Since its inception in 1995, Constant Contact has established itself as one of the pioneering email marketing platforms, growing to serve over 650,000 users worldwide. While older reviews often praise its usability, recent customer feedback reveals a more mixed sentiment.
One distinct feature that sets Constant Contact apart is its integrated event management capability, which is not commonly found in other email systems. This niche focus makes it particularly valuable for event-driven marketing, especially within sectors like real estate in the US.
While Constant Contact offers a fair platform for basic email marketing, it often charges a premium for features that are standard in many Constant Contact alternatives. Its standard plans, in particular, can be significantly more expensive.
Constant Contact Review Summary
Constant Contact is designed for small to medium-sized businesses, yet its pricing structure often deviates from other SMB-focused tools. Plans begin at an affordable $12/month for up to 500 subscribers, but the price escalates sharply thereafter. This can make it nearly twice as expensive as alternative platforms, especially considering its feature set isn’t considered advanced by industry standards.
The platform is popular among users who value phone support, a standout feature. However, essential functionalities like advanced segmentation and automations are often available only at premium tiers, contrasting with competitors that offer these as standard.
Constant Contact Pricing and Plans: How Much Does It Cost?
Constant Contact updated its pricing in the US in 2023, with a global rollout in 2025. These new tiers introduce features such as simple AI tools, additional email templates, and Stripe integration. However, these come at a higher cost, with more features being shifted to expensive plans, requiring users to pay more for tools that have become industry staples.
| Contacts | Constant Contact Lite | Brevo Starter* | MailerLite Growing Business |
| Free plan | No | ||
| 500 | $12 | $9 | $10 |
| 1,000 | $30 | $17 | $15 |
| 2,500 | $50 | $29 | $25 |
| 5,000 | $80 | $29 | $39 |
| 10,000 | $120 | $39 | $73 |
| 25,000 | $280 | $69 | $159 |
| 50,000 | $430 | – | $289 |
*Brevo plans include unlimited contacts, with this price based on 4 emails per contact per month.
Constant Contact offers three main pricing plans: Lite, Standard, and Premium. Each tier unlocks more features, and pricing within each plan varies based on the number of contacts. Email limits are set at 10x your contact number on the Lite plan and 12x on the Standard plan, with overage fees of $0.002 per email.
Compared to competitors, Constant Contact is notably more expensive. For instance, MailerLite also prices based on subscribers but includes unlimited emails on all its plans. Brevo, on the other hand, offers unlimited contacts across all plans, with pricing determined by the number of emails sent. This model can lead to significant savings for larger lists; users with 10,000 or more contacts could save hundreds of dollars by choosing Brevo.
In terms of features, Constant Contact‘s Lite plan is quite basic, providing only essential email building and sending tools, along with social media posts, polls, and event registration forms. It notably lacks industry-standard features like personalization and A/B testing for subject lines, and offers only single, basic segmentation without the ability to schedule emails.
These crucial features are added to the Standard tier, but custom automations are still absent, limited to three pre-built workflows. This is a significant omission given the cost of the Standard plan.
Both MailerLite and Brevo offer features on their cheapest plans that Constant Contact reserves for its Premium tier. MailerLite provides dynamic content for email personalization, while Brevo includes syncing campaigns to Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Both also feature robust free plans that allow sending thousands of emails monthly, with features comparable to Constant Contact’s Lite tier. Constant Contact, by contrast, only offers a 30-day free trial.
Constant Contact Core Features
- Drag-and-drop email editor: Constant Contact’s email editor is straightforward, enabling quick email creation, though it offers limited layouts and customization options.
- Templates: Recent updates have expanded the email template library to over 200, with several modern designs now available.
- Automation: Automation capabilities are very restricted until the Premium tier, offering only a few basic, largely uncustomizable workflow templates.
- Contact management: The platform provides strong list-building options with over 200 forms and lead magnets. Users can create engagement segments based on tracking data for each contact, though costs increase significantly with list size.
- Social media posting and ads: Constant Contact includes tools for managing social media posts and digital ads, allowing connections to Google Ads Manager and Facebook Lead Ads.
- Event marketing: Unique to Constant Contact are its integrated tools for organizing and managing events, including attendee list creation, promotions, and ticket sales.
Constant Contact Pros and Cons
Pros
- User-friendly: Constant Contact is highly beginner-friendly, allowing users to create and send email marketing campaigns quickly, often within 30 minutes.
- Event management and SMS marketing: Beyond email, Constant Contact offers integrated event management, social media marketing, and SMS marketing for US users.
- Phone support customer service: A key differentiator is Constant Contact‘s phone support on all paid plans, which is rare among email marketing services. Availability varies by region but typically spans six days a week, complemented by live chat and a comprehensive self-help knowledge base.
Cons
- Lack of automation: Constant Contact surprisingly treats advanced automation as a premium add-on, whereas many competitors include it as standard.
- Expensive compared to others: Constant Contact struggles to compete on price with many rivals, offering fewer features for higher costs. This becomes particularly noticeable as email lists grow, potentially limiting growth for smaller businesses.
- Difficult to cancel: Numerous users report difficulties canceling their Constant Contact subscription, often requiring a phone call to customer service rather than a simple in-account option.
Constant Contact Review Rating Details
| Ease of Use | Constant Contact is highly user-friendly, with a clean interface that makes features easy to locate and core email marketing tools simple to learn. |
| Creating & Sending Newsletters | For basic email marketing, Constant Contact excels, enabling quick and easy design of newsletters and other email types. The new AI tools for campaign and content creation are a valuable enhancement. |
| Email Templates | The recently updated email template library offers over 200 options. While many designs are of reasonable quality, some still appear dated, and users often desire greater customization freedom. |
| Marketing Automation | Automation is a weaker aspect. Users cannot customize their own workflows until the Premium plan, and even then, options fall short of industry standards. |
| List Management | Constant Contact provides standard contact management functions, but advanced options are limited. It’s disappointing that segmentation capabilities are capped until the Premium plan. |
| Personalization | Personalization features are locked behind higher paywalls. Subject line personalization is available only on the Standard plan, and dynamic content is exclusive to the Premium plan. |
| Landing Pages & Forms | Lead generation is a strong suit, with over 200 form templates and specialized ‘lead magnet’ forms. Email subscriptions can also be linked to social media accounts, though more landing page templates would be beneficial. |
| Reporting & Analytics | The platform offers some advanced reporting features, including the ability to create segments from data. However, features like click heat maps are restricted to the Premium tier. |
| Customer Service | Constant Contact‘s customer service receives positive feedback, with phone support on all plans being a unique selling proposition. The main drawback is reported long waiting times by some customers. |
| Deliverability | Constant Contact maintains good average deliverability, utilizing DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication. It also actively monitors blocklists and suspicious user activity to safeguard sender reputation. |
| Integrations & API ✔️ | A wide selection of over 300 native third-party integrations is available, with thousands more connectable via Zapier. However, some users have reported occasional glitches with certain connections. |
| Interface Languages | Constant Contact features an English interface. Its knowledge base is translated into English, German, Spanish, and French. |
| Customer Satisfaction | Customer satisfaction with Constant Contact is mixed, averaging 4/5 in user reviews on G2 and 4.3/5 on Capterra. |
Overall Score
Constant Contact exhibits notable strengths, particularly in its user-friendliness for creating and sending campaigns, and its commitment to phone customer service. However, its score is significantly impacted by weaknesses in automation and personalization. For its cost, many alternative platforms offer superior features in these areas.
Is Constant Contact for you?
Recommended if:
- You’ve used it before. For businesses that don’t require advanced personalization and automation, and are already familiar with Constant Contact, it can be a functional platform.
- You need phone support. If responsive phone support is a priority for your email marketing needs, Constant Contact is a solid choice, offering this service across all paid plans.
- You run and promote events. Constant Contact’s integrated event marketing tools are highly beneficial for organizing online and in-person events, enabling guest list management, promotions, and ticket sales directly within the platform.
Not recommended if:
- You want a good price. Constant Contact is more expensive than many competitors, with cost differences becoming substantial as your list grows. For affordable alternatives, explore comprehensive reviews of the best email marketing solutions.
- You want to customize your email designs. While Constant Contact offers numerous templates, customization options are limited. For unique design control, consider platforms like MailerLite, Moosend, or GetResponse.
- You’re looking for email marketing automation. Constant Contact falls short of modern email automation standards. For robust workflow creation that saves time and money, platforms like ActiveCampaign are significantly better.
- You want to personalize your campaigns. Constant Contact’s personalization options are underwhelming. The Standard plan only allows subject line personalization, and segmentation is restricted, hindering effective email targeting. Other platforms offer superior personalization and targeting capabilities, which are crucial for email marketing success.
- You’re an affiliate marketer. Constant Contact does not permit affiliate marketing. For alternatives that support affiliate campaigns, consider specialized reviews.
For the reasons above, numerous superior email marketing tools are available. Below are five top alternatives.
5 Best Constant Contact Alternatives
When exploring email marketing platforms, it’s beneficial to compare options as many offer advanced features at more competitive price points. Here’s a summary of recommended Constant Contact alternatives:
- Best for advanced automation: ActiveCampaign
- Best for affordable all-in-one marketing: Brevo
- Best for newsletters and small business email campaigns: MailerLite
- Best for funnel-building: GetResponse
MailerLite
While Constant Contact is beginner-friendly, MailerLite offers an excellent free entry point into email marketing, including 12,000 emails per month and up to 1,000 contacts. In comparison, Constant Contact Lite costs $30 a month for 1,000 contacts and 10,000 emails, with similar features.
MailerLite is also significantly more affordable on its paid plans, offering an even more user-friendly interface ideal for straightforward email marketing tasks, such as managing a newsletter.
Brevo
A key distinction between Constant Contact and Brevo lies in affordability for larger contact lists. Brevo plans feature unlimited contacts, with pricing scaled by the number of emails sent. This makes Brevo a much better value for lists exceeding 10,000 contacts.
Brevo also boasts a robust free plan with no contact limit, allowing users to send 300 emails daily. Beyond marketing, Brevo integrates transactional emails within its marketing plans and offers additional products for sales CRM, data management, and live chat.
GetResponse
GetResponse is the preferred choice for those seeking advanced features without enterprise-level pricing. Similar to Constant Contact, GetResponse uses a tiered pricing model to unlock features, but it is generally more affordable, especially as contact lists expand.
Moreover, GetResponse includes advanced tools on its cheaper plans that are completely absent in Constant Contact. For example, Constant Contact‘s Standard plan has very limited automation, whereas GetResponse’s middle tier, “Marketing Automation,” provides comprehensive and powerful automation capabilities missing from Constant Contact. It also offers a dedicated tier for creating and selling online courses, a feature not found in Constant Contact.
Moosend
Constant Contact has historically targeted SMBs, but Moosend presents a user-friendly, more affordable, and feature-rich alternative. Its single paid plan is cheaper than Constant Contact Lite, regardless of contact numbers, and includes advanced automation and contact segmentation—features often lacking in Constant Contact. It also supports in-email selling for e-commerce businesses and allows unlimited email sends.
ActiveCampaign
The primary distinction between Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign lies in their approach to marketing automation. Constant Contact largely neglects this area, offering advanced automation tools only on its Premium plan. ActiveCampaign, however, has evolved into a leading marketing automation specialist, enabling the creation of virtually any workflow through over 900 fully customizable templates.
Its visual workflow builder is user-friendly, and ActiveCampaign still manages to remain competitive with Constant Contact on price.
Constant Contact Review: Email Marketing Service
Understanding an email marketing software truly comes from practical experience. To assess Constant Contact‘s user-friendliness and suitability for small businesses, we conducted a thorough review by signing up and testing its functionalities. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the experience.
Email Templates in Constant Contact
Our evaluation of any new email marketing platform typically begins with its template library, as this often defines the starting point for campaign creation.
Constant Contact provides easy access to its templates via a “View all templates” link on the home page dashboard, through “Marketing channels > Email” in the main left-hand menu, and via a “Quick actions” section with links to key tools.
Users have ample template options, including starting an email from scratch, coding with HTML, converting a PDF into an editable template (a niche tool), and using BrandKit to match website styles. Pre-designed templates are also available.
Constant Contact offers over 200 pre-made templates. While the newer designs are of good quality and variety, some older, dated templates remain. The filtering options for templates are not immediately obvious. For example, finding newsletter templates requires navigating to the “Featured” tab on the Templates page, which isn’t an intuitive process.
Creating and sending newsletters with Constant Contact
Newsletter building serves as an excellent benchmark for any email marketing service, evaluating template quality, ease of creation, and customization options, including personalization and testing capabilities.
Constant Contact provides over 90 newsletter templates, offering a wide initial selection. Beyond the templates themselves, the editing process—how much control users have over design, ease of customization, and options for personalization and testing—is crucial.
Constant Contact lives up to its reputation for simplifying email creation for beginners, with the example above taking approximately two minutes from template selection. The drag-and-drop editor is exceptionally simple and straightforward; content blocks are visible on the left, and editing options appear upon clicking a block in the main window.
However, this simplicity often comes at the cost of design control. Customization options are limited, with content blocks primarily stacking in rows. The “Layouts” section within the “Build” menu allows some arrangement changes, but choices are restricted, often resulting in similar-looking designs, unlike platforms like MailerLite which offer more flexible block arrangements.
Constant Contact also offers limited email personalization. Dynamic content is exclusive to the Premium plan, meaning all recipients receive identical emails on lower tiers. The Lite plan notably lacks the ability to personalize subject lines with recipient names.
When Lite plan users attempt to personalize a subject line, an upgrade message appears:
Similar prompts appear for subject line recommendations, despite AI content suggestions within emails being available on the Lite plan. This approach of gating basic, success-oriented features behind upgrade messages can be frustrating for users, highlighting missing functionalities.
Constant Contact Marketing Automation
Constant Contact has made improvements to its automation features in recent years, including new workflow templates and an updated visual builder. However, even with these enhancements, Constant Contact‘s automation options remain modest, especially since full features are only unlocked with the Premium plan. Its automation tools do not meet the standards of a premium offering.
The platform provides 12 workflow templates, with 7 requiring integration with e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Wix. The remaining templates are very basic, such as a ‘Welcome Nurture Series’ for sequential emails or a ‘Welcome: Basic’ workflow for a single triggered email when someone joins a list.
The utility of these basic templates on the cheapest tiers is questionable, mostly serving absolute beginners. While templates aim to save time, the ‘Welcome: Basic’ workflow is so simple it could be created manually in moments. Customization is extremely limited, with only two rules and five actions, and no option for split paths or conditional logic.
E-commerce workflows, such as Abandoned Cart sequences, are more useful and include conditional logic, allowing for targeted emails to, for example, local versus international customers, or different messages for high- versus low-value abandoned carts. However, these templates, which integrate with platforms like Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce, are only available at the Premium tier.
The “build your own workflow” option, found on the Premium tier, offers a much broader selection of actions, rules, and 12 trigger options. This level of functionality aligns more closely with modern email marketing automation expectations, but its placement behind a premium paywall is a significant limitation for most users.
Reporting and Analytics in Constant Contact
Constant Contact provides standard email reporting and analytics features, but again, the most valuable insights are often reserved for higher-tier plans.
On the Lite plan, users access basic email marketing reports, including open rates, click rates, bounces, and unsubscribes. These can be analyzed by trends over time or individual campaigns, but yield limited detailed insights for performance improvement.
The Standard plan introduces “drill down reporting,” which details which contacts open emails and click links, as well as specific link clicks. This information is considerably more useful for segmenting contacts based on engagement and tailoring campaigns. The platform also provides industry benchmarks for performance comparison.
On the Premium plan, users can track e-commerce store activity and build segments from that data. This tier also unlocks “heat maps,” which visually display the most clicked links within emails, offering quick insights into link performance.
Constant Contact Integrations
Constant Contact‘s presentation of its integration numbers can be somewhat misleading. The “Integrations & Apps” page initially lists nearly 8,000 connections, suggesting extensive compatibility. However, the vast majority of these integrations are facilitated through Zapier, meaning users need a separate Zapier account, which incurs additional costs.
Constant Contact clarifies that it offers over 300 native integrations, representing direct connections without intermediaries. This selection includes many prominent platforms such as e-commerce solutions like Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce. Additionally, it integrates with Canva for user-friendly image editing and graphic design, and Salesforce for CRM and other functionalities. Despite this, some users have reported occasional glitches with certain connections.
Constant Contact Customer Support
Customer support is a standout strength for Constant Contact. Its provision of phone and live agent chat support across all plans is a unique offering, indicative of the company’s substantial resources.
These services are comprehensive: live chat is available 18 hours a day, five days a week. US customers receive 12 hours of weekday phone support and 8 hours on Saturdays. In Australia, hotlines operate 8.5 hours Monday to Friday. While UK customers have shorter time slots, phone lines are still open six days a week, including Saturdays. The only reported negative is occasional long waiting times by some users.
Final Conclusion: Is Constant Contact the right email tool for you?
This review highlights that for comprehensive value and email marketing performance, superior alternatives to Constant Contact are readily available. While the platform excels in areas like deliverability, customer service, and ease of use, it significantly underperforms in automation, personalization, and overall value for money.
Despite its drawbacks, Constant Contact retains appeal for users seeking a simple, user-friendly service who do not require advanced automation or segmentation. However, such users may quickly outgrow its capabilities. The integrated event management tools are a notable strength, making Constant Contact a viable option for businesses focused on running events.
For all other needs, numerous platforms offer better features at more competitive prices. Here’s a summary of top recommendations:
- Best for advanced automation: ActiveCampaign
- Best for affordable all-in-one marketing: Brevo
- Best for newsletters and small business email campaigns: MailerLite and Moosend
- Best for funnel-building: GetResponse
Constant Contact Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What are the downsides of Constant Contact?
Is it safe to use Constant Contact?
What is better than Constant Contact?
For specific tools, Brevo includes transactional emails. Moosend is a strong option for small e-commerce businesses, with e-commerce integrations often much cheaper than Constant Contact’s Premium plan. GetResponse, MailerLite, and Brevo all surpass Constant Contact for automated email campaigns. For premium automation at affordable prices, ActiveCampaign is often the best choice.
Which is better, Mailchimp or Constant Contact?
However, many other platforms are recommended over both. MailerLite, Brevo, and Moosend are often far cheaper and provide better features. For more advanced automation capabilities, consider ActiveCampaign or GetResponse.