The best email marketing software of 2026

Platformly shows you which email, link or source brought in each customer. Your list, your emails, the clicks and the sales sit in one account, so an order imported from Stripe, Paddle, Shopify or WooCommerce appears next to the broadcast and the tracking link that led to it. You can compare five attribution models and see revenue per subscriber and the value of a lead.

The email tools cover the full job: a block editor with a template library, broadcasts, A/B tests, sending by each reader's time zone, content blocks that show only when a reader meets a condition, merge tags and saved snippets. Visual flows start from sign-ups, purchases, clicks, tags or page visits, and they can wait, branch on conditions and call signed webhooks.

For newsletter writers, each issue can also go on a web archive with its own page and an RSS feed, and paid subscriptions run through Stripe with tiers, trials, offers, gifts and group seats. You can put polls and surveys inside an issue.

The same contacts feed a shared inbox for email, chat and SMS, sales pipelines and affiliate programs. An AI assistant suggests segments and drafts broadcasts and subject lines, and a person approves anything before it sends. You can send through Platformly or connect SMTP, Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailjet or Elastic Email.

If you only send a monthly newsletter, MailerLite does that for less work, and a shop that wants deep store-only segments should also look at Klaviyo.

MailerLite covers what a small business needs from email at one of the lower prices in this guide. You get three editors (drag and drop, custom HTML and plain text), signup forms, landing pages and automations, and the free plan includes automations too.

The free plan holds 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month with two user seats. When you outgrow it, Comfort costs $19 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers on monthly billing. Comfort allows 10 times your subscriber tier in monthly sends, so 10,000 emails at that size, and it removes the MailerLite logo and raises you to 50 automations, 10 forms and 10 sites. Power costs $39 a month for 1,000 subscribers and removes the send cap under a fair use policy. It also lifts the automation and seat limits and adds 24/7 live chat support.

Yearly billing takes 10% off. Every new account gets 14 days of premium features without a card, and MailerLite keeps your data if you decide not to upgrade.

MailerLite runs out of depth sooner than the store and CRM tools. If you want detailed store revenue reporting or a sales pipeline, a store-focused tool such as Klaviyo or a CRM-led tool such as ActiveCampaign goes further.

Kit, which used to be called ConvertKit, is aimed at people who write a newsletter and sell something alongside it. Its free plan is the most generous here on list size: up to 10,000 subscribers, with unlimited landing pages, forms and broadcasts, tagging and segmentation, and the option to sell digital products and subscriptions. Kit takes 3.5% plus 30 cents on those sales. The free plan also keeps Kit branding on your emails, gives you one user and leaves out visual automations and email sequences.

That missing automation is the usual reason a growing newsletter moves to Creator. At 1,000 subscribers Creator costs $390 a year, which works out to $33 a month, and paying month to month costs $78 more over a year. Creator adds unlimited visual automations and sequences, SMS, RSS campaigns, more than 100 direct app integrations, two users and 24/7 email and chat support.

Pro is for newsletters that grow through referrals and ads. It adds a newsletter referral system, deliverability reporting, engagement analytics and Facebook custom audiences. Kit lists Pro at $66 a month on yearly billing for 1,000 subscribers, and when we checked it was running a first-year offer of $50 a month. Both paid plans come with a 14-day trial and no card.

Kit suits a writer, podcaster or course seller more than a shop. If you run an online store and want product feeds and cart recovery, look at Klaviyo or Omnisend.

Brevo, the company that used to be Sendinblue, prices its marketing plans on how many emails you send each month instead of how many contacts you keep. If you have a big list and mail it once or twice a month, that can cost less than a tool that charges for every stored contact.

The free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day once Brevo approves your account for sending. Starter begins at $9 a month for 5,000 emails a month, and removing the Brevo logo from your emails is a paid add-on. Standard starts at $18 a month. Professional starts at $499 a month and comes with 150,000 emails a month. Enterprise is priced on request.

Brevo also goes beyond email with SMS, WhatsApp, web and mobile push, live chat and a chatbot. It sends transactional email, such as receipts and password resets, through an SMTP relay and an API, so one account can carry your marketing mail and your app's system mail. Brevo lists more than 150 integrations, including Shopify, Stripe and Zapier.

A contact-heavy list that you mail every few days can burn through the email allowance quickly. Work out your real monthly send volume before you pick a tier.

Klaviyo is the store-focused tool that rivals such as Omnisend measure their prices against. It keeps each shopper's email, text and site activity in one customer profile, and it connects natively to store platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce. Klaviyo lists more than 400 preconfigured integrations. Besides email, it sends SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and mobile push.

The free plan is small: up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month. It still includes web forms, the drag-and-drop editor with basic templates, basic segmentation, reporting dashboards and campaign revenue attribution, so you can see which emails led to orders before you pay anything. Email support on the free plan lasts for the first 60 days.

Paid plans scale with your number of active profiles and with how many texts you send. The Email plan starts at $20 a month for 251 to 500 active profiles, and Email and SMS at $35 for the same range. Above that, Klaviyo's calculator sets the price, so run it with your real profile count before you budget.

Klaviyo makes the most sense once a store has steady order volume and wants detailed segments built on purchase history. A store just starting out should also price Omnisend, which says it costs up to 35% less than Klaviyo.

Omnisend is a store-focused email and SMS tool, and its pricing page claims savings of up to 35% against Klaviyo. It lists more than 330 pre-built integrations and is rated 4.8 out of 5 in the Shopify app store, according to Omnisend's own site.

The free plan covers 250 contacts, 500 emails a month and 500 web push notifications a month, with no time limit and no card. Standard costs $16 a month for 500 contacts with 6,000 emails a month and unlimited web push. Pro costs $59 a month for 2,500 contacts with unlimited email under a fair use policy (up to 60 times your list), and it includes SMS credits equal to your monthly bill. When we checked, Omnisend took 30% off the first three months of either paid plan, which brings Standard to $11.20 a month for that period.

Texts start at $0.007 each for high-volume US sending, and the rate varies by country. Accounts paying at least $400 a month get an account expert at no extra charge, and Omnisend offers a free migration service to move your flows, lists and templates over.

Omnisend is a good fit for a small or mid-size shop that wants cart recovery, product emails and SMS at a low starting price. A business with no online store gets little from its ecommerce focus, so MailerLite is the better buy there.

ActiveCampaign is the pick when your email program depends on branching automations, with different paths for buyers and browsers and messages across email, SMS and WhatsApp. Its newer AI assistant, Active Intelligence, can build a flow from a plain-language request and runs weekly audits of your tags, automations and deliverability. ActiveCampaign says nothing changes until you approve it.

Every plan starts at 1,000 contacts. Starter includes multi-step automation, the AI automation and campaign builders and more than 250 pre-built templates, with 10,000 sends a month. Plus adds landing pages, site messages and AI-generated content and images. Pro adds predictive sending, conditional content, advanced segmentation and attribution and conversion tracking, with 12,000 sends a month and three users. Enterprise adds SSO, HIPAA support, custom objects and a dedicated account team.

At 1,000 contacts, Starter costs $15 a month billed yearly or $19 month to month, Plus $49 or $59, and Pro $79 or $99. There is a 14-day free trial with no card, and no free plan.

If you only need newsletters and a welcome series, ActiveCampaign is more tool than you need, and MailerLite does the basics for less. If you want sales pipelines on the same contact records as your email, Platformly includes them.

Mailchimp is the best-known name here, which helps when you want outside help. It connects to more than 300 apps, and its site runs a Hire an Expert directory where you can find a freelancer who already knows the tool. The Standard plan includes Intuit Assist, Mailchimp's AI writing and design help, at no extra cost.

The free plan is one of the smallest here: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month and no more than 250 sends a day, with email support for the first 30 days only. Paid plans set the monthly send limit as a multiple of your contacts: 10 times on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Essentials includes pop-up forms and 24/7 email and chat support for three users. Standard adds branded templates, custom reports, content that changes by reader, and five users. Premium adds phone support, multivariate tests, predictive segmentation and unlimited users.

Essentials starts at $13 a month and Standard at $20 a month, both for 500 contacts, according to Mailchimp's own plan pages. Both come with a 14-day trial, and Mailchimp asks for payment details when you sign up. Its main pricing page showed us euros, so check the dollar price at your list size before you buy.

Mailchimp's price rises with each contact tier, and the free plan is too small to run a business on for long. Before you commit, compare it with MailerLite at your real list size.

GetResponse hosts live webinars and online courses in the same account as your email, which makes it a practical choice for coaches and educators who sell through live sessions and want sign-ups to flow straight into an email sequence.

Every paid plan includes unlimited monthly sends. Starter covers email, a welcome series, one custom automation workflow, a landing page builder and signup forms with popups. Marketer adds ecommerce tools such as abandoned cart recovery, sales funnels, promo codes and revenue reports. Creator adds webinars, a website builder and a course creator for up to 500 students. GetResponse lists more than 170 integrations.

In its FAQ, GetResponse says monthly plans start at $19 a month for unlimited messages to 1,000 subscribers, with 18% off on a yearly plan. The pricing tables we saw were in euros, so check the US price for each plan on the vendor site. You can try premium features free for 14 days without a card. A free account also exists, but it adds a GetResponse badge to every message and limits landing pages to 1,000 unique visitors a month.

If you do not run webinars or courses, you are paying for tools you will not use, and MailerLite or Brevo cost less for plain email.