The Best Email Sequence Tools, Compared by Job

Customer.io is the deepest event-driven builder in this group. A workflow starts from an event, an attribute change or a segment entry, then runs through delays, branches, A/B splits and exit goals, and the same canvas can send push, SMS and in-app messages besides email. That depth pays off when your onboarding depends on product behavior: nudge the people who connected a data source but never invited a teammate, and say nothing to those who did.

The cost is setup. Someone has to send clean events and attributes from your backend, and the builder rewards people who think in segments and conditions. Pricing is by profiles: Customer.io's pricing page lists Essentials from $100 a month with 1M email sends included, and its selector reads $145 at 10,000 profiles, $235 at 20,000 and $505 at 50,000 and above. There is no free plan, but eligible early-stage companies that raised under $10M can apply to the Startup Program for 12 months free. Premium starts at $1,000 a month billed yearly.

Choose it if you have an engineer who will own the event feed and your journeys branch a lot. Skip it if you want three emails live this afternoon. Head-to-head reading: Customer.io vs Loops and Customer.io vs Drip.

Loops keeps the builder small on purpose: a trigger (an event you send, a contact added, a property change), then timers, a few branches and the emails themselves. A founder can wire a welcome series and a trial-ending nudge in an afternoon, and the same account sends one-off product announcements and transactional mail. The trade-off is a narrower canvas, so a journey with many nested conditions will feel cramped compared with Customer.io.

Per Loops' pricing page, the free plan allows up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days to your 1,000 newest contacts, adds a small Powered by Loops footer, and sends up to 10 emails per second. Paid pricing scales with subscribers: $99 a month at 9,998 subscribers and $249 a month at 50,000 on its dated slider readout, with transactional sends to users outside your audience included and no per-seat charge.

Choose it if you are a small product team that wants onboarding mail without an events project. Skip it if you need multi-channel journeys or heavy account-level logic. See Loops vs Drip and Loops alternatives.

Userlist treats a company as a first-class record next to the person, which matters when one account has an owner, three admins and a dozen invited teammates who should not all get the same onboarding. You can segment on company properties, message the person who has not finished setup while skipping teammates who have, and run in-app messages from the same tool as email. For B2B SaaS where seats and accounts drive revenue, that model saves a lot of workaround logic.

On Userlist's pricing page, Basic is $149 a month up to 10,000 users and adds $10 per additional 1,000 users; Professional is $349 a month up to 10,000 users, adds A/B split testing, conversion goals and advanced workflow features, and costs $12 per additional 1,000. Billing is by user rather than by contact, so a long tail of dormant trial signups counts toward the tier. Enterprise is custom.

Choose it if your customers are teams and your sequences must know which company a user belongs to. Skip it if you sell to individuals and only need linear drips. Compare it directly with Userlist vs Customer.io, or read the B2B SaaS page.

Encharge sells behavior-based flows to SaaS marketers who would rather not write code. Its visual flow builder runs on events and segments, and its integration list covers the things SaaS onboarding leans on: Segment, Stripe, Chargebee, HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify and Zapier. A typical build is a trial flow that waits for an activation event, branches on plan, and exits the moment Stripe reports a paid subscription.

Plans are priced by subscribers. Encharge's pricing page shows Growth at $99 a month ($79 a month on yearly billing) for up to 2,000 subscribers, with unlimited flows and team members and monthly sends capped at ten times your subscriber limit. The CRM connections and transactional email sit one level up, on Premium, which lifts that send multiple to twelve and costs $159 a month ($129 yearly). The page lists no free plan.

Choose it if a marketer, not an engineer, will own flows and you need Stripe or a CRM wired in. Skip it if you want a free tier or per-send pricing. Read Encharge vs Drip for the closest head-to-head on this site.

ActiveCampaign pairs an automation builder with a CRM, so a sequence can create a deal, assign a task to a rep, or move a contact between pipeline stages as well as send mail. It also tracks site visits, which lets you start a nurture sequence from page activity. That makes it a fit for lead nurture where marketing hands warm contacts to people who follow up by phone or email.

Read the plan table closely before you build. ActiveCampaign's pricing page shows starting prices at 1,000 contacts on annual billing: Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79 and Enterprise $145. Starter allows 1 user and 5 actions per automation, which is tight for an onboarding flow with several branches; Plus is the tier that lists standard segmentation and landing pages, and Pro adds advanced segmentation. Prices climb with contact count, so recheck the selector at your own list size.

Choose it if sales follow-up and nurture sit in the same system. Skip it if your triggers come from product events and you do not want a CRM. Reading: ActiveCampaign vs Drip and Brevo vs ActiveCampaign.

Brevo is the budget route into automation, and it is unusual in pricing mainly by monthly email volume rather than by contact count. Welcome series, lead nurture and re-engagement flows are all within its automation builder, and the same account can send SMS and run a small CRM. For a small list that sends a modest number of emails, the bill stays low even when the contact database is large.

The limits to read are on Brevo's pricing page. The free plan allows 300 email sends a day and storage for up to 100,000 contacts, but only 2,000 contacts in marketing automation. Starter is $9 a month and Standard is $18 a month, each starting at 5,000 emails a month with no daily sending limit; Standard is the plan that lists automation, A/B testing and advanced reports. Professional is $499 a month, covering 150,000 to 10 million monthly sends and 10 user seats.

Choose it if you send few emails to a big list or want email and SMS under one login. Skip it if the sequences depend on rich product events. Brevo is compared head-to-head in Brevo vs ActiveCampaign, and Brevo alternatives covers moving off it.

HubSpot uses the word sequence for two different things, and the split affects what you buy. Automated marketing email runs through workflows in Marketing Hub, triggered by form fills, lifecycle changes, list membership or CRM property changes. One-to-one sales follow-up, where a rep enrolls a contact and the series stops on reply, is a Sales Hub feature, and the Sales Hub pricing page lists sequences on the Professional tier, which starts at $90 per seat per month and carries a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee.

For marketing automation, the Marketing Hub pricing page offers free tools, a Starter tier from $7, and Professional at $800 a month; prices are quoted per seat and contact tier, so the number you pay depends on how big your database is. The payoff for that spend is that every email, deal and ticket sits on one contact record.

Choose it if sales and marketing already share HubSpot's CRM and a rep-triggered sequence matters as much as a campaign. Skip it if you only need onboarding mail: the platform is far larger than that job. Compare it with HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is the pick for a creator, course seller or newsletter writer who wants a welcome sequence, a lead-magnet delivery series and a few tag-based automations without thinking about a data model. Subscribers are tagged and segmented, and a Visual Automation moves them along. It is a weak fit for product-event onboarding, because the triggers revolve around forms, tags and purchases rather than what someone did inside an app.

The pricing catch is where sequences start. Kit's pricing page offers a free plan up to 10,000 subscribers with landing pages, forms and broadcasts, but lists Visual Automations and email sequences from the Creator plan upward. Creator is $33 a month at 1,000 subscribers on yearly billing and $116 a month at 10,000; Pro is $66 a month at 1,000 and adds Subscriber Signals, unlimited users and deliverability reporting. Paid plans have a 14-day trial with no card.

Choose it if your list is people who follow you and your sequences are teaching or launch emails. Skip it if you need account-level or usage-based triggers. See email tools for newsletters and ConvertKit vs Drip.

Mailchimp's automation lives in its Customer Journey builder, which suits a small business with a store or a service and a handful of flows: a welcome series, a post-purchase thank-you, a win-back for people who stopped opening. Templates and an audience you may already have make the first journey quick. It is less comfortable for product-event onboarding or anything with long conditional chains.

The money question is how the bill grows. Mailchimp's pricing page has a free plan with up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month (250 a day), then Standard from $20 a month at the default 500-contact selector. Its bands then read $100 a month for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts, $135 for 5,001 to 10,000 and $230 for 10,001 to 15,000, with monthly send allowances that rise with each band. Going from 500 contacts to the 2,501 to 5,000 band is a five-fold price jump, so model the list you will have in a year.

Choose it if you already have your audience in Mailchimp and want simple journeys. Skip it if you expect fast list growth on a tight budget. Moving away is covered in Mailchimp alternatives.

Instantly is built around volume: you connect as many sending accounts as you like, warm-up is included, and a sequence is a stack of steps with delays, variants and reply handling. Price scales with two caps rather than seats: emails per month and uploaded contacts. Its lead database and its CRM are separate products, so the outreach plan alone gets you the sending engine and not the prospects.

Instantly's pricing page lists Growth at $47 a month (5,000 emails, 1,000 uploaded contacts), Hypergrowth at $97 (125,000 emails, 25,000 uploaded contacts) and Light Speed at $358 (500,000 emails, 100,000 uploaded contacts), each with unlimited email accounts and warm-up on the first two. Enterprise is a custom quote with a private deliverability network. The free trial covers 250 uploaded contacts and 1,000 emails.

Choose it if you plan to run many mailboxes and want one flat monthly number. Skip it if you need contact data in the same tool: budget for sourcing leads elsewhere.

Lemlist is the cold tool that leans into personalization: sequences can mix an email with other touches, and its upper plan is explicitly multichannel. Expect to spend more of your time on the copy and the merge fields than on mailbox plumbing, and note that the Email plan is capped by sends while the Multichannel plan is not.

Lemlist's pricing page shows the Email plan at $69 a month ($55 a month on yearly billing) with 50,000 emails a month and unlimited users and senders, and the Multichannel plan at $109 a month ($87 yearly) with unlimited emails and messages and 5 senders per user. Enterprise is a custom quote, and there is a 14-day trial but no free plan.

Choose it if your edge is personalization and a touch beyond email. Skip it if you only want the cheapest flat-rate sending engine.

Apollo combines a prospect database with sequences, so you can filter for the accounts you want, enrich the contacts and enroll them in a multi-step sequence from one place. That removes the hand-off between a data vendor and a sending tool, which is where list quality and mapping errors tend to creep in. The catch is that pricing is per seat and tied to usage credits, so a team that exports many contacts will meet the credit ceiling before the sending limit.

Apollo's pricing page lists a free plan with 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly. Paid plans are priced per seat on annual billing: Basic $49 a month with 30,000 credits per seat per year, Professional $79 with 48,000, and Organization $119 with 72,000 and a minimum of three seats. Three Basic seats come to 3 x $49 = $147 a month; three Organization seats come to 3 x $119 = $357 a month. The page does not expose a monthly-billing price.

Choose it if you need contact data and sequences together. Skip it if you already own a clean list and want the cheapest way to send it. Reading on the sales side: sales email sequences.

Saleshandy is a flat-rate sequence engine with unlimited connected mailboxes on every plan, so the plan limits that matter are monthly emails and the number of prospects in live sequences. That makes cost easy to forecast: multiply prospects by steps, find the first plan whose send cap clears it, and pay that figure regardless of how many mailboxes you attach. It suits agencies and small teams that grow volume by adding inboxes.

Saleshandy's pricing page lists Starter at $41 a month ($34 a month on annual billing, $408 a year) for 6,000 emails and 1 user; Pro at $99 ($76 annually, $912 a year) for 100,000 emails and 10 users; and Scale at $189 ($149 annually, $1,788 a year) for 200,000 emails and unlimited users. There is a 7-day trial with no card.

Choose it if you want predictable flat pricing with many inboxes. Skip it if you need a bundled lead database.

Mailshake is the simplest of the five: a campaign builder, reply tracking and unlimited uploaded contacts, with the limit being how many sending addresses a plan includes. That is the number to read first, because a one-address plan caps your daily volume however many sends it lists. It is priced per purchased user, which suits a solo seller or a pair rather than a large team.

Mailshake's pricing page lists Starter at $29 a month ($25 on annual billing) with 1 email address and 1,500 sends a month; a middle plan at $49 ($45 annually) with 2 email addresses and unlimited sends; and a top plan at $99 ($85 annually) with 10 email addresses and unlimited sends. All three allow unlimited uploaded contacts.

Choose it if you are one or two people sending a measured volume. Skip it if you plan to scale across dozens of inboxes.

Smartlead is aimed at agencies and high-volume senders. Its pricing page lists four plans on monthly billing: Base at $39, Pro at $94, Unlimited Smart at $174 and Unlimited Prime at $379 per month, with yearly billing taking 17% off (the yearly toggle reads $32, $78, $144 and $315 per month). Base covers 2,000 contacts and 6,000 email sends a month, Pro 30,000 contacts and 90,000 sends, Smart unlimited contacts and 150,000 sends, and Prime unlimited contacts and 500,000 sends with three SmartServers included. There is no free plan, only a free trial. Each plan also carries a verified-email allowance (2,000, 30,000, 50,000 and 170,000), and its feature table lists a warm-up pool, API and webhooks, client workspaces, a private-infrastructure option and bring-your-own mailbox connections that appear on the larger tiers. Read the table against the number of clients you serve, because workspace and infrastructure features are what separate its tiers, not the sequence builder.

Woodpecker meters usage in contacted prospects, and its pricing page shows 35 € a month at 500 contacted prospects (VAT not included), and that price already covers 8,000 emails a month, unlimited email accounts and unlimited team members; the page advertises 140 € saved on annual billing. It is also explicit about how prospects are counted: adding the same prospect to five campaigns counts as five, and if you hit the limit the campaign stops emailing new prospects until you upgrade or the allowance renews on your billing date. Plans do not upgrade themselves. Its campaigns can branch on conditions, and LinkedIn steps are a separately priced add-on per connected account. The trial runs 14 days or 100 cold emails, whichever ends first.

Reply.io splits its offer into email-volume plans and a Multichannel plan, priced per user. Its pricing page shows Email Volume from $49 per user per month (1,000 active contacts a month, unlimited emails) and Multichannel from $89 per user per month (10 mailboxes, unlimited active contacts), both billed annually; the AI SDR product starts at $500 a month, and there is a 14-day free trial. The email plans meter by active contacts, which the page defines as a unique contact who can receive a first-step email and unlimited follow-ups in the month, so a long sequence does not use up extra allowance. Included mailboxes follow your active-contact count under a fair-usage rule. Extra mailboxes, LinkedIn automation, calls and SMS, AI and live-data credits, and email validation are all separate add-ons, and it connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper and Close.

Snov.io bundles a prospect finder, email verifier, warm-up and outreach in one plan, so three counters matter on its pricing page, where the monthly-billing prices are $39 for Starter (1,000 credits, 5,000 recipients) and $99 for Pro (5,000 credits, 25,000 recipients), with a Custom Ultra tier sold through its sales team. The counters are credits (spent on prospect search, email search and verification), recipients (you are charged one recipient the first time you contact a lead in a billing period, and follow-ups to that lead in the same period are free), and the number of mailboxes you can warm up at once. Each plan lists unlimited monthly emails and unlimited team seats; LinkedIn account slots are bought separately.

Klaviyo reads store data directly, so a flow can branch on the product in the cart, the order count or the predicted gap to the next purchase, and revenue is attributed to each flow. It also sends SMS from the same builder. The downside is that the profile-based bill rises quickly as your list grows, so a store with a long tail of cold subscribers should prune before it pays for them.

Klaviyo's pricing page offers a free plan with up to 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month. The Email plan reads $20 a month at 500 profiles, $30 at 1,000, $100 at 5,000 and $150 at 10,000. Those figures are the email-only readouts; check the page before assuming SMS is included.

Choose it if store events drive your revenue and you want per-flow attribution. Skip it if you sell software; see Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign for the cross-over case.

Omnisend puts email, SMS and web push into one flow canvas, so an abandoned-cart sequence can start with a push notification, fall back to email and finish with a text. Pricing is by contacts with a monthly email allowance, and SMS is billed by country and volume. It is a friendlier first step than Klaviyo for a store with a few hundred customers.

Omnisend's pricing page shows a free plan with 250 contacts, 500 emails and 500 web push notifications a month. Standard covers 500 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, shown at $11.20 a month under a 30%-off offer for paying three months upfront ($33.60 today against $48.00 total); Pro covers 2,500 contacts with unlimited emails, with SMS from $0.007 per message, shown at $41.30 a month under the same offer. Treat those as promotional rates and check the full-price line.

Choose it if email, SMS and push belong in one flow and your list is small. Skip it if you need Klaviyo's depth of predictive data.

Drip prices by the number of active people and not by sends, with unlimited email on the tiers it publishes, which makes cost steady for stores that mail often. Its workflow builder is event-driven and general enough that some SaaS teams use it for trials as well, though the defaults lean toward shoppers. It is the easiest of the three to forecast: the slider is a staircase, and each step is a fixed price.

Drip's pricing page reads $39 a month for up to 2,500 people, $154 for a 10,000-person list, $369 for 25,000 and $699 for 50,000, where the button switches to Book a demo and the plan lists 600,000 sends. It lists up to 50 workflows on the lower tiers, and a 14-day trial with no card, with no ongoing free plan.

Choose it if you mail a store list often and want one price per list size. Skip it if you want a free tier. Related reading: Loops vs Drip and ConvertKit vs Drip.

GetResponse's pricing page lists Starter at $19 a month with a welcome series and exactly one automation workflow, Marketer at $59 with unlimited workflows, abandoned-cart recovery and sales funnels, and Creator at $69 with webinars, a website builder and a course creator. Annual billing lowers those to $15.58, $48.38 and $56.58 a month. The one-workflow limit on Starter is the detail that decides whether it can run a real sequence program.

Keap is a CRM for service businesses with email automation attached, and its pricing page sells one platform plan rather than tiers, starting at $299 a month for 1,500 contacts and 2 users billed monthly. Think of it as the pick for a coaching or consulting business that wants appointments, invoices and follow-up sequences on a single contact record, and not as a product-onboarding tool.

Ortto, formerly Autopilot, combines a customer-data layer with a visual journey canvas that can span email, SMS and in-app messages. We give no price for it, because its pricing page does not give a figure that we could confirm. It is worth a demo if you want a CDP and journeys in one place.