When you don't own the channels where you reach customers, the ground can always shift beneath you. That's where email marketing shines.
The good news: there's an entire ecosystem of free email marketing tools available, and they have all the features you'll need to build out your email marketing (and then some).
I researched and tested more than 60 email marketing apps with free plans to find the best ones for a variety of use cases and business types. Here are the seven best free email marketing apps.
The best free email marketing apps
MailerLite for advanced email marketers
Brevo for all-in-one marketing and sales features
Mailchimp for a growing email marketing program
Sender for the most generous free plan
Loops for email marketing automation
Benchmark for teams with diverse skills
EmailOctopus for affordable upgrades
What makes the best free email marketing service?
How we evaluate and test apps
Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
Full-featured email marketing apps and free ones are far from mutually exclusive. There are tons of options that offer flexible subscriber and send thresholds along with the robust features small businesses need—for free. If you're just getting started with free marketing tools or want to try out a few options before committing to a paid plan, you have plenty of choices.
Here's what I looked for when testing free email marketing services:
The number of subscribers and sends included for free. Some free email marketing platforms are generous in this regard, offering thousands of free sends per month, while others include low caps that mean your "free" platform isn't free for very long. I kept this in mind while testing.
Email templates and customization. You shouldn't have to start your email marketing operation from scratch. The best options come with at least a few fully-designed and professional templates to get your free email campaign started. And in cases where there aren't any free templates, the email editor needs to really shine in ease of use.
Audience segmentation or automation. Success with email relies on being able to deliver the right emails to the right people at the right time. For growing businesses, that means you need capable audience segmentation and automation features. There aren't a lot of free email marketing tools that offer both these things, but every app below gives you either segmentation or automation for free.
Scalability. Speaking of, just because you're starting by doing your email marketing for free, it doesn't mean you won't grow out of it. The best free email marketing software can grow with your business—from free to paid when necessary, adding more features and higher limits as you go.
Full email marketing features. There are plenty of capable apps designed for one particular type of email (like newsletters, for example, or transactional emails), but for our purposes here, I focused on full-featured apps you can use across your email marketing operation.
After narrowing down the list based on those criteria, I ran each of the remaining contenders through an extensive testing workflow that included:
Creating an account and completing any onboarding offered by the app.
Looking at core features like the drag-and-drop editor, template library, and overall campaign creation flow.
Testing out additional features like automation, customer segmentation, and alternative editors (like HTML or plain text), along with determining any applicable limits for these features on the free plan.
Where available, I tested out niche features for eCommerce, universal branding, broader marketing automation, and AI, among others.
Lastly, I looked into how costs for each app scale as you outgrow the free plan and move to paid.
Along with each step, I considered the ease of use for core and ancillary features—because with all the options available today, "free" shouldn't have to mean hard to use.
With those criteria in mind, here's the best free software for email marketing.
The best free email marketing platforms at a glance
Best for | Standout feature | Free plan | |
|---|---|---|---|
Advanced email marketers | Dynamic content blocks | Up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month | |
All-in-one marketing & sales | Full-featured CRM | Up to 300 emails per day and 100,000 contacts | |
Growing email marketing | Lots of advanced features included for free | Up to 500 contacts and 1,000 sends per month (500 per day) | |
A generous free plan | 40 templates | Up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails per month | |
Email marketing automation | Unlimited automation workflows | Up to 1,000 contacts and 2,000 email sends per month | |
Teams with diverse skills | Flexible drag-and-drop, plain text, and code editors | Up to 500 subscribers and 3,500 email sends per month | |
Scalable upgrades | User-friendly audience segmentation | Up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 email sends per month |
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite pros:
Pre-built content blocks make building emails super quick
Generous allotments for segmentation and automation
Affordable upgrade for unlimited users
MailerLite cons:
No pre-made email templates on the free plan
Can't send emails from a Gmail email address
MailerLite doesn't offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than make up for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There's a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It's a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows—or you can hit the ground running with one of the 15 pre-built flows. Create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Plus, MailerLite integrates with Zapier—meaning you can automate things like adding new MailerLite subscribers from Google Sheets and sending Mailchimp subscribers to MailerLite. Here are more ideas for how to automate MailerLite, plus some pre-made workflows to get you started.
Create or update MailerLite subscribers from new Squarespace form submissions
Add new Leadpages form submissions to a MailerLite group as subscribers
MailerLite pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month
Best email marketing tool for all-in-one marketing and sales
Brevo
Brevo pros:
Pre-built, goal-oriented email automation
Generous automation limits on the free plan
Broad marketing and sales feature set
Brevo cons:
Strict 300 email/day send limit
If you're looking for one tool to handle all your marketing and sales needs, Brevo is a great option. Since rebranding from Sendinblue to Brevo, they've added several new features like a full-featured CRM, centralized solutions for sales meetings, calls, and chat, and streamlined deal tracking.
On top of these, the app still offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
You can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks, and the streamlined campaign creation flow keeps the breadth of available campaign types (Brevo supports email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and Facebook ad campaigns) from feeling overwhelming. From there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Brevo's AI Assistant won't give you much more functionality than copy and pasting from ChatGPT, but it's integrated well with straightforward, useful prompt buttons.
Once you're finished designing, either send your email as a newsletter or use Brevo's automation workflows to send on a schedule.
You can't send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts—the free plan comes with 100,000 contacts—and split them into focused lists. Brevo also lets you buy prepaid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
Expand Brevo's capabilities by integrating it with Zapier to automatically create new Brevo subscribers from new Google Contacts, Mailchimp subscribers, Facebook Lead Ads leads, and more. Discover more popular ways to automate Brevo with Zapier, or take a look at these ideas to get you started.
Create Brevo subscribers from new Facebook Lead Ads leads
Turn new Stripe customers into SendinBlue contacts
Brevo pricing: Free for up 300 emails per day and 100,000 contacts
If you're looking for strong audience segmentation features within a broader sales and marketing stack, HubSpot may be worth a look. I didn't include it in this year's list because it's moved decidedly upmarket when it comes to pricing, which would make it hard to scale past free—but the Free Tools offering is still a capable option for email marketing. Alternatively, if you don't have a ton of subscribers, SendPulse is a well-rounded sales and marketing platform that offers high-quality email templates, user-friendly automation templates, and a wide range of other features—free for up to 500 subscribers.
Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
Mailchimp pros:
User-friendly interface with helpful tips and best practices
Includes customer journey mapping, list segmenting, A/B testing, and more
Scalable pricing
Mailchimp cons:
Relatively limited free plan compared to the other options on this list
No automation on the free plan
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you're planning to scale it quickly past newsletters. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a dialog box reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you're ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you'll never have to switch to another app.
Mailchimp integrates with Zapier, allowing you to do things like automatically subscribe new form responders, leads, or spreadsheet entries to a Mailchimp list. Learn more about how to automate Mailchimp, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Add new Mailchimp subscribers to Google Ads customer lists
Add subscribers to Mailchimp for new Google Sheets rows
Subscribe new Facebook Lead Ad leads to a Mailchimp list
Mailchimp pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts and 1,000 sends per month (500 per day)
Deciding between MailerLite and Mailchimp? Read our showdown: MailerLite vs. Mailchimp.
Best free email marketing software for a generous free plan
Sender
Sender pros:
Super generous subscriber and send limits
Full access to automation and segmentation
Reasonable upgrade costs
Sender cons:
Clunky drag-and-drop editor
If you're looking to get a whole lot of value for free, Sender is your best bet. The ultra-generous free plan includes 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails each month, and full access to more advanced features like automation and audience segmentation. At a time when most email marketing apps are reining in their free plans, Sender's really stands out.
You won't get a lot of fancy email templates here, but the app does offer more than 60, most of which are of passable quality. The drag-and-drop editor isn't my favorite, but it works. The automation feature now includes three pre-built workflows—for welcome series, thank-you series, and abandoned cart campaigns. It's easy to use and includes 11 standard triggers. You can build audience segments based on all the standard dimensions you expect, along with a number of eCommerce-specific ones.
Speaking of which, if you're looking to use Sender for eCommerce, you'll probably have to upgrade eventually, but the paid plans are super affordable, too—just $47.50 per month gets you 10,000 subscribers, 120,000 email sends, SMS features, whitelabeling, and up to three users.
Plus, you can use Sender together with Zapier to automate even more of your email marketing workflow, like syncing new Sender subscribers across other apps and publishing emails to other channels. Here are some ideas, but you can connect Sender to thousands of other apps in your tech stack.
Create and update subscribers in Sender for new forms in Wix
Add new Google Sheets rows to Sender group as subscribers
Sender pricing: Free for up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails per month
Best free email marketing software for automation
Loops
Loops pros:
All features included on the free plan
Lots of pre-built automation templates
Scalable upgrade
Loops cons:
Rich text editor only
Plain text templates
Loops is an email marketing app built, from the foundation on up, for automation. The app calls automated workflows "loops" (hence the name), and they're unlimited—even on the free plan.
Loops is designed for SaaS companies, and many of the features reflect that. With 17 pre-built loops to choose from, you can make quick work of building out automations for common subscription use cases like welcoming new paid users, inviting users to upgrade, and encouraging engagement.
The app also includes audience segmentation that's on the basic side but easy to use. As a whole, Loop's user interface is simple, clean, and supremely easy to navigate.
Now, this recommendation comes with one big caveat: Loops only includes a rich text editor and a few plain text email templates. If that works for your email marketing strategy, this is a great option—just know that you won't be building out highly-designed visual-laden campaigns.
You can also use Loops with Zapier to broaden the automation horizons by sending events to Loops, adding new subscribers from other apps, and more. Here are some examples for you.
Add new Formspark submissions to Loops as contacts
Loops pricing: Free for up to 1,000 contacts and 2,000 email sends per month
Best free email marketing software for teams with diverse skills
Benchmark
Benchmark pros:
Well-rounded free plan
Flexible drag-and-drop, plain text, and code editors
Scalable upgrade
Benchmark cons:
Low subscriber limit on the free plan
Unimpressive AI features
If you're looking for an email marketing tool with a well-rounded (but not bloated) feature set available on the free plan, Benchmark is worth a look.
The app's free plan is limited to 500 subscribers, but you get a generous allotment of monthly email sends, along with basic access to email automation, audience segmentation, and high-quality email templates. Plus, Benchmark offers affordable and scalable plans once you pass that subscriber count threshold.
With every new campaign, you can choose between drag and drop, plain text, and code editors, making Benchmark great for use across a diverse team.
Benchmark also offers a handful of AI features—including the new "Smart Design" (currently in beta) to design a custom branded template and "Smart Content" to generate email copy—but I wasn't super impressed with either tool.
You can do even more when you connect Benchmark with Zapier, automating things like adding new subscribers and syncing contacts across your business stack. Here are some workflows to get you started.
Add new Facebook Lead Ads leads as contacts to Benchmark Email
Generate new Benchmark Email contacts from new Kintone records
Benchmark pricing: Free for up to 500 subscribers and 3,500 emails per month
Best free email marketing software with an ultra-affordable upgrade
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus pros:
Generous free plan
Ultra affordable upgrade to paid
Access (albeit limited) to most features on the paid plan
EmailOctopus cons:
Clunky editor
Even the most generous free email marketing apps have limits on the subscribers, monthly sends, and features you can access for free. That means, eventually, you may have to upgrade.
While EmailOctopus offers a generous free plan, with allowances for 2,500 subscribers, 10,000 monthly emails, and access to most of the features the app has to offer—in at least some limited way—it's the ultra-affordable upgrade pricing that sets the app apart. EmailOctopus paid plans are the most affordable and scalable I found—we're talking 10,000 subscribers and 100,000 monthly emails sends for $40 per month.
A couple caveats here: while you can access automation for free (up to three workflows), the feature is pretty basic compared to others I tested. The app's drag-and-drop editor is also a little on the clunky side, but ultimately, it works.
Beyond that, EmailOctopus offers dozens of email templates to choose from and an easy-to-use audience segmentation tool with all the standard dimensions you expect from a free tool, along with a handful of engagement-based ones, too.
You can also connect EmailOctopus with Zapier to get even more out of the tool, automatically adding new eCommerce customers as subscribers, keeping contact data up-to-date and complete, and more. Here are some examples.
Add new Mailchimp subscribers to EmailOctopus lists
Add new Shopify customers as EmailOctopus subscribers
EmailOctopus pricing: Free for up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 email sends per month
What about a free eCommerce email marketing tool?
You may have noticed I don't have a "best for eCommerce" category this year—that's intentional. While I tested a number of apps with useful eCommerce features, it turns out there isn't really such a thing as a free lunch in this space.
Apps like Mailchimp and Sender offer features like eCommerce-specific audience segmentation dimensions and online store integration, but the subscriber and email send limits on their free plans won't get you very far when it comes to eCommerce.
As for an email marketing tool that's tailor-made for eCommerce, Klaviyo and (my former pick) Omnisend are both super capable options. Both apps severely limit their free plans to just 250 contacts and 500 sends per month, though, so I can't recommend them if you're looking for a free email marketing solution—they won't be free for very long. That said, if you're willing to pay for niche-specific features, free plans will enable you to briefly test out both Omnisend and Klaviyo before you have to open your wallet.
Other free email marketing tools with generous free plans
In addition to the picks above, I tested a number of other tools that offer exceedingly generous free plans. For example:
ConvertKit (10,000 subscribers and unlimited emails)
Mailjet (1,500 subscribers and 6,000 emails per month)
Systeme.io (2,000 subscribers and unlimited emails)
Zoho Campaigns (2,000 subscribers and 6,000 emails per month)
These apps didn't make the cut based on lack of certain features, certain usability issues, or not quite fitting the category, but they definitely offer a long runway before you have to start paying for your email marketing. So if your main concern is getting the most bang for your (lack of) buck, test these out and decide for yourself.
Email marketing services FAQ
Still have questions about choosing an email marketing service? Here are some common questions people have about how to pick the right app.
What makes a good free email marketing software?
While different platforms will suit different people best, you'll want to keep an eye out for features like email templates and customization, audience segmentation, automation, scalability, and how many subscribers and sends are included in a free plan.
Why use an email marketing software?
Email is one of the most effective ways to market your business. Why? Email is universal, as almost everyone has an email address. Plus, email is widely recognized as having a high return on investment (ROI) compared to other mediums. Email marketing software streamlines the entire process, ensuring you're getting the most out of the time you put into it.
Can I start email marketing for free?
Absolutely. Each platform listed in this article is free to get started with, and as long as you don't exceed contact limits for the free plan, you can send emails to your email list for free.
Automate your email marketing tool
Once you've picked your free newsletter software, here are a few ideas for how to automate your email marketing tool. Then take a look at more ways to use marketing automation to grow your business.
Related reading:
This piece was originally published in February 2015 by Matthew Guay and has also had contributions from Jessica Greene. The most recent update was in August 2024.
