MailerLite Review 2024: Is It Still the Best Value for Email Marketing?
The Verdict
Buy. MailerLite remains the undisputed champion of "value-for-money" in the email marketing space, offering a frictionless user experience and powerful automation tools that typically cost twice as much elsewhere. While it isn't robust enough for enterprise-level CRM needs, it is the perfect launchpad for creators, bloggers, and small businesses.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Best-in-Class Free Plan: Includes 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails with access to automation features—rare in this industry.
- Intuitive UI: The drag-and-drop editor is clean, fast, and modern; no coding knowledge is required.
- All-in-One Capabilities: extensive landing page builder, website builder, and digital product sales features are built right in.
- Deliverability: They maintain strict approval processes, which keeps their sender reputation high and your emails out of the spam folder.
Cons
- Strict Account Approval: The anti-spam vetting process can be aggressive, sometimes flagging legitimate new accounts for review.
- Limited CRM Depth: If you need complex sales pipeline tracking or deep behavioral tagging, you will hit a ceiling.
- Reporting: Analytics are functional (open rates, click maps) but lack the granular data breakdown found in enterprise tools.
Deep Dive: Features, Value, and Usability
When you first log into MailerLite, the difference is palpable—they have stripped away the clutter that plagues legacy competitors like Mailchimp. The Ease of Use is the headline feature here. The drag-and-drop email editor is responsive and includes dynamic content blocks (like RSS feeds or e-commerce product blocks) that actually work without breaking your formatting. Building an automation workflow—such as a welcome sequence or a cart abandonment trigger—is done via a visual map that makes logical sense, allowing you to set up complex "if/then" scenarios in minutes rather than hours.
regarding Pricing and Value, MailerLite is aggressively competitive. The "Forever Free" plan is generous enough to run a legitimate side hustle without paying a dime, offering access to landing pages and forms. Once you scale, the "Growing Business" plan (starting around $9/month) unlocks unlimited emails and selling features. Unlike competitors that hide crucial features like A/B split testing or remove watermarks only on high-tier plans, MailerLite makes most pro features accessible at the entry-level paid tier. You are paying for subscriber volume, not unlocking basic functionality.
However, the "Lite" in the name does imply a ceiling on feature density. While the landing page builder is excellent for lead magnets, it won't replace a dedicated WordPress site for SEO. Similarly, while it integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce, the customer data tracking is somewhat linear. It treats subscribers mostly as email recipients rather than full customer profiles. If you need to manage a sales team or track deal stages, MailerLite functions best when integrated with a dedicated CRM, rather than trying to act as one.
The Competition
- Vs. Mailchimp: Mailchimp is the 800lb gorilla, but it has become expensive and bloated. Mailchimp offers deeper data analytics and more obscure integrations, but for 90% of users, MailerLite does the same job faster, with a cleaner interface, for significantly less money.
- Vs. Kit (formerly ConvertKit): Kit is the creator darling, specifically optimized for plain-text emails and selling digital courses. Kit has slightly more powerful tagging and segmentation logic for power users. However, MailerLite offers far better design tools for visual emails and landing pages, making it a better all-rounder for general businesses.
Conclusion
MailerLite is EXACTLY for the solo creator, the small e-commerce shop, or the professional blogger who wants to look like a Fortune 500 company without the overhead. If you want to spend your time creating content rather than fighting with software, this is your tool.
However, if you are a high-volume SaaS company requiring intricate behavioral tracking and sales pipeline management, you should look toward ActiveCampaign or HubSpot.