7 Best Email Marketing Software & Tools 2026

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):

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:

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 CRM-focused 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.)

If you are considering HubSpot because of price (after hearing things like 50–90% off the first year)—let me stop you right now, you're playing directly into their marketing shtick (you'll see the #1 concern with HubSpot is actually price).

HubSpot was not initially built as a CRM, it was a marketing email automation platform. A powerful (and expensive) one at that—but credit where credit is due. It's just, most companies often need to start with just a CRM to streamline their business operations.

It wasn't until HubSpot realized that acquiring customers for their $20–60k+/yr marketing automation suite was a difficult sell out of the gate, that they decided to built a "free CRM" as a lead magnet (and gateway) to their expensive core product.

So if you're a startup or a team of 20 or less (that will actually be using the CRM day-to-day), we highly recommend looking at a different CRM (we've done a deep-dive on that here). Because after the first year, you will be paying 2-4x more for HubSpot than the competing solutions (even at their proposed "Year 2+ discounts").

Now if your team is quite large and considering Salesforce, we actually do recommend Hubspot in most cases. HubSpot is more user-friendly than Salesforce, and you aren't going to be totally stuck in the expensive enterprise software stack that a tool like Salesforce often requires.

We will also add that we work with HubSpot often, and Copper + Pipedrive have far superior API's to HubSpot (in that we can build the same integration in 1/2 the time), so there is a second-order unseen cost associated to HubSpot.

Important Email Logging Notes

And finally, there's quite a bit that needs to "go right" in order for emails to automatically log from your team's inbox into HubSpot.

Replies to emails will be logged automatically on the contact's timeline if you have connected your personal email and the following is true:

1. The original email was sent through the CRM or sent from your connected email client with the sales email extension or add-in installed and the Log checkbox selected.

2. The original email was not sent to an email address or domain listed in your Never Log list.

3. The email address is still connected when the reply is received.

4. The reply is sent to an individual's email connected by the user who originally started the thread.

5. The sender of the reply is an existing contact in HubSpot.

(Something that most take for granted when working with a CRM like Copper, where everything just logs automatically with no prerequisites—even if the contact doesn't yet exist in the CRM, it'll go back 1 year through your team's email history and retroactively add those emails)

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.

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), ConvertKit, 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):

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 CRM-focused evergreen newsletter).