Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing service and used to be the industry favorite. But the Chimp isn’t always the Champ. With recent Mailchimp price increases and features lagging, many users are looking at other tools instead of Mailchimp.

In this review, I’ll share the best Mailchimp alternatives and review them one by one. We even have some discounts and extras for you to sweeten your picks.

I personally tested and reviewed the platforms below.

Here are the 9 best Mailchimp alternatives for 2026

1. Mailerlite best user-friendly email tool with clean interface
2. Brevo affordable email marketing, automation, and CRM
3. Moosend  best for newsletters and simple automation
4. AWeber best for small business customer support
5. Omnisend best email marketing automation for eCommerce
6. Mailjet email marketing and API combo with unlimited contacts on all plans
7. GetResponse all-in-one email marketing for B2B and eCommerce
8. Campaigner email marketing with SMS marketing and automation
9. ActiveCampaign best for advanced email marketing automation

1. MailerLite

MailerLite is a very simple and user-friendly email tool. A clean interface, simple personalization, especially attractive for small businesses.
Short Review | Visit Website

2. Brevo

Brevo is an email marketing and CRM platform. Founded as Sendinblue in 2012, it has grown to over 500,000 active users.
⍟ Extra’s? 10% discount yearly
Short Review | Visit Website

3. Moosend

Moosend is an Email Marketing platform for newsletters and simple automation, with a very nice email designer.
⍟ Extra’s? Yes! 10% extra discount + swag
Short Review | Visit Website

4. AWeber

AWeber is tailor made for sending small business newsletters. It’s cheaper than MailChimp and easier to use. On the flipside, MailChimp packs more advanced features, especially around automation.
Short Review | Visit Website

5. Omnisend

Omnisend is email marketing and automation software for e-Commerce and eShops.
⍟ Extra’s? 30% discount 3 months
Short Review | Visit Website

6. Mailjet

Mailjet is an email marketing and transactional email service. It has easy-to-use drag-and-drop editors for emails and landing pages, and unlimited contacts on all plans.
Short Review | Visit Website

7. GetResponse

GetResponse is a popular all-in-one email marketing platform with list management, marketing automation and full newsletter functions.
⍟ Extra’s? Yes! 10% extra discount
Short Review | Visit Website

8. Campaigner

Campaigner is an email service provider with SMS marketing and automation. It’s an affordable Mailchimp alternative worth checking out.
Short Review | Visit Website

9. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an advanced email marketing automation platform that will handle your email marketing and build marketing funnels.
Short Review | Visit Website

Mailerlite as a Mailchimp alternative

MailerLite was founded in 2010 and it is a popular alternative to Mailchimp for simple email marketing. More than 700.000 businesses use MailerLite to send over 1 billion emails each month.

What about Mailerlite features?
MailerLite has enough features for small business email marketing needs. Planning to send newsletters or promotional email blasts? Mailerlite is all you need.

What you’ll like about Mailerlite:

• Email template gallery with over 50 email templates to get started quickly.
• Full drag and drop email builder
• Advanced pop-ups to get more subscribers
• Landing pages, surveys and sign up forms
• Get A/B split testing up to 5 versions in the testing wizard
• Deliver by time zone
• Auto resend, to entice non-openers to give your mails a second chance.

MailChimp vs Mailerlite

MailerLite has a bit more features compared to MailChimp. With full email marketing tools, subscription pop-ups and forms and advanced scheduling and re-send function. Mailerlite simple to start with. It has a free forever plan and free trial.

What does MailerLite cost?

If you pitch Mailchimp vs MailerLite on pricing, MailerLite comes out glorious as the cheapest email marketing software of the two. What does MailerLite cost? The free email plan is for up to 500 subscribers. For bulk email, Mailerlite is also still very cheap compared to Mailchimp. Paying annually gives you an extra 15% discount. That makes sending to 5.000 subscribers come to $29 per month. So Mailerlite is a cheaper Mailchimp competitor.

Capterra Score: 4.7 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.6 out of 5

MailerLite offers a 15% discount when paying per year! Have a look and get started here.

Try MailerLite >

Brevo as a MailChimp alternative

Brevo has been around since 2012 as Sendinblue, starting out as a simple email blast software you could compare with MailChimp. It is now a full email marketing service provider and CRM platform. Brevo has a drag-and-drop email designer, statistics, email automation, free templates and landing page builder as well.

Added to that the whole system got redesigned and revamped this year, making it fresh and easy to use for 2026. The drag-and-drop email editor is very intuitive. You can start making emails from scratch or use one of the categories of templates to start.

Brevo has email automation functionality – with an automation canvas. They have premade the most popular automation for you.

MailChimp vs Brevo

Brevo is another real MailChimp alternative, if you would be considering MailChimp, you should have a look at Brevo. It is much cheaper and has way more functionality. Brevo has phone customer support in the premium version.

What about Brevo features?
Brevo has way more features compared to MailChimp. With full email marketing tools, marketing automation, SMS marketing, and business CRM in there for free. Brevo is easy to set up and take for a trial spin.

What you’ll like about Brevo:

• Free newsletter templates and a responsive email template builder
• Create landing pages in an included landing page maker
• Email automation and most popular automation workflows are pre-made
• Integrate with your other tools through API
• Business CRM included for free
• Amazing value for Money

What does Brevo cost?

Brevo is a cheaper email marketing software than MailChimp. The costs of Brevo are based on the number of emails you send. The free email plan in Brevo is good enough to look inside the software and has a daily limit of 300 emails.

But if you want to send out “mass email blasts”, Brevo is also very cheap. Starting at $9 for 5K emails per month. Only needing to pay for active sends, makes Brevo an even cheaper Mailchimp competitor.

Brevo has the Free email marketing plan, but you get a 10% additional discount if you pay yearly. Start your free trial here

Capterra Score: 4.3 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.3 out of 5

Try Brevo for free > (Extra’s included)

Moosend as a MailChimp alternative

Moosend is email marketing software for newsletters and email automations, very much like Mailchimp. It is used by startups to SMB businesses.

The Moosend user interface is simple to navigate, it is quick for even beginners to learn. Making email marketing campaigns is super straightforward. The drag-and-drop email editor lets you put together emails and campaigns from scratch and there are plenty of free newsletter templates included.

Moosend has email automation included in all versions and the free trial account. So you can start making welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, etc, etc. There is even a library of pre-made automation workflows to get you started.

We really like that Moosend provides all of its functionality across all of its plans, compared to some of its competitors who charge additional for some of their more advanced features.

MailChimp vs Moosend

You could say Moosend is a real one-to-one MailChimp alternative, only much cheaper and a bit easier to use. With all the brands switching there is even a MailChimp synchronization to let you automatically import all the contacts when you switch from MailChimp to Moosend. It also offers live chat customer support which is helpful in case you need immediate help.

What about Moosend features?

Moosend’s features are up-to-date and easy to use, without any complex interface.

What you’ll like about Moosend:

• Responsive email template builder and it also offers pre-made responsive email templates
• Make landing pages with the included landing page templates and builder
• Integrations with your favorite apps
• Triggered emails / and email automation in all plans
• Mailchimp synchronization for easy switching
• Great value for Money

What is fancy about Moosend:

• Auto-save your email while editing – function
• Repeatable email campaigns / RSS based emails
• Subject line recommender based on AI, ohlala

What does Moosend cost?

Moosend is a cheaper MailChimp alternative. And that already starts with their free trial. There is no logo shown in any Moosend plan. And yes, you only pay for active subscribers and can have as many lists as you want.

Paid plans kick in at $9. (or $7 with our exclusive discount) Next to the monthly pricing, there is also a pay-as-you-go option that you pay only when you send, without any extra fees.

Moosend has generously offered an extra 10% discount for EVS readers. That is on top of the 20% discount when paying per year. Senders with 100.000 or more contacts, also get some extra swag! (Coffee mug or T-Shirt). Register through here.

Capterra Score: 4.9 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.9 out of 5

Try Moosend for free > (Extra’s included)

AWeber vs MailChimp

AWeber was around very early in email marketing software. Founded in 1998, it actually predates MailChimp by three years. Still, that means the pair have been going head to head for 20 years solid. 

AWeber lays claim to inventing the email autoresponder. But MailChimp has since outpaced its old rival on automations. Overall, AWeber builds its model on keeping things simple. Its strengths are that it is easy to use and does the basics well, with one or two clever extra touches. These include the Smart Designer and the clever Canva integration. AWeber keeps a strong foothold in small business email marketing with this approach.

What about AWeber features?

Looking to send newsletters and promotional emails to thousands of subscribers? That’s the core of what both AWeber and MailChimp offer. But if this is your priority above all else, AWeber is the better option. 

AWeber includes more than 600 fully customizable email templates. Or you can create your own with the cool Smart Designer using just your website’s URL. The drag and drop editor is easy to use. There is a huge library of stock images to bring your emails to life. Even better, you can create your own pro-quality graphics in minutes using free design software Canva.

MailChimp lets you build unlimited landing pages and signup forms on all its plan, unlike AWeber where you can only build unlimited landing pages on its Plus and Unlimited plan. It supports direct selling through landing pages. Its transaction fees are lower than MailChimp’s ecommerce options. AWeber also offers free migrations if you subscribe to the Plus or Unlimited plan. It has an excellent support service with 24/7 live chat on all plans.

Where MailChimp stands out, though, is on more advanced features like automation. Its condition-based marketing automation tools are much more sophisticated than AWeber’s simple autoresponders and scheduled campaigns.

What does AWeber cost?

AWeber pricing starts at $14.99 a month ($12.50/month if you pay annually) for unlimited emails and 500 contacts. While MailChimp’s Standard Plan starts at $17 a month for 500 contacts.

Like MailChimp, AWeber’s Free tier is a ‘free forever’ plan that you can use as long as you like.

Capterra Score: 4.4 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.2 out of 5

Try AWeber for free here >

Omnisend vs MailChimp

Omnisend is a Mailchimp competitor built with eCommerce in mind. The email service offers many workflows for online stores like browse abandonment, cart recovery, order confirmations and more. Making it especially interesting for users of Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento.

You can segment and personalize your message down to the last detail based on customer profiles, campaign clicks, and shop behavior. Sending a follow up on coupons, last site visit etc.

What we like about Omnisend:

• Great eCommerce email marketing software for merchants.
• Very cool gamified features such as scratch cards, coupon codes and spin-the-wheel opt-in generation.
• Automated product recommendations
• Product picker and templates making email creation very simple.
• All channels in one workflow including SMS, social, push, retargeting, and email.

Special highlight:
The Omnisend product picker is amazing for quickly putting together your product-based newsletter. You select products from your online store in the content editor, and Omnisend will directly show all the images, details, and prices in your emails. Automated product recommendations push up your email conversion rates.

Omnisend pricing

Omnisend is a very affordable Mailchimp alternative. Omnisend is a fraction of the price, offering a free plan with 500 emails. The paid plan starts at $16/month. There is a free service to help you switch from MailChimp.

Omnisend has given us a generous exclusive 30% discount for the first 3 months. Use Omnisend discount code “EVS30”. Have a look and get started here.

Capterra Score: 4.7 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.5 out of 5

Try Omnisend for free >

Mailjet vs Mailchimp

Mailjet is an email marketing platform with an email API and SMTP for transactional emails. It’s a great Mailchimp alternative for SMB and larger enterprises that want to meet the needs of marketers and developers.

Mailjet’s drag-and-drop email editor is easy to work with and has reusable content blocks. The same editor is used across emails, forms, and landing pages, which makes it easy to find your feet.

The free plan of Mailjet has 1,000 contacts and 6,000 monthly emails. Mailchimp’s free plan is significantly smaller, with only 250 contacts and 500 emails per month.

Mailjet vs Mailchimp

Both Mailjet and Mailchimp cover the basics like newsletters, segmentation, and automation. Mailchimp has stronger more integrations. Mailjet keeps things simpler and focuses on transactional emails, email testing, and email validation.

One major difference is pricing. Mailjet includes unlimited contacts on all paid plans, while Mailchimp’s costs increase as your contact list grows. Choose Mailjet if you want predictable pricing, unlimited contacts, and both marketing and transactional emails in one tool.

What about Mailjet features?

Mailjet includes a drag-and-drop email editor, segmentation, A/B testing, automation, web forms, landing pages, and detailed analytics. It also offers built-in email validation and deliverability reporting. Real-time collaboration allows multiple users to work on the same email at once.

What’s great about Mailjet:

• Unlimited contacts on all paid plans
• Marketing and transactional emails in one platform
• Built-in email validation and deliverability reporting
• Detailed reporting to understand campaign performance
  

Some extra nice-to-haves offered by Mailjet:

• Real-time collaboration and commenting
• API and SMTP access for developers
• Volume-based pricing instead of subscriber-based pricing
  

What does Mailjet cost?

Mailjet is a low-cost Mailchimp alternative. Pricing is based on the number of emails you send, not how many subscribers you have. All paid plans include unlimited contacts, which can significantly reduce costs over time compared to Mailchimp.

Mailjet plans start at $17/month for 15K emails and unlimited contacts. This Essential plan has segmentation, AI writing, basic statistics, and 500 email validations. For high-volume senders or businesses with large lists, Mailjet often ends up being the more affordable alternative.

G2 Score: 4/5
Capterra Score: 4.2/5

Try Mailjet for free >

GetResponse vs MailChimp

GetResponse was founded in 1997 and has over 350,000 email marketing customers. They have been busy adding new features over the last couple of years, like automated funnels. It is the only email tool on the list that has a webinar tool included.

What about GetResponse features?

GetResponse has some additional features compared to MailChimp. With email marketing sends, webinars and funnel software included. There is a CRM in the pro plan. The editor feels a bit outdated though compared to MailChimp. The tool is simple to start with and has a free plan with unlimited emails.

What you’ll like about GetResponse:

• Start sending your newsletter today, set-up is easy
• Email marketing tool with the basics in place: editing and reporting.
• Full email marketing automation and drag and drop canvas for triggered emails
• Webinar function included
• Free Access to iStock image gallery

What does GetResponse cost?

In GetResponse versus MailChimp, the Chimp will run you $115 for 10K contacts in the standard plan, while GetResponse will cost only $65 (or $55 based on yearly pricing). So the pricing is lower than Mailchimp. The additional good news is that GetResponse only charges on active subscribers, while MailChimp needs you to pay for every contact in your database.

Capterra Score: 4.1 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4 out of 5

GetResponse has generously offered an extra 10% discount for EVS readers. That is on top of the normal discount when paying per year and first month is totally free. Register through here.

Try GetResponse >

Campaigner vs MailChimp

Campaigner has been around for decades. Founded in 1999, they grew to 100K customers supporting businesses of all sizes. It has SMS marketing, forms, landing pages, automation, 24/7 support and affordable pricing.

Keeping things simple, Campaigner does the basics well, with some clever extra touches. These are the Reputation Defender and automation with conversion tracking. 

You can track conversions with Campaigner and use conversion data in automations. Conversions can be used as triggers, conditions, and goals. The Reputation Defender protects your sender reputation without paying for an email verification service.

Campaigner has Magento, Surveytown, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Zapier integrations. Zapier lets you connect 5000+ other tools. 

Mailchimp vs. Campaigner

Campaigner has over 900+ fully customizable email templates. You can customize these with the drag-and-drop editor or an HMTL editor. In Campaigner, you can automate SMS messages for shipping and delivery notifications, promotions, billing reminders, and appointment confirmations. 

Both MailChimp and Campaigner let you build unlimited landing pages and signup forms on all plans. Campaigner has an excellent support service with 24/7 phone, email and live chat on all plans.

Automation features are on a similar level in Campaigner and MailChimp. Except for the automation builder. Most people will prefer the visual workflow editor in Campaigner with conversion tracking.

What does Campaigner cost?

Campaigner is a cheaper email software than Mailchimp. It costs $59/month for 5K contacts, 30K emails, a drag-and-drop email editor, 900+ templates, landing pages, segmentation, and conversion tracking. The Essential plan costs $179/month for 25K contacts and 150K emails. This plan removes the Campaigner branding, adds dynamic content and ecommerce integrations.

Capterra Score: 4 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 3.6 out of 5

Try Campaigner free for 30 days

ActiveCampaign vs MailChimp

ActiveCampaign is software with a focus on Marketing automation, triggered emails and marketing funnels. As a Mailchimp alternative, you would go with ActiveCampaign if Marketing Automation is your thing. But typically automation systems like HubSpot, Pardot or Marketo can get very, very expensive.

ActiveCampaign pricing makes it a great solution for small businesses, or email senders that like to put more smarts into their email marketing and funnels.

What about ActiveCampaign features?
ActiveCampaign is way more sophisticated and better than MailChimp. With full email marketing, email marketing automation. There is even built-in on-site messaging and SMS. ActiveCampaign is relatively easy to start with and take for a trial spin.

Segmentation, tagging, and conditional content make that email targeting can be everything you want. The email editor is drag and drop, yet a bit less great in comparison – there are some pre-made templates available.

What you’ll like about ActiveCampaign:

• Dynamic content, tagging and segmentation make for more effective email!
• Website tracking, so you can trigger mails based on site visits
• Very helpful community of funnel building and automation enthusiasts
• The platform gets frequent updates and new features.
• Email automation canvas that is drag and drop and easy to use
• First 2 weeks free and prices start at $15/mo for email marketing

What you should know before using ActiveCampaign:
* ActiveCampaign gives weekly “getting started webinars”, one-on-one design help and concierge onboarding (if you choose).
* If you are planning to only send mass emails or newsletters, try one of the other email systems in this list like Moosend or MailerLite.

What does ActiveCampaign cost?

If you pitch Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign on pricing, that is apples versus oranges. But the ActiveCampaign Starter plan comes closest to MailChimp features and if you use our discount is actually a lot cheaper than MailChimp! For 2500 contacts, ActiveCampaign Starter costs $39/month, and Mailchimp Standard with less advanced features and limited sending is $60/month.

Capterra Score: 4.4 out of 5
G2 Crowd Score: 4.6 out of 5

ActiveCampaign has offered a discount of 20% if you pay yearly. Register through here. You can also be delighted that there is a free migration service to smoothly go from say MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.

Try ActiveCampaign >

The best free MailChimp alternatives

MailChimp was once best known for its freemium plan. You might be wondering, what are the best free alternatives for MailChimp? You know, those that aren’t just cheaper, but also have that free plan.

Free MailChimp alternatives:

• GetResponse – free MailChimp alternative for up to 500 subscribers – visit website
• MailerLite – has a free plan for up to 500 subscribers – visit website
• AWeber – free Mailchimp alternative with 500 subscribers and 3000 emails/month – visit website
• Omnisend – Free Mailchimp competitor for eCommerce up to 500 emails/month for free – visit website
• Brevo – Free MailChimp alternative up to 100,000 subscribers and 300 mails a day – visit website
• Mailjet – Mailchimp alternative with 1,000 contacts and 200 emails per day in the free plan – visit website

Here you can see a full list of free and cheap Mailchimp alternatives.

Now, what is the Best Mailchimp Alternative for you?

MailChimp is a popular email marketing service for a reason, but as we have seen there are similar tools and companies like MailChimp that are better for different use cases. Mailchimp may not have the automation functionality that you want, and the price difference is pretty big! If you are looking for the best email software that will help your business grow at a lower cost, you’d want to compare MailChimp to other email tools that might suit your needs better.

Luckily, there are excellent MailChimp Alternatives. The 9 vendors here can serve as a good shortlist for your email marketing software selection.

Recommended Reading on emailvendorselection.com:
To further deepen research in email marketing software, check out our review of ActiveCampaign, review of Brevo, MailerLite, AWeber, Mailjet, Moosend, Mailchimp, Omnisend, and beehiiv.

FAQs about Mailchimp Alternatives

The post The 9 Best Mailchimp Alternatives in 2026 appeared first on Email vendor selection.

You have come to the right place.
But which is the best email marketing tool for you specifically? Let’s walk through that.

In this article:
Real email software selection advice
Reviews of 10 cheap email marketing software tools
An up-to-date price comparison table
Additional discounts and extras (!!)

Realize, you don’t need a big budget, to begin with email marketing:
1. A lot of email marketing tools offer a free trial. So you can take simply them for a test drive.
2. Tools are so good, you don’t need any real custom work done to get started.
3. Some systems are very cheap or even have a free email marketing software tier.

We personally tested and reviewed the 10 well-known tools below.

Let’s dive right in. Meet our brave contestants:

1. Brevo Brevo is a popular email marketing and CRM platform. Founded as Sendinblue in 2012, it has grown to over 50.000 companies using the platform. Included for free 100,000 Subscribers, 9,000 Emails per month ⍟ Extras? Yes! 60% off the first 3 months & 10% discount yearly Short Review | Visit Website

2. MailerLite MailerLite is a very simple and user-friendly email tool. A clean interface, simple personalization, especially attractive for small businesses. Included for free 500 subscribers with 12000 emails per month Access to all features + 24/7 support ⍟ Extras? Yes! A month free premium features! Short Review | Visit Website

3. Benchmark Email Benchmark Email is a simple email tool, with some advanced features, free small businesses CRM and great support. Included for free 500 contacts and 3500 emails per month 24/7 support on chat and email. ⍟ Extras? Yes! 10% extra discount on a yearly plan Short Review | Visit Website

4. Moosend Moosend is an Email Marketing platform for newsletters and simple automation, with a very nice email builder. Included with free trial forms, emails, and landing pages ⍟ Extras? Yes! 20% discount on yearly+ swag Short Review | Visit Website

5. Getresponse GetResponse is a popular all-in-one email marketing platform with list management, marketing automation, and full newsletter functions. Included for free unlimited newsletters, 1 landing page, website builder, sign up forms ⍟ Extras? Yes! 10% extra discount Short Review | Visit Website

6. AWeber AWeber is a user-friendly email marketing platform with a great email editor and an automated template designer, plus hundreds of premade templates. Included for free 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month Built-in Ecommerce + 24/7 live chat support Short Review | Visit Website

7. ActiveCampaign ActiveCampaign is advanced email automation software that will handle your email marketing and build marketing funnels. Includes Sales CRM. 14-day free trial Free onboarding and migration service Short Review | Visit Website

8. Omnisend Omnisend is an ecommerce email marketing platform with automation, SMS, and push notifications. It’s built for online stores that want multichannel campaigns and strong automation features, with easy setup and a focus on increasing sales. 250 contacts and 500 emails for free ⍟ Extras? Yes, 30% off by paying for 3 months with the code EVS30 Short Review | Visit Website

9. Kit Kit is especially for bloggers and content creators. It is a lead generation, email marketing, and email autoresponders platform. Includes opt-in forms, drip email marketing, landing pages. They are the most expensive on the list, consider if you want the included training and community. Free up to first 10,000 contacts Short Review | Visit Website

10. Mailjet Mailjet is an email marketing service for marketers and developers. The email marketing features are easy to use and attractively priced. Devs can set up transactional emails with the API. Included for free 1,000 Subscribers, 6,000 Emails per month 10% discount yearly Short Review | Visit Website

Email Software Price Comparison

I know this article is about affordable email marketing software, so you are probably looking to compare prices. To make it a bit easier, here is an Email software Comparison Chart/table. Just click on the number of contacts and the price and extra will show you what the different solutions cost. All of the ESPs have a free trial, which is linked on the right.

How many contacts are on your email list?

0 – 1000 up to 2.5K contacts up to 5K contactsup to 10K contactsup to 50K contacts up to 100K contacts

Provider

Pricing

Exclusive Extras

Free trial

$17$29$29$39$69$239$399

60% discount for the first 3 months
10% discount on the yearly plan

Free trial
Website

$16 $32$48$88$315custom plan

Access to all features
Exclusive 10% extra discount
Extra swag; a mug or t-shirt

Free trial
Website

$15$25$45$65$250$250$450

Extra 10% discount
Free email marketing cert.

Free trial
Website

$19$29$49$79$199$279$559

10% discount on yearly plan

Free trial
Website

$10$15$30$50$120$210$360

 

Free trial
Website

$19.99$29.99$49.99$69.99$149.99Custom PlanCustom Plan

Free trial
Website

$39$61$99$174$286$486Custom

 

Free trial
Website

$39$59$89$139$199$379$679

 

Free trial
Website

$17$17$37$37$105$250$470

 

Free trial
Website

* The above numbers are based on the normal edition, with a monthly plan. Some ESPs have additional or extra functions in a higher plan. Our exclusive discounts are already in the shown pricing. Mail-based prices are calculated to let you send at least 4 email campaigns per month. We do our best to update and check the pricing each month, but no guarantees.

Reviews of Free & Cheap Email Marketing Software

To give you a better overview of the Email Marketing Software listed. I am going to give a mini-review of each one. All reviews highlight my findings and considerations.

Brevo Review

Started out as a transactional email provider, Brevo now is a full email marketing software with a drag-and-drop email designer, statistics, simple automation, CRM and free templates.

What does Brevo cost?
Brevo pricing is based on the number of emails you send. The free email plan from Brevo is good for having a look inside the software and has a daily limit of 300 emails. If you want to send out mass email blasts, Brevo is still very cheap. Starting at $15 for 20,000 emails per month.

Creating emails in Brevo
The email editor is pretty fast and it auto-saves your progress. The text and font editing are in the middle section and the options are to the left. More on the editing experience in our full Brevo review.

The necessary content block types and options are there. To edit and style individual blocks, you just click on them. This opens up a window to the left for each type of content. There’s a new image editing tool that lets you edit and make eye-catching graphics.

If you want to integrate the email newsletter tool, there are direct plugins available for popular platforms like WordPress, Prestashop, WooCommerce Drupal and Shopify. There is also an API and Zapier integration available.

The free email software plan
The free plan has some functions disabled. Most important seeing where people have clicked in the email (with a heatmap). Probably you want to shift to a paid version quickly if you choose to go with Brevo. It is an affordable email marketing tool at a low cost, starting at $9 for 5,000 emails per month.

Brevo has automation and email autoresponders included, so you can send for instance welcome emails and anniversary campaigns. You can also trigger automated campaigns based on web pages visited and actions on your site. Product purchase and abandoned cart emails are also there. And recently they have added a very well-rounded landing page builder.

Pros:
Price: Very cheap email marketing software with CRM.
Simple: You need very little technical know-how to launch a campaign.
The system offers text messages (SMS) as well, so you have two channels to reach your customers.
Site-triggered automation, and email autoresponder available

Cons:
The editor works fast, but highlighting can take some getting used to.
Not for you if you want to do very complex automation campaigns.

Try Brevo free email marketing > (Extras included)

⍟ Brevo Discount and Extras

If you try out Brevo email marketing software here, there is an extra discount in it for you.

Because when I spoke to the Brevo team, they wanted you to get started on your favorite plan, basically totally free.

If you register for a new account, and start your free trial via this secret page you get…

• 60% discount for your first 3 months with the coupon code: Insider60
• Another 10% discount if you pay per year

Try Brevo for free > (Extras included)

Mailerlite Review

MailerLite is a popular and simple email marketing tool. More than 450,000 businesses, startups and freelancers around the world use MailerLite. Together they send more than 1 billion emails every month.

MailerLite is really easy to use, and it has enough features for small business email marketing needs. Planning to send some mass newsletters or simple promotional email blasts? It can be all you need if you are not looking for anything too advanced.

Creating emails in MailerLite
When creating newsletters, you can start with a drag-and-drop editor or use one of their free email newsletter templates as a start. There is help text with every step and everything is explained in videos if you need it.

During editing, you see your email in the middle and you can change the text inline and design on the right. While it updates instantly so you can see how it looks. Premade content blocks and the AI writing assistant make it easy to create email campaigns.

More features
They are keeping it basic, as you would expect: Reporting is exactly what you need. Inside templates, there is no conditional content.

MailerLite offers Zapier and API integrations, so that covers a lot of different software. There are direct integrations for the most popular platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify and a lot of opt-in subscriber growth plugins.

MailerLite has autoresponders for simple email automation campaigns, don’t expect the world of it. But you can send a welcome email autoresponder flow or automated birthday emails, with follow-up emails, etc. These are also included on the forever free email plan, so that is great.

True free email marketing software
MailerLite has a Forever Free plan that gives you all the features that they offer. It includes 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails. The only thing they ask is to display a small Mailerlite logo in the footer of your email newsletter. It is one of the cheapest email marketing tools you can find.

There is no spam testing or design testing functionality, but you can preview the designs in the browser and send yourself a test. If you can live with that, it is hard to beat free. (price-wise)

MailerLite has a form builder and a landing page builder. That includes pop-up subscription forms, embedded signup forms and unsubscribe forms. You can put them inside your site pages, as well as let them be hosted by MailerLite.

Some old MailerLite reviews online, report on email list imports to be slowish, in our own MailerLite review we didn’t find that to be true.

What is cool about MailerLite?
* Automated Resend option, to send another mail if the first one wasn’t opened.
* See your email being sent internationally timezone by timezone (if you like). It is in 7 languages.
* The price: Free and if you have more than 500 subscribers the price is still very low.
* A/B testing – although you can only test 2 versions (A and B) at a time.
* Track changes while editing your email template, you can undo if you make a mistake.
* Create landing pages and pop-ups, they also integrate with a LOT of opt-in plugins as well.

Try Mailerlite for free >

⍟ Mailerlite Discount and Extras

Because you just read this intense Mailerlite review. There is a discount. Yes there is.

Register for a new account via here and get
• Full month of free premium features!
• 30% discount if you take the yearly plan.
• I’ll add an awesome surprise (from my own pocket) if you get a > 20,000 subscribers plan.

Moosend Review

Moosend is a European-hosted email marketing platform, founded in 2011. You could say they are a real MailChimp alternative, only much cheaper. There is even a MailChimp synchronization to let you automatically import all the contacts.

Email newsletter creation
The drag-and-drop editor is very easy to use. Just add design elements from the left and edit them in the right-hand pane. All of the free email templates are responsive. But you can also add or code your own.

Nice about the editor is a “helper grid”, you can turn it on and off and it will show exactly the structure of your email. With columns and rows, you see buttons to add more blocks.

For the bit more tech-savvies, there is a code view. From there, you can copy the HTML code, download or upload a JSON file. The email tool has direct live chat support.

With Moosend you can easily manage multiple email campaigns and mailing lists, while most of the integrations should go through Zapier or direct API.

Email automation and autoresponders work in a linear fashion. You can start your own, or use template automation flows called “Marketing Automation Recipes”. The automated email streams include website-based automation like follow-up from a site visit, abandoned cart, fields changed, but also welcome campaigns, up and cross-selling campaigns, etc. More about email automation in our full Moosend review.

Moosend pricing plans
Moosend’s pro plan starts from $9 a month for 500 subscribers. With this plan, you get unlimited emails & landing pages, and access to the email designer. If you want to take the software for a test run, sign up for a free trial.

What is great about Moosend?
* Modern responsive email editor with free templates
* Support and help directly via Chat
* Sexy smart subject line recommendations and countdown timers included.
* Simple automation and free email autoresponder are all there
* Free landing page builder

What to know before starting with Moosend
* They have a 30-day free trial with all functions and chat support.
* Support is available through multiple channels during European business hours.
* To make it easy, register with your business email address (not Gmail, or Hotmail), as it is a requirement before you can start sending.

Try Moosend free email marketing > (Extras included)

⍟ Moosend discount and Extras

Oh yeah, this is the juicy part. Because you’ve taken the time to review the software here, there is an extra discount on the email software.

When I contacted the Moosend team to get some facts checked on the review and asked them. “Can you do a discount and some extras?” They were like: let’s do it!

So… this makes it one of the cheapest email marketing software. If you register for a new account, and start your free trial via this secret page you get…

• Moosend discount of an extra 10% once you hit a paid plan (on top of any other discounts for the yearly plan if you choose that).
• Extra Moosend T-shirt or Mug if you have > 50K subscribers
• Exclusive email List growth Guide + Excel email growth template

Try Moosend for free > (Extras included)

GetResponse review

GetResponse has been around since 1997. It is a mature email marketing software, serving over 350,000 email marketing customers. They have added some cool features over the last couple of years.

Marketing Automation and email autoresponders
Getresponse always had an email autoresponder function. Autoresponders allow you to do timed follow-up mail. It is still in there (I guess for nostalgic reasons). But realistically, you can now use the new email automation functions for that.

GetResponse has an advanced visual marketing automation workflow builder. You can use tagging so you can create profiles with the preferences of your subscribers and there is support for website event tracking. Learning the marketing automation is easy to set up the first one with a sort of email automation guided tour – it is really a snap.

Editor and free email templates
There is a big selection of pre-designed email templates, the top 32 templates are fresh and look 2026 – the rest don’t really. You can also start directly from the drag-and-drop editor.

There is a handy testing wizard that will let you do A/B testing for up to five variants at a time. The editor has just been redesigned and is drag and drop now. Create a newsletter or two and it works fast. Editing text is mostly inline. As a bonus, there is an image gallery with 5,000+ free stock images. The included image editor for email lets you crop, add filters, stickers, and text to the images, etc.

Unique Webinar feature
Getresponse is the first email marketing service to have a webinar marketing solution included.

You can control the scheduling and number of webinar invitations, reminders and follow-ups your contacts get. Pre-designed invitations and reminder templates get pre-filled with webinar details. That is pretty cool. And there is an auto-login hash so contacts can enter the webinar without logging in. (also pretty cool)

What to love about Getresponse:
* Chat support available 24/7
* Webinar Feature
* Visual automation and tags
* Free image gallery with 1000+ stock photos

GetResponse free plan
GetResponse recently added a forever-free plan. With this plan, send unlimited newsletters, create 1 landing page, host a website on a custom domain and even create signup forms. It’s a sweet deal for a free plan.

⍟ GetResponse Discounts and Extras

When I emailed Erica from the Getresponse team, and asked if we give a discount for Getresponse for the registrants here? Guess what she said? Yes.

Normally you get a Getresponse discount on the yearly plan. But… if you register for a new account via this secret link you get…

• 18% discount if you take the yearly plan
• Additional -10% discount – applied automatically
• You get email marketing training and certification for free (worth $199)

Try GetResponse > (Extras included)

Benchmark Email review (2026)

Benchmark Email started out as a family business in 2004. Today, 65,000 brands are actively using it. Benchmark is an email marketing platform with some advanced features thrown into the mix. But how are they compared to other email software? Let’s find out…

Getting started with Benchmark Email
We tested and signed up for a free account. The minute you try an account, they guide you every step of the way. You get welcomed by a friendly face in a “getting started” video. You also get an email that stimulates you to ask any questions you might have.

Even for a free account, they offered to do a demo and give personal help with onboarding + set-up. That is so different compared to other Do-It-Yourself email service providers. Maybe the family business spirit is still in the company culture.

Each page in the email tool has a short video that explains exactly what you can do, and you can always chat for help. Phone, chat and email support. We found that chat is tech-savvy, knows the tool and is very responsive (like within the minute).

Forever Free email marketing software
The email marketing software from Benchmark offers a free plan for up to 500 contacts and 3,500 emails/month and there is no limit on time to try it out, it is free forever.

With the free email marketing plan, you get:

• Free templates, send 3500 emails per month for free
• Customizable signup forms to capture more leads
• The free plan includes autoresponders and list-based autoresponders
• Customer support 24/7

Once you pass 3500 emails, you’d want to do some serious email blasting.
(Pardon my French Andy, I didn’t mean to say email blast.)

The Lite plan is perfect for really getting started and pricing starts at $9.99/month. It has additional functions like:
*Email scheduling and Litmus inbox checker
*Landing page builder
*Unlimited image gallery storage for your images
*Basic automations and email engagement automations

You also have the option to remove the benchmark branding in the footer. Most people don’t mind – or even like branding, provided they get the tools for free. But I think it’s more professional to mail without email tool branding in the footer.

If you’re looking to grow your audience the Pro plan has everything you need! Starting at $15 per month, It offers you:
*7500 email sends to 500 contacts per month
*A/B testing for email content
*Advanced email automation
*Custom HTML editor and website tracking

Let’s craft some emails with the Benchmark Email editor
They just recently updated their interface and it looks spanky fresh. Benchmark has a modern drag-and-drop email builder. It lets you edit in place, so you can see what your newsletter will broadly look like while typing directly in it. The email design editor is easy to use. Different content blocks you can drag into the editor on the right side and you can arrange them as you like.

It will be more than enough for most brands and small businesses that send newsletters and promotions. You can send a test email directly from the editor screen which is handy. There is a quick preview that shows a simulation of the email on desktop and mobile.

There are 100+ pre-made responsive email templates to get you started/inspired. And most of them (not all) look pretty fresh like they were made in 2026.

You can always start with the sample email and do it yourself. Here is what I made in a few minutes:

Something to note is the image editor. You can have a lot of fun with it (see above) with filters, cropping, color adjustment all types of text styles, stickers, paintbrushes, and emojis to edit your images. It takes just a little bit of playing with, and you are doing your own email Mona Lisa-image masterpieces.

The drag-and-drop editor is made to be easy for normal users.

It is not for advanced email designers/coders. For example in the drag-and-drop editor, you can’t split-screen edit the HTML code. And there are no custom HTML blocks in the drag-and-drop editor. Luckily most small business users wouldn’t even want to see HTML code, ever – if they can avoid it.

Advanced email designers/coders that desire all the cow-bells and cow-whistles, can still use their own HTML. But Benchmark is probably not the best choice for them.

More advanced email features

Email marketing Automation in Benchmark starts with automated autoresponders (called lite) in their free package. They let you do list-based and time-based automated email campaigns. You can send a welcome series, birthday emails, etc. So that is a very affordable autoresponder!

In the paid plans engagement-based automation feature is added. This means you can trigger emails based on email clicks, behavior on your website and engagement level (like a reactivation campaign).

Survey publishing: Benchmark comes with free email surveys. You set up a few questions and answer types. And you get the survey URL to use. There aren’t many options to tweak the survey design though. So might as well use a free survey tool like Typeform or SurveyMonkey together with Benchmark.

Small business CRM as a free extra
Any plan above 2500 users comes with free small business CRM built-in. This can be helpful if you don’t have any CRM yet.

• Create tasks and follow-ups, log calls
• Track sales and a sales pipeline
• A support ticket system
• A Gmail plugin to add contacts and conversations from Gmail to your CRM.

Recap Benchmark email review; what we like:
* 24/7 real user support. Live chat and email, even for free users.
* The image editor is amazing fun
* One of the cheapest email autoresponders
* Free small business CRM functions

⍟ Benchmark Email Discount and Extras

Oh yeah, one more thing. Because you read our benchmark email review here, there is an extra discount on it.

When I contacted the Benchmark team to get the facts checked on the review and asked them. “Can you give a discount?” They said, “No, we never do that.” But after about 3 months of driving them crazy on the – I want something extra for the people here– we did get something.

If you register for a new account and start here. (We will make the secret page, will be live in a few days) you get…
• 10% extra discount on the yearly plan. (on top of what you already get)
I’ll add in an awesome surprise (from my own pocket) if you get a > 20.000 subscribers plan.

Try Benchmark Email for free > (Extras included)

AWeber Review

AWeber was founded in Pennsylvania way back in 1998 when email marketing was in its infancy. It started out as an autoresponder service but has come a long way since then. These days AWeber is a solid all-around email marketing tool. Over the years, it claims to have served an impressive one million customers. So it must be doing something right!

Creating Emails and Newsletters
AWeber has a huge library of more than 600 email templates to choose from. Most of them are the sort of thing you would use for a newsletter. But there are options for email courses, events, product promotions, surveys and much more.

Every template can be fully customized. AWeber’s drag-and-drop email editor is easy to use and gives you lots of flexibility. One thing I love is that the editor connects to the free graphic design software Canva. Again, it’s really easy to use. But the designs you can create take your emails to the next level.

Another super cool tool AWeber offers is its Smart Designer. This is really unique. Paste in the URL of your website and it automatically creates email templates. You get a selection to pick from all with your own branding. And if you don’t have your own website, you can use your Facebook page. More on the editing experience in our full AWeber review.

If you want to make life even easier for yourself, AWeber also lets you turn your blog into a newsletter. Simply set how often you want to send and pick your template. Then AWeber will automatically send your latest posts straight to your subscribers.

AWeber’s forever Free plan gives you:

• Up to 500 subscribers
• 3,000 emails a month
• Access to its basic templates
• Email editor with the Canva integration and Smart Designer
• 1 landing page and signup forms
• Autoresponders

If 3,000 emails a month isn’t enough for you, the paid plans start at $14.99 a month for 500 subscribers and unlimited emails. But you can reduce this to $12.50 a month if you pay yearly. Prices then go up as you increase your number of subscribers.

What’s great about AWeber

• Tons of email templates and landing pages, even on the Free plan.
• Smart Designer and Canva are great for creating impressive designs the easy way.
• All the tools are easy to use, even for beginners.
• 24/7 live chat support and an international telephone help desk
• You can link your account to more than 750 third-party services.

What to know before testing AWeber?

• It is not for you if you are looking for advanced email automation features.

Try AWeber for free >

ActiveCampaign Review

Instead of email newsletters and mass mailings, the focus of ActiveCampaign is on Marketing automation and marketing funnels. That is where they are really strong. There is even built-in CRM, on-site messaging and SMS.

Automation systems like Pardot or Marketo can get very, very expensive. ActiveCampaigns pricing makes it a great solution for small businesses, or senders that like to put more smarts into their email marketing automation and funnels.

Segmentation, tagging, and conditional content make that email targeting can be everything you want.

The email editor is drag and drop, yet a bit less great in comparison – there are some pre-made templates available. Read our full ActiveCampaign review for more on the content editors.

What is especially nice is the option to import email marketing campaigns that others have built. It makes it very easy to get a running start on automating your emails. For instance, if you want to use and promote your online course on your site, there are ActiveCampaign automation templates for that. If you have never seen an automation system, every system is going to take some time to know. That is because of the many options. ActiveCampaign gives weekly “getting started webinars”, one-on-one design help, and concierge onboarding (if you choose).

What is great about ActiveCampaign
* Pricing is great for such advanced automation and email targeting
* A/B testing works well even on automated and drip campaigns (which isn’t as common as you’d expect)
* Helpful community of funnel-building and automation enthusiasts
* The platform is quite actively developed with frequent updates and new features.

What you should know before using ActiveCampaign
* 14-day free trial
* If you are planning to send bulk emails only, with no automation, try one of the other systems.
Try ActiveCampaign for free >

⍟ ActiveCampaign Discounts and Extras

I will be working on launching a secret page for ActiveCampaign and will annoy the AC team until they start giving more extras or discounts (alternatively, I’ll create/arrange them for you myself ).

You already get an ActiveCampaign discount of ~ 20% if you sign up for a year vs monthly. You can sign up starting with a free trial here, and if you Let me know once you’ve signed up for a paid account, and I’ll make sure you get the extras once available.

Omnisend Review

Omnisend is an ecommerce email marketing platform. It’s built for online stores, with direct integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Wix. Ecommerce stores of all sizes like Omnisend for its ease of use and pricing.

Ecommerce marketing automation
Automation is one of Omnisend’s strongest areas. You get 37+ pre-built workflows for welcome emails, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post-purchase follow-ups. The automation builder has conditions, so you can create more refined workflows based on customer behavior. New features like workflow previews and alerts make it easier to test automations and catch mistakes before going live.

You can combine email, SMS, and push notifications in the same automation. This makes it easier to reach customers on different channels without switching tools. You can set up flows that follow customer behavior, like sending an email first and then an SMS if they didn’t click in the email.

Omnisend’s Lifecycle Map gives you an overview of customers and their automations. It groups key moments like signup, purchase, and repeat buying, so you can quickly see which flows are active, and where there may be gaps to improve your automations. Find out more about automation in our full Omnisend review.

The email editor is easy to use and comes with 350+ email templates. It’s built for ecommerce, so you can add product listings and recommendations to your emails easily. Recent updates like Dark Mode Preview, AI writing tools, and brand colors make it quicker to build campaigns that stay consistent with your brand.

Omnisend has strong lead generation tools. The form builder supports multi-step forms, targeting options, A/B testing, and features like Wheel of Fortune. You can also use reCAPTCHA to reduce fake signups and protect your list quality.

The free plan has 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. It includes the email editor, templates, basic automation, web push notifications, and 24/7 support.

Omnisend pricing starts at $11.20 per month for the Standard plan with 500 contacts, 6,000 emails per month, and unlimited web push notifications.

⍟ Omnisend Discount and Extras

You’ve just read this Omnisend review, here’s a little something extra for you. Sign up for a new account via here and get a 30% discount if you pay for 3 months.

Sign up to Omnisend for free >

Kit Review

Kit (previously ConvertKit) was founded in 2013. They offer software for what they call Creators: bloggers, authors, YouTubers, podcasters and online course creators. I have been looking at why people like Kit – and I think it is because they focus on the creators and bloggers audience.

Email software for the blogger community
Monthly new “tradecraft” guides are published to improve your professional blogging. For instance running a successful webinar, influencer marketing, etc.

They run a Product Creation Masterclass several times per year – teaching bloggers to actually make money. I think making money is pretty darn important.

Next to Zapier and CMS integrations, there are a lot of direct integrations with membership and software for online courses like Thinkific, Teachable, Wishlist Member (WordPress), Memberpress, etc, etc.

Sequences (Formerly Courses)
Nathan Barry built the software as an outgrowth for his teaching courses. The main structure in Kit is “sequences” (formerly courses) – email drips sent over time, for instance for your course, of course!

Kit has a free plan, and the cheapest plan starts at $39 for 1,000 subscribers, which is not cheap in comparison. The email editor is basic, with no drag-and-drop blocks. While part of the blogging community seems to like the simplicity and “rawness/realness” of not being able to add columns. Well… everybody can have their opinion. Find out how the email editor works in our full Kit review.

The stats are there, but nothing advanced. There is no heatmap or e-commerce conversion tracking.

What I like is the tagging system. Tag subscribers for their preferences, the downloads they made, etc. Tags make it easy for people to come in and do multiple downloads without any problems. There is a visual automation editor to set up welcome and product/course campaigns.

Pros:
* For bloggers: Comprehensive training, the whole community is about professional bloggers and creators.
* Segmentation: Use tags to store preferences and segment your groups.
* Visual automation and email autoresponders.
* Free plan for 10,000 subscribers, to check out the tool. Includes unlimited landing pages and forms.

Cons:
* Price – This overview is about free and cheap email systems. In comparison, Kit asks more of the green;
* The email editor is limited;
* No heatmap in your reporting, so no visual way to see where people clicked in your emails.

Try Kit for free >

Mailjet Review

Mailjet is an email marketing and transactional email service to send newsletters, automated sequences, and transactional emails. Mailjet keeps costs low with email volume-based pricing and unlimited contacts on all paid plans. This can be simpler to budget for than tools that charge by subscriber count. 

Transactional emails
It’s not often we see transactional emails included at this price point. Mailjet makes it fairly straightforward to set this up with clear documentation. And has detailed delivery data for each email. This makes it easier to monitor sends and troubleshoot issues if they come up.

Mailjet also includes built-in email validation and deliverability reporting, which are features you don’t often see at this price point.

Mailjet’s email editor is straightforward and easy to use. You can get a head start with 70+ email templates and pre-built layout blocks.

The automation builder now supports conditions for more complex workflows. You can read our full Mailjet review to see how it compares on features, usability, and value.

Mailjet has a simple form builder that uses the same editor as the email builder, so it feels familiar right away. It’s not packed with advanced features or dozens of templates, but it gets the job done for standard newsletter signups and lead capture.

The landing page builder works the same way as the email and form editors. You can drop your forms into a page and publish it quickly if you just need something simple to start collecting leads.

The free plan has 1,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month. The drag-and-drop editor, templates, basic segmentation, and simple automation are all part of plan. 

Mailjet pricing starts at $15.30 per month for 15K emails and unlimited contacts. This Essential plan has segmentation, AI writing, basic statistics, and 500 email validations. 

The Premium plan costs $24.30 per month. This plan is for you if you need automations, landing pages, A/B testing, advanced statistics, and user permissions. All paid plans include unlimited contacts, so you don’t pay more just because your list grows.

Sign up to Mailjet for free >

Email Software selection tips for marketers on a budget

Here are 4 tips for those who are especially looking for low-cost email marketing software.

Selection tip 1: Have a look at more than one system

It is a good idea to look at more than one email marketing system. This makes sense – and you were probably thinking about doing so already. Check for 2 or 3 options that seem to be a good fit and create an account to have a look inside. All of the email software on this page has a free trial and some even a free sending plan, so they are the best MailChimp alternatives you could find. There is no risk to give them a try to see if you like what you see.

Selection tip 2: Don’t be afraid to spend a bit if you like the tool

Don’t be afraid to spend a bit if you tried and liked the email platform. Squeezing pennies is the worst mindset for growth. As long as the ESP fits in your budget range, don’t mind a few dollars. Go with the best option for you. You are worth it. Email marketing can be such a great channel. The investment will seem small in comparison to your results.

Selection tip 3: Think maximum of 1 year ahead

Of course, you want an email marketing solution that will do what you want in the near future. Don’t look too far ahead though, especially when shopping for an ESP for the first time.

Think of what you will be needing this year, it will be more realistic. You save time, evaluate only things you need and prevent over-buying. At least you are not paying for features you won’t be using!

Selection tip 4: Today is better than tomorrow

Get started. Just take the first step by trying out some of the software. Add a list, build it out and send those first emails. If your needs are simple enough, you don’t need to take a lot of time comparing each and every solution. There is nothing more expensive than waiting to start with email marketing.

Selection tip 5: Get the discount and extras

Many email providers give discounts (10 – 20%) for taking a yearly subscription. If you like the system, don’t forget to grab that discount. Non-profits might even get an extra discount. From the vendors we talk about here, 2 already give an extra discount if you sign up via this page. (No need to thank me, I do it with pleasure.)

What to look for in selecting cheap email marketing software

Now you have seen the tools available one-by-one, and an overview of what they have to offer. I’d say you probably have one or two favorites already. But let’s talk about comparison and what you should actually be looking for when comparing cheap or free email marketing services.

As with all newsletter software, there are a lot of shiny gimmicks and hyped features that will easily distract you from the real things you need.

When it comes to email marketing systems, there are only a few key factors that’ll move the needle for you.

• Marketing automation and autoresponders
• Segmentation and email lists
• Responsive email templates
• Reporting
• Support
• Price (Ok, I put this here – because that was sort of the point of this post)

Let’s see what is important on each of these, I am sure it will make it much easier to pick the best tool for your business.

Finding the right marketing automation tool / best email autoresponder software

The first advice is to consider if you want to just send email newsletters and sales promotion emails or are looking for something more like free email autoresponder software.

Think about what type of campaigns you want to do this year.

Because if you won’t be using more advanced automation, no real need to look into it.
Almost all ESPs will allow you to do a simple drip campaign (like a welcome email autoresponder).

Examples of simple email marketing automation workflows (that most software has):

• A contact signs up for your newsletter. A welcome email autoresponder is sent, followed with two or three timed messages.
• A subscriber has been on your “list” for three months, and you have an automation set up to thank them and send a special offer.
• A message goes out to subscribers on a date, for instance, their birthday. Wishing them a great day (possibly with a gift or discount).

If you really want to get into advanced automation triggers, that will take more than simple email blast software.

Examples of more advanced automation workflows

• A subscriber looks at several blog posts about Widgets on your site. The automation software tags him as “interested in Widgets”. An automated email drip campaign follows to foster that interest and promote the Widget category.
• A subscriber adds a product to their shopping cart or starts filling in a form, but doesn’t finish. The abandoned cart email sequences bring them back to finish the job.

There is much more possible with advanced email automation. But at least marketing automation software should be able to build flows, tag subscribers and set business rules (to determine who to send your emails to or not).

1. Responsive Email Templates

Templates are very valuable to get started quickly and save time with each newsletter sent. If you go for custom templates or use your own HTML, you don’t have to look at email templates.

The best email marketing platforms have a good starting selection of well-designed and modern-looking email templates. The email editor allows you to customize templates and they should be completely responsive.
Modern drag-and-drop email designers don’t require that many templates though, as the building blocks are almost templates by themselves.

Check we’ve compared and reviewed the 12 best free email template builders.

2. Email segmentation and list management

See if you can easily manage your lists and selections in the tool. For list management, think about the ways imports work. Or even better automated importing/integration with your other systems.

You’ll have to see how granular you want to go with your email list segmentation. If the plan is to send an email campaign to just a few segments, most free email service providers have email marketing features like that.

Want to go very detailed into the selections and use several fields at the same time for segmentation to make your selections, test them out.

3. Reporting and statistics

All email marketing tools have built-in statistics and reporting of the most important email metrics.

Email deliverability rates, open rate, and click rates are standard. You can find them in any email marketing software.

A tad more advanced reporting lets you see:
* New subscriber list growth (per source)
* Email client reports (desktop versus mobile)
* A click overlay to quickly see where people have clicked in the email
* Automation and drip campaign reporting
* Stats integrated with the site and Google Analytics

4. Support

Here you want to see what type of support you can expect. In the free tier, support can be less than in paid tiers. (you can imagine)

Support and customer service is always important in choosing the right email software. But on a budget think channels, response time and namely DIY (Do it yourself). Look for great documentation, chat (or phone) support, a ticketing system. An added plus would be videos.

Finally

Good hunting, I hope this review of free and cheap email marketing service providers helps you find the right solution for you. So take your pick and try out the tools! Have any questions? Do feel free to get in touch.

Free and Cheap Email Marketing Tools FAQ

The post 10 Free & Cheap Email Marketing Software Tools 2026 appeared first on Email vendor selection.

So we want to share our insights to save you time. And more specifically, help you choose the right email marketing platform.

What makes great email marketing software stand out from just ok? What are the must-have features? What should it cost? If you need help, just get in touch, we’re happy to help.

Now, let’s get you set up with the best platform for your needs.

The Best Email Marketing Services
If you are looking for more specific tool recommendations, check out the reviews in specific industries: 

• Best CRM with email marketing
• Free and cheap email marketing tools
• Best email marketing tools for ecommerce
• Best email marketing tools for Shopify stores
• Best email marketing tools for affiliate marketers
• Best CRM with marketing automation
• Jump to our industry overview below

15 Best Email Marketing Platforms Overview

I’ve seen email marketing software used in lots of different ways. But most people are looking for an email marketing platform to do the important things in a simple way.

Create attractive HTML emails without code. Automate your campaigns. Segmentation and targeting messages at the right people. All good email marketing services aim to tick these boxes.

But there are also plenty of differences between platforms. The features they include, who they are best for, and what they cost. I’ll explore these differences in detail in individual reviews for each platform. But below is a summary of the 15 services we chose out of the 35 we reviewed.

	Best For	Free Plan/Trial	Starting Price	Score
MailerLite	Starting with email marketing	Yes	$9
Brevo	Free email marketing	Yes	$8.08
ActiveCampaign	Marketing automation	Yes, 14 days	$15
beehiiv	Newsletters & monetization	Yes	$43
Moosend	Small businesses	Yes, 30 days	$7
HubSpot	All-in-one platform	Yes	$20
Mailjet	Newsletters & email API	Yes	$17
Omnisend	Ecommerce	Yes	$16
AWeber	Email design	Yes	$12.50
Kit	Subscriber growth & creators	Yes	$39
MailChimp		Yes	$13
Campaigner		Yes, 30 days	$59
GetResponse		Yes	$15
Constant Contact		Yes, 14 days	$12
Benchmark Email		Yes	$13

What to Look for in an Email Marketing Platform?

I’ve used my fair share of email marketing platforms over a long time. We have tested and reviewed 30+ for this website. That’s given me a lot of experience with both the good and bad of email marketing. But there are always some features I look out for as essentials. Here are my top six:

• Drag-and-drop email editor: You won’t find an email marketing service without a no-code HTML email builder these days. They’re essential for making attractive email designs quickly. So the first thing I judge email marketing software on is how user-friendly the email builder is. Plus, the quality and choice of pre-made templates.
• User-friendly automation: Automation speeds up and simplifies everything to do with triggered email marketing. That can be simple autoresponders and welcome campaigns. Or automating entire customer journeys, including how you nurture and segment leads. Whatever you want to automate, it should be doable. As with creating emails, I always look for visual workflow builders, how intuitive they are to use, and how detailed you can make the automation. 
• Landing Pages and Forms: Email marketing doesn’t go anywhere without people to send campaigns to. Growing your email list is key to growing your business. You can use other list-building tools, but most good email marketing software includes lead capture and sign-up forms. And landing pages to host forms on. 
• Personalization and Segmentation: Email marketing gets the best results when you target your campaigns and make them personal. Segmentation tools split your contacts up according to contact information and their behaviour. This helps you send timely, relevant content to the right people. And improve engagement and conversions.
• Flexible Pricing: Cost is always a consideration when choosing any platform. The key is getting the features you need at a price you can afford. For me, the best email marketing services start their pricing low and have the flexibility to grow. We look at how many subscribers you get and the email limits. A generous free plan or a full-feature trial is helpful. So you can check a service out without being tied to it.
• Strong Deliverability Rates: Finally, an email marketing campaign only works if your emails get seen. You want as many emails landing in people’s inboxes as possible. High deliverability rates depend on the email service having a good sending infrastructure. But also on you keeping your list clean and reducing bounces. And keep your sender reputation high. 

15 Best Email Marketing Platforms in 2026

Now for the best bit. A detailed run-through of the key features, USPs, pros, cons, and prices of all 15 platforms. Based on my experiences using them.

1. MailerLite: Best for starting with email marketing

MailerLite is an affordable and user-friendly email marketing platform. It keeps things simple to use and focuses on the email marketing functionality. This makes it ideal for a no-fuss way to build and automate email campaigns. Which is also great for beginners. The free plan is one of the most generous around.

I’m a big fan of MailerLite’s clean, intuitive interface. Everything is easy to navigate. MailerLite’s drag-and-drop email editor makes creating professional-looking marketing campaigns as simple as it can be. It comes with 90+ pre-designed email templates to start.

MailerLite also includes forms, a landing page builder, and a simple website creator.
These are all similarly easy to use.

For its price, MailerLite’s automation tools stand out to me as another major strength. Welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, audience segmentation, and more. You can build some relatively advanced workflows with multiple triggers and actions. The automation editor is simple to use, even for beginners. This is for small to midsize companies, not to build complex enterprise automations. 

The free plan includes 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. MailerLite’s paid plans for email marketing start at just $9 per month. That includes unlimited emails and three account users.

Try MailerLite for free or read our full review 

2. Brevo: Best for free email marketing

Brevo is an email marketing and CRM platform for small businesses, ecommerce brands, and marketers. Alongside email marketing, it has SMS marketing, CRM, and transactional emails. It suits businesses wanting to manage multiple communication channels in one place. It’s also user-friendly and affordable. Including a fantastic free plan

I’ve always found creating a marketing campaign in Brevo very straightforward. Its drag-and-drop email editor is well-designed and simple to use. But with just 40+ templates to start with, you don’t get much design support. Its marketing automation tools are very impressive. It supports website tracking so you can trigger automated sequences from website visits. And it has 12 pre-built workflow templates. These cover lead nurturing, abandoned carts, personalized follow-ups, and more.

Brevo lets you send multi-channel campaigns including SMS and WhatsApp messages. Businesses can send transactional emails like receipts and order confirmations alongside promotional emails. It also has a sales CRM, so you can track customer interactions across marketing and sales. 

What stands out about Brevo is how much you can do for free. The free marketing platform plan includes 100,000 contacts and lets you send 300 emails a day. These can be marketing or transactional emails. You can also include SMS and WhatsApp messages. You can use basic CRM tools for free, too.

Paid plans start at just $8.08 per month for 5000 emails. A unique feature of Brevo’s pricing is its very high contact limits. You can have 500,000 contacts even on the cheapest plan. This gives your business plenty of headspace to grow your contact lists for no extra costs. 

Get started with Brevo for free or read our full review

3. ActiveCampaign: Best for marketing automation

ActiveCampaign ranks as one of the best marketing automation platforms around. It’s equally well-known for its advanced features and its user-friendly design. It caters to businesses of all sizes. And offers everything from basic email marketing campaigns to sophisticated automation. It also has an impressive CRM.

I find ActiveCampaign amazing for building HTML emails, landing pages, and forms. The drag-and-drop editors are very similar for all three. They are easy to use, and you get a lot of control over designs. There are also an impressive 240+ email templates to choose from. And 60+ landing page templates. 

ActiveCampaign comes into its own with more advanced tools. Especially automation. With 900+ workflow templates, it’s hard to think of a sales or marketing process you can’t automate. Triggers and conditions are fully customizable. So you get complete control over what workflows include and how they function. You can link sales and marketing processes together. And use AI-powered predictive analytics to narrow down the best leads and target emails.

ActiveCampaign’s Starter plan costs $15 per month for 1000 contacts and 10,000 emails. There’s a 14-day free trial that lets you send 100 emails to 100 contacts. 

Try ActiveCampaign for free or read our full review

Or compare it to other software in our guide to the best ActiveCampaign alternatives.

4. beehiiv: Best for newsletters and monetization

Beehiiv specializes in helping creators and businesses monetize newsletters. In terms of features, there are two sides to the platform. One has everything to do with creating and publishing newsletters. The other is about audience growth and making money.

Beehiiv has a clean, intuitive editor for creating newsletters. It’s a little different from the standard drag-and-drop HTML editors most email marketing platforms have. It leans heavily into text editing tools. Including generative AI features for checking, editing, and making suggestions. These are all great for perfecting your newsletter copy. And making production more efficient.

The monetization features start with list building. With Beehiiv, more subscribers translate into more earning potential. Its choice of lead generation tools stands out from other email marketing platforms. You can build different types of sign-up forms as standard. But it also has the option of one-click Magic Link subscriptions. There’s a referral program that incentivizes subscribers to get their friends to sign up. And you can cross-promote other newsletters to encourage them to do the same with yours.

Recommendations are also one way to monetize your newsletter. You can include paid-for affiliate links to other publications. And get paid for every referral. Beehiiv also runs an ad network. Again, this involves running ads in your newsletter and getting paid per click. And finally, you can also make your newsletter a paid-for subscription. Beehiiv has tools for handling payments.

Beehiiv pricing starts at $43 a month. You can send unlimited emails and have 100,000 subscribers. There’s a free plan with no monetization features and a cap of 2,500 subscribers.

Try beehiiv for free or read our full review

5. Moosend: Best for small businesses

Moosend is one of the cheapest email marketing platforms around. But it’s more than just a budget, no-frills service. For its price, Moosend’s features pack a serious punch. Especially its automation and personalization tools. 

A lot of Moosend’s strengths come down to UX design. All core tools are visually attractive, well laid out, and intuitive. I find it a pleasure to use. It has the same drag-and-drop editor for building campaigns, landing pages, and forms. As a new user, you feel familiar with the tools quickly.

Moosend’s automation builder is similarly easy and intuitive to use. But that’s balanced against some serious flexibility and advanced features. Moosend reaches way beyond basic drip sequences. You can build sophisticated workflows with many conditions and actions. There are 25+ triggers to choose from. These include web tracking. So you can launch automations based on what people do on your website. You can also use web tracking to update customer data and build segments. And use this to personalize email content.

One final thing I like about Moosend is that it includes all Pro features on a single paid plan. You pay more to raise contact and email limits, not access more tools. This doesn’t just make Moosend’s pricing very straightforward. It also makes more sophisticated tools available at prices suited to any business.

Moosend’s Pro pricing plan starts at $7 a month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. There is a 30-day free trial.

Try Moosend for free or read our full review

6. HubSpot: Best all-in-one platform

HubSpot is a giant CRM software suite for sales, marketing, and customer service. Email marketing tools are included in its ‘Marketing Hub’, a powerful marketing automation platform. These tools cover everything you need for email marketing. User-friendly drag-and-drop editors for building emails, landing pages, and forms. Sophisticated automation tools, personalization, and detailed analytics. You can also run SMS and social campaigns alongside email. 

Where HubSpot stands out is its flexible integration of marketing, sales, and service. Yes, it’s a solid email marketing and marketing automation tool. HubSpot’s USP is the freedom to run email marketing alongside sales automation. Or customer service operations. Or content management or eCommerce. It covers every aspect of customer relationship management.

HubSpot also offers something for businesses of all sizes. Its Customer Platform is aimed at small businesses. It combines email marketing, automation, CRM, and service tools. Larger businesses can pick and choose tools to create their own custom platforms. There is also an excellent free tier with basic versions of all tools. You can run email campaigns and manage sales pipelines. All for no cost.

HubSpot plans start at $20 per month. The cheapest plans with email marketing include 1000 contacts and 5000 emails. The free CRM includes 100 contacts, 2,000 emails, 20 landing pages, 1 pipeline, a website, a blog, social media ads, and live chat.

Try Hubspot for free or read our full review

7. Mailjet: Best for newsletters and email API

Mailjet is an email marketing platform that also has transactional email sending. Marketers at mid-sized businesses and larger enterprises use Mailjet for newsletters, marketing automation, and transactional emails.

Mailjet uses volume-based pricing instead of charging by contacts. All paid plans include unlimited contacts. This makes it more affordable for businesses with large lists and moderate sending volumes.

The platform includes a drag-and-drop editor, email templates, segmentation, A/B testing, and automation. Last year, the Mailjet team improved the automation builder to include conditions. Now you can create more advanced workflows, not just email sequences.

Mailjet also includes built-in email validation, deliverability tools, and reporting. These features help reduce bounces and protect your sender reputation.

Mailjet has an SMTP and email API for transactional emails. It also offers real-time collaboration so multiple users can edit emails at the same time.

Mailjet plans start at $17 per month for the Essential plan with unlimited contacts, 15K emails, 500 email validations, and AI writing. The free plan has 1,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month.

Get started with Mailjet for free or read our full review

8. Omnisend: Best for ecommerce

Omnisend specializes in email marketing for ecommerce businesses. It’s designed to support online sales growth and works with all major ecommerce platforms.

Omnisend excels at campaign building and automation. Its 350+ email templates lean towards product promotion. But they’re all good, professional quality. The drag-and-drop editor is easy to use. But it gives plenty of flexibility in customizing layouts and styles. The same goes for its automation tools. The setup of its pre-built workflows is one of the easiest I’ve come across. You can launch abandoned cart emails and welcome series in just a couple of clicks. But you can also create your own sequences with conditions and actions. 

Automation is one tool Omnisend uses to enhance engagement and conversions. The other is advanced segmentation. Omnisend uses customer data from web store integrations for precise targeting and personalization. For me, its Customer Lifecycle Map feature is a real standout. This evaluates customer engagement levels based on past behaviour and interactions. And recommends actions to take to nurture them to the next stage.

Omnisend plans begin at $16 per month for 500 contacts and 6000 emails. There’s a free plan that includes 250 contacts, 500 emails, and 500 push notifications.

Get started with Omnisend for free or read our full review

9. AWeber: Best for email design

Established in 1998, AWeber is one of the very first email marketing platforms. It clearly does a lot of things right to have kept going so long. And to have racked up more than 1 million customers. 

AWeber sticks to the old school of email marketing. That is, making it as easy and quick as possible to send beautiful emails. It’s got an intuitive and simple drag-and-drop editor. This is backed up by an outstanding choice of 600+ email templates. 

AWeber also goes the extra mile to support great design. A standout feature is the Smart Designer. This automatically generates branded templates based on your website’s URL. AWeber also has a Canva integration built into its email editor. So you can craft your own graphics directly from the email editor. And Canva is just one of 750+ integrations AWeber offers.

AWeber’s automation features are basic. You can set up simple autoresponders and drip campaigns. But it lacks a visual workflow editor and conditional logic.

AWeber’s paid plans start at $12.50 per month for unlimited emails and 500 contacts. It has a free plan that also includes 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails per month.

Try AWeber for free or read our full review

10. Kit: Best for subscriber growth and creators

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is another platform that focuses on newsletter monetization. It’s aimed at online creators like bloggers, podcasters, and influencers. And offers tools to help grow audiences and revenues via email campaigns.

Kit’s monetization options fall into two camps. Making money from newsletters via paid subscriptions and recommendations. And promoting and selling digital products, including courses. Both start with building attractive newsletters and landing pages. So Kit features the standard drag-and-drop HTML builders for both. Its templates are bright, modern, and fully customizable. They’re geared towards repurposing existing content quickly and effectively.

Kit ties audience growth and earning potential closely together. There’s the usual option of sign-up forms to gather new subscribers. But a standout feature is Kit’s Creator Network. This allows users to cross-promote through partnerships with other creators. You can also pay for and earn money via partner recommendations. Mirroring this is the Sponsor Network. This helps creators find affiliate and brand partnerships.

Finally, Kit has a great visual workflow builder. It supports conditional logic. And you can automate customer interactions from the moment they sign up. I particularly love the segmentation options. You can tag contacts to reflect different subscriptions or levels of engagement. But you can also do things like run polls and surveys. And use the results to trigger targeted campaigns. 

Kit’s paid plans start at $39 a month for 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails. There is a free plan with unlimited emails and 10,000 contacts. The main limit is you can only build one automation workflow for free. And Kit uses assets created and published on the free plan to run its own promotions. 

Try Kit for free here or read our full review

11. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is arguably the most famous email marketing platform. Launched in 2001, it’s also one of the oldest. Many brands start out using Mailchimp as one of their first email platforms, just because it’s very well known.

Does that mean it is a platform that we would advise? Not so much.

It is definitely ok, but it gets very pricey with unfair pricing where you pay double for inactive contacts. And there are many more interesting options available. As much ground as it covers, Mailchimp lost a bit of its email marketing roots and started limiting the free and basic version of its software.

It isn’t nearly as intuitive for building and sending campaigns as other small business email platforms. So rather have a look at MailerLite, Moosend, or Brevo.

Mailchimp paid plans start at $13 per month including 500 contacts and 5000 emails.

Find the best Mailchimp alternatives here or read our full review

12. Campaigner

Campaigner is designed for high-volume email marketing. It’s packed full of features that suit larger marketing operations. These include automation, segmentation, and personalization tools. Features include an email API for bulk sending. And reputation management tools to keep your lists clean and avoid being flagged as spam.

Campaigner does a few of the basics well. Its drag-and-drop editor is straightforward to use. Templates are optimized for accurate rendering in different mail clients. A feature I like is its reusable content blocks. These are like mini-templates you can drop into emails. These work well with dynamic content to personalize emails.

Like its email editor, you don’t need to be an expert to use Campaigner’s automation builder. It’s very easy to build sophisticated workflows. You can combine email and SMS in the same sequences.

Campaigner paid plans start at $59 per month for 5000 contacts and 30,000 emails. The ecommerce plan starts at $79.95 a month for abandoned cart emails, ecommerce integrations, and unlimited contacts. There is a free 30-day trial that includes all features.

Try Campaigner for free

13. GetResponse

GetResponse has evolved over the years into a complete online marketing platform. Email marketing services are still at its core. But these days it has different tiers for marketing automation and content monetization. 

As an email marketing platform, GetResponse is a solid choice for start-ups and small businesses. It’s affordable and very easy to use. Its intuitive drag-and-drop email editor comes with 120+ customizable templates. You can also build unlimited landing pages and sign-up forms. And set up unlimited autoresponders and simple timed sequences. 

Growing businesses can unlock more advanced automation tools with the next tier up. This includes conditional workflows and web tracking. These let you automate segmentation for simple but accurate targeting. 

GetResponse is also a strong choice if you want to grow your revenue streams. Its funnel builder is aimed at converting new contacts into customers quickly. It’s great for selling subscriptions, tickets, or digital products. Then GetResponse’s top tier is all about building and selling courses. 

Paid plans start at $19 per month, with unlimited emails and 1,000 contacts. GetResponse has a free plan that includes 2,500 emails and 500 contacts. It includes basic email building and sending tools. But no automation. 

Get started with GetResponse for free or read our full review

14. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is well-known as one of the first ever email marketing tools. Today it also has automation, lead generation, and event promotion.

Constant Contact tries to smooth the path to creating email campaigns. Its drag-and-drop editor is intuitive but not as straightforward as the editors from MailerLite or Moosend. It has 300+ templates and an AI writing assistant. You can build your list with forms, including popups. Basic automation is available but isn’t a strong point. You can set up pre-scheduled messages, like birthday messages. Or simple triggered sequences like welcome emails.

A strength of Constant Contact is its social marketing tools. You can use it to schedule posts, run social media ads, and track engagement. It’s also very useful for planning and promoting events. You can create event invitations, manage registrations, and track attendance. 

Constant Contact’s plans start at $12 per month for 500 contacts and 5000 emails. It has a 30-day free trial but no free plan.

Find the best Constant Contact alternatives or read our full review

15. Benchmark Email

Benchmark Email is a well-established name in email marketing for SMEs. It’s one of the most user-friendly email marketing platforms around. And it represents solid value for money for its customers, too.

Benchmark excels at helping new users get up and running quickly. From sign up, you can be well on your way designing your first email within minutes. Its drag-and-drop editor is well-designed and quick to learn. Pre-made content blocks simplify the design process. And there are 200+ responsive email templates to get started with. Templates come in a wide range of languages.

Sign-up forms and landing pages are similarly easy to build. You can add surveys and polls to forms to encourage more engagement. Automating campaigns is also simple. It doesn’t have the wide choice of triggers some other platforms have. And you can only automate email sending. So no contact segmentation or internal tasks. But you can build some fairly sophisticated workflows with conditions. I like the visual workflow builder, too. It makes good use of symbols and clear descriptions of elements. And there are 11 pre-built workflow templates.

Benchmark Email plans start at $13 a month for 500 contacts and 7,500 emails. Its free plan includes 500 contacts and 3,500 emails a month.

Try Benchmark Email for free or read our full review

The Best Email Marketing Services for Your Industry

So that’s my take on the 15 best email marketing platforms individually. But what about choosing the right one for your email marketing efforts? Different services suit different types of business.

So what are the best choices for your type of business or sector? Below, I’ve narrowed down the best picks in six different categories.

Best email marketing services for small businesses

Small businesses look for ease of use and low costs in email marketing software. But they should also make sure they get all the features they need. 

• MailerLite is hard to beat on both simplicity and value. All of its tools are very user-friendly without being too basic. And it has a very generous free plan. 
• Brevo combines email, SMS, and CRM features. It’s ideal for businesses wanting multiple marketing channels in one affordable service.
• Moosend is the cheapest of them all. But it still manages to pack in advanced automation and personalization tools. 

Best email marketing services with CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools help businesses with large customer databases use data for better campaign targeting. And they help channel marketing results directly into sales. So you get better engagement, better quality leads, and hopefully more sales.

• ActiveCampaign pairs email marketing and sales CRM features. But its standout feature is marketing and sales automation. It has over 900 customizable workflow templates. And uses contact data for targeting.
• HubSpot is a powerful all-in-one CRM platform. You can integrate email marketing with sales, customer service, and content management. Its adaptable tools support everything from lead nurturing to sales pipelines. And you can mix and match what you need.
• GetResponse is a scalable and budget-friendly alternative. It combines email marketing tools, automation, and funnels. Its straightforward CRM and intuitive funnel builder help small businesses convert subscribers into customers.

Find more tools that combine sales and marketing features in our review of the best CRM tools with email marketing. 

Best email marketing platforms for ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses want their email marketing tool to have integration with their ecommerce platform. They’re more likely to be sending out product promotions than newsletters. So they prioritize being able to drop product listings easily into campaigns. Plus, building landing pages for specific campaigns.

• ActiveCampaign’s combined marketing and sales automation tools make it ideal for ecommerce. It connects to all the leading web store platforms. And helps with automating customer journeys, nurturing leads, and integrating sales activities. Its predictive analytics and detailed targeting features are particularly valuable for driving sales.
• Omnisend stands out with its ecommerce integrations with platforms like Shopify. It uses web store data for segmentation and targeted product recommendations. And it has some great extras like managing customer reviews on Shopify.

Best free and cheap email marketing services

Plenty of businesses don’t need the bells and whistles of marketing automation or CRM. They just need a way to build good-looking emails and manage an audience. And you can cover these basics for a small list without having to pay.

• Brevo offers one of the best free plans, allowing 100,000 contacts and 300 emails daily. It also includes SMS, WhatsApp messages, and basic CRM tools. 
• MailerLite is incredibly user-friendly and affordable. Its generous free plan covers 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails monthly. 
• Moosend doesn’t have a free plan. But starting at just $7 a month, it’s one of the cheapest email marketing services around. There are no email send limits. And the quality of its automation and personalization features makes it an exceptional value.
• Mailjet‘s free plan includes 1,000 contacts and 6,000 monthly emails. It’s a great choice if you’d like to send newsletters and set up an email API or SMTP for transactional emails.

Find more tools in our full review of the best free and cheap email marketing tools.

Best email marketing software for newsletters

Newsletters are a staple of email marketing strategy. They are great for building audience engagement. And everyone from solopreneurs to content creators can use them to make money, too.

• Tapping into this trend, beehiiv is ideal for monetizing a newsletter. Its specialized tools include referral programs for one-click subscriptions. And revenue-earning opportunities like ads and affiliate links. 
• For more traditional newsletters, MailerLite is perfect for getting started. It has a straightforward email editor, a generous free plan, and reliable deliverability.
• Moosend is great for personalizing who receives newsletters and what they see. And you can automate follow-ups based on how recipients respond. 
• Brevo offers versatility with its easy-to-use editor and multi-channel marketing. You can follow up newsletters with conversations via SMS or WhatsApp. And even feed promising leads that come up from them into sales pipelines.

Check out our full review of the best email newsletter platforms for more tools. 

Best email marketing platforms for affiliate marketers

Email is a popular channel for affiliate marketers. It’s an easy way to push affiliate links to a large audience. But you have to be careful about which email marketing platforms you choose. Some don’t allow affiliate marketing.

• GetResponse does explicitly support affiliate marketing. And many of its tools are ideally suited to affiliate campaigns. These include send time optimization, advanced segmentation, and contact scoring. Its more advanced automation workflows also help with complex affiliate marketing sequences.
• Moosend is more low-key about its support for affiliate marketing. But its price and automation tools are ideal for side-hustle affiliate marketers.

Check out our review of the best email marketing software for affiliate marketing for more details about affiliate-friendly email tools.

Find the best email marketing service for your business

Choosing the best email marketing tool is ultimately a personal choice. I’ve provided a breakdown of the features, prices, pros and cons of my favourite 15 platforms. And I’ve dipped into how they suit different types of businesses and industries. But now, it’s over to you!

In summary, if I had to pick one all-around email marketing winner, it would be ActiveCampaign. It balances user-friendly design with awesome automation tools. It helps connect the entire customer journey from lead generation to sales. And it still keeps things reasonable price-wise.

For start-ups and SMEs conscious of budget, there are several great value options. MailerLite, Brevo, and Moosend would be my picks. MailerLite is a winner for how simple it is to use. It also has a great free plan. Though the Brevo free plan is even more generous. And includes CRM and multi-channel messaging. And Moosend, the cheapest of all, has some amazing advanced features for the price.

Whatever your business needs, choosing the right email marketing software is about balance. There’s no point selling yourself short on features for a better price. You won’t get good value. You also want to keep one eye on future growth plans. Switching platform a year down the line can get messy.

Happy hunting!

Email Marketing Software FAQ

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It is no secret that online courses are more popular than ever. The latest data shows the eLearning market will grow to $325 billion in 2026! Publishing your own course is a big opportunity with so many people eager to learn.

But you’ll need the right tools to craft and sell an online course. You need an online course builder. I know. I’m building a course myself. In this guide, I review the best online course platforms for you. So take a breath, and let’s dive in.

In this guide:
1. The Best Online Course Platforms
   These are the best platforms where you create and host your online courses:
   Learnworlds – Create most engaging, professional online courses (free trial – $29/month)
   Thinkific – Best overall online course platform (free or $74/month)
   Teachable – Best platform for starters (free trial or $29/month)
   FreshLearn – Best affordable online course platform (free or $49/month)

2. The Best All-in-One Course Platforms
   These are the best tools to build your course, website, and marketing all from one platform:
   Learnworlds – Create most engaging, professional online courses (free trial or $29 / month)
   Thinkific – Best overall online course platform (free trial or $74 / month)
   Kajabi – A complete, high-end online course platform with community ($119 / month)
   Academy of Mine – High-end enterprise eLearning environment ($599 / month)

3. The Best WordPress LMS Plugins
   Install and host your online courses on your own WordPress site:
   LearnDash – Best overall WordPress LMS Plugin ($189)
   LifterLMS – Modern WordPress LMS Plugin ($360 / year)
   Masterstudy – WordPress LMS Theme with Plugins included (starts at $55 )

4. The Best Online Learning Marketplaces
   Learning platforms to take courses, where you could also sell your course.
   Udemy – Best for general knowledge learning and trainers
   Skillshare – Best for creative courses and teaching
   Coursera– Best for Academic courses
   Code Academy – Best for programming

5. How to quickly launch your first course + tips

Selecting the best online course platform the quick way (and how I was dumb to “waste” 50+ hrs in research)

One thing you need to know upfront. Most e-learning tools aren’t made for selling your online course or marketing your business.

Nope, most online course software is made for corporate and internal training. An LMS (Learning Management System) like that is extremely customizable and can cost a fortune.

But if you are looking to sell or market your online course, it’s a lot easier. There are only 4 different types of online course software.

I was dumb, worked through all of the platforms, and listed all of their features. I got overwhelmed twice along the way. Don’t repeat my mistake, please.

Looking in the right category makes it super easy to pin down the best online course platform. So I divided this article up into the types:

You know, after hours and hours of researching, there are only a few top course platforms. Provided you first pick the right flavor. Know the type you want, and you are down to one or two good choices.

All of the listed online course platforms are good choices. That’s also what the online course reviews by new and longtime users tell. And with creating courses, don’t waste too much time on the platform selection: just get started. Getting started is the hard part.

Based on your preferences, any of these can be your ideal tool. Also, if a company has an affiliate program, we will usually join. It is no cost to you, and we can see how much new business we drive to them and get you some discounts because of that.

I have personally tried and vetted most of the online course software listed here, but STARTED WITH ZERO EXPERIENCE on online course tools, just like you. And we are building online courses on all of them now, to give the insider scoop.

Time to review which online course creation tools there are!

What is an online course platform? And how will it help me be successful?

An online course platform is a tool that helps you build your online course, host it, and market it to your customers.

A virtual course can be much like an offline course in a lot of ways:

• Students are enthusiastic about a new course they heard about and enroll
• The teacher gives an inspiring class through video, slides, presentations, text, and downloadable course material.
• The students follow the course through the learning management systems (LMS) software. They can take notes, watch videos, complete exercises, and test their knowledge in exams and assessments.

An online course platform gives you a clean framework for these steps, so you don’t have to worry about the technical side of it. And can focus on the content of your courses.

An online course platform gives students access to digital classes. The best online course platforms offer everything you need to create, market, and sell a successful online course.

You’d be surprised at how much functionality goes into these tools: Web hosting, domain name, landing page designer, video and content hosting, quiz and survey, shopping cart or payment gateway, email marketing…the list goes on.

Everybody has something to teach, but you’ll need the right tools to create and market your e-courses.

The Best Online Course Platforms

Here is a review of online course platforms with pros and cons. Giving you a comparison of the best elearning tools. We also look at cost plus on how easy it is to build and sell your course.

The following list of course creation tools is the result of hours and hours of research. I hope will help you quickly choose the perfect online course platform.

1. LearnWorlds Review – Online Course and LMS Software

LearnWorlds is one of the top online course platforms for creating, selling, and marketing your online courses. LearnWorlds is nearly an all-in-one teaching tool. It has more functionality for the creation of amazing online courses and training programs than others.

You can add interactive videos with pop-up texts and quizzes, there is social learning/community, and even interactive eBooks (with note-taking) to add to your course.

LearnWorlds is good for beginners and advanced course creators

LearnWorlds is a good fit for beginners and advanced trainers. Even if you are creating your first online training, you can get your course set-up in a few hours.

Teachers can grow into more advanced features after their first launch.

LearnWorlds stands out from the competition because you can make courses with a high level of student interactivity and engagement.

Getting started with the LearnWorlds online course builder

Once you sign up, you gain access to the course admin area. All the options you need are on one screen. After a minute, you know where all the functions are (in the left side navigation).

You can start adding the lessons in the online course builder, add users, videos, content. Fill your sales and signup pages and all the marketing materials, and lastly look at reports.

LearnWorlds Features

LearnWorlds is in this list of best online course platforms for a reason. We like it because it has a bunch of unique features that add value to you (and your students)

• Interactive eBooks, where learners can make notes while they’re reading.
• A built-in social network to connect students with each other, without the need for Facebook groups.
• Strong course assessments to test student knowledge, including quizzes, assignments, and exams.
• An automated newspaper feature makes communication relevant and share article headlines, social posts, etc.
• Interactive video with pop-up text, links to more resources, navigation, and in-video questionnaires.
• Sell your course with a sales page builder that is easy to use and has hundreds of quick-start templates on every plan.
• Your own Mobile App. With LearnWorlds, you can create a mobile app for your school. Interact on mobile and get in front of new potential customers in Google Play and Apple App Store.

What does LearnWorlds cost?

You can try Learnworlds for free with all functionality. If you like the platform, the paid version is only $29/month. That includes a custom domain and unlimited paid courses. $99/ month gives an extra full site builder with unlimited pages, membership payment options, and no transaction fees.

The biggest version is the online learning center, that is when you want to have a full online school with 20 teachers and 1000s of students. One of the best online teaching platforms. That is pretty impressive.

Learnworlds Discounts

Are there any extra or discounts for LearnWorlds available? Well, yes, there are. I’d say to take advantage of their 30-day free trial. And if you want the full experience in a paid plan:

Normally, the price would be $29 and $ 99 a month, but you get a LearnWorlds discount of 20% on a yearly plan. Also, full access to their LW Teaching Academy will help to make your course.

LearnWorlds has generously offered you a discount code on top of that. Use code “JVR30” for 30% off for the first month on monthly Pro Trainer plans or above.

You can get started today and get a month free and the academy for free with my link below.

Get LearnWorlds for free > (Extra’s included)

2. Thinkific Review – Online course platform

Thinkific is one of the most popular online course platforms. They help you create and sell your digital courses. It includes easy-to-use features, email marketing tools, membership site integration, and 5-star-rated 24/7 customer support.

It is an all-in-one online course system, but you can also use it in combination with your site and marketing tools.

Thinkific standout features:

Thinkific is a great choice as a complete platform to build and promote your courses.

• Support for all types of media and external resources: file types, including video, PDF, Audio, HTML, quizzes, surveys. But also outside resources such as Typeform, Articulate, and Storyline, which liven up your course for an amazing training experience.
• Full e-commerce and student enrollment/tracking functionality. It has reporting to keep track of your sales and student progress.
• Integrations with tools such as Segment.io that means if you want to connect the data with another system, that is easy.
• Completely white-label your course platform, so no one can see that Thinkific is under the hood.
• The knowledge base is excellent. Every time you have a question, You will be able to find an answer right away.

Help getting started and creating your online course

What I like very much is that Thinkific is helping you to get started and launch their courses. That is what the Thinkific Fast Track is about.

You can get the Thinkific Fast Track via my link here. That includes a free month of the whole online course maker. Fast Track is a free course where they will take you by the hand and build out your course in 3 hours, so you can launch it in 30 days or less.
Get Thinkific quick launch training

What does Thinkific cost?

I suggest you take advantage of the free trial that Thinkific has. They also have a free course creator version. Thinkific paid starts at $99 per month.

The Grow version $199 has a membership site and more payment and customization options. There are zero transaction fees.

Thinkific discounts and extras

Yes, as mentioned, there is a Thinkific discount of 25% if you go for the annual plan. So the platform becomes $74, with no transaction fees.

Go start with Thinkific or read our full Thinkific review

3. Teachable review – Online course platform

Teachable’s catchphrase is “Everything is Teachable.” I see what you did there! 

Teachable is a very popular online course creation software. It has helped over 150,000 instructors teach millions of students, with creators earning over $2 billion through the platform to date. 

The course pages look beautiful. The setup is simple and you don’t need any technical knowledge.

Teachable is best for course creators

Teachable is great for course creators who want to get started fast. You won’t be able to customize every single small detail of your pages, but in return, it’s very easy to use and quick to set up. The platform has perks like unlimited students and free video hosting for your content. You can also customize your site to match your branding. 

Teachable is easy to use for building both smaller courses and more advanced/longer online training or membership sites.

Getting started with the Teachable Online Course Builder

Once you sign up for free, you’ll get access to the course creation dashboard. 

From there, it’s simple to start using the online course builder and set up everything, including your payment system, your course materials, and the course landing and sales pages.

Teachable features and special functions

Why do we like Teachable? Teachable might be the best online course platform for you because it is so easy to use. But don’t discount these special functions:

• The Teachable course area design looks professional, which I think is important.
• Video hosting is included. You can upload your course videos directly without another service.
• Built-in affiliate program. You can let others promote and sell your course (while you sit back?).
• Teachable has its own payment processor. They might be the only one that do this. There are transaction fees, just like other payment processors.
• You can offer more than just courses. Teachable now supports coaching sessions, digital downloads, memberships, and even community forums in your school.

One minor trade-off: Teachable doesn’t let you tweak absolutely everything in the design, but it covers all the important bases.

What does Teachable cost?

Teachable has a 7-day free trial. And if you sign up with our link, you’ll get a whole month for free to get started making your course and exploring the platform. 

Paid plans start at $39/month for the Starter plan. The Starter includes 1 course, AI features, and mobile student apps. It has a 7.5% transaction fee on each sale. If you want to avoid transaction fees, the Builder plan is $89/month with 0% fees, 5 courses, email marketing, an affiliate program, course certificates, and live chat support.

The Growth plan is $189/month, and the top-tier Advanced plan is $399/month – that one is aimed at serious course businesses. It has white labeling, 100 courses, and advanced integrations.

Teachable Discount

Get 22% off on Teachable if you choose to pay per year. The Starter plan is only $29/month, and the Advanced plan costs $309/month when billed annually. You get a 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans.

And if you sign up with our link here, you can get a free month to make your course and explore the platform.

Get Teachable here or read our full review

4. FreshLearn review – Online course platform

FreshLearn is a newer online course platform that has quickly gained popularity. 

In just a few years, creators on FreshLearn have launched over 53,000 products and seen 1.5 million+ enrollments, earning around $695 million from their courses. Not bad for the new kid on the block!

FreshLearn is best for budget-conscious course creators

FreshLearn is ideal for course creators who want all-in-one features on a budget. It offers an affordable, creator-friendly tool without skimping on functionality. You get an easy-to-use course builder, plus built-in tools for things like websites, email marketing, and communities.

And unlike some competitors, FreshLearn doesn’t nickel-and-dime you with transaction fees or limits. In fact, one of FreshLearn’s biggest perks is that it charges 0% transaction fees on your course sales, even on the free plan. This is a huge plus for budget-conscious creators. 

FreshLearn’s focus is on being an “advanced yet affordable” platform, letting you grow your online course business without hefty overheads.

Getting started with FreshLearn

Getting started with FreshLearn is a breeze. You can sign up for free and start building your course. The interface is straightforward and beginner-friendly. You can create your course curriculum, upload videos, add quizzes or assignments. And even design your website pages with a drag-and-drop editor. FreshLearn makes it easy to connect your payments, too.

Bonus: Already have courses on another platform? FreshLearn provides free migration assistance. They’ll help you move your content and students over.

FreshLearn features and special functions

FreshLearn packs a lot of bang for your buck. Here are a few standout features that we really like:

• All-in-one platform: FreshLearn goes beyond course building and hosting. You also get built-in tools for memberships, email marketing, blogging, and student communities.
• No transaction fees: You keep 100% of your course sales. There’s no commission, even on the free plan.
• Unlimited courses and students: Paid plans give you unlimited courses. You also get free video hosting with no bandwidth limits.
• AI course tools: FreshLearn has AI features to generate course outlines and quizzes, making it quicker to build your content.
• Community and engagement: Create a private student community, add gamification like quizzes and certificates, and run live classes or webinars.

Overall, FreshLearn provides a feature-rich, all-in-one tool that’s surprisingly affordable. It’s a newer platform, but it’s quickly catching up.

What does FreshLearn cost?

One of the best parts of FreshLearn is the pricing. FreshLearn has a free plan that includes one course with 25 enrollments, without transaction fees. It’s a solid option for testing your course idea or launching a small pilot without spending anything.

Paid plans start at $49/month (Pro) and include unlimited courses and students, and no transaction fees. It has features like custom domains, email marketing, and drip content. 

The $79/month No Brainer plan adds live classes, certificates, assignments, and priority support. The top-tier No Brainer+ plan is $149/month, with advanced automation and API access.

FreshLearn discounts and extras

You can save 25% with yearly plans and 40% with 2-year plans. The Pro plan drops to around $41/month with yearly billing. FreshLearn also offers free migration help on annual plans if you’re switching from another platform. And since there’s a free plan, you can start building right away and upgrade when you’re ready.

Get started with Freshlearn for free or read our full review

Best All-in-One Online Course Platforms

Vendors like Kajabi and Thinkific can take care of everything for you. From course building to web security, online course hosting, and marketing your online learning products.

If you want to sell courses and build a business around them, but don’t have other tools like a website or email marketing tool yet, this is the easiest to get started.

When selling your elearning courses, it’s smart to pick the setup that is easiest to start. So you can focus on the course creation and successfully sell your courses.

5. Thinkific as an all-in-one platform

Thinkific is also great as a hosted online course platform + marketing + sales + eCommerce + membership tool.

The all in one Thinkific set up is especially interesting if you want to create a course in no time. You get a lot of pre-made resources. And templates to design sales pages, so it’s easier to validate your course idea and take off. Creating the basic offer and test if people are eager to join!

You can still use your own email marketing tool and website CMS like WordPress, WooCommerce, and all of those if you want. But Thinkific has your back on those as well.

• Full e-commerce and student enrollment/tracking functionality. It has reporting to keep track of your sales and student progress.
• Included checkout pages – and Payment gateway integration
• Website and sales page creation with a CMS and lots of templates
• Build sales funnels, lead magnet funnels, webinar funnels, etc.
• Full Membership area
• Built-in email marketing/automation tools
• White-label your course platform completely, so no one can see that Thinkific is under the hood.

Creating your online course in a flash

Thinkific can help you to get started and launch your course quickly. You can get the Thinkific Fast Track for free via my link here. That includes a month of the online course platform and a free course designed to take you by the hand and build out your course. It is 3 hours with power help, so you can launch your course in 30 days or less.

Get Thinkific quick launch training or read our full Thinkific review

6. Kajabi Review – all in One platform: A bit more pricey but complete.

Kajabi is a full online teaching platform. It has an online course builder and all functionality for selling your course. Create landing pages, sales funnels, drip campaigns. In other words: get visitors to sign up for your courses.

You can do all of your email marketing from Kajabi. Including drip and follow up campaigns through their own Kajabi email. Other creators may want more from their email marketing. Kajabi integrates with the most popular email marketing platforms we have reviewed like Mailchimp and alternatives, MailerLite and ActiveCampaign.

Good looking out of the box + Theme marketplace

The pages and courses look great right out of the box. They have a good number of standard templates you can use.

There is also a marketplace for themes if you want something different. Which is a great idea. An online course builder with pre-made designs and templates (from the community), and you won’t see that with Teachable, Thinkific, and alternatives.

Video hosting and streaming is included

Kajabi has Wistia (one of the best streaming video platforms) integrated for your videos. This is all included in the price, baked in. Considering Wistia Pro costs $99, that is a great deal.

Live events and virtual summits are easy to set up

Kajabi is very strong in live events. Set up virtual summits or conferences. The templates are all there for streaming classes/events. Start a Webinar in Kajabi and customize your funnel by just changing around the text and video links on the registration, promotional emails, and post-event follow-ups.

Customer support and Hero university

We need to mention Hero University, it is an online training and community that helps you as a user. The support and documentation are great, but if that isn’t enough, there is a lot going on in the community, also because companies have created custom themes and a lot of additional blogs online.

Standout features of Kajabi

According to Kajabi users, the most standout and valued features are:

• Create an engaging course with video, PDFs, digital products, and mobile apps.
• Memberships, quizzes, and assignments
• WordPress-like CMS for your pages and blog
• Build all kinds of funnels: product launch funnels, lead magnet funnels, webinar funnels, etc. Including checkout pages. You can add up- and cross-sells.
• Simple payment cart included and integration with Stripe and PayPal
• Email and automation tools you will use

What does Kajabi cost?

The starting price for Kajabi is quite a bit higher than other platforms, which is a reflection of how many features it has. There is a 14-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The platform starts at $149, but there is also a discount which brings us to…

Kajabi discounts and extra’s

Kajabi offers a 20% discount with a yearly payment plan.

Start with Kajabi

7. Academy of Mine – Enterprise online training software

Academy of Mine is one of those enterprise training platforms.

The platform is the most expensive on this list starting at $599 per month. It’s an all-in-one online training software, and the team fully customizes your environment. A full website and branding for you to launch your brand and start selling courses online.

Academy of Mine can be a good choice for bigger businesses, with use cases for internal training, HR, your online language or coding school. Since it’s a complete course building and learning management system, it’s a higher price point, but you get premium service.

• Create Self-Paced Courses with free-form text, HTML, video, audio, PowerPoint, PDF, SCORM, TinCan, and more.
• Do Live Virtual Training with video conferencing, live chat, screen sharing, collaborative whiteboard, and presentations.
• Corporate and Group Onboarding. Because Academy of Mine caters to bigger schools and clients, they have specific functionality for bulk selling, directly to companies and businesses. A Group Onboarding feature allows selling course seats in big numbers and delegates the student management process to representatives of the company.
• Advanced functionality includes In-Person bookings, Calendars, E-Books, Downloadable Products, and user roles with personal audit trail (no kidding, they mean business).

Academy of Mine

Best WordPress LMS plugins

A WordPress Learning Management System (LMS) is a course software you install on your WordPress website. Obviously, that only works if you already have a WordPress site and domain name.

In general, this is attractive when you are a bit more tech-savvy and want to have (a lot of) additional control over everything.

8. LearnDash Review – Best WordPress LMS Plugin

LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin that will turn your WordPress website into a self-hosted learning environment. LearnDash is also the most popular WordPress LMS plugin today. With an online course builder and a lot of features.

One of the features in LearnDash, since version 3.0, is their “Focus Mode”. Students will be free from distractions when they go through your course. (Because all other things are hidden from your membership pages).

LearnDash LMS comes with a drag-and-drop online course builder. You can simply create courses with lessons, videos, quizzes, and more. Email drip campaigns are included. Of course, you can offer all the lessons at once, but you can also build your online lessons and then send the content paced via the email drip feed.

Being a WordPress plugin, this Learning Management System works well with bbPress, MemberPress, and other WordPress eCommerce and membership plugins.

The LearnDash WordPress LMS lets you sell individual courses, offer subscriptions, memberships, or use the shopping cart for selling access to your online training courses. Use a payment gateway like PayPal or Stripe. Once a student buys your course, a WordPress member profile is automatically created for them.

The automatically generated certificates and badges (with their own name and scores) are a nice touch. So you can award your students with official certificates based on quiz performance and on completing a full course.

What does LearnDash WordPress LMS cost?
You can start today with a $40 discount and a full 15-day money-back guarantee on their annual plans. You still have to figure out online course hosting, meaning where to host your online course videos, as I wouldn’t suggest uploading your course videos to your WordPress environment.

Get Learndash

9. Lifter LMS – WordPress Course Software

LifterLMS is a powerful Learning Management Software plugin for WordPress. You can easily create and sell online courses on your own WordPress site.

You can expand the core functionalities by integrating extensions, including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more. Of course, you can also integrate with the email marketing or marketing automation platform you use.

Like LearnDash, LifterLMS offers features to engage your students, like certificates, badges, and some social interaction. It can mix with 1:1 coaching. The LMS platform can be used to sell individual courses, but you can also create and sell bundles or offer a membership site type (with discounts).

Get addons. for $120, or the universe bundle for for $360.

Try LifterLMS here for free

10. Masterstudy LMS – WordPress Online Course Plugin and Theme

Masterstudy LMS is a modern online education and learning management system plugin for WordPress. The pages have a sleek design, and it’s very responsive thanks to being built completely in Vue.js. The template builders at StylemixThemes developed the whole WordPress plugin and themes.

MasterStudy LMS has an easy-to-use course admin panel, a messaging system, quizzes, and course announcements.

As an online course builder, you can create three types of lessons: text lessons, video lessons, and slideshow lessons. You can add additional elements, use templates, and add text blocks per type.

The Masterstudy WordPress LMS Pro version has extra features like a Udemy Course Importer, Prerequisites, Online Testing and assignments, Sequential Drip Content, a Gradebook, Lessons Live Streaming, Group Courses, and WooCommerce integration. The full WordPress Educational Theme comes with more functions, including more customization options.

Look at MasterstudyLMS

The Best Online Learning Platforms (Marketplaces)

Online marketplaces for courses like Skillshare and Udemy are spending a lot of time to attract students (and course creators). They will do some of the selling for you and take a lot of design and hosting headaches away. So we made a list of online learning platforms.

Just be aware that courses don’t really sell themselves. And even in one of the best online teaching platforms and marketplaces like Udemy, there is competition between course creators.

Udemy – The Best Learning Platform for General Knowledge and Business

Udemy is one of the most popular online learning platforms today. It certainly is the most visited to buy online courses, with more than 40 million students. The learners on this educational platform can use ratings and reviews to filter the highest quality. But is it a good place to build your course and sell it?

Pros of the Udemy learning platform:

Udemy allows course creation for everyone. You can use training materials like PDF documents, Powerpoint, text, and video content.

• No setup or platform cost
• Online course hosting is taken care of
• Self-paced learning and video courses
• No need for technical knowledge – at all
• A large built-in audience that might buy your courses.

The platform tends to promote the courses that are already selling well, so success also depends on your marketing. Udemy has control over the price of your course and often sells with a discount (good for students).

Udemy is good for teachers, instructors, educators, and freelancers who are just starting out with their online courses.

Pricing: You can start for free, the Udemy learning platform charges a 3% administration fee on courses you sold through your links.
The commissions on sales that Udemy sells for you is quite hefty, between 50 to 75%.
Go to Udemy

Skillshare – Best Learning Platform for Creative Learning

Skillshare is one of the best online learning platforms. There are more than 4 million students and 24,000 lessons on their course marketplace.

Course lessons are between 20 – 60 minutes, and courses are built with a series of small videos. There are class projects and a member community with interaction through a class discussion forum.

The online training platform has courses in the categories “Create, Build, and Thrive”, but actually they are divided into four course categories.

1. Creative topics: This forms the biggest part of the training platform and ranges from Music lessons to graphic design, cooking, etc.
2. Business courses: like marketing, freelancing, and business analytics
3. Web and technology: including web development, UX/UI design, and e-commerce.
4. Lifestyle: Learn languages, wellness, interior design, and more.

Nice about Skillshare is that, next to being an online course creation software, it has a discussion forum where students can interact and give feedback. And it is a complete package. If students go premium, they can take over 20,000 classes for one fee. Some would pitch Skillshare vs Teachable in functionality. Difference is, of course, that Teachable is primarily an online course hosting platform for your classrooms and not a marketplace.

Skillshare is good for teachers who want to make a little income on the side. Instructors can make royalties from their courses and be in the Skillshare referral program.
Have a look at Skillshare here

Coursera – Best learning platform for Academics

Coursera is an online learning platform founded in 2012 by two former Stanford professors. Coursera instructors teach at top universities and big companies and offer MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Interesting for online learning, but unless you teach at Harvard, you can’t just create a course and arrange your online course hosting on Coursera.

There are the main courses, but also specializations, and online degrees in a variety of subjects like engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities, medicine, biology, and social sciences. Coursera is free to sign up for, the training on the platform is mostly between 4-6 weeks with 2 calls a week. The price of certification and degrees are shown behind the login and run from $29-$99 /month and higher for the specializations.

Coursera.com

Code Academy

Code Academy is a learning platform that offers niche MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for the IT and programming crowd. Code Academy is built so you can start at any experience level, from basic HTML, JavaScript, and Python. As online education platforms go, coding is something different because you also need to play with the code.

The classes run up in levels so you can be able to build websites, apps, and many types of advanced programming.

In the free plan, there are 180 hours of learning. The Pro membership is also free for one week.
Learn to code at Codeacademy

Other top online learning platforms are Linkedin Learning, Masterclass, and Treehouse.

How to Create and Sell an Online Course

There isn’t one fixed way to build your course, but here are the steps to creating your first course quickly.

1. Let the experts show you how to create your own course

I’d say the easiest way to learn how to create your course is to let an expert take you through it step by step.

Luckily, the platforms in this guide really want you to launch a successful course. Because it is the only way you’ll become and stay a customer.

So these experts often offer free training on how to launch your first course. They are typically set up to help you to launch your online course step by step.

The added benefit is that you also learn about creating courses by taking courses. You can go through the lessons and experience what you like to have in your training.

These are my favorite free trainings to launch your online course:

Learnworlds Academy (free)

Thinkific Fast track (free)

Take a course somewhere else: $500 bucks and maybe not so good?!

2. Pick a course topic your audience is interested in

Picking a course topic is as easy as knowing what people would like to learn. Everybody can teach something. Something you know just a bit more about than your students.

No need to overthink it. If it is your very first course or training, I would recommend you create a short course as the first one.

The only goal is to learn about course creation and get a feel for the course platform you’re working with.
While building your first course, you learn A LOT for your “real” second course. Later on, you can repurpose this short one to build your email list or even as the intro to your real course.

3 killer ideas for your first micro-course

Idea 1: Pick a smaller subtopic and make a three-lesson course from it.
If your topic is weightlifting, create the first class about the correct posture
If your topic is email marketing, create a first training on writing a great subject line.

A lesson structure can be
1: Why is it important, and what will you learn?
2: A few do’s and don’ts
3: A few examples and one exercise.

Idea 2: Talk about the four biggest trends in [your topic]. Each trend is a lesson.

Idea 3: Find a big blog article about [your topic] and turn that into a few lessons.

I like the idea of starting with a micro-course / training because now is better than never to start making your online course a reality.

3. Figure out how much creating your online training costs

Some reports say that creating an online course is very expensive, an average of $3,000. But that is a bit steep. You can go big in budget or keep an eye on costs.

You can build your online course on a very modest budget.

If you have PowerPoint, a laptop, a webcam, and a can-do attitude, you have everything you need to get started in course creation.

You can create a decent online course under $250. Put aside $100 – $500 as a budget to create the course. Your highest costs will be the time you put into it.

The hosting, marketing, and selling of your new course can be done through the course platforms we reviewed. Here is an overview of the 4 best online course platform prices.

You might wonder, are there any free online course platforms? They are all a bit free. Either a free trial or you can start your first course for free. That will allow you to get started for free. After that, I know a free online course platform looks appealing, but realize the biggest investment is usually in time (not the platform).

4. The best equipment for creating an online course

You don’t need the most impressive set-up to craft an online course that sells like gangbusters. You do need some equipment, though. Lets walk through your main course gear options.

Microphone ($25 – $109)

Even if your content is amazing, bad audio quality is a big turnoff for the learning experience.

• You can try the Samson Meteor Mic. It’s a small USB microphone with great sound capture, costs around $25.
• I have the Blue Yeti (now Logitech Yeti) USB desk microphone myself. A bit more pricey, but great quality, and you have the quick podcasters/course creator vibe built in. It’s one of the most popular microphones for creating webinars, courses, and podcasts.

Camera ($0 – $60)

Most laptops and computers come with a built-in camera, so you might not need an extra one. But if you need a webcam or want to upgrade to higher quality, have a look at the Logitech BRIO Ultra HD. Place it on your monitor and record 4K video. For some trainings, you may want to show off your skills on camera or on location. Fortunately, your smartphone has an amazing quality camera built in.

Screen capture recording software ($0 – $20)

Monitor and screen capture, mixed with your video, is a format often used for online courses and mixed learning. At the moment, I am using Zoom.us (for meetings and online live training) and Loom for screen and video capture. They both have free options. Make sure to download all your videos and let attendees know if they will be recorded with regard to their privacy.

Lighting kit ($0 – $50)

There is a lot to be said about lighting your video course recording. Natural light is usually best to use (and free), just sit close to the window facing it for even lighting. A ring light or desk lighting kit will make sure your training videos are even well lit in the evening.

Cool Course Creators Coffee mug (you know you want it!) $10

So you see that the best course creators don’t need the world to get a great course going. If your video course is a “talking heads” presentation style, it’s similar to what you would need for a conference call or webinar!

How to Choose the Best Online Course Platform for Your Business

As you’ve realized by now, the best online course platform will depend completely on your needs.

Here are a few recommendations based on specific wishes:

• You want the best tool to create your online course with engaging content and experience
  – Check out Thinkific or Learnworlds.
• You need an all-in-one tool for online courses, email marketing, website, memberships, and sales funnels
  – Thinkific is for you.
• You’re mainly looking for a quality elearning tool, but you still want full email marketing and drip campaigns.
  – Go for Teachable or FreshLearn
• Your online course software should have a solid membership and login section:
  – Thinkific and Kajabi are the platforms to look into.
• You are looking to get a running start and help with setting up your training.
  – You’ll find Learnworlds (with their Academy), Teachable, and Thinkific to be very helpful.

If you need help creating content or marketing your course, check out the best freelance marketing websites to hire top talent.

The post 15+ Best Online Course Platforms in 2026 appeared first on Email vendor selection.

Featured CRM sponsors for your business

monday.com

Work OS with a lightweight CRM built-in. Manage everything from sales and marketing to IT and software development.

Go to site

Pipedrive

Sales CRM that's easy to set up and use. With powerful sales automation, task management, lead qualification and tracking.

Go to site

EngageBay

All-in-one CRM platform with marketing, sales, and service tools including automation at affordable prices. Free for up to 15 users.

Go to site

BenchmarkONE

Convenient all-in-one sales CRM and marketing software. It’s great value and has an impressive ‘free forever’ plan with 250 contacts.

Go to site

Salesforce

Sales CRM platform for small business to enterprise with pipelines and automation. 30-day free trial available.

Go to site

CRM software provides useful data about your customers. Knowing your customers better means better service and happier customers. Happier customers mean more sales. 

Today’s best CRM tools are far from the techy platforms they used to be. The best CRMs are slick, cloud-based applications that are big on presentation and usability.

CRM pulls customer data from all the other digital channels your business uses. It gives you a complete 360-degree view of your customers, all in one place.

The best CRM systems use reporting on your sales and marketing campaigns. They tell sales teams when to push the right offer to the right people at the right time. They help support desks provide a more efficient, responsive service. They automate workflows and help teams achieve more with less input.

7 biggest benefits of CRM

1. More efficient customer service

Every customer wants to be helped quickly. It’s frustrating to have a call passed around departments. Or to repeat your question over and over. It wastes everybody’s time.

CRMs record every customer interaction. When a customer gets in touch again, an agent can quickly find all relevant information in the CRM. Customer service agents resolve issues faster and in term have more time to spend with a customer – actually helping them instead of looking up basic information. 

2. Increase in sales

Every interaction with a customer leaves clues about who they are and what they like. Every action, from browsing your website to making an inquiry, creates data. A CRM platform vacuums it all up.

From this data, a CRM system can tell you things like how ready or likely a customer is to buy. It helps you tailor your sales processes to different people and different channels. It tells you what works for customers at different stages of their journey. The result is more closed sale deals.

3. Improved customer retention

Keeping customers costs less and takes less time than finding new customers.

A CRM system tells you what your customers like and dislike. Every abandoned cart, every unfavourable review leaves clues about why they were unhappy. With those insights, you can cut out the things that push customers away.

Happy customers stick around longer. That’s why 82% of users rate ‘active customer retention’ as one of the biggest benefits of using CRM software.

4. Personalisation

75% of customers say personalised content makes them more likely to repurchase. 71% of people now expect personalised interactions. 76% get frustrated when it doesn’t happen.

Personalisation makes a big difference to business performance. The fastest growing companies get 40% more revenue from personalisation.

To personalise marketing, sales or service, you need to know your customers. CRM is the driving force behind personalisation in the modern business.

5. Accurate analytics

Data is rarely one-dimensional. And you can use data in multiple ways. A CRM platform collects data about your customers. But that doesn’t mean it can only be used for customer insight.

The wealth of data your CRM collects and stores is ripe for use for wider business intelligence. As already mentioned, you can use it to analyse and improve your sales processes. You can track performance of marketing campaigns. You can measure service against agreed metrics.

Top CRM systems come packed with analytics tools that turn data into valuable business insights.

6. Better knowledge sharing

Sales, marketing and service teams often share the same goals. They want high sales and happy, loyal customers. Sharing information helps to achieve those goals.

CRM software makes it easier to share information across your business. It breaks down silos and helps everyone pull in the same direction.

7. Greater transparency

Better knowledge sharing leads to better collaboration. In turn, this creates a spirit of togetherness and shared purpose.

With a CRM, information is automatically available and transparent. Different teams can better understand what the other does and how they help one another.

How CRM Works

At the core of a CRM system is a customer database. But CRM goes way beyond storing basic personal details.

CRM software records details of all customer interactions. Phone calls, email, live chat, social media, and even visits to your website. Signing up for loyalty schemes or newsletters. Clicking solo ads. Making a purchase. This is the main reason why the biggest challenge in CRM use is manual data entry.

A CRM platform captures data from them all.

This data is then made available across your organization. It provides a single point of visibility. It helps to make operations more streamlined and integrated. Most importantly, it puts the knowledge of your customers at the heart of everything.

The core functionality of CRM

All CRM vendors try to make their platforms a bit unique, But there are a core set of features that any modern CRM system worth its salt should have. It’s these core CRM tools that deliver the biggest benefits.

1. Omnichannel integration

CRM systems used to be very phone focused. When sales and service teams were run from call centres, a main purpose of a CRM was to log and track call data.

Phone/voice remains a key part of the CRM mix. But customers use so many more channels these days. Email, live chat, SMS, web push notifications, social media – these all need to be included.

This matters if you want a complete view of the customer experience. It also makes managing customer relationships simpler and more efficient. For example, the best modern CRMs let you send emails and run email marketing campaigns from within the platform. These built-in tools are often on the level of standalone email marketing platforms.

The same applies to making a voice call, launching a live chat session, posting to social media. The more you can do from the CRM, the more information you can share. And you can be consistent in your approaches across channels.

2. Cloud-based CRM

Like lots of business software, early CRM platforms were big, heavyweight programmes. They had to be run from a particular machine or server group. You had to be on that machine or in that office to use them.

Nowadays, agility and accessibility are everything in CRM. Cloud-based CRM systems mean you can use them from any web browser. Mobile CRMs mean you can manage customer relationships on the move.

3. Analytics

A customer database is one thing. Using customer data to deliver a better customer experience is a second.

Analytics is what makes personalisation possible. It helps focus attention on the strongest and most valuable leads. And it lets you track sales, marketing and service performance in real time.

That means you can adjust activity as you go along to increase the chances of success. Or identify what works and repeat it in the future.

4. Automation

Data also drives automation. CRM automation comes in three main flavours. Marketing automation, sales force automation and service automation.

Automation makes workflows more efficient and responsive. It lightens the burden on staff and cuts out human error. Using data-led automation, you shouldn’t ever miss a lead or opportunity.

5. Innovations in CRM

As technology keeps evolving, we’re starting to see more and more innovations in CRM. In particular, we’re seeing CRM systems make use of AI to take analytics and automation up a notch.

With Machine Learning, CRM is becoming more efficient and powerful. Over time, the systems ‘learn’ the best ways to optimise workflows. They get better at predicting customer behaviour, making recommendations that drive more conversions. They take control of more decision-making, boosting automation.

We’re also seeing CRMs use AI to make more and more data sources available. For example, Natural Language Processing technology can now analyse spoken and written words. Information from phone calls and emails doesn’t have to be added to the customer database manually. AI can pull out relevant data and save it automatically.

A Short History of CRM

Some people claim that the history of CRM can be traced back to the invention of the Rolodex in the 1950s. A Rolodex is a rotating index card file. They became popular with salespeople for recording customer details. A long way from the advanced software CRMs we have today, sure. But the general principle is the same. Recording information about customers to aid your sales processes.

Others argue that the origins of ‘true’ CRM date back to the 1980s and the emergence of database marketing. Database marketing used analytics to predict how customers would respond to marketing campaigns.

The first purpose-built contact management software emerged in the late 1980s. In the early 90s, software that combined database marketing and contact management arrived. Nowadays, we’d recognise these products as a basic form of CRM. But at the time they went by the name sales force automation (SFA).

The phrase customer relationship management was allegedly coined in 1995. Gradually, SFA products evolved and became known as customer relationship management systems. The market leader at the time was Siebel Systems Inc. The first edition of Siebel CRM hit the market in 1995.

After that, demand for CRM software exploded. By the late 90s and early 2000s, some of the biggest names in CRM we still recognise today had arrived on the scene. Oracle CRM arrived in 1998, SAP CRM in 2000. Microsoft began marketing CRM platforms in the early 2000s. Microsoft Dynamics was launched in 2006.

Perhaps the biggest moment of all was when Salesforce launched its first edition CRM in 1999. Salesforce was an early ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) cloud pioneer. It featured a web-based interface decades before that became the standard for CRMs.

Another landmark came in 2004 with the arrival of SugarCRM, the first open source CRM. Open source means allowing other developers to use programme code under licence. Along with cloud technology, this paved the way for the huge explosion in CRM providers in the 2010s.

Instead of having to start from scratch building a CRM platform, developers can now use open source code as a starting point. This has sped up innovation, allowing developers to respond quickly to trends like social media and mobile. The SaaS model has also allowed CRM systems to become more agile, easier to run and simpler to use. They are also much cheaper than earlier legacy platforms.

The result is the booming market in specialised cloud-based CRM we see today. Whatever your market, whatever the size of your company, whatever your budget, there’s a CRM for you. You can also take your pick from CRM systems designed for specific tasks.

Types of CRMs

Sales CRMs

Sales is a complex but critical area of any business. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, your objectives are broadly the same. Growth depends on increaing the number of sales and maximising revenue per sale.

Sales CRMs are designed to smooth out complex sales processes. They focus on improving visibility and data sharing across teams with analytics to help prioritise activity. And they use automation to make workflows efficient and sales activity better targeted.

Key features to look for in a sales CRM include:

• Lead tracking and scoring: Lead tracking involves logging data about your contacts’ behaviour across channels. Analytics then use this data to ‘score’ which prospects are hot and which are not. The idea is that you can focus your efforts on the strongest leads. This is often called opportunity management. It helps drive more conversions and higher revenues per sale.

• Sales pipelines: Sales pipelines visualise your sales processes. They show you all the stages customers move through on their way to making a purchase. Visualising is understanding, so this alone gives you more power to influence the sales journey. The best tools will also allow you to automate sales pipelines.

• Proposal & Quotation Management: Proposal management features offer pipeline-like visualisations for plotting timelines and finance tools for calculating costs. Quotation management tools help prepare quotes based on desired margins. Some automate the process using previous quotations to calculate new offers quickly.

• Account Management: B2B sales teams often operate client accounts. Account management CRM tools make sure all account data is gathered in one place. They include B2B-specific tools like invoice, credit and contract tracking.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a lot more than just a CRM. It describes itself as a Work Operating System, or Work OS. It lets users create their own custom workspaces for dozens of different functions.

Monday’s unique sell is that it offers hundreds of templates for building ‘boards’. A board is a digital workspace. Templates are visual, easy to navigate and fully customizable using a drag-and-drop interface.

This gives sales teams the flexibility to shape their CRM to fit how they work. CRM-specific templates and boards include sales pipelines, tracking marketing activities, customer onboarding, and sales enablement. On top of that, there are customizable analytics dashboards and automation workflows. Another standout feature is the customer timeline view. This lets you track all interactions with customers over time.

Monday.com offers integrations with over 50 popular business apps. This includes direct integrations with email providers like Gmail and Outlook. You can connect to Zapier, which opens the door to 4000 more apps. And you can even connect to other CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zendesk and Hubspot.

The free forever plan is for up to two users. On this, you can build unlimited boards with a choice of 200+ templates.

Price-wise, Monday.com is very affordable. Paid plans start at $8 per user per month, with at least three users. So $24 a month. This gives you access to unlimited sales pipelines and contacts. Plus lead, contact, and deal management. You also get full mobile CRM via dedicated apps for iOS and Android.

If you want sales analytics and integrations, you have to upgrade. The standard plan costs $10 per user per month for three users.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a great choice for smaller sales teams. It’s user-friendly, has good value for money, and scales as your operations grow.

One of its stand-out features is that it lets you build lots of sales pipelines on all plans. Many rival services restrict users to one or two on cheaper tiers. It’s easy to customize these pipelines to suit your own sales journeys.

Pipedrive has over 400 integrations with third-party apps. Some integrations are free, others you have to pay extra for. 73 are classed as ‘app extensions’. This means the connected apps work inside the Pipedrive platform. These include Zapier, Microsoft Teams, Zendesk, and the project management platform Trello.

Pipedrive has a mobile app for iOS and Android, perfect for remote teams and sales reps on the move. And you can connect to Gmail to access Pipedrive CRM tools from your mailbox.

Pricing starts at $14 a month for basic lead, deal, and pipeline management. You have to double that to get email features and marketing automation. And double it again to get integrated calling and sales forecasting. There is no free tier, but you can try Pipedrive for 14 days without charge with full access to all features.

Find the best Pipedrive alternatives in our buyer’s guide.

BenchmarkONE

Formerly known as Hatchback, BenchmarkONE is a solid all-around CRM. It has a strong set of sales-focused features.

Chief among these are contact scoring and high-quality deal pipelines. Contact scoring uses data to rate leads and customers as ‘hot’ or otherwise. And deal pipelines use data to suggest the best way to convert leads. The combined effect is smarter sales strategies, higher conversion rates, and increased revenues.

BenchmarkONE offers marketing tools alongside its sales CRM features. These include building and sending email campaigns, marketing automation, and lead generation options. There are integrations to Gmail and Outlook so you can run customer relationship management from your inbox. You can connect to thousands of other apps through Zapier.

The free version has unlimited users, 250 contacts, and 500 emails/month. Feature-wise, it has landing pages, contact management tools, email marketing, and marketing automation.

Paid plans start at €27 with a limit of 500 contacts and 2,500 emails a month. But that only gives you marketing automation, email marketing, and contact management tools. For the full CRM experience, pricing starts at €169. We have a sweet BenchmarkONE deal just for our readers. Get 50% off your first month or sign up for a year and get an additional 10% off your annual plan + 1 month for free if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

Salesforce

Sales CRM doesn’t get any bigger than Salesforce. Founded in 1999, Salesforce is credited as the first SaaS CRM. These days it ranks as one of the biggest enterprise software companies in the world.

That’s on the back of offering a lot more than just CRM tools, of course. But sales CRM is still at its core. While still moving with the times.

Salesforce’s modern sales CRM combines engagement, analytics, intelligence, and revenue management. All driven by data and automation.

The full list of CRM features is huge. It covers everything from simple sales pipelines to advanced automation. While it’s called a ‘sales’ CRM, the offer is wider. The engagement tools provide a direct link to marketing. AI tools will score leads based on campaign responses. Then feed them through pipelines calculated to have the best chances of converting.

Salesforce’s size means it can take time to get to grips with it. It’s best suited to larger teams and growing businesses. It’s great for consolidating several tools into a single platform. It also offers a high level of customization. Pipelines can be tailored to reflect your real sales processes. And can be as big and complex as you need.

You can also add more functionality with 1000+ third-party integrations.

Pricing for the full sales CRM starts at $80 per user per month. There is a cheaper Starter package that combines basic sales, marketing and service CRM tools. This costs $25 per user per month. There is a 30-day free trial.

NetSuite

NetSuite offers a giant suite of business software. Its core service is enterprise resource planning (ERP). That covers tools for supply chain management, logistics, and production management.

But with a long list of add-ons, there’s not much NetSuite can’t do. It includes software for accounting, HR, project management, eCommerce, and CRM.

The NetSuite CRM covers the full customer lifecycle. It includes marketing automation, sales force automation, and customer service management. But the bulk of its features are focused on sales. It includes tools for managing quotations, commissions, partner relationships and forecasts. It lets you automate up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Whether you’re a B2C or B2B vendor, NetSuite covers all sales-related processes.

Another strength as a sales CRM is its commerce integration options. You can connect NetSuite apps to the best eCommerce platforms. NetSuite can take care of most back-end processes for any retail business. This includes using the CRM tools to organize and manage sales.

If you’re used to bright, colourful visual interfaces, NetSuite can look a little old school. It’s a platform that goes for substance over style. And it’s not really designed for small businesses. You can only use the CRM as an add on to the ERP platform. So you have to be big enough to need ERP. 

NetSuite only offers pricing by application. But you need a sizeable IT budget. There are implementation costs as well as licence costs. Plus having to purchase the ERP before you can add tools like CRM. 

Close

Close is a great CRM for telesales teams. It’s very strong on calling features. Global outbound calling is in every subscription. This includes automatic call logging, pre-recorded voicemail, and predictive dialing. On higher plans, you get call recordings, too.

These are the kind of tools all telesales teams are familiar with. But in most cases, you’d expect to run a dedicated call center system with a CRM plugged into it. The fact that Close offers both together simplifies things. It’s great for small to medium-sized sales teams looking for extra convenience.

Pricing starts at $29 a month, or $25 if you pay annually. For that price, you get 3 users, 2500 leads, and 4000 contacts with email and marketing automation.

There is no free plan. But you can try the service for free for 14 days. Close doesn’t have a full mobile app, just a call tracker that transfers mobile call data to the main system. You can connect third-party services through Zapier.

Dialpad

Dialpad isn’t a CRM in the traditional sense. It’s a business communications platform combining voice, messaging, and meetings. It’s the sort of platform you might want to connect your CRM to so you can make full use of all your contact data.

But Dialpad also offers what it calls customer engagement tools. It has products for customer support, omnichannel engagement, and sales.

Again, Dialpad Sell isn’t exactly a complete sales CRM. In fact, you are encouraged to connect it to your existing CRM. It has integrations available for Salesforce, Hubspot, Kustomer, Zoho CRM, and more.

Dialpad provides a suite of AI-powered tools designed to add value to your CRM processes. This includes targeted prompts, scripts, sentiment analysis, and objection handling. So as a sales agent is speaking with a customer, Dialpad tracks the customer’s level of satisfaction. It will make recommendations for what to say next to increase the chances of conversions. It will make recommendations for upselling and cross-selling, all in real-time.

It automatically produces call transcripts and summaries. Follow-up action points are sent directly to the right agent’s inbox. It provides specialist support for setting up remote teams of agents.

Dialpad starts at $15 a month if you pay annually or $20 if you pay monthly. This includes Google Workspace & Microsoft 365 integrations. But you have to move to a higher tier to get CRM integrations, starting at $25 a month. There’s a 14-day free trial but no free tier.

Marketing CRMs

Marketing and sales can be seen as two halves of the same process. Sales is all about converting leads into paying customers. But marketing is about coming up with the leads in the first place.

Marketing CRMs are all about identifying the right marketing activity for the right person at the right time. Key features to look out for in marketing CRMs include:

• Data analytics: Marketing CRM starts with understanding your audiences. Analytics does that by tracking behavior across channels. It tracks responses to marketing campaigns and draws on sales data. These insights help you sort successful marketing strategies from duds.

• Segmentation: Segmentation means grouping your audiences by demographics and behavior. This turns data-led insights about leads and customers into personalized content and campaigns. Better targeting also means more efficient use of marketing resources.

• Email marketing: Digital marketing covers many different areas. All-in-one marketing CRMs support ad campaigns, SEO, social, content marketing, and more. But the best fit for CRM is email marketing. Email addresses are the default contact information and are easy to gather. Broadcast email campaigns mean you can reach large groups at once. Or with automation tools, you can set up automated workflows to send messages one by one based on contact actions. Easy-to-use visual email editors mean you can create attractive branded emails quickly.

• Marketing automation: Sending personalized campaigns to thousands of contacts is heavy work. Marketing automation does the heavy lifting for you. Automation tools in a marketing CRM let you set rules based on what your contacts do. Using tracking data, you can trigger targeted and timely messages.

• Lead generation: Growing your audience is an important part of marketing. More leads mean more opportunities for you to convert into customers. Lead generation revolves around asking people to sign up for something. In return for their email address, you give contacts something valuable. This can be things like a newsletter, a free ebook, a webinar, a special offer, or a t-shirt. Creating a good-looking eBook is much easier with great eBook creation software.

• Landing pages: You don’t always want leads clicking through to your home page from a campaign. It’s much better to set up dedicated pages for special offers. It shortens the path to purchase. That’s why marketing CRMs should offer landing page builders. As with email design, most will offer user-friendly drag-and-drop editors. That means anyone can build a page. You won’t need to ask or hire developers every time.

• A/B testing: Finally, the best marketing CRMs will also let you test your campaigns. Seeing how small samples of contacts respond lets you refine your approach. This stops you from wasting time and money on campaigns that don’t work. A/B testing works by comparing how different versions of the same campaign perform.

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Keap was founded way back in 2001 as Infusionsoft. It was part of the original wave of SaaS sales automation platforms. Known as Keap since 2019, the service still offers sales tools. But these days it leans more heavily towards marketing functionality.

Keap has excellent marketing automation tools. Its automation workflow builder is very user-friendly and accessible to novice users. Easily automate lead capture and trigger follow-ups the moment someone signs up. You can also use CRM tracking data to score prospects and personalize responses.

Keap also includes comprehensive email and SMS marketing options. You get templates and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. Emails and texts can be scheduled into advanced, multi-channel, automated campaigns. Behavior-based tagging and segmentation further enhance the personalization.

You can get even more out of Keap by connecting to hundreds of other third-party platforms. Some integrations are paid. There is also a mobile app that provides a business phone line, SMS, and email account from your smartphone.

Keap starts at $169 a month for the Pro plan. That includes 2 users and 1500 contacts. You get CRM, email marketing, payments, invoicing, landing pages, sales pipelines automated lead capture, the mobile app, and more.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is best known as an email marketing automation software. But it describes itself as a ‘customer experience automation’ platform. Like Keap, it has tools for sales and service. But its marketing features are what really stand out.

ActiveCampaign is a great platform for more advanced marketers. Its automation tools are a cut above. It offers advanced automations for sales, marketing, and CRM functions. There’s a powerful visual editor that lets you create these advanced workflows. There are hundreds of automation ‘recipes’ to give you a head start. And you can map out how all your automations fit together visually.

It connects to more than 100 external platforms. Big ones include eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, and BigCommerce. This lets you pull customer data from your store into your CRM. You can also build promotional emails and landing pages with product listings. And track sales data to check the impact of your campaigns.

ActiveCampaign offers scalable pricing. The Starter plan starts at $15 a month if paid annually, which gives you email marketing & marketing automation, site tracking, 10,000 email sends, and campaign report for 1 user. CRM and sales engagement automation are available on Plus, starting at $49 a month. This plan comes with a mobile CRM app. There is a 14-day free trial available.

Read the full ActiveCampaign review, the full pricing guide, or visit their website.

Engagebay

Engagebay is another all-in-one CRM platform that’s strong on marketing. Engagebay stands out for the simplicity and user-friendly nature of its marketing tools.

Engagebay’s ‘Marketing Bay’ product covers all the bases. It offers email marketing and drip campaigns with ready-to-roll templates. You can build landing pages and sign-up forms for lead capture. User-friendly drag-and-drop editors make it easy to get started.

Engagebay also offers features you don’t always find on rival marketing platforms. There are dedicated tools for managing and monitoring inbound and content marketing campaigns. You can create on-site messages to greet visitors to your website. Or send out push notifications to mobile. You can also run high volume SMS campaigns.

In short, Engagebay puts an impressive range of marketing tools at your fingertips. You can throw in sales and service CRM features with automation, too. That all adds up to an impressive package ideal for small businesses. You can push what Engagebay can do further still with third-party integrations. There are 15 integrations available include Zapier, which opens the door to over 4000 other platforms.

Engagebay offers a free forever plan with 500 contacts, email marketing, autoresponders, landing pages, CRM, and live chat. Paid plans for Marketing Bay as a standalone product start at $12.99 per user per month. But you can get the full Engagebay suite for just $14.99 a month. There is a 20% discount for paying two years in advance. We have a special deal that makes Engagebay even more affordable. Get 20% off any Engagebay plan if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

Brevo

Brevo is another full marketing and sales suite. Its biggest selling points are email marketing and marketing automation. But it offers a lot more. Including automated high volume transactional emails and social ad campaigns.

And yes, CRM is part of the mix. Brevo’s CRM features lean toward the marketing side. They cover the full range of tools from lead generation to selling.

Brevo has a broad appeal, from small businesses all the way up to large enterprises. It is built with ease of use in mind even for new users. Uploading, creating, and editing contact lists is easy. Segmentation options are powerful but straightforward and link directly into marketing automation. There’s a visual drag-and-drop automation workflow builder that takes no time at all to get to grips with.

Brevo offers around 60 third-party integrations. These lean towards eCommerce platforms and content management systems. But you can also connect to other CRMs, too. This is great if you want more sales and service tools for more of an all-in-one experience.

Another thing Brevo is well known for is its free forever plan. This lets you build and send 300 emails/day and store up to 100,000 contacts. It includes list segmentation and CRM tools. Marketing automation is limited to 2,000 contacts until you pay for the Business plan, starting at $18 a month. We have a sweet deal just for our readers. Get 10% off any yearly Brevo plan if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review, learn more about Brevo pricing, or visit their website.  

HubSpot

Since its launch in 2006, Hubspot has become a major name in digital marketing. It is considered a pioneer in the field of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is about encouraging customers to come to you with educational content. If customers make the first move, they are much more likely to convert into paying customers. To do this well, you need to know your customers inside out to know what to offer them. Hence the connection between inbound marketing and CRM.

Hubspot offers a full business platform with tools for marketing, sales, service, content management, and operations. But it’s best known for its marketing CRM. It offers a bigger set of marketing tools than most rival services. All the standards like email marketing, marketing automation, and lead generation are there. But on top of those, you get tools for blogging and content creation, SEO, social media marketing, and more.

It also pulls in data from across your business to give you a complete picture. This covers sales, customer service, and your website as well as marketing. And it breaks everything down into detailed conversion analysis.

There is a free version with email marketing, ad management, forms, live chat, and reporting. Both the Free and Starter plans focus on lead generation, contact management, and basic content creation. 

Hubspot pricing for the full bundle starts at $45 a month billed annually for up to 1,000 contacts. This gives you what is described as a ‘starter’ CRM package. For the more advanced marketing tools, you have to sign up for the Professional plan starting at $1600 a month. It’s here that Hubspot comes into its own as a CRM platform for larger businesses.

Learn more about Hubspot pricing or visit their website.

Freshmarketer

Freshworks is another all-in-one business software suite. It has tools for marketing, sales, service, IT service management, and HR. Freshmarketer is its marketing CRM product.

Freshworks specializes in offering stacks of features at affordable prices. Like the rest of its product suite, Freshmarketer is easy-to-use. The tools are designed to help growing businesses get the most from their CRM. This includes pre-built industry-specific ‘playbooks’ for creating marketing campaigns. And a drag-and-drop Journey Builder for customizing them.

Freshmarketer is great for engaging with customers across different channels. It integrates email marketing, chatbots, SMS, and WhatsApp messaging in one place. On higher-tier plans, you can also add webhooks and events marketing.

There is a Shopify integration that unlocks extra features for digital stores. This includes an extra 10,000 contacts on every plan, customer segmentation, and custom playbooks.

The free version offers email marketing and contact management tools for 100 contacts. Pricing starts at $19 a month if you pay annually. There is a 21-day free trial that has all the features. The number of contacts and chatbot sessions allowed is limited on each plan, but you can buy add-ons at any time.

Service CRMs

All successful businesses know that customer relationship management doesn’t end at the point of sale. If your goal is to build a strong base of loyal customers, you could say that’s just the start.

Keeping hold of customers makes sound business sense. You have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, versus a 5% to 20% chance with a new prospect. Existing customers are also 31% more likely to have a higher average order value.

How do you keep customers coming back for more? Quality of service makes all the difference. Marketing and sales CRMs focus on generating and nurturing leads. Service CRMs are all about customer satisfaction.

Service CRMs provide tools to make service and support quick and efficient. They help to deliver consistent service across all touchpoints.

Key features to look for in a service CRM system include:

• Omnichannel communications: Modern customers use lots of different methods of communication. Phone, email, SMS/messaging apps, live chat, social media, and video. Great service starts with offering customers support on the channels they prefer. That makes it important for service CRMs to manage multiple channels.

• Ticketing: Integrated ticketing means every support request is processed in the same place. No matter which touchpoint is used, all queries are treated the same. This improves consistency and helps make workflows more efficient.

• Real-time data sharing: Modern customers don’t like being put on hold while an agent looks up what their query is about. Or having to repeat themselves over and over again. Real-time data sharing means agents have all relevant information available. When a customer gets in touch, the agent can see the ticket or customer history straight away. This speeds up service even when queries are passed between teams.

• Workflow automation: Customers complain when they get bounced around agents and teams. Not knowing who the right person is to deal with a query isn’t a great look for any business. Service CRM workflow automation sends queries to the right place at the first point of contact.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is the service CRM from the SaaS software suite Freshworks. It’s designed to make customer service simple for growing businesses and small help desk teams.

Collaboration and automation tools make ticket and task management smooth. This includes ‘collision detection’, a tool that highlights when another agent is already dealing with a ticket. You can set and manage your own SLAs with time and completion tracking. There is also a suite for creating your own self-service knowledge base.

Freshworks has an app marketplace with over 1000 integrations. These include workflow automation tools,  social ticketing, eCommerce platforms, survey tools, video plug-ins, and more.

There’s a free version for up to 10 agents with email and social ticketing, knowledge base, and reporting. Freshdesk comes in two paid tiers: Support Desk and Omnichannel. 

Support Desk starts at $15 per agent a month when you pay for a full year. It has everything in free plus automation, collision detection, integration, SLAs, and more.

The Omnichannel platform starts at $29 per agent per month, billed annually. This is for businesses that want to give customers more choices to contact the helpdesk. On the cheapest tier, it has live chat and telephone. WhatsApp Business and Apple Business Chat are available on higher tiers. Performance analytics pulls in data from all channels in real time. On higher plans, you can also automate workloads across channels.

Agile CRM

Agile CRM is a complete CRM software platform. It includes customer service tools on all its plans. It’s affordably priced and the service tools are some of the best available.

At the core is Agile’s excellent helpdesk software. Automated workflows help to assign tickets to the right people first time. You can group tickets into categories to forward to the most qualified person. This speeds up first response and resolution times.

Canned responses send automated replies so customers don’t feel like they are waiting. Smart recommendations also tell agents the best course of action.

Agile CRM lets you run your helpdesk via email, live chat or telephone. There are 50+ integrations available including eCommerce, social media, and email marketing platforms.

There is a free forever plan which gives you access to all the basic service, sales, and marketing tools. As this lets you have up to 10 users, it means you can start running a helpdesk for your micro business for no cost at all. With prices starting at $8.99 a month, Agile CRM is a cost-effective option for small businesses. 

Zendesk

Zendesk is a true customer service specialist. For other vendors, the service CRM is part of a bigger offer. But Zendesk’s flagship software is a customer service platform.

Zendesk is feature-rich with flexible plans suitable for businesses big and small. Its core tools include a multi-channel ticketing system. Tickets can be created and responded to via email, telephone, SMS, and live chat. Automated workflows assign and manage tickets while AI tools give customers instant answers. Zendesk will even scan social media to create tickets from customer posts.

Zendesk manages everything in a single workspace. Progress and outcome analytics are readily visible. On higher plans, you can customize your own metrics.

Zendesk lets you build a knowledge base on all plans. AI bots use these resources to prompt agents as they deal with customer queries. On higher tiers, you can create separate branded helpdesk portals. Several helpdesks can be built on the same account with multilingual support.

There’s a 30-day free trial and if you are a start-up, you can apply to get Zendesk free for six months. The Zendesk for Service Suite starts at $49 per agent per month billed annually. There is also a more basic Support package that starts at $19. This includes basic ticketing with pre-made rule-based workflows and a customer history database.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the original open-source CRM and Sugar Serve is its service CRM. It’s aimed at growing businesses that want to make customer service more efficient.

In SugarCRM, the focus is on building and managing high quality self-service resources. It includes tools that automatically deflect customer queries to the knowledgebase. The more customers help themselves, the more efficiently your service teams can operate.

If a query can’t be resolved using the knowledge base, Sugar Serve uses smart routing tools to get it to the right person. Sentiment analysis ‘takes the customer’s temperature’ to judge when to prioritize or escalate.

All customer information is available to agents via visual dashboards. There are real-time performance updates so you can always see if you are hitting your SLAs. SugarCRM will also identify and track common issues to help with early intervention.

Pricing for Sugar Serve starts at $80 per user per month. You have to have at least three users, which means the cheapest you can pay is $240. There isn’t a free trial or a free version, but you can get a demo.

Small Business CRMs

The market for customer relationship management software was once dominated by large enterprises. That was partly because of the size and complexity of many legacy CRM platforms. They were expensive to build, expensive to buy, and required a skilled IT team to run.

The explosion in cloud-based CRM has changed everything. The SaaS model has seen the price of CRMs decline steadily over the years. Remote hosting takes away the technical complexity.

That has opened the door for dozens of small business CRMs to enter the market.

As an SMB owner, you want a reliable all-in-one platform that covers all bases. You want a CRM that is affordable and user-friendly.

Key things that define the best SMB-friendly CRMs include:

• User-friendly interface: Small business owners have to be experts in time and resource management. Can you afford spending hours training your staff to use a new piece of business software? Small business CRMs pay a lot of attention to design and navigation. They use visual interfaces built to help even complete beginners get up to speed quickly.

• Strong customer support: When you don’t have your own in-house IT team, you rely on the quality of support from the vendor. Most CRMs for small businesses have well-stocked knowledge bases with articles and videos. They are easy to search and the guides are easy to digest. Many back this up with well-trained support teams. They focus on offering rapid turnaround on queries via phone, email or live chat.

• Integrations: Small businesses have most to gain from app integration marketplaces. Large enterprises can afford big pieces of software packed full of features. Small, agile, cloud-based platforms suit the budgets of small businesses better. But where the real value comes is when all these different services work together. The best small business CRMs offer simple integrations with apps you already use.

BenchmarkONE

BenchmarkONE is one of the best CRM platforms for small businesses. It’s all-in-one, super easy to use and has tools for all stages of the customer journey.

BenchmarkONE is a great platform if you want to convert more web visitors into paying customers. It combines marketing and sales automation in a single user-friendly platform. You can turn web visitors into leads with forms and landing pages. You can segment your contacts to send targeted email campaigns. You can use deal pipelines to track sales performance.

Everything is as straightforward as you could want it and everything is easy to learn.

BenchmarkONE has a free version with 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. It includes contact management, email marketing, landing pages, marketing automation, and a full CRM. Pricing starts at $29 per month for 500 contacts and 2500 emails for the Lite plan. This plan has contact management, email marketing, automation, and landing pages. The Pro Package with the full CRM starts at $179 per month. We have a sweet BenchmarkONE deal just for our readers. Get 50% off your first month or sign up for a year and get an additional 10% off your annual plan + 1 month for free if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

Engagebay

Engagebay’s big sell as a full CRM platform for small businesses is its range of features. With loads of marketing, sales, and service tools, it’s an ideal one-stop tool.

You get a full range of marketing features including lead generation, email broadcasts, and automated campaigns. Connect marketing to your sales pipelines for advanced automation. Their contact and lead management tools give you easily digestible data about contacts and contact groups. Lead scoring lets you focus on your best prospects.

For support teams, you can automate ticket handling and get in-depth reports on service performance. Engagebay also has live chat which is great for support and sales teams. You can connect Engagebay to 30 apps, including Shopify, Thinkific, and Zapier.

There is a free tier that gives you access to basic marketing, sales, and service tools for 500 contacts. Pricing starts at $11.99 a month if you pay for 2 years. And it’s still only $14.99 per month if you want to pay monthly, which is still a great deal for marketing, sales, and service tools. We have a special deal to make Engagebay even more affordable. Get 20% off any Engagebay plan if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

Pipedrive

Pipedrive ticks all the boxes for a small business CRM. It’s quick and simple to set up and use but still packs a punch. It’s affordable. It’s scalable. And although it’s positioned mainly as a sales CRM, it has everything you need for an all-in-one platform.

You get the basics of lead, deal, calendar and pipeline management.  As your needs evolve, you can add email marketing and sales automations. There is a mobile app available for iOS and Android, so teams can keep working on the move. The app includes call tracking, caller ID, search, and an organiser tool.

Another benefit for small businesses is the number of integrations. There are over 300 in total. You can extend Pipedrive’s functionality using your existing tools even on the cheapest plans.

Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free tier but there is a 14-day free trial with full access to all features. Prices start at $14 per user per month with an annual subscription for lead, deal, calendar and pipeline management. Higher tiers offer voice integration, contract management, revenue projections and forecasts. They also have add-ons for live chat, smart docs, and identifying website visitors.

Thryv

Thryv is a great option for small businesses that want all their software in one place. Its range of products covers communications, financial software, and marketing.

Thryv’s CRM features are part of its Business Center product. This includes payment and invoicing tools, plus email, SMS and social media marketing.

The CRM provides a bridge between marketing and sales. Information from every customer interaction can be automatically imported into a shared space. This way team members get shared access to up-to-the minute details.

Every customer record can be fully customized to focus on the data that matters most to your business. You can apply tags and filters to make finding the right records easy.

Simplicity is Thryv’s biggest strength as a CRM. It’s very easy to use. And it focuses on the fundamentals of customer data management. This is particularly useful for how it feeds into marketing campaigns. For example, Thryv automatically logs responses to social posts. You can then easily follow up with SMS or email blasts.

Other useful tools include a customer portal feature. This provides self-service options for things like payments or appointments on a company website. Another standout is Thryv’s mobile app. This gives you access to all the features on the move.

Thryv’s Business Center starts at $199 a month per location. It’s therefore better value the more team members you have.

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Keap is a great CRM for small businesses who don’t mind spending extra for advanced features.

Compared to other all-in-one CRMs aimed at small businesses, Keap serves the needs of a wider type of user. It has great marketing, sales and service features with tons of automation options. You can run invoicing and payments from within the platform, making it a great option for B2B. You can quickly generate automated quotes and manage your appointments.

Depending on which country you are in, you can access all features on the move with a mobile app. In the US and Canada, you also get a business phone line and text messaging included. Check out our review of the best CRMs in Canada.

Keap’s pricing starts at $129 for 2 users and 1500 contacts with CRM, email marketing, payments, appointments, landing pages, sales pipelines, text marketing and a lot more. It doesn’t have a free version but you can try it free for 14 days.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a small business CRM that’s cheap, easy to use and full of features.

Freshsales combines email, voice, chatbot and WhatsApp as channels in a single platform. AI-powered contact scoring identifies your strongest leads. On higher plans, similar predictive AI tools tell you how likely a deal is to close, and what the next-best action is.

Visual sales pipelines let you plot and manage customer journeys in a range of views. Automated sales sequences help ensure you never miss an opportunity.

Freshsales Suite also lets you build marketing campaigns across channels. Both products are supported by the Freshsales mobile app. This lets you make and log calls on the move, send emails and messages, and view data in real time.

Both Freshsales and Freshsales Suite start at £12 per user per month and have a completely free tier.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the biggest brands in CRM software. It’s well known for having some of the most advanced tools for large businesses. But it isn’t just about enterprise CRM. Hubspot offers very attractive packages for small business users, too.

There are dedicated products (called Hubs) for marketing, sales, customer service and operations. Or you can choose the all-in-one Hubspot CRM bundle. Or you can piece together your own custom bundle. This helps you get the right tools you need for your business to grow, without paying for things you don’t need. 

HubSpot CRM helps teams manage workflows across marketing, sales and service. All data is updated and stored in the same place, and you can assign tasks centrally across teams. It comes with multichannel communications including email marketing, live chat and Facebook Messenger. There’s marketing and sales automation, plus pipelines and ticketing.

All Starter packages for small businesses start at $45 a month. For the Marketing Hub, you get unlimited users on the same account. For the Sales and Service Hubs, and the CRM bundle, you get two users for this price. There is also a Free tier with basic versions of the marketing, sales and service CRM tools included.

All Starter packages include the Hubspot mobile app. And you can connect your account to thousands of other software platforms via Zapier.

Check out our full Hubspot review or visit their website.

Gmail CRMs for a more efficient inbox

Email is the perfect partner for customer relationship management. A quality CRM system should include email as a tried and tested way of reaching customers. Email is perfect for bulk broadcasts. It’s also easy to automate and personalise.

But what if you could add CRM features to your existing email platform?

Gmail isn’t only the world’s largest email service. It’s also now the world’s largest business email client. It has more than five million paying subscribers. As a result, CRMs that plug straight into Gmail accounts are in demand.

Adding a CRM to Gmail means you get improved contact management tools for your Google contacts list. You already use G Suite tools day in, day out, so the CRM just feels like an extension of those. You and your team will be up and running using the CRM features in no time.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the world’s most popular all-in-one CRM platforms. With their Chrome extension, you can access many of its best tools from your Gmail inbox.

The Google sidebar plugin fully integrates your email account with CRM. You can set up automated email sequences in Gmail, track responses and update contact records.

Email templates make it easier to create attractive emails to encourage more responses. The HubSpot plugin means you can personalise emails automatically. The extension is also available on mobile via the Hubspot CRM app.

Check out our full Hubspot review or visit their website.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive offers an email marketing platform and puts email right at the heart of its CRM. This includes a purpose built inbox with special CRM tools. You get email templates, personalization, simple group emails and tracking.

Alternatively, you can connect Pipedrive to your G Suite with a Chrome extension. That puts all the Pipedrive CRM tools inside your Gmail. Pipedrive enhances the familiar Gmail experience with simple scheduling and automated follow ups. You can send mass emails and track who has opened and responded to your messages.

Plus, Pipedrive’s Smart Docs add-on improves Google Sheets and Google Slides. It has extra templates and auto-populates documents with CRM data. Your can also share documents with customers using tracking links.

Zoho CRM

Zoho is a huge cloud-based office suite with products in 12 different categories. These include sales and CRM tools, marketing software, communications, collaboration, productivity and more.

Zoho CRM ranks as one of the most feature-rich CRM systems available. And it has a G-Suite integration. You can link all Google Workstation apps. If you already use G-Suite in your business is that you can simply add Zoho CRM features. For Gmail, you get the benefit of Zoho’s intelligent automation tools with automatic contact record updates and sentiment analysis.

There’s a free trial on all plans and a free forever tier. Pricing starts at €14 per user per month if you pay for a full year up front. But the free plan doesn’t include any integrations.

NetHunt

NetHunt goes a step further than most CRM Gmail integrations. Its whole purpose is to work inside Gmail. Without Gmail, it doesn’t function at all (if you ignore the fact that there’s a version for LinkedIn, anyway).

NetHunt is the purest form of Gmail CRM. It’s for people who want to add CRM features to their Gmail and nothing else. It’s great for small businesses and solopreneurs who use Google Workspace.

Once up and running, NetHunt’s tools appear as a new menu to the left of the Gmail window. Features are simple and straightforward. They cover customer and lead management, sales pipelines, team collaboration and analytics. Plus, emails with basic automated sequences.

There is a mobile app for Android and iOS that adds CRM to Gmail on your phone. Prices start at $24 a month per user billed annually. Try out Nethunt

Mobile CRMs for selling on-the-go

Mobile now accounts for more than half of global web traffic. So it’s no surprise that business software is going mobile too.

Mobile CRM simply means a CRM system designed to work on a smartphone or tablet. It might be an app built for the Android or iOS operating systems. Or it might be a web app optimized for mobile.

The power of mobile CRM is it lets you take marketing, sales, and service anywhere. People can follow up on leads and sales opportunities at any moment. Mobile puts business data at your people’s fingertips anytime, any place. And it increases opportunities to collaborate over distance.

For Mobile CRMs, design and navigation are important to guarantee ease of use. Data security is a big concern with mobile CRM, especially if you ever connect to public WiFi.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s mobile apps for Android and iOS give you access to a full suite of tools. Key features include full contact management with sales and marketing tracking. That lets you keep tabs on leads wherever you are. A mobile inbox makes it easy to keep on top of tasks and collaborate with colleagues. A clever feature is the ability to add voice notes to contacts and tasks so you don’t have to stop and type.

A special ‘Hubspot keyboard’ feature means you can send sales assets from any communication or social app you use. It also comes with call logging tools. Any phone calls made to customers or prospects on your mobile get recorded directly in your CRM.

Check Hubspot alternatives or visit their website.

Monday.com

Monday.com doesn’t pull any punches with its mobile app. This isn’t a watered-down version of the main thing. Monday’s mobile app offers full functionality.

Monday lets you build and customize digital workspaces called boards. These let you run a huge range of functions across teams. Under the CRM umbrella, you can create boards for sales pipelines, data tracking, and analytics.

All these functions are available on mobile. All that is different from the desktop app is the way you navigate and use boards. The main thing missing is that you can’t create automations on mobile. Even without that, Monday.com is still one of the most full-featured sales CRMs for mobile.

Haystack

Most mobile CRMs are iOS and Android app versions of a full CRM product. But Haystack is a mobile-first CRM. It’s designed as a mobile app with a web version you can access from any browser.

Haystack targets entrepreneurs who use smartphones as their digital device of choice. It’s ideal for anyone whose business is built around getting out and about meeting people.

The layouts are clean, and the navigation is intuitive. The core features focus on contact and team management and tracking sales opportunities. You can create quotes and proposals, and connect any email account for easy messaging. Or link a Mailchimp account to run mass email campaigns.

There is a free tier for single users and a 30-day free trial. Pricing starts at $29 per user a month. 

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Keap also has mobile apps for iOS and Android that sync to the main cloud-based CRM. This means you can access up-to-date data from marketing, sales, and service operations anywhere you go.

The Keap app doesn’t give you full access to all desktop tools. But you can create, manage, tag, and add notes to your contacts. Or create and send emails at any time. Templates are available for simple visual design on the go. You can also send out invoices.

The Keap app is currently only available in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the US and Canada, it also includes a mobile business number and call plan.

Zoho

Zoho has one of the most highly rated CRM apps on the market. Available for iOS and Android, the Zoho CRM app has extra touches designed especially for smartphones.

You can see all the latest pipelines, sales metrics, tasks, and team schedules wherever you are. You can call customers and clients from within the app. A personal assistant AI helps log call details, change deal status, record outcomes, and tag clients. You can even record voice notes that will automatically convert to text for colleagues to see.

The Zoho CRM app lets you view data and act even when offline. It comes with handy scheduling tools so you can plan your day on the move. These include clever mapping features so you can plan the best route to your next meeting. Or even look up nearby clients to arrange meetings on the go.

Free or cheap CRMs

CRM platforms that offer free trials or versions appeal for lots of different reasons. A free trial lets you ‘try before you buy’. Meaning you don’t have to commit to paying until you are sure it’s the right CRM system for you.

Free tiers go a step further. Often called ‘free forever’ plans, they mean you can use CRM for no charge at all, for as long as you like. This is great for start-ups and microbusinesses, or anyone looking to control costs.

Free trials of CRM software should give you access to all features for a limited period of time. Free and very cheap plans will typically let you use a limited number of features.

Engagebay

Engagebay offers a free forever plan that allows up to 500 contacts. It’s perfect for dipping your toes into CRM for the first time. It includes email marketing, lead and contact management and simple automations. You can connect to Gmail, Outlook or Office 365. And track your contacts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can also add live chat to your website and manage your service tickets from the same platform.

For entry-level pricing, Engagebay is one of the best value CRMs out there. For $14.99 per user per month, its Basic plan gives you access to an impressive range of marketing, sales and service tools. There is a 10% discount for paying a year in advance, or 20% for paying two years upfront. So the cheapest deal for the all-in-one suite is $11.99 per user per month. You can also pay less to get the marketing, sales or service CRM products separately.

Engagebay is both affordable and highly scalable. From starting out at no cost at all, you can build your CRM capabilities as your business grows. And at every stage you can have confidence that it will be very cost effective. We have a sweet deal to make Engagebay even more affordable. Get 20% off any Engagebay plan if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

HubSpot

HubSpot’s free forever plan is one of the best ways to get started with CRM without having to pay. The list of CRM features you get for free is impressive. You get contact management, lead generation, emails, deal pipelines, ticketing and support.

Some of the most impressive features for a free CRM is website tracking. This means you can gather data about what your contacts are doing on your website. This helps you understand the prospects and companies you are dealing with. Plus you can track and manage all activities and tasks across your teams.

There are direct integrations with Gmail and Outlook to run your CRM system from your email account. Plus you can connect to other third-party platforms via the Hubspot App Marketplace.

Check Hubspot alternatives or visit their website.

BenchmarkONE

If you’re looking to get started with CRM for free, BenchmarkONE is an excellent option. If you have less than 250 contacts, you get access to the full list of Pro tier features.

That includes a full sales CRM, deal pipelines, Gmail integration and use of the mobile app. You also get a full suite of email marketing and marketing automation tools.

BenchmarkONE is also famously easy to use. 250 contacts is not many. But if you’re a business start-up, the pro features are a great way to grow your business quickly. We have a sweet BenchmarkONE deal for you when you’re ready to upgrade. Get 50% off your first month or sign up for a year and get an additional 10% off your annual plan + 1 month for free if you sign up via this link.

Read the full review or visit their website.  

Freshsales

Freshsales’ free forever tier has simple contact management with multichannel communication. You can organise your contacts using customizable Lifecycle Stage templates. You can set these up to provide suggestions about how to move prospects to the next stage in the pipeline. This gives a taste of the AI-powered next best action prompts if you decide to buy full access.

The Freshsales free plan comes with integrated email, live chat and telephone. As well as a free forever plan, Freshsales also offers a 21-day free trial of all its sales and marketing tools.

Insightly

Insightly offers an affordable CRM for small businesses. It focuses on core sales automation like lead capture and management with some basic marketing features. You can respond to opportunities with automated and mass emails.

Some of its best features are its customer relationship analytics. These dig deep into customer journeys and feed into tagging, lead scoring and opportunities management. There are also project management tools.

Insightly pricing starts at $29 a month per user. There is also a free tier for up to two users. This ‘no frills’ tier gives small teams contact management, sales and project tools. It’s an excellent way for start-ups to track early customer journeys.

There are mobile apps for iOS and Android with full access to all features. You can also choose between full Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 integrations. Or more basic add-ons for Gmail and Outlook.

Apptivo

Apptivo positions itself as an app suite for businesses. It offers app bundles for a wide variety of purposes, CRM included. There are also tools for email marketing, invoicing, ecommerce and more.

Apptivo approaches pricing a little differently. It bases its plans on how many apps you get, plus the number of workflows you create between apps. What is consistent across all tiers is that they are attractively priced. Starting with a free forever tier that gives you 8 apps.

On the CRM side, the free tier covers basic contact management. A contact database, customer history, filters, tasks and reminders. But starting at $8 per user per month, you get extra sales tracking apps like opportunity management, sales pipelines, email integration and tracking. For $12 per user per month, you get email marketing campaigns and billing tools.

Frequently Asked Questions

The post What is CRM? Full 2026 Guide: Definition, Types & CRM Software appeared first on Email vendor selection.

What does Constant Contact offer?

Constant Contact is an email marketing platform for small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs. They have been on the market for over 25 years. They have added more and more features. People still buy it mostly for email marketing.

Constant Contact offers you: 

• Email marketing: with email templates, autoresponders and reporting.
• Ecommerce tools: with stores, online payments, transactional emails, and coupons
• A website builder to create your website and landing pages
• Surveys and polls for your questionnaires
• A logo maker and other fun SMB tools

So, Constant Contact has some appeal, but the email marketing provider also has flaws. Read our full Constant Contact review to find out more about its features.

Why do people switch from Constant Contact?

There are several reasons why people choose alternative platforms over Constant Contact. According to user reviews, competitors of Constant Contact perform much better in:

• Pricing Constant Contact is not the cheapest. There’s a lot of affordable email marketing software and even free Constant Contact alternatives.
• Email marketing automation is basic. Constant Contact uses autoresponders. Emails can be triggered by clicked links or sent to non-openers, and that’s pretty much it. There is no if/then logic or automation workflows like competitors have.
• No preview for mobile email, only desktop. Formatting issues come up often in user reviews.
• The templates look dated. Some of the available email templates are quite basic and have dated design. The email editor is fast but doesn’t have a lot of design features.

Let’s look at the alternatives to Constant Contact. Here is a quick overview, followed by full reviews.

9 Best Constant Contact Alternatives

Moosend – Solid ESP with a great email builder.
Campaigner – an affordable Constant Contact alternative with SMS marketing and automation.
MailerLite – A clean and cheapest Constant Contact competitor. Top for just sending newsletters and email marketing.
Benchmark Email – The easy-to-use Constant Contact competitor to send newsletters and automate drip campaigns, give Benchmark Email a try.
ActiveCampaign – Create funnels, send email, CRM included. Marketing automation Muscle.
Brevo – Better automated than Constant Contact with extra features, SMS, and a free plan.
GetResponse – A full package for online marketing with extra features like webinars and automated conversion funnels.
Kit –  Dedicated to bloggers and content creators, straightforward and helpful email platform.
Mailchimp – The popular kid ESP, but less impressive alternative to Constant Contact.

1. Moosend – a solid Constant Contact alternative

Moosend is an up-to-date email marketing platform. It is popular with SMBs, startups, eCommerce stores, SaaS, agencies, and publishers. For eCommerce, there are tools available like cart abandonment and product recommendations.

Their email marketing tool is user-friendly, even if you’re just starting out. They have an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email editor. You can also design your HTML email newsletters from scratch – and then use that as a template in your library.

What you’ll like about Moosend:

• Great value for money, with one of the cheapest prices
• A slick, intuitive interface and a very flexible email editor
• Free newsletter templates,
• A landing page editor with responsive landing page templates
• Triggered emails and email automation workflows in all plans

Some more sophisticated Moosend features:

• Auto-saves your emails while editing 
• AI-driven subject line recommendations
• Ecommerce tools, abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, and shoppable emails

Constant Contact vs. Moosend

Comparing Moosend vs. Constant Contact, Moosend is much cheaper and more flexible. I also found it easier to use. They help with easy list migration from email marketing providers like Mailchimp.

Moosend has more advanced email automation than Constant Contact. It includes an automation designer and a prebuilt workflow library. Triggers for automated emails include signups and dates. Behavioral triggers include opens, clicks, page visits, and purchases. 

You get pre-made, mobile-responsive email templates. Plus, there are landing page templates and a signup form maker to build your email list. 

What I really like is that all the email automation features, tracking, analytics, and more, are included in every plan, including their cheaper plans. This stands out from a lot of other alternatives to Constant Contact.

What does Moosend cost?

Moosend is a much cheaper Constant Contact alternative. Paid plans start at as little as $9 (or $7 with our discount.). You only pay for active subscribers and get unlimited lists.

Moosend has generously offered an extra 10% discount for EVS readers. That is on top of their 20% annual discount. Senders with 100.000 or more contacts also get some extra swag! (Coffee mug or T-Shirt). Register through here.

2. Campaigner – an affordable alternative with SMS and automation

Campaigner is an email marketing tool founded in 1999. It has SMS marketing, landing pages, automation, and AB testing. You also get 24/7 support and fair pricing.

900+ email templates, a drag and drop and an HTML editor make matching emails to your brand easy. The email editor in Campaigner supports personalization and dynamic content.

Create SMS marketing campaigns or add text messages to your automated workflows.

Campaigner has Magento, Surveytown, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Zapier integrations. Zapier lets you connect 5000+ other tools. 

Campaigner is a standout Constant Contact alternative for companies with a website that want to add marketing automation with email and SMS.

What you’ll like about Campaigner:

• 900+ email templates
• SMS campaigns and automation
• Drag and drop and HTML email editors

Some more sophisticated Campaigner features:

• Reputation Defender to maintain a healthy email list
• Marketing automation with conversion tracking
• Segmentation based on contact activity and demographic data

Try Campaigner for free

Constant Contact vs. Campaigner

Campaigner is a more affordable Constant Contact alternative with better automation and support. The Campaigner free trial is twice as long at 30 days. 

The visual workflow builder in Campaigner lets you set up triggers and actions in an automation overview. Tracking conversions and using them as triggers, conditions, and goals is a huge plus.

The Reputation Defender is a nice touch to protect your sender reputation without paying for an external email verification tool.

What does Campaigner cost?

Campaigner pricing starts at $59/month for 5K contacts and 30K emails. This Starter plan has the drag-and-drop editor, 900+ email templates, landing pages, segmentation, and conversion tracking. The Essential plan costs $179/month for 25K contacts and 150K emails. It removes the Campaigner branding, adds dynamic content and ecommerce integrations.

Try Campaigner free for 30 days

3. MailerLite – a clean and cheaper Constant Contact alternative

MailerLite is an email newsletter tool founded in 2010. It has additional features like landing pages, automation, and surveys. MailerLite has a simple, easy-to-use editor. You also get 24/7 support and an amazing price.

The platform is a great go-to tool for businesses starting with email marketing. It has an easy drag-and-drop email editor no coding required. (an HTML editor also available). The editor supports simple personalization and dynamic content.

What you’ll like about MailerLite:

• The free plan includes most of the features, with email marketing, automations, and a free webpage builder.
• The clean and straightforward interface is what most users like. Even marketers who don’t have experience with email marketing.
• The drag-and-drop email builder works smoothly.
• A nice selection of modern-looking, mobile-responsive templates
• Easy-to-build landing pages and websites

Some more sophisticated MailerLite features:

• Promotion popups like countdown timers and customer satisfaction survey popups 
• Auto resend email campaigns to non-openers
• Click maps to track how people interact with your emails
• AI writing assistant to generate headlines, product descriptions, or even full newsletters

Constant Contact vs. MailerLite

MailerLite is a less complicated, more user-friendly, and more affordable Constant Contact alternative. The free plan is a great start for freelancers, bloggers, and solopreneurs, SMB. If you want to send a newsletter, this is a good choice.

MailerLite focuses on email marketing. It includes features and extras like landing pages and surveys to create complete email campaigns.

MailerLite beats it when it comes to email automation. The automation workflow builder is less sophisticated than higher-priced platforms like ActiveCampaign. But it does the job. Triggers include form completion, clicks, field update, date, or cart abandonment. 

What does MailerLite cost?

MailerLite is a cheaper email software than Constant Contact. The forever free plan includes up to 500 subscribers, 12,000 emails a month, and most of the features. You get all the premium features for 30 days for free as well. 
Paid plans start at $10/month for 500 subscribers and unlimited emails.

Mailerlite will give you a 30-day premium features in their trial for EVS readers. You also get a discount of 20% on a yearly account. Register through here.

4. Brevo as a Constant Contact alternative

Brevo calls itself the “complete sales and marketing toolkit”. It’s a platform liked by startups, SMBs, agencies, eCommerce businesses, and NGOs. 

What you’ll like about Brevo:

• A free plan to start
• Easy-to-use email builder with templates and an HTML code editor
• Automation builder with pre-designed templates
• Transactional emails
• A simple CRM system
• Landing page builder with templates

Some more sophisticated Brevo features:

• Free customer service chatbot for your website
• Facebook ads available from your Brevo account
• Send time optimization
• Personalized SMS campaigns

Brevo is one of the Constant Contact competitors that offer a free forever version. Free has a daily limit of 300 emails, but that’s probably enough for all marketers to have a look and start out. There will be a Brevo logo in your emails in the Free and Starter plans.

Constant Contact vs. Brevo

Brevo is more user-friendly than its competitor Constant Contact. It’s better than Constant Contact on email automation. And it’s got transactional emails and text messages you won’t find in Constant Contact, without going for an extra plan.

We did a full Brevo review and it is surprisingly advanced when you look at the price (which we’ll get to in a moment.)

Brevo has strong core email marketing functionality and triggered automation. The platform also includes sales CRM and some extras like SMS marketing, free chat, and retargeting ads. As your email list and business needs grow, it offers more features like landing pages, Facebook ads, and A/B testing.

What does Brevo cost?

Brevo is a very affordable email marketing platform. The free plan comes with 100K contacts. You can send up to 300 emails a day. Unlike most email marketing platforms, the paid plans are based on the number of emails sent a month and start at $9 for 5,000 emails. See full pricing here.

You get a Brevo discount on the annual plan.

5. GetResponse – an all-in-one Constant Contact alternative

GetResponse is another Constant Contact alternative. It’s a platform that has grown from a pure email marketing tool into an online marketing platform. Today, it includes tools like landing pages, automated funnels, and eCommerce integrations. It also offers social ads, marketing automation workflows, and webinars.

What you’ll like about GetResponse:

• Free newsletter, landing page, and form templates.
• A modern email builder with an image editor and free stock photo library
• A complete webinar solution, including registration pages, automated invites, and reminders
• Multiple integrations with other online marketing tools
• Ecommerce tools like online stores and payments, abandoned cart emails, and product recommendations
• Free plan that comes with unlimited newsletters, a website builder and custom domains

Some more sophisticated GetResponse features:

• Automated funnels for product sales, lead generation, and webinar promotion
• Use your video recordings to offer evergreen webinars on-demand
• Create and manage Facebook and Instagram ads, social  social media banners with a mobile app and ready-made templates

You can use those tools together to run webinar campaigns or sell products and services. GetResponse will let you automate your email marketing at a pretty sophisticated level.

Constant Contact vs. GetResponse

At first glance, GetResponse looks like a cheaper and more flexible Constant Contact alternative. Both platforms have been around for a long time. But GetResponse has many tools Constant Contact is lacking. These include funnels, automated workflow builder, and webinars.

Getresponse is an easy platform to use. So it’s suitable both for marketers just starting out, and experts with more experience in email marketing. They released a drag-and-drop email creator some time back, with more design flexibility and a friendlier UI. 

Just like Moosend, GetResponse has more advanced email automation than Constant Contact. The platform offers an automation workflow builder.

The automated funnel builder is what makes GetResponse unique. It lets you build and launch a whole automated sales campaign. The funnels integrate signup forms, landing pages, emails, online payments, and even webinars.

What does GetResponse cost?

GetResponse is a cheaper Constant Contact alternative, especially considering the functionality you get. For that many tools in one, pricing is good and based on the number of contacts and functionality. GetResponse comes with a free plan too. This plan includes unlimited newsletters and access to a website builder. Full pricing here.

Plans for basic users start at $15 a month for 1000 contacts. Enterprise plans include individual support and a dedicated IP address.

6. Kit – the best Constant Contact alternative for creators

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is a Constant Contact competitor dedicated to content creators and Bloggers. It focuses on email marketing. It isn’t super advanced but includes guidance. It’s especially popular with bloggers, course creators, and freelancers.

What you’ll like about Kit:

• Free list migrations from other email marketing tools.
• An easy-to-use email designer with clean formatting and quick content options
• Landing page editor with mobile-responsive templates and an Unsplash photo library integration
• Customizable, GDPR-compliant signup forms you can connect to an automation workflow
• Free Training and guides for creators to set up their business

Some more sophisticated Kit features:

• Automated lead magnet delivery with signup forms, perfect if you’re offering ebooks or other types of content and freebies
• Exit-intent popups to maximize conversions
• RSS feeds to send your readers automated blog digests via email

Constant Contact vs. Kit

Kit definitely targets the most well-defined user group – bloggers and content creators. Kit sends simple emails designed to convert. The options include clickable CTAs and instant images. It is not for larger enterprises or senders with advanced needs. Especially analytics can be improved. 

Having said that, compared to Constant Contact the email automation is more advanced. With their straightforward, easy-to-use email sequence editor. You can build email funnels and customize a contact’s path based on their actions.

And the amazing thing that attracts creators is their step-by-step training to sell and make you a successful creator.

When you look at customer reviews, a lot of them highlight how simple it is to start and helpful support plus online resources available.

What does Kit cost?

Kit now has a free plan with 10,000 subscribers, unlimited landing pages, and unlimited traffic. 

The paid plan starts at $39 a month for 1,000 subscribers. Although they aren’t the cheapest email marketing tool. The plan includes paid newsletters, recurring subscriptions, and lead magnets.

7. ActiveCampaign – email automation platform with a bite

ActiveCampaign is a popular online marketing platform. It goes beyond email marketing capabilities, shining in marketing automation and including CRM tools. It’s a high-powered solution fit for small businesses up to Enterprise.

In fact, ActiveCampaign is often recommended as a platform to start with. It typically takes less time to get it set up and running, even though it does have very advanced features. 

What you’ll like about ActiveCampaign:

• Drag-and-drop email builder with personalization options and dynamic content
• An automation canvas builder and pre-built automations 
• Split testing in emails and automation workflows
• A CRM system with lead scoring and tagging
• Conversations, the live chat tool to capture leads and create contacts right on your website

Some more sophisticated ActiveCampaign features:

• Marketing automation map to track your leads and customers across automations.
• Chrome extension to connect ActiveCampaign to your Gmail account.
• A mobile app letting you manage your CRM data and review your campaigns on the go.

One thing you’ll find in online reviews, is complaints about the “busy” dashboard. Not in our ActiveCampaign review – What a minor thing, log in two times and you’ll know exactly where things are.

Constant Contact vs. ActiveCampaign

Used by more than 100,000 businesses around the world, ActiveCampaign is famous for its (pre-built) automation campaigns. You can personalize the content and segment audiences.

ActiveCampaign also has its own deals / CRM system. Its strongest compared to Constant Contact is the automation. AC offers a lot more options to grow and scale.

Active Campaign marketing automation is way more advanced than Constant Contact autoresponders. The ActiveCampaign platform includes site and event tracking and customer attribution. The visual automation builder has a map that lets you see all automations in a single view. 

ActiveCampaign has a bunch of useful features that span the entire customer journey. It includes subscription forms, email segmentation, predictive sending, and deal recommendations. For instance, is great automation when you publish online courses. 

What does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign is affordable for what you get. The Starter plan starts from $15/month for 1000 contacts with email marketing & marketing automation, site tracking, email sending, and campaign reports. There are no setup costs and you get a 20% discount if you pay yearly. You can see the full pricing here.

The platform gives you a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

The enterprise plan is the largest plan for 5 users. It includes additional features like a dedicated account rep and custom mailserver domain, and unlimited email design testing.

8. Mailchimp vs Constant Contact

Mailchimp is one of the most established ESPs. Founded in 2001, Mailchimp became so popular it sprouted many Mailchimp alternatives itself.

Apart from email marketing, the platform includes domains, websites, and landing pages. It also offers digital ads and some light automation.

Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp compared

Constant Contact versus Mailchimp can go toe to toe. But there are still many even more interesting ESPs in this review alone. Moosend, MailerLite, and Brevo could be the smarter (and cheaper) choice. 

If we are going to compare, Mailchimp is a Constant Contact alternative that’s more intuitive to use. It also has more modern email templates design. 

MailChimp offers a free plan for businesses that have a list of up to 500 contacts, but then after it gets more pricey quickly. 

A drawback is the customer support. Constant Contact has phone support that Mailchimp is lacking. Plus the free Mailchimp plan only gets 30 days of email support. The user is then left to their own resources.

Check out our full Mailchimp review for more details.

9. Benchmark Email – an intuitive Constant Contact competitor

Benchmark Email is an email marketing software founded in 2004. It has landing pages, automation, over 1500 integrations, and an easy-to-use email editor. You also get 24/7 support in 9 languages.

It’s a great tool for businesses getting started with email marketing. It has everything you need to send newsletters and set up basic email automation. Benchmark Email offers a drag & drop editor, a plain text editor, and a code editor for importing HTML emails.

What you’ll like about Benchmark Email:

• The simple and intuitive interface. Even novice marketers won’t get lost.
• The pre-made cards in the drag-and-drop email builder make it easy to create and customize your email templates.
• A large collection of modern-looking, mobile-responsive templates.
• 1500+ integrations to choose from and the option to create your own integrations
• The free plan includes 500 contacts and 3500 emails per month.

Some more sophisticated Benchmark Email features:

• AB testing for subject lines, copies, CTAs, and delivery times.
• Automation Pro offers 11 automation templates, advanced triggers, and conditions
• Spam check each campaign

Constant Contact vs. Benchmark Email

Benchmark Email is a less complex, more intuitive Constant Contact alternative. The free plan is great if you have a small list, up to 500 contacts. If you want to send more than 3500 emails/month, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Benchmark Email has everything a small business needs to start email marketing. Forms, popups, and landing pages to generate leads. A visual automation builder to set up drip campaigns and automated email sequences.

Benchmark beats Constant Contact when it comes to email templates, campaign creation, and integrations. The templates in Benchmark email are much more up-to-date and creating email campaigns is much easier. Constant Contact has around 350 integrations, while Benchmark has more than 1500.

What does Benchmark Email cost?

Benchmark is more affordable email software than Constant Contact. The forever free plan includes 500 contacts, 3500 emails a month, and most of the features.

Pricing starts at $9.99 for 500 contacts which allows you to schedule emails and has a landing page builder. Price goes up as your contacts increase. See detailed Benchmark Email pricing on their pricing page.

The best Free Constant Contact alternatives

You might be looking for a free email platform like Constant Contact. From the ones in this article, here are the 5 best free Constant Contact alternatives:

• GetResponse has a free forever plan with unlimited emails 
• Brevo has a free plan with a daily limit of 300 emails
• MailerLite’s free plan includes most of the features, including a free website
• Benchmark Email free plan with 500 contacts, 3500 emails per month, and drag-and-drop builder.
• Kit includes 10,000 subscribers in their free plan

From two remaining programs like Constant Contact – they let you sign up for a free trial to test the features.

• GetResponse has a 30-day free trial
• ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial.

What is the best Constant Contact alternative?

In this article, we reviewed 9 Constant Contact alternatives in detail. We’ve mostly looked at the ones that have more advanced automation options and are user-friendly.

There’s of course no such thing as a “best email service provider for everyone”. Each platform is suitable for businesses of different sizes and with different marketing needs.

Constant Contact Alternatives FAQs

The post 9 Best Constant Contact Alternatives 2026 (Tried & Tested) appeared first on Email vendor selection.

Let’s review Magento Commerce, Magento Open source, and everything you need to know about it. Want to sell products and services with your eCommerce store? Read on.

In this article:
What is Magento and what is Magento Commerce?
Magento eCommerce Review
Magento Pricing
Magento Pros and Cons
Magento Agencies and Developers
Magento Webshop Examples and Cases
Magento Alternatives

What is Magento and what is Magento Commerce?

Magento is an eCommerce platform used by companies to sell their products online. It is fit for any size from SMBs to enterprise brands. Research shows Magento covers 20% of all eCommerce shops, making it one of the most popular eCommerce systems.

Magento has everything you need to launch a successful eCommerce store. Core Magento features include a shopping cart system, site builder, product catalog management, and marketing tools.

Magento Open Source vs. Magento Commerce

There are two versions of the Magento platform:

1. Magento Open Source is the free version of Magento, previously called Magento Community.  You can download, customize, and run the platform on your own server or Magento host of choice.
   
   The majority of merchants use Magento Open Source because of the low cost and open nature. For developers, it doesn’t really matter if he develops on Open Source or Commerce. But Commerce has more built-in features that can be used out of the box.
2. Magento Commerce: Magento Commerce is the paid version of Magento, previously known as Magento Enterprise. Being the premium version, there are a lot of additional features from Magento Commerce. 
   
   Magento Commerce can be hosted on-premise. So you host and develop locally on your own server, or have the choice of your own Magento host. Alternatively, there is Magento Commerce Cloud, the cloud-hosted solution from Adobe. 

Here is a quick overview of the differences between Magento Open Source and the on-premise version of Magento Commerce:

As you can see, Magento Open Source has fewer features. But you can run a very profitable eCommerce business on it, especially in combination with extensions and other marketing tools.

Magento Commerce is a full-featured eCommerce platform that comes with additional features:

• B2B functionality, like quoting, custom catalogs, and manage buyer roles and permissions.
• BI dashboards, with Visualisation and custom report builder.
• Magento Chat (powered by dotdigital)
• Advanced marketing tools.
• Sensei powered product recommendations.
• WYSIWYG page builder.
• Customer segmentation
• Customer Loyalty Tools, like Easy-to-redeem coupons.
• Content staging and preview for Magento hosting.
• Visual merchandising.

Support and Commerce Cloud
One of the bigger differences beyond the features is that Magento Commerce comes with support from Magento directly, with access to account managers. This is not available for open source, where you would most likely turn to a Magento agency or freelancer to provide extra support.
And includes the ability to access Magento Commerce Cloud, where Magento provides the hosting.

When asking: “Magento Open Source vs. Magento Commerce, which is right for me?” The answer is easy. It all depends on your shop and business model.

Magento Open Source is recommended if:
If you’re launching your shop and don’t have the budget or revenue to validate the costs of Magento Commerce, start with Magento Open Source. This assumes that the additional functionality isn’t critical. Open source will need you to find your own Magento Hosting.

Magento Commerce is recommended if:
Alternatively, the functionality and services might be the consideration. Where BI, or B2B functionality or other of the functions or services are really needed. There is a price tag, so it isn’t a consideration if you don’t have the budget, but once your business gains momentum, you can switch to Magento Commerce.

Whichever version of Magento you go with, the platform is built as a powerful eCommerce solution.

Magento Software Review

Magento is one of the 5 most used eCommerce platforms, side-to-side with other giants like WooCommerce and Shopify. When it comes to picking the best eCommerce platform, the first thing to look at is the feature set. Let’s see which features made it such a popular eCommerce solution.

Most important and outstanding Magento Features

Magento has everything you need to run a modern eCommerce business. And if there’s a tool that isn’t in, Magento can be extended through plugins, and integrations and further customized. What are the most outstanding features?

1. Order Management

Magento Commerce’s order management helps you walk the tightrope between demand and supply. Even across multiple sales channels and locations, managing your inventory (including returns) is clear and doable. It makes it easy to manage your inventory. The order management function helps:

• Reduce costs as orders and inventory are managed in one place
• Efficiently handle returns and automate refunds
• Improve customer experience by not offering/showing out of stock items

Unless you are selling digital products, streamlining your order management and inventory is one of the most crucial success factors on the backend processes. – good fulfillment makes everything flow smoothly. 

2. Mobile-optimized Magento shops

Mobile eCommerce is expected to be 72.9% of the global retail eCommerce by 2021. You need a mobile-optimized eCommerce store, it isn’t even a question.

Magento supports HTML5, and with the templates, you don’t have to worry about setting up the basic mobile shop. Your store is ready to give customers a good shopping experience on mobile devices.

There is a lot of talk about headless – so that means you’d use Magento for the backend and another modern fronted, using programming frameworks like Vue or React for instance.

Headless allows for a great mobile experience + omnichannel optimization. With Magento PWA Studio, you can easily create PWA’s. These bring a webshop, website, and app into one solution. Fast and with cool personalization options such as push notifications straight from the webshop.

3. Open-source Platform and enormous ecosystem

Unlike most of its major competitors like Shopify and BigCommerce, Magento was built as an open-source and free eCommerce platform.

Since it’s open-source, it is customizable, flexible, and extendable. This is exactly what developers, Magento agencies, and anyone with a knack for code have been doing.

Regulated industries
The open-source and self-hosted nature is also a major consideration when you are in a regulated industry like CBD, gambling, health, affiliate, etc. With Saas applications, you always run the risk of them shutting you down. In Magento, you own the platform. You can switch hosting providers, payment providers, etc.

4. Ecosystem and community of developers

You can extend your store’s functionality with the help of a Magento development agency or freelance developer. Install pre-built Magento plugins and modules or (let an integration partner) develop your own.

There are many forums, events, agencies, and developers.

And for example, Meet Magento is held in many countries with a strong Magento ecosystem.  Meet Magento is a community hosted Magento event where partners, freelancers, and merchants can meet to discuss trends, features, and challenges. 

5. Shop speed and Performance

Performance and page load times affect your eCommerce revenue. Out of the box, Magento isn’t the quickest platform. But there are modules for Magento such as MagePack to enhance frontend speed. Magento Commerce supports horizontal autoscaling to provide stable performance during peak traffic, such as Black Friday sales.

The site speed will depend on your Magento hosting and can be much faster with the use of technologies like a CDN, NGINX, or Varnish.

6. Magento Payment and shopping cart options

Magento Commerce supports the most popular payment options like: 

• Bank transfer
• PayPal 
• Authorize.net
• Google checkout
• Amazon payment
• Cash on delivery

Customers want to have control of their payments. Multiple payment options bring your customers a good user experience (UX). For merchants it allows you to reduce or manage gateway and processing fees. And for Magento merchants, it is always good to know you can switch payment providers and be in control of the fees, etc.

Of course, a good experience results in repeat purchases, which, in turn, form the foundation of growth for your business.

7. Magento Chat

Online chat is a way for merchants to staff their virtual stores just as they would Brick and Mortar (especially relevant right now!) Solving site visitor challenges in real-time. In Econsultancy’s research, 79% of customers who prefer live chat said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly. 

Sometimes called conversational marketing is the marketing and sales side of chat and chatbots. Engage, support, convert, and even upsell customers. Or as Research from Aberdeen, shows that companies with live chat can see a 2.4x improvement on cross- and upsell.

Some of the most pertinent uses that directly impact revenue:

• Help people find the right products
• Answer and resolve payment and checkout problems.
• Suggest additions to their current product or cart.

The default Magento Chat bundled with your Magento 2 Store is free, including the first chat agent.

Turning on chat for the first time is as painless as changing the setting to yes inside the admin. Which then allows you to configure the widget, set agent roles, and get chatting.

8. Magento Multi-site multi-store Management 

Running multiple online stores at the same time can be a hassle, not so much with Magento. The platform allows you to add and manage several stores from a single dashboard greatly reducing store management time. Adding products and catalogs cross-site is simple thanks to the multi-site functionality.

After some configuration, you can also run multi-language stores, using multiple “store views” and with plugins for auto changing to the right language based on your visitors’ location.

9. Magento Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Building meaningful relationships with your customers is essential to retention and your shopper loyalty program. That’s why every interaction and customer touch can be stored in the Magento CRM.

The CRM is part of the Magento admin panel, with an easy to navigate dashboard. With insight into all customer interactions, you can create the right content and message for each stage of the buyer journey.

You can integrate Magento with marketing automation software and use Magento CRM data to power your automated campaigns. An example comes from LensPlaza who integrates Magento with their dotdigital automation to personalize and automate their newsletters and use data-driven product recommendations in their campaigns.

10. Promotion and personalization tools

One reason many eCommerce brands like Magento is the way the platform makes it easy to promote your products. Some promotional tools include:

• Personalization tools. Segment customers using your set criteria and display content and promotions tailored to each visitor.
• Product recommendations. By analyzing customer behavior, Magento offers the right product recommendations to your customers. Magento also allows you to set rules that determine which products should be recommended as upsells or cross-sells or as related products. recently, smart product recommendations by Adobe Sensei are included for free with Magento Commerce, but there are many different options. 
• Visual merchandising. Drive more sales and optimize product category pages with Visual Merchandising. Arranging products according to rules and filters such as bestsellers, color, highest margin, new releases, or any other rules that work best for you. 

Magento Commerce makes it a bit easier to direct the eyeballs to the right products and turn visitors into paying customers. 

11. Catalog Management and on-site search

As your product catalog grows and grows, it can become difficult for customers to find and browse the site. This is where a sound catalog management system comes in.

Using Elasticsearch, Magento has a strong product search engine for customers to find the product they are looking for. It offers suggestions for misspellings, synonym management, attribute weighting, support for stop words, and more. Proper search makes it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. As a result, your conversion rates go up. 

12. Reporting and Analytics

Data and analytics are the foundation of any business that wants to improve their sales and revenues. And they need to be monitored closely. That’s why the Magento Commerce Business Intelligence feature is one of the platform’s most valuable selling points.

It helps you know your business’ health with insights on:

• Average order value
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer Retention rates

Apart from that, Magento BI turns the data into visuals you can share with your team. Raw numbers aren’t information yet, you need to transform data into actionable steps that can help you grow your business.

With this core tool-set and more, launching and running your store becomes super-easy. Well, easier than it would be on other platforms, at least.

Magento Pricing

Now that you’ve seen what you can get from Magento, let’s look at one of the most pressing issues every business has to consider when investing in software – pricing. 

Magento Open Source Pricing

While Magento Open Source is 100% free, running your website certainly isn’t. Here’s a general outline of how much you should expect to invest when creating your eCommerce store on Magento Open Source:

• Hosting: $100 – $200/month or $1.200 – $2400/year
• Developer costs: $70 per hour (on average) for freelancers

Depending on the type of hosting plan you opt for, the amount of development needed, hosting an eCommerce store on Magento Open Source will need about $7,000/year. Of course, that is a very very rough estimate. There are lots of factors that go into calculating the cost of your ecommerce solution. Many smaller shops can be happy with a $70 virtual dedicated hosting package. Real pricing wildly varies and is dependent on many factors.

How Much Does Magento Commerce Cost?

If your business is about to generate a healthy revenue stream and you’d like to take it to the next level, you can consider the premium version, Magento Commerce. So how much does Magento Commerce cost?

The starting price for Magento Commerce is $1,988/month. Pricing is based on your gross merchandise value (GMV), which is the total value of merchandise you sell over a given period.

Related: Try our Gross Profit Calculator

Other costs to consider, include:

• Themes and plugins
• Development and maintenance. This will set you back, on average, $80-$200/hour if done by a professional Magento development agency or $60-$170 if you hire a qualified freelancer. If you opt for an in-house developer, they will cost anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 per year.
• Customer support 

When it comes to pricing, Magento Commerce isn’t the cheapest option. But for example, a basic Shopify Plus license also starts at $2,300/month. The higher your GMV, the more you’ll have to pay for your Magento Commerce license. That’s not counting other things like credit card processing fees, but these are the same for any eCommerce shop. But more on eCommerce system comparisons in a bit.

Magento Review Pros and Cons

To make an informed decision when it comes to choosing whether to go with Magento or not, let’s look at the Pros and cons of Magento.  While we’ve looked at many of Magento’s good attributes, we’ll hone in on a couple more in this section. 

Magento is Highly Customizable

One of Magento’s greatest strengths is the way the platform is highly customizable. From the design, templating and functionality, you can have the exact kind of store you envision. It may take a bit of work, but with the right developer, agency, and plugins, your Magento store can be customized to offer users the best shopping experience possible. 

Flexible Magento Content Management

Content is the lifeblood of every online business. Having a flexible content management system is a must. Fortunately, Magento offers you just that. With the WYSIWYG page builder, you can display your web pages any way you want and customize the product, category, sales, and content pages. Catalog management for shops is important and in Magento Commerce, you can create custom catalogs, pricing for individual customers, etc. 

SEO-friendly pages and shop

Research shows that the first 5 organic results on Google’s SERPs account for 67.60% of all clicks. So yes, SEO isn’t dead. If anything, it is more important than ever. Magento was built with SEO in mind. Optimizing your product pages for SEO, Magento:

• Generates SEO-friendly URLs
• Loads fast
• Is mobile responsive
• Offers a great user experience

With all these features, ranking well becomes easier. Well it is probably still hard as a mofo, especially in competitive niches. But at least the system is there to work with you as opposed to against. 

Scalable eCommerce system

Every business has one primary goal, no matter the industry – growth. Magento is very fit to help you do just that.

The main reason Magento is so scalable is its large ecosystem of partners and extensions which is much more comprehensive than for example Shopware. So, as the business grows and new needs for a shop arise, Magento offers a lot of flexibility for added functions:

• there are a lot of good quality and stable extensions
• there are a lot of certified programmers available who can build customizations
• the open-source architecture of Magento allows for much more flexibility than “closed” systems

What to know before starting with Magento (cons)

So what’s the other side of the story of Magento? What flaws should you be on the lookout for? Here are a couple you need to know:

Watch out for over-customization

One of Magento’s biggest cons is the way the platform can become quite complicated. While the platform is 100% customizable, doing so requires you to jump through some hoops. This is why an experienced Magento agency or developer is needed when any significant changes have to be done on the platform.

Going premium is costly (compared to free)

Another drawback with Magento Commerce is the pricing. While Magento is not the most expensive eCommerce platform on the market, it does ask for a premium that puts it among the pricier eCommerce platforms around.

As they say, nothing is perfect. However, when it comes to eCommerce solutions, Magento does come pretty close.

Magento Integrations

It’s impossible to talk about Magento’s flexibility, scalability, and customization without looking at the Magento integrations that make all that possible. You can find a ton of Magento plugins to extend your online store’s functionality on the Magento Marketplace. The popular categories include:

• Marketing
• Customer support
• Security enhancements
• Site optimisation 
• Payment gateways
• Site optimisation 

Magento Agencies and Developers

Apart from extensions and integrations, you can also consider one of the Magento agencies to get the most out of your store. Certified Magento experts deliver high-quality code and are able to implement above standard Magento customizations.

Why partnering with a Magento agency is a good idea:

• Get to market faster and speed up your growth.
• Experience in updating, staging and development minimizes downtime
• Optimize your shop for usability, conversions, SEO and speed
• Let them make and design custom elements

Magento agencies can help you with everything from building your store to designing positive customer experiences to merchandising and sales. And remember updates and upgrades can do with some expert knowledge.

There is a big ecosystem with lots of agencies. The following are excellent Magento Agencies (that also provided the case studies below).

Creativestyle
Creativestyle is an agency for data-driven marketing and responsive e-commerce since 2001. Providing creative solutions for e-commerce shops with enterprise requirements, creativestyle offers concept, design, technical implementation, and online marketing. They are the developers of MageSuite, a comprehensive open-source CMS for Magento 2.

PHPro
PHPro builds durable digital solutions like enterprise websites, webshops, PIM, web2print applications. And of course a lot of Magento, as all are based on open source. With 60+ employees PHPro is one of the biggest PHP web development agencies in the Benelux and one of the few Magento Enterprise Solution partners in Belgium.
So if you are building a custom-made e-commerce website, or need custom plugins they can do it all. Besides development, PHPro also provides digital strategy tailored to your web project. From CRO analysis to digital marketing strategies. 

Experius
Experius is Professional Magento solutions partner, realizing successful Magento e-commerce platforms and strategies together with ambitious companies in B2B and D2C. The Dutch agency has over 60 employees and the most Magento certified developers in the Netherlands. Whether it is a Magento webshop, PIM system, or an e-mail marketing automation platform, they aim to add customer value.  

Magento webshop examples and Cases

One important question that can help you decide whether Magento is the right eCommerce platform for you is – who was Magento built for? In other words, who uses Magento?

Magento was built to be an eCommerce solution for SMB and enterprise-level businesses. That makes it a great option for businesses of all sizes and in every vertical. Here are examples of eCommerce stores that run on the Magento Platform:

Orac Decor Magento 2 Commerce site

Orac Decor is all about interior decoration with innovative materials and design. When it was time to transform their simple webshop into a full eCommerce platform they went all-in and implemented Magento eCommerce together with Belgian Magento agency Phpro.be.

What we like about this Magento Commerce site:

• It is a multi-store concept with 11 websites, 19 storeviews, and 14 languages.
  The visitors land on the correct store automatically based on GeoIP redirect.
• Custom crafted CMS content blocks make sure that the visitors get the right User Experience and editors are able to easily re-use the content blocks and save time.
• Full synchronization of products and assets like images in one central place with Akeneo PIM and SAP integration.

Being a combined B2B and B2C concept includes helpful functions like a Glue calculator, Dealer locator, search bar on all levels, and Inspiration including filters.

Lensplaza, Magento 2 Store with a focus on Automation

Lensplaza is a pure-play online retailer of contact lenses and related care products in the Netherlands and Belgium.

For their eShop relaunch they wanted a new and contemporary design – mobile-friendly, clearly arranged, and high-performance and got just that together with creativestyle, a Magento agency based in Germany.

What we like especially about this store:

• Fast delivery times – Interaction of Magento 2 and the merchandise management system (PostNL) of Lensplaza makes sure they can live up to their promises.
• Smart shipping costs and shipping date calculation. Using 3D Bin Packing (3DBP), an automatic calculation of package size and shipping costs is made on the fly in the shopping cart. The shipping date is also automated through Magento stock levels and replenishment time. The expected shipping date is dynamically determined and displayed.
• Effective use of Automated eCommerce Campaigns. For instance, Lensplaza sends personalized newsletters with product recommendations, displays Product Recommendations in the store, and sends an abandoned cart email series. Integrated with marketing automation software dotdigital, Lensplaza is able to use different channels such as email, chat, social media, and SMS for retargeting and customer engagement.

Peeze Magento site, Coffee for B2C and B2B

Peeze is a Dutch coffee roaster that offers sustainable coffee, tea, coffee machines, and coffee-related products for the office, catering industry, and at home. Their roastery is one of the most environmentally friendly in the world, they are known as a CSR leader.

Developed together with Magento agency Experius, their Magento shop serves both B2B and the B2C markets.

What we like about Peeze and their Magento shop:

• Peeze focuses on unique, high-quality, and sustainable products and this is clearly reflected in the shop. 
• Personalized ordering environment for both B2B and B2C customers
• Full integration with ERP back-end
• A Loyalty program to stimulate recurring sales. Set up together with dotdigital, they reward regular customers and incentive recurring orders. 

A brand like this is always in motion and a renewed branding and shop relaunch is in the works together with Experius. Expect even more Magento and client goodness. We can’t wait to see. 

Magento Commerce – one of the best eCommerce platforms around. 

When it comes to launching an eCommerce store, the platform you use can make or break your success. That’s why going with a platform that has a proven track record is important. As you’ve seen above, Magento is such a one. Giving your store both beautiful form and impressive functionality, you can’t go wrong.

Magento eCommerce alternatives

Commerce isn’t the only eCommerce solution for your online store. While it is an excellent option, it is interesting to list some Magento eCommerce alternatives and see how it fares against its competitors.

Magento vs. Shopify

Shopify is one of the top 3 of the world’s most popular eCommerce platforms. One thing that makes Shopify a crowd favorite is the easy-to-use interface. Development costs are usually lower than Magento. Its main weakness compared to Magento is that it’s not as customizable.

When it comes to pricing, Shopify has several plans you can choose from, Shopify Starter costs $5/month. Magento Commerce’s Shopify equivalent, Shopify Plus, will set you back a minimum of $2,300/month on a 3-year term.  

Magento vs. WooCommerce

WooCommerce isn’t a standalone eCommerce platform, it is a WordPress plugin to transform your WordPress site into an online store.

Like Magento, WooCommerce is open-source, meaning it’s free to download and use. To increase its functionality, however, you’ll have to buy premium plugins and extensions.

WooCommerce has a lot of templates and with a very involved community of developers, you can easily get help when something breaks. 

PrestaShop vs. Magento

If you like open source eCommerce platforms, PrestaShop is another option for you to consider. With over 270,000 merchants running on the platform, it’s gaining momentum to become one of the best eCommerce solutions around.

Like Magento, you’ll have to purchase Modules (Magento’s equivalent of Extensions) to increase your store’s functionality. You’ll also need to hire developers to help you build and maintain your store.

Bigcommerce vs. Magento

Another big player in the eCommerce platform space is Bigcommerce. If you have basic HTML and CSS knowledge, you can customize your Bigcommerce store. There are over 500 apps and integrations, to design the eCommerce store of your dreams.

As for pricing, Bigcommerce comes with 4 plans:

• Standard: $29.95 per month
• Plus: $79.95 per month
• Pro: $249.95 per month

The major drawback of Bigcommerce’s pricing is that the amount of sales is limited according to each plan. For example, the Standard plan limits your annual online sales to $50,000. 

Bigcommerce’s Magento Commerce counterpart would be a hosted Magento Open Source plan.

Magento vs. Volusion

Do a casual search for ” best online store builders” and Volusion pops up frequently. It’s a trusted eCommerce platform that you can consider when looking for a Magento alternative. 

The biggest difference between Magento and Volusion is that Volusion leans more toward streamlining your eCommerce operations than the marketing aspect.
That includes operational functions like Volusion inventory management and customer management. When it comes to the marketing side, like conversion and promotional tools, Magento wins this battle hands down. 

Pricewise, Volusion has 5 plans you can choose from:

• Personal: $29/month with an annual sales cap of $50,000 and one staff account.
• Professional. $79/month with an annual sales cap of $100,000 and 5 staff accounts.
• Business. $299 with an annual sales cap of $500,000 and 15 staff accounts.
• Prime. Pricing is customized according to your business needs.

Volusion is an option to consider if you’re looking for an alternative to Magento Open Source. 

Magento vs. Opencart

Opencart is another open-source eCommerce platform that makes for a good Magento alternative. Being lightweight, Opencart has the advantage of being cheaper to host when compared to Magento.

The major drawback of that is that Opencart is only suitable for small to medium eCommerce businesses while Magento can easily handle everything from small businesses to large enterprises. 

Magento vs. Spree Commerce

Spree Commerce is a Magento alternative you’ll want to consider if you’re looking for a truly free eCommerce platform to launch your business. Being open-source, using it is free. An added advantage is that the extensions are free. The only costs you’ll incur involve front-end customizations and additional functionalities you’ll want to develop on the backend.

Being open-source and having a lot of free extensions, Spree Commerce allows you to set up your store pretty fast and with a minimal budget. The extensions also help you customize your store to suit your business model.

So, Magento vs. Shopify vs. Bigcommerce, well, all the alternatives we’ve looked at? 

It depends on several factors that include, budget, how much flexibility and customization you need, as well as your business goals among others. In the mid-market plus segment, you can see Hybris and Saleforce being competitors as well. But it goes without saying, going with Magento is certainly a decision you won’t regret.

The post Magento Review – Everything You Need to Know (2026) appeared first on Email vendor selection.

HubSpot is easily one of the most well-known inbound marketing and CRM platforms available. So it’s understandable that you’d want to compare HubSpot to other similar software.

People choose HubSpot competitors for several (good) reasons. Luckily, the market is filled with interesting alternative CRM and marketing automation tools. So by popular request, let’s review 12 of the best alternatives to HubSpot and see how they compare.

What to look for in HubSpot Alternatives?

HubSpot presents itself as an all-in-one platform. It has an overload of features, probably more than you will ever use. HubSpot, for instance, also has a customer service product, but we won’t be looking into that here. Our first advice is to only look at what you need.

When comparing other software to HubSpot, there is a main list of features you should consider for your marketing campaigns and CRM:

• Landing pages and lead capture forms
• Marketing automation and autoresponders
• Lead management, nurturing, and scoring
• Email marketing tools
• CRM

If a HubSpot competitor has exactly what you need, they are a great alternative. Luckily we also reviewed them all.

The 12 Best HubSpot Alternatives

Here’s a quick overview of the best HubSpot alternatives with ratings:

1. Freshsales: User-friendly and affordable CRM for growing businesses (4.3/5)
2. Pipedrive: A simple and powerful sales CRM with automation and email marketing (4.2/5)
3. Maestra: A HubSpot alternative for retail and DTC brands with advanced personalization (4.3/5)
4. EngageBay: Excellent and affordable CRM platform for marketing and sales teams (4.4/5)
5. Brevo: The full email marketing and CRM package with automation for a bargain (4.1/5)
6. ActiveCampaign: Best automation and reporting platform for B2B and B2C companies (4.3/5)
7. Omnisend: Best eCommerce alternative to HubSpot with email marketing automation (4/5)
8. Netcore: Best CRM for omnichannel customer engagement for enterprises (4.4/5)
9. dotdigital: A powerful email marketing software with strong integrations with CRMs (4.2/5)
10. BenchmarkONE: Best all-in-one, easy-to-use CRM for small sales teams (4.3/5)
11. Campaigner: An affordable marketing automation platform with email, SMS, and excellent support (4.2/5)
12. GetResponse: A competitively priced platform with smart automation features, easy integrations (4.1/5)

HubSpot’s Biggest Drawbacks

Price

HubSpot’s paid plans can get costly. The Starter CRM Suite is $50/month for only 1000 contacts and 2 users on Sales and Service Hubs. That is already more expensive than other tools with similar or better features. And you’ll need a higher plan to get advanced features, like omnichannel automation, lead scoring, dynamic personalization, or blogs. 

The Professional CRM Suite costs $1780/month for 2000 contacts and 5 users for sales and service. That’s already a hefty sum for small and medium businesses, and there’s a required, one-time onboarding fee of $4500 for Professional plans. 

Cheaper Alternatives: Brevo, Freshsales, ActiveCampaign, Pipedrive, GetResponse, EngageBay, Campaigner

Templates

HubSpot templates for emails and landing pages aren’t the best. Even the premium email templates available for Starter are pretty basic. You can buy better-looking templates from their Asset Marketplace. But that adds to the already high price tags.

Alternatives for templates: GetResponse, Omnisend

Reporting

The free and Starter plans don’t have campaign reporting or custom reports. And dashboards and reports per dashboard are limited to 10 on Starter plans. You can increase these with the reporting add-on for $200/mo. 

Reporting alternatives: GetResponse, ActiveCampaign

Google is in talks with advisors about acquiring HubSpot, according to Reuters. If Google acquired HubSpot, 33% of HubSpot users would consider alternatives, and 15% would leave.

Reviews of the Best HubSpot Alternatives

To give you a better overview of HubSpot competitors. I am going to give a mini-review of each one. All reviews highlight our findings and the considerations of real marketing and sales teams.

Freshsales Review – User-friendly and affordable alternative to HubSpot

“User-friendly and affordable CRM software for growing businesses”

Freshsales is an affordable HubSpot alternative for small to midsize businesses. It’s a complete CRM platform with an easy-to-use interface.

It has customizable dashboards, automated workflows, contact, and account management tools, lead scoring, marketing automation, lead capturing, pipelines, lead management, and detailed analytics. 

Track where customers are in their journey with customizable deal pipelines. Freshsales has a drag-and-drop pipeline view to tag customers as “At Risk” or “Warm Lead”. It also includes 24-hour phone and email support on weekdays. 

The AI-powered contact scoring comes with all paid plans. The contact score helps decide when to get in touch with leads and prospects based on their engagement and demographic data. This saves time compared to setting up lead scoring manually.

Freshsales also has workflow automation, WhatsApp integration for one-on-one conversations with customers, and AI-powered sales insight. Freshsales wins over HubSpot on price, support, ease of use, and setup.

A review of Freshsales features:

• Sales and marketing automation
• AI-powered contact scoring, deal & forecasting insights
• 36+ integrations, including Zapier
• Multi-channel campaigns: email, phone, chat, WhatsApp
• Mobile app to work from anywhere

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales prices start from $11/user/month with visual sales pipelines, 20 workflows, AI-powered contact scoring, 2000 bot sessions, and WhatsApp business. HubSpot’s Starter plan is $20/month. You get similar functionality at Freshsales for half the price. The Freshsales Enterprise plan costs $710/month for 10 users with 100 workflows, custom fields, 10 custom modules, auto-assign rules, and a dedicated account manager. The Enterprise plan at HubSpot is $4000 for 7 users.

Who is Freshsales best for?
Freshsales is a great affordable alternative for small to mid-size B2B companies that want to sell on phone calls, chat, and WhatsApp. Or need to save time on lead and deal scoring.

Freshsales free trial
Freshsales has a 21-day free trial with all features. That’s 7 days longer than what most CRMs offer. Enough time to fully test the platform. Sign up here to test Freshsales.

Try Freshsales for free here

Pipedrive Review – Specialized sales CRM HubSpot alternative

“A simple and powerful sales CRM with automation and email marketing”

Pipedrive is a user-friendly sales CRM software for small businesses. Track customer journeys easily, and visualize the sales process. It integrates with 300+ third-party applications like Zapier, Zoom, and Calendly. It’s quick to set up and use. It’s one of the biggest advantages of Pipedrive compared to HubSpot. 

Pipedrive’s CRM and sales features make it stand out. It’s a better fit for businesses that rely heavily on sales. The sales pipeline is very easy-to-use with a clean layout. Still, it gives you the flexibility to customize pipelines to your sales process. Campaigns by Pipedrive is their email marketing platform, it doesn’t have the advanced features of HubSpot. But still suitable for most small businesses.

Pipedrive main features:

• Deal, pipeline, and lead management
• Sales and marketing automation
• 41 sales automation templates
• 40+ marketing email templates
• 24/7 support and 300+ integrations

Pipedrive Pricing

Plans start from $24/user/month and go up to $129/user/month for their Enterprise package. The lowest available plan has 3000 active deals, customizable pipelines, 30 custom fields, five reports, contact management, and over 400 integrations. 

Campaigns by Pipedrive is an email marketing add-on starting at $16/month for 1000 contacts. It’s around a third of the price compared to HubSpot.

Who is Pipedrive best for?
Pipedrive is the best if you need an affordable and specialized CRM with easy-to-understand analytics. And you don’t mind using other tools for customer service, content, and ad management.

Pipedrive free trial
Pipedrive has a 14-day free trial to test all features. Get your free trial here.

Get started with Pipedrive for free here

Maestra Review – a HubSpot alternative for DTC eCommerce

“All-in-one ecommerce marketing platform with advanced personalization and loyalty built-in”

Maestra is a HubSpot alternative for retail and DTC brands. It’s a powerful all-in-one ecommerce marketing platform for mid-market and larger businesses. Unlike HubSpot, which is a broad inbound marketing suite, Maestra focuses on customer retention and personalization. It has features HubSpot lacks out-of-the-box, like a built-in loyalty/rewards program. Maestra’s client list already includes major brands like Ugg, Crocs, and L’Oreal.

Maestra delivers multi-channel marketing for ecommerce. You can run campaigns via email, SMS, WhatsApp, web, mobile push notifications, and on-site pop-ups. The built-in CDP tracks customer profiles and behavior for precise segmentation. Maestra can personalize what each shopper sees, both in emails and on your site. For example, you can set up dynamic content blocks in emails that change based on the recipient’s purchase history or loyalty status. On your website, Maestra lets you add targeted pop-ups, product recommendation widgets, and even dynamic banners to different customer segments to increase conversions.

A review of Maestra features:

• Email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and on-site pop-ups
• Visual workflow builder with 30+ triggers and conditions
• Loyalty programs with points, tiers, promo codes, and gift cards
• Integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento
• Dedicated CSM for each client helps with onboarding, strategy, and campaign setup

Maestra Pricing

Maestra pricing starts at $2,990/month for 150,000 active customer profiles, with all features included. Maestra doesn’t have a free plan or trial, book a demo to get started.

Who is Maestra best for?
Maestra is an excellent alternative to HubSpot for mid-sized and enterprise ecommerce companies (typically those with over 100,000 customers). 

If your focus is on driving repeat purchases, customer lifetime value, and personalized marketing, Maestra is an all-in-one platform to do it. It’s ideal for DTC retail brands that have outgrown basic email tools and need advanced automation and loyalty features to retain customers.

Book a Maestra demo here or read our full review

EngageBay Review – An All-in-One HubSpot Alternative (4.4)

“Excellent and affordable CRM platform for sales and marketing teams”

EngageBay is a super affordable alternative to HubSpot. It comes with marketing, sales, LiveChat, and helpdesk features. You can get all these features together or get them separately in what EngageBay calls ‘Bays’.

EngageBay launched in 2017 and since then they’ve grown to serve over 29,000 customers. The software is for CMOs, marketing managers, sales managers, small-business owners, and SMBs.

The sales bay comes with features that’ll let you create and manage complete sales pipelines. You can create, edit and manage deals, tasks, and scheduling. Use the sales automation feature to automate follow-ups, prospect tagging, and deal owners.

The marketing bay comes loaded with forms, landing pages, and email marketing tools. Create and send broadcasts by choosing from 70+ templates. A/B test your emails, create drip campaigns and automations. Automations come with conditions and actions to create precise workflows.

Quick EngageBay feature overview:

• Nurture leads and close deals with the Sales Bay
• Acquire leads with the Marketing Bay
• The Service Bay with live chat lets you manage and improve customer interactions
• Drag and drop editing to create landing pages and emails
• Customer service is available over email, live chat, and phone
• Social suite: stay on top of social media marketing by monitoring all your accounts
• Call and SMS logs: Keep track of phone communication, measure call length and effectiveness. 

EngageBay pricing

EngageBay starts for free. You can get the whole all-in-one stack or you can opt for Marketing or CRM & Sales Bay if you don’t need both. The Service Bay including the help desk and live chat is fully free. The cheapest paid plan starts at $12.74, and the most expensive one will cost you $101.99/seat.

EngageBay has generously offered a 20% discount for Email Vendor Selection readers. You can start here to get a free trial and the discount.

Who is EngageBay for?

EngageBay is a strong alternative for anyone looking for a cheaper alternative to HubSpot. It’s super affordable, all-in-one CRM software. If you’re looking for sales, marketing, live chat, and helpdesk features in a single suite, EngageBay is the way to go. 

This HubSpot alternative is great for CEOs, CMOs, marketing managers, sales managers, and small business owners. That may seem like a wide audience, but it fits due to the number of features on offer and attractive pricing.

Try EngageBay today or read our full Engagebay Review

Brevo Review – Affordable email marketing CRM alternative (4.1)

“The full email marketing and CRM package with automation for a bargain”

Brevo is an email marketing platform with CRM software. It has email and SMS marketing, WhatApp campaigns, live chat, landing pages, marketing automation, and Facebook Ads. The CRM includes deal pipelines, inboxes, and meetings.

The drag-and-drop email builder with 42+ templates makes it easy to create a campaign for any occasion. The CRM has tasks for emails, phone calls, todos, meetings, and deadlines. Delegate tasks and set up notifications to stay on track. You can organize your contacts based on any data into lists or segments.

Brevo’s support is fantastic. You can reach them on live chat, email, and phone. And they also have a knowledge base with helpful articles, videos, and FAQs.

HubSpot’s CRM features are better than Brevo. But, Brevo beats HubSpot in value for money. It’s a great option for small and medium businesses looking for a full email marketing and CRM software with automation.

Brevo features:

• Unlimited contacts
• Drag and drop editor
• 42+ ready-made email templates
• Transactional emails
• A/B testing
• Marketing automation
• Reporting and analytics
• Chat, email, and phone support
• Deal pipeline management

Brevo Pricing

Brevo prices are based on the number of emails sent in a month. The Starter plan costs $9/month for 500 contacts, 5K emails, automation for 2000 contacts, and transactional emails. The sales CRM is free with some features included. Brevo is the clear winner on pricing. 

Who is Brevo best for?
Brevo is for SMBs with large email lists that want affordable email marketing. And manage SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Ads, and chat from a single tool. The completely free sales CRM is the cherry on top. Brevo is the best bang for your buck.

The free plan has 100,000 contacts, 300 emails/day, transactional emails, automation, CRM, chat, and web tracking. It’s among the most packed free tools out there. Start for free here.

Get started with Brevo for free here or read our full Brevo review

ActiveCampaign Review – the automation HubSpot alternative (4.3)

“Best automation and reporting platform for B2B and B2C companies”

ActiveCampaign is a very popular marketing automation service built for creating funnels and email drip campaigns. Activecampaign comes with list segmentation options, tagging, reporting, analytics, but also a deals and CRM functionality – which makes it interesting as a HubSpot competitor for B2B and B2C.

The visual automation canvas allows you to drag and drop together an automated campaign. There isn’t much training required once you get the hang of it. For businesses looking for marketing automation and CRM on a budget, ActiveCampaign is a smooth start and pretty easy to set up. Especially if you have your website already.

Dashboard on your first login at ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign in short

• Many options for email marketing, segmentation, personalization
• Easy-to-use marketing automation system, create sales funnels and triggered email.
• CRM, site chat, SMS, and many more channels
• Very interesting price compared to HubSpot and enterprise systems
• User-friendly, almost no training needed to understand.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

Starting at just $49, the Plus plan shows that ActiveCampaign is a great place for a marketing automation tool with functionality that holds up to much higher-priced competitors like HubSpot, Keap (InfusionSoft), Marketo, and Eloqua. Full pricing here.

Who is ActiveCampaign best for?
ActiveCampaign is a great alternative to HubSpot for more budget-aware, small to medium businesses and consultants that want to do marketing automation. It is best in automation and drip campaigns. It doesn’t include blogging or ad management like HubSpot does.

Free ActiveCampaign trial
ActiveCampaign offers a free trial for 14 days to test out the software. You can start the free trial here.

Free ActiveCampaign trial here or read our full ActiveCampaign review

Omnisend Review – a HubSpot alternative for eCommerce businesses with marketing automation (4)

“Best alternative to HubSpot for eCommerce businesses with email marketing automation features”

Omnisend is an interesting alternative to HubSpot. Especially for ecommerce email marketing and automation. Omnisend offers marketing to several channels in its omnichannel marketing tool. We find the email and automation part well-rounded, allowing you to use multiple channels in all your automated campaigns.

Today, over 50.000 brands are actively using Omnisend.

With a drag-and-drop visual email builder and pre-built templates, it’s simple to create and customize all your email marketing campaigns.

Email list growth is essential for all ecommerce businesses. The options are attractive in Omnisend. As an alternative to HubSpot, Omnisend offers solid landing pages, pop-ups, and lead generation forms that you can use to capture leads and build your email list.

Omnisend email marketing automation comes complete with templates that make complex automation simple to set up. Advanced segmentation allows you to target customers based on profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior.

Quick Omnisend feature overview:

• Use Email, SMS, Facebook, Web push, WhatsApp – all in one automation workflow.
• Smooth visual email campaign builder
• Advanced segmentation for precise targeting
• Email capture using popups, landing pages, static and gamified sign-up forms
• Live web tracking for behavioral data and A/B testing
• 24/7 customer service

eCommerce specific functionality

• Browse and Cart Abandonment automated workflows
• Product picker for automatic importation into your campaigns
• Ecommerce-ready elements like discount codes and customer rewards

Omnisend Pricing

Omnisend is free marketing automation for up to 500 emails per month. Like other marketing automation tools, Omnisend offers plans based on the number of subscribers you’re sending to. Omnisend’s Standard plan starts at $16 per month and costs $81 per month for 60,000 emails.
An eCommerce business that wants to do more with marketing automation can add modules to customize the plan. The Pro plan starts from $59 per month for unlimited emails.

Omnisend has generously offered an exclusive 30% discount for the first 3 months for Email Vendor Selection readers. Use Omnisend discount code “EVS30”. You can start and register for a free trial.

Get a free Omnisend trial or read our full review

Netcore Cloud – The Alternative for Customer Engagement (4.4)

“Best CRM for omnichannel customer engagement for enterprises”

Netcore Cloud is a great HubSpot Marketing automation alternative.

Built on the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Netcore Cloud is a customer engagement and experience platform. They have 20+ years of experience in the industry, serving 5000 plus customers across 18 countries.

It’s a great tool for marketers and product managers in complex, fast-paced environments. Use Netcore Cloud to collect all your customer data on a single platform. Connect your marketing channels and simplify your workflows.

Netcore Cloud’s marketing automation is just as good as HubSpot’s. You can create automation workflows with Journey Builder to automate email and SMS. Improve targeting with predictive segmentation, and optimize send times/subject lines.

Netcore has a lot more to offer though.

Netcore’s main features:

• User journey optimization
• A/B testing
• Product recommendation system
• Content personalization
• Push notifications and more

Netcore’s best customer engagement features

• Journey orchestration
• Customer data platform
• Unified customer view
• Behavior analytics

For those looking for a 360 marketing platform, that offers full-stack functionality, Netcore Cloud is the way to go.

Netcore Cloud pricing versus HubSpot

You’ll need to request a demo to get a price. You’ll get a price plan for what suits your company’s needs.

Get Netcore Cloud demo

Dotdigital Review – powerful HubSpot alternative (4.2)

“A powerful email marketing software with strong integrations with CRMs”

dotdigital is a customer engagement platform that works for B2B, B2C, and e-commerce marketing.
You can create, test, automate, and send marketing emails with ease. This HubSpot alternative lets you engage your audience across all touchpoints.

Although dotdigital isn’t a CRM, it has strong integrations with CRMs like SalesForce, OroCRM, Pipedrive, and Microsoft Dynamics, often going head-to-head with ClickDimensions.

The email editor is sophisticated and easy to use. It has building blocks that are dynamic, repeatable, and make for mobile responsive emails. The data handling and analytics are smart.

What we like about dotdigital

When we compare dotdigital to HubSpot, we have some interesting inbound marketing, CRM, and Customer Persona functionalities to highlight.

• Pull marketing lists and campaigns into dotdigital Engagement Cloud and record all engagement for sales and marketing teams to view, action, and set behavioral email and multichannel campaigns
• Full website tracking and can score and nurture leads based on contact data stored in your CRM.

• Pre-built RFM segments to increase AOV and scale customer lifetime value for existing customers. They are automatically grouped into personas based on purchase history and automatically send product recommendations.
• Customer lifecycle tools, including a pre-set of the necessary automations you need: from renewal programs to loyalty schemes and more.

• Conversational marketing, one of the features of dotdigital cloud is a live chat function, but it also has SMS, mobile app and push, landing pages, forms and surveys.

dotdigital is the only email tool that is in the Magento eCommerce codebase. That shows it’s a strong platform for eCommerce marketing.

dotdigital, when pitched vs HubSpot often comes out as the preferred vendor.

dotdigital has generously offered $500 discount for our readers and up to 2 hours of free email automation consultancy for taking the demo and signing up. Please get a free trial or a 3 minute video demo through here and mention Email Vendor Selection when you talk to the sales rep.

BenchmarkONE Review – An easy-to-use HubSpot alternative (4.3)

“Best all-in-one, easy-to-use CRM for small sales and marketing teams”

BenchmarkONE is an all-in-one CRM and marketing software. They started in 2012 (formerly called Hatchback) and have grown into a thriving, competitive CRM. 

The platform is convenient, offers great value, and has a generous free plan. The great thing about BenchmarkONE is that it covers your whole sales and marketing funnel. They offer landing pages, email marketing, popups, and automation features. 

BenchmarkONE is perfectly suited for small businesses. Their pricing is super competitive. And the range of features included in their plans makes it hard to resist for customers. The best part is they offer a ‘forever free’ plan which will help you get used to the CRM before spending any money. 

Designing content is super easy and quick with BenchmarkONE. They have a drag-and-drop email editor, along with 59 pre-built email and 26 landing page templates.

BenchmarkONE’s top features are:

1. Landing pages and forms are easy to create. You’ll find it easy to grow your leads.
2. Contact scoring lets you qualify and target different types of leads. Focus your marketing campaigns where they will have the biggest impact.
3. Deal pipelines make it easier to convert leads into sales. Deals suggest targeted ways to move leads forward in their buying journey.
4. Email marketing campaigns are simple to build. The user-friendly drag-and-drop editor means you don’t need any design or coding skills to create high-quality emails.
5. Marketing automation saves you time on everything from contact management to sending emails.

BenchmarkONE pricing versus HubSpot

The free plan has all contact management tools, including tagging and task creation. Run email campaigns, create automations, forms, and landing pages. You don’t get the more sophisticated CRM features on the free plan, like deal pipelines. And there’s no live dashboard telling you what’s happening in real-time. The free tier has 250 contacts and 500 emails a month.

The Lite plan starts from $29/month. You get 500 contacts and 2500 emails a month. It also includes deal pipelines, live dashboards, and the mobile web app. The prices increase as your contact list grows. A Lite plan with 5000 contacts and 25,000 emails will set you back $109.

The Pro plan starts from $179 a month, includes all the features of the Lite plan, plus dynamic content, security features, and premium support.

We negotiated a special deal for our readers. Get 50% off your first month if you sign up for a monthly package. Or sign up for a year and get an additional 10% off your annual plan + 1 month for free!

Sign up today for BenchmarkONE here or read our full BenchmarkONE review

Campaigner Review – an affordable HubSpot alternative (4.2)

“Marketing automation platform with email, SMS, and excellent support”

Campaigner has been growing and getting a lot of attention lately as a cheaper HubSpot alternative. It first entered the market in 1999 and now they have over 100K customers supporting businesses of all sizes.

It’s a good choice for most industries but they mainly serve publishers, performance marketers, travel, hospitality, retailers, and financial services.

Because of better pricing, this is an interesting alternative to HubSpot. Campaigner offers a set of tools for lead generation, lead nurturing, email and SMS marketing.

Campaigner Automation
With Campaigner’s automation, you can build nurture campaigns and segment customers into groups, so they get the right messages. The visual workflow builder lets you set up triggers and actions in an automation overview. Track conversions with Campaigner and use conversion data in automations as triggers, conditions, and goals. 

You can set up recurring campaigns with the workflow editor. These email and text messages are sent on a predefined schedule. Recurring campaigns simplify the periodic sending of news, blog articles, and product updates.

Campaigner SMS marketing
Create SMS marketing campaigns or add text messages to your automated workflows. SMS automation is great for shipping and delivery notifications, promotions, billing reminders, and appointment confirmations. 

Dynamic Content
Send different versions of the same email to subscribers with different preferences. In the Campaigner email editor, you can choose custom field data for content blocks. Only subscribers with matching data will see those blocks.

Campaigner landing pages and forms

Campaigner has a built-in form and landing page builder. You can quickly build and customize your forms. You can add your own fields and change the order.

Landing pages can be customized in 2 ways: importing content or building with the “Full Email Editor”. The first option creates a landing page from your existing content. The Full Email Editor is an HTML editor you can use to customize every element of your landing page, but you’ll need some HTML skills to get the right look.

Campaigner Integrations

Campaigner has Magento, Surveytown, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Zapier integrations. Zapier lets you connect 5000+ other tools. The Magento integration imports customer data from your store. You can use this data to segment based on purchase information, send transactional and abandoned cart emails, and add dynamic product info to emails.

Who is Campaigner best for?

Campaigner is the best alternative to HubSpot for:

1. Companies that have a website and want to add marketing automation.
2. Ecommerce companies that use Magento and want to automate transactional and cart abandonment emails.

In Campaigner vs HubSpot, Campaigner stands out as a cheaper HubSpot alternative for marketing automation and SMS marketing.

Campaigner Pricing

Campaigner pricing starts at $59/month for 5K contacts and 30K emails. This Starter plan has the drag-and-drop editor, 900+ email templates, landing pages, segmentation, and conversion tracking. The Essential plan costs $179/month for 25K contacts and 150K emails. It also removes the Campaigner branding, and adds dynamic content and ecommerce integrations. You can test Campaigner for free with the 30-day free trial.

Try Campaigner free for 30 days

GetResponse Review – HubSpot alternative (4.1)

“A competitively priced platform with smart automation features, easy integrations” 

GetResponse has different features that make it stand out from HubSpot and the others on this list. GetResponse’s main offering is their email marketing, but marketing automation, CRM, and lead generation features are all there. So it’s the best alternative to HubSpot for small businesses. If you’re looking for email newsletter sending only, check out our review of affordable email marketing or email marketing tools like MailChimp.

You can set up email automation workflows based on preset triggers and segmentation.
The workflow covers the bases from landing pages to sales team notifications. You can use simple lead scoring to track automation events over time (e.g. cart abandonment, newsletter subscription, message open).

GetResponse Autofunnels and Webinars

Where GetResponse stands out from other HubSpot alternatives, is their included webinar software and auto-funnels.

Webinars are a very effective way to generate leads or promote your products or services. The GetResponse webinar tool is unique as a feature that other marketing automation platforms don’t offer.

With GetResponse you can run webinars from within the marketing automation platform to create complete funnels. You don’t need a third-party webinar platform.

Autofunnels are pre-built funnel templates. So you can quickly put together your sales and marketing funnels. Brands can use these marketing funnels to sell digital or physical products. These include all the steps of your funnels: landing pages, forms, emails, webinars, and even payments through payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc.

Quick overview

• Send newsletters and autoresponders
• Web forms and surveys
• Marketing automation workflows
• Premade Marketing Funnel templates
• Facebook and social ads creator
• Reporting

GetResponse Pricing

What does GetResponse cost? Sign up for a free plan to check out the software. The free plan offers unlimited emails and even offers a website builder. This plan is limited to 500 subscribers. The basic plan starts at $19/mo, which is very cheap compared to HubSpot and the features you get to use. Higher-end plans include auto-funnels, e-commerce, CRM, and many more features. Full GetResponse pricing overview here.

Who is GetResponse best for?

GetResponse is a better alternative to HubSpot for anyone looking to get started or build out their strategy with email or marketing automation. And SMBs that want to do more marketing automation. This also includes businesses that want to set up their funnels with webinars. Compared to HubSpot, their pricing is way more attractive. HubSpot does have blogging functions, where GetResponse sticks to landing pages.

GetResponse offers all Email Vendor Selection readers a 10% additional discount. that is on top of the discount you’d get for paying yearly plan. Start a free trial here.

Try GetResponse for free or read our full GetResponse Review

So which HubSpot alternative is the best for you?

Many businesses want marketing automation software to help them with marketing, sales, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We listed the services like HubSpot, for those looking to find their matching inbound marketing software. But what is the best HubSpot alternative for you? That is mostly up to what kind of marketing and sales program you are running.

HubSpot Alternatives

 

Extras via Email Vendor Selection

Free trial

 

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Get a demo
Visit Website

 

Extra 20% discount

Free plan
Visit Website

 

10% discount, if you pay per year

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Free trial with instant set up
20% discount with yearly account (standard)

Free trial
Visit Website

 

30% off for the first 3 months

Free trial
Get a demo

 

 

Get a demo
Visit website

 

50% off your first month
Additional 10% off yearly plans + 1 month free

Free plan
Visit Website

 

Free plan
Visit Website

 

Extra 10% discount
Free email marketing certification

Free trial
Visit Website

* disclaimer: We do our best to update and check the pricing, offers, extras, etc., each month. But pricing at vendor is final.

Zoho CRM gets an honorable mention as a HubSpot alternative. It’s part of an even larger business app suite. Including phone, email, social media, live chat, video calls, push notifications, and self-service portals. And you can automate sales and marketing campaigns on multiple channels. Zoho is more attractively priced than HubSpot. HubSpot does have an excellent free tier and it’s easier to use.

This HubSpot software comparison wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t review the details of the HubSpot offering, so let’s get it done…

HubSpot Review

HubSpot is known for its excellent inbound marketing. Every marketer has probably attended a webinar or downloaded a HubSpot ebook at one point.

Their blog is insightful, they create solid original research, and their inbound marketing training is cool. No wonder you have heard about HubSpot. They practice what they preach and offer great inbound marketing content.

But their marketing isn’t the only reason why HubSpot is so popular. In reality, HubSpot offers independent products for inbound Marketing, Sales and CRM that help companies to attract and nurture leads and turn them into customers, and increase sales.

So yes – HubSpot has powerful customer relationship management, but its success also depends on the inbound marketing toolset with Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.

Now you are thinking… wait. Was it HubSpot what I am looking for? Or…

am I better off with one of the HubSpot competitors? OR behind door number 3…

Combining HubSpot CRM with our HubSpot alternatives is a better choice?

To answer, we are going to review the three enterprise software functions by HubSpot in detail:

HubSpot CRM – Review

Bringing in new customers isn’t a walk in the park. Sales needs to find prospects, make calls, set meetings and make sure deals are moving forward. A sales team will use spreadsheets, send many emails, and their agenda to plan follow-ups. A lot to keep track of!

So the sales team needs a tool to keep organized without losing their mind (or attractive deals). The free HubSpot CRM is a great starter solution for this. You can view the state of your sales funnel. From incoming sales leads, to Offers to close and deals made. HubSpot CRM has all the sales activities for the team. Tasks can be assigned – improving your planning.

HubSpot free CRM – Pricing

HubSpot is a free CRM tool. So if you ask, what does HubSpot CRM cost? It is free. With the free HubSpot CRM version, you can store a million contacts, no limit on users, no limit on time.

What can you do with the Free HubSpot CRM?

• Store company info associated with your contacts
• Track and store sales deals
• Integrate with Gmail or Outlook
• A few sales productivity tools (like email sending and meeting scheduling)
• Add lead capture forms for your site
• Live chat and chatbot to put on your website

These are great to get started with inbound marketing or have a first look at the HubSpot marketing system.

There aren’t many companies that choose to stay with only the free version for very long. They either switch to one of the HubSpot competitors or the paid version. Because HubSpot free CRM has limited sales and marketing functionality (and you’ll probably want that as well, once you see what is possible).
For instance, you only get 5 email templates and 5 document templates. And you have a meeting scheduler, but 1 link per company in an overall agenda – not per person. This brings us to…

HubSpot Sales Hub review

The saying goes: Selling is 90% transpiration, 10% luck :D. But you can increase your luck and keep your shirts dry with sales automation help. With HubSpot sales, you can be assured that every sales rep takes the steps for the prospects to complete the sales funnel.

HubSpot offers email templates for salespeople. This saves time, from snippets and intro emails to follow-ups. And it tracks emails, and follow-ups, etc.
Your Sales can see companies that visit your websites and the pages they were looking at. The meeting scheduler is convenient and again saves a lot of time and back and forths. It’s synced with your agenda if you use Google Calendar, HubSpot CRM, or Microsoft Office 365.

Phone calls can be a big part of sales. The HubSpot Sales tool can queue and log calls in the CRM directly.

HubSpot Sales Pricing

HubSpot Sales is a lot cheaper than the marketing tool. It starts at $45 a month for two users, the professional version is $450 for 5 users but also has more functionality and refinement you need when doing sales in a team.

HubSpot sales comes with a free version, you can sign up here.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Review

With HubSpot Marketing hub you can give your website traffic a boost, and nurture, automate, and grow to convert more leads into clients. Woot! (but you can also do that with all of the HubSpot Alternatives here, oh yeah.)

The Marketing Hub software allows you to do marketing automation, create landing pages, blogs, and website hosting, personalize your email templates and your website, and lead management and marketing analytics.

HubSpot monitors social mentions and such and tracks customer engagements, and schedules social media posts.

The difference is here – that the HubSpot Content Hub also has all that CMS and SEO functionality, so it caters to a lot of your inbound marketing software needs. But if your website runs WordPress, you don’t need those. It’s quite expensive! If you only use HubSpot Marketing, you can integrate with other HubSpot CRM alternatives like Salesforce.

Read our full HubSpot review to find out more about the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.

HubSpot Marketing hub Pricing

Marketing Hub Starter comes in at just $45 per month. The rest of HubSpot marketing tools come with an impressive price tag. The Professional package starts at $800 per month and $3200 for the Enterprise plan. With all the extra functionality tagged on, it becomes a hefty sum, fast. Then again, this is relative to what you are looking for. Many big companies wouldn’t blink an eye and can see the benefits at scale.

Check out our HubSpot pricing guide for more details about the cost of the Marketing Hub.

Concluding HubSpot alternatives

HubSpot has over 21,000 customers and 3500 agency partners, who love to work with their inbound marketing, Sales and CRM tools. But why do so many opt to use one of the HubSpot competitors?
There is a lot to be loved about HubSpot. The biggest drawback is that the pricing is quite steep. Not if you compare it to the big enterprise marketing software, like Marketo, Eloqua, or Adobe, but certainly when compared to the inbound marketing tools we reviewed here.

Many mid-sized and small businesses can’t afford the price point and wouldn’t be using many of the features on such a large scale. They would go for HubSpot alternatives that are cheaper and take care of their needs from the start.

HubSpot Alternatives

 

Extras via Email Vendor Selection

Free trial

 

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Get a demo
Visit Website

 

Extra 20% discount

Free plan
Visit Website

 

10% discount, if you pay per year

Free trial
Visit Website

 

Free trial with instant set up
20% discount with yearly account (standard)

Free trial
Visit Website

 

30% off for the first 3 months

Free trial
Get a demo

 

 

Get a demo
Visit website

 

50% off your first month
Additional 10% off yearly plans + 1 month free

Free plan
Visit Website

 

Free plan
Visit Website

 

Extra 10% discount
Free email marketing certification

Free trial
Visit Website

* disclaimer: We do our best to update and check the pricing, offers, extras, etc., each month. But pricing at vendor is final.

FAQs about alternatives to HubSpot

The post 12 Best HubSpot Alternatives and Competitors Reviewed in 2026 appeared first on Email vendor selection.

• How will current HubSpot users react?
• What would this mean for the marketing industry? 
• Why would Google buy HubSpot, what is the deal rationale?

We did some research to find out…

The Impact of Google Acquiring Hubspot

Emailvendorselection.com asked 200+ industry experts and HubSpot users about what they would do if there was an acquisition. Here are their answers.

• 51% would stay with HubSpot, no matter what
• 33% would look around at alternatives
• 15% would likely leave HubSpot

The most remarkable is that 48% would be triggered to look around, or already have one foot out of the door. 15% said they would most likely to leave.

Hubspot’s revenue was $2.17B in 2023. A quick calculation extrapolating the numbers means that in a worst-case scenario, the impact of losing 15%-48% of clients could mean a 325M to 1B revenue loss.

Now there is a bit of nuance to that. HubSpot has shown a high retention rate over the last few years. And adding that CRM and site migration aren’t easy, plus contracts span one or more years. Just to have these experts show such a huge shift in perception is quite remarkable in itself.

HubSpot fans are staying put (51%)
On the other hand, we are seeing a large group of loyal HubSpot fans. Some added “I’m a HubSpot fanboy” and “We love HubSpot”. This group, at least from this potential deal, wouldn’t even consider a different platform. The other story behind that is that many aren’t foreseeing big changes in their day-to-day operations, or even some upsides to the acquisition.

The acquisition would be a turning point in CRM. Google, now the largest AdTech provider entering into marketing technology (MarTech). It’s not a completely unprecedented acquisition direction, many bigger technology companies have bought marketing platforms in the past: Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, etc.

HubSpot has 205K clients ranging from small businesses all the way up to enterprises. Their functionality spans CRM, sales, marketing, content, and service. Our HubSpot review gave the CRM giant 4.4 stars. The platform is well-loved.

Scenario planning and alternatives to consider
If we look at HubSpot functionalities one by one there are a lot of HubSpot alternatives. If we base expectations on our data we expect quite the rush of midsize and enterprise companies doing a reevaluation.

A 46% looking at competitors on a base of 205K current customers would mean 94K companies looking into the market. Because HubSpot is such a big player, even if 2% extra goes into compare mode, it would make sense to look into it, as true expertise in software selections is scarce.

What are users to do?
We advise at least a scenario planning exercise in their next marketing stack review. Scenario planning is actively preparing for potential changes in the market. That way you have a plan in place for once changes happen.

We continuously see that many CMOs and marketing teams aren’t very experienced in doing software selection. This is where specialised selection professionals are here to help. Martech Ops are often well vested in running their current stack, but the CTO has to look ahead 3-5 years in planning their architecture and have a more high-level view of where the market is going.

Wait and see isn’t an option
Our research shows some industry experts default into “wait and see” mode for what would happen with this acquisition. Not per se passive though. That would overlook that a selection and migration can take substantial time and contract renewal dates are a hard cut-off.

For those not involved in the HubSpot ecosystem: take out the popcorn and look at how this will play out.  About 27% of the experts we asked would be undecided or other. But midsized and enterprise HubSpot users don’t have this luxury.

Additional resources:
Marketing automation industry and market growth statistics
HubSpot pricing guide with pricing of alternatives
Hubspot alternatives
HubSpot software review and user ratings
What is the HubSpot platform?

Deal rationale: Why would Google buy Hubspot?

What is the reason for Alphabet – Google’s parent company – to consider acquiring Hubspot? Alphabet has a huge cash pile of reportedly $110 billion. They would like to invest some of it, of course, but it’s also interesting to see what the experts think are the reasons in our poll.

1. Proprietary data for training AI
2. Targeting information for Ads
3. Competitors and market positioning
4. Revenue and cross-selling

1. Proprietary data for training AI
Maybe AI is just top of mind these days in tech. Google made a rocky start with the late launch of Gemini formerly known as Bard. It’s also struggling to transform search into a valid product incorporating the new content avalanche brought by generative AI and new AI-based competition.

Experts say that the HubSpot acquisition would unlock unique data that other competitors wouldn’t have access to. This to train AI, specifically trend and profile data in the SMB market. 

2. Adding to targeting and retargeting pool for ads
With the phasing out of third-party cookies, there is a new focus on first-party data. And companies build out their own datasets with profile and behavioural data directly gathered from their audiences.

The data can be used for targeting, retargeting, and ads, especially when contextual targeting becomes more important. Creating lookalike audiences based on first-party CRM data is an important part of what makes LinkedIn and Facebook audiences targetable.

3. Moving into MarTech as a strategic move and market positioning
Many pundits point out that other big tech companies already have a MarTech leg and have bought marketing technology in recent years like Microsoft is offering Microsoft Dynamics and SAP buying Netcore, and many years ago Salesforce did multiple acquisitions.

Google has a martech gap in its portfolio, which would make acquiring one of the bigger marketing suites a logical step. 

4. Revenue and access to the HubSpot audience
HubSpot is the biggest CRM provider in the market today. Next to gaining revenue, Google would definitely like to have access to the HubSpot customer portfolio.

The play would start cross-selling into the SMB market. HubSpot users to start using Google Workspace and Ads. And pushing SMBs to become HubSpot clients. 

The biggest worries about the acquisition

Now what are the concerns our panel is mentioning most often? With a few exceptions, the consensus is that an acquisition is never good news for the end users of the acquired company.

1. A pricing increase on the horizon
On the heels of the Intuit / Mailchimp acquisition, we see that users are wondering what will happen to their current pricing for their marketing stack. History has taught us that the monetization model with a new purchase is always going to be reviewed. At the moment HubSpot already is quite pricey for midmarket, with much cheaper HubSpot alternatives available.

A price increase right after the acquisition isn’t something to worry about, but other options like moving functionality into more expensive tiers, legacy pricing to exclude newer functionality, and changing the pricing model overall are options that are very common with acquisitions. As goes “With such a big investment, they’ll need to recoup and quickest is to raise the price”.

2. Slowing of the pace of platform development
A typical result of a software acquisition is that investment in software development slows down or even grinds to a halt and certain projects are canceled completely. If they try to integrate multiple tools (which is very hard and often impossible to do), development resources are relocated to integration projects.

3. Privacy and data concerns 
The market sees data as the main reason for acquisition. This directly raises concerns about the use of the data and privacy concerns that go along with them.

A call for onboarding agencies and marketing platform users

We, as software selection experts, are also preparing for future events.

1. Our first priority is to actively update our HubSpot marketing and CRM agencies lists. After our HubSpot review, we were already expecting to see more requests for advice on the platform and are compiling and vetting a list of specialised HubSpot onboarding agencies and experts to help people onto the HubSpot platform.

2. Now it makes sense to also update the expert list of migration onto other alternatives. Looking into costs, current clients, and team size for anything from small to enterprise and split into geographical regions.

3. We are looking for marketing platform customers in multiple industries for user interviews. It’s a common practice in an expert-led selection process to interview current and new customers. Having a list of companies to call on for interviews during a selection and scenario planning exercise is a great benefit.

We ask any users of alternative platforms that have done a recent migration to reach out to us.

More stats about HubSpot

1. Hubspot’s revenue was $2.17B in 2023. That’s a 25% YoY growth compared to 2022. Subscription revenue was $2.12B, professional services and other revenue was $46.8M.
2. Hubspot has 205K customers from 135+ countries with 23% YoY growth.
3. Hubspot’s Average Subscription Revenue Per Customer was $11,365 in Q4 2023.
4. 53% of Hubspot customers are located outside of the United States. These customers generate approximately 47% of Hubspot’s total revenue for 2023.
5. Hubspot has 7.7K employees.

Press and inquiries
Please feel free to reach out to Jordie van Rijn through email or Linkedin.

The post Research on the Google HubSpot acquisition: 48% would consider switching appeared first on Email vendor selection.

Your email delivery is important for the success of your email marketing. If you don’t hit your customers’ inbox every time, your results take a hit. Picking the right SMTP service is a must.

I’ll be walking you through the best SMTP service providers you can use to scale your email marketing. We evaluated them all. So, even if this is your first time hearing about SMTP, you will be up to speed by the time you finish reading. Let’s dive in.

What is an SMTP server?

An SMTP server is the application and hardware that sends your email messages. It acts as a ‘middleman’ between you and the receiver of your emails. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is a set of guidelines and procedures for sending emails.

Why do you need an SMTP server?

Let me put it this way, without an SMTP server, your email messages won’t get to your recipients. 

There are generally two types of emails you send out to your customers:

• Bulk emails are the emails you send to a large segment of your customers at once. They include email marketing and advertising emails. 
• Transactional emails are automated emails your customers receive when they take specific actions. They include password resets, order confirmation emails, legal update emails, and so on. These are important and transactional email services deliver them fast and without trouble.

Your own website or eCommerce platform might also send email. If it uses the PHP Mail function, that can be a problem. It doesn’t guarantee high deliverability. Also, a shared web hosting server can be flagged as suspicious. This will have a negative impact on your sending reputation.

Use an SMTP server. This way, you’ll have the proper authentication that will make sure that your emails get to your customer’s inbox.

Free or premium: which SMTP server do you need?

I love free SMTP services. Getting emails delivered without spending a dime is amazing.

Of course the some limits to what a free SMTP server will do. But luckily most can do with free. And paid SMTP sending is still super cheap. Especially if you have smaller volumes, starting with free is smart and these below let you get quite some volume as you start. Which SMTP server does your business need?

• A free SMTP server is a great choice if you’re starting or have small email volume.
  It’s recommended if you don’t send out a lot of emails. Most SMTP relay providers offer a free pricing tier. Usually, there is a cap on the number of emails you can send monthly. MailerSend, for example, allows you to send up to 500 emails per month.

Once your business grows, you’ll find out that your email marketing needs exceed a free server’s capacity. Then you need to rely on scalable SMTP service and need to get a paid server.

• A paid SMTP server is best for businesses with larger mailing list or a lot of volume.
  Once you send tens of thousands or even millions of messages per month a free server won’t cut it. Also, you should consider paying for a premium email server if you want to unlock some advanced features.

In my roundup of the best SMTP platforms , I’ll focus on email marketing tools and relay services that offer the best free SMTP server solution.

Best free SMTP service providers for sending transactional emails

Below are the best free SMTP platforms to consider for your business.

1. Brevo SMTP – free plan: 300 emails/day
2. SMTP.com – 50k mails in their offer here.
3. SMTP2GO – free plan: 1,000 emails/month
4. MailerSend – free plan: 500 emails/month
5. Moosend SMTP – no SMTP server in free trial
6. Google SMTP – free plan: 100 emails/day
7. Sendpulse – free plan: 12k emails/month
8. Amazon SES – only if you already have an EC2 server
9. SendGrid SMTP – free plan: 100 emails/day
10. Elastic Email SMTP – free plan: 100 emails/day

Let’s see what each one of them has to offer you.

1. Brevo SMTP

Brevo is one of the most popular email service providers available. The platform allows you to use many marketing channels like email marketing, SMS marketing, live chats, and ads.

Brevo has a relay service infrastructure designed with speed and reliability in mind. According to the company, 99.8% of all emails sent using its platform get delivered within 20 seconds.

You’ll have access to the following features when you use Brevo:

• Flexible API: Create custom and dynamic email messages using its responsive API.
• Access to real-time statistics: You’ll have your email reporting at the tip of your fingers. Monitor metrics like open rate, click rate, deliverability and such, effectively.
• Easy integration: Integrate seamlessly with your favorite tools and platforms. These include WooCommerce, Shopify, WordPress, Prestashop, and so on.

G2 Rating: 4.5 / 5

Pricing: You have three pricing tiers to choose from. The free plan gives you 300 free emails per day along with 100,000 contacts. This is good if you’re getting started. 

The SMTP server is super affordable at 20K emails for $15/month. As your business grows, you might want to consider adding marketing / newsletter platform. And Starter plan (from $9 per month) or Business plan (starting at $18 per month) are also really well priced.

Get started with Brevo todayor read our full review

2. SMTP.com

SMTP.com is an SMTP email relay provider for marketers and developers. It’s been around for 20+ years serving over 100K businesses.

Use it to send marketing and transactional emails. Like remarketing campaigns, winback emails, email notifications, registration emails, order confirmations, status updates, and authentication emails.

SMTP.com has features like:

• SMTP reputation defender: suppresses invalid email addresses before you send. This keeps your list healthy and your domain and IP reputation high.
• Expert support: the support team comprises experienced email delivery experts with decades of collective expertise.
• Never worry about exceeding email limits. If you go over your monthly limit, keep sending and SMTP.com will charge you for the extra emails in the following billing cycle.

SMTP.com integrates with 12 apps, like Shopify, WordPress, Trello, Wufoo, Slack, and Airtable. Integrations also include Google products: Docs, Sheets, Forms, Lead Form Extensions, Calendar, and Gmail.

G2 Rating: 3.5 / 5

Pricing: Starts at $25/month for 50K emails, email relay API, detailed reporting, shared IP, email, and phone support. 100K emails with a dedicated IP cost $80/month. The reputation defender add-on costs 20% of your plan.

Get started with SMTP.com today

3. SMTP2GO

This is a reputable email delivery service provider. SMTP2GO provides you with the tools you need to properly set up and maintain your outgoing emails.

And with a redundant multi-data center infrastructure, you’re assured of your email delivery even during an internet breakdown.

SMTP2GO offers the following functionalities:

• An easy-to-use API: APIs can be complex and bothersome to use. But SMTP2GO takes care of this by designing an API that can be used with minimal fuss by developers and marketers.
• Advanced email testing options: SMTP2GO allows you to validate your emails with DKIM and SPF. You’ll see how your emails appear in more than 40 email clients and make sure that they pass their spam filters.
• Access to actionable real-time reports: You’ll be able to track metrics such as bounce rate, click rate, open rate, and unsubscribe rate. You can use the data from these reports to make informed marketing decisions.

G2 Rating: 4.7 / 5

Pricing: Get started with SMTP2GO’s free plan of 1000 emails per month. The free plan also gives you 5 days of premium reporting. To unlock more perks, you have to subscribe to the Starter plan ($10 per month) or the Professional plan ($75 per month). 

Try SMTP2GO for free today

4. MailerSend

MailerSend is a transactional email service that also comes with a drag and drop email builder. Your whole team can use it to collaborate and contribute to email campaigns.

MailerSend is great for avoiding spam traps, blacklists, and reducing bounce rates. Use it to protect sender reputation using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC security protocols.

Get the following features when you use MailerSend:

• Easy API integration process to start sending deliverable emails instantly
• Dynamic email templates to build 1 on 1 customer relationships
• Wide range of email analytics to tweak and control your email performance
• Easy account management with support for teams and collaboration

G2 Rating: 4.2 / 5

Pricing: MailerSend offers three pricing plans. Take advantage of the free plan, which you can use to send 500 emails per month. You’re guaranteed 99.5% uptime even with a free plan.

The Hobby plan starts at $7 a month and gives you access to 5000 emails, dedicated IP, and email support. Your price increases as you send more emails per month.

Sign up for MailerSend today

5. Moosend

Moosend is an email and marketing automation tool perfect for small and medium-sized businesses. Use it to create campaigns, landing pages, forms and manage audiences.

Moosend has an SMTP service you can integrate with the applications you use to send transactional emails. Moosend doesn’t give exact deliverability rate figures. Nonetheless, they ensure high deliverability using anti-spam checks, SPF, and DKIM implementations. 

Take advantage of the following features when you use Moosend:

• SMTP relay server service is easy-to-use. Integrate it with your website and start sending transactional emails right away
• Easy to monitor performance with analytics and tracking system
• Keep your IP address protected with a high-quality server infrastructure
• Easy to connect with a WordPress site

G2 Rating: 4.6 / 5

Pricing: Moosend has two pricing plans and you can try it out for a 30-day free trial. Although the trial version doesn’t include an SMTP server.

The pro plan starts at $9 a month for 500 hundred subscribers. Your price increases as the number of people on your mailing list grow.

Try Moosend todayor read our full review

6. Google

You have heard of Google. But there is a good chance you don’t know about its free SMTP service for individuals and organizations.

As you might expect, Google has a large and reliable SMTP infrastructure. With its mail servers less likely to be blacklisted.

If you want to send good-looking email from your Gmail account, check out our guide on how to send HTML email in Gmail. Or learn how to set up the Gmail SMTP server for sending.

You have access to the following features with a Google SMTP server:

• Reduced spam probability: Google’s servers don’t use port 25 to initiate an SMTP session. What this means for you is that the possibility of ISPs blocking your emails is reduced.
• Reliable backup: You can allow Google to index all the emails you send using its server. These emails will be searchable and secure on the server.

G2 Rating: 4.6 / 5

Pricing: To use Google’s free email relay service, you need either a free Gmail address or a paid Google account. With a free address, you can send up to 100 free emails per day. A paid Google account ( starts at $6 per month) lets you send as many as 2,000 emails per day.

7. Sendpulse

Sendpulse is a marketing automation platform offering SMTP servers for transactional and bulk emails. It also has a drag and drop email builder, landing pages, a CRM, chatbots, SMS, and an online course builder.

Getting started with the Sendpulse SMTP is simple. Just set up using the SMTP protocol and you can start sending. Sendpulse has 24/7 live chat support in case you need a help.

Sendpulse SMTP includes these features:

• Dedicated IP addresses: keep your sender reputation clean and avoid blacklists. Included on all monthly SMTP plans.
• Free email templates: choose from 60+ pre-made email templates to save time on email coding and design.
• Detailed reports: including emails sent, opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes, and more.

G2 Rating: 4.6 / 5

Pricing: Send 12K emails/month for free. Sendpulse’s monthly pricing starts at €69.85/month for 100K emails. Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at €15 for 10K emails. Credits are valid for 12 months.

8. Amazon SES 

Amazon SES is a product of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its cost-effective SMTP server solution allows you to start sending emails in minutes. Using Amazon SES means you will be sending from Amazon’s server infrastructure. Take advantage of fast delivery and almost zero downtime.

Amazon SES offers powerful features:

• Multiple sender configuration options: Amazon SES isn’t limited to emails via SMTP. It also offers options such as Amazon console and Amazon SES API.
• Mailbox simulator: Amazon SES helps you prepare for worst-case scenarios. With the mailbox simulator, test how your application responds to certain events like bounces, complaints, successful deliveries, or feedback.
• Reputation dashboard: Amazon SES allows you to keep an eye on details that affect your delivery rate. Issues like references to blocked domains or spam trap hits are tracked so that you can take immediate action.
• Flexible deployment options: Amazon SES also makes the process of sending your emails as simple as possible. You can share an IP address with other Amazon SES customers, lease a dedicated SMTP server, or use your IP address.

G2 Rating: 4.3 / 5

Pricing: Amazon SES is one of the cheapest email delivery platforms, especially if you send a lot of emails. They offer a forever-free usage tier where you can send up to 62,000 emails monthly at no cost.

But there’s a catch.

You have to be an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) subscriber to enjoy that perk. If not, you’ll pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send. When starting out, Amazon SES will put you in a sandbox. This is to prevent fraud and abuse. You can only send 200 emails in 24 hours to verified addresses and domains. Some users reported that it can be hard to get out of the sandbox.

You also receive your first 100 emails for free. After that, you pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you receive. See our overview Amazon SES alternatives to compare similar services.

9. SendGrid

SendGrid is a marketing and automation platform that offers both free and premium SMTP services. SendGrid allows you to use its relay infrastructure to send emails without a server of your own.

It’s trusted by companies such as Uber, Spotify, Instacart, and Airbnb.

SendGrid offers you the following features:

• Email address validation: SendGrid uses machine learning to maintain a high delivery rate and keep your funnel leaks at a minimum. You’ll be able to detect invalid email addresses and prompt your users to submit their correct contact information with ease.

• Easy Integration: You can connect to SendGrid SMTP and access comprehensive open-source libraries in 7 programming languages. And you wouldn’t be left in the dark after this. SendGrid also provides a clear setup flow to help you get started with sending your messages.

G2 Rating: 4.0 / 5

Pricing: SendGrid offers a free plan where you get 100 free emails per day forever. If your email needs exceed this volume, they have the Essential plan (starts at $14.95/month) and the Pro plan (starts at $89.95/month).

All these plans come with a free SMTP relay server. We made an overview of SendGrid alternatives to compare companies like Sendgrid.

10. Elastic Email 

Elastic Email is an email service provider with automation, verification, and SMTP relay service. Use it to start sending transactional and marketing emails from your app of choice.

In business since 2010, they’ve served 30,000+ businesses including TedX, Poptin, and BrightMetrics.

Using Elastic Email, take advantage of great features like:

• Quick SMTP relay setup
• Support for 11 programming languages to ensure integration with almost any software
• Store up to 15 SMTP credentials per account
• Fast and reliable email delivery

G2 Rating: 4.4 / 5

Pricing: Elastic Email has two pricing plans. The Email API plan $0.1/1000 emails and $0.5 per day. This plan also comes with an email designer and landing page editor. The Email API Pro plan costs $0.15 per 1000 emails plus $1 a day. This plan includes inbound email processing, subaccounts, and custom rDNS.

How does sending email through SMTP work?

The technical process of sending emails isn’t as simple as you might think.

Here is a simple breakdown of the route your email takes. And what an SMTP relay server does to get your emails delivered.

• Once you hit send, your email is transferred to a relay server via an SMTP port. Different ports are used for this connection but the most popular ones are port 25, port 465, port 587, and port 2525.
• Once the connection between your email client (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc) and the server is completed, an SMTP session starts.
• The SMTP server receives your email’s content and attachments. It assesses you and your recipient’s email addresses.
• If you and the recipient belong to the same domain name, the email is sent directly to the recipient via the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).
• If not, the MTA interacts with the Domain Name System and receives the IP address of your recipient’s email server.
• Then your SMTP server connects with your recipient’s server and transfers the email.
• If the recipient’s server isn’t available, the email will be put in a backup server or added back into the SMTP queue. The email server will make periodic delivery attempts until it’s successful. If delivery is aborted, the email is sent back to the sender with a notification.

Benefits of an SMTP server

SMTP may be a new concept to you and you must be thinking; “What’s in it for me?” Here are 3 reasons why you should consider using an SMTP server.

1. Improve your email deliverability

This is the biggest advantage of using an SMTP server. There is no point in sending out emails if they’ll end up in the spam folder. That’s a waste. SMTP relay servers make sure that your emails land in your customer’s inbox, reliably and on time.

Most SMTP service providers promise deliverability of over 98%. You worry less about whether your emails get to their destination. And focus more on driving the right actions from your recipients.

2. Track and maintain reports on the performance of your emails

A good email marketing strategy includes measuring the performance of your emails. You want to be up to speed on metrics like open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate. An SMTP server measures these metrics.

3. Sending bulk emails

Sending bulk emails is the best way to reach a huge number of your customers. But the cost of sending these emails can quickly pile up. One way to make sure you don’t break the bank when bulk emailing is to use an email relay server. This is a cost-effective approach you should consider if you send out a lot of emails monthly.

How to connect your SMTP server to your WordPress website

WordPress uses the PHP Mail function to send emails by default. But you don’t have to stick to it. It is possible to change your WordPress configuration to SMTP.

To do this, you’ll have to install a WordPress plugin called WP Mail SMTP. What this plugin does is change the WP mail function to either use the standard SMTP credentials. Or take advantage of built-in SMTP mail providers. Some of the built-in SMTP mail providers are SMTP.com, Brevo, SendGrid, Gmail, Microsoft, Amazon SES, and Zoho Mail.

Here’s how you connect your email server to your WordPress website using the WP Mail SMTP.

The first thing you do is to install WP Mail SMTP. Once this plugin is installed and activated, you’ll notice a new menu (WP Mail SMTP) show up under settings. Scroll over to this menu and click on it.

On the new page, you’ll find a few configuration settings available. Here’s what they mean.

• From email: This is the email address you want to send your emails from. It’s the one you registered with your SMTP service provider.
• From name: This lets your recipients know where the email is from. You should use your website’s name here.
• Mailer: WP Mail SMTP allows you to choose from a pool of built-in email relay service providers. Or select the Other SMTP option if your provider isn’t listed. Email service providers like Gmail, SendGrid, and SMTP.com need you to provide extra information such as API key and client ID. 
• Return path: This is to specify if you want your email’s return path to be the same as sending the emails.

If you choose the other SMTP option, you’ll be asked to provide the server’s configuration setting. This is how to go about that.

• SMTP host: This is your server’s hostname. It usually follows the format smtp.yourserver.com
• Encryption: Choose whether you have SSL or TSL encryption available.
• SMTP port: This is the port your server works on. It is set to 465 by default.
• Authentication: Your SMTP server should require authentication. Turn it on.
• SMTP username: This is the username you provided to your service provider.
• SMTP password: Input your SMTP server password.

Click on save settings once you’re done entering all the parameters.

That’s how you connect your server to your WordPress website. To confirm if you have done a good job, head over to the email test tab. Enter the address you want to send the test email to and click send mail. Check your inbox to confirm if WP Mail SMTP sent the email to you.

Conclusion: what is the best free SMTP server?

Here is a quick recap of the best SMTP relay servers you should consider.

I hope this article helped you find the desired SMTP server for your email marketing needs. Every one of the mentioned server options is:

• Cost-effective
• Easy to set up
• Reliable in email delivery
• Offers great customer support

But I recommend Brevo as the best SMTP service provider. It is suitable for small, mid-sized, and large businesses. Looking for good-looking templates to send with your SMTP? Check out the best free email templates.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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