Quick heads up: I’m an affiliate for Kit and ActiveCampaign, which means I get a commission if you sign up through my links. Zero pressure, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra. I recommend these platforms because I genuinely use them, not because of affiliate dollars.
Intro
Kit just raised their prices by 35%. If you blinked, you missed the part where they also killed their $9 and $15 plans a few months before the increase hit. Suddenly, that $29/month plan is $39, and a lot of marketers are asking: what now?
Here’s the thing: Kit made a choice. They’re going all-in on creator monetization (paid newsletters, tipping, digital products), and they’re essentially telling traditional marketers this platform isn’t built for you anymore. Fair enough. But it means a lot of people need to rethink their stack.
So if Kit isn’t right for you (or never was), what is?
This isn’t another “Top 10 Email Tools!” listicle that ranks platforms by how many features they cram into a dashboard. This is a real conversation about who each platform is actually built for, what you’ll pay, and what trade-offs you’re making.
No fluff. No affiliate bias disguised as advice. Just the straight story on five platforms I’ve either used myself or set up for clients.
How to Use This Guide
If you want the shortcut, here’s your decision tree:
- Just starting from zero? Kit (free plan) or Email Octopus
- Solopreneur/Creator building a personal brand? Kit
- Small business on a tight budget? Email Octopus or Mailchimp (free tier)
- Need serious automation for B2B campaigns? ActiveCampaign
- Want all-in-one CRM + marketing + budget to burn? HubSpot
Still with me? Let’s break down what you’re actually getting with each one.
The Headline: Built for creators who monetize their audience
Pricing:
- Free: Up to 10,000 subscribers, 1 automation, 1 sequence, unlimited emails, unlimited landing pages
- Creator: Starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers (recently increased from $29)
- Creator Pro: Starts at $66/month (adds advanced reporting, subscriber scoring, referral system)
Scale matters here. At 5,000 subscribers you’re looking at $89/month on Creator. At 10,000 it jumps to $149/month. Prices increase as your list grows, which is standard, but it gets expensive fast compared to alternatives.
Best For:
- Solopreneurs and creators building a personal brand around their expertise
- Course creators, coaches, consultants, and newsletter writers who sell to their list
- Anyone selling digital products (ebooks, templates, memberships) directly to subscribers
- People who want their emails and landing pages to look professional without hiring a designer
- Beginners who need an intuitive platform that doesn’t require a manual to figure out
Watch Out For:
- That 35% price increase that hit paid plans with only 38 days notice
- Limited design flexibility compared to platforms with drag-and-drop builders
- You’re paying premium prices for creator monetization features even if you never touch them
- If you’re running traditional B2B marketing campaigns, you’re subsidizing tools built for a different use case
- Advanced features (A/B testing, detailed analytics) are locked behind the even more expensive Pro tier
My Take:
Kit’s free plan is legitimately one of the most generous in the industry. Up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited emails? That’s unheard of. Most platforms cap you at 500-2,500 on free tiers. If you’re just starting out and want something that looks good and works without a learning curve, Kit is a no-brainer.
The interface is clean. The visual automation builder actually makes sense. You can set up a welcome sequence, tag people based on their behavior, and segment your list without watching six tutorial videos. Everything just works, and it looks professional right out of the box.
But here’s where it gets complicated: once you need paid features, you’re paying a premium. And that premium is funding features you might not care about: the Creator Network for newsletter cross-promotion, paid newsletter infrastructure, commerce tools for selling digital products.
If you’re a solopreneur monetizing your knowledge through courses, memberships, or paid newsletters, Kit is perfect. You’re using what you’re paying for. But if you’re a marketing manager running campaigns for a company and you just need reliable automation and good deliverability, you’re essentially subsidizing someone else’s business model.
The recent price increase makes this tension even more obvious. Kit is choosing a lane. They’re the creator economy platform. If that’s you, great. If it’s not, there are better options that cost less.
One more thing: Kit’s customer support is genuinely good. They respond quickly, they’re helpful, and the knowledge base is thorough. That matters when you’re troubleshooting at 11pm before a launch.
Bottom line: If you’re building a creator business, Kit is worth the money. If you’re just sending marketing emails for a company, you can do better for less.
Try Kit
The Headline: No-frills email marketing that doesn’t break the bank
Pricing:
- Free: Up to 2,500 subscribers, 10,000 emails/month
- Pro: Starts at $9/month for 500 subscribers, $24/month for 5,000 subscribers, $50/month for 15,000 subscribers
Email Octopus uses Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) for sending, which is why they can keep costs low. You’re getting professional infrastructure without the markup.
Best For:
- Startups and small businesses operating on startup budgets
- Anyone who just needs to send quality newsletters without a million features they’ll never use
- Growing lists that would get prohibitively expensive on platforms with steeper pricing curves
- People who value simplicity and straightforward functionality over fancy interfaces
- Businesses that need core email marketing (automation, segmentation, custom fields) without the bloat
Watch Out For:
- Landing page templates are more basic compared to Kit or other platforms
- Fewer third-party integrations than established players like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign
- No phone support. Everything is email-based (though response times are good)
- Reporting and analytics are functional but not as detailed as enterprise platforms
- If you need complex conditional automations with multiple branches, you might hit limitations
My Take:
Email Octopus is what I recommend when someone says “I just need to send a weekly newsletter and maybe a welcome sequence, and I don’t want to spend $100/month doing it.”
Here’s what happened recently: A startup client hit 500 subscribers on Mailchimp and got hit with a pricing jump they couldn’t justify. They weren’t monetizing their list yet. They were just building an audience and sharing updates. We moved them to Email Octopus. Same functionality they were actually using, fraction of the cost, zero regrets.
The platform has what you need: custom fields for personalization, automation workflows, list segmentation, decent templates. It doesn’t have what you don’t need: a cluttered interface trying to sell you on features, AI writing assistants you’ll ignore, or enterprise reporting dashboards.
Setup is straightforward. You connect your domain for sending, you create your signup forms, you build your automations. The visual automation builder is clean. Not as slick as Kit’s, but perfectly functional. You can trigger sequences based on actions, add delays, segment based on tags. It works.
The email editor is simple. You’re not getting drag-and-drop with a million modules, but honestly? Most marketing emails look better when they’re simpler anyway. Text-focused emails with good copy outperform over-designed templates most of the time.
Deliverability is solid. They use Amazon SES, which is the same infrastructure powering a huge chunk of the internet’s transactional email. Your emails land in inboxes.
One thing I appreciate: Email Octopus doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. They know they’re the budget-friendly, no-BS option, and they lean into it. There’s no pressure to upgrade to tiers with features you don’t need. The pricing is transparent. You know exactly what you’re getting.
The main limitations are around integrations and advanced automation. If you need to connect to a complex CRM or run multi-step conditional workflows with a dozen branches, you’ll probably outgrow Email Octopus. But most small businesses and startups? They’re nowhere near hitting those limits.
Bottom line: If you need reliable, affordable email marketing without the fluff, Email Octopus delivers. You won’t get all the bells and whistles, but you also won’t pay for them.
Check out Email Octopus.
The Headline: The household name with a complicated reputation
Pricing:
- Free: Up to 500 contacts (used to be 2,000), 1,000 emails/month, basic templates
- Essentials: Starts at $13/month for 500 contacts, $20/month for 500 contacts with added features
- Standard: $20/month for 500 contacts (includes automation, A/B testing, dynamic content)
- Premium: $350/month for 10,000 contacts (advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, phone support)
Mailchimp’s pricing model is contact-based, meaning you pay for each individual on your list, including those who have unsubscribed but remain in your system. You have to manually clean your list to avoid paying for dead contacts.
Best For:
- Complete beginners who need a recognizable brand and hand-holding
- E-commerce businesses that need Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce integrations
- Teams that value having hundreds of templates to choose from
- Small businesses that want built-in landing pages, ads, and social posting in one place
- People who prioritize brand name recognition (for whatever reason)
Watch Out For:
- The free plan got way less generous. It dropped from 2,000 contacts to 500, making it almost unusable for real businesses
- Pricing scales aggressively as your list grows, often faster than alternatives
- The interface tries to do everything, which makes it feel cluttered and overwhelming
- You’re paying for contacts even if they’re inactive or unsubscribed unless you manually archive them
- Customer support on lower tiers is limited and can be slow
- Features you think should be standard (like send-time optimization) are locked behind higher-priced tiers
My Take:
Mailchimp is the platform everyone knows because it’s the one everyone’s heard of. That doesn’t make it the best choice. It just makes it the default choice, and there’s a big difference.
Let me be clear: Mailchimp is fine. It works. Millions of businesses use it successfully. But it’s become a victim of its own success. They’ve tried to turn into an all-in-one marketing platform, which means the email marketing part (their original strength) has gotten bloated and complicated.
When someone tells me they’re using Mailchimp, my first question is always “why?” If the answer is “because I’ve heard of it,” that’s not a good reason. If the answer is “because I need their specific e-commerce integrations” or “because I’m already using their ads and landing page features,” okay, that makes sense.
The free tier used to be incredible. 2,000 contacts was enough to actually build something. Now it’s 500 contacts and 1,000 emails per month, which means you’ll outgrow it almost immediately if you’re doing anything serious. At that point you’re paying $13-20/month, and suddenly Email Octopus at $9/month or Kit’s free tier (10,000 subscribers!) starts looking pretty good.
The interface is busy. You’ve got email campaigns, automations, landing pages, websites, ads, postcards, and social media scheduling all fighting for attention in the sidebar. If you only need email marketing, it’s distracting. You’re constantly clicking past features you’ll never use.
The email builder itself is functional. Drag-and-drop works, templates are plentiful (sometimes too many options is its own problem), and you can make things look decent. But it’s not particularly modern or intuitive compared to newer platforms.
Automation exists, but it feels clunky compared to Kit or ActiveCampaign. You can build basic sequences and triggers, but if you want sophisticated conditional logic or complex workflows, you’ll get frustrated. And advanced automation features are paywalled behind Standard tier and up.
Here’s my biggest frustration with Mailchimp: the contact-based pricing model charges you for people who unsubscribed. Unless you’re regularly archiving those contacts, you’re literally paying for people who don’t want your emails. It’s a hidden cost that adds up.
One area where Mailchimp does shine: integrations. They’ve been around long enough that they integrate with pretty much everything. Your e-commerce platform, your CRM, your website builder, your social media. If integration breadth matters to you, Mailchimp has it.
Customer support is decent on higher tiers, frustratingly limited on lower ones. You’ll be dealing with knowledge base articles and chatbots unless you’re paying for Premium.
Bottom line: Mailchimp isn’t bad, it’s just not exceptional at anything anymore. If you need specific integrations they offer or you’re already deep in their ecosystem, fine. But don’t choose it just because it’s a household name. There are better, cheaper, simpler options for most use cases.
See MailChimp.
The Headline: Powerful automation for marketers who actually use it
Pricing:
- Starter: Starts at $15/month for 1,000 contacts (very limited features, basically unusable)
- Plus: Starts at $49/month for 1,000 contacts (this is where real features start)
- Professional: Starts at $79/month for 1,000 contacts (predictive sending, attribution, split automation)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing starting around $145/month for 1,000 contacts
Note: The Starter plan doesn’t include real automation or CRM features. You need Plus minimum to actually use ActiveCampaign as intended. So realistically, you’re starting at $49/month.
Best For:
- B2B companies running multi-touch nurture campaigns across weeks or months
- Marketing teams that need sophisticated segmentation and conditional logic
- Businesses where the CRM and email platform need to be tightly integrated
- Organizations that live in data and need detailed reporting and attribution
- Anyone running complex lifecycle marketing with multiple customer journeys
- Teams that have the time and skill to set up and maintain advanced automations
Watch Out For:
- Steep learning curve. Plan on spending real time learning the platform
- The interface looks like it time-traveled from 2005. Functional? Yes. Beautiful? No. If you value a clean, modern workspace, this will grate on you
- Very easy to pay for Professional or Enterprise features you’ll never actually use
- If you’re just sending newsletters, this is massive overkill and a waste of money
- Setup takes time. You can’t just jump in and start sending like simpler platforms
- The interface is powerful but dense; it assumes you know what you’re doing
- Customer support is good but you’ll need it more often because the platform is complex
My Take:
ActiveCampaign is a beast. It can do almost anything you could possibly want for email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM. The problem? Most people don’t need 80% of what it offers, and that complexity costs you in both dollars and time.
Let me paint two scenarios:
Scenario A: You’re a B2B SaaS company with a 90-day sales cycle. Prospects need multiple touchpoints, nurture sequences, behavior-based triggers, and detailed lead scoring. You need to track which emails lead to demos, which demos convert, and attribute revenue back to specific campaigns. Your marketing team lives in the platform daily, building and optimizing automations.
For you, ActiveCampaign is perfect. You’re using what you’re paying for, and the ROI is clear.
Scenario B: You’re a small business owner who sends a weekly newsletter and wants a welcome sequence for new subscribers. Maybe you occasionally run a promotion.
For you, ActiveCampaign is like buying a Formula 1 race car to commute to your office job. It’ll get you there, but you’re paying for performance you’ll never use.
Here’s what ActiveCampaign does exceptionally well: automation. The visual automation builder is the most powerful I’ve used. You can create incredibly sophisticated workflows with conditional splits, wait conditions, goal-based automation, and machine learning-powered sending optimization. You can say “if someone clicks this link but doesn’t click that link within 3 days, send them to this branch of the sequence unless they’re tagged as X, in which case move them here.”
That level of control is amazing when you need it. It’s overwhelming when you don’t.
The CRM integration is genuinely good. Contacts sync automatically between your email platform and your sales pipeline. Your sales team can see every email interaction, and your marketing team can trigger automations based on deal stages. If you’re trying to align sales and marketing, this matters.
Reporting and analytics are detailed. You can track everything: open rates, click rates, conversions, revenue attribution, automation performance. You can see which automations are driving results and which are wasting time. For data-driven marketers, this is gold. For people who just want to know “did my email work,” it’s overkill.
One thing that frustrates me: the Starter plan at $15/month is basically unusable. It’s missing the core features that make ActiveCampaign worth considering. You really need Plus at $49/month minimum, which means the “starting at” pricing is misleading.
Setup is not quick. You’ll spend time mapping out your automations, setting up your tags and custom fields, configuring your pipelines, building your sequences. If you don’t have that time or that skillset, you’ll struggle. This isn’t a “sign up and start sending emails in 20 minutes” platform.
Customer support is solid. They offer chat, email, and phone support depending on your tier. The knowledge base is extensive. You’ll use both because the platform is complex enough that you’ll have questions.
Deliverability is excellent. ActiveCampaign has invested heavily in sender reputation and infrastructure. Your emails land in inboxes.
Bottom line: If you’re running sophisticated marketing campaigns with multiple touchpoints and you need powerful automation and CRM integration, ActiveCampaign is worth every penny. If you’re sending newsletters and basic sequences, save your money and your sanity. Use something simpler.
Explore Active Campaign.
The Headline: The all-in-one solution (if your budget can handle it)
Pricing:
- Free Tools: Very limited, basically a trial to get you hooked on the ecosystem
- Marketing Hub Starter: $15/month for 1,000 marketing contacts (very basic features)
- Marketing Hub Professional: Starts at $800/month for 2,000 marketing contacts
- Marketing Hub Enterprise: Starts at $3,600/month for 10,000 marketing contacts
Important: HubSpot separates “marketing contacts” from total contacts. You pay based on how many people you’re actively marketing to, not your total database. This can save money, but it’s also confusing and you can accidentally blow through your limit.
Best For:
- Mid-size to enterprise companies that need email + CRM + marketing automation + landing pages + ads + analytics in one integrated platform
- Organizations with marketing teams (plural) who need different people working in different modules
- Companies already using HubSpot for sales CRM who want marketing tightly integrated
- Businesses that value having everything under one roof over best-of-breed tools
- Teams with budget who can actually afford Professional or Enterprise tiers
- Organizations that need detailed attribution, reporting, and revenue tracking across the entire funnel
Watch Out For:
- Pricing scales FAST. You can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars per month very quickly
- You’re locked into the HubSpot ecosystem, which is the point, but it’s also limiting
- The free tier is basically unusable for real work. It’s a lead-gen tool for HubSpot, not a functional platform
- Massive overkill for small businesses, solopreneurs, and most startups
- You’ll pay for features you never use just to access the features you do need
- If you decide to leave HubSpot, migrating out is painful and expensive
My Take:
HubSpot is an entire marketing operating system. Email is just one small piece of a much bigger platform that includes CRM, landing pages, forms, ads, social media, analytics, reporting, workflows, chatbots, and more.
If that sounds amazing, it can be, if you’re the right size company with the right budget and the right use case.
If that sounds overwhelming and expensive, it probably is.
Let’s be clear about who HubSpot is actually for: companies with complex marketing operations. You have a marketing team (not just one person wearing all the hats). You need different people managing email campaigns, paid ads, landing pages, and lead scoring. You want everything connected so when someone fills out a form, it triggers an email sequence, updates the CRM, notifies sales, and tracks attribution all the way to revenue.
For that use case, HubSpot is excellent. Everything talks to everything else. The reporting is comprehensive. You can see the entire customer journey from first touch to closed deal. The platform is mature, stable, and well-supported.
But here’s the reality: Most small businesses and solopreneurs don’t need this. You don’t need an enterprise platform when you’re sending one email per week and managing a few hundred customers. You’re paying for a massive infrastructure you’ll never fully utilize.
The free tier is clever marketing. You can use basic CRM features and send a limited number of emails, which gets you hooked on the interface and the ecosystem. But the moment you need real marketing automation, meaningful reporting, or advanced features, you’re jumping to Professional at $800/month. That’s not a typo.
The email builder itself is solid. Drag-and-drop works well, templates are modern, personalization is easy. But the email builder in a $800/month platform isn’t meaningfully better than the one in a $50/month platform. You’re paying for integration and ecosystem, not a superior email editor.
Automation in HubSpot is powerful and well-designed. You can build complex workflows with branches, delays, and conditions. It’s not quite as flexible as ActiveCampaign, but it’s damn close and the integration with the rest of HubSpot makes up for it.
Here’s the catch: even basic automation features get paywalled aggressively. I had a client paying thousands per month for HubSpot, and when we tried to set up a simple nurture sequence for form submissions, we discovered they could only trigger ONE workflow per form. Not one workflow with multiple emails…one workflow, period. Want to send a multi-touch nurture series after someone fills out a form? That’ll be an upgrade, please. For a feature that’s standard in platforms costing a tenth of the price.
This is HubSpot’s model: they give you the infrastructure, then nickel-and-dime you for features that should be included at your tier.
Where HubSpot truly shines: reporting and attribution. You can track everything. Which marketing channels drive leads? Which emails drive conversions? What’s the ROI of your paid ads? How long does it take someone to go from subscriber to customer? All of that is visible and exportable.
Customer support is generally excellent, especially on higher tiers. You get dedicated support reps, onboarding help, and extensive training resources. You’re paying for it, but it’s there.
One massive consideration: switching costs. Once you’re in HubSpot, moving to another platform is a huge undertaking. Your entire marketing operation runs through it. Migrating contacts, automations, landing pages, forms, tracking, and integrations is a months-long project. HubSpot knows this, which is why they can charge what they charge.
Bottom line: If you’re running a real marketing operation with budget, team, and need for integration across multiple tools, HubSpot makes sense. It’s the all-in-one platform that actually works. But if you’re a small business, startup, or solopreneur, this is overkill by a factor of ten. Save yourself thousands of dollars and go with something built for your scale.
Learn more about HubSpot.
| Platform | Best For | Starting Price | Key Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Kit
|
Creators monetizing through courses, newsletters, and digital products
|
Free
up to 10K subscribers
|
Most generous free plan + creator-focused features
|
|
Email Octopus
|
Small businesses on tight budgets who need straightforward email marketing
|
$9/month
for 500 subscribers
|
Best value with no feature bloat
|
|
Mailchimp
|
E-commerce businesses needing extensive third-party integrations
|
$13/month
for 500 contacts
|
More integrations than any other platform
|
|
ActiveCampaign
|
B2B companies running sophisticated multi-touch nurture campaigns
|
$49/month
realistically (Plus plan)
|
Most powerful automation builder available
|
|
HubSpot
|
Enterprise companies needing full marketing operations platform
|
$800/month
Professional tier
|
Complete integrated marketing ecosystem
|
The Bottom Line: How to Actually Choose
There’s no “best” email marketing platform. Anyone who tells you there is either hasn’t used multiple platforms or they’re trying to sell you something.
There’s only the best platform for your situation right now.
Here’s your decision framework:
Starting from scratch with no list? Kit’s free plan (up to 10,000 subscribers) or Email Octopus (affordable from day one and free for up to 2,500 subscribers)
Building a creator business and monetizing your audience? Kit (designed for exactly this use case)
Running a small business on a tight budget? Email Octopus (best value for basic but solid functionality)
Need sophisticated automation for B2B campaigns? ActiveCampaign (if you’ll actually use the power)
Want everything integrated and have enterprise budget? HubSpot (if you can afford Professional or Enterprise)
Just need to send emails without overthinking it? Email Octopus (simple, cheap, works)
The era of “one platform for everyone” is dead. Tools are specializing. Kit doubled down on creators. ActiveCampaign owns sophisticated automation. HubSpot is the enterprise all-in-one. Email Octopus is the budget champion.
Your job isn’t to pick the platform with the longest feature list or the biggest brand name. Your job is to pick the tool built for the work you actually need to do.
Most people overpay for features they never use. Don’t be most people.
Want to try one of these platforms? Check them out: Kit | Email Octopus | Mailchimp | ActiveCampaign | HubSpot
Still not sure which platform fits your needs? I help businesses streamline their marketing operations and pick the right tools for their actual use case, not the use case some sales page promises. Let’s talk through your options
