Top 9 Email Newsletter Software for Engaging Campaigns

Email newsletters are a powerful tool for business growth. They save time, create attractive communications, and drive higher open rates, clicks, and conversions. With numerous email newsletter software options available, choosing the right one can be daunting.

This comprehensive guide explores the 9 best newsletter software platforms, selected based on critical factors:

• Affordability: Excellent value for money across various plans.
• Template Variety: Abundance of professional and customizable email templates.
• User-Friendliness: Intuitive interfaces for easy navigation and design.
• Automation & Segmentation: Robust features for targeted campaigns and efficiency.
• Detailed Reporting: Clear analytics to track performance and optimize strategies.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting with email newsletters, discover the ideal platform to elevate your campaigns.

9 Best Email Newsletter Software: Quick Comparison

Here’s a quick summary of the top email newsletter software platforms:

These 9 popular and well-respected email newsletter platforms offer a robust set of core features to power your campaigns:

• Intuitive Drag-and-Drop Editor: Craft attractive newsletters with ease, no coding required.
• Diverse HTML Templates: Access a wide range of pre-designed templates for quick and professional layouts.
• Powerful Automation: Streamline your email sequences and follow-ups.
• Integrated Landing Page Builder: Create compelling landing pages to capture leads.
• Customizable Sign-Up Forms: Grow your subscriber list effectively.
• Comprehensive Campaign Analytics: Track performance, open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
• Free Plans or Trials: Test out features before committing to a paid subscription.

Now, let’s dive into the details of each platform for an in-depth comparison.

1. Moosend: Best for User-Friendly Marketing

Moosend stands out for its excellent value and highly user-friendly interface.

The platform features a unified drag-and-drop editor for crafting emails, landing pages, and forms, ensuring a consistent and familiar experience. Businesses can select from over 75 professionally designed email and newsletter templates, making it simple to create attractive communications.

Moosend excels in basic automations, offering pre-made workflow templates known as ‘recipes’. These provide an excellent starting point for those new to email sequence automation and are easily customizable within Moosend’s intuitive timeline-based workflow editor.

For businesses selling digital or tangible goods, Moosend allows direct integration with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce to import products directly into newsletters. Its robust campaign tracking provides insights into sales generated from email campaigns, facilitating advanced segmentation. Contacts can be segmented based on their website behavior, enabling highly targeted messaging. Additionally, Moosend offers excellent customer support with live chat available to all users.

Moosend Pricing

Moosend offers a straightforward Pro plan starting at $9 a month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails, positioning it as one of the most affordable email marketing tools available. This single plan includes all features. Users can also try Moosend for free for 30 days.

Explore more about Moosend by reading our Moosend review and a comparison of MailerLite alternatives.

2. MailerLite: Best Value for Money

MailerLite stands out as one of the most affordable email software solutions, providing all essential email marketing features for small businesses to create and send newsletters. It offers over 90 pre-made templates, a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, and powerful automation tools. Comprehensive campaign analytics and customizable forms for capturing new subscribers, alongside integrated landing pages, complete its robust offering.

A core strength of MailerLite lies in its exceptional ease of use, exemplified by its intuitive email editor. While it may not boast the largest selection of newsletter templates, crafting personalized emails is incredibly straightforward thanks to its pre-formatted content blocks. These blocks, such as article summaries, image-and-button combinations, or social media feeds, can be easily dragged onto the canvas. An RSS feed integration allows for automatic conversion of blog posts or news into newsletters. The email editor also includes an AI writing assistant capable of generating headlines, product descriptions, and even full newsletters.

MailerLite Pricing

MailerLite starts at $10 a month for 500 contacts, allowing unlimited emails. Its generous free plan supports up to 500 contacts and 12,000 emails per month, including all core features. Paid plans also offer a 30-day free trial.

Discover more about MailerLite by reading our MailerLite review and a comparison of Brevo alternatives.

3. Brevo: Best Free Plan

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a sophisticated email marketing tool that comprehensively covers all email newsletter platform essentials. Most of its features are available for free, and all plans accommodate an unlimited number of contacts.

Users benefit from over 80 high-quality email templates, alongside a versatile drag-and-drop email builder that allows for custom content block placement. Its brand styles feature simplifies design, enabling users to set colors and fonts once and apply them across all newsletters.

Where Brevo truly distinguishes itself are its advanced features beyond standard email marketing. It includes a complete CRM for sales and marketing management, along with the added capability to run SMS and WhatsApp campaigns. Users can also set up automated transactional emails via a dedicated server. Complementing these professional features, Brevo provides customer service through live chat, email, and phone support.

Brevo Pricing

Brevo’s pricing is based on the number of emails sent, starting at $9 a month. A generous allowance of 20,000 emails per month is included, offering scalability as your business grows. The landing page builder is available with the Business plan, which costs $18/month.

The Brevo Free plan is excellent, allowing up to 100,000 contacts. The main limitation is a daily sending cap of 300 emails and the inclusion of Brevo branding. Explore the Brevo pricing page for full details.

Learn more about Brevo by reading our Brevo review and a comparison of GetResponse alternatives.

4. GetResponse: Best for Growing Businesses

GetResponse positions itself as an all-in-one online marketing platform, with email marketing at its core. Its dedicated email marketing plan provides all the necessary tools for creating and sending newsletters without requiring payment for additional, unneeded features. However, users also have the option to scale up to advanced marketing automation, sales funnels, webinars, and even AI-powered website building.

GetResponse offers over 125 email templates featuring professional designs. Its drag-and-drop email editor is user-friendly, providing flexible positioning for new content blocks, making it highly effective for most small to medium business users.

GetResponse includes an AI subject line generator, which suggests text optimized to encourage contacts to open emails. For more detailed insights into whether GetResponse aligns with your needs, explore its features comprehensively.

GetResponse Pricing

GetResponse starts at $15 a month for 1,000 contacts, with unlimited emails. While the price increases for more advanced features, all plans come with a free 30-day trial.

The GetResponse Free plan offers full access to the email builder, along with sign-up forms. It allows sending up to 2,500 newsletters per month to 500 contacts, and also includes the ability to build a website, a landing page, and a popup.

For a comprehensive understanding, read our GetResponse review and a comparison of Benchmark alternatives.

5. Benchmark Email: Best for First-Time Newsletter Senders

Benchmark Email provides an excellent starting point for those new to sending newsletters, emphasizing simplicity and dedicated email functionality. Users can kickstart their newsletter creation with a selection of over 200 high-quality templates, easily searchable by industry.

Benchmark’s drag-and-drop editor is intuitive, featuring icon-based navigation and a clear layout, supported by numerous helpful prompts. A standout feature is the Smart Content AI tool, which functions like a ChatGPT for email marketing, generating optimized text based on your newsletter’s topic. A minor limitation of the Benchmark editor is the somewhat restricted flexibility in content block positioning.

Beyond newsletter building, Benchmark offers two tiers of automation: simple autoresponders are free across all plans, while more advanced customer journey automation is available on higher tiers. Benchmark excels in list management and segmentation, providing robust list-cleaning tools that help prevent email domains from being flagged as spam. The platform also enables the creation of forms and landing pages to capture new leads. To learn more about its offerings, read our Benchmark Email review.

Benchmark Pricing

Benchmark Email’s pricing starts at $9.99 a month for 500 contacts and allows sending 3,500 newsletters monthly. Prices scale with the number of contacts. The free plan includes 500 contacts and 3,500 emails, offering access to most main features, excluding landing pages and email scheduling.

6. AWeber: Best for Newsletter Design

AWeber, a pioneer in email newsletter tools since 1998, instills confidence from the moment you sign up. The platform scores highly for ease of use, making it approachable even for those with no prior newsletter experience, thanks to helpful prompts guiding users through every stage.

The standout feature of AWeber is its exceptional newsletter design capabilities. Users have access to over 600 templates, one of the most extensive selections among email marketing tools, combined with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.

Key design features include the Smart Designer, which automatically creates branded templates based on your website, and seamless Canva integration. Canva’s intuitive graphic design interface makes creating custom designs both easy and enjoyable.

AWeber provides 24/7 live chat support on all paid plans and boasts over 750 direct integrations with other software. Automation features, however, are more limited compared to some competitors, with caps on the number of automations available on cheaper plans. For a deeper dive into its email building, automation, and integration capabilities, explore the AWeber review.

AWeber Pricing

AWeber starts at $9.99 a month for 500 contacts, offering unlimited emails. This includes full use of the email editor, Smart Designer, and Canva integration, though other features may be capped until upgrading to the Plus plan.

The AWeber Free plan also allows unlimited newsletters to up to 500 contacts, including all email-building tools. It further includes 1 automation and 1 landing page.

7. ActiveCampaign: Best for Automation

ActiveCampaign is a contemporary newsletter platform renowned for its advanced automation capabilities, which extend to CRM and sales automation tools.

While simpler alternatives like MailerLite might suffice for basic newsletter sending, ActiveCampaign distinguishes itself for two primary reasons:

1. Users will inevitably seek more sophisticated automations, such as welcome sequences, birthday emails, or reminders, which ActiveCampaign handles with ease.
2. ActiveCampaign’s core email tools are exceptionally powerful and well-designed.

Its segmentation and sending options are highly flexible, allowing users to define open-ended rules for sending different newsletters to specific audiences. Conditional content blocks enable showing and hiding content within the same email template, providing tailored experiences for recipients.

ActiveCampaign pricing

ActiveCampaign starts at $12.5 a month for 1,000 contacts and 10,000 email sends. This tier grants full access to its marketing automation and segmentation tools, along with 24/7 live chat support. For more advanced features and larger teams, an Enterprise plan is available. Users can also experience the platform with a free 14-day trial.
To understand the costs in detail, refer to our ActiveCampaign pricing review.

8. Constant Contact: Best for Event Invitation Management

Constant Contact is a newsletter platform offering over 200 email templates, with 70 specifically designed for newsletters. However, many of these designs may appear dated and too basic for modern professional newsletters.

If the pre-made designs don’t quite fit, they are easy to customize using Constant Contact’s user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. Layout blocks facilitate effortless restructuring of your newsletter. Additionally, interactive action blocks, such as polls, RSVPs, and product listings, provide compelling reasons for contacts to engage.

Constant Contact features a prominent ‘Create’ button on its main dashboard, revealing a comprehensive list of options. These include standard features like landing pages, forms, and email automations, alongside useful extras like social posts, advertisements, surveys, and a dedicated section for creating and scheduling events.

Overall, Constant Contact is a reasonable choice if you plan to leverage its additional features, as it maintains simplicity across its offerings. Learn more about this newsletter platform and its comprehensive functionalities.

Constant Contact Pricing

Constant Contact starts at $9.99 a month for 500 contacts, allowing up to 12,000 emails (calculated by multiplying your contacts by 24). The cheapest Core plan includes all key newsletter software tools, plus extras like social posts and integrations with platforms such as Shopify. Generally, Constant Contact tends to be more expensive for the features offered compared to other newsletter platforms in this guide.

Users can try Constant Contact with a 30-day free trial before purchasing.

Check out our full Constant Contact review to learn more about its features, pros, and cons.

9. Mailchimp

Mailchimp was once synonymous with newsletter platforms, but recent years have seen significant price increases and a slower pace in releasing innovative features. This has led many users to seek Mailchimp alternatives.

Focusing purely on newsletter sending, Mailchimp does retain several strengths. Its content optimizer provides valuable tips for email content, enhancing effectiveness. A send time optimizer intelligently suggests the best time to send messages for optimal visibility.

Users can leverage predictive analytics to identify the most engaged contacts for specific campaigns and personalize newsletters using dynamic content. Mailchimp also boasts robust automation features and over 300 integrations, though many marketing automation capabilities may extend beyond basic email campaigns.

Mailchimp Pricing

Mailchimp’s paid subscriptions start at $13 a month for 500 contacts, with a sending restriction of 6,000 emails. Prices increase steeply as contact lists grow and email send limits are raised. The Essentials plan primarily offers access to basic features.

A free plan is available, limiting users to 500 contacts and 1,000 emails per month. This free version does not support custom HTML and includes Mailchimp branding, with limited automation and testing capabilities for its core email and newsletter tools.

Choosing the Right Email Newsletter Software for Your Business

Selecting the ideal email marketing platform for newsletters depends significantly on your business type and specific objectives. Different platforms cater to various needs, from affordability to advanced automation.

For Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) prioritizing value and simplicity, platforms like Brevo, MailerLite, and Moosend offer excellent free plans and competitive starting prices, ideal when time and budget are constrained.

If your goal is to achieve significant visual impact to drive high open and click rates, AWeber, with its Smart Designer and Canva integration, provides powerful tools for professional design. For businesses requiring sophisticated automation, targeted segmentation, and advanced newsletter capabilities, ActiveCampaign and GetResponse stand out as top recommendations.

Email Newsletter Platforms: Frequently Asked Questions