The short version: Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Beehiiv are the two tools I point creators towards first in 2026, because they're built for people who sell things off the back of a list, not just people who send newsletters. Flodesk suits creators with big lists and tight budgets, Substack suits creators who want distribution more than ownership, and Mailchimp suits almost nobody who calls themselves a creator anymore.
Why "best" depends on what you're selling
Every list I get sent for this topic reads the same: five tools, a comparison table, a vague recommendation to "pick what suits you." That's not useful when you're a creator trying to decide where to put your subscriber list before it gets to 5,000 people and moving it becomes a proper headache.
Here's the bit that gets skipped. The tool you need depends entirely on how you make money. A creator selling a £2,000 cohort course needs sequences, tagging, and behavioural automation. A creator selling ad space in a newsletter needs a platform with a built-in ad network and clean open rate reporting. A creator running a £5 a month paid Substack needs almost none of that, they need reliable sending and a paywall. Three different jobs, three different answers, and most "best of" posts hand everyone the same tool.
Kit (ConvertKit): the one built for people who sell things
ConvertKit rebranded to Kit in late 2023 and the product has kept improving since. It's still my first recommendation for any creator whose email list feeds a product, a course, coaching, or affiliate income.
The free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with basic broadcasts, which is generous for a starting point. Once you need automations, tagging by interest, and paid subscriptions, the Creator plan starts around £25 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers and scales up from there. The visual automation builder is the reason I keep recommending it: you can build "if this person clicks the link about the course, tag them and start a five-email sales sequence" without touching code.
I compared this against Mailchimp a while back in Mailchimp vs ConvertKit, and the gap has only widened. Kit's deliverability team also publishes actual data on send reputation, which almost nobody else does.
Beehiiv: the newsletter-first platform with a monetisation engine baked in
Beehiiv came out of the team that built Morning Brew, and it shows. The free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers, and their paid tiers (roughly £34 to £84 a month depending on list size) add referral programmes, a built-in ad network, and boost features that let other newsletters pay to recommend you to their subscribers.
This is the platform I now recommend to any creator whose main income is sponsorships rather than product sales. The analytics are built around what advertisers care about (open rate, click rate, growth rate week on week) rather than what a course seller cares about.
Here's the uncomfortable bit nobody mentions in the glossy Beehiiv reviews: the free plan is a loss leader that pulls you into their ad network, and once your list is big enough to attract sponsors through that network, Beehiiv takes a cut of the deal. It's not hidden exactly, it's in the terms, but creators rarely clock it until their first sponsored send goes through and they see the percentage. Read the ad network terms before you build your monetisation plan around it.
Flodesk: flat pricing for creators with big lists and tight margins
Flodesk charges a flat fee, currently around £38 a month on the annual plan, regardless of how many subscribers you have. If you're a creator sitting at 30,000 or 50,000 subscribers, every other tool on this list would charge you £150 to £400 a month at that size. Flodesk doesn't.
The trade-off is automation depth. It's beautiful for design (templates look like something a design agency built, not a marketer) but the automation logic is simpler than Kit's or ActiveCampaign's. Fine for a weekly newsletter with a product link at the bottom. Not fine if you need branching logic based on five different tags.
Substack: distribution over ownership, and that trade-off is real
Substack remains the easiest way to start a paid newsletter with zero setup. No monthly fee to send, no design decisions, and a discovery feed that occasionally puts your writing in front of people who've never heard of you. For a writer starting from nothing, that discovery layer is worth more than any automation feature.
But Substack takes 10% of your paid subscription revenue on top of Stripe's processing fees. On a newsletter earning £3,000 a month from paid subscribers, that's £300 a month gone before you've paid for anything else. Compare that to Ghost, which charges a flat hosting fee (from around £9 a month for a small list) and takes nothing from your subscription revenue. If your paid newsletter is earning real money, that 10% adds up fast enough to justify the migration hassle.
MailerLite: the cheapest proper option for creators just starting out
If you've got under 1,000 subscribers and no revenue yet, MailerLite is where I tell most new creators to start. Plans begin around £8 to £10 a month, the automation builder is simple enough to learn in an afternoon, and you're not locked into a platform-specific ecosystem the way you are with Substack. I've moved three clients off MailerLite and onto Kit once their list crossed 2,000 subscribers and they needed heavier automation, and the export process took under an hour each time.
Mailchimp: why I stopped recommending it to creators specifically
Mailchimp still runs a huge share of small business email, and I've written before about the best email marketing platform for small businesses, where it still gets a fair hearing. But for creators specifically, it's fallen behind. Pricing jumps hard once you cross a few thousand contacts, the automation builder feels built for e-commerce brands rather than personality-led newsletters, and the deliverability reputation has taken hits over the last two years from being such a mass-market target for spam filters. If you're already on Mailchimp and it's working, don't panic and migrate for the sake of it. If you're choosing fresh in 2026, there are better options, and I've laid a few out in the honest guide to Mailchimp alternatives after testing them all.
The number nobody wants to talk about: your list is smaller than you think
Here's the thing every creator wants to avoid hearing. That 12,000 subscriber list you're proud of is not 12,000 people who want to hear from you. Every list I've audited for a client has had between 30% and 50% of subscribers who haven't opened a single email in six months. They're not customers, they're dead weight you're paying to store and email.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
I worked with a wedding photographer building her coaching side-business who had 8,400 subscribers on her list and was convinced growth was her problem. We pulled the engagement report. 3,600 of those subscribers hadn't opened anything in over a year. We removed them, her open rate went from 14% to 31% almost overnight (nothing about her content changed, only the denominator did), and her next email sequence sold three times as many spots on her coaching waitlist as the previous one. Same content, smaller list, better result. Most creators never run this exercise because a shrinking subscriber count feels like failure, even when it's the opposite.
Do this once a quarter: sort by "last opened," remove anyone past 90 to 180 days of silence (send one re-engagement email first, give people a chance), and watch what happens to your actual numbers.
What I'd pick, based on what you do
- Selling a course, coaching, or a digital product: Kit
- Sponsorship and ad-supported newsletter: Beehiiv
- Big list, tight budget, mostly weekly sends: Flodesk
- Paid subscription writing, want built-in discovery: Substack
- Paid subscription writing, want to keep all the revenue: Ghost
- Just starting, under 1,000 subscribers, no budget yet: MailerLite
None of these decisions need to be permanent. I've moved list exports between platforms more times than I can count for clients, and it's rarely the disaster people expect. The bigger mistake is picking nothing and leaving your list sitting inside an Instagram DM folder or a spreadsheet, which I still see more often than you'd believe from creators with six-figure followings.
Where AI fits into this, and where it doesn't
Every one of these platforms has bolted on some kind of AI subject line generator or content assistant over the past two years. Some of it's useful. Kit's AI writing assistant is decent for a first draft of a subject line you'll still rewrite. None of it replaces knowing your audience well enough to write the email yourself. I've written about the tools that earn a place in my own daily workflow in the AI tools I use every single day to run my business, and email AI features sit low on that list, useful but not the reason to pick one platform over another.
If you're weighing up more than the email tool itself, and want a wider view of which paid tools are worth the money versus which ones are subscription fatigue in disguise, I covered that ground in the email marketing tools worth paying for in 2026.
Related reading: one to one ai coaching for business owners.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free email marketing tool for creators in 2026?
Kit's free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with broadcasts and basic landing pages, making it the most generous free option for a creator starting from zero. Beehiiv's free plan (up to 2,500 subscribers) is the better pick if sponsorships are your goal from day one.
Should creators pick Substack or Beehiiv?
Pick Substack if discovery and simplicity matter more than keeping all your revenue, since it takes a 10% cut of paid subscriptions. Pick Beehiiv if you want stronger analytics, referral growth tools, and access to a built-in advertiser network, though check the ad network's revenue share terms before relying on it.
How often should creators clean their email list?
Once a quarter. Send a re-engagement email to anyone who hasn't opened in 90 to 180 days, then remove those who still don't respond. Most creator lists carry 30% to 50% dead weight, and removing it typically improves open rates and deliverability within one send cycle.
Is it worth switching from Mailchimp as a creator in 2026?
If your list is growing and Mailchimp's pricing tiers are starting to hurt, yes, it's worth comparing options, since Kit and Beehiiv are both built more specifically around creator monetisation. If Mailchimp is cheap for your current list size and working fine, there's no urgency to move for the sake of it.
Related reading: The AI Subscription Stack: What I Pay For (and What I Cancelled) in 2026 and AI Phone Receptionists for Small Business: What They Cost and Where They Quietly Lose You Money.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to email marketing.
