Six platforms, scored against seven criteria we publish in full. No vendor paid for a position in this table — the scores are arithmetic, and you can check the weights yourself.
MailerLite. Its free plan covers 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month, and the interface is the one most people get productive in on day one. Brevo is the alternative if your list is large but you email it rarely, because it bills on emails sent rather than contacts stored.
For the first few thousand subscribers, yes. MailerLite, Brevo, Omnisend, Kit and GetResponse all run permanent free tiers. What you give up is automation depth and, on some plans, the vendor footer on your emails. You will hit the ceiling on automation long before you hit it on contacts.
Editor's pick
Deepest automation of the group, priced for growing lists
Built for ecommerce, not retrofitted for it
The one most people can actually operate
Pay for emails sent, not contacts stored
Creator-first, tag-based, deliberately plain
Powerful automation, a support record we cannot ignore
Scores are weighted totals across seven criteria. See how we rank for the weights and what each one measures.
Most comparison advice starts with feature lists. That is backwards. Feature lists are how vendors want to be compared, because every vendor wins on some list. Start instead with the three questions that actually change the answer.
Pricing models split into two camps. Most platforms bill on contacts stored, so a 40,000-person list costs the same whether you send once a year or daily. Brevo bills on emails sent, which makes a large dormant list close to free. If you are sitting on a big list you email quarterly, that difference is the whole decision and nothing else comes close.
If yes, ecommerce automations are not a nice-to-have. Abandoned cart, browse abandonment and post-purchase flows typically account for the majority of email revenue in a store. Omnisend ships these as working templates tied to store events. General-purpose platforms let you build the same flows, but you are assembling them from parts.
This is the question people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the tool gets used. ActiveCampaign has the deepest automation engine in this comparison and we still did not rank it first, because a powerful tool nobody on the team can drive produces nothing. If the person running email has three other jobs, weight ease of use heavily and accept a lower ceiling.
Deliverability carries the heaviest weight in our scoring, tied with automation and ease of use, because an email that does not arrive has no other qualities worth measuring. The honest finding is that the spread between reputable platforms is narrower than marketing copy suggests. All six here clear the bar for a sender with a clean list and correct authentication.
Where they genuinely differ is in what happens when things go wrong: how fast bounces are suppressed, whether spam complaints automatically pause a flow, and how visible any of that is to you. Kit scores highest here largely because plain-text-style sending and a writer-heavy user base keep engagement rates high, which feeds back into inbox placement.
| Platform | Free plan | Entry paid | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| GetResponse | Free plan, up to 500 contacts | From $19/mo | Teams that want automation and landing pages from one vendor |
| Omnisend | Free plan, 250 contacts / 500 emails a month | From $16/mo | Shopify and WooCommerce stores |
| MailerLite | Free plan, 1,000 subscribers / 12,000 emails a month | From $10/mo | Creators, newsletters and small businesses starting out |
| Brevo | Free plan, unlimited contacts / 300 emails a day | From $9/mo | Large lists that are emailed occasionally |
| Kit | Free plan, up to 10,000 subscribers | From $29/mo | Writers, newsletter operators and course sellers |
| ActiveCampaign | No free plan, 14-day trial | From $29/mo | Teams with someone dedicated to running the automation |
Entry prices are list prices at the smallest paid tier and rise with contact count. Vendors change pricing without notice — confirm on the vendor's own page before you buy.
Deepest automation of the group, priced for growing lists. Best for: Teams that want automation and landing pages from one vendor.
Watch out for: The cheapest tier holds back the automation builder.
Trustpilot rates it 4.3 out of 5 across 1,033 reviews. Full GetResponse review · Visit GetResponse
Built for ecommerce, not retrofitted for it. Best for: Shopify and WooCommerce stores.
Watch out for: Little reason to pick it if you do not sell products.
Trustpilot rates it 4.4 out of 5 across 507 reviews. Full Omnisend review · Visit Omnisend
The one most people can actually operate. Best for: Creators, newsletters and small businesses starting out.
Watch out for: Automation runs out of room once flows get complex.
Trustpilot rates it 4.1 out of 5 across 3,277 reviews. Full MailerLite review · Visit MailerLite
| Criterion | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox deliverability | 20% | Seed-list tests plus our own sends to Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. |
| Automation depth | 20% | Branching logic, triggers, dynamic segmentation, split testing. |
| Ease of use | 20% | Time from signup to first campaign sent, measured on a fresh account. |
| Price per 1,000 contacts | 15% | Monthly cost at 1,000 / 5,000 / 25,000 contacts on the entry paid plan. |
| Email builder & templates | 10% | Template count, drag-and-drop behaviour, mobile rendering. |
| Integrations | 10% | Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, major CRMs, native vs third-party. |
| Support | 5% | Channels offered and real response time when we opened a ticket. |
Each platform gets a 0–10 sub-score per criterion. The headline number is those sub-scores multiplied by the weights above. Nothing is adjusted afterwards, and commission rates are not an input. The longer version is on our methodology page.
Entry paid plans in this group start between $9 and $29 a month. The number that matters is cost per 1,000 contacts as your list grows, because that is where the plans separate. At 25,000 contacts the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive option here is roughly three times.
Yes, but less than people assume. Sending infrastructure and IP reputation differ between vendors, and that is real. List hygiene, authentication records and how often you email matter more. A good platform on a bad list still lands in spam.
Yes. Gmail and Yahoo require authenticated sending for bulk senders. Every platform here walks you through adding the DNS records. Skipping it is the single most common reason a new sender lands in spam.
Contacts and tags export cleanly as CSV everywhere. Automations do not — those are rebuilt by hand. That is the real switching cost, and it is why automation depth deserves weight in the decision even if you do not need it yet.
Marketing email is sent to a list on your schedule. Transactional email is triggered by a user action, such as a receipt or a password reset. Brevo handles both in one account. Most of the others expect you to bring a separate service for transactional sending.
Consistently rather than frequently. A list emailed once a month on schedule outperforms one emailed four times in a week and never again. Long silences hurt deliverability because recipients forget they subscribed and mark you as spam.