NEWSLETTERS, CAMPAIGNS & PERMISSION-BASED LISTS

Email marketing tools: choose for your list and sending plan

Compare Kit for creator broadcasts, beehiiv for a newsletter publication, MailerLite for campaigns with forms and automation, and Brevo when sending capacity is the deciding constraint. Choose the workflow first, then check subscribers, monthly sends and your busiest sending day.

Official plan information checked September 9, 2026. These are researched selection recommendations, not inbox-placement tests or paid endorsements. This guide covers subscribers who asked to hear from you, not purchased lists or cold outreach.

Four platforms, with the limits that change the choice

Use the free plan to assess the relevant workflow, not as proof that a growing program will remain free. The fit recommendations below are editorial judgments; plan capabilities and limits come from the linked providers.

Scroll the comparison sideways. Keyboard users can focus the table region and use the arrow keys.

Current plans for a creator or small marketing team
Platform	Start here when…	Free-plan boundary	What can require an upgrade
KitCreator broadcasts	You publish to a creator audience and want forms, landing pages, tagging and scheduled broadcasts without building a full sales system.	Free: up to 10,000 subscribers and unlimited email broadcasts. This is not unlimited access to every automation feature.	The current Free-plan documentation puts visual automations and email sequences on paid plans. If an automated welcome series is essential, price the paid plan from the beginning.
beehiivNewsletter publication	The newsletter itself is the publication, and you want email, a hosted site and subscriber growth features in the same system.	Launch: up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited email sends and one team member.	Email automations, paid-subscription monetization features and a three-seat team are listed on Scale. A large enough free subscriber allowance does not make those features free.
MailerLiteCampaigns, forms & automation	You want to evaluate campaign editing, signup forms and a small number of automations together, with a manageable list.	Free: 250 active subscribers, 2,500 monthly emails, two user seats and three automations. Both the subscriber and sending limits matter.	A bigger list, more sends or more feature capacity. Comfort's monthly sends are 10× the ceiling of the subscriber tier; Power lists unlimited sends subject to fair use. Check the quote for your tier.
BrevoSend-capacity planning	Your stored list and sending frequency are very different sizes, and you want to evaluate campaign software against actual daily sending demand.	The Free-plan FAQ lists up to 100,000 stored contacts but only 300 email sends per day. Unused sends do not roll over.	A campaign that must reach more than 300 recipients on one day. The remaining campaign recipients require manual requeuing on Free; do not mistake contact storage for same-day sending capacity.

A WORKED SENDING PLAN

A 1,200-reader list needs more than a 1,200-contact allowance

Suppose you send four campaigns to the same 1,200 eligible subscribers in one billing month, plus 200 welcome emails. On the busiest day, one full campaign and 40 welcome emails are due. This hypothetical plan has three different capacity requirements:

Illustrative workload — not a vendor dashboard or an actual campaign

ELIGIBLE SUBSCRIBERS1,200

The audience in this example

MONTHLY EMAIL SENDS5,000

1,200 × 4 + 200 welcome emails

BUSIEST DAY1,240

1,200 campaign + 40 welcome emails

Peak-day workload

1,240

300/day allowance

300

The two bars use the same scale. Monthly arithmetic cannot remove a daily limit.

For broadcasts alone

Kit Free and beehiiv Launch have enough published subscriber and broadcast capacity for this example. If the welcome messages must run as a sequence, their paid automation requirements change the choice. Capacity is not the same as feature fit.

For this list in MailerLite

The example exceeds both Free limits. Request a paid quote for at least 1,200 subscribers and 5,000 monthly sends, then include the required automation, forms and seats. Do not use a smaller tier's starting price as the cost for this list.

For a same-day deadline in Brevo

Free cannot deliver the 1,240-send day within its 300/day allowance. Even the 1,200-recipient campaign alone needs at least four days at 300/day, with no other sends. That is an arithmetic minimum, not an automated delivery schedule; choose adequate capacity for a time-sensitive campaign.

Calculate sends as the sum of recipients across campaigns, plus automation messages and planned resends. Forecast list growth separately. Include your current plan's billing cycle, the actual subscriber tier, seats, branding removal and any add-ons in a paid quote; no platform's entry price is a universal total.

THE MIGRATION DECISION

Move subscriber permissions and exclusions, not just addresses

A CSV of email addresses is not a complete migration. Separate eligible subscribers, unconfirmed signups, unsubscribed contacts, bounces and complaints. Preserve the source and meaning of their status. A platform move does not grant new permission or make an unsubscribed person active again.

MailerLite's export documentation, for example, lets an administrator export subscriber states, but the chosen visible columns determine the exported fields. Check status, groups and required custom fields in the actual file before assuming the export includes them.

KEEP WITH THE MIGRATION RECORD

What can be sent, and why

The list or topic the person joined, and its subscription source.
Current subscription status and the fields needed to interpret it.
Unsubscribe, bounce and complaint exclusions, mapped to the destination's suppression controls.
Which existing automations must pause during the cutover to avoid duplicate welcomes.

VERIFY BEFORE THE FIRST REAL CAMPAIGN

A small, permissioned test

Confirm sender authentication and inspect a received message.
Use consenting test recipients to check signup, confirmation, welcome timing and reply handling.
Unsubscribe a test address and verify exclusion from a later test campaign.
Check the real destination and campaign parameters of each call-to-action link.

For personal Gmail recipients, Google's sender guidelines distinguish all senders from bulk senders. Bulk requirements include SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication, plus one-click unsubscribe for marketing and subscribed messages. Ask your provider to verify the message headers as well as the visible unsubscribe link; a footer alone is not the whole mechanism.

The checklist above is a proposed test, not one ToolMerit has performed in these services. It does not guarantee inbox placement or legal compliance. For a separate signup page, compare the landing-page and form options before adding another platform that owns the same form.

AFTER THE SEND

An open rate is not verified readership

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection can download remote content in the background when a message arrives, rather than when it is read. Do not treat a tracking-pixel open as proof of attention or automatically resend to everyone reported as unopened.

Read deliveries, bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, replies and recorded outcomes together. A clicked link is not automatically a purchase, and engagement reports do not prove causation. Our analytics and conversion guide explains how to define the outcome and its denominator.

PREPARE THE MESSAGE & LINKS