At a time when most email marketing tools had complex user interfaces and were hard to navigate, Kit set itself apart by keeping things simple.

More than a decade later, Kit has maintained its position as one of the top, feature-rich, and beginner-friendly email platforms.

That’s probably why you’ve heard it recommended to you over and over again by your peers and email marketers online.

But just because Kit works best for them doesn’t automatically mean it’s the right fit for you.

Before you follow the crowd, let’s take a closer look at what Kit offers, explore some compelling Kit alternatives, and check out the unique features these alternatives bring to the table—features that might better support your business needs and goals.

That way, you can make an informed decision rather than settling for what’s trending.

Kawusara has 5 years of experience using email marketing tools to run her side projects. She also loves researching, testing, and writing about software. This allows her to write comprehensively about this topic and share her unique insights.

Back in 2013, ex-blogger Nathan Barry was looking for a better way to promote his courses and books. The email tools available at the time felt too generic for his needs, so he built his own. 

That tool became Kit (formerly ConvertKit).

From day one, Kit stood out with its clean, easy-to-use interface. Writing emails felt as natural as drafting a message in Gmail. In fact, Kit played a role in popularizing plain-text emails, which resonated with its core audience: content creators.

For content creators, it meant less time spent on tweaking email template designs and more time focusing on the content of their emails.

Kit also made it easy to set up multiple sales funnels. This included landing pages, opt-in forms, freebie delivery, segmentation, and automations, to help creators drive digital product sales. It also integrated seamlessly with website and course platforms like WordPress, Podia, and Gumroad.

Eventually, Kit launched its own built-in commerce features, so you can sell digital products right from the platform.

And with the ConvertKit-to-Kit rebrand came one of the best free plans in the game: the allowance to send unlimited emails to up to 10,000 subscribers.

So yes, Kit checks a lot of boxes…why consider anything else?

Well, there are a few good reasons, and I’ll break them down next.

If there’s one thing Kit is doing right, it’s picking a target audience—content creators looking to sell digital products—and serving them right.

But what if you don’t fall into that group?

Or maybe you’ve been using Kit for a while and are starting to hit some limits because:

If you nodded yes to any of the above, there’s a Kit alternative that’ll serve you better. 

Short on time? This summary gives you the key highlights of each top Kit alternative. Stick around if you’d like a more in-depth breakdown of each one.

Let’s break down each Kit alternative—what they do well, where they fall short, and their pricing models—so you can find the one that fits your business best.

beehiiv is a newcomer on the block. 

When it launched in 2021, Kit had already established itself in the creator space. While both platforms offer similar features, they were built for completely different purposes.

Kit is primarily a marketing automation platform for driving digital product sales. Meanwhile, beehiiv is a newsletter-first blogging platform tailored for creators, writers, and media brands intent on growing and earning from their newsletters.

beehiiv’s editor has a simple, clutter-free layout that makes writing super simple and fun. You can format text, insert media, and call on beehiiv’s AI by hitting slash (/) on your keyboard. When your content is ready, you have the option to publish it as a newsletter, a blog post, or both.

While beehiiv is newsletter-focused, it still comes with segmentation and automation features for targeting different subscriber groups and setting up basic email sequences.

Kit has recently started adding newsletter growth and earning features, but it’s still not quite on beehiiv’s level.

beehiiv offers a full growth suite—like a built-in recommendation network for cross-promoting with other newsletters, a referral system to reward readers who bring in new subscribers, and ways to earn through paid ads, Boosts (which pay you for referring subscribers to other newsletters), and premium subscriptions.

So, if your main goal is to grow and make money from one or multiple newsletter publications, beehiiv is your best bet. 

beehiiv Pros

beehiiv Cons

beehiiv Pricing

Before Kit came around, Mailchimp had already been around for over a decade. Back then, if you were just getting started with email marketing, it was pretty much Mailchimp or nothing. 

To its credit, Mailchimp could’ve kept all its features behind a paywall, forcing everyone to cough up cash just to send emails. Instead, it offered a generous free plan that made it accessible to everyone.

But things have changed.

Today, Mailchimp has one of the most restrictive free plans (not to mention pricey paid plans), while Kit has gained popularity for offering one of the most generous free tiers in the market.

That said, Mailchimp’s higher pricing does come with a more extensive feature set.

It offers over 100 newsletter templates, more than 100 automation workflows, and integrates with a wide range of E-commerce and CRM platforms. While it may not have as many landing page templates as Kit, Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor allows for unlimited customization.

Besides email, Mailchimp supports SMS marketing, transactional emails (for automating order confirmations, product delivery details, password reset instructions, etc.), retargeting ads for website visitors who didn’t convert, and social media scheduling—all from a single dashboard.

This setup makes Mailchimp ideal for E-commerce businesses, large marketing teams, and agencies managing complex, multi-channel campaigns.

Mailchimp Pros

Mailchimp Cons

Mailchimp Pricing

While Kit was designed to serve creators, Klaviyo was purposely built with ecommerce brands in mind.

Firstly, Klaviyo is an omnichannel marketing platform, allowing you to reach your audience via email, SMS, and push notifications.

Its email editor lets you include product blocks from your E-commerce shop—new arrivals, best-sellers, and personalized product recommendations—inside emails. You can also use conditional logic to control which content blocks appear for users based on their demographics and past behavior.

Klaviyo’s segmentation and automation features are also tailored for E-commerce use cases. For instance, Klaviyo’s automation library features browse abandonment, cart abandonment, product review request, cross-sell, and back-in-stock email flows.

Another powerful Klaviyo feature is this: predictive insights.

It lets you segment your audience and send them personalized emails based on predictive data like their gender, next order date, customer lifetime value, and churn risk.

While all these features do come with a steeper learning curve, they’re incredibly useful for E-commerce brands that want to drive more repeat purchases and recover lost sales.

Klaviyo Pros

Klaviyo Cons

Klaviyo Pricing

Klaviyo’s free plan lets you send 500 monthly emails to 250 contacts. 

The Email plan starts at $45/month. The Email + SMS plan starts at $60/month for 1,000 contacts.

Substack is more similar to beehiiv than Kit. This means it’s primarily a newsletter platform, rather than a full-fledged marketing automation tool.

Its interface is simple enough for someone with zero tech background—yes, even your mom or grandma—to set up and run a Substack newsletter. Besides newsletters, Substack also lets you share podcasts and videos with your audience.

For growth and earning, Substack offers two main tools: a recommendations engine for cross-promoting your newsletter with other Substack writers, and paid subscriptions for readers who want access to exclusive content.

Substack’s biggest strength is its community-building features.

You get tools like discussion threads for hosting discussions with your audience, a chat feature for real-time one-on-one or group messaging, and Notes—a microblogging space similar to Twitter for sharing updates and thoughts with your audience.

That said, Substack lacks the integrations, segmentation, and automation features you’ll find in more robust email marketing platforms like beehiiv.

As a result, it’s not ideal for building email sequences and promoting your digital products. But if your focus is publishing newsletters, building a loyal community, and earning via paid subscriptions, Substack is a solid fit.

Substack Pros

Substack Cons

Substack Pricing

Substack is completely free to use. 

However, if you’re earning through paid subscriptions on the platform, Substack takes a 10% cut of your earnings.

When you first log into ActiveCampaign, it feels a lot more complex than Kit—and that’s because it packs in way more features.

Unlike Kit, which focuses mainly on email, ActiveCampaign also supports SMS marketing and includes a built-in CRM. This lets you manage your sales pipeline, store lead details (like demographics and past interactions), and track each lead’s journey.

ActiveCampaign is known for its robust automation and segmentation features.

For instance, you can segment subscribers by their engagement level, purchase history, and pipeline stage. 

You’re also able to create automations with a wide variety of triggers—such as form submissions, page visits, link clicks, and email replies—to execute actions like sending an email or SMS, updating contact records, assigning tasks, and moving a contact to the next stage in your funnel.

The built-in automation tool includes an A/B testing feature for testing subject lines, email content, send times, and even entire automation flows. 

There’s also the option to either test your whole list or send variations to a smaller group first, then roll out the best-performing version to the rest.

So while ActiveCampaign can feel complex and pricier, it’s a great choice for large businesses that want to combine marketing and sales under one roof to close more deals.

ActiveCampaign Pros

ActiveCampaign Cons

ActiveCampaign Pricing   

ActiveCampaign doesn’t have a free plan. You can only get started with one of its paid plans:

One of the key differences between Kit and Flodesk is how they structure their free and paid plans.

Kit offers one of the best free plans out there, but its pricing is based on the number of subscribers, which means your costs can climb quickly as your list grows. 

Flodesk, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach: its free plan doesn’t let you send emails, but once you upgrade, you get unlimited emails and unlimited subscribers for a flat monthly rate.

Also, both platforms offer marketing automation features, but the depth and flexibility of these features vary.

Kit’s email editor is designed for writing clean, plain-text emails, while Flodesk leans more into visual design. It offers beautifully designed templates and lets you customize emails with your own fonts, image collages, and even posts pulled from your Instagram feed.

Flodesk also makes it easy to build segments and automations, but these features are more limited compared to what Kit offers.

For example, Flodesk only supports basic automations with a single trigger and limited actions, like sending an email or adding/removing a subscriber from a segment. Kit, in contrast, gives you access to more automation templates, supports multiple triggers, and allows a wider range of actions.

Regardless, Flodesk is still a great option for creators and small business owners who want a simple, affordable email tool that prioritizes visual design.

Flodesk Pros

Flodesk Cons

Flodesk Pricing

Flodesk’s free plan lets you create forms and landing pages to collect subscribers, but you can’t send emails until you upgrade. 

The Professional plan ($38/month) includes unlimited emails and unlimited subscribers. The Advanced plan ($64/month) adds E-commerce features for hosting and selling both digital and physical products.

The first thing you’ll notice about GetResponse is that it doesn’t have a free plan. So if you're looking for a platform to start emailing without any upfront costs, GetResponse is out.

Its paid plans are also generally more expensive than Kit’s. That’s because GetResponse is more of an all-in-one marketing platform (similar to Mailchimp) with a broader set of tools.

But to be fair, it packs in a lot.

With GetResponse, you won’t need to rely on as many third-party tools. In addition to email marketing, it supports SMS and transactional emails, plus features for building websites, landing pages, and even running Facebook and Google retargeting ads.

It goes a step further by offering push notifications (both web and mobile) and live chat, so you can connect directly with your audience via your emails, websites, and landing pages.

A unique GetResponse feature is its built-in webinar tool, which lets you run webinar funnels and host webinars within the platform.

So if you’re looking to access all your marketing tools in one place while cutting down on costs, check out GetResponse.

GetResponse Pros

GetResponse Cons

GetResponse Pricing

GetResponse doesn’t have a free plan, but their paid plans come with a free 30-day trial:

There’s no doubt Kit is still one of the best email platforms out there. But as we’ve seen, it’s not for everyone.

The best Kit alternative for you really comes down to your industry, budget, and the features that matter most to your business.

If you’re after more advanced automation and segmentation than what Kit offers, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, or Mailchimp are worth considering.

If you prefer a simpler and more affordable email platform, Flodesk is a great option.

And if your focus is less on marketing automation and more on publishing and earning from your content, Substack is a good option, especially if you’re open to investing time in building a community.

But if your top priority is to access extensive growth and earning tools to turn your newsletter into a profitable income stream, beehiiv is the perfect platform for you.

Sign up for a free beehiiv account and start building your dream newsletter publication!

It depends on your goals. ConvertKit (now Kit) is better suited for creators who want a simple email platform for promoting their digital products. Meanwhile, Mailchimp is more of an all-in-one marketing platform that supports email marketing, SMS, transactional emails, retargeting ads, and social media scheduling.

Yes, ConvertKit is definitely worth it if you're a creator, blogger, or small business owner looking for an easy-to-use platform to host your digital products, as well as promote them with simple sales funnels.

beehiiv is better than ConvertKit if your main goal is building and earning with your newsletter. It comes with growth tools like a recommendations engine and referral program, plus monetization options like ads and premium subscriptions.