Constant Contact vs MailerLite
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
Editorial assessmentConstant Contact compared with MailerLite
MailerLite costs a fraction as much at every list size, has a cleaner interface, a better free tier at 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails, and a more capable automation builder. Constant Contact counters with events, ads management, SMS, and human support. Purely as an email marketing platform, MailerLite is better and much cheaper. Constant Contact only wins when the events module or the phone line is doing real work for you.
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.
Choose MailerLite if
Solopreneurs, small businesses, and lean marketing teams that want the whole email toolkit (campaigns, automations, sites, forms, paid newsletters) at low cost, with a clean editor and EU-hosted data, and do not need enterprise CRM depth.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Constant Contact | MailerLite |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) | $10.80/mo (Comfort, up to 500 subscribers, billed annually; $12 monthly) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Usage-based tiers: every paid plan carries the full feature set, and price scales with active subscriber count and sending volume. Comfort includes 10x your subscriber-tier ceiling in monthly emails; Power includes unlimited sending under fair use. Annual billing saves 10%. |
| Free plan | No | Up to 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/month, 2 user seats, 3 automations, 1 website, 1 landing page, 3 forms, all three editors, A/B testing. |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14-day premium feature trial on every new account, no credit card |
| Best for | 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. | Solopreneurs, small businesses, and lean marketing teams that want the whole email toolkit (campaigns, automations, sites, forms, paid newsletters) at low cost, with a clean editor and EU-hosted data, and do not need enterprise CRM depth. |
| Setup time | 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. | An afternoon for import, a form, and a first campaign; domain authentication (SPF/DKIM) is the only technical step most users touch. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low. The editor and automation builder are among the most approachable in the category; the subtle parts are billing mechanics (cumulative counting, the 10x multiplier) rather than the product itself. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Webhooks | Web app, iOS app, REST API, MCP server |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 | GDPR, ISO 27001 (EU data center) |
| Founded | 1995 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Vilnius, Lithuania (remote-first team) |
| Ownership | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group | Subsidiary of Vercom S.A. (Warsaw-listed communications group) since 2022; operates as an independent brand |
Strengths and limitations
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.
MailerLite
Strengths
- Full feature set on every paid plan; pricing scales on usage alone, which makes cost modeling honest and upgrade pressure structural rather than feature-hostage.
- Interface and editor quality are consistently the best-reviewed part of the product, with three editor modes and 70+ content blocks.
- Websites, landing pages, popups, digital products, and commission-free paid newsletters are bundled where competitors charge or take a cut.
- A/B testing on the free plan and auto-resend on paid plans are practical performance features at every budget.
Limitations
- Free plan's 250-subscriber cap makes it an extended demo, far behind Kit's 10,000 and beehiiv's 2,500 free ceilings.
- Comfort's 10x email multiplier quietly meters frequent senders; daily-send publishers need Power at roughly double the cost.
- Cumulative active-subscriber billing means a purged list keeps costing until the next billing anniversary.
- No growth network of any kind: no recommendations marketplace, no ad network, no referral bounty; acquisition is entirely your problem.
Pricing compared
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.
MailerLite
Usage-based tiers: every paid plan carries the full feature set, and price scales with active subscriber count and sending volume. Comfort includes 10x your subscriber-tier ceiling in monthly emails; Power includes unlimited sending under fair use. Annual billing saves 10%.
- Free$0
- ComfortFrom $10.80/mo annually ($12 monthly) at 500 subscribers
- PowerFrom $22.50/mo annually ($25 monthly) at 500 subscribers
- EnterpriseCustom
MailerLite is the value benchmark of this category's mid-market: at 1,000 subscribers, Comfort's roughly $17/month annual rate buys automations, sites, forms, paid newsletters, and A/B testing that Kit prices at twice that and old-guard suites price higher still. Only EmailOctopus meaningfully undercuts it, and it does so with a visibly thinner product. The traps are structural rather than hidden: the 250-subscriber free ceiling is the tightest of the five platforms reviewed here, the 10x sending multiplier pushes frequent senders into Power at roughly double the price, and cumulative subscriber counting means list churn is billed for a full cycle. Priced against what it replaces (a page builder, a form tool, a newsletter platform), it remains hard to beat.
Editorial verdict on each
Constant 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 profileMailerLite
MailerLite is the sensible default for small-business email in 2026: the most complete toolkit per dollar in this comparison, delivered through the category's friendliest interface, on EU-hosted, ISO 27001 infrastructure. Its honest usage-based pricing cuts both ways, no feature hostage-taking, but also structural nudges (the 250-subscriber free cap, Comfort's 10x sending multiplier, cumulative billing) that move growing accounts up tiers on schedule. It offers nothing for audience growth, no network, no marketplace, and no built-in transactional layer, so creators chasing distribution should weigh Kit or beehiiv, and SaaS teams should look at Loops. Everyone else can start here and probably stay.
Read the full MailerLite profileConstant Contact profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; MailerLite last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.