Best Free Email Marketing Services in 2025
Email marketing space has always been crowded, with over 300 providers listed on review sites like G2. In the last year, the battle for market share between newsletter platforms got more intense, with established providers offering more generous free plans to combat newcomers. All the competition resulted on abundance of choices for new newsletter operators and digital content creators.
We picked providers with competitive free tiers and based on most common use cases.
Top Free Email Marketing Services
- Kit – best for digital content creators
- Substack – best for thought leaders
- Beehiiv – best for newsletter operators
- MailerLite – best marketing platform for SMBs
- BigMailer – best value for outgrowing free tier
Check out our comparison table, or skip to the analysis for each pick.
Last updated: January 9, 2025
So let’s go over the reasons for our top 5 picks.
Kit
Kit is an email marketing platform specifically designed for digital content creators. It offers features and efficient workflows for creators who sell their digital content, like courses or training, online. It’s known for it’s minimalistic approach to email template design as it doesn’t offer a drag-n-drop template builder or library of email templates, so you need to design your own. It has the most generous free plan – up to 10,000 subscribers with some feature limits.
Summary: An email platform with the most generous free tier and robust automation features.
Substack
Substack offers incredible value to thought leaders who need to send simple content updates to their audience. The platform is free on any list size, as long as newsletter is not monetized. Substack only charges a % fee on paid newsletter subscriptions. Just like Kit, Substkck it doesn’t offer a drag-n-drop template builder or library of email templates. It’s more limiting than all other providers on our list as it lacks even basic automations, like a welcome sequence, that are very popular among marketers.
Summary: A free alternative to Beehiiv, with less focus on growth and monetization.
MailerLite
MailerLite is kind of like a cheaper Mailchimp, which is loosing its popularity after several rounds of price increases, following its acquisition by Intuit. MailerLite is a marketing platform for small businesses that offers more than just email service – landing pages, Facebook ad integrations, SMS, and more. If you are looking to promote your business beyond simple email updates, this more affordable alternative to MailChimp is worth your consideration.
Summary: Best and cheaper alternative to Mallchimp, a robust marketing platform for small businesses.
Beehiiv
Beehiiiv is a fast growing platform focused on newsletter operators and is known for it’s free plan for up to 2500 subscribers. It’s notable features focus on operating and monetizing a newsletter product. It offers support for paid newsletters, ad network, and a variety of other growth oriented features. It doesn’t offer a drag-n-drop email template editor at this time, but a recent acquisition of a website building platform may change that in the future. It went through a price increase in 2024, but still offers a good value for newsletter operators that send daily updates, with its unlimited sending.
Summary: Cheaper alternative to Substack for paid newsletters only, with a focus on list growth and monetization features.
BigMailer
BigMailer caters to publishers and marketers that manage large lists or multiple brands, or operate as part of a large team, for example marketing agencies or franchises. It offers support for all email campaign types (newsletters, drip/automations, transactional and RSS-to-email), landing pages, drag-n-drop email template builder, and a variety of features loved by high volume senders (like volume throttling). Marketing agencies or service providers have an option to white label the platform. It’s the only platform on our list that offers built-in email validation, that can protect sender reputation with minimal effort or expense.
Summary: Best value for marketers that plan to outgrow a free tier fast.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot to consider when choosing a new provider, but we hope this article helped you understand your options and narrow down your choices. While free tiers are very attractive early on, consider your list growth and the cost after the free tier. Switching providers isn’t trivial, so it might be best to pick one that fits your long-term needs best.
If you are just looking to start with email marketing and have an email list that you collected over the years, you absolutely must validate the list before importing it into an email marketing platform. Check out this list of email verification providers, some offer generous free tier as well.
Still not sure which platform is right for you? Check out our expanded comparison of email service providers.
Happy email marketing and best of luck of you are just starting out.
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