MailerLite Review 2026: The Free Plan Shrank, the Product Did Not

TL;DR, Should you still use MailerLite in 2026?

Yes, if you pay for it. MailerLite is the cheapest credible email platform that still answers support tickets with a human, and the editor is the reason people stop shopping. Of the 200 most recent Capterra excerpts we read, at least 93 praise how easy it is to use and at least 49 praise support by name. That is not a marketing claim. It is what the queue looks like when you read it.

The free plan is a different story. It carried 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month for years. It fell to 500 during 2025. On June 16, 2026 it fell again, to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. The send cut is the harder of the two. It is a factor of 4.8, and almost nobody is talking about it. If your plan was to grow on the free tier, that plan is now about six weeks long.

Already paying? Stay, and check one thing. The Comfort plan is now capped at 10x your subscriber tier per month. The plan it replaced had no send cap at all. If you mail your list more than ten times a month, price the Power tier before your next renewal, not after.

The context you need before evaluating MailerLite in 2026

MailerLite is not independent, and has not been since June 2022. Vercom S.A., a Polish messaging group listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, bought it outright along with two sibling products. The company began as a Lithuanian web design agency in 2005, launched the email product in 2010, and has never had a head office. It still runs fully remote.

The siblings explain the biggest gap in the product. MailerLite publishes no SMTP relay and says so plainly. Transactional mail goes to MailerSend. List hygiene goes to MailerCheck. What stays inside MailerLite is the marketing half, and it reaches further than most tools at this price: a website and landing page builder, and native selling of digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions through Stripe, on which MailerLite takes no commission.

Now the fact that governs everything else. The publisher documents the change itself. Its free plan update FAQ states that on June 16, 2026 the subscriber limit was reduced from 500 to 250 and the sending limit from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails. The pricing page confirms it: up to 250 subscribers, and past that, sending locks.

Here is why that matters for anyone reading reviews of this product. The user reviews are behind. Of the 200 recent excerpts we read, 168 predate the June cut. Eight of them put a number on the free plan. Every one of those eight says 1,000 or 500. Not one says 250. The most recent of them is dated June 15, 2026, the day before the change, and it reads “the free tier is now down to 500.”

So the honest sentence is not that users report a drop to 500. The honest sentence is that the free tier fell to 500 during 2025 and to 250 on June 16, 2026, and the review corpus still describes the 500-subscriber era. If a comparison article you are reading quotes 1,000 free subscribers, it is not lying. It is old.

Snapshot

What MailerLite does well

The editor is why people stop shopping

Ease of use is the single loudest theme in the corpus. At least 93 of the 200 rendered review excerpts name it. Nothing else comes close. Capterra scores ease of use at 4.6/5 across 2,322 reviews. The phrasing repeats almost word for word across years and languages: clean, intuitive, drag and drop, beginner-friendly. Several reviewers arrive from Mailchimp and say the interface is the reason they stayed.

Support is answered by people, and quickly

At least 49 excerpts praise support by name, the second-largest cluster in the corpus. Capterra scores customer service at 4.8/5, higher than its own ease-of-use score, which is unusual for a low-cost tool. For comparison, Mailchimp scores 4.5/10 on support in our own rating, driven by billing tickets that go unanswered. This is the clearest gap between the two products, and it is the one buyers underweight.

Selling is built in, and MailerLite takes no cut

Digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions sell natively through Stripe. MailerLite charges no commission on those sales. Only Stripe’s own fee applies. Creator-focused competitors at this price either charge a platform fee or push you to a second tool. This is a real cost difference for anyone selling a course, a template pack or a paid tier, and it does not appear on a feature-comparison grid.

Authentication is generated for you

Add a domain and MailerLite writes the SPF record and hands you an exact-match DKIM CNAME. That covers the two protocols most senders get wrong. DMARC and BIMI stay yours to configure, which is standard across the category. Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require DMARC from anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day, so budget that step whatever platform you pick.

Automation runs on every tier, including the free one

The free plan includes 3 automation flows. Comfort raises it to 50. Power removes the ceiling. This is worth naming because the obvious comparison went the other way: Mailchimp removed automation from its free plan in June 2025. A welcome sequence on a 250-subscriber list is a small thing, but it is the difference between a mailing list and a funnel, and MailerLite still gives it away.

Where MailerLite falls short

The free plan was cut twice in twelve months, and the send cut is the harder one

Subscribers went 500 to 250, a factor of two. Sends went 12,000 to 2,500, a factor of 4.8. The ecosystem coverage discusses the first number and ignores the second. At 250 subscribers, 2,500 sends a month is ten campaigns. That is a demo allowance, not a starting tier. Past 250 subscribers, campaigns and automation both lock, so the free plan does not degrade gracefully. It stops.

Comfort gained a send cap it never used to have

The paid tiers were renamed in 2026. The rename brought a change most buyers will not read about: Comfort is now capped at 10x the ceiling of your subscriber tier per month. The plan it replaced had unlimited sending. If you mail a 5,000-subscriber list weekly, you are near that cap already. Power restores unlimited sending at $25/mo. Price the upgrade before you hit the wall.

Two independent 2026 panels disagree by fifteen points

This is the finding that moved our deliverability score. EmailToolTester puts MailerLite at 89.8 percent inbox placement in its most recent published round, with a three-round average of 94.41 percent and a consistency award. EmailDeliverabilityReport, testing over the 2026/7 period, puts it at 76.82 percent inbox, with 20.82 percent landing in spam and 2.36 percent lost outright, on 76,782 sends, scored 89 out of 100. We re-read that page on 27 August 2026 and the figure had moved; the panel states its data is updated monthly.

We are not averaging those, and there is a second reason not to. On the same day we checked four more platforms on that panel and they came back almost identical: Postmark 78.00 percent, Mailchimp 77.61 percent, Kit 77.52 percent and Campaign Monitor 77.48 percent, against MailerLite’s 76.82. A spread of 1.2 points between a premium transactional relay and a bulk marketing platform is not a measurement that separates providers. Read that panel as evidence that roughly a fifth of marketing mail lands in spam across the whole industry, and read EmailToolTester’s January 2024 round as the one that actually ranked anybody. What it means practically: MailerLite’s shared pools are good on average and variable in any given month. If inbox placement is the constraint your business runs on, test with your own list before you migrate, and do not take either number as a promise.

Automation stops where lifecycle marketing starts

At least 8 of the 200 excerpts name automation or segmentation depth as the limit, and the wording is consistent: fine for sequences, thin for branching. Reviewers coming from tag-based tools describe an adjustment. Reviewers wanting conditional splits, revenue attribution or product-behaviour triggers describe a ceiling. Klaviyo for ecommerce and ActiveCampaign for B2B are the honest answers if that is your requirement.

There is no SMTP, so transactional means a second product

MailerLite is broadcast-only. There is no SMTP endpoint and no transactional API on the account. Password resets, receipts and order confirmations go through MailerSend, a separate product with a separate bill that shares single sign-on. For a newsletter this is irrelevant. For a SaaS product it means two vendors, two reputations and two deliverability surfaces to monitor. Our SMTP settings tab documents the MailerSend route in full.

The compliance gate is real, and the publisher contradicts itself on notice

At least 11 of the 200 excerpts describe account friction: initial verification, business-site confirmation, a “Hold” safety feature that delays sending, account recovery, and in the hardest cases outright restriction. Four of the corpus’s eight one-star reviews are account-restriction stories. That is a signal, not a verdict, but it is a signal you will not find in a feature grid.

What MailerLite does publish, and almost nobody else does, is the numbers. Its Anti-Spam Policy names the thresholds that put a campaign at risk: spam complaints above 0.2 percent, bounces above 5 percent, unsubscribes above 1 percent, or an open rate below 3 percent. It names no forbidden industry, no banned vertical, no prohibited business category. That is the opposite of Mailchimp, which bans affiliate marketing outright. MailerLite bans sending behaviour, not trades. If your list is clean, your trade does not matter here. If your list is not, your trade will not save you.

Support has a bot in front of it, and live chat is gated

The same support people get praised 49 times and criticised for how you reach them. At least 11 excerpts complain about the AI chatbot standing between them and a human, about live chat being available only on paid plans, or about the absence of a phone channel. One reviewer puts it exactly: “dealing with ai before a live support person.” The humans are the best part of this product. The queue in front of them is not.

What real users actually say

We read the 200 most recent reviews on Capterra, pages 1 through 8, deduplicated on the exact record. Zero duplicates. The corpus covers roughly fourteen months: 75 from 2026, 125 from 2025, nothing older.

One number reframes all of the above. At least 52 of the 200 excerpts put nothing in the Cons field at all, or put praise there. “Nothing.” “N/A.” “I can’t think of anything.” So the real critical mass of this corpus is around 148 excerpts, not 200, and every complaint figure above is proportionally larger than it looks.

The mixed cluster, and it is support. Support is the second-most praised theme and the joint-fourth most criticised. Both are true, and they are not in conflict. The people are praised. The path to them is not: an AI bot answers first, live chat is a paid-plan feature, and there is no phone. The corpus contains reviewers who call support “unbelievably helpful” and reviewers who say it took days to reach anyone. Those are the same support team, reached through different doors.

The second mixed cluster is price. At least 22 excerpts call MailerLite good value. At least 13 call it expensive. The split is not opinion, it is list size. Under about 2,500 subscribers the value verdict dominates. Above it, the tier jumps start showing up in the Cons field, in phrasing like “can get quite pricy when subscriber numbers increase.”

Ratings breakdown

Six categories, scored 1 to 10. The overall is the unweighted arithmetic mean of the six, rounded to one decimal. The best alternative column names the platform we would recommend instead if that single criterion is what your business runs on.

Who should still use MailerLite

Third-party validation

All figures read on August 27, 2026.

The Trustpilot line is a gap, and we would rather show the gap than fill it. Four retrieval paths were attempted and all four refused: two direct fetches of the review page, and two automated page-parsing routes, one of which returned a CloudFront 403. A search snippet exists and mentions a four-star rating, but a snippet gives no decimal and no verified count. Under our first rule, no source means N/A, never an estimate dressed as a measurement.

The divergence framework we normally apply here does not fire. It is reserved for gaps wider than 1.5 points, of the kind Mailchimp shows between G2 at 4.3 and Trustpilot at 2.6. G2 and Capterra sit 0.1 apart on MailerLite. They are telling the same story.

One check we can run for free. The 200 recent excerpts we read break down as 158 five-star, 29 four-star, 5 three-star, zero two-star and 8 one-star. That averages 4.645, against 4.70 published across all 2,322. A gap of 0.06, and it points down. That is small, and we will not over-read it, but recent sentiment is very slightly below the lifetime average rather than above it. Note also the shape: zero two-star reviews. This corpus is bimodal. People are delighted or they are furious, with almost nothing in between, and the furious half is mostly account restriction.

Top 3 alternatives

• Brevo is the stronger free tier for email-first solo senders: 300 emails per day forever with no subscriber ceiling, plus a transactional API on the same account, which is exactly the thing MailerLite does not have.
• Kit is the answer if selling is the business. Tag-based subscribers and native commerce beat MailerLite for creator monetisation, at a higher price.
• Mailchimp is the comparison every MailerLite prospect runs. Mailchimp wins on integration breadth. MailerLite wins on price past 2,500 contacts, on support, on automation on the free tier, and on not billing you for unsubscribed contacts.

Full ranked coverage, including the underrated tier, lives on our MailerLite alternatives tab.

Continue reading

• MailerLite pricing 2026 – every tier, the 10x Comfort send cap, and what the rename changed.
• MailerLite SMTP settings – there are none, and this is the MailerSend route instead.
• MailerLite API and MCP – Marketing API v2, and where the MCP story actually stands.

Frequently asked questions

Is MailerLite free? There is a free plan, and it is small. Since June 16, 2026 it covers 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. It includes 3 automation flows, one landing page and no forced branding, which is more generous than most free tiers on features and much less generous on volume. Past 250 subscribers, campaigns and automations lock.

What is the MailerLite free plan in 2026? 250 subscribers, 2,500 monthly emails. It was 500 and 12,000 until June 16, 2026, and 1,000 and 12,000 before 2025. If a review or comparison quotes 1,000 free subscribers, it predates both cuts. The publisher documents the current numbers on its free plan update FAQ.

Is MailerLite good? We rate it 7.4/10. G2 users give it 4.6/5 and Capterra users 4.7/5. It is good at the thing it is for: newsletters and marketing campaigns for lists under about 5,000, run by someone who does not want to become an email specialist. It is not good for transactional mail, branching automation or free-tier growth.

What is MailerLite used for? Newsletters, marketing campaigns and automated sequences, plus landing pages, a basic website builder, signup forms, and selling digital products or paid subscriptions through Stripe. It is not used for transactional mail. For the full product definition, see our MailerLite hub.

Is MailerLite better than Mailchimp? On price, support and billing practice, yes. MailerLite starts at $12/mo against Mailchimp’s $13/mo, and the gap widens sharply as the list grows. MailerLite does not bill for unsubscribed contacts. It keeps automation on the free tier that Mailchimp removed in June 2025. Mailchimp wins on integration breadth and brand recognition. Our scores: MailerLite 7.4, Mailchimp 6.3.

What are the best MailerLite alternatives? Brevo for a usable free tier and transactional on the same account. Kit for creators who sell. Mailchimp if integration breadth matters more than cost. Full list on the alternatives tab.

How good is MailerLite deliverability? Contested. EmailToolTester’s most recent published round puts it at 89.8 percent inbox placement, with a three-round average of 94.41 percent. EmailDeliverabilityReport, re-read on 27 August 2026, puts it at 76.82 percent with 20.82 percent in spam. Both are independent, but only the first one separates providers: on the same day, that second panel returned 78.00 percent for Postmark, 77.61 for Mailchimp, 77.52 for Kit and 77.48 for Campaign Monitor, all within about a point of MailerLite. Test with your own list before committing.

What is MailerLite? A Lithuanian-born email marketing platform, launched in 2010 and owned by Warsaw-listed Vercom S.A. since June 2022. Broadcast only, no SMTP. Full background on the MailerLite hub.

Changelog

• August 27, 2026: Review published. Ratings set at 7.4/10 overall. G2 and Capterra read the same day. 200 recent Capterra excerpts clustered and counted. Trustpilot recorded as N/A after four failed retrieval attempts. Ban tolerance left unrated pending an editorial decision on threshold-based versus category-based justification.
• June 16, 2026: MailerLite cut the free plan from 500 to 250 subscribers and from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails.
• 2026: Paid tiers renamed to Comfort and Power. Comfort gained a 10x send cap relative to subscriber tier; the plan it replaced had unlimited sending.
• 2025: Free plan cut from 1,000 to 500 subscribers.
• June 2022: Vercom S.A. acquired MailerLite, MailerSend and MailerCheck.
• 2010: MailerLite launched out of a Lithuanian web design agency founded in 2005.