Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover email marketing & automation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| ActiveCampaign | MailerLite | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $12 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 14 days |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Not stated |
| Covers | Email Marketing & Automation | Email Marketing & Automation, Newsletter & Email |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | 1 |
Email automation with a CRM underneath it
ActiveCampaign is what people move to when the sequences outgrow a newsletter tool, and its conditional logic goes deeper than anything at this price. The CRM underneath means a sponsor conversation and a subscriber record are the same object. It takes a weekend to learn, and the cheapest plan caps automations at five actions, which is not enough to try the thing it is good at.
Our note
Budget for Plus rather than Starter. The five-action cap on the cheapest plan blocks exactly the branching logic that justifies choosing ActiveCampaign over a newsletter tool, and discovering that after migrating a list is a bad afternoon.
Email marketing that stays cheap as lists grow
MailerLite sends campaigns, runs automations and hosts the signup forms feeding them, and prices all of it under the tools it competes with. The editor is plain in a way that suits people who write more than they design. The free plan stops at 250 subscribers, which is a fraction of what beehiiv and Kit give away, so the comparison is really about what you pay at ten thousand.
Our note
The cheap end of email, done properly. Kit is better at automation and beehiiv at growth, and MailerLite wins on the bill, which for a list that is not itself the product is often the only comparison that matters.
Only on this side
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.