GetResponse Review 2026: 28 Years In, Still Hard to Use
The Best: Runs its own networks, AS198881 and AS46469, and delivers 90.9 percent
The Worst: Capterra ease 4.0 and service 4.0, the lowest sub-scores on the site
TL;DR, Should you still use GetResponse in 2026?
GetResponse has one advantage nothing else in this comparison group can claim, and it is not a feature. It runs its own networks. AS198881 in Poland and AS46469 in the United States belong to GetResponse, so it owns the IP space its mail leaves from rather than renting it. That shows up where it should: 90.9 percent inbox placement in the most recent independent round, third best of the panel.
It is also the hardest and least well-supported platform we have measured. Capterra scores ease of use at 4.0 and customer service at 4.0. Both are the lowest sub-scores we have recorded for any platform on this site, below ActiveCampaign’s 4.2 on ease and well below Omnisend’s 4.6 on service. And the low-star tail is the harshest in our set: roughly 14 one and two-star reviews in 117.
One structural cap deserves naming before anything else. The Starter plan allows exactly one automation workflow. On a platform that has sold automation since it was an autoresponder script in 1998, the entry tier gives you a single flow.
The context you need before evaluating GetResponse in 2026
GetResponse is the oldest product in this comparison group by some distance. It began in 1998 as an autoresponder script that Simon Grabowski wrote in Gdansk for his own business. It has never taken outside investment. It traded as Implix until 1 October 2014 and converted to a joint-stock company in February 2022 to run an employee share plan.
Twenty-eight years of independence has produced a specific shape: a very wide product, a very deep feature list, and an interface that has accumulated all of it. That is the tension this review is about, and the sub-scores measure it precisely.
Now the part almost nobody writes about, and the reason to take this platform seriously. GetResponse operates its own autonomous systems on both sides of the Atlantic, AS198881 in Poland and AS46469 in the United States. Most email platforms in this price band send from IP space rented inside somebody else’s cloud, which means their sender reputation is partly hostage to neighbours they do not choose. GetResponse owns its ranges. For a category where deliverability is the whole product and almost nobody can show you the plumbing, that is a real and checkable differentiator.
The distinctive product feature is equally unusual: a webinar room built into the email platform rather than integrated from outside. Up to 100 live attendees on the Creator plan, and webinars you can charge for. If your business is teaching, this collapses two subscriptions into one. Nothing else in this comparison group does it at all.
Two commercial facts to carry into the pricing tab. The free account stays usable past the first 14 days with limited features, which is more generous than a trial and less generous than a real free tier. And transactional email sits behind the Enterprise MAX tier as a paid add-on, so there is no SMTP relay for anyone below it. Starter begins at EUR 16/mo at 1,000 contacts, with unlimited sends, and that one-workflow automation cap.
Snapshot
| Product | GetResponse (founded 1998 in Gdansk, traded as Implix until October 2014, never took outside investment) |
| Category | Email marketing platform with built-in webinars |
| Best for | Creators who run paid webinars from the same tool that sends their email |
| Not for | Anyone who wants a pleasant interface, anyone needing more than one automation on the entry plan, anyone building AI-agent workflows |
| Starting price 2026 | Starter from EUR 16/mo at 1,000 contacts, with unlimited sends |
| Free plan | Free account stays usable past the first 14 days, with limited features |
| Automation cap | Starter allows exactly one automation workflow |
| Webinars | Built into the platform. Up to 100 live attendees on Creator, and you can charge for them. |
| Network | Runs its own autonomous systems: AS198881 (Poland) and AS46469 (US) |
| API | REST |
| MCP support | None. No official server, and no community route we could verify. |
| SMTP relay | None. Transactional sits behind the Enterprise MAX tier as a paid add-on. |
| Native integrations | Around 170, the smallest catalogue in this comparison group |
| G2 rating | 4.3 / 5 (1,141 reviews, read August 27, 2026) |
| Capterra rating | 4.2 / 5 (524 reviews, read August 27, 2026). Ease of use 4.0, customer service 4.0. |
| Trustpilot rating | N/A. Source unreachable. |
| Deliverability | 90.9 percent in the most recent published round, around 85.6 percent averaged across rounds |
What GetResponse does well
It owns the network its mail leaves from
AS198881 and AS46469 are GetResponse’s own autonomous systems, one in Poland and one in the United States. This is genuinely rare at this price. Most platforms in this group send from address space they rent, which means their sender reputation is shaped in part by whoever else is in the same range. GetResponse controls its own ranges, its own reverse DNS and its own remediation when a range gets flagged. It is the least visible thing on this page and arguably the most valuable.
The placement number is good, and it is measured
EmailToolTester puts GetResponse at 90.9 percent in the most recent published round, third of the panel behind ActiveCampaign at 94.2 and Constant Contact at 91.7, and ahead of MailerLite, Mailchimp, Brevo and, by a wide margin, Omnisend at 75.1. The round-to-round average sits around 85.6 percent, so the recent round is a good one rather than a plateau, but the direction is right and the infrastructure story above explains why.
Paid webinars are in the box, and nothing else here has them
Up to 100 live attendees on the Creator plan, run from the platform rather than through an integration, and you can charge for attendance. For a coach, a course seller or a consultant who currently pays for an email tool and a webinar tool separately, that is one subscription removed and one integration that cannot break. No other platform in this comparison group offers it at all.
Twenty-eight years has produced a very complete product
Email, automation, landing pages, websites, funnels, webinars, forms and a conversion funnel builder, in one account. Reviewers name the breadth constantly: “combines powerful tools in one place,” “one-stop shop, efficient management,” “a complete digital marketing platform,” “all-in-one software.” Landing pages are included on all paid plans, which several reviewers single out as unusual.
One reviewer flags something no competitor’s corpus mentions
A three-star reviewer writes that GetResponse is “very accessible to blind users.” That is a single data point and we are not turning it into a claim about the product’s accessibility conformance. We are surfacing it because in roughly a thousand review excerpts read across eight platforms, it is the only time screen-reader accessibility appeared at all, and for anyone for whom that is the deciding constraint, a single credible mention is more than the rest of the category offers.
Where GetResponse falls short
Both usability sub-scores are the lowest we have recorded anywhere
Capterra scores ease of use at 4.0 and customer service at 4.0. Set against every other platform we have profiled:
| Platform | Ease of use | Customer service |
| Flodesk | 4.7 | 4.4 |
| MailerLite | 4.6 | 4.8 |
| Brevo | 4.6 | 4.5 |
| Omnisend | 4.6 | 4.6 |
| Klaviyo | 4.5 | 4.3 |
| Constant Contact | 4.3 | 4.2 |
| ActiveCampaign | 4.2 | 4.4 |
| GetResponse | 4.0 | 4.0 |
Being last on one axis is a positioning choice. Being last on both is a pattern. And the corpus agrees: “very difficult to set up and use,” “poor user interface,” “at first, it was very confusing to use,” “ci si perde in un bicchier d’acqua” (you get lost in a glass of water).
Support divides almost evenly, and the bad half is hostile
This is not a platform where support is quietly mediocre. Roughly 7 excerpts praise it warmly, including “10/10 for 24*7 customer support” and “fast response, very attentive service.” Roughly 9 criticise it, and several are not complaints about response time:
- “Lack of support, false non-payment accusations” – one star
- “Extreme onvriendelijke klantenservice” (extremely unfriendly customer service), two stars
- “Sistema de pago automático ineficiente. Atención al” cliente, one star
- “Que no son comprensivos, tuvimos un inconveniente” (they are not understanding), two stars
- “Not to good customer service, that has” – four stars
Note what the harshest ones have in common: two of the seven one-star reviews in this corpus are billing disputes, not product complaints. That is a pattern worth carrying into a renewal decision.
The entry plan allows one automation workflow
Not one automation with limited steps. One workflow. On a product that started life as an autoresponder in 1998 and sells automation as a core capability, the Starter tier gives you a single flow, and you upgrade to get a second. Roughly 10 excerpts criticise the automation independently of the cap: “automations half-baked,” “very primitive and limited automation workflows,” “limited automation and segmentation,” “automation less robust.”
There is no MCP server, and that gap is now conspicuous
Of the eight platforms we have profiled, five ship official agent tooling: Klaviyo, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend and Flodesk. Constant Contact has community routes. GetResponse has neither. Add the smallest integration catalogue in the group at around 170, no SMTP relay, and transactional locked behind the MAX tier, and the developer story is the weakest here. Our API tab has the detail.
Price is the most repeated complaint, and it is the familiar shape
Roughly 14 excerpts complain about cost, almost always tied to list growth: “pricing increases with contact list growth,” “pricing gets pricier as database grows,” “quite expensive for bulk audience over” a threshold, “price unaffordable.” Others call it good value, particularly older reviews, and a few explicitly praise it as the cheapest of its comparison set. Both are consistent: it is affordable to start and it scales like everything else that bills on contacts.
The review corpus is the oldest we have read, and that matters here more than usual
Of the 125 rows we read across five pages, only around a dozen are dated 2026. The bulk sits in 2018 to 2023, with reviews going back to 2018 on page four. For comparison, the entire MailerLite corpus we read covered fourteen months.
We are flagging this rather than hiding it because it cuts both ways and a reader deserves to weigh it. The criticisms of the interface may describe a version that has since been rebuilt. The praise for the price may quote a plan that no longer exists. What survives the age problem is what we could measure today: the two 4.0 sub-scores, the 90.9 percent placement figure, the one-workflow cap and the absence of an MCP server. Those are the load-bearing facts in this review, and none of them come from the corpus.
Account risk: not rated
The corpus shows no suspension theme of the kind we measured at Brevo. What it does show, twice inside the one-star tail, is disputed billing: a user accused of non-payment they say was false, and another describing an inefficient automatic payment system. That is a commercial risk rather than a compliance one, and it belongs in a different column of your assessment.
What real users actually say
We read 5 pages of Capterra reviews, 125 rendered rows, and deduplicated on the exact record, leaving roughly 117 distinct. A substantial minority are in German, Spanish, Italian, French or Dutch, and were read in the original.
Praised most often
- Ease of use – roughly 33 of 117 excerpts, which sits oddly against the 4.0 sub-score
- All-in-one breadth: email, landing pages, funnels, webinars – named constantly
- Support, when it lands well – roughly 7
- Affordability, especially in older reviews
- Templates and delivery reliability
Complained about most often
- Price rising with the contact list – roughly 14
- Automation limited or half-baked – roughly 10, before counting the Starter one-workflow cap
- Support, when it lands badly – roughly 9, including two billing disputes at one star
- Customisation and design rigidity – roughly 9
- Speed, lag and bugs – roughly 5
- Deliverability – only 2, both from reviews dated 2021 to 2023
The distribution is the harshest in our set: roughly 14 one and two-star reviews in 117, about 12 percent, against 9 percent at ActiveCampaign and 2 percent at Klaviyo. It is also the only platform in our set where Capterra scores lower than G2, at 4.2 against 4.3. Every other platform we have read runs the other way. That is a small thing, and it points the same direction as everything else on this page.
The mixed cluster is support, and it is a genuine split rather than a date pivot. Seven people praise it warmly and nine criticise it, and unlike Flodesk, where the criticism stopped dead in 2023, both halves here run across the whole corpus. Some customers get “10/10 for 24*7 customer support.” Others get accused of not paying a bill they say they paid. The sub-score of 4.0 is what an even split looks like when it is averaged.
The second cluster is ease of use itself, and it is the sharpest contradiction in our whole review set. Roughly 33 excerpts praise how easy the product is. The Capterra sub-score is 4.0, the lowest we have recorded. Both are real, and the resolution is in the corpus dates: the praise skews older and the platform has grown more features every year since. The people who learned it in 2019 find it easy. The 4.0 is what people arriving now are scoring.
Ratings breakdown
Six categories, scored 1 to 10. The overall is the unweighted arithmetic mean, rounded to one decimal.
| Category | Rating | Best alternative for this |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of use Interface, onboarding, daily friction | 6.5 | MailerLite or Omnisend, both at Capterra 4.6 |
| Automation depth Branching, triggers, and the Starter cap | 5.5 | ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo, both at 9.5 |
| Deliverability Inbox placement, and who owns the network | 8.0 | ActiveCampaign at 94.2 percent |
| Support Response time, quality, billing disputes | 5.5 | MailerLite at Capterra 4.8, the best in the category |
| Pricing value Entry cost, unlimited sends, the one-workflow cap | 6.0 | Brevo at 8.5, which meters sends rather than contacts |
| API and MCP Developer experience, agent support, integrations | 5.0 | Anything else here. Lowest API score on the site. |
| Overall | 6.1 | Level with Constant Contact, just below Mailchimp at 6.3 |
Who should still use GetResponse
Recommended if
This is the case, and it is the only one where GetResponse is the obvious answer. Up to 100 live attendees on Creator, run natively, and you can charge for them. No other platform in this comparison group has webinars at all, so the alternative is a second subscription and an integration that can break on the day it matters.
GetResponse runs AS198881 and AS46469 itself. Most competitors at this price rent address space inside somebody else’s cloud and inherit whatever the neighbours do to it. The 90.9 percent placement figure is downstream of that ownership, and it is checkable.
Email, landing pages, websites, funnels, forms and webinars in one account, with landing pages on every paid plan. Twenty-eight years of accumulation is a complete product. It is also why the ease sub-score is 4.0, and you should go in knowing that trade.
Who should look elsewhere
Starter allows exactly one workflow. A welcome sequence and an abandoned-cart flow is already two. If automation is why you are shopping, price the tier that actually delivers it, or go to ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo, both of which we rate 9.5 on automation depth.
Capterra ease of use 4.0 and customer service 4.0, both the lowest we have recorded on this site, with roughly 12 percent of the corpus at one or two stars. MailerLite scores 4.6 and 4.8 on the same two axes and costs less.
No MCP server, official or community. The smallest integration catalogue in this group at around 170. No SMTP relay, with transactional locked behind the Enterprise MAX tier. Brevo gives you all three for less.
Only about a dozen of the 125 recent reviews we read are dated 2026, and the bulk run from 2018 to 2023. If you are comparing platforms on user testimony, GetResponse is the one where the testimony is oldest. Take the trial and judge the current build yourself.
GetResponse strictly prohibits messages that “endorse a political party, candidate, elected official,” any purchased or rented list, adult material, and content promoting its own competitors. That last one is unusual and worth noting. Enforcement runs to immediate termination or suspension, with or without notice, and a deleted paid account has 120 days to be restored at the discretion of GetResponse. The prohibited list is short enough to read in full.
Third-party validation
All figures read on August 27, 2026.
| Source | Score | Reviews |
| G2 | 4.3 / 5 | 1,141 |
| Capterra | 4.2 / 5 | 524 |
| Trustpilot | N/A | Not retrieved |
The gap is 0.1, far under the 1.5 point threshold at which we stop to reconcile a divergence. But the direction is worth a sentence, because it is unique in our set. GetResponse is the only platform we have profiled where Capterra scores lower than G2. Every other one runs the other way, usually by a tenth or two. It is a small signal on its own and it points the same way as the two 4.0 sub-scores.
Those sub-scores are the number to carry away from this page. 4.0 for ease of use and 4.0 for customer service are the lowest figures in either column across all eight platforms we have measured. A 4.2 headline built on two 4.0 sub-scores is a product people tolerate rather than enjoy.
Top 3 alternatives
- Brevo is the straight upgrade on almost every axis this review criticises: an official MCP server, a real SMTP relay, a permanent free tier, billing on sends rather than contacts, and Capterra sub-scores of 4.6 and 4.5. We rate it 7.7 against GetResponse’s 6.1.
- ActiveCampaign is the answer if automation is the reason you were looking. It is also hard to use, but it is hard in exchange for genuine depth, and its measured inbox placement is the best on the panel at 94.2 percent.
- Mailchimp is the comparison prospects run, at 70 searches a month for getresponse vs mailchimp. Mailchimp is easier, has a free plan and a far larger integration catalogue. GetResponse delivers better and includes webinars.
Full ranked coverage on the GetResponse alternatives tab, which draws 170 searches a month, the same as getresponse pricing.
Continue reading
- GetResponse pricing 2026 – the ladder, the one-workflow Starter cap, and what the free account keeps after 14 days.
- GetResponse SMTP settings – transactional sits behind the MAX tier, and this is what to use instead.
- GetResponse API – the REST surface, and the absent MCP story.
Frequently asked questions
How much does GetResponse cost? Starter begins at EUR 16/mo at 1,000 contacts, with unlimited sends, which is unusual and genuinely good. The catch to price in first: Starter allows exactly one automation workflow. Full ladder on our pricing tab.
What are the best GetResponse alternatives? Brevo if you want the same breadth done better and cheaper, with SMTP and an MCP server. ActiveCampaign if automation depth is the point. MailerLite if you want the friendliest tool in the category. Full list on the alternatives tab.
Is GetResponse better than Mailchimp? On deliverability yes, 90.9 against 89.5 percent in the same panel, and it includes webinars Mailchimp does not have. On almost everything else no: Mailchimp is far easier, has a free plan, a much bigger integration catalogue and no one-workflow cap. Our scores are close on purpose: GetResponse 6.1, Mailchimp 6.3.
What is GetResponse? A Polish email marketing platform founded in 1998 in Gdansk as an autoresponder script, traded as Implix until October 2014, and never funded from outside. It covers email, automation, landing pages, funnels and built-in paid webinars, and it runs its own networks on both sides of the Atlantic. Full background on the GetResponse hub.
Is GetResponse free? There is a free account that stays usable past the first 14 days with limited features. It is more than a trial and less than a real free tier. If a permanent working free plan is the requirement, Brevo gives 300 emails a day with unlimited contacts and SMTP included.
Is GetResponse good? We rate it 6.1/10. The public panels put it at 4.3/5 on G2 and 4.2/5 on Capterra, the lowest pair in our set. The two numbers that decide it are Capterra’s sub-scores: 4.0 for ease of use and 4.0 for customer service, both the lowest we have recorded for any platform.
Changelog
- August 27, 2026: Review published. Rated 6.1/10. G2 and Capterra read the same day. Roughly 117 distinct Capterra reviews across 5 pages, the oldest corpus in our set. Deliverability from the EmailToolTester panel. Trustpilot recorded as N/A. Ban tolerance left unrated.
- February 2022: Converted to a joint-stock company to run an employee share plan.
- 1 October 2014: The company stopped trading as Implix and took the GetResponse name.
- 1998: Founded in Gdansk by Simon Grabowski as an autoresponder script for his own business. Never took outside investment.
This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
