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 has said publicly that they are not building AI features into the product. Chris Frantz said it on the thespl.it podcast in April 2026, and their only AI shipment as of then was translation, not generation.
We are not going to dress that up as a gotcha. It is a defensible product decision, made by a team that knows its users, and it is the reason Mara exists as a separate company instead of a feature request. But it is the thing to weigh honestly. If what you want is somebody else writing the emails, a tool that has said it will not do that is not going to start because you waited another quarter.
If Loops changes its mind, we will rewrite this page.
Side by side
| Loops | Mara | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the emails | You | 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 |
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 audience 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 audience 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.