Home / Partner Picks / Campaign Monitor
Best for: Small & mid-sized teams sending polished email campaigns
Last updated: September 05, 2026
Campaign Monitor (now by Marigold) is the easy, design-led email platform: an intuitive drag-and-drop builder and polished responsive templates make good-looking, on-brand campaigns simple, backed by advanced segmentation and personalization, automation for welcome and re-engagement journeys, analytics, and 100+ integrations (Shopify, Salesforce, WordPress, GA). It's a comfortable fit for small and mid-sized teams that care about how their email looks. The honest catches: there's no free plan (just a 5-subscriber sandbox), costs escalate and billing gets confusing as lists grow, some find it pricey for the feature set, you can't edit automations while live, and template customization can feel limited.
STARTS AT
$13–$171/mo
Priced by contacts across three tiers. As a guide at up to 500 contacts: Lite ~$13/mo, Essentials ~$31/mo, Premier ~$171/mo, each adding more sending, automation and advanced features. Prices rise as your list grows, with a pay-as-you-go option for infrequent senders and discounted non-profit rates. There's no free plan — only a 5-subscriber sandbox. Since the meter is contacts, the headline figures understate the real cost for larger lists — price your actual list size, not the entry rate.
No free plan. There's a limited 5-subscriber sandbox to build and test — enough to try the interface, templates and workflow, but not to run a real campaign. To send to an actual audience you need a paid plan. If a genuinely free tier matters — say to start a small list at no cost — rivals like Mailchimp or Brevo offer free plans, whereas Campaign Monitor expects payment from the point you send to real subscribers. Use the sandbox to confirm the builder and features suit you first.
Ease of use and design. The drag-and-drop builder is intuitive and the responsive templates produce polished, on-brand emails with little effort — a big reason design-conscious teams like it. Beyond building, it offers advanced segmentation and personalization (divide by demographics or behaviour, tailor content dynamically) and solid automation for welcome and re-engagement journeys. Analytics track opens, clicks and performance, and it connects to 100+ apps (Shopify, Salesforce, WordPress, GA). For small/mid teams that value a clean, attractive email experience, it's comfortable and capable.
Three themes recur. Cost: prices escalate and billing gets confusing as lists grow, and some feel it's pricey vs rivals for the feature set. Workflow limits: you can't edit automations while they're live — frustrating when tweaking an active journey — and the builder/template customization can feel limited for fine-grained design control. And the absence of a free plan plus a moderate learning curve. Not dealbreakers for its target user, but weigh the true cost at your list size and confirm the automation/customization limits fit how you work.
Both are popular, easy platforms for small/mid businesses and overlap heavily. Campaign Monitor is praised for its clean, design-led builder and attractive templates — a favourite of brand-conscious teams — while Mailchimp offers a broader all-in-one suite and, importantly, a free plan Campaign Monitor lacks. Both meter by contacts and get expensive at scale, so it usually comes down to whether you value Campaign Monitor's design polish and simplicity or Mailchimp's wider features and free entry point. Send well-designed newsletters? Often Campaign Monitor. Want breadth or a free start? Lean Mailchimp.
Small and mid-sized businesses, agencies and non-profits wanting an easy, design-led way to send polished, well-branded campaigns and newsletters, with enough segmentation and automation for welcome and re-engagement journeys without a steep setup. It suits teams valuing a clean interface and attractive templates over maximum feature depth, and benefits from non-profit rates and pay-as-you-go. Weaker fit for those needing a free plan to start, very large senders (costs escalate sharply), and power users wanting deep template customization or to edit live automations.
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