9 Best Email Newsletter Software Platforms Reviewed (2024)

Paul Newham 3 October 2024

Thinking of starting a newsletter for your business? You should.

The best email newsletter software will save time, create attractive newsletters, and get more people to open, click, and convert. 

There are a lot of email newsletter software tools out there. So which one is right for you? I’ve put together this full guide on the 9 best newsletter software options out there.

We selected the list based on:

• Good and affordable price
• Plenty of email templates
• Ease of use
• Automation and segmentation
• Clear reporting

Whether you’ve used email newsletter software before or not, read on to see them all.

9 Best Email Newsletter Software Overview

Here’s our review comparison table with the best email marketing platforms as a quick summary of what’s next.

	Free Plan	Price	Best Feature	Rating
Moosend	Yes (30 days)	$9/mo	Overall great choice
MailerLite	Yes	$10/mo	Best value for money
Brevo	Yes	$9/mo	Email and CRM
ActiveCampaign	Yes (14 days)	$15/mo	Advanced Marketing Automation
GetResponse	Yes	$19/mo	Email Marketing Automation
Benchmark Email	Yes	$9.99/mo	Smart Content AI
AWeber	Yes	$12.5/mo	Newsletter Design
Constant Contact	Yes (60 days)	$9.99/mo	Event invitation management
Mailchimp	Yes	$13/mo	Integrations

So what do the best email marketing tools for newsletters do? These 9 newsletter platforms are all popular and well-respected services. They offer a list of core features, including:

• Drag-and-drop email editor for creating attractive newsletters
• HTML email templates for easy no-code designs
• Automation features
• A landing page builder
• Sign-up forms 
• Campaign analytics
• Trial or a free plan to test

As they say, the devil is in the details. So read on for an in-depth comparison.

1. Moosend: Best for User-Friendly Marketing

Moosend is great value for money and very user-friendly.

It has one drag-and-drop editor for building emails, landing pages, and forms. Which means everything becomes familiar quickly. There are more than 75 email and newsletter templates to choose from. Just what you’re looking for to send out a small business newsletter.

Moosend is great for basic automations. The pre-made workflow templates are called ‘recipes’. If you’ve never automated an email sequence before, these are a good starting point. The automations are easy to customise in Moosend’s timeline-based workflow editor.

If you sell digital products or tangible goods, you can connect your ecommerce store and import products into newsletters.

Campaign tracking shows how many sales you get from your email campaigns. This also helps with segmentation. Tracking means you can also sort contacts based on their behaviour on your website. Another Moosend plus point is customer support. Live chat is available to all customers.

Moosend Pricing

Moosend pricing is only $9 a month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. Which makes it one of the cheapest email marketing tools around. Pricing is simple because there is one Pro plan that has all the features. Try the full service for free for 30 days.

Try Moosend for free hereor read our full review

2. MailerLite: Best Value for Money

MailerLite is one of the most affordable email software, while still giving you all the email marketing features a small business needs for creating and sending newsletters. 90+ pre-made templates, a drag-and-drop editor and automation tools. There is campaign analytics. Forms for capturing new email subscribers. And landing pages to link to.

One of MailerLite’s strengths is how easy it is to use. Its intuitive email editor is a great example. It doesn’t have the biggest choice of newsletter templates, but it’s very easy to put together your own emails. That’s because it has pre-formatted content blocks. For instance with an article summary, image, and button combo.

Drag a block on the canvas and quickly put together a newsletter. With an RSS feed, your blog or news gets turned into a newsletter. Other blocks include social media feeds, videos, quizzes, and surveys. The email editor also has an AI writing assistant that can write headlines, product descriptions, and even full newsletters.

MailerLite Pricing

MailerLite pricing starts at $10 a month. For this, you get 500 contacts and you can send unlimited emails. Get started with the free plan, which has 12,000 emails a month to 1,000 contacts. You get all the core features there. There is a 30-day free trial for paid plans.

Get started with MailerLite for free read our full review and pricing guide

3. Brevo: Best Free Plan

Brevo is a slick email marketing tool. Brevo covers all the email newsletter platform bases. Most of the features are free and you can have as many contacts as you like on all plans.

You get 80+ email templates, which are good-quality designs. Brevo has a drag-and-drop email builder that lets you place content blocks anywhere for custom design layouts. With brand styles, you only have to set colors, fonts, etc only once to apply to every newsletter.

Where Brevo stands out are some of the extras beyond email marketing campaigns. There is a complete CRM for sales and marketing. And running SMS and WhatsApp campaigns is a nice extra. You can also set up automated transactional emails through a dedicated server.  To back up the more ‘pro’ features, Brevo has customer service via live chat, email, and phone.

Brevo Pricing

Brevo paid plan starts at $9 a month. The subscription is based on the number of emails you send. A generous 20,000 a month is always included – so it grows with you as you scale making it easy to budget for growth. The landing page builder is on the Business plan, which is $18/month.

Brevo’s Free plan is excellent, and you can add up to 100,000 contacts. The only catch is that you can only send 300 emails a day and it has a Brevo branding. Get started for free here. 

Get started with Brevo for free read our review or check out the pricing guide

4. GetResponse: Best for Growing Businesses

GetResponse is an ‘all-in-one online marketing platform’. With email marketing at the core. The email marketing plan gives you all the tools you need to create and send newsletters. Without having to pay for other features.

But if you want, it has advanced marketing automation, sales funnels, webinars, and AI-powered website building.

GetResponse has 125+ email templates with professional-looking designs. The drag-and-drop email editor is easy to use, but not super refined. Positioning new content blocks is flexible. Most SMB users would get all they want from it.

GetResponse comes with an AI subject line generator. This suggests text that encourages contacts to open. Need more info to decide if GetResponse is right for you? Get started with a free GetResponse account. 

GetResponse Pricing

The Email Marketing plan starts at $19 a month for 1,000 contacts, with unlimited emails. The price goes up quickly for more advanced features. But you do get a free 30-day trial on all plans.

GetResponse has a packed free plan. This gives you full access to the email builder plus sign-up forms. You can send 2,500 newsletters a month to 500 contacts. And you can also build a website, a landing page, and a popup. Try GetResponse for free here.

Get started with GetResponse for free read our full review or find out more about pricing

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

Benchmark Email is a good place to start for first-time newsletter senders. It’s all about email, and it’s all about simplicity. Creating your newsletter starts with more than 200 templates to choose from. They are good-looking, and you can search by industry.

Benchmark’s drag-and-drop editor is intuitive. All the navigation is done via icons, and the layout is clear. There are lots of prompts to help you, too. A feature I like is the new Smart Content AI tool. Think ChatGTP for email marketing. Just tell it what you want your newsletter to be about. And it suggests optimised text.

One slight downside to the Benchmark editor is I don’t find the layouts very flexible. You can only move content blocks around to a limited number of positions.

Aside from building newsletters, Benchmark also offers 2 tiers of automation. Simple autoresponders are free on all plans. More advanced customer journey automation is available on the higher tiers. Benchmark is good for list management and segmentation, with strong list-cleaning tools. This helps to avoid your email domain being flagged as spam. You can build forms and landing pages to capture new leads. Read our in-depth Benchmark review to find out more about what it has to offer.

Benchmark Pricing

Price-wise, Benchmark’s Lite plan starts at just $9.99 a month. This lets you have 500 contacts and send 3,500 newsletters a month. The price goes up as you add more contacts. The Free plan has 500 contacts and 3,500 emails. You get all the main features except landing pages and email scheduling.

Get started with Benchmark Email for free

6. AWeber: Best for Newsletter Design

AWeber is one of the earliest email newsletter tools. It was founded back in 1998 when sending email newsletters was still a new thing. Right from the moment you sign up, you feel in safe hands.

It’s another platform that scores high for ease of use. You’ll have no problem getting comfortable with it even if you’ve never sent a newsletter before. There are handy prompts to guide you through every stage. 

For me, the stand-out feature of AWeber is newsletter design. There are more than 600 templates to choose from. One of the best selections in any email marketing tool. And a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.

But the star features are the Smart Designer and Canva integration. The Smart Designer creates branded templates based on your website. And Canva is a brilliant graphic design tool. Its drag-and-drop interface makes custom designs easy and fun.

AWeber comes with 24/7 live chat support on all paid plans. And there are 750+ direct integrations available with other software. Automation is limited compared to other services. Including caps on how many automations you can build on cheaper plans. Check out our full AWeber review to find out more about email building, automation, and integrations.

AWeber Pricing

AWeber’s pricing starts at $12.50 a month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. This includes full use of the email editor, including Smart Designer and Canva. But other features are capped until you move to the Plus plan.

There is also a Free plan which again lets you use all the email-building tools. You can send as many newsletters as you want to 500 contacts. You also get 1 automation and 1 landing page.

Get started with AWeber for free

7. ActiveCampaign: Best for Automation

ActiveCampaign is a modern newsletter platform with advanced automation. It also has CRM and sales automation tools.

If you only want to send out simple newsletters, better try something like MailerLite. But ActiveCampaign deserves its place amongst the best email tools for 2 reasons.

1. You’ll quickly want to do more automation, like a welcome program, birthday emails, reminders, etc. 
2. ActiveCampaign’s email tools are great as well.

Segmentation and sending options are very flexible. You can set open-ended rules to send different newsletters to different people. Conditional content blocks show and hide content within the same email template.

ActiveCampaign pricing

ActiveCampaign’s Plus Plan starts at $49 a month for 1000 contacts and 10,000 email sends. This gives you full use of the marketing automation and segmentation tools. Plus 24/7 live chat support. For more advanced features and bigger teams, there’s the Enterprise plan. Try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days to test the platform.
Learn more about the costs, in our detailed ActiveCampaign pricing guide.

Try ActiveCampaign for free

8. Constant Contact: Best for Event Invitation Management

Constant Contact is a newsletter platform with over 200 email templates, with 70 just for newsletters. Many designs look dated and too basic for professional newsletters.

If the pre-made designs aren’t quite right, they are easy to customise. Constant Contact’s drag-and-drop editor is user-friendly. Layout blocks make it easy to alter the structure of your newsletter. Action blocks like polls, RSVPs, and product listings give contacts a reason to engage.

Constant Contact has a prominent ‘Create’ button on the main dashboard. This opens up a long list of options. Standards like landing pages, forms, and email automations. But also social posts, adverts, and surveys. It has a section for creating and scheduling events.

Overall, Constant Contact is an OK choice if you are going to work with the other features included. It still keeps everything simple. Find out more about this newsletter platform and the best Constant Contact alternatives here.

Constant Contact Pricing

Constant Contact plans start at $9.99 a month for 500 contacts and 12,000 emails. Emails limits are calculated by multiplying your contacts by 24. The cheapest Core plan gives you all the key newsletter software tools. Plus extras like social posts and integrations with the best ecommerce platforms. Overall, Constant Contact is expensive for what you get. The other newsletter platforms in this article offer more and better features for less money.

Try Constant Contact before buying on a 60-day free trial.

Try Constant Contact here

9. Mailchimp

Mailchimp was once the household name among newsletter platforms. But in the past years, they increased prices a lot, and lagged on released interesting features. This leaves many users looking for better Mailchimp alternatives.

If we focus on just sending newsletters, Mailchimp does have some strengths. A content optimiser gives you tips on your email content, which is nice. And a send time optimiser tells you the best time to send so contacts see your message.

You can use predictive analytics to single out the best contacts to send a campaign to. And you can personalise newsletters with dynamic content. Mailchimp also has automation features and 300 integrations. But many marketing automation capabilities aren’t relevant to email campaigns.

Mailchimp Pricing

Mailchimp paid subscriptions start at $13 a month for 500 contacts. But you’re restricted to sending 6,000 emails. Prices go up steeply as you add more contacts and increase email send limits. The Essentials plan only gives you access to basic features, too.

There is a Free plan with a limit of 1000 emails a month and 500 contacts. This doesn’t allow you to use your own HTML and has Mailchimp branding. You get the core email and newsletter tools, automation and testing are limited.

Which email newsletter software should you pick?

So what is the right email marketing platform for newsletters for your business? That depends a lot on the type of business you are. And what you want to get out of newsletters.

SMEs want value and simplicity from any newsletter software tools they use. When time is limited. And they cannot afford to waste money on expensive features they don’t need. MailerLite, Brevo, and Moosend have great free plans and cheap starting prices. 

You might want a bit more from your newsletter software tools. Visual impact is important and helps drive high open and click rates. AWeber’s Smart Designer and Canva integration open the door to professional design. If you want to run more sophisticated automation and send newsletters, ActiveCampaign and GetResponse are your best bets.

Email Newsletter Platforms FAQ

About Paul Newham

Paul Newham is a content writer specialising in business blogging, report writing, software reviews, and online copywriting. He has 5+ years of email marketing, marketing automation and software review experience. He tested over 60 business software including email marketing tools, CRMs, outreach services, SMTP providers, email verification, and AI writing tools.
With a background in journalism and PR, he understands business content from both sides. And knows what makes for great, engaging copy, but also understands that for businesses, the written word is all about driving value.

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