The short version: Stop comparing feature lists and start comparing what happens to your list, your automations, and your deliverability on day one, day ten, and day forty of the switch. Test with a seed list before you migrate a single real subscriber, and price the new platform at the list size you’ll have in a year, not today. Most migration pain comes from rebuilding automations by hand, not from picking the “wrong” tool.
More on this here: What Makes an Interactive Marketing Builder Worth Using.
Why the feature comparison chart is the wrong place to start
Every email platform’s comparison page tells you the same story: unlimited automations, A/B testing, dynamic content, AI subject lines, deep segmentation. Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Brevo, GetResponse and Kit (the platform formerly known as ConvertKit) all tick nearly identical boxes on paper. So the chart doesn’t help you decide anything. It just makes you feel thorough while you avoid the actual decision.
The real question is narrower: what job does this platform need to do that your current one can’t? If you’re an ecommerce brand and your list runs 40,000 contacts, the job is behavioural triggers tied to purchase data, which is where Klaviyo earns its higher price. If you’re a coach with 3,000 contacts and three evergreen sequences, the job is simple, reliable automation at a low price, and ActiveCampaign’s mid-tier or Kit will do it without the ecommerce overhead you’re paying for and not using. Naming the specific job before you look at a single platform is the same discipline behind a jobs to be done approach to planning, and it works just as well here as it does for content.
The five things that decide it
Once you know the job, there are five practical filters that matter more than anything on a features page.
- Deliverability track record on shared vs dedicated sending infrastructure, not just the platform’s own claims about inbox placement.
- How cleanly your tags, custom fields, and engagement history import, because most platforms will happily import contacts and quietly drop the data that made your segmentation work.
- Automation logic complexity, meaning can it replicate your if/then branches, wait steps, and goal-based exits, or will you be flattening three-year-old sequences into something simpler and worse.
- Pricing at your future list size, not your current one, since almost every platform bills in bands and the jump from 2,500 to 5,000 contacts can add £30 to £80 a month depending on provider.
- Support response time when something breaks, which you can only really test by emailing their support with a real technical question before you sign up, not after.
My own switch, and what nobody mentioned beforehand
In 2019 I moved a list of just over 38,000 subscribers from AWeber to ActiveCampaign. On paper it was an upgrade: better automation logic, proper conditional splits, and a CRM layer I needed at the time. What I didn’t plan for was sending reputation. New sending domain, new IPs, and my open rate dropped from around 24 percent to 9 percent within the first week of the new platform going live, because inbox providers didn’t yet trust the new sending infrastructure with my volume. It took roughly six weeks of consistent, smaller-batch sending before deliverability climbed back to where it had been.
Nobody selling me the platform mentioned this. The sales call was all about features. The actual cost of switching wasn’t the £70 a month price difference, it was three weeks of underperforming campaigns and about 40 hours of my own unpaid time rebuilding automations that AWeber’s export tool had flattened into single emails instead of full sequences. That’s the uncomfortable bit most comparisons skip: the platform isn’t what makes migration expensive, your own historic automation logic is, and no vendor’s migration tool rebuilds branching logic for you. You do that by hand, every time, regardless of which two platforms you’re moving between.
It’s the same lesson I learned the hard way with automation generally: I wrote about a hands-free tool that promised to do the heavy lifting for me in my Week 17 cold email automation failure, and the pattern repeats here. Anything that promises a “” migration where you don’t have to touch your logic is selling you a smaller version of the truth.
The step-by-step test before you commit
This is the process I now use for every client who’s weighing up a switch, and it takes about two weeks before you cancel anything.
- Step 1: Export everything from your current platform first, contacts, tags, custom fields, and at minimum 90 days of engagement history, even if you’re not switching yet. This is your insurance.
- Step 2: Build a seed list of test addresses across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and your own business domain, and add them to the new platform before you touch your real subscribers.
- Step 3: Send test campaigns from the new platform to that seed list for at least 10 days, checking inbox placement, not just “sent” status, because sent and delivered to inbox are very different things.
- Step 4: Rebuild your three highest-revenue automations manually inside the new platform and run them alongside the old ones for one full cycle before cancelling anything.
- Step 5: Recalculate total monthly cost at the list size you expect in 12 months, factoring in growth, because the platform that’s cheapest today is often not cheapest at your next pricing threshold.
The pricing trap that catches almost everyone
Email platforms don’t price like most software. They price by list size, and the bands aren’t gentle. Mailchimp’s paid tiers step up roughly every 500 to 1,000 contacts. ActiveCampaign’s jump from 1,000 to 2,500 contacts on its Plus plan can add £40 to £60 a month. Klaviyo prices by both contacts and monthly send volume, which means a highly engaged, frequently emailed list can cost more than a larger, quieter one on paper. Brevo is the outlier, pricing mainly by email volume rather than list size, which suits people with big lists who don’t email often.
The mistake I see constantly is people comparing today’s price across platforms and ignoring where their list will sit in a year. If you’re growing at 500 subscribers a month, the platform that’s £10 cheaper now might be £60 more expensive by month nine. Run the numbers forward before you sign, the same way you’d want a genuine business case rather than a headline price before signing off on any tool. That’s the same evaluation discipline I’ve written about when judging whether a marketing dashboard is worth paying for, and it applies just as directly to email platforms.
What happens to your automations, honestly
This is the part that catches even experienced marketers off guard. Automation logic doesn’t transfer between platforms cleanly, ever, no matter what the migration page promises. A three-step conditional split in ActiveCampaign doesn’t map one-to-one onto Klaviyo’s flow builder. A goal-based automation in Kit doesn’t translate directly into Drip’s workflow logic. Every platform structures its “if this, then that” differently, and the export tools move contacts and content, not decision trees.
What that means practically is you should never automate the migration itself and trust it blindly, you need a human checking every rebuilt sequence step by step before it goes live on your real list. This is one of those moments that belongs firmly on the list of marketing tasks you should never fully automate, because the cost of a broken welcome sequence sending the wrong email to a new customer is far higher than the hours it takes to check it manually first.
When to bring someone in instead of doing it yourself
If your list is under 5,000 contacts with two or three simple automations, do the migration yourself using the five-step test above. It’s tedious but not technically hard. Once you’re running conditional logic across multiple products, integrating with a CRM, or moving a list over 20,000 contacts where deliverability warming needs careful pacing, it’s worth paying someone who’s done it before rather than learning six mistakes on your own list. If you do bring in outside help, check their actual migration experience with the specific two platforms you’re moving between, not just general email marketing knowledge, which is exactly the kind of due diligence covered in what to check before hiring an AI consultancy for marketing.
Either way, budget both time and a dip in performance into your plan. Nobody’s list migration is instant, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn’t done one at scale.
Frequently asked questions
How long does switching email marketing platforms usually take?
For a list under 10,000 contacts with a handful of automations, plan for two to four weeks including a seed list test period and a deliverability warm-up. Larger lists or complex automation logic can take six to eight weeks if you’re rebuilding sequences by hand rather than relying on automated import tools.
Will my open rates drop after switching platforms?
Very likely, at least for a short period. New sending domains and IP addresses have no reputation with inbox providers yet, so expect a temporary dip in inbox placement, often visible as a lower open rate for two to six weeks before it recovers, assuming you’re sending consistently and not spiking volume.
Do I need to rebuild all my automations manually when I switch?
Usually yes, at least the important ones. Migration tools move contacts, tags and content reasonably well, but branching logic, wait steps, and goal-based exits rarely map cleanly between platforms because each one structures automations differently. Rebuild and test your highest-value sequences by hand before cancelling your old account.
Is the cheapest email platform the cheapest choice?
Not usually, once you factor in list growth. Most platforms bill in size bands, so a price that looks lower today can overtake a competitor’s price within a year if your list is growing steadily. Always compare cost at your projected list size in 12 months, not today’s headline figure.
Primary sources
Related reading: How to Choose the Best Hosting Provider for Your Blog and The Difference Between Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing (And Why You’re Probably Doing Both Wrong).
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to email marketing.
