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6 Best Email Marketing Software in 2026

Updated today (Mar 30, 2026)

See how our top 3 picks compare across the 6 email marketing software we evaluated.

Explore what each does best, where it falls short, and why it earned a spot on our 2026 list.

Alex Bass Headshot
Alex Bass
Andra Vomir Headshot
Andra Vomir

    Best Email Marketing Software at a Glance

    6 apps and 3 deals
  1. 1
    Kit
    Kit

    creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities

    creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities
  2. 2
    Klaviyo
    Klaviyo

    Best eCommerce email marketing platform

    Best eCommerce email marketing platform
  3. 3
    Loops
    Loops

    Best for startups

    Best for startups
  4. 4
    Customer.io
    Customer.io

    For onboarding communication flows

    For onboarding communication flows
  5. 5
    Mailchimp
    Mailchimp

    Legacy email marketing tool

    Legacy email marketing tool
  6. 6
    Postmark
    Postmark

    For sending transactional emails

    For sending transactional emails

How We Evaluate Email Marketing Software

We score each email marketing software across multiple criteria, and hands-on expert evaluation

  • No Category Criteria records assigned to this category yet.
  • Expert Evaluation
    Curated by
    Alex
    and
    Andra
    , our rankings reflect in-depth testing, industry insights, and hands-on experience.
1
Kit

Kit

creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities

creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) was built primarily for small businesses and creators, and does marketing emails and basic email flows super well.

While it's more basic than many other options, it gets the job done especially if you're a smaller team with less complex needs.

Kit
Go to Kit site

What is Kit?

What is Kit?

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is one of the oldest email marketing providers on the market (in-fact, I used them for 7 years in my prior consultancy business back in 2015), and while that is normally a huge red flag to us, they have actually done a good job at staying relevant over the years.

They've focused heavily on being the best solution for creators and small businesses, and have managed to capture a lot of the creator economy especially.

And this shows itself when looking at what tools Kit integrates with. Unsurprisingly, all the growth and marketing tools in our Creator stack.

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2
Klaviyo

Klaviyo

Best eCommerce email marketing platform

Best eCommerce email marketing platform

We spoke to a few friends running e-commerce stores across different niches, and every single one was using Klaviyo for their email flows. At this point, it's basically become part of the default e-commerce tech stack.

Klaviyo
Go to Klaviyo site

What is Klavyio?

What is Klavyio?

Klaviyo is one of the best email marketing tools for e-commerce stores, especially if you want to build out things like different sales sequences, upsells, or abandoned cart flows.

Klaviyo gives you templates that are based on best practices from across the e-commerce space, which is why they tend to perform well. When speaking to friends in the e-commerce space, they all said they use Klavyio, it’s pretty much become the default tool e-commerce stores rely on.

While Klaviyo started as only email marketing flows, they now call themselves a B2C CRM where your customer data, messaging, and automation all live in one place. That’s what allows you to personalize flows based on real behavior (e.g. you can email someone if they added a product to their cart and didn't check out, or send them an email sequence if they haven't re-purchased in the past 60 days. Klaviyo also seems to be better than Shopify for A/B testing these flows.).

Superhuman Mail
Superhuman Mail
Featured

Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).

3
Loops

Loops

Best for startups

Best for startups

Loops sends marketing and transactional emails with a super simple, modern interface that avoids the clutter and complexity of tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot, or ConvertKit, making it easy to create campaigns, sequences, and segment audiences without getting lost in extra features.

If you want an email tool that just works, stays out of your way, and lets you automate or trigger emails from your CRM with minimal hassle, this is the one to pick, especially if you're tired of bloated pricing and confusing workflows.

Loops
Go to Loops site

What is Loops?

What is Loops?

We've used just about every single marketing and transactional email sending tool on the market, and we believe that Loops is the most simple and modern solution, poised to take much of the market share in time.

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), ConvertKit, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the difference.

And that's totally fair! Believe us, we've used them all and more. Dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things—they used to be the most user-friendly solution on the market, but with growth has come complexity and segmented products (like why are they trying to get me to create a website...?)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

I mean come on, you have contacts (an audience), and then one-off bulk emails (campaigns) you want to send to your contacts, and sequences (Loops) which are re-usable emails (e.g. like a newsletter or customer onboarding sequence):

Embedded Image

Screenshot of Loops

The main differentiation point of Loops is that it is just super simple and straightforward to use. You can easily segment down your audience (contacts) by defining in the campaign or sequence whatever filtering criteria you'd like specific to the actual one-off email or sequence you are sending out—super straightforward:

Embedded Image

Example of how to build a segment within an email sequence

What we like to say is the best email tool is one you rarely need to open up. Wait, what? Yeah create your email sequences once, and then use their flexible API to easily pass these contacts from your CRM to Loops.

While they advertise themselves as "better email for SaaS", we've been able to use them for our evergreen newsletter, which has nothing to do with integration into our products, it really just means that they have a robust API, allowing you to easily trigger one-off or sequences of emails (Loops) to go out at various points in the process.

These other email sending tools like ConvertKit, MailChimp, and Hubspot have just added so many additional "features" to try and extract more money (with the blink of an eye you'll be spending $20k/yr with Hubspot to unlock all of their marketing automation features). Loops on the other hand just has simple pricing and "gets out of the way", with a clean email editor, powerful API, and a great user-experience.

P.S. We use and love Postmark for sending transactional via our Communicate app, but that's only because it's more of a product, in most cases, companies shouldn't really be looking at an email sending tool like Postmark for marketing automation. Not to mention, Loops has actually just added transactional (one-to-one) email support, which should be able to take care of most transactional emails (like password reset emails, etc.)

4
Customer.io

Customer.io

For onboarding communication flows

For onboarding communication flows

Customer.io handles segmented onboarding funnels and lets you manage communication flows with customers visually, plus it connects well with tools like Slack for updates and event pushes. If you need a full-featured email marketing tool, this is not the right choice.

Customer.io
Go to Customer.io site

What is Customer.io?

What is Customer.io?

Customer.io is great for building segmented onboarding funnels within your product (e.g. a series of emails and push notifications based on the onboarding flow).

It allows you to manage all of your communication flows with the customer in a visual way.

We've been seeing more and more companies switch over to this due to their flexibility of native integrations.

You can also do things like push app sign-ups and in-app events to a shared channel in Slack, or even use it to automatically push out updates to shared Slack Connect channels.

Superhuman Mail
Superhuman Mail
Featured

Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).

5
Mailchimp

Mailchimp

Legacy email marketing tool

Legacy email marketing tool

Mailchimp buries you in confusing options and makes even basic email sending feel complicated, while pushing flashy templates that actually hurt engagement. If you want straightforward, effective marketing emails that feel human and aren't a mess to set up, skip Mailchimp entirely, look for something simpler.

Mailchimp
Go to Mailchimp site

What is Mailchimp?

What is Mailchimp?

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), Kit, Loops, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the actual differences.

You're probable checking "does it integrate with my CRM?" and the most confusing bit of it all is that what you think integrating with your CRM and what the marketing sites list as integrating are two totally separate things.

Mailchimp is the 800lb gorilla in the space—has been around the longest, has the most "integrations" out of the box, but as they've grabbed more and more of the market, they've had to expand their product offering to generate more revenue. Even expanding to offering websites, stores, and appointment booking (only to get worse with their recent acquisition by Intuit—how do you become a $100bn email sending company? You don't, you expand to everything but the kitchen sink):

Embedded Image

The sheer number of options and products available is overwhelming

So dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things (even just on the sending email front)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

They also focus heavily on "beautiful email templates that match your brand", well the open-rates and click-through of highly templated/branded emails have fallen off a cliff in recent years. Would you believe that with so much automated emails, people actually prefer receiving emails that feel like they were sent by a human? Big shocker, right? 😅

We highly recommend checking out a more simple tool like Loops to build out and manage your marketing emails (it's what we use for our newsletter).

6
Postmark

Postmark

For sending transactional emails

For sending transactional emails

Postmark was one of the best transactional email solutions on the market, but they were acquired by ActiveCampaign and have gone downhill since.

Postmark
Go to Postmark site

What is Postmark?

What is Postmark?

Postmark is a transactional email service, used for password reset emails for example. They've always been great, but they got acquired by ActiveCampaign, and have been going downhill ever since.

Superhuman Mail
Superhuman Mail
Featured

Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).

Our Verdict

1
Kit

Kit

creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities

creators looking to send emails to their audience and communities
Worth trying
Apps worth trying
These email marketing-adjacent apps prioritize another category at their core, but their email marketing features are strong enough that you should still consider them.
  1. Dub Partners
    Dub Partners
    Affiliate Marketing

    Best for SaaS affiliate programs

    Best for SaaS affiliate programs
  2. Cello
    Cello
    Affiliate Marketing

    For peer-to-peer referral programs

    For peer-to-peer referral programs
  3. PartnerStack
    PartnerStack
    Affiliate Marketing

    Runner-up for B2B SaaS affiliate programs

    Runner-up for B2B SaaS affiliate programs
  4. FirstPromoter
    FirstPromoter
    Affiliate Marketing

    Not for serious affiliate programs

    Not for serious affiliate programs
  5. Ahrefs
    Ahrefs
    SEO Tools

    all around SEO keyword research and monitoring

    all around SEO keyword research and monitoring
  6. Hootsuite
    Hootsuite
    Social Media Management

    For enterprise teams

    For enterprise teams
  7. Buffer
    Buffer
    Social Media Management

    Best social media scheduler for small teams

    Best social media scheduler for small teams
  8. Typefully
    Typefully
    Social Media Management

    Best for posting on X and LinkedIn

    Best for posting on X and LinkedIn
  9. Dub Links
    Dub Links
    URL Shortener

    Best for modern link attribution, a true industry disrupter

    Best for modern link attribution, a true industry disrupter
  10. Fathom Analytics
    Fathom Analytics
    Website Analytics

    Best for privacy focused analytics

    Best for privacy focused analytics
  11. Luma
    Luma
    Event Management

    Best modern event management platform

    Best modern event management platform
  12. Rewardful
    Rewardful
    Affiliate Marketing

    Not for serious, growth focused affiliate programs

    Not for serious, growth focused affiliate programs
  13. Metricool
    Metricool
    Social Media Management

    For agencies that prioritize analytics over reliable posting

    For agencies that prioritize analytics over reliable posting
  14. Cloudflare
    Cloudflare
    Cloud Suite

    Security, reliability and speed everywhere. More easily manage your website DNS.

    Security, reliability and speed everywhere. More easily manage your website DNS.
  15. Bitly
    Bitly
    URL Shortener

    Oldest incumbent

    Oldest incumbent
  16. Short.io
    Short.io
    URL Shortener

    Generous free tier but incredibly buggy & subpar analytics

    Generous free tier but incredibly buggy & subpar analytics
  17. Impact
    Impact
    Affiliate Marketing

    Best for D2C brands with hundreds of SKUs, not SaaS

    Best for D2C brands with hundreds of SKUs, not SaaS
  18. Google Analytics
    Google Analytics
    Website Analytics

    Free, but bad for performance

    Free, but bad for performance
  19. Tapfiliate
    Tapfiliate
    Affiliate Marketing

    Frequently blocked by ad blockers

    Frequently blocked by ad blockers
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