11 Free Email Marketing Services Compared — The Ultimate Email Marketing Guide

EmailOctopus started as a feature of Amazon’s SES service and has grown into one of the best free email marketing services around. It doesn’t have a ton of features, but it does have enough to make it a great option for businesses looking for an email marketing solution that’s not going to cost them a lot of money. It includes an email list management feature that helps with segmentation and personalization.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 email sends per month. If you’re using Amazon’s servers, you can send up to 62,000 emails for free.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Reporting and statistics stored for 30 days
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Email list management
• Basic customer support

? Ease of Use

EmailOctopus is very user-friendly and offers a simple UI with a sleek design. You can choose from the available templates or use the drag-and-drop editor to create great emails. It also has a great dashboard that both looks good and is easy to use.

? Automation

EmailOctopus offers automation tools that make it easy to create email sequences to promote your business and products. The platform also handles things like bounces, unsubscribers, and complaints automatically and scrubs your email list regularly.

? Analytics

EmailOctopus shows data on clicks, opens, and unsubscribes. You can also check your performance on Amazon SES.

? Who Is It Best For?

The platform is best for SMEs, eCommerce, NPOs, and businesses who are already using Amazon SES.

Benchmark is a simple email marketing platform that doesn’t take much to set up and customize. It includes a pretty powerful set of integrated, automated features that will be useful to businesses of any side. The platform includes a drag-and-drop email builder and email checklist to get every email looking great in less time. The company operates in 15 countries around the world and supports nine languages.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan lets you have an unlimited number of subscribers on your list, and you can send up to 3500 emails each month. The next step up will get you unlimited email sends per month for $13/month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Drag-and-drop email builder
• Responsive email templates
• RSS email campaigns
• List management
• Basic segmentation
• Basic drip campaigns
• Email deliverability management
• Lead generation tools like sign-up forms, polls, and surveys
• Reporting tools including live engagement, click heatmaps, Google Analytics tracking, opens by hour, and opens by device
• 1500+ integrations

? Ease of Use

Benchmark has an easy sign-up and onboarding process—just enter your name, email address, phone number, and company name. You’ll need to confirm your email address, but then you’ll be ready to go. The user interface (UI) is intuitive and easy to navigate, and it includes guidance on how to create your first email campaign.

? Automation

Automation is available on the free plan in the form of basic trigger-based emails. While you won’t be able to set up very sophisticated automations on the free plan, it can still be used to create welcome emails.

? Analytics

Benchmark’s reporting gives you all the stats you need to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns—even on the free plan. You get live engagement reports, click heatmap reports, Google Analytics tracking, and can view opens by hour and opens by device.

? Who Is It Best For?

Benchmark is best for bloggers, agencies, SMBs, and eCommerce stores.

HubSpot is a complete marketing platform that includes email marketing software as part of its marketing hub. This platform gives you the tools you need to create professional email campaigns that look good no matter the device. They offer goal-based email templates, a drag-and-drop editor, list membership, and more.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

HubSpot’s free email marketing service allows for up to 1 million contacts and you can send 2,000 emails per month with HubSpot branding.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Lead generation tools like forms and landing pages
• List segmentation with up to 5 active lists
• Team email
• Live chat
• Conversational bots
• Mobile optimization
• Reporting dashboard with up to three dashboards and 10 reports each
• Limited Messenger integration
• 10 custom properties
• 1 form follow-up email
• HubSpot mobile app

? Ease of Use

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub (which is where its email marketing service lives) is loaded with features that include sales, CRM, and customer service. With the addition of all of those features, HubSpot has a bit of a steeper learning curve than the other free email marketing services on our list. It doesn’t have a guide when you first get started, so you’re left to figure things out on your own. Having said that, the platform is well-organized, making navigation logical. Plus, the features are named as you’d expect so they’re easier to find and understand.

? Automation

You can use HubSpot to create automated email series that are trigger-based and can use as many triggers and conditions as you want. Triggers can include things like filling in a sign-up form, interactions with emails and ads, or even date-based triggers like the last time a subscriber interacted with your brand.

? Analytics

HubSpot Marketing Hub includes comprehensive email marketing tracking, analytics, and reporting. You can easily view email marketing metrics like opens, clicks, spam reports, bounces, and unsubscribes, but that’s nowhere near all that HubSpot offers.

? Who Is It Best For?

HubSpot is a great option for SMBs, agencies, and SaaS businesses.

Mailchimp has long been a favorite option for small businesses and bloggers, largely because it was one of the first reputable email marketing platforms to offer a free plan. Mailchimp has tons of tools, as you’d expect from an email marketing service that’s been around forever. It offers a library of more than 100 professionally designed email templates, automation tools, a content studio, and even integration with your online store.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

Mailchimp’s free plan includes up to 2,000 subscribers and allows you to send up to 10,000 emails per month. To upgrade to unlimited emails, you’ll pay $10/month, but the number of subscribers you can have drops to 500.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• 1-step automations
• Subject line helper
• Sign-up forms, surveys, and a marketing CRM
• Landing pages
• Social posting
• Facebook and Instagram ads
• Postcards
• Creative Assistant
• Websites and domains
• Content Studio
• Basic email templates
• Email support for 30 days
• Marketing calendar
• 250+ integrations

? Ease of Use

Mailchimp has a simple sign-up process and a clean, simple dashboard. You start off with just three options that allow you to create and send an email, create or import an email marketing list, or create a sign-up form. Once you get going, the dashboard will change to include campaign activity, recent events, and list growth information.

? Automation

Mailchimp is another email marketing service that lets you run email campaigns based on triggers and includes a ton of preset options that you can customize.

? Analytics

All Mailchimp users get access to A/B testing and reports that cover subscriber activity, click maps, revenue, and domain performance. Plus, you can integrate with Google Analytics to get a lot more information.

? Who Is It Best For?

Mailchimp is best for SMBs, publishers, and eCommerce businesses.

MailerLite is another of our favorite free email marketing services. It includes live 24/7 support and some great features like landing pages and automation. There’s also a drag-and-drop editor, but you’re able to use Rich Text to create your emails, too.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan lets you send up to 12,000 emails each month, as well as the bulk of the email marketing features the platform offers. You can get access to additional features for just $10 per month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Support including a knowledge base, video tutorials, and 24/7 email support
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Rich Text editor
• Built-in image editing
• File manager
• Mobile-friendly email newsletters
• Lead generation tools like landing pages (with tons of additional features) and sign-up forms
• Subscriber management
• Unsubscribe page builder
• Email automation
• Advanced segmentation
• Tagging
• RSS campaigns
• A/B testing
• Email campaign reports and surveys
• Account management tools including domain authentication, multi-user accounts, and user permissions
• Integrations and API

? Ease of Use

MailerLite has a simple, easy-to-use interface. You can do just about anything you need to do with just a few clicks, from creating an email to managing your subscribers.

? Automation

With MailerLite, you have a few options to set up automated workflows. After you choose a trigger, you can send an email, set up an action, schedule your email for later, or set up a condition. This makes it easy to send emails automatically in response to campaign activity, workflow activity, custom fields, and more. Plus, you can automatically add, move, or remove subscribers from groups, mark them as unsubscribed, etc.

? Analytics

Your MailerLite dashboard will show you open rates and click rates. And, thanks to Google Analytics, you can keep track of links, too.

? Who Is It Best For?

MailerLite is best for startups, SMBs, NPOs, creatives, and bloggers.

Mailjet is best known for sending transactional emails but also includes basic features that make it another viable free email marketing service. You can use Mailjet’s drag-and-drop email builder, called Passport, and collaborate with multiple team members in real-time to edit or comment on the emails you’re creating.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan allows for unlimited contacts and lets you send up to 6,000 emails per month (200 per day).

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Unlimited contacts
• APIs, SMTP relay, webhooks
• Advanced email editor
• Advanced statistics

? Ease of Use

Getting started with Mailjet is easy and you have three ways to create an email marketing campaign: drag-and-drop templates, ready-made email layouts, or HTML editor. You can send emails out right from Mailjet’s UI.

? Automation

Mailjet includes automation features that make it easy for you to reach your current subscribers at the right time, integrate new subscribers automatically, and even reward subscriber actions. Automations are easy to set up and generally take just a few clicks.

? Analytics

Mailjet’s reporting is basic, but it still gives you details like opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and bounces so you’ll have the information you need to make sure your campaigns are performing as you want them to.

? Who Is It Best For?

Mailjet is best for eCommerce, enterprise businesses, and SMEs.

Moosend consistently appears on lists of the best free email marketing services, and with good reason. The platform lets you create beautiful, automated email campaigns with a drag-and-drop builder or one of its templates. Plus, real-time analytics and list segmentation features.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan includes up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited email sends per month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Email campaigns
• Sign-up forms
• Templates
• Basic image editing
• Countdown timers
• Conditional content
• AI-engine product recommendations
• Automation workflow designer with pre-built automation templates and multi-step workflows
• Tracking, reporting, and insights (no custom reporting)
• Support including a knowledge base, email support, and chat support
• 100+ integrations and API

? Ease of Use

Moosend has an intuitive UI and is easy to navigate. The features and tools are clearly named and where you would expect them to be. It has separate tabs that you use to manage your campaigns, lists, automations, and reports, so your dashboard isn’t overwhelmed with clutter.

? Automation

Moosend has great email marketing automation features (and they’re the same on the paid and free plans). You can create marketing automation workflows so you can send out emails at just the right time. This includes product offers, welcome emails and onboarding sequences, abandoned cart recovery emails, and more. Moosend includes ready-made tested automation recipes and also gives you the option to create your own.

? Analytics

Moosend offers comprehensive, accurate, and easy-to-manage reports that give you insights into your subscribers and campaigns. You can track unique and total open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, forwards, and unsubscribes. You can even see where in the world your customers are so you can target them based on location. One of our favorite analytics features they offer is click heatmapping which lets you see how subscribers are navigating your emails.

? Who Is It Best For?

Moosend is best for agencies, bloggers, eCommerce, SaaS, publishers, and SMEs.

Omnisend is a great free option for eCommerce business owners. You can pull products in from your store and use them to create emails and opt-in forms. It has a library of pre-built email templates that are perfect for eCommerce shoppers, and you can also save templates to make it even easier to create email campaigns in the future.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

Omnisend allows users on the free plan to have an unlimited number of subscribers. You’re allowed to send up to 500 emails per month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Website tracking with live view, customer profiles, and one month of tracking history
• Five segments
• Customer lifecycle stages
• Three active sign-up forms
• Landing pages
• Email templates
• Basic image editor
• Reports including sales, audience growth, sign-up forms, campaigns, campaign clickmaps, customer breakdowns, and retention

? Ease of Use

Omnisend has a clean, modern UI where the features are clearly explained and laid out on the dashboard. You can build emails with Omnisend’s drag-and-drop email editor and they have several templates that you can customize to cut down on the time it takes to create.

? Automation

Omnisend doesn’t have a ton of automation features available in its free plan. You can run simultaneous email campaigns, set up when and how many emails to send, and personalize messages based on segment.

? Analytics

With Omnisend’s reporting, you can create customized reports to find out which devices, languages, and countries are most represented, as well as drilling down into the specifics of your marketing campaigns and finding out which sign-up forms are performing well. There’s also a clickmapping tool that lets you see where subscribers are clicking on your newsletters.

? Who Is It Best For?

Omnisend is a good choice for eCommerce businesses, SMBs, entrepreneurs, and publishers.

Next on our list of free email marketing services to compare is Sender. This platform offers email marketing features, push notifications, integrations, and some beautiful email designs that you can customize to match your brand. If you’re an eCommerce business, you’ll enjoy the integrations with popular eCommerce platforms like Magento and WordPress (WooCommerce).

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

Sender’s free plan allows for up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 email sends per month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Subscription forms
• Custom fields
• Easy segmentation
• CMS plugins and API integrations
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Newsletter email templates
• Personalization
• Basic image editor
• Product handling
• Mobile-ready
• Upload your own HTML templates
• Reporting and analytics including a click map, open and click tracking, data and time analysis, subscriber profiles, and Google Analytics integration

? Ease of Use

Sender has an intuitive, user-friendly interface that makes it easy for even beginners to learn and navigate.

? Automation

With Sender, you can automate welcome and onboarding emails, abandoned cart recovery emails, follow-up emails, and set up drip campaigns.

? Analytics

The platform offers comprehensive reports so you can have a full understanding of how your email campaigns are performing and who your audience is.

? Who Is It Best For?

Sender works well for multiple business types and is best for eCommerce, SMBs, bloggers, and agencies.

Brevo is another free email marketing service that is known for transactional emails. For email marketing, it has a ton of templates that you can customize and personalize, A/B testing, a workflow editor, contact management, and real-time reporting. There’s also SMS text sending and marketing automation features that make Brevo a great option.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

The free plan allows for an unlimited number of contacts but you can only send up to 300 emails per day.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Mobile-friendly email designer
• Email template library
• SMS marketing
• Email & SMS personalization
• Chat
• Unlimited contacts & details
• Advanced segmentation
• Customizable signup forms
• Sales CRM
• Transactional email and SMS sending
• Core API features
• Advanced templating language
• Workflow editor
• Page tracking
• Real-time reporting
• Email support
• GDPR compliance

? Ease of Use

It’s easy to get started with Brevo’s free plan. You can upload a .csv or .txt file to add your contacts, copy and paste from an .xls file, or just add them manually. The platform is easy to navigate and most users will be able to get their first email campaign up and running quickly with no problem.

? Automation

While Brevo offers some great automations, you’ll need to have your emails prepped and ready to go beforehand. From there, you just set up the trigger events and go.

? Analytics

Brevo includes basic reporting tools so you can track opens, clicks, complaints, and unsubscribers. You’ll also be able to figure out where emails are being opened and on which device as well as some clickmapping so you can see which links your subscribers are clicking.

? Who Is It Best For?

Brevo is best for eCommerce businesses, publishers, and agencies.

SendPulse also offers email marketing, SMS marketing, transactional emails, etc. It comes with a great set of features (even in the free plan) and gives marketers a multichannel option. SendPulse lets you A/B test, personalize emails, and send targeted welcome emails and re-engagement campaigns. Our favorite feature is the ability to resend your emails to non-openers to try to get more eyes on your email copy. There are also more than 130 email templates to choose from.

? How Many Subscribers & Emails Come With the Free Plan?

SendPulse allows for up to 500 subscribers and 15,000 email sends per month.

? What Features Come With the Free Plan?

• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Email templates
• Email scheduler
• Subscription forms
• Automation360 for up to five events
• A/B testing
• Resend to unopened
• Reports including opened emails, delivered, how many subscribers clicked the link and which one, number of errors, emails marked as spam, and unsubscribed users
• Personalization and segmentation
• Custom unsubscribe links
• Drag-and-drop and HTML email editors
• GIFs
• SPF and DKIM
• Adding SMS/push to autoresponders
• Sending an email campaign to multiple mailing lists

? Ease of Use

SendPulse is easy to set up and customize to your needs. You can use your Google account to get signed up and then SendPulse will ask you what your needs are and whether you’ve sent email newsletters before. It also asks for your mailing list size and the dashboard will be tweaked to reflect common actions for lists that are your size.

? Automation

You can create flexible event-based automation flows using actions, conditions, filters, goals, as well as creating up to 50 blocks with different situations and goals. Plus there’s the “resend to unopened” feature, so you can send emails to the folks who haven’t yet opened with a new subject line.

? Analytics

SendPulse lets you easily track things like open rates, click rates, geographic statistics, device statistics, error statistics, and click charts.

? Who Is It Best For?

SendPulse is best for eCommerce businesses and SMEs.