Email tools look interchangeable on a feature list and behave very differently on an invoice. These four questions separate them faster than any comparison table.
1. Does the price count contacts or emails?
This is the first fork in the category. Mailchimp, MailerLite, GetResponse, Omnisend and AWeber price by how many contacts or subscribers you store. Brevo and Mailjet price by how many emails you send each month and let the contact list grow without changing the bill.
If you hold 30,000 addresses and mail them twice a year, volume pricing is dramatically cheaper. If you hold 800 addresses and mail them twice a week, contact pricing is.
2. How many people need a seat?
Seat counts are where the published tiers bite. Mailchimp includes one seat free, three on Essentials and five on Standard. Sender includes three seats at US$7 a month and ten at US$14. ActiveCampaign includes one user on its first two tiers and three on Pro.
A three-person team is on the entry plan at some vendors and the third plan at others, at several times the price, for the same sending volume.
3. Do you need transactional email in the same account?
Receipts, password resets and order confirmations are transactional messages, and not every marketing platform sends them. Brevo, Mailjet, GetResponse, Sender and listmonk state transactional sending on their own pages. MailerLite points at a separate product for it.
Keeping both in one account saves a second integration and a second sending reputation to manage. It also concentrates the risk if that account is suspended.
4. What does the free tier actually allow?
Free tiers in this category range over an order of magnitude. beehiiv, EmailOctopus and Sender publish free ceilings of 2,500 subscribers. Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Omnisend stop at 250. Mailjet's free plan is expressed in emails instead: 6,000 a month with a 200-a-day cap.
The daily cap is the part people miss. A 200-a-day limit is fine for drip automation and useless for a Tuesday newsletter to 3,000 people.
When a self-hosted tool makes sense
listmonk and Mautic have no licence fee, and both expect you to run a server and connect your own sending route. That trade is worth it when the list is large, the budget is small, and someone on the team is comfortable operating infrastructure and managing deliverability. It is a poor trade when nobody is.
What we could not verify
Some vendors do not publish a price at all. ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo compute the monthly figure from a contact or profile count in a builder, so their plans appear here without a price rather than with a guessed one. Where a pricing page refused automated access, the profile says so instead of showing an estimate.
