The best drip email marketing software of 2026

Platformly suits drip campaigns whose job is to sell. Its visual flows start from sign-ups, purchases, clicks, tags, page visits and other events, then use waits and conditions to branch, so a sequence can check whether someone has bought before it sends the next offer. Signed webhooks pass events in and out of a flow when another app needs to start a sequence or hear about a step.

The difference from most drip tools is what happens after the click. Platformly imports sales from Stripe, Paddle, Shopify and WooCommerce and ties each one to the email, link or source that brought the customer in, with five attribution models, so you can see which sequence pays for itself instead of stopping at opens and clicks. Lead scoring, segments and a sales pipeline work on the same contact records, and an AI assistant can draft broadcasts and subject lines or fix a flow step, with a person approving anything that sends.

That matters most to businesses that sell through their own links, stores and checkouts. For drips driven by events from your own software, Customer.io goes deeper, and Klaviyo is the store specialist. See Platformly's site for current plans.

ActiveCampaign is the drip tool to choose when a fixed sequence of emails is no longer enough. Every plan includes multi-step automation and an AI-powered automation builder, and ActiveCampaign adds goals: checkpoints that move a contact forward or out of an automation once they do what you wanted, such as booking a call or buying. That is how you build a trial drip that stops selling to people who have already paid.

The cheapest plan is tight for drips. Starter limits each automation to 5 actions and allows 15 active goals, which is fine for a three-email welcome series and cramped for anything longer. Plus removes the action limit and allows 25 active goals; Pro allows 200 and adds conditional content inside emails plus attribution and conversion tracking.

For 1,000 contacts, Starter costs $15 a month billed yearly or $19 month to month, and Plus costs $49 yearly or $59 monthly. At 5,000 contacts Plus rises to $145 a month yearly ($179 monthly), so the bill grows quickly with the list. Pro is $79 a month yearly at 1,000 contacts.

Plus costs more than MailerLite Comfort at every list size we compared: $59 against $19 at 1,000 contacts on monthly billing. You pay for the depth of the automation builder and the goals behind each drip. There is a 14-day free trial with no card.

MailerLite is the cheapest good way to run drip campaigns. The free plan, for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, includes 3 active automations with up to 5 steps each. That covers a welcome series, a lead magnet follow-up and a re-engagement email at no cost.

Comfort raises the allowance to 50 active automations of up to 100 steps. It costs $12 a month at 500 subscribers, $19 at 1,000, $49 at 5,000 and $89 at 10,000 on monthly billing, or 10% less yearly. Power ($25 at 500, $39 at 1,000) removes the monthly email cap under a fair use policy and lets a single automation start from several triggers.

It has less depth than ActiveCampaign for long drips that branch several ways. For a service business or a blogger sending a five-email welcome course, that rarely matters.

New accounts get 14 days of premium features without a card, which is enough time to build and test a sequence.

Kit, the creator email platform formerly called ConvertKit, is built around two ideas that suit drip campaigns: sequences and tags. A sequence is a set of emails sent on a schedule, and a visual automation decides who enters which sequence. Automations can start when someone signs up, clicks a link, buys a product or goes inactive, and their actions can apply or remove tags and add people to a sequence.

That suits writers, coaches and course creators. A reader who downloads a free guide gets a five-day email course, clicks a link on day three, gets tagged as interested and moves into a launch sequence for the paid course. Kit also sells digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions, so the purchase can end the drip.

Sequences and visual automations aren't on the free plan, which covers 10,000 subscribers for broadcasts only. Creator costs $39 a month for 1,000 subscribers on monthly billing or $390 a year, and adds unlimited sequences and automations, SMS, RSS campaigns and 24/7 email and chat support. Pro adds engagement scoring and a newsletter referral system.

Kit is weaker for stores and for businesses that want sales-pipeline data, and it costs more than MailerLite at the same list size. Creator and Pro have a 14-day trial without a card, and Kit migrates lists from other tools for free.

Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, prices by the number of emails you send each month instead of by list size. For drip campaigns that is useful when you have a large list but each person gets only a few automated emails, such as a three-step welcome series for every new customer.

Automation starts on Standard, which costs $18 a month at its entry volume and includes unlimited multi-step workflows, A/B testing, advanced reports and send-time optimization that picks a send time per contact. The Starter plan ($9 a month for 5,000 emails) has the editor and segmentation but not the workflow builder, and the free plan caps sending at 300 emails a day. Yearly billing saves 10%.

Brevo also handles transactional email through its API and sells SMS credits, so order confirmations and the follow-up drip can live in one account. It connects with more than 150 tools, including Shopify, WordPress and Stripe.

The builder is less flexible than ActiveCampaign's, and the next plan up, Professional, jumps to $499 a month. For a small business that wants many simple drips without paying per contact, Standard is good value.

Drip shares its name with the campaigns this guide covers, and it is an ecommerce email tool rather than a general one. It is built for Shopify and other online stores that want behavior-based segments, automated workflows and on-site pop-ups in one place, priced on list size with unlimited email sends.

Drip's site blocked our check on November 4, 2026, so we could not confirm today's price. The last copy of its pricing page we could read, archived on March 23, 2026, showed $39 a month for up to 2,500 people, with unlimited email sends, up to 50 workflows, on-site campaigns, unlimited sub-accounts, open API access, chat and email support and free migration. It also offered a 14-day free trial without a card, though unlimited sends are not part of the trial.

If those terms still hold, unlimited sends make Drip good value for a store that emails its list often. The 50-workflow limit is enough for most stores. Check the live pricing page before you sign up, since we could not read it.

Klaviyo suits stores that have outgrown a starter tool, because its flows start from what shoppers do. A flow can begin when someone views a product, starts a checkout, places an order, completes a form, hits a birthday or anniversary, or goes quiet for a long stretch. It can also start from a predicted next order date, which lets a coffee or supplements store email just before a customer usually runs out. The library has more than 60 prebuilt flows, including abandoned cart and browse abandonment.

The free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month. Paid Email plans start at $20 a month for 251 to 500 active profiles, and Email and SMS starts at $35.

Klaviyo costs more than Omnisend at the same size and takes longer to learn. The flows, segments and reports are the reason stores accept that. A small store still finding its first customers should start with Omnisend's free plan and move later.

Omnisend gives a small online store its two most useful drips for free. The free plan, for 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, includes a welcome series and an abandoned-cart workflow, which most shops set up before anything else.

Standard costs $16 a month for 500 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. Pro costs $59 a month at 2,500 contacts with unlimited email under a fair use policy. When we checked, new customers paying three months up front got 30% off. Texts and web push notifications sit in the same account, and Omnisend connects with more than 330 tools.

Compared with Klaviyo, Omnisend is cheaper to start, while Klaviyo has the larger flow library and triggers such as a predicted next order. For a store doing its first few hundred orders a month, that trade is usually right. Omnisend's team will also move your flows, lists and templates from another tool in about five days at no charge.

Customer.io is for software companies that want drip emails to follow what people do inside the product. A workflow can start from an event your app sends, a change in segment, a form, a date or a webhook. So a new user who hasn't created a project after two days gets a nudge, and someone who just invited their team gets the next tip instead.

Workflows can send email, texts, push notifications, in-app messages, WhatsApp and Slack messages, and the visual builder includes send-time optimization and actions that call a language model.

Essentials costs $100 a month billed monthly and includes 5,000 profiles and 1 million emails a month. Extra profiles cost $0.009 each and extra emails $0.12 per 1,000. Higher tiers cost $145 a month at 10,000 profiles and $235 at 20,000. Premium starts at $1,000 a month billed yearly. Startups that have raised under $10 million can apply for 12 months free.

Customer.io expects a developer to send it events, and the starting price is high for a newsletter. If your drips depend on what users do in an app, it does that job better than any tool here.

GetResponse has kept the classic autoresponder, which is the simplest form of drip: email one goes out on the day someone joins, email two on day two, and so on. Every plan includes autoresponder series, so a five-day email course or a 30-day onboarding plan is quick to build even on the cheapest tier.

Branching workflows are more limited at the bottom. Starter includes one custom automation workflow, while Marketer and Creator include unlimited workflows. GetResponse says monthly plans start at $19 a month for 1,000 subscribers with unlimited messages, and yearly billing takes 18% off. Its pricing page showed only euro prices from our location for the plans above Starter.

GetResponse also runs webinars, landing pages and online courses, which fits creators and coaches who sell through a free webinar followed by a drip. There is a 14-day free trial without a card, and a free version with limits after it ends.

Choose it for schedule-based sequences and webinar funnels. For drips that branch on behavior, ActiveCampaign or MailerLite give more for the money.