Hogsend vs. Loops

Of every platform we compare against, Loops is the one we have the most respect for. It is the closest competitor to Hogsend in spirit: both teams clearly believe that lifecycle email tooling for product companies should feel good to use, not like a relic from the 2010s marketing-automation era. If you are weighing Hogsend against Loops, you have already filtered out the platforms that treat developers as an afterthought. The remaining decision is narrower and more interesting than most comparisons on this site.

From $49/mo | priced per subscribed contact -- free up to 1,000 contacts ($49 at 5k, $99 at 10k, $249 at 50k)

Pricing last verified 9 June 2026 -- vendors change plans often, so check Loops' pricing page for the current numbers.

What Loops does well

Loops has the best UI in the category, and it is not close. The editor feels like Notion -- writing an email is genuinely pleasant, and the result looks good without you fighting templates. The whole product is designed rather than assembled, and it shows in the small things: clean navigation, sensible defaults, an onboarding flow that does not make you read a manual first.

It is also legitimately API-first. There is a maintained React/Next.js SDK, a clean REST API, and the kind of documentation that assumes you are a developer who wants to integrate quickly rather than a marketer clicking through a wizard. For a SaaS or product-led-growth team that wants transactional and lifecycle email handled in one place, with a UI a non-technical teammate can also operate, Loops is a strong, honest choice. It removes a real category of pain -- nobody on your team has to dread opening the email tool.

Where it falls short

The trade-offs are mostly about depth and ownership, not quality.

Automation in Loops (renamed Workflows in May 2026) is deliberately simpler than Customer.io or ActiveCampaign. You get welcome sequences, time delays, and basic branching, but you will hit the ceiling on heavy conditional logic, fine-grained event-property filtering, and cross-journey orchestration. For "welcome sequence plus trial nudge" that ceiling is fine. For "branch on three runtime conditions, call an internal API mid-flow, then route into a second journey," it starts to feel constraining.

Workflows are also dashboard-only. Loops' API and CLI can trigger a workflow with an event, but they cannot create or modify one -- their own API docs say so. The flow itself lives on the canvas: no version control, no PR review, no diff when the trial email changes.

There is no self-hosting and no bring-your-own provider -- all sending goes through Loops' infrastructure. Your contact data lives there too, and pricing is per subscribed contact: you pay for list size as it grows, whether or not you send. And as a newer platform, the integration ecosystem is thinner than the incumbents. None of these are bugs; they are the natural consequences of being a polished hosted SaaS.

When to pick Loops

Pick Loops when the UI is the point. If a non-technical founder, a marketer, or a generalist needs to write and ship emails without a developer in the loop, Loops is hard to beat -- and that is a real, common requirement. Pick it if you are a SaaS or PLG team whose flows are genuinely more "onboarding sequence and trial reminder" than deep multi-stage branching, and if you would rather pay a predictable monthly bill than run any infrastructure yourself.

If your honest assessment is that nobody on your team wants to own a self-hosted service, Loops is the right call, and we would tell you so.

Loops vs. Hogsend

This is the comparison where Hogsend and Loops actually overlap on values, so the differences are sharp and specific.

The core split is code-first and self-hosted versus polished hosted SaaS. In Hogsend, every journey is a TypeScript file authored with defineJourney() -- not a flow on a canvas and not an SDK call into someone else's runtime. That control flow is plain TypeScript, so if/else, loops, external API calls, and feature-flag checks are just code, which gets you past the branching ceiling that Loops' simpler automation hits. See the Journeys guide for what that looks like in practice.

On ownership, Hogsend is source-available (ELv2) and self-hosted: your data sits in your own Postgres, and there is no per-contact or per-email pricing -- you pay only for infrastructure. It is consumed as a versioned engine package (@hogsend/engine), so you scaffold with pnpm dlx create-hogsend@latest and upgrade with pnpm up "@hogsend/*". It is a dependency you pin, not a fork you maintain.

Hogsend also leans on durable execution through Hatchet. A ctx.sleep survives deploys and resumes exactly where it left off, and ctx.waitForEvent pauses a journey until the user does something specific or a timeout wins -- whichever comes first. Combined with native PostHog integration, first-party email open and link-click tracking, and real-time, code-defined Buckets for segmentation, the model is built around events you already emit.

For a fuller side-by-side, see the feature matrix. The short version: Loops wins on UI polish and zero-ops; Hogsend wins on control, branching depth, and pricing that does not scale with your contact count.

Migrating from Loops

Because both platforms are developer-friendly, a move from Loops is one of the cleaner translations. Your Loops automations become defineJourney() files -- you are rewriting the good parts in TypeScript rather than importing config, and the simpler your Loops flows are, the faster this goes. Contacts come over via Hogsend's bulk import endpoint (POST /v1/admin/contacts/import, CSV or JSON), and your email designs get rebuilt as React Email components. Historical analytics stay on Loops; Hogsend tracks from the first email it sends. See Migrating to Hogsend for the step-by-step.