Most business owners and creators struggle to get the most out of their email marketing. Not because they’re bad at it, but because their tools are.
So in this article, I’ll be covering:
- And how to properly choose the right one for your business.
What Are Email Marketing Tools?
Email marketing tools are platforms that you can use to create, manage, and send out email campaigns.
It allows you to speak directly to your audience, track engagement, and make sales, with zero to no complications.
Now, a lot of email marketing platforms offer the same standard features:
Automations: These allow you to send automated campaigns, so you can make sales without lifting a finger.
Segmentation: That lets you send personalized campaigns to specific contacts, so you can get the most out of each subscriber
Integrations: That lets you connect other apps and tools with your marketing platform so that you can efficiently run your business.
But 5 providers stand out from the rest.
The 5 Best Email Marketing Tools For Your Business (Pros and Cons)
Email marketing tools basically look the same at first glance, but what sets them apart is what they specialize in. These 5 marketing platforms that I’m about to showcase stand out from most tools because they’re the most effective at what they’re good at.
By the end of this section, you’ll understand their pros and cons and which one works best for your business.
Let’s dive in.
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MailerLite
MailerLite is the leading email marketing tool for beginners and small businesses. Even though it offers similar features to other marketing tools, it’s mainly known for its simplicity and ease of use. In fact, G2 (software and service platform) awarded MailerLite as the “easiest to use” email marketing platform in 2025. So it makes sense why most beginners choose MailerLite to grow their business.
Pros of MailerLite:
- Free/Affordable Plans
Mailerlite has a free plan that offers basic email automation, landing pages, forms, and workflows, with the paid version equipped with better features. The limit to the free plan is less than 1,000 contacts and no more than 12,000 emails per month.
- Simplicity And User-Friendly Interface
Clean UI’s and simplified interfaces that allow you to properly navigate, operate, and understand how to use MailerLite without any complications.
- Key Features/Integrations Included
Need the basic marketing principles to grow your business? MailerLite’s got it. Not only that, but MailerLite offers integrations at its disposal so that you can seamlessly run your business the way you want it to.
- Accurate Subscriber Count.
Unlike other ESPs (Email Service Providers), MailerLite keeps a proper count of the subscribers on your newsletter and doesn’t charge you for inactive contacts. Unsubscribe or bounced, but still in your contact list? No worries.
Cons of MailerLite:
- Limited Advanced Features
MailerLite’s simplicity comes with a cost of limited capabilities behind higher-tier plans, like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functions, detailed reports, advanced workflows, and behavioral triggers.
- Design & Templates
The free plan doesn’t offer any templates and requires you to build campaigns from scratch. Paid plans do provide templates, but there are fewer design customizations.
- Startup Account/Domain Approval
Good news! Some of MailerLite’s strengths lie in its high deliverability rates; the downside? New users experience more delays in getting started due to authentication checks
- Standard Reports/Analytics
Lack of advanced reporting and analytics, such as funnel tracking, click maps, predictive metrics, etc. The basics are there— Open rates, CTR (click-through rates), contact metrics, etc.
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ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an automation powerhouse. At first, it can look intimidating, especially if you’re new to managing software, but ActiveCampaign is open to all businesses regardless of where you stand. They’re most known for their advanced marketing features and services.
Pros of ActiveCampaign:
- Free Migrations
Switching from another platform? ActiveCampaigns got it covered.
- Advanced Features/CRM system
Stronger automations, stronger workflows, stronger tools. Unlike other marketing tools, ActiveCampaign offers more advanced marketing capabilities, including a built-in CRM system that’s integratable with your automation for optimal lead management and pipeline tracking.
- Free Human Support
ActiveCampaign sounds confusing so far? Well, ActiveCampaign offers free personal onboarding coaching 1:1 with any paid plan, speeding up the setup process, assisting with building your marketing strategy, and answering any questions you may have.
- Advanced Reports
No more wondering what your customers are up to. ActiveCampaign delivers accurate and advanced reports like click-maps, page visits, and geo-tracking, but third-party websites like Shopify require higher plans for tracking.
Cons of ActiveCampaign:
- Pricey Plans
Free 1:1 coaching, but no free plans are available aside from a 14-day free trial. Plans here are usually more expensive than simpler marketing tools and gradually become more expensive as your list grows.
- Basic CRM
Although ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM system, it’s not a CRM focused platform, resulting in a lack of features that can potentially limit scalability for larger sales teams.
- Entry Plan Limitations
Go big or go home. ActiveCampaign’s starter plan is the most affordable option out of their plan selection, but it contains several limitations. An example of these limitations is the restricted automation features as well as templates that are non accessible apart from higher-tier plans.
- Learning Curve
This can be balanced with 1:1 coaching and not affect most people who decide to use ActiveCampaign, but for someone who’s brand new, it can be quite confusing trying to figure out the functionalities of each tool.
If you’re a content creator, media brand owner, or publisher, then Beehiiv might just be your right-hand man. Beehiiv is the go-to tool for creators who want to grow and monetize their audience through the form of a newsletter. Their main purpose focuses on supporting independent writers’ profit while simultaneously building their audience and expanding their reach.
Pros of Beehiiv:
- Generous Free Plan
Beehiiv offers one of the most generous plans on the market. Giving creators and upcoming businesses a huge head start by supporting them with up to 2,500 subscribers before it’s time to upgrade your plan.
- Monetization Tools
Looking for a gold mine? Beehiiv is the right choice. Beehiive heavily emphasizes turning your newsletter into a money-making machine. Because of this, Beehiive has multiple ways to monetize your newsletter with their built-in tools through paid subscriptions, ad networks, boost/referral programs, and sponsored content.
- Website/SEO Support
While most email marketing tools provide advanced automations, landing page builders, and email marketing, they often forget about SEO, and more often than not, you’ll have a hard time finding one that supports SEO like how Beehiiv does. With Beehiiv, your newsletter doesn’t have to remain hidden solely in email.
- User-Friendly Interface
Beehiiv has a relatively simple interface compared to most larger marketing software, which mitigates the overwhelming feeling of too many tools and buttons.
Cons of Beehiiv:
- High Price Jump
The free plan might look glamorous, and I won’t blame you. It’s worth it, but once you surpass the subscriber limit for the free plan, you’re left with the option to pay $49/m to maintain that list. As your list gradually grows, so does the price, and for a lot of starters, this could be a setback.
- Limitations
Unlike ActiveCampaign, Beehiiv leans more towards simplicity and the basic side of marketing, containing fewer actions/triggers in automations, workflows, websites, and more.
- Fewer Integrations
Beehiive is not like other established platforms that get all kinds of integrations stuffed onto their marketing software. So, unfortunately, this makes users have to look for shortcuts.
- Fewer Design/Template Options
If you’re a creator who’s heavy into styling and designing their emails, then this might be quite an upset. Beehiiv is somewhat limited with its design and template options.
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GoHighLevel
GoHighLevel is the go-to platform for almost all kinds of businesses that you can think of…agencies, service providers, businesses big or small, it doesn’t matter. GoHighLevel is the all-in-one marketing automation tool and CRM that combines nearly all aspects of marketing onto one big platform. Why settle for one specific marketing tool when you can have all of them?
Pros of GoHighLevel:
- Everything In One Place, All At Once
How would you like to have a business where you’re not clouding your mind by constantly jumping from one app to the next like a frog on caffeine? With GoHighLevel, you can keep all of your emails, texts, websites, pipelines, CRM, and more, all in one dashboard, and finally, put your headaches aside.
- Cost Saving
Setting up your business with email marketing meant paying for separate subscriptions for certain systems/tools until GoHighLevel. The gap in modules that are in GHL compared to other marketing tools is huge, giving you a cost advantage. Additionally, GHL offers a 14-day free trial.
- Automations And Workflows
GoHighLevel offers advanced automations better than most tools out there. They’ve got it all down from lead nurturing, pipeline triggers, SMS, email, follow-ups, funnels, you name it.
- White-Labeling/Agency Features
Want to rebrand the platform into your own? GoHighLevel does just that. Need to onboard clients and manage your team? GoHighLevel handles that too. With GHL, the sky is the limit, and how far you want your business to scale is up to you.
Cons of GoHighLevel:
- Learning Curve
So many features can soon become overwhelming, with several features ultimately going untouched. Setting everything up to get your business up and running can take quite a while. Understanding functions, features, and how to properly build your workflows can cause a delay in the process.
- Platform And UI Bugs
Some reviews and articles seem to have occasionally mentioned bugs in GHL, such as website crashing, issues with email deliverability, text messages being sent incorrectly, or UI visual bugs.
- Cost/Pricing
While GHL is cheaper than paying for many tools separately, accessing more features can quickly become expensive. That’s without accounting for higher tiers or email deliverables.
- Limited Integrations
GHL has its fair share of integrations (Stipe, GoKollab, Twilio); it’s not to say that they’re not the best. In fact, they’re super helpful. The issue that most users find is being limited to options for integration. This results in users trying to look for alternatives.
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Klaviyo
Own an e-commerce store? This is the marketing tool for you. Klaviyo is widely regarded as the leading email marketing tool that specializes in supporting e-commerce businesses with their marketing and exposure. This is where most branded emails and SMS marketing come from. If you’ve got an e-commerce business, this is where you’ll want to go for scalability.
Pros of Klaviyo:
- Integrations
Klaviyo essentially has an infinite library of integrations that help your business with the proper marketing, expanding your reach to a much larger audience. Klaviyo also works with nearly every e-commerce platform that you can think of and offers plenty of integrations to mess around with.
- AI Tools
Klaviyo has embedded AI into its software that lifts all the hard work off your shoulders. Providing you with information like customer behavior, content generation/Ideas, analyzing data, and can even automatically draft engaging emails almost instantly.
- Advanced Tools
Properly segment your audience with Klaviyo’s segmentation, and create sophisticated, engaging, and powerful workflows that can be tailored to specific customers based on their behaviors.
- Built-In CRM
Keep your customers’ data organized with Klaviyo’s CRM feature and understand your customers’ needs by building a closer relationship with your audience.
Cons of Klaviyo:
- Cost/Pricing
Ever since Klaviyo introduced “active profile-based billing,” their prices have gone higher. As your list grows, your monthly bills will grow too. There’s also a noticeable price difference when compared to Klaviyo’s competitors.
- Learning Curve
AI integration with Klaviyo sounds amazing. Everything would just be said and done right? No. Certain tools in Klaviyo are a bit more sophisticated than drafting an email from scratch. This could overwhelm beginners.
- Limited Free Plan
Klaviyo does offer a free plan, but there’s a caveat. You’ll be limited to certain features that’ll normally be accessible with a plan, like advanced segmentation, automated flows, SMS, and more. Some of these can be crucial to your marketing.
- Lack of Websites
With the help of Klaviyo’s wide range of integrations, you can most likely find an alternative to building a landing page or website, but as of now, Klaviyo doesn’t offer an official way to build websites or landing pages.
How To Choose The Right Email Marketing Tool
At this point, you might’ve taken a deep look at the 5 different marketing tools and what they specialize in, but in case you’ve skimmed through most of it, here’s a quick breakdown to help you choose the right tool for your business.
MailerLite: Beginner-friendly. Great for businesses that want to get started with Marketing. Free and affordable plans.
ActiveCampaign: Automation Powerhouse. Great for automating your business. No free plans, but free 1:1 coaching upon purchasing a plan.
Beehiiv: Creator Friendly. Best used for content creators, publishers, and media brand owners who want to monetize their audience. Generous free plan.
GoHighLevel: All-In-One Platform. Primarily used by bigger businesses, agencies, and service providers who want to keep track of accurate analytics and continue to scale higher.
Klaviyo: E-commerce Centered. Generally used by business owners who run an e-com brand and do their marketing through branded emails or SMS.
Conclusion:
Picking the right tool can be difficult to the point where comparing options can start feeling like a chore, but it’s part of the process; otherwise, you might end up with a tool that doesn’t align with your vision.
On the surface, many marketing tools may seem like they offer the same recycled features, but the truth is, some specialize in certain areas more than others. Hopefully, this list of what I think are the 5 best and most distinct email marketing tools can help you find the one that best suits you, or at the very least guide you in the right direction.
Now, on a side note, if you’ve already got your pick and need someone to build and run your automations, landing pages, or some other marketing-related witchcraft…then contact one of our team members here today.
