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Email remains a critical component of digital marketing strategies, effectively driving customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. However, an effective email marketing campaign goes beyond a simple mailing list; it demands robust tools for automated delivery, compelling content creation, and comprehensive metric tracking. PCMag has been testing leading email marketing platforms for a decade, evaluating their capabilities, ease of use, effectiveness, and other features. Our Editors’ Choice winners—including Brevo, HubSpot, and Mailchimp—represent your current best bets. Read on for all our top picks, links to our in-depth reviews of each service, and buying advice to help you choose the right email marketing solution for your business.
Our Top Tested Picks
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Editors’ Choice
4.5
Outstanding
HubSpot Marketing Hub seamlessly unifies sales, advanced automation, and email campaigns over a shared data core, cementing its status as an industry-leading promotional solution for scaling brands.
Jump To See More DetailsHubSpot Marketing Hub Review
- Generous free tier with 2,000 monthly email sends
- Unified Smart CRM syncs marketing, sales, and service
- Built-in Breeze AI tools allow copy editing, content remixing, and intent tracking
- Upgraded Forms Builder offers a multi-column drag-and-drop grid and native multi-step features
- Proactive error dashboard flags when and where workflow sequences break
- Expensive up-front costs and mandatory onboarding fees
- Steep learning curve
Best for Marketing With E-Commerce
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Mailchimp’s renowned promotional platform offers robust e-commerce features and AI-powered tools, making it a fantastic multichannel email marketing hub.
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- Full marketing hub
- Extremely easy to use
- Convenient email templates and helpful reports
- Improved AI recommendations and automation
- Optional web hosting plans
- Respectable free tier
- The lower tiers have fewer features than before
- Relatively expensive as plans scale
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Brevo’s expanded email marketing service is now a comprehensive hub that delivers enhanced automation, AI tools, varied templates, and terrific CRM functionality, while remaining surprisingly easy to use.
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- Simple navigation and lots of assistance
- Great email builder and template customization
- Good range of automation and integrations
- Optional SMS and WhatsApp marketing support
- Reasonably priced
- Free tier
- Limited landing pages
- Some features use credits and cost extra
- Occasionally lethargic loading
- Some finicky data importing
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ActiveCampaign deftly bridges the divide between simple newsletter tools and massive, enterprise-focused email marketing ecosystems by providing high-level features like predictive sending and HIPAA compliance at a mid-market price.
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- Terrific drag-and-drop email builder
- Advanced machine learning for predictive sending and content optimization to boost engagement
- More than 900 native integrations
- Free migration service to move from a competing platform
- Steep learning curve to master its massive feature set
- Pricing increases significantly as your contact list grows
- CRM lacks the depth of dedicated platforms
Best for Robust Reporting and Analytics
$45 Per Month With 15,000 Monthly Emails and Email or Chat Support
at Klaviyo
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A powerful new omnichannel builder and deep AI protocol integrations transform Klaviyo from a complex, data-heavy tool into an accessible, autonomous marketing engine.
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- Excellent reporting tools
- Highly useful AI integrations
- Exhaustive list of templates for all core features
- Visually oriented for ease of use
- Pricier than the average newsletter platform
- Many add-ons and upgrades make pricing a bit confusing
- Lacks phone tech support
Best for E-commerce SMBs on a Budget
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Omnisend is a top choice for small and mid-market e-commerce companies thanks to its intuitive interface, AI integrations, and accessibility.
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- High-quality email builder and newsletter templates
- Many user-friendly tools
- Excellent customer support
- Affordable plans
- Still lacks a true CRM
- Relatively skimpy free tier
Best for Existing Zoho Customers
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Zoho Campaigns delivers a modernized, fluid email editor, plus seamless integrations with Zoho’s other SMB software and third-party e-commerce, so you can build the toolset you need to meet your email marketing goals.
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- Budget-friendly pricing
- Well-designed dashboard
- Convenient integration with Zoho services
- Unified multi-channel reports
- Novices may initially find the workflows challenging
- A few key tools are gated behind the Professional tier
- Some visually dated templates
Best for Basic Campaigns and Newsletters
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Campaign Monitor is an intuitive email platform bolstered by new AI copy assistance and native landing page builders, but it continues to trail the competition in workflow flexibility and tiered customer support.
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- Easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface
- Simple visual automation tool
- Good SMB analytics
- AI copy assistance and smart layout generators
- Native web builders for landing pages
- Aggressive price scaling as subscriber lists grow
- Rigid automation builder that blocks active workflow editing
- Lacks live support chat
- Phone support isn’t available with every tier
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at Constant Contact
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Constant Contact offers accessible marketing automation, e-commerce and social media marketing integrations, and AI tools that cater to small businesses.
Jump To See More DetailsConstant Contact Review
- Intuitive and elegant UI
- Wide range of third-party integrations
- Superior email deliverability rate
- Predictive AI content and multi-email sequence generation
- Templates don’t offer much customization
- Relatively expensive if you have thousands of contacts
- Tedious contact record updates that lack inline list editing
The Best Email Marketing Software Deals This Week*
- Klaviyo—$45 Per Month With 15,000 Monthly Emails and Email or Chat Support
- Get the Best Prices On Email Marketing Softwares—Download Our Free Price Comparison Tool $0
*Deals are selected by our commerce team
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
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EDITORS’ NOTE
July 10, 2026: With this update, we’ve added ActiveCampaign to our list of recommended email marketing services. We have also retested all of the existing picks this year.
Best Overall
4.5
Outstanding
- Generous free tier with 2,000 monthly email sends
- Unified Smart CRM syncs marketing, sales, and service
- Built-in Breeze AI tools allow copy editing, content remixing, and intent tracking
- Upgraded Forms Builder offers a multi-column drag-and-drop grid and native multi-step features
- Proactive error dashboard flags when and where workflow sequences break
- Expensive up-front costs and mandatory onboarding fees
- Steep learning curve
More than just an email marketing tool, HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive marketing technology (martech) platform that integrates many features that small to mid-size businesses need. In that sense, it’s competitive with enterprise-grade products like Salesforce. Due to its integrated nature, its focus is shifting increasingly to tracking and optimizing the entire customer journey, rather than just the email experience.
SMBs looking to combine email and customer relationship management: If you’re looking for a single app that integrates CRM, email, marketing automation, and other features, HubSpot has nearly everything you could need. However, the stacked suite comes at a cost, with the robust Professional tier starting at $890 per month (or $800 per month, billed annually). Lower-cost versions are available if you’re willing to sacrifice functionality.
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4.5
Outstanding
- Full marketing hub
- Extremely easy to use
- Convenient email templates and helpful reports
- Improved AI recommendations and automation
- Optional web hosting plans
- Respectable free tier
- The lower tiers have fewer features than before
- Relatively expensive as plans scale
A longtime player in the email marketing space, Mailchimp has steadily improved its service to meet the demands of its large customer base. While its core focus remains email, it has integrated CRM and even website-building features into recent releases, all without compromising its consistent, comfortable UI.
Marketing newcomers and small businesses:Mailchimp’s strength lies in email campaigns, despite its expansion into all-in-one marketing solutions. A user-friendly interface, convenient templates, useful reports, and a respectable free tier make it a worthwhile service for beginners and SMBs.
Businesses needing e-commerce integration: With Mailchimp, you can track plain-text clicks, Google Analytics numbers, and, in a nice touch, e-commerce links to stay on top of sales. Additionally, Mailchimp seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce platforms, such as BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce, making it easy to manage your marketing efforts.
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Best for SMBs on a Budget
4.0
Excellent
- Simple navigation and lots of assistance
- Great email builder and template customization
- Good range of automation and integrations
- Optional SMS and WhatsApp marketing support
- Reasonably priced
- Free tier
- Limited landing pages
- Some features use credits and cost extra
- Occasionally lethargic loading
- Some finicky data importing
Since ditching its former Sendinblue branding, Brevo has evolved from a basic email marketing package to a more comprehensive marketing hub. It includes built-in CRM features and advanced automation capabilities, as well as a broad portfolio of integrations with third-party software. It also features an attractive price that’s sure to turn heads.
SMBs on tight budgets:Brevo’s free plan lets you send 300 emails per day and apply automations to 2,000 contacts. Want more flexibility? For $18 per month, you can send up to 5,000 emails per month and enjoy basic analytics. You won’t get the same feature set as some of the more costly entries in our roundup, but you’ll save money.
Growing SMBs: Brevo offers generous contact storage with all plans (the free plan supports up to 100,000 contacts!), advanced automation, CRM, and multichannel marketing. Cost-effective, volume-based pricing and an all-in-one suite of integrated marketing and sales tools mean companies can scale their operations without stumbling over technical and budgetary hurdles.
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Best for Scaling Businesses
4.0
Excellent
- Terrific drag-and-drop email builder
- Advanced machine learning for predictive sending and content optimization to boost engagement
- More than 900 native integrations
- Free migration service to move from a competing platform
- Steep learning curve to master its massive feature set
- Pricing increases significantly as your contact list grows
- CRM lacks the depth of dedicated platforms
ActiveCampaign is a powerhouse platform that offers enterprise-grade automation without requiring an enterprise-grade budget. It has a steeper learning curve than more beginner-friendly software on this list, but its visual workflow, omnichannel tracking (for SMS, website, and email), and built-in sales CRM make it an unbeatable all-in-one growth platform for businesses set on scaling their marketing efforts.
Advanced e-commerce stores: Online retailers that need hyper-personalized emails for their clients can leverage ActiveCampaign’s incredibly granular segment builder. For example, you can send a special discount code only to shoppers who abandoned a $100 cart, visited the sizing page twice, and haven’t purchased an item in 30 days.
B2B service providers and agencies: Businesses with high-touch sales models can use the built-in CRM to automatically assign leads to sales reps, track client interactions, and bump a lead’s “score” when they download a whitepaper or book a consultation. ActiveCampaign handles these by default, with no additional purchases needed.
4.0
Excellent
- Excellent reporting tools
- Highly useful AI integrations
- Exhaustive list of templates for all core features
- Visually oriented for ease of use
- Pricier than the average newsletter platform
- Many add-ons and upgrades make pricing a bit confusing
- Lacks phone tech support
Klaviyo is a well-rounded platform designed for email marketers focused on driving sales. In addition to its robust e-commerce features, the company offers targeted solutions for the retail, wellness, and restaurant industries. Klaviyo provides a strong feature set out of the box, and it supports a wide range of integrations with third-party software to enhance your campaigns. Moreover, it has some of the best reporting and analytics capabilities of any email marketing tool we’ve tested.
Experienced e-commerce marketers: If your company is familiar with email marketing, it’ll benefit from Klaviyo’s rich feature set. The service offers e-commerce-specific automations, dynamic product feeds, and seamlessly integrates with major online stores, including BigCommerce, Magento, Presta Online, Shopify, Square Online, and WooCommerce.
Data-driven analysts: Klaviyo gives your business extensive analytics, predictive insights, and real-time tracking, enabling you to make informed decisions and develop more effective marketing strategies.
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4.0
Excellent
- High-quality email builder and newsletter templates
- Many user-friendly tools
- Excellent customer support
- Affordable plans
- Still lacks a true CRM
- Relatively skimpy free tier
Omnisend is an affordable, full-featured email marketing system built for e-commerce storefronts, making it incredibly simple for even inexperienced shop owners to use. It has a clean, uncomplicated UI alongside a strong collection of shoppable email templates. It also offers pre-built retail automations to help you get started right away.
Beginners and budget-conscious e-commerce stores: Omnisend offers a feature-rich free tier ideal for new online stores, providing 500 email sends per month, e-commerce automation (such as abandoned cart and order confirmation workflows), segmentation, and limited web push notifications. However, growing storefronts can increase the email sends to 6,000 per month and leverage unlimited web push notifications for just $16 per month.
4.0
Excellent
- Budget-friendly pricing
- Well-designed dashboard
- Convenient integration with Zoho services
- Unified multi-channel reports
- Novices may initially find the workflows challenging
- A few key tools are gated behind the Professional tier
- Some visually dated templates
Zoho offers a robust portfolio of business software, with its various elements tightly integrated. For Campaigns, its integration with Zoho CRM is especially attractive. This integrated approach also makes Zoho a good choice for businesses seeking to replace a disparate collection of legacy software and for early-stage companies looking to get up and running quickly. In addition, Zoho provides a wealth of educational and help resources.
New and existing Zoho customers: If the concept of an integrated business suite with a consistent, well-designed UI appeals to you, Zoho should definitely be on your radar. For example, Zoho Mail offers free, professional, custom-domain email hosting that you can use to send marketing emails. You also have the additional benefit of a single
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Best for Organizing Events
3.5
Good
- Intuitive and elegant UI
- Wide range of third-party integrations
- Superior email deliverability rate
- Predictive AI content and multi-email sequence generation
- Templates don’t offer much customization
- Relatively expensive if you have thousands of contacts
- Tedious contact record updates that lack inline list editing
With its focus squarely on email marketing for small and local businesses, including SMS and social media pushes, Constant Contact is a platform worth checking out. It’s easy to use, offers basic marketing automation tools, and provides integrations with third-party software, including CRMs and e-commerce systems. The natively integrated Event Marketing suite lets you create beautiful landing pages, issue tickets, collect digital payments, and follow up with attendees from the same interface where you send your newsletters.
Fundraisers and event organizers: Constant Contact offers tools and integrations ideal for community engagement, event management, and fundraising. It integrates with tools like Eventbrite and Eventzilla, for example, letting you manage registrations, ticketing, and event emails.
Local shops or classes: A cooking school, art studio, or yoga instructor can build custom registration pages, track maximum attendance caps, and send automated email or text reminders to registered attendees.
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Buying Guide: The Best Email Marketing Software for 2026
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether the recipients opened and read them. The options range from text-based templates that marketers can quickly customize to more complex HTML or JavaScript ones. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started and isn’t an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup offer free trials and affordable starter plans, and some even provide onboarding services for new customers.
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide that their most effective marketing tactic is a newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others may want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, allowing them to provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools to create and distribute thesubscribers by demographics and engagement levels. You’ll probably want to integrate them with other back-end accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory management systems
One tactic marketers increasingly use to build trust in their email messages is incorporating user-generated content (UGC). For example, an email might include a customer review of a product, similar to those found on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and its competitors. UGC also draws from other channels, including online forums and social media.
Do You Need Email Marketing Software in 2026?
There’s a perception in the market that email is outdated in favor of web chat, SMS, social media, web landing pages, and even the metaverse. That’s true to some extent—and modern, multi-channel marketing campaigns should undoubtedly take advantage of as many of these channels as possible—but that’s no reason to ignore email.
According to the market research firm Statista, email usage remains virtually ubiquitous. The company estimates that email marketing will grow to more than 400 billion sends by 2027.
What Does Email Marketing Software Cost?
The good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the profit potential is high. Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails per month and bill you based on the number of subscribers. If you have a small list, consider a free plan, a low-cost plan that supports several hundred subscribers, or a pay-as-you-go plan. In that case, consider Brevo, a low-cost, high-quality email marketing tool, starting at $9 per month (or $8.08 per month with an annual plan)
On the flip side, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Mailchimp, and other email marketing services may cost significantly more money due to robust feature sets that include strong automation, AI (more on that in a bit), and CRM tools. Occasionally, it might even make sense to negotiate a custom plan directly with a sales rep.
How to Get Started With Email Marketing Software
Getting up and running with email marketing software isn’t difficult. Generally, you’ll know right away whether you like a product’s user interface (UI). Most of the services we reviewed offer free trials, letting you explore them before committing any money. The majority have modern graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.
Make sure to factor in a vendor’s tech support options, since they differ by company. Some offer 24/7 support by phone, email, and live chat, while others supply online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources (such as FAQs and articles) and live support
You must consider regulatory compliance issues, too. For example, if you plan to market to customers in the European Union, ensure your software complies with GDPR. In the US, on the other hand, HIPAA mandates how you can use certain protected health information in your campaigns, while other laws govern how you can market to minors. Consult with your potential vendor to ensure they can assist you with the regulations applicable to your organization.
And don’t forget about mobile. People access email throughout the day and wherever they are, thanks to phones and tablets. Those devices have apps for mobile payment services, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, that play a major role in e-commerce. That combo makes mobile email a one-stop shop, enabling customers to transition seamlessly from marketing to purchasing in a single session.
The growing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should be able to preview how your email looks in a responsive format, meaning the HTML correctly sizes images and other elements depending on the viewing device.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may require you to create custom reports to view this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool, such as Microsoft Power BI or Tableau.
Does Email Marketing Software Leverage AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant component of many digital marketing efforts, and email marketing is no exception. AI enhances email marketing mechanics, including A/B testing and audience segmentation. Depending on how much information you can feed from your CRM and sales systems, it can also help personalize email content to individual customers.
With the right data, AI can select content, modify customer experiences in real time, and even interact directly with customers, you must look closely at how a prospective email marketing service implements AI and what kinds of features it offers
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Another area where AI can be beneficial is in the marketing automation capabilities offered by most email suites. Automation technology is most suitable for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. An important aspect of this is tracking the customer’s journey and the various touchpoints they encounter from initial contact to closing the sale.
Can You Customize Email Campaigns?
The best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts by automatically generating emails based on special occasions (such as a customer’s anniversary, birthday, or past purchases), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases, among other examples.
The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows that allow you to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they complete their tutorials.
This level of customization can become complex, so it’s essential not to get overwhelmed at the outset. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say it, and why. Follow that plan, and you’ll quickly build a journey that might start with a post-purchase welcome email and gradually drill down into more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.
Solidify Your Email Marketing Strategy
Sending out campaigns isn’t much help unless you can track your successes and failures and quickly make adjustments. All the services in this roundup offer some level of tracking, whether it’s simple open and click-rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you’ve got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, in which one part of your audience receives an email built one way while another gets a different version.
In addition to A/B testing, many services offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performs best. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.
Neil MacAllister contributed to this article.
