Best Email Marketing Platforms
Every major email marketing platform compared on published pricing, tiers and sending limits — with the best pick for each use case and budget.
We do not publish a score for software. This list is ordered by published entry price, not ranked; unpriced tools sit last. The written verdict under each name is the judgement — why we dropped the number.
Zoho Campaigns
Best value email marketing if you're already in the Zoho ecosystem — confusing standalone
✓ Extremely affordable
✓ Tight Zoho CRM integration
Moosend
Best budget email marketing platform — offers features that cost 5x more elsewhere, with solid deliverability
✓ Extremely affordable ($9/mo)
✓ Solid automation builder
Campaign Monitor
Beautiful email designer let down by high pricing and limited automation vs. modern alternatives
✓ Best drag-and-drop email designer
✓ Good template quality
From $11/month
Read Review →Omnisend's Standard Plan Gives You 500 Contacts — Twice the Free Tier, For $11.20
Free carries 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Standard at $11.20 doubles the contacts to 500 and lifts sends to 6,000. Pro at $41.30 gives unlimited emails but still only 2,500 contacts — the unlimited is on the axis that was not constraining you.
✓ The free plan is permanent, with 500 monthly emails and 500 web push notifications
✓ Pro removes the email send limit entirely
Constant Contact
Long-established but now clearly outdated — struggling to compete with modern, cheaper alternatives
✓ Easy to use
✓ Good for local/small businesses
From $12/month
Read Review →MailerLite vs Mailchimp Free
Both free plans cap at 250 subscribers. MailerLite lets you send 2,500 emails a month against Mailchimp's 500, and its paid entry is $12 against $13. On the specific comparison most people are actually making, it wins on the numbers.
✓ Free plan sends 2,500 emails a month — five times Mailchimp's free allowance
✓ Comfort starts at $12/month, and Power at $25 removes send limits entirely
What Mailchimp's Free Plan Actually Gives You in 2026
The free plan is 250 contacts and 500 emails a month — the most restrictive of any major email tool. Mailchimp is still the default recommendation in a hundred blog posts written when that number was 2,000, and those posts have not been updated.
✓ The most familiar interface in email marketing — genuinely easy to start
✓ Essentials at $13/month is a low entry price for a paid tier
AWeber's Monthly Billing Costs Up to 50% More Than Annual
AWeber Plus is $19.99/month billed annually and $30/month billed monthly — a 50% premium for paying as you go, the widest annual-versus-monthly gap in the category. The product is solid and unremarkable; the billing structure is the thing worth knowing before you sign up.
✓ One of the longest-running email platforms — stable, well documented, reliable delivery
✓ Lite starts at $12.49/month billed annually for 500 subscribers
Systeme.io
The best value in all-in-one marketing: funnels, email, and courses on one bill, with a genuinely usable free tier — as long as you can live with plain design and shallow reporting
✓ Free plan is real, not a trial — 2,000 contacts and unlimited emails, no card required
✓ Funnels, email, courses, blog and affiliate tools on a single bill
Systeme.io vs ClickFunnels
At the entry tier ClickFunnels costs $80/month more and gives you fewer courses, capped emails and no affiliate tools — but double the contacts. If your list is under 5,000, that $960 a year buys you very little.
✓ Systeme.io Startup is $17/mo against ClickFunnels Launch at $97/mo — a $960/year difference
✓ Unlimited emails on every Systeme.io plan; ClickFunnels Launch caps you at 50,000/month
GetResponse Has No Free Plan — But No Send Limits Either
Unlimited monthly sends on every tier, including the $19 entry plan. There is no permanent free plan — only a 14-day trial — so this is a straight trade: you give up the free on-ramp and never think about send limits again.
✓ Unlimited monthly email sends on every plan, including Starter at $19
✓ Annual billing saves up to 18% — a smaller monthly-vs-annual gap than most competitors
From $19/month
Read Review →ActiveCampaign
The best marketing automation platform for small-to-mid businesses — deep automation at a fair price
✓ Best-in-class visual automation builder
✓ Strong CRM included
From $29/month
Read Review →Kit's Free Plan Goes to 10,000 Subscribers. What's the Catch?
Ten thousand subscribers free with unlimited broadcasts is the most generous free tier in email marketing by a wide margin. The catch is real but narrow: the free plan sends broadcasts, not sequences, so you are buying automation when you upgrade — not capacity.
✓ Free to 10,000 subscribers — 40× Mailchimp's free contact limit
✓ Unlimited email broadcasts on the free plan, not a monthly send cap
From $33/month
Read Review →Flodesk
Best-looking emails in the industry — perfect for visual brands but limited on automation depth
✓ Most beautiful email designs
✓ Flat-rate pricing (no contact limits)
From $38/month
Read Review →Drip
Solid ecommerce email automation with good Shopify support, but Klaviyo has clearly won this race
✓ Good ecommerce automation
✓ Easy Shopify integration
From $39/month
Read Review →Klaviyo
The best email platform for ecommerce — unmatched Shopify integration and revenue attribution
✓ Best Shopify/ecommerce integration
✓ Excellent revenue attribution
Iterable
Enterprise-grade cross-channel marketing automation — powerful, but priced and scoped for large teams only
✓ Best enterprise-grade automation
✓ True omnichannel (email, SMS, push, in-app)
Benchmark Email's Send Limit Is a Formula, Not a Number — 10× Your Contact Count
Free gives 500 contacts, 2,500 sends a month and one user who cannot invite anyone. Pro starts at $27 and its send limit is stated as 10× your contact limit — so the number that matters changes every time your list grows. Extra users are $15 each, up to ten.
✓ The free plan is permanent, with 500 contacts and 2,500 monthly sends
✓ Pro's send allowance scales automatically at 10× the contact tier
Brevo
Best free/affordable email marketing platform for growing businesses — generous limits and multi-channel support
✓ Generous free plan (300 emails/day)
✓ SMS + WhatsApp + email in one
See site
Read Review →HubSpot Email Marketing
Best free email marketing tied to a CRM — if you're already using HubSpot, the email is a no-brainer
✓ Free CRM + email combo
✓ Deep personalization with CRM data
SendGrid
Best transactional email infrastructure — not a marketing platform, but the gold standard for deliverability
✓ Industry-best transactional email
✓ Excellent deliverability
Systeme.io's Free Plan
A permanent free tier with 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails and no card required — genuinely enough to run a small business on. The wall you hit first is three funnels, not the contact count.
✓ 2,000 contacts and unlimited emails — no card, no expiry, not a trial
✓ Affiliate management included on the free plan, which most paid platforms charge extra for
One alternative that is not on this list
Everything ranked above is a cloud subscription. Bonfire Terminal is an AI agent that runs locally on your own machine instead — we have not ranked it against these tools because it does a different job. The way in is a $27 club that includes 21 days of access.
What the $27 actually gets you →