Constant Contact vs Mailjet
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 assessedConstant Contact compared with Mailjet
Mailjet prices on emails sent with unlimited contacts, which inverts Constant Contact's model completely: a 50,000-contact list mailed once a month costs $27 or so on Mailjet against $460 on Constant Contact Standard. Mailjet also includes a transactional API and is EU-hosted. What it does not have is events, social posting, ads management, phone support, or anything resembling Constant Contact's hand-holding. For a large list mailed infrequently, Mailjet is dramatically cheaper. For a small business that needs guidance, it is the wrong product.
Mailjet compared with Constant Contact
The clearest illustration of what per-email pricing does. A 50,000-contact list mailed monthly costs a modest Mailjet volume step against $460 a month on Constant Contact Standard, and a 10,000-contact list is $17 on Mailjet Essential against $160. What Constant Contact has that Mailjet does not is event registration with ticketing, social and ads management, landing pages, phone support, and local training. Mailjet is the better economics by a wide margin; Constant Contact is the better product for a small business owner who needs guidance.
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 Mailjet if
Small businesses and European companies that need both marketing campaigns and transactional email from one vendor, especially those with a large list they mail infrequently, where per-email pricing is dramatically cheaper than per-contact pricing.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Constant Contact | Mailjet |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) | $0 for 6,000 emails a month, then $9 a month (Starter) (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. | Metered on monthly emails sent rather than on contacts stored, with unlimited contacts on the Essential tier and above. Four published tiers plus a quoted Custom tier, scaling with send volume. |
| Free plan | No | 6,000 emails a month capped at 200 a day, with 1,000 contacts, one sub-account, and Mailjet branding on messages. |
| Free trial | 14 days | No |
| 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. | Small businesses and European companies that need both marketing campaigns and transactional email from one vendor, especially those with a large list they mail infrequently, where per-email pricing is dramatically cheaper than per-contact pricing. |
| 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. | A few hours. Add a sending domain, publish SPF and DKIM, import contacts or drop in the API credentials, and send. Nothing is gated behind a sales conversation below the Custom tier. |
| 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 for the marketing side and low for developers on the transactional side. The one concept worth learning deliberately is sub-accounts, which are how you keep marketing and transactional reputation apart and are only available in quantity on Premium. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Webhooks | Web application, REST API v3, SMTP relay, Inbound parsing webhook, Official libraries for 6 languages |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 | ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR as an EU-established processor, CAN-SPAM |
| Founded | 1995 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Paris, France, as part of Sinch (Stockholm, Sweden) |
| Ownership | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group | Owned by Sinch AB (STO: SINCH) since December 2021 |
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.
Mailjet
Strengths
- Priced on emails sent with unlimited contacts on paid plans, which is dramatically cheaper than contact-based pricing for a large list mailed infrequently and eliminates the dormant-contact hidden cost entirely.
- Covers both jobs in this category from one account: marketing campaigns and a genuine transactional API with inbound parsing, webhooks, and message logs.
- The real-time collaborative email editor with comments and locked sections is unique in this category and removes an entire review cycle for teams.
- MJML, the open-source responsive email markup language Mailjet created, is genuinely good and is used far beyond Mailjet's own customer base.
Limitations
- Automation is Premium-only and simple, with none of the branching or behavioural depth of ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, or Omnisend.
- Segmentation does not exist below the Essential tier, so the cheap plans are broadcast tools rather than marketing platforms.
- No landing pages, webinars, events, courses, or CRM; Mailjet is email and nothing else, which limits how much of a stack it can consolidate.
- The free plan's 200-emails-a-day cap makes it close to unusable for real campaigns, and it takes five days to mail a full 1,000-contact list.
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.
Mailjet
Metered on monthly emails sent rather than on contacts stored, with unlimited contacts on the Essential tier and above. Four published tiers plus a quoted Custom tier, scaling with send volume.
- Free$0
- Starter$9
- Essential$17
- Premium$27
- CustomQuoted
Because Mailjet meters sends rather than contacts, the standard comparison points need translating. A 1,000-contact list mailed once a month is 1,000 emails, comfortably inside the free plan, though the 200-a-day cap means the send takes five days; $9 on Starter fixes that. A 10,000-contact list mailed once a month is 10,000 emails, inside the $17 Essential tier with room to spare, against $120 to $275 on Constant Contact and $100 to $135 on AWeber for the same list. A 50,000-contact list mailed once a month is 50,000 emails, which needs a higher volume step but still lands far below the $430 to $575 Constant Contact charges. Mail that same 50,000-contact list weekly and the picture changes: 200,000 emails a month moves Mailjet up several volume steps while the contact-priced platforms charge exactly the same as before. Mailjet is outstanding value for a large list mailed occasionally and merely competitive for a small list mailed often. Add the transactional API on the same account, which replaces a separate Postmark or Resend subscription for low-volume application mail, and the total-cost case for a small business gets stronger still.
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 profileMailjet
Mailjet is the one platform in this category that meaningfully changes the arithmetic rather than the feature list. Metering emails sent instead of contacts stored, with unlimited contacts from $17 a month, makes it dramatically cheaper than everything else here for a business with a large list it mails occasionally, and it removes the dormant-contact hidden cost entirely. Add a genuine transactional API with inbound parsing and sub-accounts on the same account, European data centres, the only real-time collaborative email editor in the category, and MJML, and the case for a small European business is strong. The limits are equally clear. Automation is Premium-only and shallow, segmentation does not exist below Essential, there are no landing pages or events or CRM, and the free plan's 200-a-day cap makes it a demo rather than a plan. On the transactional side Sinch clearly reserves the depth for Mailgun. Buy Mailjet when your send pattern favours per-email pricing, when you want both jobs from one vendor at low cost, or when EU hosting is a requirement. Buy something else if the automation is what you are actually shopping for.
Read the full Mailjet profileConstant Contact profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Mailjet last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.