EngageBay Review (2026)
The meter is contacts AND seats at once: prices are per user, and each tier caps contacts — Basic’s 500 contacts fills fast, and the Growth jump is steep ($15 → $65 per user).
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 26 Aug 2026
- Free — $0250 contacts, 1,000 branded emails, free for teams up to 15 members
- Basic — $14.99/user/mo500 contacts — $12.74 on biennial prepay
- Growth — $64.99/user/mo5,000 contacts, marketing automation — $55.24 on biennial prepay
- Pro — $119.99/user/mo50,000 contacts, SSO, uptime SLA, phone support — $101.99 on biennial prepay
Genuinely free tier: $0 for 250 contacts with email marketing, CRM, helpdesk and live chat, and the plan card adds that it is free for teams of up to 15 members. All-in-One suite per user/month on monthly billing: Basic $14.99 (500 contacts), Growth $64.99 (5,000 contacts, marketing automation), Pro $119.99 (50,000 contacts). Those three rates are unchanged since our July reading, but the Pro contact allowance is not what we recorded then: it is a 50,000-contact cap, not unlimited.
Read the toggle before you read the number. The page defaults to a biennial ‘15% off’ display (Basic $12.74, Growth $55.24, Pro $101.99) with a yearly ‘8% off’ step in between ($13.79, $59.79, $110.39), so the friendly figure in the headline assumes you prepay two years. Single bays (Marketing or CRM & Sales) start at $11.04/user/mo on that same biennial display. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
AIBUILDER20 — 20% off your first billing, created for AIBuilder Marketplace readers and confirmed in writing by EngageBay on 10 Aug 2026. Read the limits before you count on it: it works only on Growth or Pro, and only on yearly or biennial billing — the free tier, Basic and every monthly plan are excluded, and the code expires on 31 October 2026. Because those plans are prepaid, the first billing is the whole term, so this is 20% off your first year or first two years and then the standard rate at renewal. One detail we had to go back and ask about, now settled: EngageBay's pricing page defaults to a biennial ‘15% off’ display, so it was not clear which figure the 20% comes off. EngageBay confirmed in writing on 12 Aug 2026 that it is calculated from the list prices — $64.99 per user per month for Growth and $119.99 for Pro — and not from the already-discounted biennial figures. Compare your checkout total against those list prices. for referrals, verified in the partner dashboard. Claim the deal →What the pricing page doesn’t say
The advertised ‘starts at $12.74’ assumes biennial prepay — two years upfront for the friendly number. Real automation only starts at Growth.
What EngageBay does
All-in-one CRM, marketing, helpdesk and live chat for small teams — a genuine free tier (250 contacts) and per-user suites that undercut the big names.
What buyers report about EngageBay
Recurring themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run EngageBay ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Marketing, sales and support in one bill at a fraction of the enterprise suites — 4.7 across 617 G2 and 907 Capterra reviews, with affordability the single most-cited reason.
- • Support is repeatedly called responsive, which is not a given at this price.
- • Advanced automation has a real learning curve, and that is where new users stall.
- • Reporting and analytics are the recurring request — reviewers want more depth and better visuals.
- • Integration breadth and mobile polish both trail the larger platforms.
- • Contacts are tiered: 500 on Basic at about $14 per user, 5,000 on Growth at about $60, 50,000 on Pro at about $110. Price the tier your list needs.
When the paid plan is worth it
EngageBay's free plan covers a single early-stage user managing up to 250 contacts and sending up to 1,000 branded emails a month, with basic forms and one landing page - enough to validate a small pipeline before paying anything. The push to Basic ($14.99 per user per month) comes fast: free tops out at 250 contacts, and Basic only lifts that to 500, so a team running any real outreach volume outgrows it within weeks.
Growth ($64.99 per user per month) becomes worth it mainly for automation depth - 10 workflows with up to 15 nodes each - rather than for more contacts, since 5,000 contacts is a jump most small teams will not need right away. What upgrading does not fix is the per-user pricing itself. Every tier is priced per seat, so adding sales or marketing staff multiplies the bill directly — headcount growth compounds cost independently of contact volume or automation needs.
How to actually use EngageBay
Getting first value from EngageBay starts with setting up the account. Then either import an existing contact list by CSV, mapping fields during import, or connect a mailbox such as Gmail or Outlook to sync existing contacts. Before any marketing email will reliably land in inboxes, the sending domain needs DKIM and SPF verification. EngageBay generates the records under Account Settings, but adding them as DNS TXT records happens at the domain registrar, outside EngageBay, and confirmation depends on DNS propagation there.
This is a common stalling point because it requires registrar access rather than just an EngageBay login, and it cannot be rushed from within the product. A second practical snag is that a bulk contact import can immediately exceed the free plan's 250-contact and 1,000-email caps, which silently blocks further sends until the list is trimmed or the account is upgraded. Automation workflows only become useful once contacts and at least one integration are already connected.
Distilled from engagebay.com/pricing (live, WebFetch 6 Aug 2026); engagebay.com/glossary/dkim-setup (WebFetch 6 Aug 2026); WebSearch results on EngageBay knowledge base / DKIM-SPF setup articles (help.engagebay.com blocked from direct fetch, cross-checked via search snippets), read 6 Aug 2026
EngageBay vs Keap, side by side
Both columns come from the same place: each vendor’s own published pricing, read on the date shown in the sources at the foot of this page. We do not average them into a score.
Both names above are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. Neither changes what this table says: both columns come straight from the vendors’ own pricing pages.
The natural comparison is Keap — Keap is the automation-first veteran at a higher price point; EngageBay is the budget all-in-one with a real free tier — pick Keap for automation depth, EngageBay for breadth per dollar.
More on EngageBay
Everything we publish about EngageBay links back here — the review stays the honest hub:
The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does EngageBay remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges? If the job above is genuinely yours, it's worth a look. We never publish fake or “exclusive” prices, so always confirm the current plan on their site.
Frequently asked questions
What should I weigh before buying Sales & CRM software?
Most tools in this category plug in rather than replace. Check which direction the data flows and whether the sync is genuinely two-way, because a one-way push creates a second source of truth that your reps will quietly stop trusting. If it does aim to replace your CRM, price the migration honestly: history, custom fields and reporting rarely move across cleanly.
Is this a hands-on review of EngageBay?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Capterra and Tekpon, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 26 Aug 2026.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
We list our sources because most review sites do not. How we review →
Others in this category
The sales & crm tools closest to EngageBay that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match:
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