The best Benchmark Email alternatives of 2026

Benchmark Email tells you who opened and who clicked. Platformly goes on to show which email, link or traffic source brought in each sale. Connect Stripe, Paddle, Shopify or WooCommerce, or send sales in through a webhook, and every order lands on the contact who placed it. Reports then show revenue per subscriber, the value of a lead and the result under five attribution models, so you can see which campaigns paid for themselves.

The email side covers what you use in Benchmark today: a block editor with a template library, A/B tests, sending by each reader's time zone, saved snippets and content blocks that show only to readers who match a condition. Visual automation flows start from sign-ups, purchases, clicks, tags or page visits, with waits and conditions, for sequences that branch on what people do. Forms and landing pages use double opt-in and keep consent records, and your Benchmark contacts come across in an import file.

The same contact records hold a sales pipeline, lead scoring, a shared inbox for email, chat and SMS, and an AI assistant that drafts broadcasts and subject lines and explains your figures, with a person approving anything before it sends.

If you only send a monthly newsletter and have nothing to sell, that is more than you need, and MailerLite or Zoho Campaigns will be simpler to run.

MailerLite covers the same ground as Benchmark Email, with a drag-and-drop editor, templates and signup forms, and it goes further on the parts a small business grows into. Every plan, the free one included, has a visual automation builder, a landing page builder and a website builder, and you can sell digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions from the same account. There is also a simple editor and a custom HTML editor, and MailerLite lists more than 150 integrations.

The free plan holds 250 subscribers, half of Benchmark's free allowance. In return it lets you send 2,500 emails a month against Benchmark's 1,000, and it includes two user seats, three visual automations, one landing page and three signup forms or pop-ups. Benchmark Pro charges $15 a month for each extra user, so that second seat matters if two people share the work.

Comfort costs $12 a month for 500 subscribers or $19 for 1,000 on monthly billing, the same $12 entry price as Benchmark Pro at 500 contacts. Power costs $25 for 500 subscribers or $39 for 1,000. Yearly billing takes 10% off, and you can try every feature for 14 days without a card.

MailerLite runs out of depth when you want a sales pipeline or detailed CRM work next to your email. For that, ActiveCampaign goes further.

Zoho Campaigns has the most generous free plan here for a small business that sends regular campaigns. Forever Free covers up to 2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails a month and five users. That is four times Benchmark Email's free contact limit and six times its monthly sends. The free plan includes signup forms, basic templates and a compliance check. A new account starts with a 14-day trial of every feature and then moves to Forever Free.

Paid plans are cheap. Zoho's pricing data lists Standard at $4 a month for 500 contacts and $7 for 1,000, with unlimited emails, 10 users, basic segmentation, more templates and drag-and-drop workflows for your autoresponders. Professional, at $6 for 500 contacts and $12 for 1,000, adds advanced segmentation, contact scoring and tags, pop-up forms, abandoned cart and post-purchase workflows, email surveys and sending by each recipient's time zone. Zoho takes 25% off for annual billing. If you send only a few campaigns a year, you can buy email credits and skip the subscription.

The free plan's templates are basic, and the richer workflows sit on Professional. Zoho Campaigns fits best if your contacts already live in another Zoho app such as Zoho CRM, since it can import contacts from integrated apps.

Brevo, the company that used to be Sendinblue, prices its marketing plans by the emails you send each month instead of the contacts you keep. Benchmark Email prices by contacts, so if you hold a large list and mail it once or twice a month, Brevo can cost much less.

The free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day once Brevo approves your account for sending. Starter costs $9 a month for 5,000 emails a month and covers the drag-and-drop editor, templates, segmentation, forms and a follow-up email that goes out when someone signs up. The Brevo logo stays on Starter emails unless you pay to remove it. Standard, at $18 a month, adds unlimited multi-step automation workflows, A/B testing, send-time optimization and one landing page, and it drops the logo. Professional starts at $499 a month for 150,000 emails and adds WhatsApp, pop-ups and more channels. Paying yearly saves 10%.

Brevo also sends SMS and transactional email from the same account, which suits a shop that wants receipts and newsletters in one place. Full automation starts on the $18 Standard plan, though, while MailerLite and Zoho Campaigns include some automation at a lower price.

ActiveCampaign is the step up when your Benchmark autoresponders have turned into flows with several branches and follow-ups. Every plan includes multi-step marketing automation, AI builders for automations and campaigns, and more than 250 pre-built email templates. Plans start at 1,000 contacts.

At 1,000 contacts, Starter costs $19 a month, or $15 a month billed yearly ($180 a year), with 10,000 sends a month and one user. Plus costs $59 a month, or $49 billed yearly, and adds cross-channel marketing, landing pages and site messages, and AI-generated content and images. Pro costs $99 a month, or $79 billed yearly, raises sends to 12 times your contact limit and includes three users. You get a 14-day free trial, and there is no free plan.

Compared with Benchmark, you give up the free plan and pay more at the same list size. What you gain is an automation builder made for long, branching sequences. If all you send is a newsletter and a welcome email, MailerLite or Zoho Campaigns cover it for less.

Kit, formerly ConvertKit, suits writers, podcasters and course sellers. Its free plan holds 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 leaves out visual automations and email sequences, so it replaces Benchmark Email's newsletter sending but not its autoresponders.

Creator adds unlimited visual automations and email sequences. For 1,000 subscribers it costs $390 a year, about $33 a month, and paying month to month costs $78 more over a year. Pro costs $79 a month, or $66 a month billed yearly, and when we checked it had a first-year offer of $593 billed yearly (about $50 a month). Pro adds subscriber engagement scoring, deliverability reporting and unlimited users. Both paid plans have a 14-day trial without a card, and Kit moves your subscriber lists and automations across for free on a paid plan.

At 1,000 subscribers Kit costs more than MailerLite. Its extras, such as paid recommendations and newsletter sponsorships, pay off when you sell from your newsletter. A business that mainly sends promotions to customers gets more for the money from MailerLite or Brevo.

Every GetResponse paid plan includes unlimited monthly sends, so you stop counting emails the way you do on Benchmark Pro, which caps sends at 10 times your contact count. Starter covers email, a welcome email series, one custom automation workflow, a landing page builder and signup forms and pop-ups. Marketer adds unlimited automation workflows. Creator is the first plan with live webinars, for up to 100 attendees.

GetResponse's FAQ says monthly plans start at $19 a month for unlimited messages to 1,000 subscribers, with 18% off a 12-month plan. The plan tables we reached showed euros, so check the dollar price of Marketer and Creator on GetResponse's site before you buy. You can try premium features free for 14 days without a card.

After the trial you can keep a free account, with limits: every message carries a GetResponse badge, landing pages are capped at 1,000 unique visitors a month and webinars at 10 people. That works for testing, but the badge and the visitor cap make it a poor home for a business list.

If you never run webinars, you pay for a Creator plan you do not use, and MailerLite or Zoho Campaigns handle plain email for less.

Mailjet pairs a drag-and-drop marketing editor with an email API and SMTP relay, so your developer can send password resets and receipts from the same account your marketer uses for newsletters. Teams can edit templates together, leave comments and approve a campaign before it goes out.

Like Brevo, Mailjet prices by monthly email volume. The free plan sends 6,000 emails a month, up to 200 a day, to as many as 1,000 contacts, and includes the API, SMTP relay and webhooks. Starter costs $9 a month for 8,000 emails and 2,000 contacts. Essential, at $19 a month for 15,000 emails, removes the contact limit, adds segmentation and drops the Mailjet logo. Automations and landing pages arrive on Premium, at $29 a month for 15,000 emails, which also adds team management and priority support. Annual billing takes 10% off.

That automation gap is the reason to look elsewhere if autoresponders are what you used Benchmark Email for. You would pay $29 a month on Mailjet for what MailerLite's free plan starts you with. Mailjet makes the most sense when one account has to serve both a product team and a marketing team.