The best email marketing software in 2026

What we judged these on

Email marketing software all claims to do the same thing: send campaigns, automate sequences, and grow a list. What actually separates the six tools below is how they price as your list grows, how deep their automation goes before you have to upgrade, and whether they're built for a specific use case (ecommerce, creators, agencies) or general-purpose. We priced every plan at a consistent benchmark, roughly 1,000 contacts, pulled from each vendor's own pricing page or a verified 2026 pricing breakdown, so you can compare like for like instead of relying on "starting at" headlines.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is still the default most people reach for first, and its free plan is genuinely usable for testing: up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with basic templates. Paid tiers start at Essentials, $13/month for up to 500 contacts and 5,000 sends, with A/B testing and branded templates. Standard is $20/month at the same starting contact tier but adds automated follow-ups, AI tools, and predictive segmentation, which is where Mailchimp becomes genuinely competitive with automation-first tools. Premium jumps sharply to $350/month, but at that tier contacts are unlimited and you get 150,000 sends, priority phone support, and a dedicated onboarding specialist.

The gap between Standard and Premium is the thing to watch: Mailchimp is affordable and full-featured for small lists, then becomes one of the pricier options once you need Premium-tier volume. If you're under a few thousand contacts and want an all-purpose tool with a huge library of integrations, Mailchimp remains a safe default. If you're already planning to scale past 10,000 contacts, price it out before committing.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is built for ecommerce, and it shows: every plan ties directly into Shopify, WooCommerce, and similar platforms, with revenue attribution and product-level segmentation baked in rather than bolted on. The free plan covers up to 250 active profiles with 500 email sends and $5 of SMS credit, generous enough to test real automation flows before paying anything. Paid Email plans are priced by active profile count and climb from roughly $20/month at 500 profiles to about $30/month at 1,000 profiles, scaling up to around $400/month at 25,000 profiles. Every tier includes drag-and-drop email and SMS building, AI subject line generation, and built-in revenue reporting tied to actual orders, not just opens and clicks.

The tradeoff is that Klaviyo's pricing model, based on active profiles rather than a flat contact list, can get expensive fast if you have a large but low-engagement list, since Klaviyo counts profiles that received or opened emails recently. For a store that wants email and SMS revenue attribution out of the box, Klaviyo is worth the premium over a generalist tool. For a non-ecommerce business, it's usually overkill.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit rebranded from ConvertKit and repositioned itself specifically for creators and newsletter writers rather than general marketers. The Creator plan starts at $39/month billed monthly (about $33/month billed annually) for up to 1,000 subscribers, and scales to roughly $89/month at 5,000 subscribers and $139/month at 10,000. Every paid tier includes unlimited sends with no per-email charges, landing pages, and paid newsletter/subscription tools built in, which sets it apart from tools that charge extra for monetization features. Kit also keeps a free tier with unlimited sends up to a meaningful subscriber count, though it caps you to a single automation, which is the real limitation of the free plan rather than the send volume.

Kit raised prices substantially in late 2025, roughly doubling the entry-level annual price, so if you're comparing it against older reviews, expect the current numbers to run higher than what you'll find in outdated posts. For a solo creator or newsletter business whose main revenue is paid subscriptions, Kit's built-in monetization tools justify the premium. For a company running product marketing campaigns, the creator-specific features go unused.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign's pitch is automation depth: multi-step, conditional, behavior-triggered sequences that most competitors don't match until their top tier, if at all. At 1,000 contacts, monthly billing runs Starter at $15/month, Plus at $49/month, Professional at $79/month, and Enterprise at $145/month, with annual billing trimming roughly 15% off each. Plus is the meaningful jump: it adds unlimited automation actions, landing pages, and limited AI features, versus Starter's five-action cap. Professional adds predictive content and premium integrations, and Enterprise adds custom objects, SSO, and a dedicated support team.

The tradeoff is that ActiveCampaign's pricing scales aggressively with list size once you're past the entry tier, with some reports of Plus-tier costs climbing over 10x between 1,000 and 50,000 contacts. It's also the tool with the steepest learning curve on this list; the automation builder rewards the time investment but isn't something you'll master in an afternoon. If deep, behavior-based automation is the actual reason you're shopping for new software, ActiveCampaign remains the strongest option here. If you mainly need to send newsletters and basic drip sequences, you're paying for depth you won't use.

Brevo

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) prices by email volume rather than contact count, which makes it the outlier, and often the cheapest option, for a business with a large list that doesn't email constantly. Starter plans run from $9/month for 5,000 emails up to $69/month for 100,000 emails, with contacts uncapped. The Standard tier (which replaced the old "Business" plan in late 2025) adds automation, A/B testing, and landing pages for roughly $9 to $15 more per month at each volume level, starting at $18/month for 5,000 emails. Brevo also offers a genuinely free forever plan and a Professional tier around $499/month for larger senders needing advanced deliverability tools.

Because Brevo doesn't charge by contact count, it's a strong fit for a business with a large but infrequently-emailed list, like a transactional-plus-occasional-newsletter setup. It's a weaker fit if you send frequently to a smaller list, since you'll hit volume caps faster than a contact-based competitor. Brevo also bundles SMS and, on higher tiers, a basic CRM, which some competitors charge separately for.

MailerLite

MailerLite is the budget-conscious generalist pick. The free plan covers up to 250 active subscribers with 2,500 monthly emails, two user seats, and access to all three of its email editors, unusually generous for a free tier. The Comfort plan (MailerLite's mid tier, previously marketed as Growing Business) starts at $12/month and scales with subscriber count, reaching roughly $73/month at 10,000 subscribers per independent 2026 pricing trackers; it adds 50 visual automations, an AI writing assistant, and up to 10 landing pages. Power, the top self-serve tier, starts at $25/month with unlimited sends, automations, and user seats.

MailerLite doesn't try to match ActiveCampaign's automation depth or Klaviyo's ecommerce-native reporting, and that's the point: it's built to be affordable and straightforward at small-to-mid list sizes. For a small business or solo marketer who wants solid automation and a clean interface without paying agency-tier prices, MailerLite is consistently one of the cheapest ways to get there.

How the plans compare

Tool	Entry paid price (~1,000 contacts)	Free plan	Best for	Pricing basis
Mailchimp	$13/mo (Essentials)	Yes, 250 contacts	General-purpose, small lists	Contacts
Klaviyo	~$30/mo (Email)	Yes, 250 profiles	Ecommerce (Shopify/Woo)	Active profiles
Kit	$39/mo (Creator, monthly)	Yes, limited automations	Creators, paid newsletters	Subscribers
ActiveCampaign	$15/mo (Starter)	No	Deep automation	Contacts
Brevo	$9/mo (Starter, 5K emails)	Yes	Large list, infrequent sends	Email volume
MailerLite	$12/mo (Comfort)	Yes, 250 subscribers	Budget-conscious generalists	Subscribers

How to choose

If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store and want revenue tied directly to campaigns, start with Klaviyo; the ecommerce integrations alone justify the price gap over generalist tools. If your business model is a paid newsletter or creator subscription, Kit's built-in monetization tools save you from stitching together a separate payment platform. If you need multi-step, behavior-triggered automation and have the time to build it properly, ActiveCampaign has no close second on this list. If your list is large but you don't email often, Brevo's volume-based pricing will likely beat every contact-based competitor here. If you just want a reliable, affordable tool without a steep learning curve, MailerLite or Mailchimp's Essentials tier will cover most small-business needs.

The verdict

There's no single best email marketing tool, only a best fit for how you actually use email. We'd point an ecommerce store to Klaviyo, an agency running complex nurture sequences to ActiveCampaign, and everyone else, small businesses, solo marketers, and anyone just getting a list off the ground, to MailerLite or Mailchimp, in that order, based on budget. Don't pay for automation depth or ecommerce integrations you won't use; that's the single most common way businesses overpay for email software.