Honest reviews of email marketing platforms covering ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, AWeber, and GetResponse. Every review includes pricing, automation features, deliverability, pros, cons, and who each platform is best for.
Browse all reviews on our marketing tool reviews hub or use our free marketing calculators to run the numbers before you decide.
Email marketing still delivers the highest ROI of any digital channel — around $36 for every $1 spent according to industry data. But choosing the wrong platform can cost you deliverability, subscribers, and money. Our reviews help you cut through the marketing noise and find the platform that fits your list size, budget, and automation needs.
Not all email platforms allow affiliate marketing links. AWeber and GetResponse are the most affiliate-friendly. ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit allow affiliate links but monitor for spam complaints. Always check the terms before migrating your list.
ActiveCampaign and AWeber consistently score highest for deliverability in independent testing, typically achieving inbox rates above 90% for clean lists. GetResponse and ConvertKit are close behind. The biggest factor in deliverability is your list hygiene — remove unengaged subscribers every 90 days regardless of which platform you use.
Most platforms allow affiliate links but enforce spam policies strictly. AWeber and GetResponse are the most permissive for affiliate marketers. ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign allow them but watch your complaint rates. Some platforms like Mailchimp explicitly ban affiliate marketing — we note this in every relevant review so you are not caught off guard after migrating your list.
Most platforms offer a free tier up to 500–1,000 subscribers. AWeber and GetResponse both have free plans. For serious affiliate marketing, the paid tier is worth it from day one — free plans restrict automation features you need to build a proper welcome and follow-up sequence.
Email marketing consistently delivers the highest return on investment of any digital marketing channel. Industry data puts average ROI at around thirty-six dollars returned for every dollar spent, which dwarfs social media advertising, paid search, and content marketing by a significant margin. The reason is straightforward: email reaches people who have explicitly opted in to hear from you, making the audience far more qualified than cold traffic from any other channel.
The challenge is that building and maintaining a healthy email list requires consistent effort, the right platform for your use case, and a content strategy that delivers enough value to keep subscribers engaged. A large list with low engagement rates will actively hurt your deliverability over time, as inbox providers use engagement signals — opens, clicks, replies — to determine whether your emails belong in the inbox or the spam folder.
Open rates are vanity metrics if your emails are landing in spam. Deliverability — the percentage of your emails that actually reach the inbox — is the metric that determines whether your list is an asset or a liability. Every platform review on this page includes our assessment of deliverability performance based on published third-party testing data and verified user reports. Do not choose an email platform based on price alone without checking its deliverability reputation first.
Regardless of which platform you use, clean your list every ninety days by removing subscribers who have not opened any email in that period. Re-engagement campaigns can recover some of these subscribers, but the ones who do not respond should be removed. Keeping unengaged subscribers on your list costs you money in platform fees and degrades your sender reputation, which affects deliverability for your entire list — including the engaged subscribers who do want to hear from you.