Categories: Businesses

About the ESP

Omnisend occupies an interesting position in the email marketing landscape as a platform that has chosen to focus almost exclusively on ecommerce simplicity. Founded in 2014 in Lithuania (originally as Soundest), this bootstrapped company serves over 100,000 brands, though primarily smaller retailers who prioritize ease over advanced capabilities.

What defines Omnisend is their deliberate choice to simplify email marketing, sometimes at the expense of depth. While competitors like Klaviyo target sophisticated marketers with granular controls, and platforms like Emercury focus on deliverability and ROI-driving features for email veterans, Omnisend has opted for what they call being “boringly reliable” – though this often translates to limited options for experienced marketers who know what actually drives results.

The platform’s ecommerce focus, while initially appealing, can feel restrictive. Every feature assumes you’re selling physical products through specific platforms, which means service businesses, digital products, or businesses with complex sales cycles may find themselves fighting against the platform’s assumptions. The pre-built nature of many features, while convenient for beginners, often lacks the flexibility that growing businesses need as they develop more sophisticated strategies.

Onboarding Process

Getting started with Omnisend is undeniably straightforward – perhaps too much so. The platform offers a simplified onboarding that gets you operational quickly, but this speed comes at the cost of understanding the nuances that impact long-term success. The wizard immediately pushes you toward their preferred ecommerce platforms, with limited options for custom integrations or non-standard setups.

The one-click integration, particularly with Shopify, feels almost too automated. While convenient, it makes assumptions about your data structure and customer relationships that may not align with your business model. More experienced marketers often find themselves having to undo these automatic configurations to implement proper segmentation strategies.

The free migration assistance sounds impressive on paper, but users report mixed experiences. The migration specialists, while helpful, tend to focus on getting data moved rather than optimizing it for better performance. Complex segmentation rules, custom fields, and sophisticated automation logic often get simplified or lost in translation. Several users mention having to rebuild their advanced workflows from scratch.

The “Omnisend Academy” provides basic training, but the content rarely goes beyond surface-level implementation. For marketers who understand that success comes from testing, optimization, and deep segmentation, the educational resources feel elementary.

Ease of Use

Omnisend’s interface is clean and approachable – some would say oversimplified. The dashboard presents limited options, which new users appreciate but experienced marketers often find frustrating. The platform seems designed for people who want to “set and forget” rather than actively optimize their campaigns.

This simplification philosophy permeates every aspect. Where platforms like Emercury provide granular control over deliverability settings and sending patterns, Omnisend hides these options behind their “smart” algorithms. You’re essentially trusting the platform to make decisions that could significantly impact your sender reputation and inbox placement.

The Brand Assets system, while convenient, enforces consistency in a way that can feel limiting. Once set, these elements appear everywhere with limited ability to customize for specific campaigns. Experienced marketers know that different segments often respond to different visual approaches, but Omnisend’s system makes this kind of testing difficult.

The trade-offs become apparent quickly. Users accustomed to platforms that provide detailed control over sending throttling, IP warming, or domain authentication find Omnisend’s “we’ll handle it for you” approach concerning. You’re essentially flying blind on critical deliverability factors.

Broadcast Feature

The campaign builder follows a rigid, step-by-step workflow that, while logical, doesn’t allow for the flexibility many marketers need. You can’t easily jump between sections or save drafts at different stages, forcing a linear process that doesn’t match how many professionals actually work.

Segmentation capabilities appear sophisticated at first glance but reveal limitations under scrutiny. The visual segment builder, while pretty, lacks the ability to create truly complex segments with nested logic. The platform struggles with “OR” conditions combined with “AND” conditions, forcing workarounds that shouldn’t be necessary in 2025.

More concerning is how Omnisend handles segmentation for deliverability. Unlike platforms focused on sender reputation, there’s no easy way to segment based on engagement recency, domain groups (Gmail vs. Yahoo vs. corporate domains), or create virtual segments for send throttling. These are fundamental features for maintaining high deliverability rates, yet Omnisend treats them as unnecessary complexity.

The platform’s Customer Lifecycle Mapping sounds innovative but essentially just automates what experienced marketers prefer to control manually. The automatic categorization often misclassifies customers, and the inability to customize these definitions means you’re stuck with Omnisend’s interpretation of what makes someone “at-risk” or “loyal.”

The sending limitations are particularly problematic. The 12x contact limit on the Standard plan uses confusing calculations that can unexpectedly throttle your sending. Unlike platforms that clearly show your sending capacity and let you purchase additional volume as needed, Omnisend’s system creates artificial barriers that force plan upgrades.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

Omnisend’s automation capabilities reveal the platform’s philosophy: make it easy, even if that means making it basic. The visual workflow builder works well for simple sequences but quickly shows its limitations when you need sophisticated logic.

The 25+ pre-built workflows are a double-edged sword. While they provide quick starts, they also encourage a “template mentality” that experienced marketers know doesn’t optimize for individual businesses. These workflows can’t account for your specific audience behavior, pricing strategy, or brand voice. Users report that customizing these templates often takes longer than building from scratch on more flexible platforms.

Key limitations that become apparent:

  • Multi-channel workflows sound impressive but lack granular control over channel prioritization
  • Behavioral triggers are limited to Omnisend’s predefined events rather than custom events
  • A/B testing within workflows is extremely basic, testing only single elements rather than entire branches
  • Conditional logic lacks the depth for truly personalized journeys
  • Time delays don’t account for optimal sending times per individual subscriber

The visual representation, while attractive, can be misleading. The clean interface hides the fact that you can’t implement advanced strategies like lead scoring decay, progressive profiling, or complex attribution models. Platforms like ActiveCampaign or Emercury that may look more complex actually provide the tools needed for sustainable growth.

Templates

The 350 email templates reveal Omnisend’s most glaring limitation: they are STRICTLY ecommerce product-focused. Not a single template exists for service businesses, SaaS, content marketing, or any non-physical product use case. Every template assumes you’re pushing physical products with images, prices, and “Add to Cart” buttons.

This isn’t just limiting – it’s exclusionary. If you’re selling consulting services, digital products, subscriptions, or running any non-traditional ecommerce business, you literally cannot find a relevant starting point. You’re forced to either awkwardly retrofit product templates or build from scratch, defeating the purpose of having templates at all.

The narrow focus becomes almost comical when you realize that even their “welcome” templates assume you’re showcasing products. Their “newsletter” templates have product grids built in. It’s as if the platform cannot conceive of email marketing beyond “here’s stuff to buy.”

More problematic is the lack of true customization. While you can modify colors and fonts, the underlying structure of templates remains rigid. Experienced designers find themselves fighting against the template constraints rather than being empowered by them. The inability to save custom modules or create truly reusable components means recreating similar designs repeatedly.

The mobile optimization, while automatic, doesn’t allow for the fine control that optimization requires. You can’t create truly mobile-first designs or implement advanced techniques like progressive enhancement. The platform makes decisions for you that may not align with your audience’s behavior.

Email Template Editor

HTML WYSIWYG Editor

The HTML capabilities in Omnisend are frankly disappointing for a platform launched in 2014. What they call HTML support is really just the ability to paste in code blocks – there’s no true WYSIWYG HTML editor comparable to what you’d find in professional platforms.

The separation between visual and code editing creates a frustrating workflow. You can’t quickly switch between views to fine-tune designs or troubleshoot rendering issues. This makes it nearly impossible to create pixel-perfect emails that maintain brand standards across all clients.

The limitations become crippling for anyone with HTML knowledge:

  • No integrated CSS editing means inline styles everywhere
  • Limited debugging capabilities force a test-and-pray approach
  • No support for modern email techniques like progressive enhancement
  • Inability to create truly custom modules or interactive elements
  • Preview limitations that don’t accurately represent all email clients

For agencies or brands with design standards, these limitations often prove to be deal-breakers. You’re essentially forced to choose between Omnisend’s visual editor limitations or fighting with their limited HTML support.

Drag and Drop Editor

While functional, the drag-and-drop editor reveals its limitations once you move beyond basic newsletters. The block-based approach, while preventing major mistakes, also prevents creative layouts that could improve engagement.

The product picker, touted as a key feature, actually creates dependencies that can be problematic. It ties your emails directly to your store’s catalog structure, making it difficult to feature products creatively or create curated collections that don’t match your store’s organization. More sophisticated platforms allow for dynamic product feeds with custom rules and filters.

The interactive elements like scratch cards and gift boxes might seem engaging, but industry data shows these gimmicks often hurt deliverability and professional perception. Experienced marketers know that clear, value-focused messaging outperforms tricks, yet Omnisend promotes these features prominently.

Mobile optimization being automatic means you lose control over the mobile experience. You can’t implement mobile-specific strategies or create truly mobile-first designs. The platform makes assumptions about mobile behavior that may not match your specific audience.

List Management

Omnisend’s single-list approach with segmentation sounds modern but creates practical problems. Without separate lists, you lose the ability to maintain different permission levels, communication preferences, or data governance requirements. This becomes particularly problematic for businesses operating in multiple regions with different privacy regulations.

The automatic lifecycle segmentation makes assumptions that often don’t match reality. A customer who hasn’t purchased in 60 days might be “at-risk” in fashion but perfectly normal in furniture. The inability to customize these definitions means you’re stuck with generic rules that may trigger inappropriate messaging.

Data management tools are surprisingly basic:

  • No built-in deduplication beyond email matching
  • Limited data cleaning recommendations
  • No engagement scoring beyond basic open/click metrics
  • Inability to maintain suppression lists for specific campaign types
  • No advanced preference centers for subscriber control

The platform’s approach to GDPR feels like checking boxes rather than enabling true compliance. Unlike platforms that provide granular consent management and data portability tools, Omnisend offers the minimum required features.

Analytics

Analytics in Omnisend feel like an afterthought, particularly on lower-tier plans. The basic metrics provided don’t give the insights needed for serious optimization. Even the Pro plan’s “advanced” reporting lacks the depth that data-driven marketers require.

Critical missing elements include:

  • No cohort analysis for understanding customer lifetime value
  • Limited attribution modeling beyond last-click
  • No predictive analytics or propensity scoring
  • Inability to create custom calculated metrics
  • Poor data export options for external analysis
  • No API access for building custom dashboards

The revenue tracking, while integrated with ecommerce platforms, uses simplistic attribution that can be misleading. Without the ability to customize attribution windows or account for multiple touchpoints, you’re making decisions based on incomplete data.

The visual reports, while attractive, prioritize aesthetics over utility. You can’t dig into the underlying data or understand statistical significance. This surface-level reporting might satisfy beginners but frustrates anyone trying to optimize based on data.

Support

While Omnisend advertises 24/7 chat support, the quality reveals a concerning gap in expertise. The support staff appear to lack fundamental email marketing knowledge, particularly around deliverability – arguably the most critical aspect of email success.

Support interactions often feel like talking to customer service reps reading from scripts rather than email marketing professionals. When asked about deliverability issues, SPF/DKIM configuration, IP warming, or engagement-based segmentation, responses tend to be generic documentation links rather than expert guidance.

This contrasts sharply with platforms like Emercury, where support means talking to actual email marketing experts who understand that an undelivered email can’t generate revenue, no matter how pretty the template or clever the automation. Omnisend’s support can help you click buttons but can’t help you succeed at email marketing.

The support team’s lack of expertise becomes particularly apparent when troubleshooting performance issues. They can tell you how to use features but not why your emails aren’t reaching inboxes, why engagement is dropping, or how to improve your sender reputation. For a platform charging premium prices, this level of support is unacceptable.

Pricing

Omnisend’s pricing initially appears competitive, but the value proposition weakens under scrutiny. The contact-based pricing model sounds straightforward until you realize the hidden limitations that force upgrades.

Hidden limitations include:

  • Email sending caps that aren’t clearly communicated
  • SMS credits that seem generous but deplete quickly
  • Feature restrictions not apparent until you need them
  • Data retention limits that impact long-term analysis
  • API rate limits that impact integrations

The free plan’s 250 contact limit is almost unusably small for serious businesses. The inclusion of Omnisend branding makes it unsuitable for professional use, essentially making it an extended trial rather than a true free tier. Platforms like Emercury offer more generous free tiers that actually support small businesses.

The Standard plan’s 12x sending limit creates artificial constraints that don’t exist with volume-based pricing models. For engaged lists that warrant frequent communication, this forces premature upgrades to Pro pricing that may not be justified by other feature needs.

When compared to platforms like Emercury that base pricing primarily on email volume rather than features, Omnisend’s model can result in paying for capabilities you don’t need just to get reasonable sending volumes.

Pros

Exceptional ease of use – The interface feels intuitive even for email marketing newcomers. Complex tasks like automation creation become approachable through thoughtful design.

Ecommerce-specific functionality – Every feature assumes you’re selling online. Product pickers, cart abandonment workflows, and purchase-based segmentation work out of the box.

Outstanding customer support – 24/7 live chat with knowledgeable agents sets a high bar. The support quality alone justifies the platform for many users.

Competitive pricing with transparent structure – No feature gates or hidden fees. The Pro plan’s included SMS credits provide exceptional value.

Powerful automation with pre-built workflows – Sophisticated automations remain accessible. The pre-built workflows rival agencies’ custom campaigns.

Seamless ecommerce platform integration – One-click setup with major platforms. Real-time inventory sync feels magical compared to manual processes.

All features available on free plan – Unlike competitors who gate essential features, Omnisend includes everything even for free users.

Strong omnichannel capabilities – Email, SMS, and push notifications work together naturally, not as bolted-on afterthoughts.

Cons

Limited A/B testing capabilities – Only subject lines and send times, not complete content testing. This feels outdated compared to competitors.

Basic HTML editing functionality – No true WYSIWYG HTML editor frustrates users needing precise control.

Template customization restrictions – While templates look professional, customization options remain limited compared to design-focused platforms.

Deliverability concerns – Multiple reports of inbox placement issues. he 75.1% average deliverability falls below industry standards.

Scalability limitations – Larger businesses hit ceiling with features like 200 segment maximum and limited data retention.

English-only interface – No multi-language support limits international usage despite global customer base.

Missing advanced features – No predictive analytics, limited cohort analysis, basic reporting compared to enterprise platforms.

Integration ecosystem gaps – 130+ integrations sound impressive but pale compared to Klaviyo’s 350+ or ActiveCampaign’s extensive marketplace.

Final words

Omnisend succeeds brilliantly at its stated mission: making sophisticated ecommerce email marketing accessible without overwhelming users. For small to medium-sized online stores, particularly those on Shopify or WooCommerce, it provides an ideal balance of power and simplicity.

The platform shines brightest for businesses with 500-50,000 contacts who want professional email marketing without dedicating staff to managing complexity. The combination of fair pricing, excellent support, and ecommerce focus creates compelling value for this sweet spot.

However, limitations become apparent as businesses scale or require advanced features. The basic A/B testing, deliverability issues, and analytics constraints will frustrate power users. Enterprises needing predictive analytics, unlimited segmentation, or complex integrations should look elsewhere.

Omnisend is perfect for:

  • Growing ecommerce businesses prioritizing ease of use
  • Shopify/WooCommerce stores wanting seamless integration
  • Budget-conscious companies seeking feature-rich marketing
  • Teams without dedicated email marketing specialists
  • Businesses frustrated by Klaviyo’s complexity or Mailchimp’s generic approach

Look elsewhere if you need:

  • Enterprise-grade analytics and predictive modeling
  • Extensive A/B testing capabilities
  • Complex B2B marketing automation
  • Multi-language platform support
  • More than basic HTML email editing
  • Guaranteed premium deliverability

For its target market, Omnisend delivers exceptional value. While it may not satisfy every power user’s wishlist, it provides what most ecommerce businesses actually need: reliable, effective email marketing that doesn’t require a PhD to operate. In a market increasingly dominated by complex, expensive platforms, Omnisend’s “boringly reliable” approach feels refreshingly practical.

About the ESP

MailerLite positions itself as the simple, affordable email marketing platform for small businesses and creators. Founded in 2010 by a Lithuanian web design agency, they’ve built their reputation on offering a generous free plan and keeping things “lite” – which in practice means stripping away advanced features in favor of simplicity.

The platform was acquired by Polish company Vercom in 2022 for $90 million, which has led to some changes in their approach. While they maintain their beginner-friendly image, the reality is more nuanced. Their simplicity often translates to missing features that even intermediate email marketers might need, and their much-touted affordability comes with significant trade-offs in functionality.

What’s particularly interesting about MailerLite is how they’ve managed to build a loyal following despite these limitations. This appears to be largely due to their generous free plan and clean interface, though as we’ll explore, there are considerable drawbacks once you dig deeper into actual usage.

Onboarding Process

MailerLite’s onboarding process is frustratingly restrictive for anyone wanting to simply test the platform. Unlike most ESPs where you can explore features immediately, MailerLite puts up multiple barriers that make evaluation unnecessarily difficult.

First, you can’t even access the campaign creator without verifying your domain – even if you just want to click around and see how things work. This isn’t about sending emails; you literally cannot open the editor to explore the interface without domain verification.

Then there’s the bizarre requirement that you need a minimum of 4 subscribers in a group to proceed through certain steps in the campaign wizard. Want to test the workflow? Too bad – you must either import a list (committing data to a platform you’re still evaluating) or manually add fake subscribers one by one. This artificial restriction serves no purpose except to frustrate potential users.

On top of these hurdles, there’s still the separate approval process that can take up to 24 hours before you can actually send anything. While they claim this maintains deliverability, it creates an absurd situation where legitimate businesses can’t properly evaluate the platform without jumping through multiple hoops.

Adding to the confusion, MailerLite includes a 30-day “premium trial” with your free account, giving you temporary access to higher-tier features. However, they don’t clearly indicate which features you’re only seeing because of this trial. You might get in the habit of using a feature during testing only to discover it disappears after 30 days unless you upgrade to an expensive plan.

Ease of Use

MailerLite’s interface is indeed clean and minimalist, but this simplicity comes at a cost. While beginners might appreciate the uncluttered design, anyone with moderate email marketing experience will quickly notice the missing functionality.

The dashboard provides a basic overview of your account with subscriber growth charts and recent campaign stats. Navigation is logical with everything accessible from the left sidebar. However, the simplicity that MailerLite promotes often translates to “we just don’t have that feature” rather than elegant design solutions.

One particularly frustrating aspect is the inconsistency across different builders. The email editor, form builder, landing page creator, and website builder all have different interfaces and workflows. This means that despite the platform’s supposed simplicity, you’re actually learning multiple different systems rather than one cohesive interface.

Broadcast Feature

Creating a broadcast campaign in MailerLite follows a straightforward four-step process. You set up basic details like subject line and preview text, create your content, select recipients, and review before sending.

The campaign creation screen is clean but lacks many advanced options you’d find elsewhere. A/B testing is limited to just 3 variations (compared to unlimited on many platforms), and advanced features like send time optimization are locked behind higher-tier plans.

The recipient selection is basic – you can choose groups or segments, but the segmentation capabilities themselves are quite limited compared to platforms that focus on email marketing fundamentals. There’s no advanced behavioral targeting or sophisticated condition builders that experienced marketers would expect.

One notable limitation is the lack of advanced scheduling options. While you can schedule campaigns for specific times, there’s no built-in functionality for time zone sending or more complex delivery patterns without upgrading to expensive plans.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

MailerLite’s automation builder uses a visual workflow editor, which sounds good on paper but is surprisingly limited in practice. The available triggers are basic: subscriber joins a group, completes a form, clicks a link, updates a field, or reaches a specific date.

The workflow actions are similarly restricted. You can send emails, add delays, update fields, move subscribers between groups, or add simple conditions. But compared to dedicated automation platforms or even email-focused competitors like Emercury, the options feel constraining.

Advanced features like complex branching logic, webhook integrations, or sophisticated behavioral triggers are either missing entirely or require workarounds. The platform allows only 3 triggers per automation even on advanced plans, which severely limits complex workflow creation.

The automation interface itself is clean but almost too simple. Power users will find themselves constantly bumping into limitations when trying to create anything beyond basic welcome sequences or simple follow-ups.

Templates

Here’s where MailerLite’s limitations become particularly apparent. While they advertise “50+ templates,” these are completely unavailable on the free plan. This is a significant restriction compared to platforms that include template access across all tiers.

The templates themselves are functional but uninspiring. They follow modern design principles but lack the sophistication or variety you’d find on platforms with larger template libraries. Many feel generic and require substantial customization to avoid looking like every other MailerLite email.

The saving grace is that you can create and save your own templates, but this requires design skills that many small business owners lack – exactly the audience MailerLite claims to serve.

Email Template Editor

HTML WYSIWYG Editor: The HTML editor is basic but functional. It includes syntax highlighting and a preview mode, but lacks advanced features like CSS preprocessing or sophisticated code completion. It gets the job done for simple HTML emails but isn’t suitable for complex custom designs.

Drag and Drop Editor: The drag-and-drop editor is MailerLite’s strongest feature. It’s genuinely easy to use with inline editing and a good selection of content blocks. However, it lacks the depth of customization options found in more robust platforms.

Interactive elements like surveys, countdown timers, and quizzes are available, which is nice. But the customization options for these elements are limited, and you’ll often find yourself wanting just a bit more control over styling or behavior.

The AI writing assistant (available only on Advanced plans) is basic compared to dedicated AI tools, often producing generic copy that requires significant editing.

List Management

MailerLite uses a system of Groups (static lists) and Segments (dynamic lists based on conditions). While this dual approach offers some flexibility, the actual implementation is frustrating for anyone used to more sophisticated list management.

The segmentation builder only supports AND/OR logic at a basic level. You can’t create nested conditions or complex rule sets. For example, creating a segment like “Subscribers who opened any email in the last 30 days AND (purchased product A OR clicked link B) BUT NOT in segment C” requires multiple workarounds.

Custom fields are unlimited, which sounds great until you realize they’re limited to just text, number, and date types. No dropdown selections, no multiple choice options, no advanced field types that modern email marketers expect.

The inability to create truly sophisticated segments means you’re often forced to use multiple groups and manual processes to achieve what should be simple targeting objectives.

Analytics

MailerLite provides basic email metrics: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces. The dashboard is clean and easy to read, but that’s largely because there isn’t much data to display.

Missing analytics features include:

  • No deliverability dashboard or inbox placement tracking
  • No heat maps for email engagement
  • Limited automation performance metrics
  • Basic e-commerce tracking (even with integrations)
  • No cohort analysis or advanced subscriber lifecycle tracking

The geographic and device reports are helpful but basic. You can see where opens occurred and what devices were used, but you can’t dig deeper into user behavior patterns or create sophisticated reports based on multiple data points.

For an email platform in 2025, the analytics feel dated and insufficient for data-driven marketing decisions.

Support

MailerLite’s support structure immediately reveals their cost-cutting priorities. Free plan users only get access to a community forum – no direct support whatsoever. This is particularly problematic given their strict approval process and the potential for account issues.

Paid plans include email support (24/7) and live chat on Advanced plans. However, there’s no phone support at any level, which can be frustrating when dealing with urgent issues or complex problems that require real-time conversation.

User feedback on support is mixed. While some praise the response times and helpfulness, others report frustrating experiences with rigid enforcement of policies and limited willingness to help with edge cases. The support team seems well-trained on basic issues but often lacks the authority or capability to resolve more complex problems.

Pricing

MailerLite’s pricing appears attractive on the surface:

Free Plan: Up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails

  • Includes basic automation
  • 1 website, 10 landing pages
  • MailerLite branding on everything
  • No email templates
  • Limited features

Growing Business: $10/month for 500 subscribers

  • Unlimited emails
  • Removes branding
  • Adds templates and priority support

Advanced: $20/month for 1,000 subscribers

  • Adds live chat support
  • Smart sending and advanced features
  • Facebook audiences

The free plan is indeed generous in terms of subscriber count, but the feature limitations are severe. No templates on the free plan is a significant restriction that forces users to upgrade just for basic functionality.

Pricing scales aggressively with subscriber count. At 10,000 subscribers, you’re looking at $90/month for Advanced features – not much cheaper than more sophisticated platforms. The value proposition diminishes significantly as you grow.

Pros

Clean, Simple Interface

The interface is genuinely easy to navigate for beginners. If you’re new to email marketing and don’t know what you’re missing, MailerLite will feel approachable.

Generous Free Plan Subscriber Limit

1,000 subscribers on the free plan is more than most competitors offer, though the feature restrictions limit its usefulness.

Decent Drag-and-Drop Editor

When it works properly, the email editor is intuitive and produces clean, mobile-responsive designs.

Website Builder Included

Unlike most email platforms, MailerLite includes a basic website builder, though it’s quite limited.

Cons

Aggressive Feature Gating

Despite claiming to be simple and accessible, MailerLite locks essential features like email templates behind paywalls. This feels particularly cynical given their target audience of small businesses and beginners. The 30-day premium trial makes this worse by letting you use features temporarily without clearly indicating they’ll disappear.

Limited Automation Capabilities

The automation builder is too simple for anything beyond basic sequences. Power users will quickly outgrow its capabilities.

Frustrating Testing Barriers

The platform makes it nearly impossible to properly evaluate before committing. Domain verification requirements just to see the editor, minimum subscriber requirements to test workflows, and the confusing premium trial that doesn’t clarify which features are temporary all create unnecessary friction for evaluation.

Missing Advanced Features

No lead scoring, limited segmentation, basic analytics, no SMS marketing, limited integrations – the list of missing features is extensive.

Inconsistent Interface

Different tools within the platform have different interfaces and workflows, creating a fragmented user experience.

Account Suspension Issues

Numerous reports of sudden account suspensions without warning, with difficult appeal processes.

Final words

MailerLite succeeds in being simple and affordable for absolute beginners, but this comes at the cost of functionality that even moderately experienced email marketers will miss. The platform feels like it’s stuck between two identities – trying to be both a simple tool for beginners and a comprehensive platform for growing businesses, succeeding fully at neither.

The generous free plan subscriber limit is offset by severe feature restrictions, including the lack of email templates. The clean interface is undermined by the fragmented experience across different tools. The affordable pricing becomes less attractive as you grow and realize you need features that are either missing entirely or locked behind higher tiers.

For businesses that truly need just the basics – simple newsletters to a small list – MailerLite might suffice. But anyone with ambitions to grow their email marketing efforts will quickly find themselves constrained by the platform’s limitations. The lack of advanced segmentation, limited automation capabilities, and missing analytics features make it difficult to execute sophisticated email marketing strategies.

When evaluating email marketing platforms, it’s important to look beyond surface-level pricing and consider the total value proposition. While MailerLite might appear more affordable initially, the severe feature limitations and aggressive gating of basic functionality (like email templates) reveal a different story. Platforms that focus on core email marketing fundamentals – deliverability, segmentation, and automation – without artificial restrictions often provide better long-term value.

The choice ultimately depends on your email marketing maturity. If you’re sending occasional newsletters to a small list and don’t mind design limitations, MailerLite’s simplicity might suffice. But for businesses serious about email marketing ROI, platforms that make advanced features accessible across all tiers, prioritize deliverability infrastructure, and provide sophisticated automation without arbitrary limits will serve you better in the long run.

About the ESP

Klaviyo positions itself as a data-driven marketing automation platform primarily targeting ecommerce businesses. Founded in 2012, it has grown significantly, especially after securing major funding rounds and establishing a deep integration with Shopify. What sets Klaviyo apart is its comprehensive approach to customer data and its event-based architecture that serves as the foundation for all platform features.

Unlike email-first ESPs that prioritize message deliverability and straightforward broadcasting capabilities, Klaviyo was built from the ground up with a focus on customer data and personalization. Their philosophy centers around unifying all customer interactions into a single data model, treating every touchpoint—from email opens to website visits to purchases—as events that feed into a cohesive customer profile. This data-first approach creates powerful capabilities but also introduces complexity that requires dedicated time to master.

Klaviyo has particularly strong appeal for mid-market ecommerce businesses with dedicated marketing teams that require sophisticated segmentation, personalization, and automation capabilities. The platform is designed for businesses that value extensive data analysis and are willing to invest significant time in learning a complex system rather than those seeking straightforward, reliable email delivery with high deliverability rates. For companies with the resources to leverage its capabilities, the platform enables marketers to create highly targeted campaigns based on customer behavior, purchase history, and predictive analytics.

Onboarding Process

Klaviyo’s onboarding experience is notably streamlined and tailored to your business type. The process begins with straightforward questions about how you’ll use the platform and which ecommerce platform you’re using. These choices actually impact the interface and available features, creating a customized experience from the outset.

The onboarding flow is divided into two distinct phases. The first phase collects information about your business and marketing needs through a series of targeted questions. The second phase focuses on technical setup, with particular emphasis on connecting your ecommerce platform—whether that’s Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or others.

For WooCommerce users specifically, Klaviyo offers two installation paths: directly through the WooCommerce website or via the WordPress plugin directory. The WooCommerce website path adds some friction, requiring account creation and form completion, but both methods ultimately lead to the same outcome—a connected store that begins sending customer data to Klaviyo.

What stands out during onboarding is Klaviyo’s emphasis on historical data synchronization. The platform automatically pulls in your past orders and customer interactions, creating an immediate sense of value as your dashboard begins populating with real data from day one.

Ease of Use

Klaviyo sacrifices simplicity for power, creating a significant learning curve due to its data-centric approach. The interface is modern and well-organized, but the platform’s complexity means new users often require weeks of dedicated learning to become proficient. The introduction screens for each section help, but they can’t fully mitigate the inherent complexity of the system.

The platform’s event-based architecture creates substantial terminology hurdles—particularly the confusing distinction between “metrics” (event types) and “events” (individual instances). This conceptual model eventually provides flexibility for advanced users but creates frequent confusion even for experienced marketers who are new to the platform. Users must invest considerable time understanding these concepts before they can effectively use the system.

Klaviyo’s approach to progressive disclosure is well-intentioned but can overwhelm users as they dig deeper into functionality. The customizable dashboard views help mitigate this by allowing users to focus on specific metrics, but finding and configuring these views requires platform knowledge that newcomers lack.

For marketers transitioning from traditional ESPs, Klaviyo’s approach to segmentation and automation requires a fundamental mindset shift. While the platform provides documentation and contextual help, the learning process remains steep—requiring most organizations to dedicate specific team members to mastering the platform rather than enabling everyone to use it effectively from the start.

Broadcast Feature

Klaviyo refers to broadcast emails as “campaigns,” and while the creation process offers powerful capabilities, it also demonstrates the platform’s preference for automation over reliable, straightforward email delivery. The campaign builder leads users through multiple steps: selecting recipients, creating content, setting sending options, and reviewing before launch—a process that emphasizes targeting precision over speed of execution and deliverability focus.

The segmentation capabilities within the campaign builder showcase Klaviyo’s data-driven approach but can make simple broadcasts feel unnecessarily complex. Users can target audiences based on virtually any combination of profile attributes, past behaviors, or custom properties—powerful for sophisticated marketers but potentially overwhelming for those who simply want to send a newsletter to their full list with high inbox placement rates.

Content creation offers both drag-and-drop and HTML options. The editor supports dynamic content based on customer data, but implementing these personalization features requires a thorough understanding of Klaviyo’s data model. Marketers comfortable with basic broadcasts may find themselves struggling to implement the personalization capabilities that justify Klaviyo’s premium pricing, when what they really need is reliable delivery of well-crafted messages.

A/B testing is comprehensive but not intuitive, allowing for testing subject lines, content, sending times, and sender information. While the platform provides statistical analysis of results, understanding and acting on this data requires analytical skills that not all marketing teams possess.

For businesses that primarily rely on broadcast emails rather than complex automation, and who value deliverability and straightforward campaign creation over data integration, Klaviyo’s campaign tools may feel overengineered and unnecessarily complex for day-to-day broadcast needs.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

Klaviyo refers to automations as “flows,” and this is where the platform truly shines. The flow builder is a visual, drag-and-drop environment that allows marketers to create sophisticated customer journeys triggered by events, list memberships, or segments.

The flow builder’s strength comes from Klaviyo’s event architecture. Any tracked event—from email clicks to website visits to purchase completions—can serve as a trigger or conditional split within a flow. This creates virtually unlimited possibilities for personalized customer journeys.

Particularly impressive is the flow builder’s handling of ecommerce-specific scenarios. Pre-built templates (“ideas”) include abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase follow-ups, winback campaigns, and product replenishment reminders. These templates aren’t just starting points—they’re sophisticated flows with conditional logic already in place.

Flows can incorporate multiple channels (email, SMS, etc.) and include time delays, conditional splits based on behavior, personalized content, and splits based on predictive analytics like customer lifetime value. The conditional logic capabilities are especially powerful, allowing for complex scenarios like “send this message only if the customer viewed but didn’t purchase from category X in the last 30 days.”

The platform also provides comprehensive analytics for flows, showing performance at both the overall flow level and for individual messages within the flow. This makes optimization straightforward, with clear visibility into where customers advance or exit the journey.

Templates

Klaviyo offers a substantial library of email templates designed specifically for ecommerce use cases. The templates are modern, mobile-responsive, and categorized by industry and purpose, making it easy to find relevant starting points.

The template designs reflect current ecommerce email best practices, with strong visual hierarchy, prominent call-to-action buttons, and layouts that work well across devices. They’re particularly well-suited for product showcases, with effective spacing and formatting for product grids.

Beyond static templates, Klaviyo also provides “ideas” (template flows) for automation. These comprehensive templates include not just the email designs but also the trigger logic, sending schedules, and conditional paths—essentially providing complete marketing programs that can be quickly customized.

Klaviyo’s template system is enhanced by its dynamic content capabilities. Templates can include product recommendation blocks, countdown timers, dynamic image swaps based on customer attributes, and other personalization elements that pull from the customer data platform.

While the template library is extensive, Klaviyo also makes it easy to import custom HTML templates or create designs from scratch using the drag-and-drop editor.

Email Template Editor

Klaviyo offers two primary ways to create emails: a visual drag-and-drop editor and an HTML editor for those who prefer to work with code.

The drag-and-drop editor provides a clean, intuitive interface with a wide range of content blocks including text, images, buttons, dividers, spacers, product blocks, and dynamic content. The editor includes robust styling options while maintaining guardrails that help ensure emails remain responsive and deliverable.

What sets Klaviyo’s editor apart is its seamless integration with the platform’s data capabilities. When editing any text element, users can easily insert personalization tags, dynamic content blocks, and conditional content rules that change what’s displayed based on subscriber attributes. This tight integration between content creation and data makes sophisticated personalization straightforward.

The HTML editor offers direct code access with syntax highlighting and a preview mode. It’s well-suited for advanced users who want complete control over email rendering. The platform also provides a hybrid approach where users can build with the drag-and-drop editor and then fine-tune with HTML when needed.

Both editors include mobile preview capabilities, allowing users to see how emails will render on different devices. The platform also provides spam testing features to identify potential deliverability issues before sending.

List Management

Klaviyo’s approach to list management reflects its data-first philosophy. Rather than treating lists as the primary organizational structure, Klaviyo centers around individual customer profiles that can belong to multiple lists and segments.

The platform distinguishes between lists (explicit groups created through signup forms or imports) and segments (dynamic groups based on behavior or attributes). This dual approach provides flexibility while maintaining clean organization.

Profile management is comprehensive, with each customer profile containing:

  • Contact information and consent status
  • Custom fields and attributes
  • Complete interaction history across all channels
  • Basic engagement metrics
  • Segment memberships
  • Campaign and flow engagement

It’s important to note that advanced predictive analytics like churn risk and lifetime value calculations require purchasing Klaviyo’s separate Marketing Analytics add-on, which starts at an additional $100/month beyond the base subscription cost.

Klaviyo’s segmentation capabilities are extensive but complex to master. Segments can be created based on combinations of profile attributes, behavioral data, and custom properties. The segment builder supports both simple and complex logic, including nested conditions and AND/OR operators, but requires significant time to learn effectively.

What distinguishes Klaviyo’s list management is how it leverages the event architecture. Any event tracked in the system—from email clicks to website visits to purchases—can be used as segmentation criteria. This creates precise targeting potential, allowing marketers to reach specific audiences with each message, but requires deep platform knowledge to utilize effectively.

The platform also provides list cleaning tools, including automatic suppression management, bounce handling, and engagement tracking to help maintain deliverability rates.

Analytics

Klaviyo’s analytics capabilities are comprehensive but complex, leveraging the platform’s event-based architecture to track touchpoints across channels. This complexity creates a steep learning curve for utilizing the data effectively.

The analytics dashboard is customizable, allowing users to create personalized views with various metrics. These “cards” can display different data points, from traditional email metrics to ecommerce analytics. However, creating and interpreting these custom reports requires significant platform knowledge and analytical skills.

Standard email metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes) are available but presented within Klaviyo’s complex data model, sometimes making it difficult to quickly access straightforward campaign performance data that other platforms present more directly.

Where Klaviyo attempts to differentiate is in connecting marketing activities to business outcomes. The platform provides attribution reporting to show how email campaigns and flows contribute to revenue, including:

  • Revenue per recipient
  • Revenue per email
  • Attributed conversion value
  • Product-level purchase analysis

However, it’s critical to note that the most valuable analytics features—including customer lifetime value calculations, advanced cohort analysis, and predictive purchase behavior—require purchasing Klaviyo’s separate Marketing Analytics add-on, which starts at an additional $100/month beyond the base subscription cost. This significant additional expense puts these advanced features out of reach for many businesses.

For ecommerce businesses, Klaviyo offers reports including:

  • Product performance analytics
  • Purchase frequency metrics
  • Geographic sales distribution

The reporting interface enables segmenting any report by various dimensions and adjusting date ranges for trend analysis, but the complexity of creating and interpreting these reports often requires dedicated analytical expertise that smaller marketing teams may lack.

Support

Klaviyo’s support model reflects its positioning as a premium platform with a tiered service approach that reserves faster response times and more personalized assistance for higher-spending accounts. The standard support included with all paid plans includes email support and basic live chat, but response times vary dramatically based on your support tier.

For standard paid accounts, email response times range from 4 hours for urgent issues to 48 hours for low-priority concerns. LiveChat is available on weekdays only (24/5) with no weekend coverage. While this baseline support is adequate for routine questions, businesses experiencing critical deliverability issues or urgent technical problems may find the response times frustrating.

Klaviyo offers two premium support tiers—Professional and Enterprise—but provides no transparent pricing or qualification criteria on their website, requiring potential customers to “talk to sales” to learn more. This lack of transparency makes it difficult for businesses to budget for appropriate support or understand what level of service they can expect.

The Professional support tier improves email response times (2 hours for urgent issues) and adds weekend LiveChat during local business hours, plus a single annual training session. Deliverability strategist access is technically available “upon request,” but without clear guidelines on what qualifies a request or how quickly it might be fulfilled.

Only at the Enterprise support level do customers receive truly premium support with 1-hour response times for urgent issues, 24/7 LiveChat coverage, regular access to deliverability strategists, and proactive deliverability monitoring. These deliverability services—critical for email marketing success—are effectively gated behind what is likely a substantial additional investment beyond the already premium platform cost.

This tiered approach stands in stark contrast to email-first platforms like Emercury, which includes services such as onboarding consultation, live account setup, dedicated customer success managers, and delivery analysts as standard features in their mid-tier plans. For instance, Emercury’s Pro plan ($825/month for 150,000 contacts) includes phone support, Skype chat support, a delivery analyst, dedicated IPs, and monthly one-on-one training sessions without requiring separate premium support packages.

For businesses without enterprise-level budgets, Klaviyo’s approach to support means you’ll largely rely on self-service resources—their knowledge base, community forums, and video tutorials. While these resources are comprehensive, they can’t replace the strategic guidance and rapid intervention that dedicated support teams provide, especially when facing deliverability challenges that directly impact campaign performance and ROI.

Pricing

Klaviyo’s pricing structure is primarily based on the number of contacts in your database, with unlimited email sends. While this approach differs from some competitors that charge based on email volume, it creates significant cost challenges for businesses with large contact lists who send emails infrequently.

The pricing scales steeply as your subscriber count grows, making Klaviyo one of the more expensive ESPs on the market. Current pricing tiers include:

  • 10,000 contacts: $175/month
  • 25,000 contacts: $425/month
  • 50,000 contacts: $790/month
  • 100,000 contacts: $1,440/month

What’s crucial to understand is that Klaviyo’s multi-channel approach significantly multiplies costs. SMS functionality is priced separately based on message volume, with packages of SMS credits available for purchase at substantial additional cost. For businesses utilizing both email and SMS, this can effectively double your monthly expenditure.

The cost multiplication becomes even more dramatic when you add the Marketing Analytics add-on, which scales with your contact count just like the base subscription:

  • 10,000 contacts: +$100/month
  • 25,000 contacts: +$128/month
  • 50,000 contacts: +$237/month
  • 100,000 contacts: +$432/month

This add-on is required for access to advanced features like customer lifetime value analysis and predictive analytics.

This compounding cost structure means that a business with 50,000 contacts using email, SMS, and analytics features could easily spend over $1,000/month ($790 base + $237 analytics + SMS costs), compared to a fraction of that amount on an email-focused platform that includes core features in its base pricing. For businesses with 100,000+ contacts utilizing all three components, monthly costs can exceed $2,000 before even considering premium support tiers.

While Klaviyo markets itself as not engaging in feature-gating within its email platform, the reality is that its base price point is already set at a premium level, and crucial functionality is spread across multiple paid add-ons that all scale with list size. This means businesses pay for advanced capabilities whether they use them or not, potentially making it cost-inefficient for companies with simpler needs.

The platform offers a free tier for up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends, but these limitations are so restrictive that they’re primarily useful for testing rather than actual marketing operations. Most businesses will quickly exceed these limits and face significant price jumps.

For ecommerce businesses that fully leverage Klaviyo’s advanced features, have high-value products with strong margins, and utilize all channels effectively, the pricing may be justified by ROI. However, businesses with lower-margin products, larger contact lists, or more basic email marketing needs will likely find Klaviyo’s pricing structure prohibitively expensive compared to more cost-effective alternatives that focus on delivering excellent email performance without the added cost of features they may never use.

Pros

Unified Customer Data Platform

Klaviyo centralizes customer data in one place, creating comprehensive profiles that can power marketing activities. This event-based architecture enables advanced personalization and targeting based on customer interactions, though mastering this system requires significant investment.

Ecommerce Integration

The platform integrates with major ecommerce platforms (particularly Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento), enabling synchronization of product data, order history, and customer information without requiring extensive technical support.

Advanced Automation Capabilities

Klaviyo’s flow builder provides flexibility for creating complex, multi-step customer journeys triggered by tracked events and incorporating conditional logic. These capabilities benefit businesses with sophisticated marketing needs and the resources to implement them.

Detailed Segmentation

The platform’s approach to segments allows for targeting based on combinations of customer attributes, behaviors, and custom properties, creating precision in audience selection for businesses with the expertise to utilize these features effectively.

Revenue Attribution

Klaviyo provides visibility into how marketing activities drive revenue, with attribution reporting that helps businesses understand the ROI of their email and SMS programs. However, the most valuable analytics features require an additional paid add-on.

Cons

Steep Learning Curve

Klaviyo’s data-centric approach and confusing terminology create a significantly steeper learning curve than email-first ESPs. Many businesses report taking weeks or months to become proficient, often requiring dedicated staff just to manage the platform effectively.

Premium Multi-Tiered Pricing

The platform’s base pricing is substantially higher than email-focused marketing tools, but the real cost shock comes from its multi-tiered pricing structure. Email, SMS, and Analytics are all priced separately, with both the base subscription and add-ons scaling with contact count. This can potentially multiply costs by 3-4x for businesses that want the complete solution, making Klaviyo extraordinarily expensive for businesses with large lists or multi-channel needs.

Hidden Support Costs

Critical services like deliverability strategists and priority support require additional investment in premium support tiers with non-transparent pricing. Unlike email-focused platforms that include deliverability expertise in standard plans, Klaviyo reserves these essential services for Enterprise-level support customers.

Complex for Broadcast-Focused Marketers

For businesses that primarily rely on broadcast emails rather than complex automation, Klaviyo’s tools can feel unnecessarily complicated and overengineered. The platform clearly prioritizes data integration over making broadcast campaigns simple and efficient.

Less Focus on Deliverability

While Klaviyo offers deliverability tools, these are primarily reserved for premium support tiers. The standard platform doesn’t emphasize deliverability optimization with the same intensity as email-first platforms that treat inbox placement as their core competency across all plan levels.

Confusing Metric vs. Event Terminology

The platform’s terminology around “metrics” (event types) and “events” (individual instances) is persistently confusing even for experienced users, creating ongoing friction in daily use.

Limited Custom Event Creation in UI

Creating custom event types requires using the API rather than the user interface, making this powerful feature inaccessible to non-technical users who can’t write code or don’t have developer resources.

Tiered Support with Slow Response Times

Standard support response times can reach up to 48 hours for low-priority issues, with limited weekend coverage. This contrasts starkly with email-first platforms that typically provide faster, more personalized support regardless of plan level.

Resource-Intensive

Fully leveraging Klaviyo requires significant team resources, making it difficult for businesses without dedicated marketing staff to achieve positive ROI despite the high costs.

Limited Broadcast Innovation

The platform’s focus on automation means broadcast features receive less development attention, potentially frustrating marketers who still rely heavily on manual campaigns and value ongoing innovation in core email functionality.

Final words

Klaviyo represents a significant evolution in marketing platforms, moving beyond straightforward email delivery to create a comprehensive customer data and marketing automation system across multiple channels. Its event-based architecture provides flexibility and power for businesses willing to invest in its complexity, but this comes at the cost of simplicity, direct focus on email deliverability, and substantial financial investment across multiple add-on services.

What distinguishes Klaviyo is its thoroughly data-driven approach to marketing. Every aspect of the platform is built around customer data integration, creating opportunities for sophisticated personalization that traditional email-first ESPs don’t prioritize. However, this data-centricity comes with significant complexity and shifts focus away from the core email delivery capabilities that drive immediate results for many businesses.

Potential customers should be fully aware that Klaviyo’s multi-channel approach can dramatically multiply costs. The base email platform is already premium-priced (ranging from $175/month for 10,000 contacts to $1,440/month for 100,000 contacts), but when you add separate charges for SMS functionality and the Marketing Analytics add-on (which adds $100-$432/month depending on list size), businesses can easily end up paying more than double what they might spend on an email-focused platform that includes core features in a single, straightforward pricing structure. For businesses with 100,000+ contacts utilizing all three components, monthly costs can easily exceed $2,000 before even factoring in premium support tiers.

The platform is best suited for mid-market to enterprise ecommerce businesses with dedicated marketing teams, substantial technical resources, healthy margins that justify the premium pricing across multiple add-ons, and a genuine need for multi-channel marketing. These organizations can leverage Klaviyo’s advanced capabilities to drive revenue growth that offsets the substantial costs. For businesses that primarily value reliable email delivery, straightforward broadcast capabilities, and focused innovation on core email functionality without the financial burden of paying for unused channels, email-first platforms that prioritize deliverability and direct human support will likely provide better value and results.

While Klaviyo offers powerful capabilities, businesses should realistically assess whether they need a complex multi-channel data platform or simply an effective email marketing solution. Organizations that focus primarily on direct communication through well-crafted broadcasts may find better value in platforms that specialize in email delivery rather than trying to be an all-in-one marketing solution with separately priced components that all scale with list size. These email-first platforms typically offer more accessible interfaces, more affordable pricing models (especially for larger lists), and support teams focused specifically on maximizing email performance.

For the right business—one with substantial marketing budgets, technical resources, data expertise, and a need for sophisticated automation across multiple channels—Klaviyo provides a powerful marketing engine. But for many others, particularly those focused on effective email communication rather than complex data analysis across multiple paid channels, specialized email platforms that prioritize deliverability, broadcast innovation, and human support represent a better alignment with their actual needs, capabilities, and budget constraints.

About the ESP

ActiveCampaign tries to position itself as the “all-in-one” buffet, where you just get an ActiveCampaign subscription and all of your marketing and business are taken care of. Is this true, or are there some tradeoffs? Let’s talk about this.

If your business has sales and marketing as completely separate teams, both are likely to find that the platform doesn’t cater to them as much as specialized sales or marketing platforms. Furthermore, if you actually want to unlock more advanced features, you’re forced to buy higher-tiers (pro tier for segmentation and conditional content), or pricey addons (the pipelines addon for even basic sales features).

Note that the platform tries to make it seem like standard email marketing features rely on their “Marketing CRM”, which is essentially nothing but basic contact management. For anything beyond that, you have to purchase the “Enhanced CRM” add-on. 

Things such as segmenting off of customer data, behavior, events (etc) are available on all modern email marketing platforms, and pretty much standard, even if other platforms don’t call it “Deep CRM integration”.

The other thing to note is that the platform seems to prioritize getting you to upgrade to higher tiers. This can be seen by the user experience which is highly focused on presenting everything as equally important, which can lead to overwhelm if you’re just starting out. 

You can’t just decide to focus on say just one foundational area of marketing, and add more complexity as you grow. Everything is presented as if it were equally important to implement from day one in your business. This means that using the platform involves a larger learning curve than for example a platform that focuses on email marketing first and foremost.

They do offer an impressive library with hundreds of design templates (both email and landing pages) as well as automation recipes. They also boast an equally impressive (and unmatched) number of native integrations. One however gets the impression that you’re charged a severe penalty by paying a lot more simply because you have access to more templates than with other platforms.

Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the first point at which you get a glimpse at their tiered philosophy. It differs heavily based on what plan you have chosen. While the basic plans emphasize documentation and tutorial videos, higher-tier plans include personalized onboarding sessions with a dedicated specialist. This differs from other platforms where human support for onboarding is more accessible even if you’re on a more basic plan.

The platform guides you through initial setup steps like importing contacts, setting up your first campaign, and then configuring basic automations.

Ease of Use

ActiveCampaign aims to be an all-in-one platform, offering a wide range of features beyond email marketing. While this can be beneficial for businesses that need a comprehensive solution, it can also make the platform feel overwhelming for new users. The interface, while visually appealing, can appear cluttered and complex, especially for those primarily focused on email marketing.

The platform throws a lot of information at you from the start, presenting all features as equally important, regardless of your immediate needs. This can lead to a steep learning curve, as you’re bombarded with options and functionalities that may not be relevant to your current marketing goals.

For example, if you’re primarily focused on building email lists and sending targeted campaigns, you might find yourself navigating through numerous menus and features related to CRM, sales automation, and other functionalities that you may not need immediately.

While ActiveCampaign offers helpful resources like tutorials and a knowledge base, the initial onboarding experience could be more streamlined for users who are primarily interested in email marketing.

Broadcast Feature

ActiveCampaign’s broadcast functionality can be a little confusing at first if you’re mostly experienced with traditional email-marketing platforms. There is essentially no feature called “broadcasts” in ActiveCampaign.

What you do have is a screen called “Campaigns” which lists multiple ways of targeting customers with email. This includes 3 automated types of campaigns (“Automations”, RSS-Triggered and Date Based). It also includes two types of broadcast campaigns which they refer to as “Standard Emails” and “Split Testing” (which is essentially A/B split broadcast.

The broadcast creation process is designed in a clever way where you’re presented with a single, elegant screen. At first glance it seems a bit too basic. On the top left it only presents you with 4 fields. The sender, recipients list, preheader text and subject line.

At first glance it seems underwhelming. That is until you select the recipient list and see that you can go a lot more granular than this. You may choose any segment you’ve predefined or built before. But in addition to that it has a nice unique feature labelled “Send using custom conditions”.

This opens up a popup where you can define your exact targeting.  The core targeting capabilities are similar to what you’d find in any robust ESP – you can combine multiple conditions based on subscriber behavior, custom fields, tags, and engagement metrics. What makes this really convenient is that it allows you to easily set conditions for one given campaign, without having to build a segment first. You can do it all on the campaign screen.

Note that while you can also target based on pipeline-specific data like deal stages and sales pipeline position, this requires purchasing the additional add-on.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

This is probably the one feature that ActiveCampaign is best known for. It features a marketplace with over 900 pre-built automation recipes as well as guided tutorials. The automation builder itself uses a flowchart-style interface where you drag in the different types of actions, triggers, and conditions. As of recently they have also integrated some AI-powered tools for content generation and optimization.

Some standout features include:

  • Site tracking integration that allows you to trigger automations based on website behavior
  • A large library of native integrations with third-party platforms
  • Pipeline-specific conditions like deal stage changes or sales rep assignments (if you own the add-on)
  • Win probability predictions for sales opportunities (if you own the add-on)
  • Lead scoring functionality that can automatically adjust based on subscriber behavior (if you own the add-on)

It’s important to note however that except for the pipeline-specific conditions and the large library of pre-built recipes, all of this is standard fare in any robust ESP. And while on paper the number of native integrations provided by ActiveCampaign appears impressive, this advantage is severely reduced in today’s era. This is thanks to the likes of Zapier, Make and webhook functionality making it possible to connect virtually any two platforms, regardless of native integrations.

Furthermore, while ActiveCampaign tries to present things in a way where it appears that the CRM functionality is necessary for robust automation, the truth is that most of these automation capabilities are quite common in email marketing platforms.

Templates

ActiveCampaign boasts an absolutely massive library for various use cases and industries. The templates themselves as well designed and responsive. Whilst this would have been a huge advantage in the past where people relied more on a platform’s provided templates, today it is much less of an advantage. With options like Stripo nowadays, a big library of ready-made templates inside the ESP is a “nice to have”, but no longer makes as big of a difference.

Email Template Editor

HTML WYSIWYG Editor: The WYSIWYG editor is provided for those who prefer to work with HTML directly. It includes syntax highlighting and a preview mode, allowing you to avoid any big mistakes.

Drag and Drop Editor: The drag-and-drop editor is modern, intuitive and offers all the elements you would need to build out your emails. You can easily insert basic personalization tags, dynamic content, and conditional blocks directly within the editor. The editor also includes mobile preview capabilities and spam testing features to help ensure your emails look good and reach the inbox.

List Management

ActiveCampaign emphasizes a “Marketing CRM” approach to list management. While this sounds sophisticated, it essentially refers to basic contact management features. You can organize contacts into lists, add custom fields, and segment based on simple criteria.

However, to leverage more advanced segmentation options, such as those based on customer behavior, events, or sophisticated scoring models, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier or purchase the “Enhanced CRM” add-on.

This creates a situation where seemingly standard email marketing features are presented as reliant on premium add-ons. Segmenting based on customer data, behavior, and events should be a core functionality of any modern email marketing platform, not an extra expense.

This approach can lead to frustration and confusion, especially for businesses that don’t have a sales team, or prefer a different sales CRM and may not require the full suite of “Enhanced CRM” features, but still need robust segmentation capabilities for effective email campaigns. If this is you, look elsewhere.

ActiveCampaign is essentially tying what should be basic list management to the concept of an “Enhanced CRM”. But this “Enhanced CRM” is a sales team feature. And there’s no reason why you’re forced to buy a sales add-on to get basic marketing features. It’s just another pointer to how things are unnecessarily tied together to force you into paying for things you don’t need, to get what you do need.

Analytics

ActiveCampaign provides comprehensive analytics across all aspects of your email marketing and automation efforts. The reporting interface offers both high-level overviews and the ability to drill down into specific metrics.

The platform tracks standard email metrics like opens, clicks, and bounces, but also provides deeper insights into:

  • Automation performance
  • Campaign comparisons
  • Geographic data
  • Device statistics
  • Contact source reporting
  • Revenue attribution (for e-commerce integrations)

Note that the analytics functionality is limited by your tier. This is another area that differs from traditional email-marketing platforms that tend to give you all analytics functionality, regardless of your tier.

Support

Support varies significantly based on your plan level, and this tiered approach to support often compounds the overwhelm problem. While all users have access to email support and documentation, the support team tends to emphasize the platform’s full feature set rather than helping users focus on what matters most for their specific needs.

Higher-tier plans include phone support and dedicated account representatives, but even these resources often seem more focused on helping you implement every available feature rather than identifying which ones will actually drive results for your business.

In addition we’ve seen mixed reports on support times. Whilst some users report good experiences, others, such as the folks at WPFusion report sometimes waiting for weeks, or even months to get a reply.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing structure is multi-tiered and can become quite expensive as your contact list grows. The platform offers four main tiers:

  • Lite: Basic email marketing and simple automations only, just one user (starts at 19$ for 1000 contacts)
  • Plus: Remove the limit on automations and add landing pages ($59/month for 1,000 contacts)
  • Professional: Added conditional content and split automation features ($89/month for 1,000 contacts)
  • Enterprise: Added custom reporting and priority support ($159/month for 1,000 contacts)

The one thing that stands out here is how they artificially tie some features to a higher-tier. Such as for example conditional content requiring a professional plan, or segmentation offering less control on lower and mid-tier plans.

What’s particularly notable is how quickly costs escalate with contact count. For example, even basic features for 25,000 contacts will cost $489/month. This means that you pay $489 every month and don’t even get access to granular segmentation, conditional content and are limited to very simple automations (just 5 actions per automation).

Note that these are features that on other email-centric platforms are considered basic features and provided on even the most basic plans. The pricing seems designed to push users toward higher tiers by taking what is essentially considered a basic feature and limiting it to the higher-tiers.

In addition note that many features are sold as add-ons, and these scale with the plan. For example adding the pipelines add-on to an enterprise plan is an additional $107 a month just to add pipelines and deals. If you also want to add win-probability, this will set you back $179 a month.

Pros

Powerful Automation Capabilities

The automation builder is incredibly versatile and can handle complex marketing scenarios. The visual interface makes it accessible while still offering advanced capabilities.

Comprehensive Feature Set

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of features, including email marketing, CRM, lead scoring, and sales automation. However note that by the time you add all of these features, either via add-ons or upgrading your tier, this can get quite expensive.

Extensive Integration Options

ActiveCampaign integrates with a vast number of third-party platforms, making it slightly easier to fit into existing business workflows. Though the advantage over using something like Zapier or Webhooks is minimal.

Cons

Feature Overwhelm and Priority Confusion

The platform presents essential and non-essential features with equal prominence, making it difficult for users to know what to focus on first. This creates a paradox where having more features actually makes it harder to effectively use the core ones that matter most to your business.

Forced Feature Bundling

Their philosophy of bundling and tying things together means you’re often forced to pay for features you don’t need just to access specific capabilities you want. 

Price Scaling with Bundled Features

Costs increase significantly as your contact list grows, and you’re paying for the entire ecosystem rather than just the specific features you need. This can make it much more expensive than combining best-of-breed solutions for your specific needs.

Limited Flexibility in Feature Selection

The rigid tier structure means you can’t pick and choose which features you want. This can be particularly frustrating for businesses that prefer to build their own stack using specialized tools for each function.

Final words

ActiveCampaign presents itself as a comprehensive marketing automation platform that goes beyond simple email marketing. Its powerful automation capabilities, integrated CRM, and extensive feature set make it particularly appealing to businesses looking for a sophisticated marketing tool that can grow with them.

The platform’s strength lies in its ability to handle complex marketing scenarios while still maintaining accessibility for simpler use cases. However, this comes with the trade-off of a steeper learning curve and a pricing structure that may not suit all businesses.

Whether ActiveCampaign is right for you largely depends on your philosophy about marketing tools. If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform and are willing to pay for features you might not need, while investing the time to learn a complex system, it could be worth considering.

However, if you prefer the flexibility of choosing best-of-breed solutions for each specific need, or if you want to pay only for the features you’ll actually use, you might want to explore more focused alternatives. The platform’s bundled approach to features and pricing can make it an expensive choice compared to combining specialized tools that excel in their specific areas.

About the ESP

Emercury positions itself as a mid-sized ESP that caters primarily to email marketing veterans and businesses focused on ROI. What makes them interesting is their philosophy of prioritizing core features and deliverability over flashy additions. While they’re not as well-known as some of the bigger names in the space, they’ve carved out a niche by focusing on what they believe actually drives results in email marketing.

The platform stands out for its approach to features and pricing. Rather than using feature-gating as a pricing strategy (common among larger ESPs), they make most features available across all plans. Their development philosophy centers on proven, ROI-driving capabilities rather than chasing every new industry trend. This makes them particularly appealing to experienced email marketers who value substance over novelty.

This review will explore how this philosophy plays out across their various features and capabilities, from their streamlined interface to their emphasis on human-based support.

Onboarding Process

Emercury has a pretty streamlined onboarding process that ensures you get started on the right foot. The moment that you sign up, you’re guided to setting up your sender profile and the support team is there to help you. You get access to an actual live support team to guide you if you get stuck at any point.

Ease of Use

This is probably the leading advantage when it comes to Emercury. As per their stated philosophy, their platform is designed to focus on the core features that make a difference. That isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of additional cool features.

However, the design seems to be entirely focused around the fundamentals. You will never feel overwhelmed, and there is next to no learning curve. Whether you’re a newbie trying to send your first campaign, or an advanced email veteran, you are sure to craft your first campaigns in minutes.

Broadcast Feature

If you care about broadcasts, then Emercury might just be right up your alley. With the ever increasing focus on “automation”, many ESPs have stopped innovating when it comes to broadcasts. Emercury is different because at their core they believe that broadcasts are just as important as automation. Something you can learn more about in this mailcon article here.

With that said, the main thing we love about the broadcast panel in Emercury is how it prioritizes the main features that you need. You can choose to either create a regular campaign, an A/B split campaign. To the side you have your folders which allows you to easily organize your drafts and templates, and then you have the list of all campaigns.

The really fun stuff begins once you enter into the campaign creation process 

Emercury decided to go with a wizard whereby you can easily create a campaign and get access to all the features and options you need, without getting overwhelmed. This is accomplished by first splitting the process into 4 steps.

But even then, within the different steps the most important features are put front and center, whereas the more advanced features are unveiled as you need them.

The first step involves creating the actual email (using the editor of your choice), and it includes everything you might expect, and then some more. Aside from allowing you to easily design the email and handle the copy, it also allows you to tweak personalization to your liking.

Aside from the basic merge tags that let you drop in bits of personal data (like first name, city, or custom field values), it also allows you to leverage “Smart Personalization”.

This is a pretty cool feature where you can literally have entire parts of the email look or show differently based on who’s viewing the email. That is to say you can set certain conditions, and based on which conditions the viewer meets, they will see different content.

In the second step is where you get to see the really cool extra features that broadcasters will love.

At first glance it seems simple because you just define the basics such as the subject line, and preheader text, however, it also provides a ton of extra features. All you have to do is click on the “Edit Advanced Options” button and see a plethora of extra features.

This includes enabling an automatic delivery reminder or permission reminder. These remind the subscriber either how they got on your list and/or that they need to add you to their address book, as a way of boosting deliverability.

Next, you will see a super useful feature that automatically adds anyone who opens the campaign to a specific list. An option to add google analytics tracking to the links inside of the email, an option that generates ECPM/CPA tracking code so you can see the ROI for each campaign. And finally, an ability to set the delivery stop time.

Aside from this it allows you to customize the footer if you want to for this specific campaign, as well as decide if this campaign will be public (shown on publisher’s site).

The third screen is where you get to leverage the power of your segments

It is a simple panel where you choose which list or segment you want to send the campaign to. And then, you also get to select suppression lists (contacts to be excluded from this campaign).

But the really cool feature is something that they call “virtual segments”. It is a special segment that is created for that specific campaign, and won’t show up in your “lists” panel. This is used mostly for the purpose of throttling a campaign and making sure that it sends in multiple steps. That is to say, it makes it so that not everyone gets the campaign at the same time.

This is a feature that is essential for those with bigger lists and serious email marketers who care about deliverability.

And finally, overview and content scoring

The final step is an overview of how your campaign is set up, and it has shortcuts to the main actions you might need. This includes the preview feature, if you want to take another look at the email without going backwards. It has the option to schedule a delivery, schedule a test send, or even send the campaign immediately, if you’re especially confident.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

The automation feature is probably the best example about how Emercury tries to make things feel simple, and yet still offer a lot of power. Instead of overwhelming you with a ton of different modules, you’re presented with some really straightforward fundamental blocks.

This means that you can recreate a basic autoresponder in literally seconds from the moment you open the journey builder for the first time. However, at the same time it still offers some powerful features when you want to get fancier, you just need to enable them.

Some of our favorite modules include the “if” block which lets you define all sorts of cool logic about how the automation should flow. Including day and time targeting, as well the webhook module which allows you to to trigger actions in any external system.

However, the module that really stands out is the “Go to” module which we think hasn’t been seen on other platforms yet, at least not to our knowledge. It’s this really cool module where you can have the automation go to any previous step.

This is useful if for example someone has been sent an entire sequence, but hasn’t bought yet. You can simply insert a go-to step that takes buyers through the flow once again.

Templates

Emercury offers a growing library of templates. It’s not a huge library by any means, but it offers everything you need with classic, elegant, responsive templates that are a good choice for any brand. If you want to go super custom and match your brand exactly, they offer custom services where their team of designers can custom-design templates to match your brand.

Email Template Editor

Email Template Editor Options

✅ HTML WYSIWYG

✅ Drag and Drop

The drag and drop editor is another example of how Emercury balances power with simplicity. As you might expect, it gives you all the standard drag-and-drop functionality for building your emails visually. However, what makes it interesting is how it integrates with Emercury’s personalization features.

When you’re working with any text content in the editor, you get access to both basic merge tags and the Smart Personalization feature mentioned earlier. This means you can select any text block and either drop in basic subscriber data (like names or custom field values), or set up those conditional content rules we talked about in the broadcast section.

This is a good example of Emercury’s focus on ROI-driving features. Instead of overwhelming you with dozens of fancy-sounding options, they’ve focused on making it easy to do the things that actually impact your bottom line – like personalizing your content to different subscriber segments.

The integration is particularly well thought out. You won’t find yourself hunting through complex menus to find the personalization options. They’re right there when you’re editing text, which makes it practical to use these features in your day-to-day email creation process, rather than treating them as a special occasion thing.

List Management

Sending emails is only one half of the coin. If you have low quality list management, then no amount of sending features will help you. Fortunately the people behind Emercury seem to share that notion, as can be witnessed by their attention to list management features.

Adding contacts

When it comes to adding contacts, aside from the basics such as letting you build forms, integrations, and adding contacts manually, they also support an incoming webhooks feature not common on most platforms. With this you can essentially make it so that you can feed new data to your Emercury account, in real time, coming from other platforms.

In addition, they feature a full contact profile where you can at a glance see the assigned tags and all custom field values, as well as the “Message Center”, which displays the full messaging history with this contact.

Segmentation

Emercury seems to support every single way that you can imagine of organizing, segmenting and managing your contacts. It all seems to start with lists, which are the basic organizational unit for contacts. Each contact must belong to a list.

From there on you have multiple ways to differentiate contacts in even more granular ways, including via tags, smart segments, custom profile values and events.

As you might and should expect, when you send out a broadcast campaign you can choose one or multiple lists (or segments).

If you want to get super granular, you can use the advanced segment builder and create a segment based on any possible combination of tags, conditions, actions, events that you can imagine. And then when you do broadcast, proceed to choose any combination of segments or lists.

Of course, if you’re utilizing the automation builder, you can trigger a journey any time a lead enters a given segment or list. And even create “broadcasted journeys” which are something like a hybrid between a broadcast and an automated journey. They call this feature “Scheduled Automations for Existing Lists”.

Analytics

Emercury claims that its analytics and reporting features are one of the main reasons why a lot of email veterans are moving to their platform. If you’re overwhelmed with the reporting and analytics on other platforms, then Emercury might just be right for you.

It displays all the metrics you need in a simple and straightforward way which is simple to interpret at a glance. This makes it fun and easy to go and look at your reports each time you’re trying something new in your marketing. And that is how you grow and improve as a marketer. If this ease of use sounds good, then it might be right for you.

Support

One of the advantages of working with a medium-sized ESP is that you still get to deal with humans, and we see that advantage clearly displayed here. Whenever you reach out to support you will notice that there are no support chat bots, ready-made (copy-pasted) answers and runarounds that make no sense.

You’re dealing with actual humans who are inside the company and working right alongside the key players. As opposed to an outsourced support team following canned scripts, as you would with a larger more corporate ESP.

Pricing

The pricing is really interesting here, because it highlights the difference between those “in the know” and beginners who chase after flashy featurettes. If you look at the actual price per email sent, Emercury is far more affordable than those big platforms.

According to Emercury, their philosophy is that you pay for sending emails, not for features (unlike most other platforms). Their philosophy states that features should be available to everyone, and not use features as a pricing metric.

When they develop a feature, they try to make it available to all tiers. The only exception is if the feature is genuinely computationally expensive, in which case it differs from one plan to the next. Otherwise though, pricing is not related to features.

Now, if you’re experienced with email, you will know that most of your profit comes from using the staple foundational features and that deliverability impacts your profits far more than any fancy side-featurette. If you’re this person, Emercury pricing will appeal to you as you will get to make more profits, while spending less per email sent.

Pros

Feature development that focuses on ROI

If you read through the Emercury blog, you’ll notice a pattern. Their CEO is adamant about making it clear that their philosophy is that they give you what you need to make money off of email marketing.

This means that their approach is entirely different to platforms that try to lure you in with cool-sounding features that you’re either not going to use, or don’t make much of a difference.

Emercury states that they primarily cater to and serve the needs of email veterans, and all feature development is driven towards what their expert users need to boost ROI on email.

This isn’t to say that they don’t also add all kinds of fun and quality-of-life features, merely that their focus is heavily biased toward results, not what sounds cool on paper.

Simplicity of use versus overwhelm

One thing that you will notice is how “simple” Emercury seems when you first use it. This seems to flow directly from their philosophy of prioritizing the money-making features, as this is what they put front and center.

The interface is almost like a guide that gets you to focus on what matters in email marketing, making sure that you don’t get lost in overwhelm. Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of the extra features. Their interface is just designed in such a way that they are de-emphasized or enabled on a per-need basis.

If you ever feel overwhelmed trying other email marketing platforms, you might just want to try Emercury and see if your opinion changes. When everything is in front of you all at the same time, it can feel like an impossible task to master email marketing. However, when you realize that most of your results come from getting a few basics right, email marketing can become quite a bit easier.

A focus on human-based support

If you’ve used other SaaS offerings (email marketing or otherwise), you might be used to customer support that is frustrating. You might be used to obvious canned responses (even when you do reach an actual human), and conversations that go in circles. This is because most platforms outsource their customer service.

Emercury has an in-house customer service where you talk to members of the core team. That is to say they are intimately familiar with the product and how it works, as opposed to merely random people trained how to answer questions.

Fair pricing, not using features as blackmail

Another thing that the CEO of Emercury seems to emphasize quite often is their philosophy that features should be available to all. This is in contrast to many of the larger email marketing names that use “feature lock” as a way to get you to upgrade.

It’s typical with many of the services that we review to see a situation where you only need one small feature, but you have to upgrade to a higher tier that includes a volume of email you don’t actually need.

Emercury on the other hand bases its pricing on the number of emails sent, not number of features included. Almost every feature is included in every plan, and you only pay more in order to send more emails.

Cons

Less of the smaller or more experimental features

If you’ve grown accustomed to one of the smaller exotic features on a different platform, you might find that it doesn’t exist on Emercury. This is both good news and bad news, depending on how you view it. They seem intent on developing proven features that really move the needle, and don’t rush smaller and unproven features.

It’s good in the sense that it might help you focus on what actually gives results. It might be bad if you find that you have a habit of using one of these smaller features. We recommend giving it a test and finding out.

Final words

Emercury presents itself as a focused, deliverability-oriented ESP that prioritizes core features and ROI over flashy additions. Its streamlined interface, fair pricing model, and emphasis on human support make it particularly appealing to email marketing veterans who value substance over novelty. While it may not offer every experimental feature found on larger platforms, this intentional restraint appears to be a strategic choice rather than a limitation.

For businesses seeking an ESP that emphasizes what actually drives results in email marketing – deliverability, usable analytics, and core functionality – Emercury offers a compelling option. The platform’s philosophy of making features available across all tiers, coupled with its focus on human-based support, creates a refreshing alternative to the feature-gating common in the industry.

Whether Emercury is right for you ultimately depends on your priorities. If you value straightforward functionality, strong deliverability, and direct access to knowledgeable support over having every possible feature, it’s worth serious consideration. The platform seems particularly well-suited for experienced email marketers who want to focus on what drives actual results rather than getting lost in feature complexity.