Email marketing and newsletters

Email marketing and newsletter platforms store your list, send campaigns and newsletters to it, and run automated sequences such as a welcome series when someone signs up. Small businesses, online stores, creators and publishers use them, from a few hundred contacts to millions. They differ in what they bill for (contacts stored, active profiles, subscribers, or emails sent), in which plan carries multi-step automations, and in what comes around the email: landing pages, SMS, paid newsletters, an ad network, or a customer data platform. This category is about marketing email to a list; for emails your app sends one at a time, see transactional email APIs.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether every list size has a published price, whether the plan can be bought online and month to month, what going over a limit costs, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan: how many contacts a permanent free plan can email each month, whether it includes automations, and whether paid plans have a free trial.
• Price for 5,000 contacts: the monthly cost for 5,000 contacts, 25,000 emails a month and a three-email welcome series, on the cheapest self-serve plan that covers it, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Campaign and growth tools: A/B testing, landing pages, sending without the vendor's branding, SMS, and paid newsletters, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and data location: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a DPA in the terms, and storing data in the EU.
• Team access, API and export: users included, SAML single sign-on, user roles, two-factor sign-in, an API and a self-serve export of your contacts.

How many emails reach the inbox depends on your list and content as much as on the tool, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.