form submission. Exit intent and scroll triggers need Pro, as do geolocation, referrer, URL-pattern, user-role and schedule targeting (plugin listing). A content site that only wants a click-to-open signup box can stay free for good; one that wants to catch leaving visitors cannot.

That makes the first test free. Put a click-to-open signup box, built with the free plugin and your existing form, on the five posts with the most organic entrances, and compare four weeks of confirmed signups with the four weeks before. Pay for exit intent, on either tool, only if that box earns its place.

How a test is judged

Popup Maker Pro 1.2.0, released on 3 August 2026, added split testing of content, settings, whole popups and holdout groups, judged on conversion goals with Bayesian results (Pro 1.2.0 notes). OptinMonster's guide tells you to pick the campaign with the highest conversion rate (split test guide). If you want to know whether the popup beats no popup, only one of them builds that comparison in.

Prices side by side

USD, checked on 26 October 2026 on Popup Maker's pricing page, whose site selector also lists Pro for 5 sites at $149 for the first year, and OptinMonster's annual pricing page; OptinMonster also sells Pro at $87 billed monthly (monthly pricing). Popup Maker refunds within 30 days, OptinMonster within 14.

An agent with access to the popups

Popup Maker Pro now exposes an MCP integration for Claude Desktop, Cursor or any MCP client. It needs WordPress 6.9 or later, the MCP Adapter plugin and a WordPress user allowed to edit popups, and its 22 tools cover creating and updating popups, triggers, targeting and themes, plus get-popup-stats and analyze-popup-conversions (Pro 1.2.0 notes).

A useful weekly run: the agent pulls the last month's stats, names the two weakest popups and drafts one replacement for each. The human check matters because the tools can also change a popup's publish status. Give the agent its own WordPress user, tell it to leave every new popup as a draft, and have a person compare the agent's numbers with the analytics dashboard before publishing anything. OptinMonster's AI help is narrower: five rewrites of a text field, and you choose.

Whose comparison you are reading

Popup Maker's plugin listing sets its Pro at $99 a year against "OptinMonster starts at $108/year" (plugin listing). That $108 is OptinMonster's introductory Basic year, which has no Exit-Intent; the like-for-like figure is Pro at $444. The listing is there to win the install, so redo its sums with the plans you would buy.

Choose OptinMonster if

• Your job covers sites on Shopify, Wix or Squarespace as well as WordPress.
• You want the form, 700+ templates and the email connection in one product (homepage).
• You manage clients and need sub-accounts, which come with Pro and Growth (pricing).

Choose Popup Maker if

• Your job is popups on WordPress sites where impressions would otherwise push you up a tier.
• Your forms already live in Gravity Forms, WPForms or Fluent Forms.
• You want a no-popup holdout inside the plugin, or an agent that can read your popup stats.

FAQ

Is Popup Maker's free version enough for an exit popup?

No. The listing marks the exit trigger and the scroll trigger as Pro features (plugin listing).

Does OptinMonster need coding on WordPress?

No. Its plans list a WordPress plugin, and the pricing FAQ says campaigns are built from templates without code (monthly pricing, pricing FAQ).

Does either tool charge more as traffic grows?

OptinMonster does: past a plan's impressions it moves the account up a tier automatically (pricing FAQ). Popup Maker lists unlimited impressions on every plan.