Loops vs Encharge

How each tool models your users

Loops keeps one flat record per contact. According to the Loops contact properties documentation, every contact has eight default properties (email, first name, last name, notes, source, subscribed, user group and user ID), and you can add custom properties typed as string, number, boolean or date. Two details matter in practice: a property cannot be edited after you create it, so a wrong name or type means creating a new one, and a contact holds only one User Group value, which is the closest thing Loops has to an account field.

Encharge is built around people and the companies they belong to. Its features page describes user profiles that show every action a person has taken, company profiles that list every person at a company and sync company data across tools, and custom objects for data that does not fit on a person. For a B2B product sold to teams, that is the structural difference: you can onboard an account, not just each login.

• If your product sends one email per user and never needs to know which company a user belongs to, the flat Loops record is simpler and less to maintain.
• If a workspace admin should get different messages from a regular member, or you want to stop nurturing a company once any person at it converts, plan for Encharge company profiles or stash the company ID in a Loops custom property and filter on it.

Events, triggers and billing integrations

In Loops an event is a payload sent through the events API with an email or userId and an eventName. If the contact does not exist it is created, event properties can personalize the email, and the same call can add the contact to mailing lists. Workflows then start from one of four triggers: Contact added, Contact updated, Contact added to list, or Event received. The documentation also notes that sending to @example.com and @test.com addresses fires the event without sending mail, which is a cheap way to test.

Loops also receives platform events from Stripe, Clerk and Supabase through incoming webhooks, and the integrations list includes Segment, PostHog, RudderStack, Zapier and Make. Encharge lists Stripe, Chargebee, Chargify, Recurly and Paddle on its integrations page, alongside HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Segment and Zapier. If your billing system is Chargebee, Recurly or Paddle, Encharge has the longer list of named connectors; if it is Stripe, both can listen.

Transactional email: where the two tools differ most

Loops treats transactional email as a first-class feature of every paid plan. The transactional documentation describes composing the email in the editor or uploading MJML, publishing it, then posting to the API with a transactionalId, the recipient's email and the data variables. Transactional recipients are not added to your audience and do not count toward billing, and unsubscribed contacts still receive transactional mail. Two traps: a send fails if you omit any non-optional data variable, and you should not put marketing content in transactional sends.

Encharge lists transactional emails as a feature (password reset, payment receipt, single sign-on link) and its pricing page names transactional email on the Premium tier. That means a team that wants one vendor for both marketing automation and system email should price Premium, not Growth, from the start.

A worked cost example: 10,000 subscribers, four emails a month each

Assume 10,000 subscribers who each get four marketing emails a month, which is 40,000 sends. On Loops that is the $99 tier with unlimited sends, so the bill is $99 a month, or $1,188 a year, and transactional password resets cost nothing extra.

On Encharge Growth the allowance is 10x subscribers, or 100,000 emails a month, so 40,000 fits and the bill is $249 a month, or $2,988 a year. If sales needs CRM sync, Premium at $399 a month comes to $4,788 a year. The gap between the two vendors is therefore $150 a month without CRM sync and $300 a month with it. Whether that is worth paying depends on whether a marketer will use company profiles, lead scoring and the visual flow builder enough to replace hours of engineering time.

Moving from Loops to Encharge

1. Export contacts from the Loops Audience page, including custom properties, and keep the Subscribed column so unsubscribed contacts stay unsubscribed after the import.
2. Rebuild each Loops workflow as an Encharge flow, mapping trigger types: Contact added becomes a segment or form entry, Event received becomes a behavior trigger on the same event name.
3. Create the same events in Encharge by sending them from your app, and keep the property names identical so segments transfer.
4. Replace the Loops transactional calls with the Encharge transactional API only after you have confirmed you are on a tier that includes it; until then keep sending system mail through Loops.
5. If you adopt company profiles, backfill the company ID from your database rather than from the Loops User Group field, which holds only one free-text value.

Moving from Encharge to Loops

Sources for this section: Loops CSV upload guide and the Loops and Encharge pricing pages, checked 2026-10-07.

1. Export people from Encharge and decide what to do with company-level data first: Loops has no company object, so carry a company ID or plan name as a custom property.
2. Create custom properties in Loops before importing, using the exact property names as CSV column headers; Loops cannot rename or retype a property once it exists.
3. Upload the CSV on the Audience page. All new contacts import as subscribed unless the CSV includes a Subscribed column set to false, and a CSV upload cannot re-subscribe anyone who unsubscribed earlier.
4. Recreate each flow as a Loops workflow, then replace behavior emails with Event received triggers sent from your product code.
5. Check any flow that depended on lead scoring or HubSpot sync, because those have no direct Loops equivalent and will need an event or Zapier route.