Changes happening across search algorithms and social media feeds make one thing crystal clear: it's never been more important for businesses to own the channels where they communicate with customers. Email is one such channel—and it's stood the test of time.
Today, email newsletters run the gamut from small-scale personal notes to massive automated campaigns—and so does newsletter software. No matter where on the spectrum your email marketing operation falls, the best email newsletter software makes it quick and easy to send professional-looking emails to hundreds or thousands of subscribers.
The thing is, there are so many email newsletter tools out there. In nearly a decade of working in marketing, I've used my fair share of them, and I know it can feel overwhelming to choose the right one for you. To help, I considered more than 60 different apps and tested more than 30 of them to help you find the best email newsletter platform.
The 10 best email newsletter platforms
Benchmark for a full-featured email marketing app
Mailchimp for managing your email, social, website, and SMS together
ConvertKit for paid newsletters
Omnisend for eCommerce newsletters and campaigns
Campaign Monitor for agencies who handle email marketing for multiple clients
AWeber for putting your newsletter on autopilot
beehiiv for monetizing your newsletter
Curated for curated newsletters
Flodesk for unlimited subscribers and sends at one flat rate
Zoho Campaigns for ridiculously affordable plans
What is an email newsletter?
Email newsletters are bulk emails from brands, and email newsletter platforms are the tools that power them. They're a great way to share news, announce new promotions, show off new product features, promote your new blog posts, and curate content for your subscribers.
As email newsletters have grown in popularity, they've started to intersect with email marketing more broadly—and other areas of marketing, like marketing automation, web push and SMS campaigns, social media, and even web building. With all that overlap, many dynamite email newsletter tools have widened their feature sets to include broader email marketing and marketing automation capabilities.
For this list, I focused on the best options for email newsletters: every app on the list, no matter how broad the feature set, delivers on making it quick and easy to build email newsletters, grow your list, and understand performance. But many of the tools below are also more than capable of handling (and scaling) your entire marketing operation, offering additional advanced features like transactional emails, drip marketing campaigns, marketing automation, and A/B testing.
What to look for in an email newsletter platform
How we evaluate and test apps
Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
The best software for newsletter sending always includes the following key features, which are what I focused on in my testing:
Segmentation options. If you have a large mailing list, it's useful to be able to divide up how you email people according to their demographic details and their behaviors. All the apps included here have appropriate segmentation options for doing exactly that.
Affordability. It's possible to spend a lot of money on newsletter email services. I've focused on apps and tools that are affordable, even for smaller businesses with tight budgets.
Usability. Creating and sending an email newsletter should be a simple process, so I excluded any tools that were so complex that I spent more time searching Google than actually testing and using the tool. (I also only tested software with a full feature set, meaning you can both design and send newsletters in one tool.)
Analytics and reporting. Whether you're planning to monetize your newsletter or not, it's important a tool can help you understand how your email campaigns perform.
Once I narrowed down my list based on those criteria, I dove into testing. I followed a similar testing protocol for each, so I could compare key features across the board and find uniquely valuable ones, too. Here's what my testing workflow looked like:
First, I created an account and went through any onboarding provided by the app.
I tested the core features first, creating a new campaign, choosing from the library of templates (where available), editing the design, and completing the scheduling flow.
From there, I looked into more advanced features like segmentation and automation.
After my scheduled newsletter went out, I viewed the email from the recipient side, then checked out any reports and analytics provided.
Where applicable, I tested out features for creating a digital product or paid subscription to the newsletter—plus any other niche features like those designed for curated newsletters, eCommerce, or marketing agencies.
Throughout this workflow, I rigorously tested for ease of use—because your newsletter software shouldn't come with a steep learning curve or add frustration to your day. I've used email marketing apps extensively over the last decade, so if it was hard or time-consuming for me to figure out, it didn't make the cut.
This year, after spending about a week testing more than 30 email newsletter tools, I landed on the top ten you see below.
The best email newsletter platforms at a glance
Free plan | Pricing | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|
Yes, up to 500 contacts, 3,500 emails/month, and basic features | Paid plans start at $8/month for 500 contacts, 3,500 emails/month, and most features | Full-featured email newsletter software | |
Yes, up to 500 contacts and 1,000 sends/month | Paid plans start at $13/month for 500 contacts, 5,000 sends/month, 3 users, and additional features | Managing your email, social, website, and SMS together | |
Yes, up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited emails, and core features | Paid plans start at $9/month for up to 100 subscribers, unlimited emails, and most features | Paid newsletters | |
Yes, up to 250 contacts, 500 monthly sends, and most features | Paid plans start at $16/month for 500 contacts and 6,000 monthly sends | eCommerce | |
No | Paid plans start at $11/month for 500 contacts and 2,500 emails | Agencies who handle email marketing for multiple clients | |
Yes, up to 500 subscribers, 3,000 monthly sends, and limited access to most features | Paid plans start at $12.50/month for unlimited subscribers and sends plus most features | Putting your newsletter on autopilot | |
Yes, up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited sending, and limited features | Paid plans start at $42/month for up to 10,000 subscribers and unlimited sending | Monetizing your newsletter | |
Yes, full access to all features for up to 1,500 subscribers | Paid plans start at $39/month for up to 2,500 subscribers | Curated newsletters | |
No | The Email plan is $35/month for unlimited subscribers, unlimited sends, and all email features | Flat-rate pricing | |
Yes, up to 2,000 subscribers, 6,000 monthly sends, 5 users, and limited features | Paid plans start at $3/month for up to 500 subscribers, unlimited sends, up to 10 users, and basic features | An affordable option |
Best full-featured email newsletter software
Benchmark Email (Web)
Benchmark pros:
Over 200 beautiful templates
Full email marketing features
Generous free plan
Benchmark cons:
More than some newsletter senders may need
If you're looking for a capable email marketing tool to power your newsletters and other campaigns, you can't go wrong with Benchmark. From powerful but easy-to-use automation and segmentation to the supremely intuitive editor, Benchmark was my favorite app of the bunch.
To start, you can choose to send a regular campaign or RSS, then select the standard drag-and-drop editor (which I tested), HTML code editor, or plain text editor. You choose your editor at the start of every new campaign, making it a great option if you have multiple team members building emails.
Choose from over 200 well-designed email templates, start from scratch with a blank layout, or pull in any of your past emails to edit. When you're ready to design and customize your email, the menu is off to the left, so your design takes center stage. You can also build landing pages to help grow your subscribers, and the landing page editor is nearly identical to the email drag-and-drop.
Head over to Automations in the left-hand menu to create or edit automated flows. To create a new flow, you can choose from nine pre-built flows for things like welcoming new subscribers, requesting feedback, Facebook ad retargeting, and more.
Segment your subscribers by a number of basic criteria, or add your own custom dimensions to get more in-depth. Benchmark segments are dynamic and update automatically. And after you send your first email newsletter, you'll see robust analytics that include the basics—like opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes—then go a step deeper with a click map of your email content and subscriber-level activity data.
Connect Benchmark with Zapier to power automated tasks like adding new subscribers to your email list, validating email addresses, and more. Here are a couple of examples, but you can connect Benchmark to thousands of other apps.
Add new Facebook Lead Ads leads as contacts to Benchmark Email
Benchmark price: Free for up to 500 contacts, 3,500 emails/month, and basic features; Paid plans start at $8/month for up to 500 contacts, 3,500 emails/month, and more advanced versions of core features like automation, lead generation, and reporting.
Best email newsletter platform for managing email, social, website, and SMS together
Mailchimp (Web)
Mailchimp pros:
All-in-one marketing automation platform
Easy-to-use advanced features
Super reasonable costs as you scale
Mailchimp cons:
Free plan is much more limited than it once was
Mailchimp prides itself on being an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses. That can sound intimidating if you simply want a good way of formulating email newsletters. But because it started out as an email newsletter platform, it offers a lot of simple functionality for when you're starting out—along with the opportunity to upscale your campaigns as your business develops.
Its templates are more blank canvas than some other apps' polished choices, but that gives you a lot of flexibility. However, with the app's extensive library of polished themes, you can always buy a great template a la carte. Segmentation options are easy to manage, but expect to upgrade to a premium plan if you want in-depth statistical analysis and performance reports.
Overall, Mailchimp is intuitive and welcoming, and you'll appreciate how it grows alongside your business. When the time comes, you can manage your website, landing pages, social media, and SMS campaigns together with your email initiatives.
Plus, Mailchimp's Zapier integration allows you to extend its value even further, automatically adding your leads to Mailchimp and sharing contacts across contact databases. Learn more about how to automate Mailchimp, or look at these ideas to get you started.
Subscribe new Facebook Lead Ad leads to a Mailchimp list
Create Mailchimp subscribers from new Typeform responses
Add or update Mailchimp subscribers from new activity in ClickFunnels Classic contacts
Mailchimp price: Free for up to 500 contacts and 1,000 sends/month with limited features; from $13/month for an Essentials package that includes access to all email templates, custom branding, limited automation features, and A/B testing functionality.
Best email newsletter platform for paid newsletters
ConvertKit (Web)
ConvertKit pros:
Designed for creators and paid newsletters
Intuitive email editor that works like a web builder
Create digital products, sell to your list, and collect payments with one tool
ConvertKit cons:
Emphasis on minimal, text-forward newsletters can be limiting
One of the more expensive options
Editor's note: ConvertKit recently rebranded to Kit. The next time we update this article, we'll be sure to address this, but for now, we'll continue to call it ConvertKit since that's what most users will be doing until it settles in.
ConvertKit is built for creators. The app goes beyond email to include landing pages and digital products, but newsletters (called "broadcasts") are at the heart of it all.
The email editor in ConvertKit functions a lot like a website builder. Instead of the drag-and-drop you'll find in most email newsletter tools, you click the + button on the left and choose the element you want to add.
The tool largely emphasizes a minimal, text-forward design for broadcasts, but it finally now offers 15 well-designed visual themes to choose from—they still keep things aesthetically simple, but they'll give your newsletter a little more polished look. Plus, you can create and save your own templates for reuse.
If you're sending a paid newsletter or other digital product, ConvertKit makes it easy to sell to your list, collect payments, and segment paid subscribers. Payments are powered by Stripe, but you can set them up without leaving ConvertKit's app. Once you're set up to collect payments, simply add a product, set the price, and you're in business.
You can start using ConvertKit—and even selling digital products—for free. If you sign up for a paid plan, ConvertKit includes free, done-for-you migration from your current email provider. Plus, ConvertKit integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like add event attendees as new subscribers and tag survey respondents automatically. Start with one of the templates below, or learn more about how to automate ConvertKit.
Add new leads from Facebook Lead Ads to ConvertKit forms
Add tagged subscribers to ConverKit from new Calendly events
Create ConvertKit subscribers from new Crowdcast registrations
ConvertKit price: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited sending, and limited features; the Creator package starts at $9/month for up to 300 subscribers and additional features like automation and free migration from other email tools.
Learn how ConvertKit stacks up against popular marketing tools with these showdowns: ConvertKit vs. ClickFunnels and ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign.
Best email newsletter platform for eCommerce
Omnisend (Web)
Omnisend pros:
All-in-one transactional emails, newsletters, and automated campaigns for eCommerce
Robust integrations with eCommerce platforms
Thoughtful pre-built audience segments
Omnisend cons:
Limited free plan and pricey to scale subscribers
Fewer template options
Omnisend is email marketing built for eCommerce, allowing you to build and manage everything from transactional emails to newsletters and automated email flows.
The app integrates with popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Wix, and more. Once you connect your store, Omnisend pulls in key data on your customers and their behavior to help power robust customer segmentation, email automation, and detailed reporting.
You can choose from more than 20 pre-built segments designed for eCommerce—like "high potential buyers," "clicked on promotional messages," and "frequent store visitors"—to make quick work of powerful segmentation.
Omnisend offers a smaller number of email templates, but they're designed to be versatile. The intuitive editor makes it easy to customize your newsletter with pre-built layout blocks for product listings, recommendations, discounts, and more. And if you use SMS campaigns or push notifications in addition to email, you can build and send these with Omnisend, too.
Plus, you can connect Omnisend with Zapier to open up a whole world of automation, from adding new contacts from your CRM or website form to syncing Google Ads events and more. Learn more about how to automate Omnisend with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Create or update Omnisend subscribers from new Leadpages submissions
Omnisend price: Free for up to 250 contacts, 500 monthly sends, and access to most features; the Standard plan starts at $16/month for 500 contacts, 6,000 monthly emails, and upgraded support options.
Best email newsletter software for agencies who handle email marketing for multiple clients
Campaign Monitor (Web, iOS)
Campaign Monitor pros:
Strong client management features
Expansive reporting features
Transactional email and SMS
Campaign Monitor cons:
Less user-friendly interface
Costs can jump quickly
If you manage email marketing for multiple clients, Campaign Monitor makes that process simple. You can add as many clients as you want; create custom templates, emails, and automations for each client; allow clients to access their campaigns through a white-label version of the tool; and lock specific sections of emails and templates so they can't be edited.
Then, either have clients pay for their usage themselves by reselling the product to them, or you can pay for all of your clients yourself as part of a single package. You can even pay individually for a specific campaign if you have a client who only wants to send emails occasionally to a large list of contacts. Such flexibility is great if you're on a tight budget and need to plan accordingly.
Campaign Monitor's email editor initially encourages you to create a branded template based on the color scheme of your website. The whole interface isn't quite as user-friendly as some options here, but it's still a fast way to customize your messages with drag-and-drop functionality included. On the Unlimited plan, you can even preview what your email will look like in 20 different inboxes, helping you ensure that your emails look great for everyone.
Campaign Monitor offers Zapier integrations, so you can automatically add new Campaign Monitor subscribers based on purchases, event registrations, and more. Learn more about how to automate Campaign Monitor with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Create Campaign Monitor subscribers from new WooCommerce customers
Add new Campaign Monitor subscribers to EmailOctopus lists
Add Campaign Monitor subscribers for new attendees registered in Eventbrite
Campaign Monitor price: From $11/month for the Lite plan to send up to 2,500 emails/month to 500 contacts; from $19/month for the Essentials plan that includes 500 contacts, unlimited monthly sends, time zone delivery, and priority support.
Best email software for putting your newsletter on autopilot
AWeber (Web, iOS, Android)
AWeber pros:
Strong automated campaigns
Affordable paid plans
AWeber cons:
Limited free plan
If you're looking to get going quickly, AWeber may be a great option. It rivals every other app on this list with a huge number of email templates to get you started and a familiar drag-and-drop campaign editor. You can also build custom landing pages and opt-in forms to grow your subscriber base, starting from templates on offer there, too, or building yours from scratch.
Automation is where AWeber really shines, though. With pre-built campaigns to automate sending out new blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, and even Etsy products—or share top-performing evergreen content on an ongoing basis—you can easily set up an automated campaign and just let it run, hands off. Or build your own automated flow triggered when a new subscriber joins the list or has a particular tag applied.
AWeber's free plan is capped at 500 subscribers, so you'll likely have to upgrade to get the most out of it—including access to segmentation features and analytics. But the app's paid plans are totally accessible: you can get unlimited subscribers, lists, segments, automation, and users starting at $30/month.
Plus, you can do more by taking advantage of AWeber's Zapier integrations—available on all pricing tiers—to automatically add customers or meeting attendees to your AWeber subscribers list. Learn more about how to automate AWeber, or check out these ideas to get you started.
Create AWeber subscribers for new Calendly invitees
AWeber price: Free for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 sends/month. Paid plans start at $12.50/month for unlimited subscribers and sending, 3 users, 1 custom segment, and advanced reporting.
Best email newsletter software for monetizing your newsletter
beehiiv (Web)
beehiiv pros:
Generous free plan
Built-in monetization features
Detailed reports
beehiiv cons:
No templates and limited visual customization
beehiiv is a great option for anyone looking to aggressively grow and monetize an email newsletter.
The app itself is easy to use with familiar navigation and a clean editing interface. It also includes my favorite of the (admittedly uninspiring) AI features. The generative AI writer feature is built seamlessly into the post and email writing flow, and it also offers an AI image generator, which works just fine if your requirements aren't super specific. But it's important to note: beehiiv is unapologetically text-forward, with no templates available and very few options for customizing the visual design of your emails. Whether that's a benefit or a knock really depends on your newsletter style.
Monetization is the bread and butter of beehiiv. You can grow your email list by bidding to be featured in other beehiiv creators' emails (it works similarly to bidding on a Google Ad) or even setting up an entire referral program. Then, start earning by "boosting" other newsletters in your emails, offering paid newsletter subscriptions, or applying to join beehiiv's native ad network and one-click accepting inbound ads from the app's network of sponsors.
You can get a concise view of your performance from the dashboard—or head to Analyze in the left-hand navigation to dive into the in-depth subscribers and posts reports.
beehiiv also connects with Zapier, so you can automate adding new subscribers from any number of other tools in your stack. Learn more about how to automate beehiiv, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
beehiiv price: Free plan includes up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited sending; paid plans start at $42/month for up to 10,000 subscribers, additional users, unlimited segmentation, and more.
Best email newsletter software for curated newsletters
Curated (Web)
Curated pros:
Super quick newsletter building
Generous free plan and simple pricing
Curated cons:
No templates
No audience segmentation features
Curated is the fastest way to build out a newsletter full of your favorite content, curated from anywhere across the web. Collecting links to feature is a breeze. You can add them manually from the Collected Links tab, email links to a special email address, save from Slack messages, or—my personal favorite—add the Curated bookmarklet to your browser to save any page, with its headline brief description and a featured image, in as little as two clicks.
When you're ready to build out your next newsletter issue, all your collected links (that haven't been added to a previous newsletter) appear on the left-hand side. All it takes is one click to add them to the newsletter draft. It's just as easy to remove, rearrange, or edit items, and you can add custom text to introduce the newsletter or add any other context needed. Once you're up and running, the app includes comprehensive reports on click performance and subscriber growth.
All that speed and simplicity does come at the cost of visual customization, though. Curated doesn't include any email templates, and you can't edit the look of your emails beyond selecting the featured image for each curated link.
You can do more with Curated by using it together with Zapier to automate saving links, adding new subscribers, verifying subscriber email addresses, and more.
Add new Facebook Lead Ad leads to Curated as subscribers
Verify Curated subscriber email addresses with NeverBounce
Curated price: Free for up to 1,500 subscribers with unlimited sending and all features included; paid plans start at $39/month for up to 2,500 subscribers.
Best email newsletter software with flat-rate pricing
Flodesk (Web)
Flodesk pros:
Simple, flat-rate pricing
Minimalist, easy-to-use editor
Option to add eCommerce features
Flodesk cons:
High starting price with no free plan
Manual segmentation
Flodesk is an all-around great email marketing tool, with an intuitive email-building flow, a number of modern templates to choose from, and extensive reporting features. The overall user experience is much cleaner and less busy than most email marketing software, which feels like a breath of fresh air.
But what gets Flodesk on this list is its unique flat-rate pricing structure. If you're just looking for email features, it's a flat $35/month—that's it. No matter how many subscribers you add, emails you send, or features you need, it's all the same price.
With the newly released Checkout features (still in beta as of this writing), Flodesk is a strong contender for both eCommerce newsletters and creators of digital products, too. You can accept payments, build unlimited sales pages, deliver digital products, and view detailed eCommerce analytics. Flodesk also offers simple but in-depth analytics on subscriber growth, email and form performance, and workflows.
The automation builder is another strength. Tab on over to Workflows in the top navigation, and choose from four flexible workflow templates—welcome sequence, sales sequence, nurture sequence, or lead magnet delivery—or build from scratch.
If Flodesk has one weakness, it's segmentation. You can create segments within the app—filter subscribers by acquisition source, activity, and other data fields, then select all and click Add to segment—but it's a manual process, and the resulting segments are static.
If you go with Flodesk, you can connect it to all the other tools in your tech stack using Zapier. Learn more about how to automate Flodesk, or start with one of these pre-made templates.
Create subscribers in Flodesk from new appointments in Acuity Scheduling
Create Flodesk subscribers from new HoneyBook inquiries
Flodesk price: Flat-rate Email plan is $35/month and includes unlimited subscribers, sends, and all email features; upgrade to Email & Checkout to add checkout features like sales pages, online payments, and checkout analytics.
Best affordable email newsletter software
Zoho Campaigns (Web)
Zoho Campaigns pros:
Generous free plan and ridiculously affordable upgrades
Lots of great templates
In-depth analytics
Zoho Campaigns cons:
Segmentation and automation require upgrade
Editor experience isn't excellent
Zoho Campaigns is by far the most affordable email newsletter tool on this list. Different pricing structures (based on subscriber count, email sending volume, features, or a combination) make it hard to compare free plans apples-to-apples, but Zoho's is definitely in the running with 2,000 subscribers, 6,000 emails/month, and five users all included for free. And while the free plan doesn't offer features like segmentation or automation, or most email templates, upgrading is ridiculously affordable, with plans starting as low as $3/month.
Zoho includes in-depth campaign reports with all the standard metrics, plus a click map, device and browser breakdown, and social stats. You can manage SMS campaigns in tandem with your email newsletter, connect your eCommerce store, and build automations, from scratch or based on one of seven pre-built workflows.
Now, with that low price and all those features, it makes sense that there are some negatives. Zoho's email editor functions fine, but it lacks the modern design and familiar drag-and-drop functionality that most apps now offer. If the price outweighs the interface issues, be sure to connect Zoho Campaigns with Zapier to automate your email newsletter workflows. Learn more about how to automate Zoho Campaigns, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Add or update Zoho Campaigns contacts with new TikTok Lead Generation leads
Add Calendly invitee as a contact in Zoho Campaigns
Add or update Zoho Campaigns contacts for new contact activities in ClickFunnels Classic
Zoho Campaigns price: Free plan includes up to 2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/month, 5 users, and basic templates; paid plans start at $3/month and include unlimited emails, up to 10 users, and additional features like basic segmentation and workflows and advanced templates.
What about AI newsletter software?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has absolutely made its way into email marketing software, and I made sure to test any advertised AI features I came across.
The first thing I noticed was that the AI features are mostly generative, meaning they'll help you write a bit of copy here and there or generate an image from a text prompt. You can get the same quality by copy/pasting from ChatGPT or Bard. Having said that, Mailchimp and beehiiv offered the best of the lot. Their AI assistants are built seamlessly into the campaign-building flow, and both offer some degree of customizability around language and tone of voice.
In the coming months and years, I'm sure AI will make its way into more aspects of email marketing. Mailchimp, for example, just announced that it's launching Intuit Assist, which will do things like automatically generating segments and automations.
How to choose the right email newsletter platform
If you send similar emails to groups of people regularly, you need an email newsletter platform. You might not need all the features of advanced email marketing platforms, with automated sending schedules and landing page builders and personalization tools. Not yet, anyhow. But as your lists and marketing ambitions grow, you might.
That's the great thing about the wide variety of online newsletter platforms available. Whether you want to send a curated set of articles weekly to build a following around a topic or need to send thousands of personalized messages for your multinational corporation daily, there are email apps to fit your needs.
You can start simple—even with a free email marketing app—then grow into the advanced email marketing features the top newsletter platforms offer.
Start with the email newsletter software that feels most like it fits your needs today. Don't worry: when you need more features, you can always upgrade your plan, switch to another app, or keep your original, email newsletter platform alongside a more advanced marketing automation tool.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in June 2018 by Jessica Greene and has also had contributions from Jennifer Allen. The most recent update was in September 2023.
