Best email tool for an online shop — three requirements that narrow the field

An online shop’s email tool is a different purchase from a newsletter tool. A newsletter goes to a list, but a shop’s emails go out on an event: an order, a shipment, an abandoned purchase. That is why the choice comes down to three questions, all of which can be answered from the services’ own documents.

The short answer

• For most online shops

  Brevo

  Native connectors to Shopify, WordPress and Stripe, transactional emails and text messages in the same account. 10,000 contacts for €28/month, and the Standard plan with automation for €55/month.

  Start free — 300 emails/day

• When automation decides

  ActiveCampaign

  Over 1,000 connectors and conditional content: the email is chosen by buying behaviour. €149/month at 10,000 contacts, conditional content on the Plus plan at €189/month.

  Try 14 days without a card

• When the shop is small

  MailerLite

  Shop connectors and a predictable bill that does not move with sending pace: 2,500 contacts for €29/month.

  Start free — 250 subscribers

Three requirements that narrow the field

1. Do the shop’s events reach the tool without a middleman? A native connector moves orders and customer data directly. An intermediary like Zapier works too, but it is one extra fee and one point of failure at exactly the point where a purchase should trigger an email.
2. Do order confirmations go from the same account? Transactional emails are a different thing from marketing emails. If they are in a different service, you maintain two sender reputations and two bills.
3. What does the list cost as it grows? An online shop’s list grows with every order, so the pricing model decides more than the starting price.

Of the seven tools we compare, one meets all three criteria: Brevo. The second criterion rules out the others, because only there do transactional emails go through the same account. ActiveCampaign meets the first criterion by a wide margin but fails the third (€149 against €28 at 10,000 customers), and transactional emails go through a separate service there.

All seven side by side

Prices are monthly prices excluding VAT, read from the services’ own price lists on 3 September 2026. Our recommendation concerns a typical small online shop with a list of a few thousand to ten thousand customers.

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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.
• ActiveCampaign and EmailOctopus: 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.

Connectors: what is native and what is not

This is the first narrowing criterion, and it can be read on the services’ own pages. We recorded what they themselves name, not how the connectors work in practice — we have not used the tools ourselves.

• Brevo names Shopify, WordPress, Stripe and Zapier, among others, as native.
• ActiveCampaign states over 1,000 connectors — the widest coverage in the comparison, and in practice decisive if the shop platform is a rarer one.
• MailerLite states over 130 connectors, including WordPress, Shopify and Stripe.
• Mailchimp states over 300 connectors.
• EmailOctopus’s direct connectors are a WordPress plugin and Zapier; Shopify, for example, works only through Zapier.

The practical rule: the closer your shop platform is to Shopify or WordPress, the less connector coverage separates the tools. On a rarer platform the gap between ActiveCampaign and the rest is the biggest single reason to pay more. The figures are the services’ own, read from their pages on 4–5 September 2026.

Transactional emails are the online shop’s distinguishing requirement

Order confirmation, shipping notification and password reset are emails that go to one person on the basis of an event. They are not marketing, and they are not sent to a list — and that is exactly why many newsletter tools do not do them at all.

Of the tools we compare, at Brevo transactional emails go through the same account. At the others it means a separate service, so you maintain two sender reputations and two bills. For an online shop this weighs more than the difference in monthly price, because the order confirmation is the email that has to get through every time — and sender reputation is built separately for every sending system.

Authentication is therefore worth doing properly once for both. The requirements are the same regardless of tool: what Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.

The price grows with the list — and an online shop’s list grows

This is the third criterion and the one that separates the most. An online shop’s list grows with every order, so the starting price is irrelevant and the growth curve is what matters.

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Cheapest paid plans read from the price lists (Brevo, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Mailchimp) on 3 September 2026, excluding VAT. Brevo’s figure assumes two campaigns a month, because its price follows sending volume; ActiveCampaign’s figures are monthly prices on annual billing and its smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts. Brevo’s marketing automation is on the Standard plan, whose price on the same rows is €15, €41 and €55.

Two things from the table. Brevo is the cheapest on every row, and the gap grows with the list: at 10,000 customers it is €121 a month compared with ActiveCampaign. On the other hand, Brevo’s price moves with sending pace — in an online shop that is a risk, because besides campaigns, event-based emails consume the same quota.

Anyone who needs automation is also not comparing the right figure if they look at Brevo’s cheapest column: marketing automation is on the Standard plan. The same calculation opened up in full: MailerLite vs Brevo.

When pricier automation pays for itself

ActiveCampaign costs €149 a month at a 10,000-customer list, i.e. €1,452 a year more than Brevo’s cheapest plan. That is a large sum for a small shop and a small sum for a shop whose average order is hundreds of euros.

The reason to pay is conditional content and lead scoring — according to the price list they are on the Plus and Pro plans, not on the Starter in the table above, so the real comparison price is higher than €149. The idea is that the email is chosen by what the customer has done, not by which list they are on. If you build paths where a first-time buyer, a returning customer and a dormant customer each get a different email at a different moment, the difference is real. If you send the same newsletter to everyone, you pay for a feature you never open — and that is ActiveCampaign’s own caveat about who it does not suit.

Deliverability: for an online shop this is money

We do not measure deliverability ourselves. Below is Tooltester’s 2017–2024 series as history — it has ended, and the source no longer stands behind its method — and eight points from the services’ own help pages.

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Tooltester ended the series with the January 2024 round and explained why in August 2026: seed lists proved unreliable and providers started optimising for them. The figures are therefore history, not a measurement of current deliverability.

Source: Tooltester deliverability test, 12 rounds 8/2017–1/2024. About 80 seed addresses, 28 providers, shared IP addresses. Average across all platforms in the latest round 83.1%. Average and range calculated from the published rounds.

Deliverability features from the help docs

Eight points read from each provider’s own help pages on 13 September 2026. This replaces percentages as a buying basis: a feature can be checked and dated, a seed-list result no longer can. Every cell links to the article it was read from.

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Yes = the help page describes the feature. No = the help page says it is absent or points to an external tool. — = not found in the help pages; that does not mean the feature is absent.

For an online shop, list quality decides: a campaign goes out once, and inactive and wrong addresses eat reputation with every send. Read from the help pages, ActiveCampaign cleans out the inactive in the app (Engagement Management) and gives a dedicated IP to a 100,000-contact list; Brevo shows a deliverability score in the app but points cleaning to manual work. This is the other side of the price difference, and it belongs in the same equation: cleaning that is not done shows on a 10,000-customer list in every campaign.

The customer register and data location

Besides the subscriber list an online shop has a customer register, and often both move into the email tool. Then the tool is a processor of personal data and is recorded in your own privacy policy.

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 (lists in AWS’s Irish data centre). Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign transfer data outside the EU, in which case the transfer basis has to be recorded in the policy. Read from the services’ own privacy policies on 3 September 2026. What a shop should check with its processor: email marketing and GDPR.

Who each one suits

• Shopify or WooCommerce, under 10,000 customers → Brevo: native connector, transactional emails and text messages from the same account; automation requires the Standard plan. Try it free
• Paths that react to buying behaviour → ActiveCampaign: conditional content from the Plus plan and lead scoring from the Pro plan, and the widest connector coverage in the comparison. Try it free
• Small shop, simple newsletter → MailerLite: the contact-based price does not move with sending pace. Try it free
• The shop also sells courses → Systeme.io: funnels, courses and payment handling in the same price. Try it free (ad)
• Zero budget and the shop just opened → EmailOctopus: 2,500 subscribers for nothing — but the shop connector only through Zapier. Try it free (ad)

What we have not checked

This page is written from what can be read in the services’ own price lists, documentation and privacy policies. We have not used the tools with a real shop, so we say nothing about the quality of individual abandoned cart templates, how smoothly the connectors install or how completely each connector transfers product data.

Those are real questions, and the cheapest way to answer them is to try: on Brevo’s free plan you can install the connector and see what the shop sends to the tool. The full method and what we do not assess: how we compare.