Email marketing platforms for small business: seven compared at 5,000 contacts

Most email marketing platforms for small business do the same core job: hold a list of contacts, let you design a campaign, send it, and handle the unsubscribes and complaints that come back. The differences that decide the bill and the workload are narrower. Seven marketing email platforms are compared here: Rasket, Mailchimp, Brevo, MailerLite, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact.

We make Rasket. That is the reason the method matters more than the verdict, so here it is in full. Every platform is scored on the same six things: the price at 5,000 contacts, the price once automations are included, the free tier, how far the automations go, whether an API and transactional email live in the same account, and whether text messages are part of the product. A last column says who each one suits. That column is our reading, not a vendor’s claim, and it is labelled as ours.

• One scenario, priced for everyone. 5,000 contacts, US dollars, billed monthly wherever the vendor publishes a monthly price. One vendor’s tier table publishes only annual-billed prices, so its cells say so.
• Emails as well as contacts. One vendor prices on emails sent rather than on contacts. For that one we assume a campaign a week, about 20,000 emails a month, and say so in the cell.
• Every competitor fact comes from the vendor’s own page. The superscript beside each name links to the pricing page its cells were read on. Where that page does not state something, the cell says “Not stated” rather than filling the gap from memory or a review site.
• Our own prices are computed, not typed. Rasket’s cells are drawn from the same price list the checkout charges, on the pricing page. The marketing add-on is sold on top of a paid plan, so the 5,000-contact price is the Pro plan plus the first contacts tier, not the tier on its own.

The first column is the cheapest plan that holds 5,000 contacts. The second is the cheapest plan whose automations are not capped at a handful of steps, which is what most small businesses end up needing once a welcome series and an abandoned-cart reminder are running. The table scrolls sideways on a narrow screen rather than shrinking the text.

Read the two price columns together. At 5,000 contacts with automations included, Rasket is the lowest at $45 a month, with MailerLite four dollars behind. On the entry plan alone, the platform that prices on emails is cheaper than both if you send once a week, and becomes more expensive the more often you send: contact-priced plans do not change when you go from four campaigns a month to eight.

Two things the headline number does not show. Several plans carry a monthly send allowance tied to the contact count, and charge or upgrade you past it; the vendors that publish the allowance are quoted in the cells. And the two products with no free plan both offer a fourteen-day trial, which is enough to send a real campaign before you pay.

The same seven, on what you get rather than what you pay. “API and transactional email” asks whether the receipts and password resets your website sends can live in the same account as your newsletter, with the same unsubscribe and complaint lists.

The numbered sources, in table order. Ours is a path on this site; everyone else’s is their own page.

1. Rasket · /pricing · read 1 October 2026
2. Mailchimp · mailchimp.com · read 1 October 2026
3. Brevo · www.brevo.com · read 1 October 2026
4. MailerLite · www.mailerlite.com · read 1 October 2026
5. Klaviyo · www.klaviyo.com · read 1 October 2026
6. ActiveCampaign · www.activecampaign.com · read 1 October 2026
7. Constant Contact · www.constantcontact.com · read 1 October 2026

The tables give the facts. These paragraphs say what they add up to, in the same order, and each one names something that platform does better than we do.

The outline we started from had a deliverability row: DMARC guidance, one-click unsubscribe and complaint handling. We did not score it platform by platform, because none of the seven pricing pages states those features in a form we could quote, and a row we cannot source is a row we will not print. What we can say is what every platform is now required to do, because the mailbox providers say it publicly.

Google’s sender guidelines require anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC record, support one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail with a visible link in the body as well, and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.30%, recommending under 0.10%. One-click unsubscribe is the mechanism RFC 8058 defines: a List-Unsubscribe header carrying an HTTPS address and a List-Unsubscribe-Post header, so the mail app can unsubscribe the reader with one POST and no web page.

Whichever platform email marketing runs on, check four things in the trial:

• Your own domain, authenticated. The platform should send from your domain with DKIM signing and walk you through a DMARC record, not send from a shared domain of its own. See DKIM, SPF and DMARC.
• One-click unsubscribe on every campaign. Look at the headers of a test send for List-Unsubscribe-Post.
• Complaints that suppress. A recipient who marks a campaign as spam should never be mailed again, and that should hold for every message you send, not only the next campaign. See suppression lists.
• Consent you can prove. Import only people who asked to hear from you. Never upload a bought or scraped list; it is the fastest way to a spam rate over the line, and double opt-in is the cleanest proof.

On Rasket, Campaigns carry the RFC 8058 headers, add a footer with an unsubscribe link and your postal address to a body that has none, and write every choice to a consent ledger. A complaint suppresses the address for everything the team sends, and the domains page checks your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and says what to fix.

A comparison written by one of the contestants is only worth reading if it says where the author loses. Here is where we do.

• No landing-page builder. MailerLite, Brevo’s Standard plan and ActiveCampaign’s Plus plan list landing pages on their pricing pages. Rasket hosts a preference page for your subscribers and nothing else; a signup page lives on your own site and posts to the API.
• No SMS. Klaviyo builds text messages in, Constant Contact includes 500 on Premium, and most of the rest sell them as an add-on. Rasket sends email only.
• The newest product in the table. Every other platform here has years of third-party tutorials, agencies that know it and integrations built by other companies. Rasket has its own documentation and a shorter track record.
• The entry price, if you mail rarely. A business with a large list and one campaign a month pays less on a plan that prices on emails sent, and the Rasket marketing add-on needs a paid plan beneath it.
• Fewer integrations. There is no app store of e-commerce, CRM and webinar connectors. Rasket has an API, webhooks and an SMTP relay, which reach anything but ask somebody to write the glue.

If any of those is the deciding row for you, one of the others is the better choice, and the paragraph above tells you which.

There is no best email marketing platform small business owners should all pick. There is the one whose rows match the four questions your business actually asks.

• Do you also send email from a website or an app? Order confirmations, password resets and booking reminders are transactional email, and marketing email is the newsletter. Keeping transactional email and marketing in one account means one sender reputation to look after and one unsubscribe list that both obey. If you do, the API row decides it. The difference is set out in transactional vs marketing email.
• How often do you send? Weekly or more often, a plan priced on contacts is cheaper; once a month to a large list, a plan priced on emails can be.
• Do you need a website, landing pages or text messages? If yes, choose a product that builds them rather than stitching a second tool on.
• Who will run it? A developer will want the API and webhooks; an owner doing it on a Sunday evening will want templates and a phone number to call.

With those answered, shortlist two, import a small list of people who asked to hear from you, and send the same campaign from both trials. Compare the reports an hour later. If Rasket is one of the two, the marketing email page is the overview, and sending a newsletter from the API is what the developer route looks like end to end.