Item: MailerLite
Rating: 4.8
Author: Jack Farrell

MailerLite sits in an unusual position: it is genuinely good, and genuinely free for businesses under 500 subscribers. That combination is rare in email marketing.

Most free tiers are stripped-down versions designed to frustrate you into upgrading. MailerLite's free plan includes a drag-and-drop editor, 10 landing pages, automation workflows, and 12,000 email sends per month. Templates are locked to paid plans, so free users start from a blank canvas, but the editor itself is clean and fast to learn.

We signed up with a test business, built a five-step welcome sequence, ran a promotional campaign to a segmented list, and tested the landing page builder. Here is what we found.

Try MailerLite free for up to 500 subscribers and test it with your own list before committing to a paid plan.

Is MailerLite worth it for small businesses?

Yes, particularly if you are under 500 subscribers and want a professional email marketing setup at no cost.

The free plan is not a bait-and-switch. You can build proper email sequences, create landing pages, and grow your list without paying a penny. When your list outgrows the free tier, paid plans start at around $9 per month (roughly £7 billed annually) and add full template access, 24/7 live chat support, and unlimited email sends.

The main gaps are advanced CRM (ActiveCampaign does that better), webinars (GetResponse has those), and deep ecommerce analytics (Klaviyo leads there). For standard email marketing, MailerLite is hard to beat at this price.

How much does MailerLite cost?

MailerLite publishes pricing in US dollars and bills UK accounts in GBP. Plan names and pricing changed in June 2026, so always verify current rates on the MailerLite website. At time of testing, the structure ran as follows.

The free plan covers up to 500 subscribers with 12,000 email sends per month, 10 landing pages, and basic automation. Email-only support on the free tier, with no access to templates. Growing Business (from around $9/mo billed annually, roughly £7) removes the subscriber cap on sends, adds template access, branded emails removal, and 24/7 live chat. Advanced (from around $18/mo, roughly £14) adds AI writing tools, dedicated sending IP, and custom HTML editing.

Pricing scales with your subscriber count. At 5,000 subscribers, the Growing Business plan runs around $19/month on an annual plan. At 25,000 subscribers, it rises to around $65/month. Renewal prices match what you see at signup, with no surprise increases at the end of a contract period.

An Enterprise plan is also available with custom pricing for large or complex teams. Most small businesses will find Growing Business covers everything they need.

What do you get on MailerLite's free plan?

More than most free tiers, but with some important limitations. The free plan covers up to 500 subscribers and 12,000 email sends per month, along with 10 landing pages, signup forms and pop-ups, and basic automation including welcome emails and simple sequences.

The key gap is templates: free accounts cannot access MailerLite's template library, which means you build emails from scratch using the block editor. That editor is genuinely clean and fast, so most beginners adapt quickly. But if you want a polished starting point rather than a blank page, you will need a paid plan.

Free emails carry a MailerLite-branded footer, support is email-only, and analytics are limited to opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. For a business still building its list or testing whether email marketing is worth the investment, the free plan removes all financial risk.

Start with MailerLite's free plan and upgrade only when your list is ready.

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How easy is MailerLite to use?

Very easy. MailerLite has one of the cleaner editors in this category. You pick a template (on paid plans) or start from a blank canvas, click to edit blocks, drag to rearrange sections, and preview on mobile without switching views.

The template library on paid plans has around 80 professionally designed options. They are clean and functional rather than exceptional, but good enough for a professional-looking email without design skills. If your branding requires something specific, the blank canvas gives full control over block layout.

Setting up a campaign from scratch takes about 15 minutes once you have your copy ready. The subject line, preview text, sender name, and schedule all live on a single configuration page. That streamlined flow matters when email is one of several things you are managing at once.

How powerful is MailerLite's automation?

Solid for most small business use cases. MailerLite uses a visual workflow builder where you connect triggers, wait steps, conditions, and actions in a drag-and-drop canvas. The logic is visual and relatively intuitive compared to more complex tools.

The free plan supports basic automation triggers: when a subscriber joins a group, confirms their email, or a date arrives. Paid plans add click-based triggers, field updates, and more sophisticated conditional splits. The Advanced plan adds branching logic based on custom contact attributes.

In testing, we built a five-step welcome sequence with a three-day delay and a conditional split based on link click behaviour. It worked exactly as expected, with no configuration errors. Against ActiveCampaign, MailerLite's automation is simpler. For a welcome series, a weekly newsletter, and a win-back sequence, that simplicity is an advantage rather than a limitation.

Does MailerLite include landing pages?

Yes, 10 on the free plan and unlimited on paid plans. This is a meaningful differentiator. Most competitors either exclude landing pages from free tiers or limit you to one. Having 10 available from the start means you can create lead capture pages, launch pages, and sign-up forms without upgrading.

The landing page editor uses the same drag-and-drop interface as the email builder, so there is no new tool to learn. You can create a lead magnet page, a newsletter sign-up, or a product launch page in under 30 minutes. Paid plans add the ability to connect a custom domain, removing the MailerLite subdomain from your page URL.

The pages are mobile-responsive and load quickly. They are not as design-flexible as dedicated landing page tools, but for collecting email subscribers, they do the job well. If you are sending paid traffic to these pages, connecting a custom domain on a paid plan is worth doing.

MailerLite includes 10 landing pages on the free plan. No paid tool required.

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What are MailerLite's deliverability rates like?

Good, and consistent. MailerLite maintains a strong sender reputation partly because they enforce clean list standards. You cannot import a contact list without providing proper consent documentation, and they monitor bounce rates and spam complaint rates actively. That enforcement protects everyone on the shared sending infrastructure.

SPF and DKIM authentication setup is covered in the knowledge base with step-by-step screenshots for most major domain registrars. We completed authentication on a Cloudflare domain in about 10 minutes. In test sends across Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail, emails reached the primary inbox without hitting spam folders.

The free plan uses a shared IP pool, which occasionally affects deliverability if other senders on the pool have poor list hygiene. The Advanced plan includes a dedicated sending IP for businesses where inbox placement is critical to their operations. For most small businesses, the shared pool is more than adequate.

What does MailerLite integrate with?

Over 150 direct integrations, covering most tools a small business uses. Shopify and WooCommerce connect natively, syncing subscriber data, purchase history, and abandoned cart events. WordPress has an official plugin. Stripe lets you trigger emails from payment events without a middleware layer.

For everything beyond the native list, Zapier and Make connect MailerLite to most CRMs, booking systems, and project management tools. If your existing tech stack already connects to Zapier, it connects to MailerLite.

One note: MailerSend is MailerLite's transactional email product for order confirmations, password resets, and similar system-generated messages. It is a separate product with its own pricing. The two share a parent company and work well together, but they are not automatically linked on signup.

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Is MailerLite good for ecommerce?

Yes, for small to mid-size ecommerce stores. The Shopify and WooCommerce integrations pull in purchase data and let you segment customers by what they have bought, how much they have spent, and when they last ordered.

Abandoned cart emails work out of the box with Shopify. You set a delay, write the recovery message, add a discount code if you want one, and the automation handles the rest. Product blocks inside campaign emails pull in images and prices from your store dynamically.

The gap versus Klaviyo is predictive analytics and revenue attribution. Klaviyo can model expected customer lifetime value and suggest optimal send timing per contact. MailerLite does not offer that depth. For stores doing under £500k per year, MailerLite covers the essentials well and at a fraction of Klaviyo's cost at scale.

MailerLite connects to Shopify and WooCommerce out of the box, free up to 500 subscribers.

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Does MailerLite have AI writing tools?

Yes, on the Advanced plan. The AI features include a subject line generator, email body copy suggestions, and smart send-time optimisation, which adjusts when each email is delivered based on when individual subscribers have opened emails in the past.

The subject line generator produces five options from a short brief in about 20 seconds. In testing, two of the five were good enough to send without modification. That is a reasonable output rate for a first-draft tool that removes the blank-screen problem.

Smart sending, the timing optimisation feature, is arguably more useful. Staggering sends based on individual subscriber open-time data improves engagement rates without any additional effort from you. These AI tools are not available on the free or Growing Business plans, which is a fair reflection of the price difference.

What support does MailerLite offer?

Email support only on the free plan, with response times typically within one business day. For most free-plan queries, the knowledge base resolves things before you need to submit a ticket. It is well-organised, regularly updated, and written in plain English.

24/7 live chat comes with the Growing Business plan. In testing, response times were under five minutes, and support staff answered specific technical questions accurately. That is above average for a tool at this price point.

Phone support is not available on any plan. If you need to speak to someone when something goes wrong, that is a genuine gap. Most businesses manage without it, but it is worth knowing before you commit. There is no dedicated account manager until Enterprise tier.

How does MailerLite compare to the alternatives?

Against GetResponse, MailerLite and GetResponse now offer similar free tiers at 500 contacts each. GetResponse includes more features at the free tier including limited landing pages and unlimited sends, but its interface is busier. GetResponse's key advantage over MailerLite is webinar hosting, which MailerLite does not offer at all.

Against ActiveCampaign, MailerLite is significantly simpler and cheaper. If your email programme is a welcome series, a weekly send, and a couple of promotional campaigns, MailerLite covers it. If you need multi-branch automation tied to a CRM and a sales pipeline, ActiveCampaign has considerably more depth.

Against Klaviyo, MailerLite is better for service businesses, content businesses, and anyone without an ecommerce store. Klaviyo's free plan is more limited at 250 contacts. If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store where email revenue is attributable and scalable, Klaviyo justifies its higher cost.

Should you use MailerLite for your business?

MailerLite earns a 4.8 because it does what most small businesses actually need, without unnecessary complexity or aggressive upselling. The free plan is a genuine starting point, and the paid plans represent strong value as your list grows.

Use MailerLite if you are starting your first email list and want to build without paying immediately, if you run a service, content, or professional services business where ecommerce-specific features are not critical, or if you are moving off a more expensive tool and want to reduce costs without losing core capability.

Look elsewhere if you run a high-volume Shopify store and want predictive revenue analytics (Klaviyo is stronger there), if webinars are a core part of your business model (GetResponse includes them), or if you need deep conditional automation tied to a sales pipeline (ActiveCampaign leads that category).

MailerLite is free for up to 500 subscribers. Paid plans from around £7/month.

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