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What MailerLite actually is
MailerLite launched in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2010 and now serves over a million businesses, creators, and bloggers. It covers four core jobs: email campaigns, automation workflows, landing pages and forms, and a basic website builder, all under one subscription. More recently it added monetisation tools, so you can sell digital products, paid newsletter subscriptions, and bookings without MailerLite taking a commission.
The deliberate gaps matter as much as the features. There is no built-in sales CRM, no native SMS or WhatsApp, and transactional email lives in a separate product called MailerSend with its own billing. MailerLite is not trying to be an all-in-one marketing suite like Brevo or HubSpot. It is trying to be the cleanest, fastest way for a small team to run email well, and on that narrow brief it is excellent.
One housekeeping note: the platform you sign up for today is the rebuilt version. The old interface still exists as MailerLite Classic for legacy users, but new accounts get the modern editor and automation builder this review covers.
Pricing: subscriber-based, and recently reshuffled
MailerLite charges by how many active subscribers you store, not by emails sent. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts drop off your billable count, which is a real structural advantage over volume-priced tools. The catch with any subscriber-based model: cross a tier threshold and your bill steps up automatically, even in a month you barely sent anything.
On 16 June 2026 MailerLite restructured and renamed its plans, and raised prices roughly 10% to 30% across tiers. Older review sites still cite the previous names, Growing Business and Advanced, so it is worth being clear about the current lineup.
A few things to budget for. Comfort's monthly email allowance is 10 times the ceiling of your subscriber tier, so the up-to-1,000 tier gets 10,000 sends a month whether you have 200 subscribers or 900; heavy senders who would blow past that need Power for unlimited sending. Transactional email is not included at all, so a store needing order confirmations pays separately for MailerSend. And there is no migration support: MailerLite calls itself self-serve, so moving a list and rebuilding automations is on you or a paid expert.
For most small businesses, Comfort is the right starting point. It strips out the free-plan limits and keeps the price predictable as your list grows. Just price the tier you will be on in twelve months, not today, since the per-bracket increases compound on larger lists.
The free plan after two rounds of cuts
This is where honesty matters. MailerLite's free plan used to be one of the most generous around at 1,000 subscribers. It was halved to 500 in September 2025, and the June 2026 restructure dropped it again to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, down from 12,000. That is roughly an 80% cut to the send allowance.
What you still get is real: campaigns, automations, a website, one landing page, signup forms, all three editors, and a 14-day trial of the premium features when you first sign up. But at 250 subscribers, even a modest newsletter hits the ceiling within weeks. Treat the free plan as a proper sandbox to test the editor and workflows before you commit, not as a long-term tier. If a large free list is your priority, EmailOctopus and Sender both offer 2,500 free subscribers and are worth a look.
Features that earn their keep
The email editor
This is the headline. The drag-and-drop editor is consistently rated one of the smoothest in the category, with neatly organised content blocks, inline editing, reusable sections, and a change-history view that helps when several people touch a design. You get three editors in total: drag-and-drop, a custom HTML option, and a plain-text mode. Nice extras include RSS-to-email for podcasts and blogs, dynamic content blocks that show different content to different segments, Unsplash and Giphy integration with built-in image editing, and AMP widgets like quizzes and carousels. The main gripe in reviews: brand-wide styling is limited, so heavily branded layouts sometimes need workarounds, and the canvas can feel laggy when you drag elements around.
Automation
The visual automation builder is approachable and, since a 2025 update, fully drag-and-drop for rearranging steps. Workflows trigger on signups, link clicks, purchases, or dates, and on the top tier you get multiple triggers feeding one workflow with branching paths. Auto-resend, which retries unopened emails with a fresh subject line, is a reviewer favourite. The honest limit: this is if-this-then-that automation done cleanly, not the deep branching logic of ActiveCampaign, and there is no website-visit trigger. Free accounts are capped at five automation steps, which several users flag as too tight for a real lead-to-sale sequence; paid plans open this up substantially.
Landing pages, forms and a website
You can build and publish a landing page and a small website without a separate tool, which is genuinely useful given standalone landing page builders often run $40 to $90 a month. Pages can sit on a MailerLite subdomain or display on your own site; a custom domain needs a paid plan. There are 30-plus landing page templates, and the form builder offers six visibility rules (show or hide by device, page, and so on). It will not replace a real CMS, but for adding a few campaign pages or spinning up a quick minisite it is plenty.
Monetisation and ecommerce
Newer tools let creators sell digital products, paid subscriptions, and one-to-one bookings with no MailerLite commission (you still pay standard Stripe or PayPal processing fees). The Bookings feature syncs Google or Outlook calendars and can trigger a tailored email sequence the moment a session is booked. For ecommerce, native Shopify and WooCommerce connections sync customer and order data, and 30-plus commerce blocks plus behaviour-based automations cover thank-you emails and abandoned-cart flows without code.
Reporting and AI
Reporting covers the essentials, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, revenue per send, and click maps, with newer custom reports letting you combine and filter by campaign type, audience, or time period and chart up to two metrics. Deeper breakdowns like multivariate results become available on higher tiers. The AI writing assistant drafts subject lines, headlines, and full newsletters and generates A/B variants; how much you get scales with your plan. As with every email tool since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, treat open rates as directional rather than exact.
Deliverability and the strict approval process
Deliverability is a genuine strength. MailerLite has ranked at or near the top of independent EmailToolTester deliverability rounds, and reviewers report inbox rates in the high 80s to low 90s percent. SPF and DKIM authentication set up quickly (with guided support for GoDaddy, IONOS, and Cloudflare), DMARC guidance is in the help centre, and the platform partners with MailerCheck for list verification. Dedicated IPs are an Enterprise add-on for very high-volume senders.
The flip side is a strict, sometimes blunt, account-review system. MailerLite vets every new account before you can send, which usually takes a few hours but can drag if your profile is incomplete or your list looks unusual. Its published suspension thresholds, spam complaints above 0.2%, bounces above 5%, unsubscribes above 1%, or open rates below 3%, are reasonable. The problem reviewers report is enforcement that occasionally overshoots: documented Trustpilot cases from early 2026 describe accounts suspended despite metrics well inside those limits, including one annual-plan user terminated after a campaign with a 39.6% open rate and near-zero complaints, and others suspended during the review phase before sending a single email. MailerLite responds to these publicly, citing its permission-based-only policy. The practical defence is the same every time: use a live website, fill in your whole profile, and import only genuine opt-in contacts. A clean list plus a complete profile is what gets you approved fast.
What the reviews actually say
MailerLite is widely and positively reviewed across G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Software Advice and Gartner, where it tends to land in the mid-to-high four-star range, with ease of use and support drawing the most praise. Ratings and counts change over time, so check the current numbers on each platform. EmailToolTester has also recognised MailerLite for ease of use in recent years.
Praise clusters tightly around ease of use, the drag-and-drop editor, value for money, reliable deliverability, and a support team that reviewers repeatedly describe as fast, human, and patient, even on lower plans. Long-term users like that it stays uncluttered rather than piling on features.
The complaints are consistent too: the strict approval and occasional unexplained suspensions, support that is slower and more limited on the free plan, design flexibility that stops short of full brand control, reporting that lacks deep attribution, the tightened free tier, and no migration help when switching in. These are the predictable edges of a deliberately simple, deliverability-protective platform rather than signs of a bad product, which is why the scores stay high.
How MailerLite compares
Against Mailchimp, MailerLite is cheaper at scale (independent comparisons put it 25 to 46 percent lower for larger lists), has a stronger website and landing page builder, and does more capable automation, while Mailchimp keeps a bigger template library, deeper reporting, and built-in ad tools. Against Brevo, the trade is clear: Brevo adds a CRM plus SMS and WhatsApp and bills by emails sent, while MailerLite wins on editor polish and ease of use. Against ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign has far deeper branching automation and a website-visit trigger; MailerLite is friendlier and cheaper. Against Klaviyo, Klaviyo goes deeper on ecommerce personalisation while MailerLite is simpler and lighter on the wallet. You can also see our MailerLite vs Mailchimp comparison, our MailerLite alternatives guide, our ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse comparison, where it ranks in our best email marketing software guide, and the rest of our email marketing reviews.
This review is a research-based analysis. It draws on MailerLite's official pricing and documentation as listed in July 2026, publicly available user reviews across G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Software Advice and Gartner, and independent EmailToolTester deliverability data. It does not reflect first-hand testing by us. Prices and plan features change often, and MailerLite restructured its plans on 16 June 2026; confirm current details on MailerLite's site before buying. We may earn a commission from sign-ups made through links on this page.