Pick by use case
If you publish a newsletter or have an audience
Use ConvertKit. It's built for creators — clean signup forms, simple sequences, segmentation that doesn't require a PhD. Pricing scales with subscribers, which is fair.
If you run B2B and need to nurture leads
Use HubSpot Marketing Hub. The CRM-integrated workflow makes it the obvious choice for SaaS and B2B. Yes it's expensive at the Pro tier — but the alternative is duct-taping Mailchimp + a separate CRM and pretending that works.
If you sell ecommerce
Use Klaviyo (Shopify native, abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows are best-in-class) or Brevo (cheaper alternative, broader feature set if you also do SMS).
If you need cheap, fast, and transactional
Use Brevo. The free tier is generous (300 emails/day), pricing is per email sent rather than per contact, and the transactional API is solid.
What to skip
- Mailchimp at scale — pricing has crept up over the years and it does not pay back the cost
- Marketo and Eloqua — enterprise-only, painful to onboard, only worth it if you have a dedicated MarOps team
- Anything promising "AI-powered" workflows that is not from one of the established players — usually wrapper products with no moat
Common mistakes to avoid
Buying the highest tier on day one. You will use 15% of the features. Start with the cheapest tier that solves your current bottleneck and upgrade only when you feel friction.
Letting your list rot. Engagement-based deliverability is real — sending to people who don't open damages your sender reputation. Aggressively prune dead contacts every quarter.