Sailthruvs
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Sailthru
Retail and publisher email personalisation, now one product inside the Marigold portfolio
As of 31 August 2026, Sailthru's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. Sailthru personalises email and on-site content from an interest profile built out of reading and browsing behaviour, which is why publishers use it more than any other ESP. Softwr lists it under Email Marketing. Sailthru is made by Marigold, available on Web, API.
Overview
What Sailthru does
Sailthru was founded in New York in 2008 and sells email and on-site personalisation built around a per-user interest profile. Content and products are ingested into a catalogue, user behaviour builds affinity vectors, and both email content and website modules are assembled per recipient from those vectors. Prediction Manager adds churn, lifetime value and engagement scores used as campaign conditions. The important commercial fact is ownership. Sailthru was acquired by CM Group in 2019, and CM Group renamed itself Marigold in 2023 after also acquiring Cheetah Digital, giving one owner a portfolio that includes Campaign Monitor, Emma, Selligent, Liveclicker and Cheetah alongside Sailthru. Several of those products address overlapping buyers. Anyone signing a multi-year contract should ask directly which product the vendor intends to invest in for their segment, because portfolio rationalisation decides roadmaps in a way that no feature demonstration reveals. Buyers are digital publishers, media businesses and retailers with high content volume and daily send cadence. The trade-off is technical dependency: the on-site personalisation needs a developer to implement the JavaScript and the content feed, and the templating language, Zephyr, is proprietary, so the pool of people who can maintain your templates is small and shrinking relative to Liquid-based competitors.
What people use it for
- A publisher sending a personalised daily newsletter assembled per reader from a content catalogue
- A retailer that wants email and on-site recommendations driven by the same affinity model
- High-cadence sending where per-recipient content assembly matters more than journey branching
- Teams that want churn and lifetime value scores available as native campaign conditions rather than imported fields
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Sailthru.
- The product sits in a portfolio with several overlapping platforms under one owner, so roadmap investment is a portfolio decision rather than a product decision and is worth asking about in writing.
- Pricing counts stored profiles, so retained inactive readers keep costing money long after they stopped opening anything.
- On-site personalisation requires a developer to implement the JavaScript and maintain the content feed, which puts the highest-value feature behind engineering time.
- Zephyr is a proprietary templating language, so template maintenance skills are scarce compared with the Liquid syntax used by most competitors.
- It is built for high-cadence content and retail sending, and B2B lifecycle programmes with long sales cycles sit poorly on the model.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Sailthru
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- SailthruvsKlaviyo
Klaviyo: Simpler and cheaper for retail email and SMS without publisher-grade content personalisation
- SailthruvsBraze
Braze: Better where mobile app engagement rather than email content assembly is the priority
Pricing
What Sailthru costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Sailthru
On request
- Priced on stored profiles and send volume
- Site personalisation and prediction features licensed by module
- Annual contract through Marigold
Capabilities
Features
Interest profiles
Per-user affinity vectors built from reading and browsing behaviour
Personalisation engine
Email and on-site content blocks assembled per recipient from the content catalogue
Prediction Manager
Churn, lifetime value and engagement scores usable as campaign conditions
Site personalisation
Recommendation modules rendered on the website from the same profiles
Zephyr templating
Proprietary templating language for data-driven email content
Lifecycle optimiser
Send-time and cadence controls for daily and high-frequency programmes
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Who owns Sailthru now?
Marigold, formerly CM Group, which also owns Campaign Monitor, Emma, Selligent, Liveclicker and Cheetah Digital.
Does that affect the roadmap?
It can. Overlapping products in one portfolio compete for investment, so ask which platform is the strategic one for your segment before signing multi-year.
Is it worth it just for newsletters?
For personalised daily newsletters at publisher scale it remains one of the strongest options. For simple broadcast sending it is heavily over-specified.
Keep looking
Where to go from Sailthru
- Sailthru alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Sailthru pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Sailthru badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Email Marketing softwareThe full category
- Best Email Marketing softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Email Marketing software for
Compare Sailthru with
- Klaviyo
- SAP Emarsys
- Moosend
- Attentive
- Zoho Campaigns
- Dotdigital
- Ortto
- Sendy
- Brevo
- ActiveCampaign
- EmailOctopus
- AWeber
- RD Station Marketing
- Shortwave
- Amazon SES
- Attentive
- Ortto
- Sendy
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Sailthru, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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