Constant Contact has been around since 1995, making it one of the veterans of the industry. It’s old enough for me to remember using it in my first marketing job, so that’s saying something!
It’s especially well known among small businesses and nonprofits, and over the years, it has expanded well beyond newsletters with tools for events, social media, SMS and more.
MailerLite is the younger, leaner alternative. Its appeal lies in keeping things simple, modern and relatively affordable, while still packing in features such as automations, landing pages, websites and tools for selling digital products.
Given Constant Contact’s head start, you’d think it would have the advantage in terms of market share. But our Email Detective data shows this isn’t the case at all. From the thousands of real-world emails we’ve observed in users’ inboxes, MailerLite appears to have over three times as many users as Constant Contact:
So why are more users opting for MailerLite? And are there still any good reasons to choose Constant Contact over MailerLite, especially when you consider its much higher price tag?
To find out, I tested MailerLite vs Constant Contact across the areas that matter most day to day, including ease of use, templates, automation, list management, reporting, and pricing.
And while Constant Contact has a few areas where it genuinely stands out, MailerLite proves surprisingly difficult to beat.
Ease of Use
If you’re a small team that just wants to get campaigns out without hunting through menus, ease of use is probably top on your list.
MailerLite is one of the smoothest email marketing tools I’ve tested. In fact, it has consistently won our Best Email Marketing Tool for Ease of Use award over the past few years.
The interface is clean and modern, and navigation is logical. New users get a straightforward setup checklist, which is great for beginners. Creating a campaign is also uncomplicated: choose the campaign type, add the content, select your recipients, then send or schedule it. There aren’t many unnecessary steps in between.
Constant Contact isn’t difficult to use either. Its main sections are generally easy to reach, and the email editor itself is fairly intuitive.
But the experience feels less polished. The interface can look a little dated, and as Constant Contact has expanded into more areas, some features have become harder to find. Automations are a good example. They’re there, but you may have to do a little exploring to find what you’re looking for.
I’d also like to see a stronger onboarding tour, particularly given how heavily Constant Contact targets small businesses and beginners.
Oh, it’s also worth noting that Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan. You just get a 14 day free trial, forcing you to make your mind up about it pretty quickly! MailerLite lets you sign up with a free plan, meaning you can take your time before making a decision.
Winner: MailerLite. It feels cleaner, faster and more intuitive from the moment you log in.
Score: MailerLite – 1, Constant Contact – 0
Design and Templates
Templates are one area where Constant Contact has a clear advantage – at least in terms of numbers.
MailerLite offers more than 120 email templates, covering newsletters, promotions, ecommerce, events, nonprofits and plenty of other use cases. There are also simpler layouts aimed at creators who prefer emails that feel more personal and text-heavy.
The designs are generally polished and modern, but the catch is that the full template gallery is only available to paying customers and during your free trial. Free users can still build attractive emails using basic layouts and the drag-and-drop editor, but they get less of the ready-made experience.
Fortunately, MailerLite’s editor is excellent. There’s a broad selection of content blocks, including video, quizzes, surveys, testimonials and ecommerce content. You can save blocks for reuse, apply global styling, and show or hide content based on the recipient.
MailerLite also has an AI writing assistant for generating or improving email copy and subject lines, while its Custom HTML editor includes AI assistance for generating code.
Constant Contact, meanwhile, offers more than 700 templates. That sounds like an easy victory, although quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. While some of the templates look polished and modern, others feel noticeably older.
However, I did appreciate the fact that its editor is straightforward, and includes useful blocks for things such as products, polls and event promotion.
Constant Contact also offers some handy design shortcuts. Its branding tools can pull colors, logos and other visual elements from your website, and its AI tools can help produce email content and designs. (MailerLite offers something similar through Brand Styles, so in this respect, they’re pretty evenly matched.)
Ultimately, Constant Contact offers far more templates, while MailerLite gives us the editing experience and design consistency we prefer.
Winner: Draw. Constant Contact wins on quantity, while MailerLite wins on editing experience and modern designs.
Score: MailerLite – 2, Constant Contact – 1
List Management
List management isn’t the most exciting feature to compare, but it’s one of the easiest places for an email marketing tool to become messy or expensive.
MailerLite organizes subscribers using Groups and Segments. Groups work like static lists, where you decide who belongs to them based on filters and criteria.
Segments are dynamic. Subscribers automatically move in or out depending on whether they meet the rules you’ve defined.
You can create segments using subscriber information, campaign activity and engagement, and MailerLite provides several ready-made options based on things such as geography, inactivity and time zone.
One subscriber can belong to multiple groups and segments without being counted several times from a billing perspective. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts are also excluded from your active subscriber count.
There’s even a dedicated area for identifying inactive subscribers, which makes regular list cleanup easier.
However, one limitation is its custom fields types, which are relatively basic. Collecting standardized data such as a subscriber’s industry or state can be less elegant than we data-obsessed marketers might like.
Constant Contact offers lists, tags and segments. Segmentation can use contact details, email engagement, ecommerce activity, list membership and more.
It also provides useful predefined engagement categories, helping you quickly distinguish highly engaged contacts from less active ones.
However, there are some limitations. The Lite plan only allows one custom segment, which won’t be enough for businesses doing much targeted email marketing.
Constant Contact’s approach to contact-based pricing can also be frustrating. If your contact count pushes you into a higher billing tier, deleting contacts won’t return to the cheaper tier. Instead, you’ll be paying for the highest amount of contacts you’ve ever had – which feels very unfair.
Both tools support personalization and conditional content, although some of Constant Contact’s more advanced dynamic content functionality requires its higher-priced plans.
Winner: MailerLite. Its subscriber structure is simpler, segmentation is more generous, and list cleanup is easier.
Score: MailerLite – 3, Constant Contact – 1
Email Automations
MailerLite really begins to pull ahead when we get to automation. It offers a good selection of automation templates covering common workflows such as welcome sequences, re-engagement campaigns, product promotions, abandoned carts and webinars.
You can also build workflows from scratch using its visual editor. Triggers can be based on subscriber actions and group membership, and workflows can automatically move subscribers between groups. Higher tiers also let you start an automation with multiple triggers.
MailerLite also lets you A/B test subject lines and emails within automations, something Constant Contact doesn’t offer. And while it isn’t an automation powerhouse on the level of ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, for the average small business, creator or ecommerce store, there’s a lot you can do.
Constant Contact handles straightforward automations such as welcome messages, birthday emails and emails triggered when someone joins a list.
The problem is that the Lite plan is quite restricted. More advanced custom paths, ecommerce sequences and multi-channel journeys require higher tiers.
And even after upgrading, its workflow builder offers fewer conditions and actions than MailerLite. Actions are restricted to things like sending an email or SMS, or updating lists and tags. And you can’t easily combine multiple starting points in one automation.
Winner: MailerLite. It offers noticeably more automation flexibility, particularly when you consider the price – more on that later!
Score: MailerLite – 4, Constant Contact – 1
Registration Forms
Both platforms offer several ways to collect new subscribers. MailerLite provides embedded forms, pop-ups, signup buttons and unsubscribe forms. They’re simple to create and customize, and they connect neatly to groups and automations.
A particularly useful feature is the ability to A/B test pop-up forms, letting you compare designs or messaging rather than simply guessing what converts best.
MailerLite’s form builder isn’t perfect. As I mentioned before, custom fields are fairly basic, and I feel like some options could be easier to configure.
Constant Contact actually offers a good variety of signup methods, including pop-ups, flyouts, banners and inline forms. “Text to Join” and Facebook Lead Ads offer a couple of additional ways to grow your list.
But the forms themselves are less flexible. There are no real form templates or built-in A/B testing features, and the available fields and customization options are fairly limited. Consent collection for GDPR purposes could also be handled more elegantly, which is something to keep in mind if you’re targeting subscribers in the EU.
Winner: MailerLite. Constant Contact offers plenty of ways to capture contacts, but MailerLite provides the better form-building and optimization experience.
Score: MailerLite – 5, Constant Contact – 1
Landing Pages
So far, MailerLite has a considerable lead on Constant Contact. And the difference becomes even clearer when we move from signup forms to landing pages.
MailerLite has one of the stronger landing page builders I’ve seen in an email marketing platform. It uses a similar drag-and-drop interface to the email editor, so there’s virtually no learning curve. Pages can include forms, surveys, countdown timers, products, events, and downloadable lead magnets.
You can also edit SEO settings and A/B test page variants. And MailerLite goes beyond landing pages by offering a proper website builder, letting you create multi-page sites with navigation.
The free plan even lets you publish one website and one landing page, although you’ll need a paid plan if you want to connect your own domain.
Constant Contact also lets you build signup and custom landing pages, but the editor is simpler. There are fewer design options, fewer blocks and less overall flexibility.
It’s perfectly adequate for a straightforward lead-capture page. For businesses that plan to use landing pages regularly as part of their marketing, though, MailerLite gives you much more room to grow.
Winner: MailerLite.
Score: MailerLite – 6, Constant Contact – 1
Spam and Design Testing
MailerLite lets you preview emails for desktop and mobile devices, but there’s no built-in spam test and no comprehensive email-client preview system showing how your message will look across different versions of Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.
Constant Contact offers more pre-send checking. Its error-checking tools can highlight things such as missing links and unfinished content, and you get more flexibility when previewing personalized content.
There’s also the option of purchasing the Inbox Preview add-on, which allows you to preview your emails across various email clients via Litmus. This is useful for making sure your emails render correctly in as many devices as possible.
Winner: Constant Contact. Neither replaces a dedicated spam and email rendering test, but Constant Contact gives you a little more before you hit “Send”, giving it the (much-needed!) advantage in this round.
Score: MailerLite – 6, Constant Contact – 2
Reporting
When it comes to analytics, MailerLite covers the fundamentals well: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, ecommerce activity, automation performance and more.
Its reporting has also become more sophisticated. Custom reports let you combine and filter campaign data, while click maps make it easier to see which parts of your email are attracting attention. You can also connect Google Analytics for additional website-level tracking.
There are still some limitations, though. It’s not possible to filter out bot clicks or Apple Mail Privacy opens, which means you might not be getting an accurate picture of how your campaigns are doing.
Reporting happens to be one of Constant Contact’s stronger areas. It provides a polished overview of campaign performance with open and click trends, engagement information, device data, subject line reporting and campaign comparisons.
You can also activate bot click and open filtering to remove “fake” metrics. Its industry benchmarks are useful too, particularly for beginners who want some context around their results.
More advanced reporting functionality is reserved for higher tiers, but overall there’s plenty of useful data.
Winner: Constant Contact. Its reporting is a little deeper and more polished overall.
Score: MailerLite – 6, Constant Contact – 3
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are messages such as receipts, password resets and shipping notifications. They serve a different purpose from newsletters and often need dedicated infrastructure.
MailerLite itself is focused on marketing email, but its sister product MailerSend provides a dedicated transactional email service.
That gives businesses a relatively straightforward way to keep transactional and marketing emails within the same wider ecosystem, even though they remain separate products.
Constant Contact is primarily designed around marketing campaigns, events and promotions.
If you need transactional sending, you’ll normally use the notification system built into your ecommerce platform or connect another transactional email service.
Winner: MailerLite. MailerSend provides a clearer route if you need both types of email.
Score: MailerLite – 7, Constant Contact – 3
AI Features
AI is increasingly appearing inside email marketing tools, although I’d be cautious about choosing a platform purely because it has the longest list of AI features.
MailerLite offers an AI writing assistant that can help generate and improve email copy and subject lines. Its Custom HTML editor also includes AI-assisted coding, which is potentially much more useful for technically minded users than yet another generic copy generator.
MailerLite also supports MCP, opening up interesting possibilities for connecting the platform to AI assistants, and creating more advanced workflows outside the standard interface. This means an AI assistant can create and schedule campaigns, manage subscribers and segments, and even create draft automations, all from natural-language instructions.
Constant Contact goes broader with its built-in AI functionality. Its AI tools can help create email content, subject lines and other marketing copy. It has also integrated AI more heavily into its design and branding workflow, including tools that can help turn prompts and existing brand assets into campaign content.
Constant Contact also makes use of MCP, but its native implementation is currently more focused on analyzing campaign performance. Its separate ChatGPT and Claude connectors can create and edit emails and social posts, while Zapier MCP adds actions such as managing contacts and lists. However, these don’t yet provide the same breadth of direct, native account control as MailerLite.
Winner: Constant Contact currently incorporates AI into more areas of its platform, while MailerLite’s MCP capabilities are stronger – meaning this round is a tie.
Score: MailerLite – 8, Constant Contact – 4
Extra Marketing and Monetization Tools
This is where Constant Contact finally has the chance to turn the tables, with its standout event marketing features.
You can create an event, sell multiple ticket types, and check in attendees from within Constant Contact. Physical, virtual and hybrid events are supported, making the feature useful for workshops, classes, fundraisers, conferences and similar events.
However, there are some limitations. Event pages aren’t especially sophisticated, and Constant Contact charges fees on paid ticket sales. Still, it’s an unusually complete event-management system to find inside an email marketing platform.
Constant Contact also branches out into other channels with tools for areas such as social media publishing, surveys, advertising and SMS in supported markets.
MailerLite’s extra tools are aimed at creators and very small businesses. You can sell digital products directly through the platform using Stripe and manage bookings for consultations, appointments and webinars. MailerLite doesn’t charge any commissions, so sellers only have to pay the standard Stripe processing fee.
They have also been developing additional monetization features around subscriptions, memberships and donations, although these haven’t been released yet.
Winner: Constant Contact. Its event tools give it a genuine point of difference that few email marketing platforms can match. That said, if your business revolves around selling downloads or appointments, MailerLite can be very handy.
Score: MailerLite – 8, Constant Contact – 5
Integrations
You might expect Constant Contact to have the larger ecosystem. At the time of this review, however, MailerLite listed more than 140 integrations, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, WordPress, Canva, Stripe and MailerCheck.
Zapier adds thousands more possible connections, and MCP provides another route for connecting MailerLite to compatible AI tools.
Constant Contact’s marketplace listed around 67 direct integrations when I checked, including important business tools such as Salesforce, Zoho, Xero, WordPress and Microsoft 365. Like with MailerLite, Zapier can fill many of the gaps.
Of course, the number of integrations matters much less than whether your specific apps are supported. Constant Contact also has some specialist connections that could be particularly useful to nonprofit, CRM-heavy or accounting-focused organizations.
Winner: Based on the current native selection, MailerLite comes out on top for integrations.
Score: MailerLite – 8, Constant Contact – 5
Support
This is an interesting comparison because the platform offering the most support channels isn’t necessarily the one we prefer dealing with.
MailerLite provides email and live chat support depending on the plan you’re using, alongside a comprehensive knowledge base and MailerLite Academy. Our experiences with its support team have generally been positive. Responses tend to be quick and helpful, and we’ve often encountered the same small group of support agents.
The main drawbacks are that there’s no phone support and free-plan customers only receive direct support for a limited period.
Constant Contact offers more channels, including phone support, live chat, a knowledge base and a community. Phone support is a real advantage if you’d rather talk through a problem with someone.
However, our experiences have been less consistent. Availability can vary, and getting a clear answer hasn’t always been as straightforward as we’d like.
So Constant Contact gives you more ways to contact support, but MailerLite has provided the more consistently positive experience for us.
Winner: MailerLite.
Score: MailerLite – 9, Constant Contact – 5
MailerLite vs Constant Contact Pricing
Pricing is where the difference between these platforms becomes really difficult to ignore.
At first glance, things look pretty even: both start at around $12 per month for 500 subscribers.
But their entry-level plans aren’t equivalent. MailerLite’s paid plan includes most of the core functionality that small businesses are likely to need, while Constant Contact’s Lite plan places stricter limits on features such as segmentation and automation.
And the price gap widens as your list grows:
| Subscribers | MailerLite | Constant Contact |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $12/month | $12/month |
| 1,000 | $39/month | $30/month |
| 2,500 | $33/month | $50/month |
| 5,000 | $49/month | $80/month |
| 10,000 | $89/month | $120/month |
Prices can change and may vary according to billing period, plan changes or promotions.
MailerLite also has a Free Forever plan for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails.
That limit is much less generous than MailerLite’s free plan used to be, but it still gives new users a proper way to run email campaigns without paying immediately. The most obvious restriction is the lack of access to the complete template gallery.
Constant Contact doesn’t offer an equivalent permanent free tier for the full platform. Instead, you can try it through a limited free trial.
It has also introduced Starter Email, a separate stripped-down email product costing around $6 per month. This includes unlimited contacts, but caps sends at 2,500 per month, making it potentially interesting if you have a large database that you email very infrequently. However, its feature set is much more limited than what you’d find on Constant Contact’s standard plans.
And let’s not forget Constant Contact’s questionable billing policy of charging you for the highest number of contacts you’ve ever had, even if you delete contacts!
Winner: MailerLite. It gives you considerably more functionality for your money, particularly as your subscriber count grows.
Score: MailerLite – 10, Constant Contact – 5
MailerLite vs Constant Contact: Our Verdict
After testing both platforms, MailerLite is our overall winner – by a landslide! It’s easier to use, provides stronger automation, gives you better landing pages and website-building tools, has more flexible list management, and currently lists more native integrations.
Its creator-focused features for selling digital products and managing bookings are useful extras too.
And then there’s pricing. Once your list grows beyond the smallest tiers, MailerLite can cost considerably less while placing fewer restrictions on many of the features businesses actually use.
Constant Contact has more email templates, stronger reporting, and one of the better integrated event-management systems we’ve seen in an email marketing platform. If you regularly sell event tickets or manage registrations, those tools alone could justify choosing it.
But for most businesses, the advantages stack up heavily in MailerLite’s favor. Constant Contact may have been doing email marketing for much longer, but longevity alone isn’t enough to win this comparison.