The 4 Best Email Platforms For Creators With Decent Free Tiers

Best Email Platform For Creators Looking To Start An Email List

What We Recommend For Creators Right Now

For me, the best email marketing platform is the one that doesn’t nickel and dime you for everything.

That’s easy to use and can scale with you from zero to $100,000/mo without the need for additional staff and support.

And that comes with all the tools you need to grow and sell right out of the box.

Right now, Kit is the only one that ticks all these boxes for me which is why it is the only platform I use on all my main projects.

Best Email Marketing Tools With Free Tiers

1. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) 🥇

The Best Overall Option for Serious Creators & Monetization

I use Kit for this site (and on other projects); it’s been my go-to for email marketing since 2018.

It comes with professional-looking landing pages that are perfect for converting social media followers into subscribers.

You have built-in e-commerce for digital products as standard, a plethora of email templates, sequences, and the simplest (and most potent) tagging and segmentation tools on this list.

For most creators, it is all you’re ever going to need.

I’ve looked elsewhere and tried alternative platforms on other projects but when stuff gets serious, I always end up coming back to Kit.

It’s not perfect; I’d like more control over templates, for instance, but that’s about it.

Once you know how to use the platform and its core features, it will become the central pillar of your business.

I love the simplicity and power of its list segmentation, it’s a breeze to create and manage multiple sequences.

There are loads of great-looking landing pages that can be easily customized for all kinds of offers and lead magnets.

You can run custom fields and custom templates, if you want to get fancy, and there’s loads of free and even paid templates to choose from for your emails.

Its list-focused system, which you can organize with tags and rules, is really simple to get started with right away which means no more paying for duplicate contacts.

The upshot of this kind of list management also means your subscribers ONLY see what they signed-up to see.

For me, the ease of organizing your list in Kit is what makes it so damn useful.

The main reason people unsubscribe is if you keep sending them stuff they’re not interested in.

By organizing your list through rules and tags from the get-go ensures that your audience only gets sent stuff they’re actually interested in.

And the free tier is good enough for testing out the platform before committing to a paid plan.

2. Beehiiv 🐝

The Best All-in-One Newsletter Publishing Platform

Developed by the team that helped create Morning Brew, Beehiiv is easily the most talked about and hyped newsletter on this list.

It’s also the newest, having only been launched a few years ago.

Developed as the “ultimate modern newsletter platform”, Beehiiv iterates new features and updates on an almost weekly basis, and the core platform is very strong.

It has growth tools, an ad network for monetizing and growing your list, a website builder where you can house posts, pages, and newsletter updates, and paid newsletter features.

Beehiiv also takes 0% cut of your subscription revenue too which, compared to Substack’s 10%, is a very nice hook for both new users and legacy Substackers looking to switch.

I’ve used Beehiiv on a couple of projects, one of my own and another one when doing some client work, and while it does have a lot going for it, I’m not a fan of its dashboard and back-end.

There’s a mountain of hype about the platform online, so rather than gushing about what it can do and why iT’s ThE bEsT NeWsLetTeR PLatForM EveR, I’m gonna focus on the things I don’t like about using it.

The big one, for me, at least, is its backend. I just really don’t like using it.

It’s busy, it’s fiddly, and the endless drop-down menus make it feel like wading through treacle to get your basic, boilerplate template setup.

Third-party integrations are limited, and it doesn’t play well with external sites, and the signup forms are terrible (on the free plan).

So bad, in fact, that you’ll have to use a third-party alternative which means more money being spent.

But the biggest issue for me personally, and the reason why I stopped using it, was because I just didn’t like working inside the platform.

Beehiiv also likes to play it fast and loose with updates, pushing out new features when they never should have left beta.

Given the size of some of the companies that use it, this approach is bonkers.

One update last year, pushed out without proper testing, completely changed the look and feel of the templates. The fonts changed, the title styling. Everything.

It was after this that I decided to move my list away from Beehiiv; it wasn’t for me. I don’t enjoy using its backend and the updates are just too all over the place for my liking.

Plus, all the features that make Beehiiv truly unique, its growth and monetization engines, are locked behind its paid tiers.

3. MailerLite 💡

The Best for Intuitive Simplicity & Free Automation

MailerLite is fine. It’s cost effective, simple enough to use, and it does the basics very well indeed.

I used it on a project last year. I needed a quick and simple way to start collecting email for an e-commerce site I was helping to set-up.

It was on WordPress, using WooCommerce. And for this, MailerLite was surprisingly good. It plays nice with WordPress, it comes with forms and pop-ups, and it has list segmentation and sequences.

But for a creator, I’d argue it’s too limited to build your business around. Yes, it’ll do e-commerce stuff but you’ll need to use a dedicated e-commerce platform like Shopify or Woo.

Also, on the free tier the templates are bloody awful.

There’s also the fact that once you get going with email marketing, you inevitably hit a ceiling with MailerLite.

You’ll want to do things it simply cannot do, like advanced automations or funnels.

And then you’ll have to migrate to another platform which is a pain in the ass.

MailerLite is cheap and has enough features for the basics but most creators that get serious will end up with FOMO once their audience starts growing.

And the clincher, for me?

Most creators only sell digital products, so why not just use a newsletter platform that supports digital product sales as well as paid memberships and paid newsletters like Kit?

The key point here is that what you don’t want to be doing is building on one platform and then, once you have some scale, migrate to another platform.

You’re far better off just starting with the right one. This will save you a bunch of headaches in the short, medium, and long term.

4. EmailOctopus 🐙

The Best for Cost-Conscious Bloggers

I’ve used EmailOctopus on a few quick-turnaround projects—mostly landing pages to collect emails and simple broadcast sequences.

It’s one of those tools that works straight out of the box, no friction, no real learning curve.

And for a lot of creators, that’s exactly what you want when you’re just getting started.

The appeal here is obvious: it’s free (up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month), it’s fast to set up, and it doesn’t try to do too much.

You sign up, build a form or a landing page, plug in your emails, and you’re off.

For testing ideas or spinning up side projects, it’s easily one of the better free-tier email platforms out there.

Deliverability is solid—better than I expected, to be honest—and it runs on Amazon SES, which handles that side of things quietly in the background.

Emails landed in inboxes, sequences sent on time, and I never had to think about it.

That’s a win.

Where it starts to show its limitations is once you want more control over design, automation, or growth.

The automation builder is painfully basic. You can set up a welcome sequence or a timed drip, but that’s about it.

No visual editor, no branching logic, no conditional flows.

It’s enough to warm up new subscribers, but that’s where it ends.

The email templates are also very limited, and the ones that are there feel a bit dated.

I usually ended up stripping them down and rebuilding from scratch, which defeats the point of using a template in the first place.

If you want modern layouts or anything branded, you’re better off working in HTML or switching platforms entirely.

There’s also no native A/B testing.

If you want to test subject lines or content blocks, you have to clone your campaign, manually split your list, and track performance yourself.

It works, but it’s clunky and feels like something you shouldn’t still have to do in 2025.

And yeah, while integrations exist, most of them run through Zapier.

Fine in theory, but it adds overhead both in cost and setup time. If you’re trying to keep things lean and native, it’s not ideal.

There are also a few weird UX decisions, like the lack of an undo button in the editor which means you’re rebuilding that block from scratch if you make a mistake.

Not a dealbreaker, but annoying when you’re working fast.

Still, for simple newsletters or landing page lead-gen, it’s hard to knock what EmailOctopus offers for free.

I’ve recommended it to plenty of creators who just need something that works without dragging them into a 30-tab YouTube tutorial rabbit hole.

It’s perfect for small lists, early validation, or MVPs.

But once you want smarter automations, cleaner templates, or deeper analytics, you’ll hit a wall and when you do, you’ll probably move on, and my go-to right now for that would be Kit.