Campaign Monitor Review 2026: Neither the Prices Nor the SMTP Details Are Published
The Best: Ease 4.5 and service 4.5, and unlimited sending from $19
The Worst: No prices on the pricing page, no address for the SMTP relay
The short version
Campaign Monitor makes the nicest emails in this category and tells you the least about how to use it. Both halves are unusual enough to lead with.
The product is genuinely good and genuinely loved. Capterra rates it 4.5 across 506 reviews with ease of use at 4.5 and customer service at 4.5, and it has been the designer’s choice since 2004. Reviewers describe onboarding new staff without training and building campaigns faster than in the tools they came from. It is also under active development: in January 2026 it shipped three AI features, and in August 2026 it won an Email Marketing Innovation award for one of them.
Then you try to find out what it costs. The pricing page prints no prices at all. We read the served HTML twice: the plan cards literally contain $ /month, with the numbers injected by JavaScript from a contact slider. The only hard figure anywhere on it is a $10 a month website builder add-on.
And then, for a site called SMTPedia, the finding that matters most. Campaign Monitor advertises transactional email “Sent via API or SMTP” and refers to “Campaign Monitor’s API or SMTP servers”. It publishes no SMTP hostname and no port, anywhere. We checked four separate pages including the help centre, the features page and the API documentation. The server, username and password are shown inside the application, to people who have already paid.
A lovely tool for a marketing team that wants beautiful email and a human to call, priced somewhere you will have to discover for yourself. If you need to plug an application into it, look elsewhere: you cannot even find the connection details without an account.
Four owners in a decade, and it survived them
Campaign Monitor’s corporate history matters here because it usually predicts decline, and in this case it did not.
Founded in Sydney in 2004 by David Greiner and Ben Richardson. In April 2014 Insight Venture Partners put US$250 million in. In January 2019 it acquired Sailthru and Liveclicker, and the holding company CM Group was formed around it alongside Emma, Delivra and Vuture. In October 2021 CM Group merged with Cheetah Digital, with Insight remaining majority shareholder and Vector Capital taking a substantial minority. In January 2023 the whole thing was renamed Marigold.
The product is now officially “Campaign Monitor by Marigold”, one of six brands under that roof. Its own page says: “For more than two decades, Campaign Monitor by Marigold has empowered small businesses, nonprofits, and marketing agencies.”
Elsewhere on this site, that history usually ends in a product left to run. Not here. On 29 January 2026 Campaign Monitor announced three AI features by name, Marketing Monitor, Segment Mapper and AI Email Booster, quoting its own chief product officer. On 6 August 2026 Marigold took two MarTech Breakthrough awards, one of them for Marketing Monitor. Compare that with Sendloop, also reviewed here, whose last blog post is dated May 2023.
SMTP and transactional
| Transactional email | A built-in feature, not a separate product, in two variants: “smart transactional email” and “classic transactional email” |
|---|---|
| SMTP claimed | Yes. The documentation says classic transactional emails are “Sent via API or SMTP” and refers to “Campaign Monitor’s API or SMTP servers”. |
| SMTP hostname | Not published. Checked across four pages. |
| SMTP port | Not published. |
| Where the details live | Inside the application. The documentation says only that you can change “server, username, and password details”. |
| Transactional API base | https://api.createsend.com/api/v3.3/ |
| Send endpoints | POST /transactional/smartEmail/{smartEmailID}/send and POST /transactional/classicEmail/send |
| Other endpoints | GET /transactional/smartEmail, /transactional/classicEmail/groups, /transactional/statistics, /transactional/messages, and POST /transactional/messages/{messageID}/resend |
| API auth | OAuth 2.0, or the API key as the username in HTTP Basic with a dummy password |
| Rate limits | Headers only, no numbers: X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset, and a 429 carrying “Rate limit exceeded”. Rate limiting is documented as applying specifically to the transactional endpoints. |
| Transactional pricing | Not published. No per-email price and no included quota appears anywhere. The documentation says only that finishing setup “will prompt you to choose” a monthly plan. |
| Official MCP | None found. A community server and a third-party commercial connector exist; neither is Campaign Monitor’s. |
Every other provider in this project publishes its connection details on a public page. SendGrid tells you smtp.sendgrid.net, port 587, username the literal string apikey. Amazon SES publishes nineteen regional hostnames. SMTP2GO publishes eight ports. Campaign Monitor tells you it has SMTP servers and stops there. We do not treat that as a secret worth guessing at, so this page contains no hostname and no port. If you need one, you will need an account first.
Snapshot
| Founded | 2004 in Sydney, Australia, by David Greiner and Ben Richardson |
|---|---|
| Ownership | Marigold, formerly CM Group. US$250m from Insight Venture Partners in April 2014; merged with Cheetah Digital in October 2021; renamed Marigold in January 2023. |
| Free plan | None. A 30-day trial is offered, limited to 500 contacts and 500 emails. |
| Lite | $11 / mo, capped at 2,500 emails a month |
| Essentials | $19 / mo, unlimited emails |
| Premier | $149 / mo, unlimited emails, adding advanced engagement segmentation, send time optimisation, advanced link tracking, email section locking and phone support |
| Enterprise | “Custom pricing tailored to your volume and goals” |
| Prices on the pricing page | None rendered. The plan cards contain an empty currency field; figures are injected by JavaScript from a contact slider. The prices above come from Capterra’s listing and the vendor knowledge base. |
| Website builder | $10 / mo add-on, the only hard price on the pricing page |
| Transactional availability | Listed as a feature from the Lite plan upward |
| Independent inbox placement | Absent from the seedlist panel that ranked providers. See the deliverability section. |
| Product activity | Active. AI features announced 29 January 2026; MarTech Breakthrough award 6 August 2026. |
What Campaign Monitor does well
The editor, which is why it has survived four owners
Campaign Monitor built its reputation on making email look good, and twenty years later that is still the reason people choose it. Capterra’s ease of use sits at 4.5 from 476 raters, level with MailerLite and above Kit, HubSpot, AWeber and Constant Contact.
What reviewers describe is speed of adoption rather than depth of feature. “Easy all-in-one solution; new employees quickly grasp software.” “Fantastic UI; deploying campaigns simpler than Blackbaud.” “Reliable, intuitive platform with quick support.” For an agency or a communications team where several people touch the same campaign, that matters more than any single capability.
Unlimited sending from $19, which almost nobody offers
The Essentials plan removes the send cap entirely and bills on contacts only. Against the platforms on this site that meter both, and against Lite’s own 2,500-email ceiling, that is a genuinely clean model: grow your list, pay more; mail it more often, pay the same.
Support that shows up in the sub-score
Customer service rates 4.5 from 386 raters, which puts Campaign Monitor above HubSpot, SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES and Constant Contact, and level with Brevo. Phone support arrives at the Premier tier. It is not the account-manager model iContact runs, but it is well above this category’s average.
Still being built, twenty-two years in
The AI release of January 2026 is worth naming because so many platforms of this vintage are coasting. Marketing Monitor benchmarks your performance against industry standards and prioritises what to fix. Segment Mapper builds audience segments from a plain-language description. AI Email Booster gives recommendations inside the editor. Whatever you think of AI features generally, this is a product team shipping, and the external award in August 2026 is a second data point.
A transactional API with a proper surface
The v3.3 API is not an afterthought. Beyond the two send endpoints it exposes statistics, message listing, individual message retrieval and a resend endpoint, with OAuth 2.0 alongside key authentication. The documentation also claims header compatibility with Mailgun, Mailjet, Mandrill, Postmark and SendGrid, which is a migration-friendly touch you rarely see.
Where Campaign Monitor falls short
The pricing page does not contain any prices
This is not a figure of speech. We read the served HTML twice and the plan cards contain an empty currency and a slash, with the amounts injected client-side from a contact-count slider. The only price hard-coded into the page is a $10 a month website builder add-on.
The figures in our snapshot, $11, $19 and $149, come from Capterra’s listing and from Campaign Monitor’s own knowledge base rather than from its pricing page. That is a strange place to have to go for a headline number, and it is the second platform in this project where we have had to do it: Drip’s pricing is also calculated in the browser with no table in the served page.
Lite is cheap because it caps you at 2,500 emails
$11 a month looks like the best entry price in this comparison until you see the ceiling. Two thousand five hundred emails a month is one send to a list of 2,500, or two sends to a list of 1,250. Essentials at $19 removes the cap. Treat $19 as the real entry price and Lite as a trial that bills you.
No free plan, and a trial that has changed
There is no free tier. The current trial is 30 days limited to 500 contacts and 500 emails. Note a wrinkle worth knowing if you are reading older reviews: several reviewers from 2018 and 2023 state that no free trial existed at the time. Whatever the history, plan on paying to evaluate this properly.
Advertised SMTP with no published address
Covered above and repeated here because it is the finding this site exists to surface. Campaign Monitor says its classic transactional emails are “Sent via API or SMTP”. It does not publish a hostname. It does not publish a port. It does not publish a per-email price or an included quota for transactional sending. All three are inside the product.
For a marketing team that never leaves the interface, none of this matters. For anyone evaluating whether to route an application’s mail here, it makes evaluation impossible before purchase, and it is the clearest reason this fiche scores where it does on API.
No numeric rate limits, and no MCP server
The API documents rate limit headers and a 429 but no numbers, and states that rate limiting applies specifically to the transactional endpoints, which is exactly where you would want the figure. There is also no official MCP server. What exists is a community project and a third-party commercial connector, neither of them Campaign Monitor’s, at a point where Resend, Customer.io, Mailgun, GoHighLevel, SMTP2GO and Drip all ship one.
Integrations and reporting draw the recurring complaints
The corpus is warm overall, and its two consistent criticisms are integration friction and support access. “Salesforce integration was painful; relied on reports causing significant issues.” “Getting help or support has been a challenge.” “Could offer more style solutions when editing emails.” And one two-star review names the ceiling: “Lacks advanced functionality.”
The support complaint sits oddly against a 4.5 service sub-score, and both are in the same corpus. Our reading is that Campaign Monitor’s support is good when you reach it and that reaching it is the friction, with phone access reserved for the $149 tier.
On deliverability, and why we are not printing a ranking
Campaign Monitor does not appear in the seedlist inbox placement panel that ranked sixteen providers, and that series has since been discontinued anyway. So there is no comparable figure for it.
A second panel does publish a page for Campaign Monitor, stating that 77.48 percent of 75,813 emails reached the main mailbox, with 20.38 percent filed as spam and 2.14 percent lost, for a score of 92 out of 100. We are publishing that figure and immediately telling you not to rank anything with it.
On 27 August 2026 we read the same panel’s pages for four other platforms. Postmark, a premium transactional relay whose entire business is deliverability, came back at 78.00 percent. Mailchimp, a bulk marketing platform, came back at 77.61 percent. Kit at 77.52. MailerLite at 76.82. Campaign Monitor at 77.48. That is a spread of 1.2 points across five products that could not be more different, with spam rates between 19.97 and 20.82 percent and sample sizes all around 76,000.
A measurement that puts Postmark and Mailchimp within four tenths of a point is telling you something about the industry, not about the vendor. Read it as evidence that roughly a fifth of marketing mail is filed as spam everywhere, and read nothing else into it. We also caught that site’s homepage returning a completely different figure for Campaign Monitor, 98.55 percent, which the dedicated page contradicts. Always read the per-platform page.
What real users actually say
We read 175 rendered rows across seven pages of Campaign Monitor’s Capterra listing (product ID 76928, displayed as “Campaign Monitor by Marigold”), out of 506 total, roughly a 35 percent sample. Page one returned without dates, so it is used for themes and quotations but not for dating. Sub-scores: ease of use 4.5 from 476 raters, customer service 4.5 from 386, features 4.3 from 417, value for money 4.3 from 382.
What they praise
- The editor and the interface. The reason people arrive and the reason they stay.
- Speed of onboarding. New staff productive without training.
- Reliability. Described as dependable rather than exciting.
- Cost structure at the low end. One non-profit describes sending for $5 plus a penny per email.
- Support quality when reached. A 4.5 sub-score from 386 raters.
What they criticise
- Reaching support. “Getting help or support has been a challenge.”
- Integrations. Salesforce named specifically and painfully.
- Advanced functionality. The ceiling arrives sooner than in the automation platforms.
- Editing depth. Beautiful defaults, limited styling beyond them.
- Opaque pricing. Not in the corpus, but our own finding.
The mixed clusters
Beautiful and bounded, said the same way for twenty years. The corpus praises how campaigns look and criticises what happens when you want them to do more. That has been the trade since 2004 and the four ownership changes have not altered it.
Support is rated highly and described as hard to reach. Both appear in the same body of reviews. Phone support is a Premier feature at $149 a month, which is the most likely explanation.
Non-profits are heavily represented. A large share of the reviews we read come from non-profit and civic organisations, the same audience that dominates iContact’s corpus. These two products compete for the same buyer, and Campaign Monitor is the better-looking one.
Ratings breakdown
Six categories, each out of 10, judged against the same evidence rules on every platform we cover. The overall is the unweighted arithmetic mean, rounded to one decimal: 8.0 + 5.5 + 6.5 + 7.0 + 5.5 + 6.0 = 38.5, divided by 6, equals 6.4.
Ease of use, 8.0. A 4.5 Capterra ease score from 476 raters and a corpus that names onboarding speed repeatedly. This is the product’s whole case and it holds.
Automation, 5.5. Journeys and segmentation exist and the Premier tier adds engagement segmentation and send time optimisation. Reviewers name the ceiling, and it arrives well below ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo or Customer.io.
Deliverability, 6.5. Absent from the only panel that ranked providers, and the second panel places everyone within a point of everyone else. The corpus does not complain about placement. Scored at the midpoint, which is where the evidence genuinely sits.
Support, 7.0. A 4.5 customer service sub-score, above most of this category, moderated by reviewers describing difficulty reaching it and by phone access being a $149 feature.
Pricing value, 5.5. Unlimited sending from $19 is a genuinely clean model. Against it: no free plan, a Lite tier capped at 2,500 emails, no transactional pricing published, and a pricing page that renders no prices at all.
API and MCP, 6.0. A real transactional API with OAuth, statistics, resend and cross-vendor header compatibility. Held down hard by an SMTP relay with no published hostname or port, no numeric rate limits, no published transactional pricing and no MCP server.
Who should use Campaign Monitor, and who should not
Campaign Monitor is the right call for
Look elsewhere if
Third-party validation
| Source | Score | Volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.1 / 5 | 731 reviews | No sub-scores displayed. Product page campaign-monitor; the duplicate campaign-monitor-by-marigold listing reports the same figure. Collected 27 August 2026, confirmed 28 August 2026 by a third independent route. |
| Capterra | 4.5 / 5 | 506 reviews | Ease of use 4.5 (476 raters), customer service 4.5 (386), features 4.3 (417), value for money 4.3 (382). Product ID 76928, displayed as “Campaign Monitor by Marigold”. |
| Trustpilot | N/A | – | No verified listing found. |
| Seedlist panel | Absent | – | Not among the sixteen providers tested. The series has since been discontinued. |
| Second panel | 77.48% | 75,813 emails | Published but non-discriminating: it places five very different platforms within 1.2 points. See the deliverability section. |
The sub-score pattern is the useful reading, and it is the mirror image of iContact’s. Where iContact scores highest on service and lowest on features, Campaign Monitor scores its two highest marks on ease of use and service, both 4.5, with features and value for money both at 4.3. Nothing sags. This is a product that does a narrower job than its competitors and does it evenly well, which is exactly what twenty-two years of the same design philosophy produces. One caveat on independence: G2 and Capterra are no longer separate companies. G2 announced on 29 January 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice from Gartner. Read the 4.1 and the 4.5 as two readings from one house, not as two independent sources.
Top 3 alternatives
| Alternative | Our score | Take it instead if |
|---|---|---|
| MailerLite | 7.4 | You want the same simplicity and the same design quality with a real free plan, published prices, and a measured 89.8 percent inbox placement from the panel that actually ranked providers. |
| Brevo | 7.7 | You need a documented SMTP relay in the same account, billed on sends rather than contacts. The only platform in our marketing set that publishes one on an entry plan. |
| Constant Contact | 6.1 | You are choosing between the two legacy newsletter platforms for a non-profit. It has the website builder and a measured 91.7 percent placement; Campaign Monitor has the better editor. |
Continue reading
- Campaign Monitor pricing, the tiers and the Lite send cap
- Campaign Monitor API, the v3.3 surface and transactional endpoints
- Campaign Monitor SMTP settings
- Campaign Monitor integrations
- MailerLite review
- Constant Contact review
Frequently asked questions
How much does Campaign Monitor cost?
Lite is $11 a month and capped at 2,500 emails, Essentials is $19 a month with unlimited sending, Premier is $149 a month, and Enterprise is quoted. There is no free plan; the trial runs 30 days with 500 contacts and 500 emails. One caveat worth knowing: the pricing page itself renders no prices, because the figures are injected by JavaScript from a contact slider, so the numbers above come from Campaign Monitor’s knowledge base and its Capterra listing rather than from its pricing page.
Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp: which is better?
Campaign Monitor for the editor and for a team that cares how email looks; Mailchimp for breadth, integrations and a measured 89.5 percent inbox placement from the panel that ranked providers. Mailchimp also has a free plan and Campaign Monitor does not. Neither is an automation platform in the way ActiveCampaign or Customer.io are.
What are the best Campaign Monitor alternatives?
MailerLite at 7.4 for the same design-led simplicity with a real free plan and published prices. Brevo at 7.7 if you need a documented SMTP relay in the same account. Constant Contact at 6.1 if you are choosing between legacy newsletter platforms and want a website builder. All three are reviewed here with the same six categories.
Does Campaign Monitor have an API?
Yes, at https://api.createsend.com/api/v3.3/, authenticated with OAuth 2.0 or with your API key as the HTTP Basic username. The transactional surface includes send endpoints for smart and classic emails, statistics, message listing and a resend endpoint, and the documentation claims header compatibility with Mailgun, Mailjet, Mandrill, Postmark and SendGrid. Rate limits are returned as headers with a 429 but no numeric threshold is published, and there is no official MCP server.
What is createsend.com and is it Campaign Monitor?
Yes. createsend.com is Campaign Monitor’s original operational domain and it is still where the API lives, at api.createsend.com. If you are configuring an integration, that is the host you will be pointing at, not campaignmonitor.com.
Is Campaign Monitor part of Marigold?
Yes. The product is officially “Campaign Monitor by Marigold”. The chain runs: founded 2004 in Sydney, US$250 million from Insight Venture Partners in 2014, CM Group formed around it after the Sailthru and Liveclicker acquisitions in 2019, merged with Cheetah Digital in October 2021, and the whole group renamed Marigold in January 2023. Unusually for a product with that history, it is still being actively developed.
Does Campaign Monitor support transactional email?
Yes, as a built-in feature available from the Lite plan, in two variants it calls smart and classic transactional email. Classic transactional emails are documented as sent via API or SMTP. However, Campaign Monitor publishes no SMTP hostname, no port and no transactional pricing on any public page; those details are shown inside the application. If you need to evaluate the relay before buying, you cannot.
Changelog
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 27 August 2026 | First publication. 175 of 506 Capterra rows read across 7 pages. The absence of rendered prices on the pricing page confirmed on two passes, as was the absence of any SMTP hostname or port across four separate pages. Ownership chain sourced to the Insight Partners, Businesswire and Marigold announcements. Product activity confirmed from the 29 January 2026 release and the 6 August 2026 award. The second deliverability panel’s figure published together with the cross-platform comparison showing it does not discriminate. Search volumes measured for the United States; the measurable long tail on this brand is thin, with only four queries above 20 a month. |
This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
