iZooto Alternative: Own Your Push Notification Data on WordPress

If you run a content-heavy WordPress site — a news outlet, a digital magazine, a niche blog with serious traffic — you've probably encountered iZooto. It's positioned as the push notification platform for publishers, with features tailored to media companies: audience segmentation, automated feeds, and monetization through notification ads.

On the surface, iZooto looks like a strong choice. But when you look under the hood — where your data actually lives, what you'll pay as your audience grows, and how tightly it integrates with WordPress — the story gets less compelling. Especially for WordPress publishers who value control over their audience data.

Let's look at what iZooto offers, where it falls short, and why EasyPusher is the self-hosted alternative that gives publishers more power for less money.

What iZooto Does Well

iZooto has been in the push notification space for years and has built features specifically for publishers. Here's what they get right:

• Publisher-focused features. Automated RSS-to-push, category-based segmentation, and the ability to monetize notifications through ad partnerships are features designed for media sites.
• Multi-channel support. Beyond web push, iZooto supports app push notifications and messenger-based notifications, giving publishers multiple channels to reach their audience.
• Audience segmentation. iZooto lets you segment subscribers by geography, device, browser, and behavior. For publishers with diverse audiences, this enables more targeted notification campaigns.
• Established track record. iZooto has been around since 2016 and serves some well-known digital publishers. It's a proven platform with reliable delivery infrastructure.

For large media companies with dedicated marketing teams and custom integration budgets, iZooto can be a workable solution. But for the vast majority of WordPress publishers, the downsides outweigh these advantages.

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Where iZooto Falls Short for WordPress Publishers

1. Your audience data lives on iZooto's servers

This is the fundamental issue. When visitors subscribe to your push notifications through iZooto, their subscription data — browser tokens, preferences, segments — is stored on iZooto's infrastructure. Not yours.

You're building your push notification audience on rented land. If iZooto changes their pricing, modifies their terms of service, gets acquired, or shuts down, you lose access to the audience you've spent months or years building. And unlike email lists, push notification subscriptions can't be exported and imported to another provider — the browser tokens are bound to the service that created them.

For publishers who've learned hard lessons about platform dependency (remember when Facebook throttled organic reach?), this should be a red flag.

2. Opaque, publisher-tier pricing

iZooto's pricing isn't published transparently on their website. They use a "contact us for pricing" model for most of their plans, which is a common signal that costs are negotiated and can vary significantly. Published estimates from review sites suggest plans range from $85/month to $250+/month depending on subscriber count and features.

There's no free tier worth mentioning — iZooto offers a limited trial, but sustained free usage isn't part of their model. For WordPress publishers who are cost-conscious (which is most of them), this lack of pricing transparency makes budgeting difficult and creates the risk of unexpected costs as your audience grows.

3. Complex setup and onboarding

iZooto's setup process involves creating an account on their platform, configuring your site settings in their external dashboard, installing their WordPress plugin (or adding code manually), setting up service workers, and verifying your domain. The process can take 30 minutes or more, and troubleshooting issues often requires contacting their support team.

Compare this to a native WordPress plugin that installs in one click and has you sending notifications within five minutes. For publishers who want to move fast and don't have a dedicated dev team, iZooto's setup friction is a real barrier.

4. External dashboard workflow

While iZooto has a WordPress plugin, the actual campaign management, analytics, and audience segmentation all happen on iZooto's external web dashboard. You're constantly leaving your WordPress admin to manage push notifications on a separate platform.

This fragmented workflow is especially frustrating for solo publishers and small teams who manage everything from within WordPress. Writing a post, optimizing for SEO, managing WooCommerce orders, and then switching to a completely different platform just to send a push notification about that post — it breaks the flow.

5. Monetization comes with trade-offs

iZooto's notification ad feature lets publishers earn revenue by including sponsored notifications alongside their own. While this can generate additional income, it means your subscribers receive notifications they didn't sign up for. This can increase unsubscribe rates, erode trust, and dilute the value of your push channel.

If your push notifications start feeling like a spam channel because of third-party ads, you'll lose the audience you worked hard to build — and that audience is stored on iZooto's servers, so you can't take it elsewhere.

6. Feature gating across tiers

iZooto reserves certain features — advanced segmentation, priority support, dedicated account management, A/B testing — for higher-tier plans. If you're on a lower plan, you're working with a limited toolset. This is standard SaaS practice, but it means you might be paying a premium just to access features that should be table stakes for a push notification service.

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EasyPusher: The Self-Hosted Alternative for WordPress Publishers

EasyPusher takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of being a SaaS platform that stores your data externally, EasyPusher is a WordPress plugin that keeps everything on your server, in your database, under your control.

Full data ownership — no exceptions

Every subscriber record lives in your WordPress database. Your audience is yours. You're not renting access to your own subscribers through a third-party platform. If you ever decide to change services, your data stays right where it is — in your database, backed up by your hosting provider, protected by your security stack.

This isn't just a philosophical difference. It has practical implications for GDPR compliance (you control the data processor), disaster recovery (your data is part of your standard backups), and business continuity (no vendor dependency).

Transparent, flat pricing

No "contact us" pricing. No hidden tiers. No per-message fees. EasyPusher's pricing is published openly and stays flat:

• Free: Up to 20,000 subscribers — all features included
• Pro: $4.99/mo for up to 50,000 subscribers
• Business: $9.99/mo for up to 100,000 subscribers
• Agency: $19.99/mo for unlimited subscribers

Compare that to iZooto's $85–$250+/month plans. Even at the Agency tier with unlimited subscribers, EasyPusher costs less than iZooto's entry-level plan.

All features on every plan

There's no feature gating in EasyPusher. Segmentation, scheduling, analytics, unlimited campaigns — every feature is available on every plan, including the free tier. The only thing that differs between plans is the subscriber limit. This means you're never paying extra just to access a feature you need.

WordPress-native from top to bottom

EasyPusher isn't a SaaS with a WordPress plugin wrapper. It's a WordPress plugin, period. Everything runs inside your WordPress admin:

• Compose and send notifications from the WordPress editor
• Set up automatic notifications when new posts are published
• View subscriber analytics on your WordPress dashboard
• Manage audience segments without leaving your admin
• Schedule campaigns alongside your editorial calendar

No external dashboards. No context switching. No separate login credentials.

Five-minute setup

Install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, create a free account, connect it, and you're live. No service worker configuration, no domain verification headaches, no SDK integration. If you can install a WordPress plugin, you can set up EasyPusher.

Zero performance impact

EasyPusher's script loads asynchronously with a minimal footprint. Your site's Core Web Vitals, page load times, and SEO performance are unaffected. For publishers who depend on organic search traffic, this matters.

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EasyPusher vs iZooto: Full Comparison

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When iZooto Might Still Make Sense

iZooto isn't the wrong choice for everyone. It may still be a fit if:

• You're a large media company with a dedicated marketing team and the budget for enterprise push notification tools. iZooto's publisher-specific features like notification ads and RSS automation are built for this audience.
• You need multi-channel beyond web push. If you're looking for app push notifications and messenger integrations alongside web push, iZooto's multi-channel approach covers more ground.
• You want to monetize notifications. If earning ad revenue from your push channel is a priority (and you're comfortable with the subscriber experience trade-offs), iZooto's ad network partnerships are a differentiator.

But for independent publishers, WordPress bloggers, niche content sites, and small-to-medium media operations — the ones who make up the vast majority of the WordPress ecosystem — EasyPusher is the smarter, more affordable, and more transparent choice.

The Data Ownership Argument

Let's spend a moment on why self-hosted data matters so much for publishers.

Your push notification subscriber list is a direct channel to your most engaged readers. These are people who actively chose to hear from you. Unlike social media followers (where algorithms decide who sees your content) or email subscribers (where deliverability is never guaranteed), push notification subscribers get your message delivered directly to their browser.

When that subscriber list lives on a third-party server, you're introducing a dependency. The third party can:

• Raise prices at any time
• Change their terms of service
• Get acquired by a company with different priorities
• Experience outages that prevent you from reaching your audience
• Shut down entirely

With EasyPusher, your subscriber data sits in the same MySQL database as your WordPress posts, pages, and comments. It's backed up when you back up WordPress. It's secured when you secure WordPress. It's portable because it's standard database records. No vendor lock-in. No surprise pricing changes. No dependency on a third party's business decisions.

Getting Started with EasyPusher

Making the switch is straightforward:

• Step 1: Install the EasyPusher plugin from the WordPress plugin directory
• Step 2: Create a free account at app.easypusher.com
• Step 3: Connect the plugin to your account
• Step 4: Customize your opt-in prompt and start building your self-hosted subscriber list

Keep in mind that push notification subscriptions are tied to the service worker that created them. You can't migrate existing iZooto subscribers to EasyPusher (this is a browser-level limitation, not a vendor one). But you can run both services during a transition period, and your new EasyPusher opt-in prompt will start collecting subscribers immediately.

With 20,000 free subscribers and all features included, there's zero financial risk in getting started. Most publishers find that their EasyPusher subscriber base grows quickly — the cleaner opt-in experience and lack of third-party branding tend to improve conversion rates.

The Bottom Line

iZooto was built for a specific slice of the publishing industry — large media operations willing to pay premium prices and comfortable with their audience data living on someone else's servers. For everyone else, it's more tool than needed at a price that's hard to justify.

EasyPusher gives WordPress publishers what they actually need: a self-hosted push notification system with full data ownership, transparent pricing that starts at free, and a native WordPress experience that doesn't require an engineering degree. Your data stays yours. Your audience stays yours. And your costs stay predictable.