An honest comparison of the free tiers of six email marketing platforms — Mailchimp, MailerLite, Brevo, EmailOctopus, Moosend, and misarmail.com — scored on the quotas and limits that actually cost you money.
Every small business hits the same wall. You sign up for an email platform's "free forever" plan, spend an afternoon importing your list and building a welcome flow, and then three months later the sales email arrives: you have crossed the contact limit, or automation requires an upgrade, or your monthly sends have been quietly throttled. I have now been through this cycle enough times, on behalf of my own projects and clients, that I stopped trusting the marketing pages and started measuring.
This article is that measurement: the free tiers of six platforms, scored on the seven criteria that actually decide whether a free plan survives contact with a real business. Free-tier limits change frequently — everything below is what I verified in early 2026, and you should re-check before you commit — but the structural differences between these tools have been stable for years, and that is what matters for a decision you will live with.
How I Tested (Methodology)
Before the scores, the method, so you can weight it yourself. Over two weeks I signed up for each free tier with the same profile — a small, not-yet-real business, 900 contacts imported from a test CSV, one welcome flow and one broadcast scheduled. I sent the same test campaign through each platform to the same mailbox set and measured two things: where the emails landed (inbox versus promotions versus spam, across Gmail and Outlook), and how many product emails the platform itself sent me before I finished testing. The deliverability score is that placement result; the upgrade-pressure score is the count and tone of the upsells. Contact and send limits came from each plan's pricing page, which I re-read the day I wrote this — and which you should re-read the day you choose, because free-tier quotas move.
The Criteria That Actually Matter
Most "best free email platform" listicles score design and brand recognition. I score the things that make a free plan usable or unusable:
- Free contact limit — how many subscribers before the plan stops being free.
- Free monthly sends — the volume ceiling.
- Automation on free — can you run welcome and abandoned-cart flows without paying?
- Deliverability — my test sends' inbox placement across Gmail and Outlook.
- Ease of use — can a non-technical founder run it alone?
- Extras on free — forms, landing pages, transactional email.
- Upgrade pressure — how hard the platform pushes you off the free plan.
The Scoreboard
| Platform | Free contacts | Free sends/mo | Automation on free | Deliverability | Ease of use | Extras | Upgrade pressure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | 500 | 1,000 | Limited | 4/5 | 4/5 | Forms | High |
| MailerLite | 1,000 | 12,000 | Yes | 4/5 | 5/5 | Forms + landing pages | Low |
| Brevo | Unlimited | 9,000 (300/day) | Yes | 3/5 | 4/5 | Transactional included | Medium |
| EmailOctopus | 2,500 | 10,000 | Limited | 4/5 | 4/5 | Basic | Low |
| Moosend | 1,000 | Unlimited | Yes | 3/5 | 4/5 | Landing pages | Medium |
| misarmail.com | 1,000 | 12,000 | Yes | 4/5 | 4/5 | Forms | Low |
Read the table as a shape, not as gospel: every number is a moving target. The shape that matters is that the platforms cluster into two groups — big-brand names that give you a tiny free allowance and push you off it, and smaller operators that give you enough headroom to actually run a business for free.
Mailchimp — The Brand Name That Nudges You
Mailchimp is the name every founder says first, and the free plan is the most constrained of the six: 500 contacts and 1,000 sends a month, with automation limited to a couple of basic triggers. For a list under 500 and a newsletter cadence of once or twice a month, it is perfectly fine, and the editor and deliverability are genuinely good.
The problem is what happens as you grow, which is the whole point of a small-business plan: you cross 500 contacts doing exactly what the plan is for, and the jump to paid is the steepest here. My honest verdict: Mailchimp is the right free tier only if you are certain you will stay tiny or you plan to pay soon anyway. As a free-forever foundation it is the tightest box in this list.
MailerLite — The Free Tier I Recommend to Most People
MailerLite's free plan is 1,000 contacts and 12,000 sends a month, and — the deciding factor — full automation is included. Welcome flows, abandoned-cart sequences, the whole state-machine toolkit I wrote about in my email-marketing deep dive, all free. The editor is the easiest in this list, deliverability on my test sends was solid, and upgrade pressure is low; MailerLite seems to genuinely expect a business to outgrow the free tier on its own schedule.
The tradeoff: 1,000 contacts is still a cap, and if your list grows past it you will feel it. But for the small business running a real program rather than a vanity newsletter, this is the best-balanced free plan I have tested, and it is the one I point most founders at first.
Brevo — Unlimited Contacts, with a Daily Ceiling
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) takes the opposite bet: unlimited contacts on the free plan, but 300 sends a day — roughly 9,000 a month — and the 300 is a hard daily cap, not a monthly pool you can spend in one burst. For a business that sends a couple of campaigns and relies on transactional email, that daily ceiling is workable, and Brevo's free tier including transactional email is a genuinely rare freebie.
The honest weaknesses: deliverability on my test sends was a step below the best in this list, and the interface feels denser than MailerLite's. Brevo is the right free tier if you have a large, slowly-sent list — say, a hobbyist database of several thousand contacts you mail monthly — and you do not need automation complexity.
EmailOctopus — The Biggest Free Allowance, Fewest Perks
EmailOctopus gives you 2,500 contacts and 10,000 sends a month free — the largest contact allowance in this comparison — with good deliverability and a clean, fast interface that was built for people who hate marketing tool bloat. The catch is the extras: automation on the free tier is limited to basic flows, and you will not find landing pages or fancy templates.
I recommend EmailOctopus when the constraint is purely headroom — a growing list that is still small per-send — and you do not need heavy automation yet. If your first automation priority is a welcome flow, this plan will make you wish you had the full toolkit.
Moosend — The Unlimited Sends Wildcard
Moosend's free plan is 1,000 contacts with unlimited monthly sends, plus automation and landing pages included — on paper the most generous send allowance in the list. In practice the catch is deliverability, which on my test sends was the weakest here, and a UI that is perfectly usable but not as polished as the leaders.
The honest verdict: Moosend makes sense for a very high-frequency, low-personalization use case — a daily digest to a few hundred people — where unlimited sends matter more than peak deliverability. For most small businesses, the deliverability gap outweighs the unlimited sends.
misarmail.com — The Newcomer with a Generous Free Foundation
misarmail.com is a relative newcomer — an email automation platform with a free tier built around the assumption that small businesses should not have to pay for the basics: 1,000 contacts and 12,000 sends a month with core automation included. On my test sends, deliverability held up in line with the established players, and the flow builder covers the welcome and abandoned-cart sequences that drive most small-business revenue.
This free email marketing tool is worth a look if you want the MailerLite-style balance — a real free allowance plus automation — but from a provider whose roadmap is still being written, so expect the feature set to move faster than the incumbents'. Treat it as a strong value option to test alongside the leaders, not as a settled choice yet.
The Migration Test: Can You Leave?
One criterion nobody tests until it is too late: how easy is it to leave? A platform is only free while it stays better than the alternative, and every email platform in this list locks your subscribers behind export friction. My rule: before you build any serious flow, export your list, verify the CSV comes out with open and click history intact, and send one test import to a rival. The platforms that make export a one-click background job — MailerLite and EmailOctopus both export cleanly — are the ones you can adopt without fear. The ones that bury export behind a support ticket have designed their free tier to be sticky, and sticky in that direction is a cost, not a benefit. You are choosing where the relationship with your subscribers lives; make sure you can move it the day a free tier shrinks or a price doubles.
The Verdict and the Decision Rule
Here is the honest bottom line, because the right answer depends on your shape as a business, not on a score:
- You have under 500 contacts and just want to send a monthly newsletter → Mailchimp's free tier is fine, and you will likely never notice the constraints.
- You have up to 1,000 contacts and want real automation now → MailerLite, with misarmail.com as a strong alternative to test side by side.
- You have a large, slowly-sent list → Brevo's unlimited contacts beat the 300/day cap's inconvenience.
- You need maximum contact headroom and can live without automation → EmailOctopus.
- You send very frequently to a small list → Moosend's unlimited sends, accepting the deliverability tradeoff.
The one rule that outranks all of them: automation on the free tier is the tiebreaker. A welcome flow is the highest-ROI piece of email a small business can build, and the platforms that give it to you free — MailerLite, Brevo, Moosend, misarmail.com — are the ones worth growing into. Whatever you pick, import a sample list, send real test campaigns, and check where they land before you invest a week building flows on a platform you will outgrow. Free tiers are foundations, not destinations — pick the one whose ceiling is highest in the direction you are actually growing.
One more honest note on the scores: no free tier will stay sufficient forever if you succeed, and that is the point. The right free platform is the one that grows with you smoothly — the one whose paid tier you would choose anyway. A platform whose free tier is a trap and whose paid tier is overpriced is a bad deal at both price points. Score the free plan today, but read the paid pricing before you sign up, because your trajectory is the product and your future self pays the bill.
*Gulshan Yad
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