Mara vs Loops
Loops is a good sending tool with a sequence builder, and its users like it more than people normally like software. Mara is not a better Loops. She is the person who would have been using it.
What Loops gets right
Clean product, no enterprise sludge, transactional and marketing in one place, a free tier up to a thousand subscribed contacts, and a founder who still answers support personally. In a market full of people who got burned by Mailchimp-shaped software, that reputation is earned rather than bought. If you are on Loops and happy, this page is not trying to talk you out of it.
Where it stops
Loops sends what you write. All of it. Every subject line, every wait, every branch, every decision about who gets which email, and every "is this still true since the redesign" pass.
The builder is good. It is still a builder, and you are still the one at the controls.
That is a fine deal if you are a marketer. It is a bad deal if you are the founder, because you are also on support, on the roadmap, and on the bug that showed up this morning. Lifecycle email loses that fight every week, and it loses quietly, which is why nobody notices for a year.
On the AI question
Loops still has not built a copy generator, and as far as we can tell they still do not intend to. Chris Frantz said so on the thespl.it podcast in April 2026, and their only AI shipment remains translation.
What they did instead is more interesting, and if you are reading this page you should know about it. Loops has shipped a full agent surface: a CLI, an MCP server, and installable agent skills for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Point your coding agent at Loops and it can wire up the integration, migrate your stack, send events, and draft a campaign through their API.
If you are technical, that is a real option and we are not going to pretend otherwise. You already have a coding agent. Loops will happily let it drive.
Here is the honest difference. That setup makes you plus your agent the lifecycle marketer. You still decide what programs should exist, what each email should say, when to test something, what the results meant, and when the copy went stale because the product changed. Your agent is very good at doing what you ask, in the session where you ask it. It is not sitting there in three weeks noticing that your activation email stopped working.
Mara is the opposite arrangement. She holds the job, not the session. The work happens on the weeks you never think about email, and it arrives in a queue for your approval.
Two different bets. If you enjoy running the program and want good tooling, Loops plus your own agent is a genuinely strong answer. If you want the job off your desk, that is what we sell.
Side by side
| Loops | Mara | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the emails | You, or your own coding agent | Mara, in your voice. You approve before anything sends |
| Who rewrites the ones that flop | You, if you notice | She tests variants on live sends and rewrites the losers |
| What it knows about your product | Whatever you typed into it | Your site, your repo, your event stream |
| Branching and waits | You build them | She proposes the program, you approve the shape |
| Replies | Land in your inbox | Read, sorted, answers drafted |
| Pricing shape | Per subscribed contact | Per active program, contacts unlimited |
| Channels | Email, transactional and marketing | Email. Triggered lifecycle programs only, no broadcasts |
| A quarter where you ignore it completely | The same emails keep going out | The same programs keep going out, with different emails |
What we call things
Loops and Mara use one word very differently, and it is worth knowing before you get confused by a screen.
| In Loops | In Mara |
|---|---|
| Loop | Program |
| Audience (your whole list) | Contacts. Careful: this is the one that bites |
| Segment | Segment |
| Campaign, broadcast | Nothing. She only writes triggered programs |
| Goals | Goal |
| Contact | Contact |
| (nothing) | Needs you: the approval queue nothing skips |
The full mapping is in the glossary.
Pricing works differently, and that matters more than the number
Loops bills on subscribed contacts. Mara bills on active programs: $99 for three running at once, $299 for ten, contacts unlimited on both.
For B2B SaaS that is not a rounding difference. Your list is mostly people who signed up once and disappeared, and those people are precisely the segment for a win-back. On a per contact plan every dormant signup is a line item, so the rational move is to prune the list, which means deleting the segment for the program you have not written yet.
Per program, adding that win-back costs one slot and nothing else. Neither model is a trick. They reward different behavior, and you should pick the one that rewards the behavior you want.
When to stay with Loops
You are under a thousand contacts. Their free tier covers you and Mara has no free tier, so this one is not close.
You want to send a newsletter. Broadcasts are an explicit non-goal here. Mara writes triggered programs: welcome, activation, feature adoption, re-engagement, churn-save, expansion, win-back. If your main sending job is a Tuesday newsletter, she is the wrong hire.
You enjoy writing your emails, or someone on the team does. Keep doing that. It is better than what most companies manage.
Or run both
Mara sends from her own subdomain of your domain, so Loops keeps doing whatever it is doing today. Nothing migrates. There is no rip-and-replace weekend, and if you cancel, your contacts and your sending reputation stay yours.
Thirty seconds, no signup, nothing sends: point Mara at your site and see what she drafts for you. Or read the pricing first.