Email marketing software

Email marketing software: email marketing platforms, services and tools compared

A buyer's guide to the category for US teams: verified August 2026 US prices read from each vendor's own page, the four incompatible billing meters that decide what you actually pay, and an honest account of the job these platforms hand straight back to you.

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The short answer

Email marketing software stores your list, sends campaigns and automated sequences to it, and reports what came back. For a US list of 500 contacts, published prices in August 2026 run from free to roughly $41 a month: Omnisend Standard $11.20, Constant Contact Lite and MailerLite Comfort $12, Mailchimp Essentials $13. The number that decides your real bill is not the plan name, it is the meter. Mailchimp and MailerLite charge for every stored contact, Brevo charges for every email sent, and Klaviyo charges per active profile. The same 20,000 person list can cost $100 or $400 a month depending only on which of those you signed. Every platform here sends what you have already written. None of them writes it.

Last updated August 2026. Prices below carry the date each figure was read from the vendor's own US pricing page.

What the main email marketing platforms cost in the US

Every figure here was read from the vendor's own published US pricing, with the date it was checked. Where a vendor does not publish a number, we say so instead of estimating. Entry prices assume the smallest paid tier, and almost all of them rise as your list grows.

Platform	What it bills for	Free tier	Entry paid price	Best suited to
Mailchimp	Stored contacts, including people who never open	$0 for 250 contacts, 500 sends a month capped at 250 a day	Essentials $13 and Standard $20 a month at 500 contacts, Premium $350 at 10,000 (checked Aug 2026)	Teams that want the most familiar product and a large template library.
MailerLite	Stored subscribers	$0 for up to 250 subscribers	Comfort $12 and Power $25 a month at 500 subscribers, about 10 percent less on annual billing (checked Aug 2026)	Small lists that want clean campaigns without paying for automation depth.
Omnisend	Stored contacts, with send caps by plan	$0 for 500 emails a month	Standard $11.20 and Pro $41.30 a month at 500 contacts (checked Aug 2026)	Ecommerce stores that want email and SMS in one place at a small-list price.
Constant Contact	Stored contacts	None, 14 day trial	Lite $12, Standard $35 and Premium $80 a month at 500 contacts (checked Jul 2026)	US small businesses and nonprofits that value phone support.
Brevo	Emails sent, with unlimited contacts	$0 for 300 emails a day	Starter from $9 a month, Business from $18, both scaling with send volume (checked Jul 2026)	Large lists that are mailed rarely, and anyone punished by contact based pricing.
Klaviyo	Active profiles, including cold and suppressed ones	$0 up to 250 profiles	About $20 a month at 500 profiles, $100 at 5,000 and $400 at 25,000 (checked Jul 2026)	Ecommerce teams that want revenue attributed to every flow.
ActiveCampaign	Stored contacts plus paid seats	None, 14 day trial	Starter $15, Plus $49 and Pro $79 a month at 1,000 contacts on annual billing (checked Jul 2026)	Teams whose real requirement is deep multi step automation.
HubSpot Marketing Hub	Seats plus marketing contacts	$0 with HubSpot branding on your emails	Starter $7 per seat a month, then Professional $800 a month plus a one time $3,000 onboarding fee (checked Aug 2026)	Companies that want marketing, sales and CRM in one system and can absorb the jump.

One thing worth knowing before you commit to a multi year plan: these prices move. MailerLite raised paid prices across every subscriber tier in June 2026. Vendors rarely announce increases loudly, and an annual contract locks your rate but not your renewal. We keep deeper breakdowns of Mailchimp pricing and Klaviyo pricing with the band by band math.

Four billing meters, and the one you pick decides the bill

Comparison roundups line these vendors up by entry price as though they sell the same unit. They do not. This is the single most useful thing to understand before you shortlist anything, because it explains why two quotes for identical work can differ by a factor of four.

Meter	Who bills this way	What makes the bill grow	Who it punishes
Stored contacts	Mailchimp, MailerLite, Constant Contact, Omnisend	List growth of any kind. A contact who has never opened an email costs exactly the same as your best customer.	Anyone with an old list. Years of accumulated dead addresses bill at full rate every month.
Emails sent	Brevo	Send frequency. Contacts are unlimited, so the meter only runs when you actually mail.	High frequency senders. Daily campaigns to a modest list can cost more than storing a huge one.
Active profiles	Klaviyo	Profiles that remain active in the account, including people who bounced or unsubscribed until you suppress them properly.	Ecommerce stores after a good year. Profile counts climb faster than revenue does.
Seats plus contacts	HubSpot, ActiveCampaign	Two meters at once. Hiring adds seats and success adds contacts, so the bill grows on both axes.	Growing teams. Every new marketer is a full seat price on top of the contact tier.

The cheapest lever most teams never pull

If your vendor bills on stored contacts, the fastest way to cut the bill is not switching platform. It is deleting or archiving people who have not opened anything in a year. A list of 20,000 where 8,000 are cold is paying a contact tier it does not need, month after month, for an audience that will never buy. Most platforms let you archive rather than delete, which keeps the record while removing it from the billable count.

Do that before you migrate. Teams routinely move platforms to save $40 a month when cleaning the list would have saved more and improved deliverability at the same time, because sending to addresses that never engage is exactly what pushes the rest of your mail toward the promotions tab.

What these platforms do, and what they quietly hand back to you

Every vendor above is good at what it claims. Disappointment usually comes from a job nobody was assigned. A sending platform is very good at delivering campaigns and completely indifferent to whether any exist. Here is the split, drawn as honestly as we can.

The job	Who does it on a standard platform	Why it matters
Getting mail into the inbox	The platform, completely	The core win and the real reason to pay. Shared and dedicated IP reputation, authentication and bounce handling are genuinely hard to run yourself.
Handling unsubscribes and consent records	The platform	CAN-SPAM requires a working opt out and a physical address on commercial mail. Doing this by hand is how companies get fined.
Storing and segmenting the list	The platform	Reliable and useful. Segments are only as good as the data you feed them, which is usually thinner than people expect.
Running automated sequences on triggers	The platform, on mid tiers and above	Real value once configured. Note the phrase once configured, because this is where most subscriptions quietly stall.
Reporting opens, clicks and revenue	The platform	Accurate counting. Apple Mail Privacy Protection has made open rates close to meaningless, so judge on clicks and revenue.
Deciding what this month should say	You	No sending platform generates a point of view. An empty calendar costs the same subscription as a full one.
Writing the campaigns and the variants	You, or a separate tool you also pay for	Most platforms now ship an AI subject line helper. Very few produce a month of on brand campaigns from your actual offer.
Noticing a sequence has quietly stopped converting	You, if you look	The automation runs forever and reports faithfully. Nothing in the product tells you the offer went stale.

How to choose an email marketing service in four steps

Count your list and your send frequency

Write down how many contacts you actually have and how many campaigns you send in a normal month. Those two numbers pick your meter, and the meter narrows the shortlist faster than any feature comparison.

Clean the list before you price it

Archive anyone who has not engaged in twelve months, then price the platforms against the real number. Buying a contact tier for dead addresses is the most common overspend in this category.

Be honest about automation depth

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot earn their price only if someone will build and maintain multi step flows. If nobody owns that job, you are paying for a builder that will sit at one welcome email.

Test deliverability on your own domain

Run the trial with your real sending domain, authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and send to a genuine segment. Inbox placement, not the feature grid, is what you are buying.

Which platform fits which situation

Small business, list under 5,000

MailerLite, Omnisend or Constant Contact

At this size the automation depth of the expensive platforms is wasted. Spend $12 a month on sending and put the difference into producing campaigns. Our guide to AI marketing tools for small business covers the wider stack.

Ecommerce store

Klaviyo, or Omnisend on a smaller budget

Both attribute revenue to individual flows, which is the thing that justifies the spend. Watch the profile count rather than the plan name. See AI marketing for ecommerce for how the email side fits the rest.

Team that needs a CRM too

HubSpot or ActiveCampaign

Only if a sales conversation closes your revenue. HubSpot jumps from $7 a seat to $800 a month with no tier between, so read the HubSpot pricing breakdown before committing.

Where an AI marketing agent sits next to a sending platform

Everything above starts working the moment you have campaigns written. AiMarketer is built for the step before that: it decides what the month should cover, writes the campaigns and their per segment variants, drafts the ads and landing copy that go with them, and reports which topics produced inquiries rather than opens.

So it sits alongside a sender rather than replacing one. If Mailchimp or Klaviyo already delivers your mail reliably, keep it. The gap we are trying to close is the empty campaign calendar, not the sending infrastructure. Our channel page on AI email marketing goes deeper on how that loop runs week to week.

The honest caveat

AiMarketer is in early access and we are not an email service provider. There is no sending infrastructure, no dedicated IP pool and no deliverability team here. If you need mail delivered to a list next month, buy one of the platforms in the table above. That is a genuine recommendation, not a formality.

Nothing on this page is trying to talk you out of a sender that already works. We wrote it because pricing in this category is confusing by design and the meters are almost never explained.

The quickest way to judge the output is the live demo above. It builds a real campaign for your business in about 30 seconds, with no account.

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Questions people ask about email marketing software

What is email marketing software?

Email marketing software stores your subscriber list, builds and sends campaigns to it, runs automated sequences triggered by behavior, and reports opens, clicks and revenue. The paid product is really deliverability plus compliance: getting mail into the inbox and handling unsubscribes and consent records correctly. What none of these platforms do is decide what to send.

How much does email marketing software cost?

For a US list of 500 contacts, published August 2026 prices run from free to about $41 a month. Omnisend Standard is $11.20, Constant Contact Lite is $12, MailerLite Comfort is $12, Mailchimp Essentials is $13 and Mailchimp Standard is $20. Costs climb steeply with list size, and the meter your vendor uses matters more than the entry price.

What is the best email marketing software?

There is no single best one because the vendors bill on incompatible meters. MailerLite and Omnisend are the best value for small lists. Klaviyo is the strongest choice for ecommerce because it bills per active profile and ties revenue to each flow. Brevo suits anyone with a large list who sends rarely, since it charges for sends rather than contacts. ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are for teams that need automation depth and a CRM.

What is the best email marketing platform for small business?

For most US small businesses with a list under 5,000, MailerLite Comfort at $12 a month or Omnisend Standard at $11.20 covers campaigns and basic automation without per-seat charges. Constant Contact at $12 is worth the money if you want phone support. Avoid buying automation depth you will not configure, which is the most common way small teams overpay.

Do I need email marketing software?

You need it as soon as you email more than a few dozen people at once. Sending marketing mail from Gmail or Outlook gets you throttled, breaks unsubscribe compliance under CAN-SPAM, and damages your domain reputation. Dedicated software handles authentication, list hygiene and consent records. Below about 100 contacts the free tiers are genuinely enough.

What is the difference between email marketing software and a CRM?

Email marketing software is organized around the list and the campaign. A CRM is organized around the individual contact and the deal, tracking every touch across sales and support. The overlap is growing: HubSpot and ActiveCampaign now sell both in one product. If your revenue comes from a sales conversation, you want a CRM. If it comes from a list buying directly, an email platform is enough.

Why do email marketing platforms charge so differently?

Because they meter different things. Mailchimp, Constant Contact and MailerLite bill on stored contacts, so a large inactive list is expensive even if you never mail it. Brevo bills on emails sent, so a big list you rarely mail is cheap. Klaviyo bills on active profiles. The same 20,000 contacts can produce quotes that differ by several hundred dollars a month depending on which meter you agreed to.

Can AI write my marketing emails?

AI can draft the campaign, write per-segment variants, generate subject lines and summarize what performed. It cannot own your offer, approve a claim about your product or decide what this month should be about. The realistic split in 2026 is that AI removes the production work while a person keeps judgment, and you still need a proven sender to deliver the mail.

Weighing a specific vendor? We keep honest comparisons at Mailchimp alternative, Klaviyo alternative, ActiveCampaign alternative, Brevo alternative and Constant Contact alternative. Plan by plan pricing is broken down in Constant Contact pricing and Mailchimp pricing. For the wider stack, see marketing automation software and AI marketing platform pricing.

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