The Best Online Newsletter Platforms [2024]

If you’ve got any sort of audience or have your own business of any sort, communicating with that audience or set of customers (or potential customers!) is key. There are umpteen social media networks and platforms to do this through, but email newsletters have long proven to be one of the most effective ways of keeping an audience connected and aware of what’s going with you and your brand, and converting those readers into paying customers.

As with any marketing platform, there are plenty of email newsletter services out there, each catering to a slightly different audience and filling a different niche. So, we’ll take a deeper look at what’s out there, identify the cream of the crop, and show you how you can maximize newsletter monetization!

Mailmodo is one of the best online newsletter platforms out there today, letting you grow your ecommerce business in leaps and bounds thanks to the variety of features they offer. You’ll get everything you need with this platform, and most exciting of all, Mailmodo can really raise the ceiling thanks to the implementation of gamification. This can boost conversion, which is huge given that you’re getting a best-in-class product even without the extras that turn it up to 11.

Pros: Drag and drop builder for AMP and HTML, full stack campaign manager, AI-powered automations.

Cons: Can get expensive if you have a large contact list thanks to flexible pricing. While this means you won’t pay too much for a small mailing list, you may not get all the benefits of scale with a large one.

Pricing: Flexible pricing gives you a rate depending on how many contacts you have. The Lite and Pro plans start at $39 and $79 respectively for up to 2500 subscribers, while Max costs $159 up to the 10k contact mark. Lite tops out at $199 for 50k contacts, Pro hits its limit at $639 for 200k contacts, and Max has a 250k contact limit priced at $939.

Smartrmail has plenty of advantages if you go premium, but it’s one of the most generous services that you can use without paying. You can have up to 250 email subscribers and shoot off 1250 emails a month, meaning that the numbers are a great match if you’re just starting off on your newsletter journey. The platform offers tons of great features that you can take advantage of, from various automation workflows to abandoned cart emails.

Pros: You can test out the advanced Pro plan with a free trial, and Smartrmail offers lots of standout features like Back In Stock notifications, abandonment automation and many more.

Cons: The number of subscribers you can have on a free plan has come down recently - but it’s enough to get started with.

Pricing: The free plan gives you 250 subscribers and 1250 emails per month, importantly not locking off any features. Once you start to scale beyond the 250 contact mark you can go up to 12 emails per contact with the Essentials plan at $9.80 per month, or 24 emails per contact, and 1000 SMS credits plus additional features with the $69.30 Pro plan. Essentials remains around half the price of Pro until 5k contacts, at which point you might be tempted to upgrade.

Mailchimp started out as an email newsletter platform but has since grown into an all-in-one marketing platform. That’s good news for small businesses because it offers lots of advantages whether you're just starting out or focusing on scaling. Mailchimp is easy to use, and you can use it to manage your website, landing pages, socials, and even SMS campaigns alongside your newsletters.

Pros: Mailchimp is really easy to use and intuitive in its design, and it serves as an all-in-one marketing platform. This can help you when starting out since you don’t want to have too many platforms eating away at your time and budget.

Cons: The free plan is very limited, and you’ll have to buy templates if you really want your newsletters to look good.

Pricing: Mailchimp’s full-featured Premium plan starts at $350 per month for 10k contacts, Standard starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts, and Essentials drops down to just $13 per month for 500 subscribers. The Standard plan has most of the tools you’ll need to scale, featuring advanced automations and data-driven optimization, and it scales well—at a maximum of 100k contacts and 1.2 million monthly email sends, it only goes up to $800.

Best Platform for Creative Newsletters

ConvertKit is positioned for creators, but the intersection between creatives and creators is pretty wide and the platform definitely fits the bill. It lets creatives focus on their craft by providing maximum automation and easy-to-use features, while also leaning on the creative experience with clean, pleasant design that allows you to really express your message. On top of that, it also gives creatives several monetization options right from the newsletter, such as premium conversion, listing of digital products, subscriptions, and more.

Pros: Provides significant assistance when it comes to monetization options while also helping you to grow both your reach and your following while staying connected to your existing audience.

Cons: Design is text-forward so which may be hit-or-miss depending on whether or not your medium is visual.

Pricing: ConvertKit’s free plan covers 1000 subscribers and does allow you to sell digital products and subscriptions, but the platform’s power starts with the creator plan at $9 per month for 300 contacts. This plan hits a three-figure cost at 10k subscribers, but if you’re growing enough for that you should consider Creator Pro ($140 for 10k contacts) which unlocks features like newsletter referrals and an insights dashboard

Best Platform for AI-Powered Newsletters

Benchmark is a full-featured email newsletter platform that also allows you to harness the power of AI. The platform’s “Smart Design AI” offers you a companion that helps you whip up professional emails featuring your own logos, images, colors and messaging with minimal input. It can pull all of this straight from your website, then drafts up the copy for you too. Once all of this is done, you can take your time editing everything to your liking—and you’ve got options here too, with a drag-and-drop editor, HTML code editor, or plain text editor to choose from.

Pros: Benchmark gets you off to a great start with its Smart Design AI, but also has all of the automations and other options that you need in a great email newsletter platform. It also keeps pricing simple with a single subscriber-count based plan in addition to its free option.

Cons: The free plan is very limited, basically just giving you a single sign-up form and basic segmentation and automations.

Pricing: Benchmark’s free plan lets you send 3,500 emails per month to 500 contacts, but you can double that count and start unlocking a powerful feature list if you switch to Pro for just $13 per month. That goes up to $144 per month at 25k contacts, which is about when you should get in touch with Benchmark to talk about send-based pricing or a bespoke plan.

Substack has changed the game when it comes to thought leadership and influence, and given that it’s such a powerful platform for sharing a message, it’s no surprise that Substack does a great job sending your words directly to your audience in email newsletter form. The advantages of Substack lie in full ownership of intellectual property, total editorial freedom and the complete absence of gatekeeping when it comes to content, but behind the scenes, the interface has it all—it’s a website, a blog, a podcast platform, video host, and payment processor all rolled into one.

Pros: Substack is free to use, and its core purpose is serving your message to the inboxes of your audience. You also retain full ownership of whatever you publish, and a lot of new subscriptions can be gained via the platform itself

Cons: Substack isn’t a specialist newsletter platform per se, so you don’t have as many options when it comes to designing the perfect email. That said, it gets the job done and helps you to monetize

Pricing: Free to use, but the platform takes 10% of your revenues when you turn on paid subscriptions

You might have noticed something that most of the platforms we’ve covered have in common—contact-based pricing. Just about every newsletter platform prices based on how many subscribers you have, meaning that they’re able to take advantage of your growth. So, if you want to avoid overpaying as you scale, all you need is a flat-rate provider. Flodesk is our pick, offering a rock-solid newsletter platform that allows you to create custom emails with full creative freedom and total automation, robust analytics, advanced segmentation, and much more.

Pros: Flodesk is a simple, easy to use platform that’s visually appealing and rich in features, even extending all the way to monetization options within your newsletters.

Cons: Starting price can be considered high until you start to realize the benefits of your newsletter and grow your audience.

Pricing: Flodesk is the simplest entry on this list in this regard, charging $35 per month for email marketing irrespective of how many subscribers you have or emails you want to send

If you’re looking for a great platform for monetization, you’ll want something creator-built—and beehiiv fits the bill perfectly. Developed by the team behind the Morning Brew, beehiiv is a newsletter platform that gives you a code-free way of putting out a world-class newsletter with a minimum of fuss and maximum earning potential. It’s easy to work with and packed with tons of familiar features, and allows monetization via ad network, recommending other newsletters, and converting readers into premium subscribers.

Pros: Modern, intuitive design and extremely powerful tools to help you put out your newsletter, automations and generative AI to save time, and several growth features including the same boost recommendations that help you monetize your own newsletter.

Cons: Slightly lacking in terms of visual customization compared to some of its competitors.

Pricing: beehiiv has a free plan supporting up to 2500 subscribers that’s appealing given unlimited email sends and several important features such as custom domains and audience segmentation. Scale is the main premium plan though, starting at $39 per month for 1000 subscribers and unlocking access to beehiiv’s key features including full monetization. The Max plan at $99 for 1000 subscribers lets you get rid of beehiiv branding, giving you a white label option. It must be noted that these premium plans are competitive as you grow, with Scale and Max costing just $299 and $399 for 100k subscribers respectively.

Discover more email newsletter software in this guide

Platform Name	Free Plan	Paid Plans	Best For
Mailmodo	No, but you can sign up for a free trial	Lite plan starts at $39, Pro starts at $79, and Max starts at $159	Ecommerce and digital entrepreneurs
Smartrmail	Yes, with 1250 emails to 250 contacts but importantly allowing you access to all features	Essential starts at $9.80 per month for 250 contacts and Pro starts at $69.30 for 5k contacts	Free newsletters and early-stage businesses
Mailchimp	Yes, up to 500 contacts and 1000 emails per month	Standard starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts, with limited Essentials plan priced at $13 per month	Small businesses needing a marketing platform
ConvertKit	Yes, including monetization for up to 1000 subscribers	Creator starts at $9 per month and Creator Pro at $25 for 300 subscribers	Creative and creator newsletters
Benchmark	Yes, with 3500 email sends to 500 contacts	Starts at $13 per month for 500 contacts	AI-powered newsletters
Substack	Yes, totally free to use	Charges 10% of your revenue	Influencers and thought leaders
Flodesk	No, although you can trial the service for free	$35 per month flat rate	Scaling and growth
beehiiv	Yes, up to 2500 subscribers and offering custom domains	Scale starts at $39 per month for 1000 subscribers, white label Max option starts at $99 for 1000 contacts	Monetization

When evaluating the best email newsletter platform to suit your needs, there are several things to keep in mind. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important criteria in greater detail!

Ease of Use

One of the biggest things to consider when picking an email newsletter platform is how easy it is to use. The best platforms out there have made user experience almost a precise science, and you can expect to be able to build attractive, professional-looking newsletters without knowing a single line of code.

Some knowledge in this regard can help, of course, but you shouldn’t need any sort of extra skills to be able to communicate with your audience—you’ve got other things to put all that time and effort into, so find a platform that gives you easy tools and a great experience for the best results in the long run.

Pricing

The next key component to look at is pricing, and while that should be obvious, the newsletter industry does have a few intricacies to unpack. As a rule of thumb, you’re probably going to have to pay more if you want more features and send more emails out regularly to a large subscriber list.

So, look for services that let you ‘cheat’ a little bit—for example, Flodesk’s flat rate is awesome if you’re doing things in bulk since all of the other services will jack their prices up for those numbers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we chose Smartrmail as our top free pick because it doesn’t gate off any features, meaning maximum value on at least one of those variables.

Segmentation

Segmentation is important to any marketer, and being able to divide people based on things like demographics and behavioral traits is crucial for building strategies around marketing and sales. As such, you’ll want to make sure the platform you choose lets you do this effectively to make sure that you can convert as high a percentage of your audience as possible.

Analytics and Reporting

Just like with segmentation, analytics and reporting are crucial to the operation of any business. Analytics can help you evaluate how your email campaigns are doing and adjust strategy, allowing you to make the most of your newsletter—without robust analytics and reporting features, you’ll have no understanding of how and why your emails are performing as they are.

Monetization

Monetization is also a critical piece of the puzzle in today’s economy, because while a newsletter may primarily have other purposes, it’s important to be able to convert as easily as possible. Many businesses have found that a smaller, highly connected audience has the potential to be far more profitable than a larger, less-invested one, and a newsletter definitely gives you the former.

Mailmodo is one of the top newsletter platforms out there and we’ve picked it out as our top platform for ecommerce—which essentially gives it the badge of being the best overall email newsletter platform. However, it didn’t feature quite as highly on monetization, so what gives?

Well, the best way to make money from your newsletter is with Whop, and use the Mailmodo integration to send your emails!

Newsletters help you connect with your audience and cultivate a loyal community - and Whop not only enhances this connection, but also helps you to monetize. You can monetize your newsletter with subscriptions, premium content, courses, exclusive offers, and more. Rather than sending your readers to multiple different places to access many different products, funnel them to your Whop Hub, where you can offer them all kinds of digital experiences and products.

With Whop, you design your own customized, centralized hub, bringing your audience together by means of Whop Apps—each app you choose to include in your Hub gives your community more ways to interact with your brand and your community. Let's say you have a newsletter about beekeeping - funnel your customers to your Hub where they can find a subscriber-only beekeeping chat, beekeeping courses, ebooks on how to manage your hive, downloadable files on best beekeeping practices, and so on!

Whop's streamlined and user-friendly solution makes managing your newsletter funnel effortless. Through subscriptions, premium content, courses, or exclusive offers, newsletters can become a significant revenue stream. Plus, you'll have all the tools to succeed with Whop's streamlined, user-friendly solution for managing your newsletter funnel. There are no fees to get started, and only a small 3% fee on sales - try Whop today risk-free!

So, check out Whop today to get started with your Hub, and simply integrate Mailmodo to start monetizing your email newsletter.

Monetize Your Newsletter