AWeber vs Constant Contact
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedAWeber compared with Constant Contact
The two American small-business incumbents, and remarkably similar in shape and price. Constant Contact is stronger on events, nonprofits, and social posting, and has a large local support network. AWeber has a free tier where Constant Contact only offers a trial, bills without counting unsubscribes, and is independently owned rather than private-equity-held, which shows up in how each has repriced over the last five years. AWeber is the better value; Constant Contact is the better fit if events or a nonprofit are the use case.
Constant Contact compared with AWeber
The two American small-business incumbents, similar in shape and often similar in price. AWeber has a permanent free tier where Constant Contact only offers a trial, is independently owned rather than private-equity held, and bills without counting unsubscribes. Constant Contact has native event registration, social posting and ads, SMS, and a phone support line AWeber cannot match, and counts contacts once across the account where AWeber bills per list membership. Choose Constant Contact if you run events or want the phone line, AWeber if you want the free tier and the vendor stability.
Choose AWeber if
Solo operators, coaches, consultants, bloggers, and small businesses who want a straightforward newsletter and autoresponder platform from a stable independent vendor, with a free tier that is genuinely usable and support that answers the phone.
Choose Constant Contact if
Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | AWeber | Constant Contact |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $0 free for 500 subscribers, then $12.49 a month billed annually (Lite) (free plan available) | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of subscriber count. Two self-serve tiers plus a managed done-for-you service. Price steps at subscriber bands. | Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message. |
| Free plan | 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month with automations, landing pages, sign-up forms, the AI writing assistant, and the template library included, with AWeber branding on messages. | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on the paid tiers, and the free plan itself never expires | 14 days |
| Best for | Solo operators, coaches, consultants, bloggers, and small businesses who want a straightforward newsletter and autoresponder platform from a stable independent vendor, with a free tier that is genuinely usable and support that answers the phone. | Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact. |
| Setup time | A few hours to create a list, authenticate a sending domain, build a first campaign, and put a sign-up form on a site. Longer if you are importing, because every import is reviewed by a human before it can be mailed. | An afternoon to import a list, authenticate a domain, and send a first campaign. The template library and brand kit mean the design step is fast, which is deliberate given the audience. |
| Learning curve | Low. AWeber is deliberately conventional and the concepts are the ones the whole category uses. The one genuine confusion is having two automation mechanisms, the older follow-up series and the newer Campaigns builder, doing overlapping jobs. | The lowest in this category, by design. Everything is arranged around a marketing calendar and the terminology avoids jargon. The tradeoff is that the ceiling is low: once you want conditional automation or expressive segmentation, the simplicity becomes a constraint. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, Atom mobile subscriber capture app, REST API, Webhooks | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Webhooks |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 |
| Founded | 1998 | 1995 |
| Headquarters | Chalfont, Pennsylvania, United States (remote-first since 2020) | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States |
| Ownership | Privately held and bootstrapped, founder-owned and run by Tom Kulzer | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group |
Strengths and limitations
AWeber
Strengths
- A free tier that is genuinely usable at 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month with automations, landing pages, and forms intact rather than stripped out.
- Bootstrapped and founder-owned since 1998 with no acquisition, no venture capital, and no private equity, which is the strongest pricing-continuity story in this category.
- Support has a long-standing reputation for being fast and human, including phone support and 24/7 priority on Plus.
- Unsubscribes stop counting toward your billed total, so the invoice tracks your actual active audience rather than accumulating dead weight.
Limitations
- The send multiplier caps frequency: ten times subscribers on Lite and twelve on Plus, which rules AWeber out for daily newsletters.
- Lists bill separately and are never deduplicated across, so a multi-list structure quietly multiplies the invoice.
- Automation is shallow next to ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, or GetResponse, with limited branching and no predictive or advanced conditional logic.
- Expensive per subscriber relative to MailerLite, EmailOctopus, and Sender for what the email functionality alone provides.
Constant Contact
Strengths
- Native event registration with ticketing and payments, which no other mainstream email platform does properly and which alone justifies the price for organisations that run events.
- Real phone support with US hours, plus local seminars, a partner network, and paid done-for-you services, aimed at owners who want to be taught rather than documented at.
- Unsubscribed contacts are excluded from billing, so list churn does not quietly inflate the invoice.
- Automated and triggered emails are excluded from the monthly send multiplier entirely, which is more generous than it first appears when designing flows.
Limitations
- Expensive. At $120 for 10,000 contacts on the entry tier it costs several times what MailerLite, Brevo, EmailOctopus, or Sender charge for comparable or better email functionality.
- Automation is the weakest part of the product: Lite offers a single welcome email, Standard offers templates, and real branching paths are Premium-only and still shallow next to ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo.
- Bounced addresses count toward your contact limit even though they cannot receive mail, so poor list hygiene costs money directly.
- No free plan at all, only a 14-day trial, in a category where permanent free tiers are now standard.
Pricing compared
AWeber
Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of subscriber count. Two self-serve tiers plus a managed done-for-you service. Price steps at subscriber bands.
- Free$0
- LiteFrom $12.49 billed annually, $15 monthly at 500 subscribers
- PlusFrom $19.99 billed annually, $30 monthly at 500 subscribers
- Done For YouAbout $20 a month plus a $79 one-time setup fee
Modelled at this directory's three reference points: at 1,000 subscribers you are in the band above 500, so roughly $20 to $25 on Lite and $35 to $45 on Plus depending on the exact step, with the free plan covering you entirely up to 500. At 10,000 subscribers it is $100 on Lite and $135 on Plus, with monthly send allowances of 100,000 and 120,000 respectively. At 25,000 it is $210 and $250, and at 50,000 AWeber moves into the high hundreds; check the current ladder because the upper bands are revised. Against MailerLite, EmailOctopus, and Sender, AWeber is expensive for what the email alone does. Against Constant Contact it is broadly comparable and includes more per tier. Against GetResponse it is cheaper at the entry but capped on sending where GetResponse is unlimited. What the premium buys is a genuinely good free tier, a support organisation with a long reputation, landing pages and Stripe-backed selling included, and a vendor that has not changed hands in twenty-eight years. If you value continuity and human support over feature depth or price per contact, it is defensible. If you are optimising cost per subscriber, it is not the cheapest option on this list.
Constant Contact
Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message.
- Lite$12 at 500 contacts
- Standard$35 at 500 contacts
- Premium$80 at 500 contacts
- Above 50,000 contactsCustom
Modelled at this directory's three reference points: 1,000 contacts costs $30 on Lite, $55 on Standard, or $110 on Premium. Ten thousand contacts costs $120, $160, or $275. Fifty thousand contacts costs $430, $460, or $575. Those are among the highest prices in this category for the email functionality delivered. MailerLite, EmailOctopus, Sender, and Brevo all cost a fraction of it at the same list sizes and several of them automate better. The defence is that you are not buying email alone. Event registration with ticketing, social posting and ads, SMS, landing pages, a phone support line, local training, and a partner network are all in the price, and if you genuinely run events or genuinely need to be taught how to do this, the alternative is buying three subscriptions and still having nobody to call. The nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent shifts the arithmetic further. If you are only sending a newsletter, you are overpaying substantially and should look elsewhere.
Editorial verdict on each
AWeber
AWeber is the stable, unexciting, human choice in a category full of churn. It has been owned and run by the same founder since 1998, has never been acquired or repriced by a new investor, answers the phone, offers a free tier that is actually usable at 500 subscribers, and does not count your unsubscribes toward the bill. For a coach, consultant, blogger, or owner-operated small business that wants a newsletter and a welcome sequence to work reliably for the next decade, that is a genuinely good set of properties. It is not the best value per subscriber and it is not the most capable platform here. The send multiplier of ten to twelve times your list rules out frequent sending, the automation is shallow next to GetResponse or ActiveCampaign, and the per-list billing quietly multiplies your invoice if you organise with several lists instead of tags. MailerLite and Sender both give you more email for less money. Buy AWeber when vendor stability and support quality matter more to you than feature depth or cost per contact, and consolidate to a single tagged list on day one.
Read the full AWeber profileConstant Contact
Constant Contact is the most expensive way to send a newsletter in this category and the best way to run a small organisation's marketing if you are not a marketer. Those two statements are both true and they resolve into a simple test. If you run events, sell tickets, manage social and ads alongside email, and want a phone number to call when something breaks, the bundle is worth the money and the nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent makes it genuinely competitive. If you are sending a monthly newsletter to 10,000 people, you are paying $120 for what MailerLite or Sender will do better for a fraction of it, and you should leave. The billing is fairer than most, with unsubscribes excluded and contacts counted once across the account, though bounced addresses still count and the send multiplier caps frequency on the lower tiers. The automation is the real ceiling: shallow at every tier and barely present below Premium. Buy it for events, for the support line, and for the fact that the owner will actually use it. Do not buy it as an email platform on the merits of the email.
Read the full Constant Contact profileAWeber profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Constant Contact last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.