Beehiiv

ConvertKit

ConvertKit (now Kit) is an email marketing platform designed for creators — writers, YouTubers, podcasters — emphasizing simple automations, tagging, and monetization tools like paid newsletters. It favors plain-text, relationship-driven emails.

EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus is an email marketing platform focused on simplicity and lower cost, letting small businesses and individual creators build and send newsletters and campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor, subscriber segmentation, and automation. It positions itself explicitly against pricier competitors, citing an example of $480/year for 100,000 subscribers versus roughly $1,620/year on Mailchimp's equivalent plan.

Flodesk

Flodesk is an email marketing platform built around visual design, offering a drag-and-drop email designer with custom fonts, brand colors, and layout tooling aimed at helping non-designers create polished newsletters. The company reports its emails see higher open engagement than industry averages, attributing this partly to design quality and deliverability practices. Beyond email campaigns, Flodesk includes automation workflows for subscriber journeys, opt-in forms, sales funnels for products and memberships, checkout for digital products, and link-in-bio functionality for capturing subscribers from social media. It integrates with Shopify, Typeform, Canva, Google, and Zapier.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a widely used email marketing platform offering campaigns, automations, landing pages, and audience management, popular with small businesses. It has expanded into a broader marketing suite.

Substack

Substack is a publishing platform that lets writers launch paid or free email newsletters with built-in subscription payments, podcast hosting, and a discovery network across other Substack publications. It provides a simple way for writers to connect with their audience and monetize their content.