Constant Contact vs Sender
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 Sender
Not a close contest on price. Sender gives away 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month for free and charges single-digit dollars where Constant Contact charges $30 to $110 at 1,000 contacts. Sender's automation is also arguably better. What Constant Contact has is events, social and ads management, phone support, local training, and thirty years of institutional presence. If money is the constraint, Sender wins outright. If somebody needs to be taught how to run this at all, Constant Contact is what they will actually use.
Sender compared with Constant Contact
Not close on price. Constant Contact charges $30 to $110 at 1,000 contacts where Sender is free, and $120 to $275 at 10,000 where Sender is in single or low double digits. Sender's automation is also arguably better and it includes transactional sending. Constant Contact has event registration with ticketing, social and ads management, phone support, and local training, none of which Sender attempts. Buy Constant Contact for events and hand-holding; buy Sender for everything else.
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 Sender if
Price-sensitive small businesses, ecommerce stores, and solo operators who want a complete marketing email platform with automation and SMS for single-digit monthly spend, and anyone whose list is under 2,500 subscribers and would rather not pay at all.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Constant Contact | Sender |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) | $0 free for 2,500 subscribers, then from $7 a month (Standard) (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. | Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of list size, priced on a slider rather than in a published static table. Prepaid email credits are available as an alternative for occasional senders. |
| Free plan | No | 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, including automation workflows, 10 landing pages, popups and forms, responsive templates, and transactional email access. Sender branding appears in the footer, and SMS, A/B testing, branding removal, and advanced reports are excluded. |
| Free trial | 14 days | The free plan is permanent and serves as the trial; paid features can be evaluated from it |
| 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. | Price-sensitive small businesses, ecommerce stores, and solo operators who want a complete marketing email platform with automation and SMS for single-digit monthly spend, and anyone whose list is under 2,500 subscribers and would rather not pay at all. |
| 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 hour or two. Sign up on the free plan, import or collect subscribers, authenticate a sending domain, and send. There is nothing gated behind a sales call and nothing that needs configuring before a first campaign. |
| 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 product is deliberately conventional and anyone who has used another email platform will recognise every concept. The automation builder is the only part that rewards deliberate learning, and it is simpler than its competitors' by design. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Webhooks | Web application, REST API, SMTP relay, Webhooks |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 | GDPR as an EU-established processor, CAN-SPAM, CCPA |
| Founded | 1995 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Ownership | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group | Privately held and bootstrapped |
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.
Sender
Strengths
- The most generous free tier in the category: 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month with automation, landing pages, and popups intact rather than stripped out.
- Paid plans starting at single-digit dollars with a 30 percent annual discount, undercutting almost every competitor at the same list size.
- Transactional email API and SMTP included on every plan including free, which no other budget marketing platform offers.
- Automation workflows available on the free plan, where most competitors reserve them for paid tiers.
Limitations
- Pricing above the entry point is set on a slider rather than published as a static table, which makes budgeting for a large list harder than it should be.
- Automation is competent but a clear tier below ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, and Omnisend on conditional logic and ecommerce personalisation.
- A team of roughly thirty people supporting over 180,000 accounts means support is a ticket queue on the lower tiers, with phone support only on Enterprise.
- The transactional feature is a convenience rather than infrastructure: no message stream separation, no inbound parsing, and nothing resembling Postmark's or Mailgun's logging and observability.
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.
Sender
Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of list size, priced on a slider rather than in a published static table. Prepaid email credits are available as an alternative for occasional senders.
- Free Forever$0
- StandardFrom $7
- ProfessionalFrom $14
- EnterpriseCustom
At the volumes this directory compares, Sender is the cheapest credible option on the list. A 1,000-subscriber list is entirely free, including automation, landing pages, and popups, where Constant Contact would charge $30 to $110 and AWeber $20 to $45. A 10,000-subscriber list moves onto a paid tier whose price the slider sets from the $7 and $14 entry points, and which in practice lands well below the $120 to $275 Constant Contact charges and the $100 to $135 AWeber charges at the same size. Fifty thousand subscribers likewise sits far below the $430 to $575 range at Constant Contact. The send multipliers of twelve and twenty-four times are competitive, sitting between Constant Contact's ten to twenty-four and AWeber's ten to twelve. What the low price does not buy is depth: the automation is a tier below the serious platforms, the reporting is thinner, there are no events or webinars, and support is a small queue rather than an organisation. For a business whose email needs are a newsletter, a welcome flow, a cart recovery sequence, and occasional SMS, Sender delivers all of it for less than anything else here.
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 profileSender
Best ValueSender is the best answer in this category to the question of how little you can pay. The free tier at 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, with automation workflows, ten landing pages, popups, and a transactional API included, is more than several competitors give you on a paid plan, and the paid tiers start at single-digit dollars with SMS and A/B testing added. For a solo operator, a small ecommerce store, or any business under a few thousand subscribers, it is very hard to justify paying Constant Contact ten times as much for something that does the same job less generously. The limits are honest ones. The automation is a tier below the serious platforms, the reporting is thin until the Professional plan, there are no events or webinars, and roughly thirty people are supporting over 180,000 accounts, so support is a queue and the integration ecosystem is small. The transactional feature is a convenience, not infrastructure, and should not replace Postmark or Resend for a real dependency. Pricing above the entry point also lives on a slider rather than a published table, so read it for your own list before budgeting. Within those limits, this is the most email per dollar available to a small business today.
Read the full Sender profileConstant Contact profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Sender last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.