Best Email Marketing Tools for Beginners

Quick verdict

All figures from vendor pricing pages read in September 2026. Kit Creator is $39/mo billed monthly or $390 a year; MailerLite quotes Comfort as "starting $12/month" and its ladder by subscriber count did not render to us. See what we could not price.

The free plans differ by 40x

Every roundup in this category recommends roughly the same four tools and treats their free plans as broadly equivalent starting points. They are not close.

Subscriber and email figures quoted from each vendor's own pricing page, September 2026. Kit: "Free—up to 10,000 subscribers" with "Unlimited email broadcasts". MailerLite: "up to 250 subscribers, 2 user seats, and 2,500 monthly emails". GetResponse: "Send 2,500 newsletters/mo" with a 500-contact list. The final column is our arithmetic. MailerLite's 250 and 2,500 are recent figures — its own update page records a cut from 500 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails on June 16, 2026, so older roundups describe a free plan that no longer exists.

Kit's free plan holds 40 times more subscribers than MailerLite's and 20 times more than GetResponse's. A 9,000-person list costs nothing on Kit. GetResponse charges for 10,000 contacts on its cheapest paid tier; Kit gives that capacity away.

This matters because the standard beginner advice in this niche — including the advice this page used to give — names MailerLite first. That recommendation was written when ConvertKit's free plan was much smaller, and it has not caught up with the rebrand to Kit or the tier it now publishes. If your only requirement is somewhere to keep a list and send it a newsletter, the free ranking is not a close call.

What Kit's free plan does not include is the other half of the story. Its pricing page lists email sequences, unlimited visual automations, A/B testing, subscriber engagement analytics and deliverability reporting as paid features. You can hold 10,000 people for free; you cannot run an automated welcome series at them.

September 2026 note, and it bears on this recommendation. A 10,000-subscriber free list sits right on a line Google treats as permanent. Google defines a bulk sender as one sending “close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts within a 24-hour period”, so a single send to a full free list crosses it as soon as more than half those addresses are on Gmail — and Google states that “bulk sender status doesn’t have an expiration date” and that “changes in email sending practices will not affect permanent bulk sender status once it’s assigned.” Crossing it requires DMARC, both SPF and DKIM, From-header alignment and one-click unsubscribe from then on. Kit states it authenticates DKIM and SPF for you but leaves DMARC to your domain host, so that record is yours to add. Separately, Google’s 0.3% spam rate limit is in its all-senders list rather than the bulk list, and applies from your first send whatever plan you are on. We read all of it at source in the sender rules that apply before you hit 5,000 a day.

The cap that actually binds

Two of these plans meter two things at once, and the second one is the one people hit. MailerLite and GetResponse both allow 2,500 emails a month free. That is a shared ceiling, and it converts into a very different list size depending on how often you write.

Sends per month calculated from 52, 104, 156 and 365 sends a year divided by 12. Usable list is the lower of the tool's subscriber cap and what 2,500 emails covers at that frequency. Bold cells are where the send cap binds rather than the subscriber cap. All our arithmetic on the two vendor-published figures.

Read down the last two columns and the advertised difference between these plans evaporates. GetResponse offers double MailerLite's free contact allowance, and that advantage only exists below five sends a month — because 2,500 divided by 500 contacts is exactly five. From twice a week upward, both plans are governed by the identical 2,500 figure and deliver the same usable list. At three times a week they are both 192, and the 500 on GetResponse's pricing page means nothing at all.

This is why Kit's free tier is not just bigger but differently shaped: it publishes no send ceiling, so writing more often does not shrink the list you are allowed to keep. For a daily or thrice-weekly newsletter, the other two free plans are not small — they are roughly 82 and 192 people.

One honest caveat on our own table: it assumes you email your whole list every time. Segmenting cuts the count proportionally — a 500-person list mailed to a 200-person segment three times a week uses 2,600 emails, not 6,500 — so if you segment heavily the send cap binds later than shown.

MailerLite has one rule, not two

MailerLite presents its free subscriber cap and its free send cap as separate numbers. They are not independent, and noticing that makes the whole ladder predictable.

MailerLite states on its pricing page that "Comfort gives you 10× the ceiling of your subscriber tier each month." Apply that rule to the free plan: 250 subscribers times 10 is 2,500 monthly emails — exactly the free allowance it publishes. The free plan is not a special case. It is the same rule, applied to a 250-subscriber tier.

So MailerLite's real unit across free and Comfort is ten emails per subscriber per month, which is a little over twice a week if you mail everyone. The Power plan removes the ceiling entirely — MailerLite describes it as "unlimited monthly emails, subject to our fair use policy" — and that, rather than any feature, is what the step from Comfort to Power actually buys a frequent sender.

Two consequences worth having. The allowance follows the tier ceiling rather than your actual list — MailerLite's own example is that "if you're on the up-to-1,000 tier, you get 10,000 emails a month whether you have 200 subscribers or 900" — so a small list on a larger tier gets real headroom. And because ten sends a month to a full list is the rule at every tier, a daily newsletter on MailerLite is a Power plan question from the beginning, not a problem you grow into.

MailerLite also states that "billing is based on the number of active subscribers in your account," so cleaning inactive contacts moves your tier. We could not read the price at each tier; see below.

What the first paid step costs

Kit wins the free comparison and loses the next one. Here is the first paid tier on each tool, at the only subscriber count all of them displayed to us.

Kit and GetResponse figures are at 1,000 subscribers. GetResponse quotes in euros to us — "Prices on this page are shown in EUR" — so its figure is deliberately not converted or ranked against the dollar prices. Kit's page displays $33 and $66 as per-month figures alongside annual totals of $390 and $790 and stated savings of $78 and $158; the $39 and $79 monthly rates are our arithmetic recovering the monthly price from those savings, and both reconcile exactly to Kit's stated 17% annual discount.

MailerLite's first paid step is $12 against Kit's $39 — about a third of the price. If what you need is a welcome sequence and a couple of automations, and your list is small, Kit's generosity on the free tier is irrelevant to you and MailerLite is straightforwardly cheaper.

There is a sharper version of this for anyone who takes Kit's free plan at face value. That $39 is the price at 1,000 subscribers, not the price of leaving the free plan. If you have grown to 7,000 free subscribers and then need one sequence, you do not pay $39 — you pay the Creator rate at the 7,000 tier, which Kit does not display without moving a slider and which we could not read. The free plan is genuinely free; the exit is priced on a number Kit never shows you while you are filling it up. Budget for that before you build a large list on it.

If you are weighing these two specifically, our older MailerLite vs ConvertKit comparison covers the feature-level differences, and our MailerLite review goes deeper on the things that are not features — the June 2026 free plan cut, the affiliate clause in its terms, and how its subscriber billing actually moves. Note that ConvertKit now trades as Kit — its pricing page carries the line "Formerly ConvertKit" — so older comparisons under the ConvertKit name describe the same product.

Which one to start on

The choice resolves on two questions, in this order.

How often will you actually send? This decides the free tier, and almost nobody asks it first. Weekly or less, every free plan here holds a real list and the difference does not matter. More than twice a week and only Kit stays usable free, because the other two convert frequency directly into a smaller allowed list.

Do you need automation on day one? If yes, the free comparison is moot and you are choosing between $12 and $39, where MailerLite Comfort is the cheaper route into sequences by a wide margin. If no — and for most people starting a list the honest answer is no, because there is nothing to automate yet — take the biggest free plan and defer the decision.

That gives a default we are comfortable stating plainly: start free on Kit, move to MailerLite if and when you need cheap automation and your list is still small. Both tools import a CSV, so switching early is cheap. The mistake is paying $39 a month in month one for automations with no audience yet, or building 8,000 free subscribers without ever checking what the exit costs.

One caveat on that default, added September 12, 2026. If your site runs on affiliate income, read Kit's acceptable use policy before you build on it. Kit permits affiliate links at roughly 20–30% of your content, but it also prohibits "Make-money-online or get rich quick schemes" and "CPA affiliate type sites or similar affiliate type of sites, network marketing sites, affiliate educational offers" — and states that a violating account "may be closed immediately and without prior notice" with no new account permitted afterwards. That is a real consideration when the same platform is holding 10,000 subscribers for you free. We read all six major platforms' policies side by side in which email tools actually allow affiliate links.

One thing none of these tools is: a way to charge readers. If the plan is paid subscriptions rather than a free newsletter that sells something else, the fee models are different again and the cheapest depends on list size rather than revenue — our Substack vs beehiiv vs Ghost fee breakdown has that table, including why Ghost's $18 entry plan cannot take payments at all. Course platforms bundle email in but allow far less headroom: Podia includes it on every plan and caps the entry tier at 100 subscribers, which we cost out in Teachable vs Podia vs Thinkific. Kit itself sells digital products on its free plan at a stated 3.5% + 30c transaction fee.

What we could not price

Four gaps, stated plainly rather than filled with numbers we did not read.

• Brevo, entirely. Five separate Brevo URLs returned either a page containing nothing but its own title or HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, so no Brevo figure appears anywhere on this page. Third-party sources consistently report that Brevo bills on emails sent rather than contacts stored, with unlimited contacts and a free plan of 300 emails a day — which would make it the only structurally different tool in this comparison and a strong fit for a large list you email rarely. We did not verify any of it and do not state it as fact.
• MailerLite and Kit above the entry point. Both publish their ladders behind an interactive slider that did not render for us. MailerLite gave "starting $12/month" for Comfort and "starting $25/month" for Power; Kit displayed only the 1,000-subscriber rate. Both are therefore floors, not the price at 5,000 subscribers. Third parties report MailerLite Comfort at $12, $19, $33 and $49 for 500, 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 subscribers, which is consistent with the floor we verified, but we did not read it at source.
• GetResponse in dollars. Its pricing page states "Prices on this page are shown in EUR" and served us a full euro ladder (Starter at EUR 16, 48 and 69 for 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 contacts). We have not converted those figures, because a conversion rate we invent is not a price GetResponse charges. Treat the euro column as a shape, not a like-for-like comparison.
• Whether GetResponse's free plan is permanent. Its two pages disagree. GetResponse's free-plan page says an account "stays free forever with no credit card required" at 500 contacts and 2,500 newsletters a month, with a GetResponse badge added to messages after the first 14 days. Its main pricing page describes only a 14-day trial and showed us no perpetual free tier. The most likely reading is that the trial downgrades into the free plan, which both descriptions fit, but we could not confirm it and have used the free-plan page's figures throughout.

Everything on this page is a September 2026 snapshot of pages that change without announcement. Kit's 10,000-subscriber free cap and the shared 2,500-email ceiling are the load-bearing facts here — a change to either would move the conclusion, not just a number.

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