6 Email Marketing Tools for Small Teams, Compared Honestly
Most small teams don’t struggle with email marketing because the tools are bad. They struggle because the popular comparison articles are written for marketing departments with five specialists and a six-figure budget, and the advice simply doesn’t transfer. When you’re a two-person studio or a solo consultant, you don’t need a “customer data platform.” You need to send a decent-looking email to a few hundred people without losing an afternoon to it.
That’s the lens for this comparison. Below are six established email marketing tools — Kit, MailerLite, Moosend, AWeber, GetResponse, and Brevo — evaluated on the things that actually matter when the person writing the email is also the person doing client work, bookkeeping, and everything else.
One honest note before we start: this comparison is based on each vendor’s published pricing, documentation, and feature pages — checked against the official pricing page of every tool here — not on long-term personal use of all six products. Where a claim depends on day-to-day experience, I say so, and I’d encourage you to use the free plans below to run your own two-week test — it costs nothing and beats any review, including this one.
How to judge an email tool when your team is small
Feature lists converge. Every tool on this page has a drag-and-drop editor, signup forms, automation, and analytics. Choosing on the length of the feature list is how small teams end up paying for software built for someone else. Three criteria separate these tools in practice:
1. Cost at your actual list size — and at the next size up. Email tools price by subscriber count, and the tiers are where budgets quietly break. A tool that’s free at 500 subscribers can become one of your bigger software bills at 5,000. Check the price at your current list size, then check it again at the size you hope to reach in a year. The gap between tools widens dramatically as lists grow.
2. How much marketing knowledge the automation assumes. “Automation” ranges from “send a welcome email when someone subscribes” to visual workflow builders with branching logic, lead scoring, and site tracking. More power is not automatically better: an automation builder you don’t understand is a feature you’re paying for and not using. The right question is not “which tool has the most automation” but “which tool’s automation matches what I’ll realistically build in the next six months.”
3. Deliverability and sending reputation. An email that lands in spam might as well not exist. Deliverability depends partly on you (list hygiene, authentication, content) and partly on the provider’s infrastructure and policies. Providers with stricter signup policies tend to protect their sending reputation better. This is the criterion you can’t see on a pricing page, which is why running a small real-world test with your own list is worth more than any chart.
The comparison at a glance
| Tool | Free plan | Entry paid plan | Automation depth | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kit | Up to 10,000 subscribers, no automations | Creator plan, from $39/mo ($33/mo billed yearly) | Visual builder, creator-focused | Newsletter writers, creators |
| MailerLite | Up to 250 subscribers | Comfort plan, from $12/mo ($10.80/mo billed yearly) | Visual builder, approachable | Small businesses, beginners |
| Moosend | 30-day trial only | Pro plan, from $9/mo ($7/mo billed yearly) | Visual builder, generous limits | Budget-focused senders |
| AWeber | Free tier plus 14-day trial | Lite plan, from $12.50/mo billed annually | Simpler, sequence-based | Solo owners who want simple |
| GetResponse | 14-day trial | Starter plan, from $19/mo ($15.58/mo billed yearly) | Deep: funnels, webinars | Teams outgrowing basic email |
| Brevo | 300 emails/day free | Starter, from $9/mo ($8.08/mo billed yearly) | Email + SMS, priced by volume | Senders with big lists, low volume |
Every price and plan name in this table should be confirmed against the vendor’s own pricing page before you decide — email tools revise their tiers often, and third-party articles (again, including this one) go stale.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
Kit repositioned itself from “email tool” to “operating system for creators,” and the product reflects that: it is organized around a newsletter and its author, not around a marketing department.
Strengths. The subscriber model is tag-based rather than list-based, which means one person exists once in your account no matter how many forms they came through — a small architectural decision that saves real money, since you’re not paying twice for duplicated contacts. The automation builder is visual and reads like a flowchart a non-marketer can follow. Kit also ships creator-economy features the others mostly lack: paid newsletter subscriptions, digital product sales, and newsletter sponsorships, plus a recommendation engine that lets other newsletters send you subscribers.
Weaknesses. Email design flexibility is deliberately narrow — Kit leans toward plain, text-first emails. If your brand depends on heavily designed campaigns, you will feel boxed in. Pricing also climbs faster than budget options as your list grows. The free plan carries an unusually generous 10,000 subscribers, but visual automations and email sequences are reserved for paid plans, which withholds much of what makes Kit worth choosing.
Choose Kit if your email is essentially a newsletter with a person’s voice behind it, and you may someday monetize the list directly.
MailerLite
MailerLite has built its reputation on one promise: the features most small businesses need, at a price and interface complexity they can live with.
Strengths. The interface is repeatedly cited as one of the most approachable in the category, and the free tier includes three automations — notable because several competitors strip automation out of their free plans entirely. Every paid plan gets the full feature set; you only pay more for a bigger list or more sending. It includes a website and landing page builder, so a very small operation could run its entire online presence from one tool. Paid plans stay among the cheapest per subscriber as lists grow.
Weaknesses. New accounts go through a review before sending is enabled, which protects everyone’s deliverability but adds friction at signup — worth knowing if you are in a niche that email providers scrutinise. Reporting is adequate rather than deep, and there is no built-in CRM.
Choose MailerLite if you want the lowest-friction start with room to grow, and your niche is a comfortable fit for their content policies.
Moosend
Moosend competes almost purely on value: close-to-full features at a price that undercuts nearly everyone.
Strengths. The Pro plan includes automation workflows, landing pages, and subscription forms at an entry price under $10 per month, which makes it one of the least expensive ways to get a “real” automation builder. Real-time reporting and email heatmaps are included rather than gated to higher tiers.
Weaknesses. There is no permanent free plan — only a 30-day trial — so the “run it alongside your current tool for a while” strategy costs money here. The template library and integration catalog are smaller than the veterans’, and the brand is less established, which matters if you’re betting a core business system on the vendor’s longevity.
Choose Moosend if price is your deciding factor and you’re comfortable committing after a trial rather than living on a free tier.
AWeber
AWeber is one of the oldest names in email marketing, and it shows in both good and bad ways.
Strengths. Simplicity. AWeber’s model of lists and follow-up sequences predates the visual-workflow era, and for a solo owner who wants “people sign up, they get my five welcome emails, then my weekly newsletter,” that older model is genuinely easier to reason about. Support is a longstanding strength, with 24/7 contact options on paid plans. A free starting tier exists, though AWeber now leads with a 14-day trial of its paid plans, and the free tier’s exact subscriber limit is not stated on the pricing page — you see it when you create the account.
Weaknesses. The automation depth simply isn’t competitive with the visual builders here, and the entry-level Lite plan caps you at three automations and three landing pages. The interface feels dated in places, and per-subscriber pricing is middle-of-the-pack rather than cheap — you’re paying a legacy-brand price for a simpler product.
Choose AWeber if you actively want less machinery, and a straightforward sequence-plus-broadcast setup covers everything you plan to do.
GetResponse
GetResponse is the most “full marketing suite” tool in this lineup: email plus landing pages, conversion funnels, webinars, and on higher tiers, e-commerce features.
Strengths. If your growth plan includes webinars or structured sales funnels, GetResponse builds those in natively where competitors require third-party tools and integrations — sales funnels arrive on the Marketer plan, webinars on the Creator plan. The automation builder is deep, with unlimited workflows and advanced segmentation from the Marketer tier up. For a small team that knows it’s heading toward funnel-driven selling, buying the suite once can be cheaper than assembling four tools.
Weaknesses. That same breadth is the cost: more menus, more concepts, more settings than a two-person team sending a weekly newsletter will ever touch. The features that differentiate GetResponse sit on mid and upper tiers — the entry-level Starter plan includes only one custom automation workflow — so budget buyers end up paying entry price for a product whose entry tier is not its selling point.
Choose GetResponse if webinars or sales funnels are concretely on your roadmap — not “maybe someday,” but planned.
Start a free GetResponse trial
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
Brevo breaks the category’s pricing convention: it charges by email volume, not subscriber count, and its free plan caps daily sending rather than limiting your list.
Strengths. The pricing model is a structural advantage for a specific shape of business: a large list you email occasionally. A 20,000-contact list that gets one monthly update is expensive everywhere else and cheap here. Brevo also bundles SMS and transactional email from the entry plan, with WhatsApp campaigns and push notifications on higher tiers and a sales CRM available as a paid add-on, making it closer to a communications hub than a newsletter tool.
Weaknesses. The daily sending cap on the free plan (300 emails/day) makes launches and big announcements awkward until you pay. Workflow automation only arrives on the Standard plan — the entry-level Starter tier has none — and the email editor, while competent, draws fewer compliments than MailerLite’s. Because Brevo also serves transactional senders at scale, its small-business experience can feel like a slice of a bigger product.
Choose Brevo if your list is large relative to how often you email it, or you want SMS and email under one roof.
Which tool fits which team
A solo creator writing a personal newsletter — Kit first, MailerLite second. Kit’s tag-based model and monetization features are built for exactly this; MailerLite wins if you want more design control or a lower bill.
A two-to-five-person service business (agency, studio, consultancy) — MailerLite first, Brevo second. You need clean campaigns, a welcome sequence, and low overhead. MailerLite’s free tier lets you validate the habit before spending anything; Brevo takes the lead if your contact list is already large.
A budget-constrained sender who needs real automation — Moosend. Accepting the lack of a free tier buys you the cheapest serious workflow builder in the group.
A team planning webinars or funnel-based selling — GetResponse. It’s the only tool here where that path doesn’t require bolting on external products.
Someone who finds all of this exhausting — AWeber. A simpler mental model, real human support, and everything a basic sequence-plus-newsletter operation needs.
A high-volume or multichannel sender — Brevo, on the strength of volume-based pricing and built-in SMS.
The honest way to decide
Every tool on this page will send your emails. The differences that matter — how the editor feels at 9 p.m. when you’re tired, whether your emails land in Gmail’s Primary tab, whether the automation builder clicks with how you think — only show up in use.
So use them. Four of the six have free tiers, and the other two offer free trials — 30 days for Moosend, 14 for GetResponse. Pick your top two from the fit list above, load a copy of your real subscriber list into each, and send your next two newsletters from both. Two weeks of parallel testing will tell you more than two hundred comparison articles.
When you’ve picked one, start free, keep your list clean, and spend the time you saved on the thing that actually grows a small business: writing emails people want to open.
Related: For a closer look at the two tools most small teams end up deciding between, see Kit vs MailerLite. If you’re moving off Mailchimp specifically, see Mailchimp alternatives for small teams. If you are choosing tools for a small team more broadly, the same logic applies to where the work itself lives — see our comparison of project management tools for small teams.