10 Best Email Marketing Software Comparison and Review

Modern email marketing software, coupled with the power of email marketing automation, has become unstoppable. It allows you to leverage the amazing potential of email marketing, reaping the benefits in the form of customer retention and conversions.

But the struggle to find the best email marketing platform is real. Choosing the one that fits your needs perfectly can be daunting.

So, we will help you out of this paradox of choice.

This blog will help you choose the best software for email marketing by comparing the 10 best email marketing software in detail and weighing their pros and cons. Let’s dive in.

How to choose the best email marketing platform?

The best email marketing platform isn’t the one with the most features – it’s the one that fits your business needs, budget, and technical expertise.

Here’s what to consider before making a decision.

1. Affordability

Email marketing software comes at different price points, ranging from free plans to enterprise-level solutions. Small businesses need an affordable tool that doesn’t skimp on essential features.

Here are the things to consider when choosing an affordable email marketing software:

• A generous free plan: Sending upto 500 emails/month and access to core features
• Pay-as-you-grow: Look for pricing based on subscriber count to avoid unnecessary costs.
• No hidden fees: Some platforms charge extra for automation, advanced email segmentation, or integrations – check before committing.

2. Type of Business

Not every email marketing service works for every business. Choose an email software based on the type of business you run.

• E-commerce: You need email automation for abandoned carts, product recommendations, and transactional emails.
• B2B & SaaS: Requires lead nurturing, email drip campaigns, and CRM integration.
• Nonprofits & Bloggers: Budget-friendly options with donation or subscriber engagement tools.

3. CRM or No CRM?

• If you need a built-in marketing automation CRM: Choose an all-in-one solution like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign.
• You already have a CRM: Pick an email tool that integrates seamlessly with it
• If you don’t need a CRM: Go with a simple email marketing tool like Retainful or Omnisend

4. Complexity: User-Friendly vs. Advanced Automation

• If you’re a beginner: Look for drag-and-drop builders, pre-built templates, and intuitive workflows.
• You need advanced automation: Choose a tool with complex email automation workflows, A/B testing, and behavioral triggers.
• If you want a balance: Go for an email marketing tool that offers both simplicity and flexibility.

5. Email ROI

Sure, features and design matter, but if they don’t lead to sales, what’s the point? When you’re investing in an email marketing service provider, you want to know it’s directly contributing to revenue.

So, focus on conversion rates, engagement metrics, and customer retention. If your email marketing tool isn’t helping you generate more revenue, it’s not the right fit – no matter how shiny it looks. ROI is everything.

Calculate your current Email ROI in 2 minutes here: Email ROI Calculator.

Email Marketing Software Comparison Chart

Email Marketing Software	Best for	Free version	Affordability	Built-in CRM
Retainful	Ecommerce businesses	Yes – upto 500 emails	Very affordable and suitable for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses	No
Mailchimp	Businesses looking for basic email marketing	Yes – very limited features	No. Suitable for medium and large buinesses	Yes
Omnisend	Email + SMS for ecommerce	Yes – upto 250 contacts	Yes. Suitable for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses.	No
Yotpo	For ecommerce customer retention	Yes – 10,000 emails	Yes. Suitable for medium sized ecommerce businesses	No
Sendlane	For large/enterprise ecommerce buinsesses	Yes, with limited features	No. Suitable for ecommerce enterprises businesses.	No
Klaviyo	Best for enterprise ecommerce businesses and marketing agencies	Yes – 500 emails/month	Not affordable. Suitable for enterprises.	Yes
Activecampaign	Best for B2B and B2C businesses needing advanced automation with CRM.	No, but offers a free trial.	Not affordable. Suitable for large businesses needing advanced automation.	Yes
Kit	Best for content creators and solopreneurs	Yes upto 10,000 subscribers	Yes.	Yes
Hubspot	Best for enterprise B2C and B2B businesses looking for integrating sales and marketing.	Yes – with limited tools	Not affordable. Suitable for enterprises.	Yes
Brevo	Best for small businesses sending bulk emails and newsletters	Yes. 300 emails/month	Yes.	Yes

10 Best Email Marketing Software

The best email marketing software are:

1. Retainful
2. Mailchimp
3. Omnisend
4. Yotpo
5. Sendlane
6. Klaviyo
7. Activecampaign
8. Kit
9. Hubspot
10. Brevo

Let’s review these email marketing software in detail.

1. Retainful – Best email marketing software for ecommerce

Retainful is the best free email marketing software specifically designed for ecommerce businesses. It is the only tool you need to cover all your bases in ecommerce email marketing.

It has email automation at its core and is very simple to use – you wouldn’t need a 3-page manual to set it up. With Retainful’s automation feature, you can send personalized emails to a variety of customer actions.

You can create targeted sign-up forms and popups that collect the email addresses of your visitors and grow your email list.

Also, this best free email marketing software’s advanced segmentation feature allows you to group your customers based on many pre-defined or custom criteria and send targeted emails.

Coming to crafting your emails effortlessly, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop editor – so you can design stunning email templates without being a design pro.

Its abandoned cart recovery is the best in the market – boasting a higher cart recovery rate than any other platform.

Pros:

• Abandoned Cart Recovery – Proven a huge success in recovering abandoned carts.
• Easy-to-setup automation – Automate in 3 clicks, not 3 pages.
• Add-to-cart and exit-intent popups – Prevent customers from abandoning the cart at the last minute.
• Teams Feature – Invite your team members, and collaborate on tasks.
• Pricing based on active profiles only – Auto list suppression of inactive contacts

Price tiers and Email Volume:

• Free plan: 500 Emails
• $19/month: 20,000 Emails
• $49/month: 50,000 Emails

2. Mailchimp – Best email marketing software for small businesses

MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform. Beyond email, it has expanded into landing pages, forms, and even a built-in CRM for customer profiles.

The visual automation builder in this best email marketing software is very intuitive and easy to use.

MailChimp serves a broad range of industries. It’s popular with e-commerce (Shopify, WooCommerce stores) for basic email marketing needs, though it lacks some advanced cart recovery features out of the box.

This best free email marketing software is a great fit for general business needs, bloggers and nonprofits needing many integrations.

MailChimp introduced a built-in CRM (audience management) that lets you store contact profiles and track customer lifetime value. While not as robust as dedicated CRMs, it covers the basics for small sales teams.

Pros:

• Enhanced automated customer journey builder
• AI suggestions for crafting email content
• Surveys and feedback creator

Cons:

• Lower pricing tiers offer fewer features than before.
• Offers only single-step automation in Free and Essential plans.
• Transactional emails are not included in the Free and Essential plans.

Price tiers and Email Volume:

• Free plan: 1000 Emails
• $4.60/month: 5000 Emails
• $6.87/month: 6000 Emails
• $137.41/month: 150,000 Emails

Related Reading: Explore the best MailChimp Alternatives in our blog: 8 Best Mailchimp Alternatives in 2025

3. Omnisend – Best email and SMS marketing software

Omnisend is purpose-built for e-commerce, offering features like shoppable emails (pulling products directly from your store) and a rich email automation library.

Also, this best SMS and email marketing platform excels with advanced automation workflows – 25+ prebuilt e-commerce sequences and supports multiple channels (email, SMS, push) in one platform.

It allows you to include dynamic content using customer data and behavior, ensuring each recipient receives a tailored message.

This email marketing app is designed for e-commerce growth – from product pickers in the email editor to Shopify/WooCommerce native integrations, it is tailored to driving online sales.

This best email marketing service is praised for being easy to use yet more feature-rich than basic tools.

Notably, Omnisend’s pricing is contact-based unlike Sendlane or Brevo. Also, this best email marketing app doesn’t charge for inactive contacts – you pay for those you can send to, which can save cost.

Pros:

• Enhanced customer journey mapping
• Dynamic content and advanced segmentation
• Comprehensive reporting and analytics
• Ecommerce focused features

Cons:

• Lack of advanced reporting
• Basic template editor

Price tiers and Email Volume:

• Free plan: 500 Emails
• $16/month: 6000 Emails
• $59/month: Unlimited Emails

4. Yotpo – Best for DTC customer retention

Yotpo email marketing software began as a customer reviews and loyalty platform and now offers integrated email and SMS marketing. Its strength lies in unifying customer data for retention marketing – reviews, loyalty rewards, referrals, SMS, and email all tie together.

As a feature-rich email marketing service, Yotpo presents a mild learning curve when you start exploring its more advanced capabilities. Simpler email marketing tools like Retainful and Mailchimp are considered more “plug and play” for beginners, since it aim to simplify process with minimal options.

While Yotpo covers all the basic triggers, it may not offer as many ultra-granular triggers or logic steps as advanced email marketing platforms like Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign.

After 10k emails, this best free email marketing software uses a pay-as-you-send model: there’s no fixed subscriber fee; you simply pay for additional emails sent​.

Pros:

• Generous free plan
• Pricing based only on the email sends

Cons:

• Limited email segmentation and personalization
• Learning curve for beginners and non-technical users

Price tiers and Email Volume:

• 10,000 emails – Free
• 50,000 emails – $60/month

5. Sendlane – Best for enterprise ecommerce businesses

Sendlane is the best SMS and email marketing software, known for advanced automation and white-glove support.

It’s also unique in basing pricing on email sends, not contacts. This is appealing to marketers frustrated by paying for huge dormant lists; instead, you pay for usage.

This email marketing service provider is relatively expensive and geared toward larger senders – its entry pricing is higher than many SMB tools, which is not feasible for small businesses.

Also, this best email marketing software with good customer support differentiates by offering truly unlimited support and guidance, almost like having an email coach on call.

If you are looking for email marketing software with the best customer support, consider Sendlane. It offers separate plans for the level of customer support you need.

Here is what Sendlane offers in their support tiers.

Pros:

• Exceptional onboarding process and customer support.

Cons:

• Pricing on the expensive side

Pricing tiers and email volume:

• 60-day free trial – 100 contacts & 500 email sends
• 50,000 email sends – $600/month

6. Klaviyo – Best for marketing agencies and large ecommerce businesses

Klaviyo email marketing software is e-commerce-focused, featuring advanced email automation and a customer data platform.

This email service provider has a built-in CRM-like profile for each customer, centralizing their data and engagement history.

Also, this best email marketing service offers predictive analytics tools, like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and purchase prediction, helping you to identify high-value customers and target them more effectively.

There’s also a learning curve in this best email marketing platform– while the email editor is friendly, mastering segmentation and multi-step flows is daunting for beginners, with lots of jargon and setup steps​.

One saving grace – if you’re small, Klaviyo pricing has a free plan that is full-featured and great for testing if under 500 monthly sends.

Pros:

• Advanced ecommerce email automation
• Rich integration library

Cons:

• Complicated pricing and billing
• Pricing based on active profiles
• Expensive for small ecommerce businesses
• Steep learning curve

Pricing:

• Free plan – 500 emails/month
• Email Plan – Starts at $20/month for 251-500 active profiles

7. Kit – Best email marketing service for content creators

Kit is the best email marketing software for creators and solopreneurs. It has been built around the needs of writers, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and course creators.

In this best email marketing service provider, you can sell digital products or subscriptions, which is unique in an email marketing platform.

Also, Kit excels in automation for content nurturing – you can tag subscribers based on link clicks or sign-up sources and funnel them into simple drip sequences without needing complex logic (good for creators who want to segment by interests).

This email marketing tool is subscriber-centric (tag-based) rather than list-centric, so you don’t pay twice for the same subscriber on two lists – a plus over some list-based tools. There are no send limits in this email marketing software pricing. You will be billed based only on subscriber count.

But, this email marketing app’s CRM capabilities are minimal. It is suitable for broadcasting and simple automation, not managing complex sales pipelines.

Pros:

• Tag-based subscriber system
• Simple landing page builders
• Easy newsletter referral system,
• Direct paid newsletter support sign-up forms and landing pages

Cons:

• Not feature-rich for design and template customization

Pricing:

• Free – 10,000 subscribers
• Creator – $25/month: Starting 1,000 subscribers and unlimited email sequences
• Creator Pro – $50/month: Starting 1000 subscribers and unlimited users

8. ActiveCampaign – Best email marketing + CRM for advanced automation

ActiveCampaign email marketing platform is celebrated for extremely powerful automation – a visual workflow builder with 135+ triggers/actions and 500+ automation recipes/templates. This allows sophisticated multi-step campaigns for both marketing and sales follow-ups.

Also, ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities allow users to create complex, automated workflows that can trigger personalized emails based on specific actions, behaviors, or time intervals.

Beyond traditional email marketing, this email marketing campaign software offers a built-in CRM system designed to manage and nurture leads throughout the sales funnel.

This best email marketing app straddles both worlds: B2B and B2C.

This email marketing tool also enables site and event tracking, allowing users to monitor subscriber interactions with their website and other digital assets.

There’s no free plan (aside from the 14-day trial). ActiveCampaign repositioned its pricing, and CRM features became add-ons or moved up tiers – so if you want to use AC just for email and keep another CRM, you could stick to Starter plan and not pay for CRM features.

Pros:

• Predictive sending and content
• Dynamic content personalization
• Comprehensive CRM features

Cons:

• No Free plan

Pricing:

• Free trial is available
• $29/month – 1000 contacts
• $49/month – 1000 contacts, Landing page builder, and more features

9. Hubspot – Best CRM and email marketing software

HubSpot is the best email marketing platform with CRM that has a strong email marketing component as part of its Marketing Hub. Its email platform is tightly integrated with HubSpot’s CRM, so all your contacts, their website activity, and your sales data are in one place.

For users who only need email, HubSpot might be overkill; the abundance of features can be overwhelming if you’re not utilizing the CRM, landing pages, etc

With this best email marketing service with CRM, B2B companies with sales teams particularly benefit – marketing can nurture leads then sales can see those interactions in CRM.

This best email marketing software pricing for email is bundled in Marketing Hub plans. With the Free plan you get up to 2,000 email sends/month.

Pros:

• Dynamic list segmentation
• Advanced detailed analytics
• Integrated CRM
• Advanced email automation

Cons:

• Overkill for small businesses
• Requires a steep learning curve
• Basic features in the Free Plan

Price tiers and Email Volume:

• Free plan: 2000 Emails
• $18/month: 5000 Emails
• $800/month: 50,000 Emails
• $3600/month: 200,000 Emails

10. Brevo – Best email marketing software for bulk email sending

Brevo’s is the most cost-effective, all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses. This best email marketing platform has evolved to become a comprehensive CRM suite.

This email marketing software with CRM features a built-in lightweight CRM module. It allows you to manage contacts, deals, and tasks within a straightforward pipeline. While it is not as advanced as HubSpot CRM, it is available for those seeking basic sales tracking integration.

This email marketing software’s visual automation builder is not very easy-to-use. The developer-style language used and prompts for setting the automation fall short compared to very intuitive automation builders like Retainful and Mailchimp.

Brevo is a generalist tool. It is not tailored to e-commerce out of the box.

Also, this email marketing platform has a generous free plan that supports up to 100,000 contacts, advanced segmentation, AI content generator, and more.

Pros:

• Generous free plan
• CRM integration
• High email deliverability

Cons:

• No reporting in the Free and starter plans.
• You can only send 300 emails/ day in a free plan.

Price tiers and email volume:

• Free plan: 300 emails/month
• $25/month: 20k emails
• $65/month: 20k emails + Push notifications and landing page features.

The Verdict – Which email marketing app is best for small businesses, ecommerce, and CRM?

Best email marketing software for small businesses

Top email marketing software for small businesses for non-ecommerce niche are Mailchimp and Brevo.

The best email marketing software for small businesses in ecommerce niche is Retainful. It has a generous free plan and paid plans are more affordable than email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Klaviyo.

Best email marketing app for ecommerce

The best email marketing apps for ecommerce are:

• Retainful – Built for ecommerce, ecommerce-specific email capture, workflows and
• Omnisend – Best email marketing platform and cross-channel workflows

Best email marketing platform with CRM

Hubspot is the best email marketing software with CRM for large businesses.

Also, for small businesses requiring email marketing software with CRM, Brevo will be the best choice.

Best affordable email marketing software

The best affordable email marketing software with a generous free plan is Retainful. It has access to all core features in the free plan.

Wrapping up!!

Choosing the best email marketing software comes down to your specific needs – whether you’re a small business, a growing e-commerce brand, or B2B.

So, test a few of the best email marketing tools, measure your success, and see which best email marketing platform aligns best with your goals. The best email service provider isn’t the most expensive but the one that delivers the highest ROI.

Also Read:

• 9 Best WordPress Email Marketing Plugins Comparison
• 10 Best Email Marketing Apps For Shopify
• 8 Best Email Capture Software Compared

Frequently Asked Questions