6 Best Cheap Email Marketing Platforms Compared [2025]

Although it’s generally considered that affordable and good don’t go together, in this article, I’ll try to prove the saying doesn’t hold true for cheap email marketing platforms.

And how do I plan to do that?

Simply put, after many hours spent testing, I’ve come up with a list of affordable platforms that offer advanced features at basic plans and those with a generous email/contacts allowance for the price you pay.

If you’re interested in the methodology I’ve used, you can skip ahead and go over it real quick by clicking on [this link]. Or, you can skip ahead to:

A snapshot of the platforms
Comparison criteria
Detailed review of each service

P.S. Need free solutions? If so, be sure to check out our dedicated article on the topic. Or this one, if you want to see how the cheap alternatives compare to the more expensive ones.

Best cheap email marketing platforms: a snapshot

Click on a platform name to jump ahead to the detailed review.

Mailtrap is best for businesses that want to send emails with industry-best analytics and high deliverability by design.
EmailOctopus is for small-to-medium size businesses with up to 25,000 contacts who need a no-frill-approach solution.
Brevo is for large businesses looking for a variety of templates for multiple purposes, superb automations, and lots of contacts.
Moosend is for small-to-medium size businesses that want to send unlimited emails with a limited number of contacts.
MailerLite is for small businesses and startups looking to get their email marketing efforts off the ground.
Klaviyo is for small businesses that would prefer advanced features over the limited amount of allowed monthly sends and contacts.

And here’s what you get for $30 with each platform on this list:

Platform	Email limit/mo	Contacts
Mailtrap	100,000	50,000
EmailOctopus	50,000	5,000
Brevo	10,000	500
Moosend	Unlimited	3,000
MailerLite	Unlimited	1,000
Klaviyo	10,000	501-1,000

Disclaimer: The references to software ratings, available features, and pricing were valid at the time of writing this article but could be subject to change in the future.

Affordable email marketing services comparison criteria

Before we dive in, I thought it’d be useful to provide the actual criteria I’ve used to come up with the list since.

In the following chapter, you’ll find every aspect I’ve benchmarked while testing the platforms and researching them.

And yes, you can expect a 100% non-biased review, no affiliate links, no sponsored content—everything is by the books.

Email infrastructure

Email infrastructure consists of three key components that work in unison to make sure your emails reach inboxes. These are: deliverability, reliability, and scalability.

Deliverability

In short, email deliverability is the email marketing platform’s actual ability to have your emails land in the main inboxes instead of going to spam or promotion folders. To achieve this, email services need to have proper authentication protocols in place, use dedicated IPs, separate streams, etc.

Although I know this sounds like a lot of technical make-believe, let me tell you one thing: deliverability does matter. If you’ve been told otherwise, well, I’ve got some news for you: you’ve been lied to. Namely:

The cost of undelivered emails is not neglectable since you lose $0.11 for every email that doesn’t reach the main inbox.
We’ve noticed there is a noticeable difference in deliverability % between different email marketing software. For instance, after sending out campaigns in one of our most recent tests, SendGrid scored 10.4% more than Mailgun.

If you feel like exploring this further, feel free to check out the article we’ve prepared for you on the topic of email deliverability comparison. ⬅️

Reliability

Reliability in the email marketing world is synonymous with consistent delivery of your emails that doesn’t include any hiccups, such as delays and downtimes, even during peak times.

Nowadays, most email marketing platforms boast an uptime of 99%. However, you should take that with a grain of salt since status pages like this one and online user reports such as this one tell a different story.

So, before settling down for a platform when putting this list together, I’ve made sure to check if there’s a reason for you to worry about when using them.

Scalability

Picture this: you’ve purchased a car primarily for commuting, and you’ve decided to go on a trip — however, the car breaks only a few hours in. 🚨

This is what can happen to you if you choose an email marketing platform that’s not scalable — that is, a platform with which you cannot grow your business without facing bottlenecks or degraded campaign performance.

And trust me, you can go on a road trip in a cheap car just as well as you can upscale your business with an affordable email marketing tool.

P.S. Scalability is not just about how many emails you send — it’s also about the number of emails delivered. So, you can also look at scalability as “cost per delivered email.”

Pricing

As I’ve mentioned in the intro, I’ll consider email marketing platforms with plans that allow you to get the most out of them for the price you pay.

To be more specific, I will consider plans for:

Low-to-medium email sending

These are typically called ‘Basic’ or ‘Starter’ plans. Suitable for their names, they:

Cost typically up to $100 per month.
Allow you to send 1,000 to 100,000 emails per month.
Include basic features such as drag-and-drop editors or email templates.

However, what makes the basic plans on this list different from the rest you can read about on the web is this: they offer some advanced features that are available on other platforms only at higher-end plans.

E.g., Brevo lets you use its automation features with the basic plan, whereas Constant Contact or GetResponse don’t, which is why they didn’t make the cut.

To make things even worse, some basic plans out there don’t offer ‘basic’ features at the lower-tier plans that should be included by default regardless of the plan.

For example, I didn’t include Mailchimp in this article since basic plan users don’t have access to customer support via live chat or tickets, just email. On the other hand, I’ll talk about Mailtrap or MailerLite, which provide reliable support regardless of the plan you use.

High-volume email sending

Usually called ‘Premium,’ these plans:

Cost more than $100/month.
Let you send more than 100,000 + emails per month.
Include advanced features (e.g., deliverability expert consultation, etc.)

And here’s the thing: some platforms out there are affordable only for low-volume users but have a huge price jump if you want to send more than 100k emails/month (looking at you, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, etc.). In translation, they stop being cheap and affordable if you want to scale your project.

On the other hand, there are platforms like Mailtrap, which let you send more without forcing you to break the bank.

But, there are certain exceptions to this, which I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for including, but I had to since they offer great basic plans, making them perfect for you if you don’t plan on scaling in the future or simply want to use advanced features with a low sending volume.

Best bang for your buck plan(s)

For all of you out there who are not sure if you want to increase your sending amount in the future or simply want something cheap that’s enough for most email marketing strategies, I’ve made sure to include plans that are just that: the golden middle. These plans are typically called ‘Business’ and they:

Cost more or less than $100.
Let you send anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 emails per month
Include both basic and advanced features (e.g., team member slots and SSO support, etc.).

The trick is that these plans are not as widespread and common as you might think. For instance, the usual suspects, HubSpot or Mailchimp seem to completely skip these plans.

This is primarily because they are platforms geared towards large businesses, organizations, or enterprises, which are more than happy to pay for the high-end plans simply for features like advanced teams and user permissions or predictive AI lead scoring.

AI, email automation, and integrations

AI in email marketing

Needless to say, AI is pretty much everywhere nowadays and email marketing is no exception.

You can use it for everything from writing email content to creating landing pages.

However, some cheap email marketing platforms offer AI that’s more a gimmick than it is a tool. But don’t worry — to have a more trustworthy picture of these, I’ve tried out the AI email writers, template builders, segmentations, and you name it. 🤖

Automation

In the email marketing world, automation is pretty much the equivalent of autopilot on modern electric cars.

With automation, you can have the platform do all the work for you: send welcome emails, re-engagement emails, abandoned cart reminders, and more.

Most importantly, unlike in the automotive market, where autopilot is reserved only for high-end vehicles, email marketing automations are available even on cheap platforms.

Oh, and yes, AI didn’t skip out on automations, either. For an in-depth dive, check out the awesome video our YouTube team has prepared for you on the topic:

Integrations

Continuing with the automotive analogies (this is the last one, I promise), if you’re purchasing a car, you’ll want it to have different plugins like GPS or bluetooth.

The same goes, as you might have expected, with email marketing platforms and integrations: the right integration can improve your marketing funnel in various ways and bring you one step closer to your customers at every stage of their journey.

Some cheap platforms on this list offer many, some but a few, and some none. But the key part is that the quantity is actually not important—it’s the relevance you’re looking for since you want integrations that offer real value and are useful to your business.

After all, you wouldn’t want a plugin in your car as useless as a GPS if you never drive further from around the block or to work and back, would you now?

So, if you’re choosing a platform for its integrations, make sure it aligns with what you actually need. For example, you can choose some of the following:

E-commerce store integrations, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and similar platforms – offered by OmniSend or Brevo.
B2B or service-based integrations like Salesforce or Zoho, etc. – found in platforms like HubSpot
Content-creation integrations for toolkits like Zapier, WordPress or content and course platforms like Teachable – supported by MailerLite.

And this is why, throughout this article, I’ll highlight specific useful integrations if I come across some that are worthy of your time.

Email design

Drag-and-drop email builder

Not so long ago, you’d need help from a developer to create HTML emails from scratch, personalize them to your audience, make them responsive, etc.

Now, you can use drag-and-drop email builders, which allow you to:

Use them without putting in the time to learn the ropes.
Easily customize elements with no need for coding.
Re-use elements like headers, buttons, images, etc.
Preview how your emails look for mobile and desktop.

Email templates library

Although most email marketing software nowadays offers email templates, some selections are greater than others.

For example, EmailOctopus has a great selection of newsletter templates, whereas Brevo has professional emails for everything you can imagine.

Most importantly, the templates need to be easily customizable and personalizable for your target audience so you don’t have to waste time inserting custom values for every single email.

Email analytics

Without analytics, you wouldn’t be able to see whether your email marketing campaign is performing well or if it’s healthy. Most importantly, with no stats, you can’t optimize your emails and campaigns.

Some of the most important metrics that allow you to do this include:

Open rate
Click-through rate
Bounce rate
Subscribes and unsubscribes
Conversion rate

For example, your bulk emails should have an open rate that’s between 15-25%. For bounce rate on the other hand, you need to be under 2% regardless of the campaign type, and so on.

User experience

When we’re talking about user experience, we talk about:

Ease-of-use

Since we’re talking about cheap email marketing platforms, you likely want a service provider that can help your business save time and money. Of course, they won’t allow you to do this if they have a high learning curve.

So, all of the platforms on this list have a pretty user-friendly campaign-sending process, some more than others, but they’re all there.

Ease-of-integration

Another aspect that effectively saves you time and money is the ease of integration and the migration process.

You want to be able to import your contacts in a few clicks, transfer your templates easily, or even transfer all of your configurations and setups if you’re coming from another platform.

Knowledge base

Then, we have our supporting documentation, which is usually called ‘Knowledge base’ or ‘Help center.’ These articles should help you with everything from sending email campaigns to dealing with potential blockers and issues.

Customer support

Do you want to spend hours trying to reach a customer support team or hear from them while you’re facing a blocker? I didn’t think so.

So, I’ll make sure to include platforms that have great support teams working around the clock and omit ones that have a bad reputation in this regard.

Legal compliance and security

When it comes to legal compliance and security, I will be checking the following:

Data protection regulations – These include regulations such as GDPR (EU), CCPA and CPRA (US), and so on.
Consent management – By including obligatory unsubscribe links in emails, a marketing platform can help you comply with the regulations above.
Email encryption – Since it’s technical, encryption is usually not fun. It includes protocols such as TLS, HTTPS, AES 256, etc.
Access control and permissions – If you have a big team, you’ll want to be able to manage access control, give some users certain permissions, etc.

Customer experience

Last but not least, I’ll be checking customers’ testimonials on social media pages and review platforms like G2 and Capterra. You’ll notice the score for each platform before I dive into each review.

I’ll also check what social media platforms have to say about each platform since that’s where most reports of downtimes and any other potential issues are usually found.

By doing this, I can easily see whether the fancy award badges displayed on numerous platforms’ websites are true or not.

Best affordable email marketing platform: Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform

G2: 4.8 🌟 Capterra: 4.8 🌟

Free plan: 1,000 emails per month (Sending), 100 emails per month (Testing), 500 contacts

Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform is designed to drive your revenue. It’s perfect for email marketers focused on high email deliverability, in-depth analytics, and growth-focused features to create and send impactful marketing campaigns.

Who is it for?

Since you also get an SMTP/API service along with the Email Marketing suite all-in-one plan, I’d say Mailtrap is best for both developer and marketing teams looking to send marketing, mass, and transactional emails with industry-best analytics.

Notable features

In-depth analytics

One of the things you’ll likely notice if you start using Mailtrap is its analytics, which includes helicopter view dashboards and drill-down reports. With these, you can observe your email marketing efforts, how your campaigns perform with various Mailbox Providers, how much they bounce, and more.

High deliverability rates by design

Basically, if you want an email marketing platform that will provide you with the best odds of reaching your recipients’ main inboxes in time, Mailtrap is most likely your best bet. Of course, I would never make such a claim without something to back it up.

So, here’s how Mailtrap performed on the recent tests we’ve performed using free plans and without warming up domains:

Platform	Email placement results	Spam filter rating	Inbox email delivery with top providers
Mailtrap	Inbox: 78.8% Tabs: 4.8% Spam: 14.4% Missing: 2.0%	Google Spam Filter: Not spam; Not phishy Barracuda: Score 0 Spam Assassin: Score: -3.8	Gmail: 67.50% Outlook: 77.78% Hotmail: 100% Yahoo: 55.56%

Drag-and-drop email builder

Mailtrap’s drag-and-drop editor lets you create responsive HTML emails or templates and personalize them with merge tags without any coding skills. The editor also comes with built-in AI you can use to generate images or text for headers, subject lines, and such.