The Top 6 Free Lead Capture Tools

Lead capture tools are specifically designed to help ensure that website visitors become newsletter subscribers, by increasing the odds that they sign up for your list. ESPs (email service providers) like MailChimp and ConvertKit may include some of their own forms and popups to help facilitate this, but a dedicated lead capture tool can ensure that an even larger percentage of that traffic completes that step and converts to a lead.

There are a large number of lead capture tools out there, but if you’re looking to start with a tool that has a free (or “freemium”) plan, here are the top 7 that you should start looking at.

1. Subscribe Sense

We're admittedly biased, but Subscribe Sense is the only tool on this list that caters to double opt-in lists and ensures that you're fully capturing the leads who've already indicated interest in joining your list by increasing the odds that they'll confirm their email address.

Subscribe Sense works by providing leads with a subscription status bar after they sign up so they can see if they've made a typo in their submitted email address, and can be alerted if their email bounced, or when their confirmation has been successful.

It also provides users with a sniper link button that updates based on their submitted email address and takes them directly to your confirmation email in their inbox.

Finally, if all else fails, leads can be sent reminder emails with a new confirmation link 1 or 2 days after their initial signup if they haven't yet confirmed.

Subscribe Sense has a full-featured free plan with support for up to 100 confirmed subscribers per month. It's one of the only tools on this list that uses a value-aligned pricing metric for paid plans, aligning with number of confirmed subscribers rather than just pageviews like many other tools.

You can also use Subscribe Sense with many of the other tools on this list to get even more lift when it comes to lead capture.

2. Convertful

This is, in our opinion, the best tool with a free plan for creating forms and popups for lead capture.

While most ESPs provide basic forms and popups, Convertful provides a much wide variety and includes some tools to try to increase conversion rates, such as support for gamification widgets like spinners and scratch cards, and embedding video in your popups.

But where Convertful really shines in its targeting features. You can customize who sees which popups based on a wide range of triggers like referrer source domain, geography, number of pages viewed, the current date, and more. You can also trigger based on more behaviours than standard ESPs provide, such as when they click on a particular link or an html element with a given class, and you can include negative triggers to prevent showing the form to those who've seen it in the last x days or submitted in the last y days.

Convertful's free plan integrates with most ESPs, however you're limited to one default action on their free plan, so all your campaigns would need to submit to the same list unless you upgrade. There is, however, support for submitting POST requests on a form completion, so you can use those to submit directly to your ESP if necessary to get around the integration limitation. (None of the other popup or form lead capture tools in this list provided the ability to configure a POST on submission, so this is a big win for Convertful in providing flexibility.)

The free plan is limited at 3000 pageviews a month and doesn't include their multi-step capture widgets (which could, for example, allow surveys for segmenting leads), but otherwise is relatively full-featured.

However, like all the other lead capture tools on this page list (except for Subscribe Sense), this Convertful defaults to assuming that you're using a single opt-in list, and doesn't have first-class support for double opt-in lists.

3. Optimonk

Like Convertful above, Optimonk provides some great looking popups and forms for collecting leads.

They support integrations with most major ESPs, although connecting with them is a bit cumbersome and the integrations need to be set up for each campaign, there is no way to default to using the same integration for all campaigns. There are also fewer options for ways to connect with your ESP, for instance their ConvertKit integration only supports first name, last name and email fields, with no support for custom fields.

Like Convertful, they have good support for targeting, including by referer and country. For e-commerce sites, they can also target based on what's in your lead's cart, which can be very useful for providing coupons for chosen items in exchange for email addresses.

Their free plan has very few limitations compare to paid plans, other than a branding on forms and a limit of 15,000 page views, which is quite generous compared to some of their competitors.

4. Poptin

Poptin offers lots of visually appealing templates for your popups and lead capture forms, with considerably more variety than your ESP is likely to offer. Strangely, the free plan does however limit the types of fields you can put on your form. For instance, if you want to include a mandatory checkbox (for agreeing to GDPR or privacy policies, for example), that's not availble without an upgrade to a paid plan.

While the display triggers it offers are similar to most of the competitors (exit intent, time on page, etc), it lacks any real targeting, so all your potential leads, regardless of referrer or geography, are forced to see the same untargeted popup.

Poptin supports integration with most major ESPs, but support, even for paid plans, is limited. For example, there is no way to send custom fields to your ESP, even with a paid plan.

On paid plans, you can configure autoresponders when a lead is submitted. However, most ESPs provide this functionality already, so it seems unnecessary unless you're not integrating with another service for your marketing list.

Poptin's free plan includes 10,000 page views, which is relatively generous. However, given the limited features beyond form and popup creation, this wouldn't be our recommended starting place for improving your lead capture funnel.

5. Sumo

Sumo provides popups, forms, autoresponders and more. However, as a lead capture tool goes, their free plan falls pretty short.

Their paid plan has access to a variety of templates for lead capture forms and popups, but the free plan just has the most bare-bones template, you'll be forced to do a lot of design work to get it to look appealing.

Their free plan has support for most ESPs, but you'll need to upgrade if you use Klaviyo, Pardot, or any of the ESPs they deem "premium".

Likely the most valuable part of Sumo is in their integration with e-commerce platforms, which supports popups to grant coupon codes when a cart is about to be abandoned, but does not provide much value if your goal is lead capture.

Unlike other most tools here, Sumo's free plan isn't limited based on page views, but only on sent emails. If you don't plan to use their autoresponder and are okay with doing your own design work instead of using a template, you could in theory use their free plan for popups and forms regardless of your size. But given the limited functionality, this wouldn't be my first choice of tool.

6. ConvertFlow

While ConvertFlow has some great features rivaling Convertful in #2, their free plan is really more of an extended free trial, so for that reason it ended up at the bottom of our list. Their free plan only includes 250 unique "conversions", i.e. form completions, then you're forced to upgrade to a paid plan.

The free plan also only has support for a very limited number of ESPs; only AWeber, Campaign Monitor, ConvertKit, GetResponse and MailChimp are included.

They do have a wide selection of popups and forms, with a real emphasis on e-commerce. Popups with product recommendations and targeting abandoned carts may be of particular use to online stores.

Conclusion

If your goal is to increase the percentage of site visitors who sign up for your mailing list, a couple of these tools can work together quite well to improve your funnel without breaking the bank. We recommend pairing Convertful for collecting email addresses with Subscribe Sense for ensuring those leads confirm their spot on your double opt-in list. Contact us if you want help getting them to play nicely together, we can help make lead capture both beautiful and effective!