Email tool for a consultant — funnels and courses, or just a newsletter?

Email tools are sold to solo businesses on two different promises: simplicity and the all-in-one package. Either can be right, but not for the same person. The choice comes down to one question that is worth answering before you look at a single price.

The short answer

• When you sell expert work

  EmailOctopus

  2,500 subscribers for nothing and €16/month after that — a newsletter and a form, nothing else.

  Start free — 2,500 subscribers (ad)

• When you sell a course or coaching

  Systeme.io

  Funnels, a course platform and payment handling in the same price, 2,000 contacts on the free plan.

  Start free — 2,000 contacts (ad)

• When leads need scoring

  ActiveCampaign

  €15/month at a 1,000-contact list; conditional content requires the Plus plan at €49/month.

  Try 14 days without a card

One question: do you sell your time or a product

This difference decides the tool, because it decides what the email has to achieve.

• You sell your time — consulting, training, design by the hour or by project. The deal happens in a conversation, and the email’s job is to keep you in mind until then. You need a newsletter, a form and one landing page. They are included in almost every tool’s price, free plans included.
• You sell a product — an online course, a coaching programme, templates. The deal can happen without you, and then the email’s job is to take the reader all the way to purchase. You need a funnel, payment handling and a platform to deliver the product on. Those are not part of a newsletter tool.

Most solo businesses are in the first group and buy the second group’s tool, because it is marketed harder. That produces a monthly fee for features that are never opened.

All seven side by side

Prices are the cheapest paid plans at three list sizes, read from the services’ own price lists on 3 September 2026 excluding VAT. Our recommendation concerns the first group, the seller of expert work — the most common kind of solo business.

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Prices exclude VAT, billed monthly unless stated otherwise.(ad) = ad link

• The price is the monthly price of the cheapest paid plan at that list size. The Free plan column shows when you do not have to pay.
• EmailOctopus and ActiveCampaign: the price list only shows the monthly price on annual billing. Monthly billing costs more.
• ActiveCampaign and GetResponse: the smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts, so the 500-contact column shows that price.

If a newsletter is enough

An expert’s list is typically small and grows slowly: a few hundred names a year. With that profile, two options are free for years to come. EmailOctopus’s free plan holds 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, Systeme.io’s 2,000 contacts with no sending limit.

When the free plan runs out, the price difference is small: EmailOctopus €16, Brevo €21, MailerLite €29 a month at 2,500 subscribers. All three have forms, and MailerLite and Systeme.io have landing pages too. The two cheapest head-to-head: Brevo vs EmailOctopus.

One thing still separates them, and it is worth knowing: EmailOctopus’s and Systeme.io’s help pages offer no list cleaning in the app, while MailerLite’s “Clean up inactive” removes the inactive in one view. If the newsletter is your most important sales channel and the list is alive, that is a reason to pay €13 a month more.

If you sell a course or coaching

Then you need three things, of which a newsletter tool does one: the list, a landing page and payment handling. In our comparison Systeme.io does this at the lowest price: sales funnels, online courses and order management are in the same price, and the number of courses has its own row on the price list. The other option is GetResponse’s Creator plan, which starts at €62 a month at a thousand contacts.

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Read from Systeme.io’s own price list on 3 September 2026. Billing is in dollars, so the exchange rate comes on top of the bill and the figures cannot be compared directly with euro prices. Two months are free on annual billing.

The reference point is worth calculating out: a separate course platform and a separate email tool mean two monthly fees and one integration between them. In a one-person business the integration is the part that quietly breaks — and you do not notice until someone tells you they did not get the course they bought.

The downside has to be said for honesty’s sake: there is no independent deliverability measurement of Systeme.io, and its help pages do not say which contact statuses count toward the 2,000-contact limit. The review and the full plan table: Systeme.io.

Automation is cheap at a small list

This is the page’s counter-intuitive point. ActiveCampaign is the most expensive tool in our comparison at a large list — 10,000 contacts cost €149 a month — but at a 1,000-contact list it costs €15 a month, less than MailerLite at the same list size (€17). The figures are not quite on the same line: ActiveCampaign’s price is the monthly price on annual billing, MailerLite’s on monthly billing, and MailerLite’s annual billing is 10 per cent cheaper. The gap shrinks, but does not flip.

For a consultant this means that starting with automation is not a price question as long as the list is small — conditional content, on the other hand, is, because it starts on the Plus plan at €49 a month. They are a time question: the paths have to be built and maintained, and in a one-person business that time comes out of billable work. If you do not have time to build them, you pay for a feature you never open — and that is ActiveCampaign’s own caveat about who it does not suit.

Who each one suits

• You sell expert work by the hour → EmailOctopus: a newsletter and a form are enough, and a list under 2,500 subscribers is free. Try it free (ad)
• You sell an online course or a coaching programme → Systeme.io: funnel, course platform and payment handling in the same account. Try it free (ad)
• A pipeline of quotes and lead scoring → ActiveCampaign: automation for €15 a month at a thousand contacts, conditional content on the Plus plan at €49. Try it free
• Webinars are your main sales channel → GetResponse: the webinar tool is included in the price, but there is no free plan. Try it free
• The list grew into the thousands and the newsletter goes out rarely → Brevo: the price follows sending volume, so a large, quiet list is cheap. Try it free

Data location is a sales argument for a consultant

If your customers are businesses, sooner or later one of them asks where their contact details are. The answer is shorter if the data does not leave the EU.

Of the tools we compare, five store the data in the EU: Brevo (France), GetResponse (Poland), Systeme.io (Irish ITACWT Limited), MailerLite (for EEA customers Irish MailerLite Limited) and EmailOctopus (British company, lists in AWS’s Irish data centre). Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign transfer data outside the EU, in which case the transfer basis is recorded in your own privacy policy. Read from the services’ own privacy policies on 3 September 2026. What belongs in the policy: email marketing and GDPR.

Three things that apply only to a one-person business

• Time is more expensive than the licence. A €13 monthly difference is less than half a billable hour. Choose the tool you have time to make a newsletter with, not the one with the most features.
• Your own domain is mandatory before the first newsletter. Sender authentication requires access to the domain’s DNS records, and a free email service’s address cannot be authenticated. What Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.
• One list, not many. In several tools the same address is counted separately for every list, so the free plan fills up many times faster. Separate readers with tags. How contacts are counted.

What we have not checked

We have not used the tools ourselves, so we do not assess the clarity of the editors, how well the funnel builder works or how fast a course can be set up. Those would be measurement results, and there is no measurement. Everything on this page was read from the services’ own price lists, documentation and privacy policies and dated. How we compare.