A popup is a type of window that appears on top of the main content of a website. This window typically displays additional information or a call to action triggered by an event, such as clicking a button or link. Popups often display important messages, offers, or forms, engaging visitors and encouraging them to take specific action.

WordPress, the most popular CMS, provides several methods to add popups to your website. It offers a lot of pluggable additions called plugins. 

You might want to use a popup plugin on your WordPress site for several reasons. Popups can be a great way to draw attention to important information or offers. They can also help you engage your visitors and encourage them to take specific actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing. Popup plugins also provide an easy way to manage and customize your popups, allowing you to control when and how they are displayed on your site. A popup plugin can help you improve your site's user experience, leading to better conversion rates and more success for your business or organization.

Best Free WordPress Popup Plugins

This article will discuss the 7 Free best popup plugins available in the WordPress market.

1. FireBox

FireBox - A WordPress Popup Plugin that boosts conversion rate

While being a new WordPress popup plugin compared to others in our list, FireBox hasn't left out any of the features provided by other plugins. It has a beautiful and modern interface, making you feel obsessed with it at first glance. 

FireBox is based on the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg), offering users a brand-new pop-up editing experience. You can insert, re-arrange, and change the styling of your popups effortlessly with FireBox. Moreover, FireBox provides support for various campaign types, including but not limited to newsletter opt-ins, contact forms, modals, floating bars, sidebars, slide-in scroll boxes, fullscreen popups, cookie consent bars, and more. 

FireBox provides Smart Triggers. Unlike most plugins, FireBox consists of more triggers that help implement the conversion successfully. On Page Load, Scroll, a Specific Element's Visibility, Exit Intent, Click/Hover,  Idle (Inactivity), and AdBlock detection are only a few of the heap of triggers offered by FireBox.

Additionally, FireBox has some advanced triggers that will trigger the popup when certain condition(s) are met. For instance, on a particular menu item, a specific URL, referral tag, specific date/time, a certain user/user role, geographical data, browser, and operating system. It also provides the ability to create your triggers using PHP. Thus, your imagination is the only limit with FireBox.

Price: Feature-rich lite version, Pro versions cost from 39€/year to 79€/year.

2. OptinMonster

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is claimed to be the ultimate WordPress popup plugin, with more than 1 million users. It’ll help you generate leads, increase sales, and get email subscribers.

Moreover, OptinMonster allows you to easily convert your visitors into customers and subscribers. It comes with a few different types of campaigns and powerful targeting features. Their trademark Exit-Intent strategy is an amazing feature that helps convert leaving visitors into customers and subscribers.

OptinMonster has many pre-designed templates and even lets you design your template from scratch. On top of that, it comes with GDPR and built-in analytics (Google Analytics) support. A huge plus of this plugin is its use on multiple websites with one account.

Price: Starting with 9$ / month for Basic and up to 49$ / month for Growth package.

If you are looking for an OptinMonster alternative, consider using FireBox.

3. Sumo

Sumo

Sumo promises high-converting opt-in forms to collect email addresses. It can help you increase conversion rates, grow your subscriber list, and ultimately drive more sales to your business. Furthermore, Sumo provides social sharing and seamless integration with Woocommerce while having GDPR compliance.

Sumo provides excellent performance due to loading its code asynchronously and thus causes a minimal impact on site performance. It has many pre-designed templates, SEO-friendly features, customized popups based on traffic sources, a welcome email for new subscribers, and a free version. 

Sumo's built-in campaign builder lets you create your popup design. Furthermore, it offers free customer support for users. While Sumo offers a free version, it's very limited and injects some banner notifications, which may seem unprofessional to some visitors. 

Price: Free basic package and Pro package for 39$ / month.

4. Icegram

Icegram

Icegram is a relatively new yet powerful popup plugin that stands out from the rest with its extra features. This plugin can show specific popups to targeted visitors by creating popups, along with Call To Action (CTA), and ultimately convert them to subscribers and/or customers.

Icegram is free to use yet has paid extensions/add-ons to extend its features. It provides four different opt-in types: Lightbox style popups, Action bar (in the header and/or footer area), Toast style notifications, Slide-in messengers, and 8 more customizable message styles, which are available only in the premium package.

Icegram can be integrated with popular email services. Furthermore, it has a responsive design displays popups in multiple display positions and analytical and tracking features. Unlike many other popup plugins, Icegram doesn't require having an account with them to use the plugin. Icegram provides extensive customizability as an extra feature if you are a power user.

Price: Free to 147$ / annually for the Max plan.

5. Poptin

Poptin

Self-proclaimed as the best free exit intent popup builder, Poptin also comes with a form builder. You can create popups, opt-ins, and contact forms using Poptin.

Poptin can track visitors on the website and show the intended message at the right time. It uses a powerful exit-intent technology that helps to gain more newsletter subscribers, leads, and sales. Additionally, Poptin can create popups, inline forms, advanced overlays, exit popups, and widgets that can be customized using a built-in drag-and-drop popup builder.

Poptin lets you track and use analytics on your popups, advanced targeting options, and inactivity triggers while integrating with popular email/CRM or marketing platforms. Besides, it offers great features such as A/B testing, high customizability, Drafting, auto-saving features, RTL support, responsiveness, and integration with WooCommerce.

Price: Limited Free account to Agency package for 99$ / month.

Check out Poptin alternative review on our website.

6. TrustPulse

TrustPulse

TrustPulse uses a social proof methodology with a modern approach, triggering the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to get more leads and conversions. 

TrustPulse comes with a social proof notification builder, which can be used to design FOMO popups. The social proof methodology helps you win visitors' trust for your services/business by providing effective popups, which successfully use the power of peer pressure (What other people are doing and making them move into I should do the same). Moreover, TrustPulse allows you to choose from two FOMO campaigns called recent activities (Actions taken by other users on your website, purchases, sign-ups, etc.) or On-Fire (Number of people taking a certain action within a certain period).

TrustPulse can be conveniently integrated with WooCommerce, membership sites, etc. It comes with real-time event tracking, analytics, and smart targeting while having a very low impact on the website's performance.

Price: Very limited free and Paid packages from 5$ / month to 39$ / month.

7. Popup Builder

Popup Builder

Popup Builder includes one of the simplest interfaces out of the plugins in our list. It offers support for various types of popups, including but not limited to Images, HTML, Facebook, and Subscriptions. The premium version of this plugin offers support for popup types such as video, Exit intent, web push notifications, MailChimp, WooCommerce, and user login popups.

Popup Builder provides various options and incredible customizability while providing a simple and easy-to-use interface. Moreover, it lets you customize your design and supports integration with popular form and email marketing plugins, Woocommerce, and many more. Moreover, this awesome plugin offers features such as unlimited popups, customizable show/hide options for the popup, responsiveness, showing the pop-up on CTA, as exit intent, on scroll, and as an inactivity trigger.

While the free version of this plugin offers numerous features, the pro version offers even more added features. Some pro features are autoresponder, tracking, analytics, social engagement support, social proofing such as "ending soon" popups, and the ability to detect ad blockers and notify the user. 

Price: Free version and pro packages with extensions included from $39.95 / month to $149.55 / month.

Conclusion

While using a WordPress popup plugin on your site is a great idea, you might have to struggle to choose the right plugin among the ocean of available plugins. 

In this article, we tried to find a few needles in the haystack of available popup makers. We compared various aspects of these plugins, such as their useful features, pricing, ease of use, functionality, customizability, and support for many popups. We also discussed facts like adapting modern approaches, scalability, and, most importantly, if the plugin works out of the box with minimum hassle. 

Suggesting a specific plugin out of these seven is impossible without carefully analyzing your requirements. However, generally, we can recommend OptinMonster, TrustPulse, and FireBox, with their features listed above. Of course, you can choose any plugins from the above list based on your requirements and what each plugin offers.

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Co-Founder & Team Leader
Tassos is the founder and team leader at FireBox. With a background in user-centric design and full-stack development, he is dedicated to ensuring that FireBox is user-friendly and aesthetically beautiful.