People leave GetResponse for three reasons: the bill climbs fast as your list grows, the features you actually want (abandoned-cart flows, product recommendations, real automation) are gated behind the Marketer and Max tiers, and the page builder feels fiddly. GetResponse still does a lot — landing pages, webinars, a website builder — but if you came for email, you're paying for a suite you don't fully use.
Here's the honest bottom line before the detail:
- Want the best value with a genuinely good editor? MailerLite is the default pick for most creators and small businesses. Cheapest full-featured plans, excellent drag-and-drop builder, strong deliverability.
- Monetizing a large audience (paid newsletters, digital products, courses)? Kit is built for that, and its free tier goes to 10,000 subscribers — far bigger than anyone else here.
- Need serious automation and a real CRM? ActiveCampaign is the most powerful tool on this list, and priced like it.
- On a tight budget but still want automation? Moosend undercuts almost everyone on price.
Quick comparison
| MailerLite | Kit | ActiveCampaign | Moosend | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/mo | 10,000 subscribers, unlimited sends, 1 automation | None (14-day trial) | None (30-day trial, 1,000 subs) |
| Entry paid price | From ~$9/mo (500 subs, annual) | $33/mo annual ($39 monthly), 1,000 subs | $15/mo annual, 1,000 contacts | From ~$7/mo annual ($9 monthly), 500 subs |
| Price at ~5,000 subs | ~$29/mo annual | ~$89/mo | ~$99/mo (Starter) | ~$48/mo |
| Key strength | Best value + best editor | Creator monetization | Deepest automation + CRM | Cheapest automation |
| Best for | Most SMBs and creators | Creators selling to a big list | Sales-driven SMBs, complex flows | Budget-conscious marketers |
Prices reflect published 2026 rates and change with list size; always confirm at your exact subscriber count.
MailerLite — the best all-round value
For most people leaving GetResponse, MailerLite is the switch that just makes sense. Paid plans start around $9/month (500 subscribers, billed annually; $10 monthly) and stay cheap as you scale — roughly $18/month at 1,000 subscribers and about $29/month at 5,000 on the Growing Business plan. Every paid plan includes unlimited monthly emails, so you're only ever paying for list size, not send volume.
What you actually get for that: a genuinely excellent drag-and-drop email editor (widely considered the nicest in this price bracket), a solid automation builder, landing pages, signup forms, a basic website builder, and reliable deliverability. It's the rare "cheap" tool that doesn't feel cheap to use.
The honest weakness: MailerLite quietly gutted its famous free plan in June 2026. It used to offer 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails; now it's 250 subscribers and just 2,500 emails a month, with MailerLite branding, a cap of 3 automations, one landing page and one website. If you were counting on a generous free ride, that's gone. The free tier is now really just a trial. The paid plans, though, remain the best-value option here — and MailerLite still applies a manual account-approval step that occasionally slows new signups.
Pick MailerLite if you want the lowest total cost with a builder you'll enjoy using, and you're happy to go paid (which, at these prices, most people should).
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) — for creators who monetize
Kit is purpose-built for creators — writers, YouTubers, course sellers, coaches — and it shows. Its standout is the free Newsletter plan for up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sending, unlimited forms and landing pages. Nothing else on this list comes close on free-tier headroom. The catch: the free plan gives you only one automation and no visual automation builder, so it's for straightforward broadcasting, not complex funnels.
Where Kit really separates itself is monetization. Built-in paid newsletters with subscription billing, native digital-product and course checkout, tip jars, and a creator network that recommends your newsletter to other creators' audiences. If your email list is a business, Kit gives you the plumbing to sell from it without bolting on third-party tools.
Paid plans (Creator) run $33/month annually ($39 monthly) at 1,000 subscribers, $59 at 3,000, and $89 at 5,000. Creator Pro starts around $66/month annually.
The honest weakness: Kit got noticeably more expensive. A September 2025 price change pushed the entry Creator plan from $15 to $33/month — a jump that upset a lot of long-time users. The email editor is deliberately text-first; great for plain, personal-feeling newsletters, frustrating if you want richly designed, image-heavy campaigns (MailerLite is far better there). And despite the creator focus, Kit has no native infrastructure for selling newsletter sponsorships or ad placements — you manage those yourself.
Pick Kit if you have (or expect) a large list you plan to monetize through subscriptions or digital products, and you value a big free tier over design flexibility. For pure newsletter-plus-ad-network businesses, Beehiiv is also worth a look as a specialist alternative.
ActiveCampaign — the automation powerhouse
If GetResponse frustrated you because its automation felt shallow, ActiveCampaign is the opposite problem — it may be more than you need, but it's the most capable tool here by a wide margin. The automation builder handles genuinely complex, multi-branch logic, and it ships with a real sales CRM, lead scoring, and site tracking. For an SMB where email, marketing automation and a sales pipeline all need to talk to each other, nothing else on this list competes.
Pricing (billed annually, at 1,000 contacts): Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79, Enterprise $145. The gotcha is how it scales — at 10,000 contacts you're looking at roughly $149/month on Starter, $189 on Plus and $375 on Pro. This is the tool where list growth genuinely hurts the budget.
The honest weakness: there's no free plan — only a 14-day trial. The entry Starter tier has a limited integration catalog and holds back the most powerful automation and CRM features, so the plan people actually need is usually Plus or Pro. There's a real learning curve; the interface can feel dense, and independent testing has flagged occasional deliverability and load-speed issues. This is a "pay more, get more, invest time to learn it" tool.
Pick ActiveCampaign if automation depth and CRM are the whole point, and you have the budget and patience to match. If you just want to send nice newsletters, it's overkill.
Moosend — the budget automation pick
Moosend is the value contrarian: it offers surprisingly capable automation for less than almost anyone. The Pro plan starts around $7/month annually ($9 monthly) for 500 subscribers, about $24/month at 2,000 and roughly $48/month at 5,000 — and even the entry plan unlocks the full feature set, including unlimited emails, automation workflows, landing pages and signup forms. There's no artificial gating of "the good stuff" behind higher tiers, which is refreshing after GetResponse.
The automation editor is clean and approachable, deliverability is respectable, and for straightforward campaigns plus behavioral automations at a low price, Moosend delivers.
The honest weakness: the ecosystem is smaller. Moosend has roughly 42 native integrations — it covers the essentials (Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier), but if you rely on a niche tool you may be reaching for Zapier. Templates and the landing-page builder are more basic than MailerLite's, the brand carries less third-party support and community content, and like ActiveCampaign there's no permanent free plan — just a 30-day trial.
Pick Moosend if price is the deciding factor and you want automation without paying for a big brand name — accepting a smaller integration library and plainer design tools in exchange.
The verdict
- Choose MailerLite if you want the best balance of price, ease and quality — the right answer for the majority of GetResponse switchers. Just budget for a paid plan, since the free tier is now minimal.
- Choose Kit if you're a creator with a sizable list to monetize, or you specifically want a large free tier to grow into. It's pricier per subscriber and weaker on design, but unmatched for selling.
- Choose ActiveCampaign if deep automation and a built-in CRM are non-negotiable and your budget can absorb the scaling costs.
- Choose Moosend if you want the cheapest route to real automation and can live with a smaller integration ecosystem.
One thing worth saying plainly: on free-tier generosity, GetResponse's own 500-contact free plan and Kit's 10,000-subscriber free plan both now beat MailerLite's 250. So if never paying is the goal, MailerLite is no longer the free-plan champion — Kit is. For everyone paying to grow, though, MailerLite's combination of price, deliverability and editor still makes it the strongest all-round GetResponse alternative in 2026.
Whatever you pick, migrate during a quiet week, warm up your sending on the new platform gradually, and test deliverability with a small segment before moving your whole list.