EmailOctopus alternatives — what replaces it and when switching pays

EmailOctopus is the cheapest paid plan in the comparison at 2,500 subscribers, and its free plan is among the widest measured by contact count. It is also deliberately the narrowest tool: no CRM, no scoring, no conditional automation branches. That is where the three situations arise in which an alternative is worth looking at — and all three can be calculated in advance instead of noticed on the bill.

The short answer

• When the automation no longer stretches

  MailerLite

  Automations are included in the cheapest paid plan, forms and landing pages in the same price, and cleaning out the inactive in the app.

  Start free — 250 subscribers

• When the email quota filled up

  GetResponse

  Sending is unlimited on every paid plan, and the price is in euros — Systeme.io is the other unlimited one, but bills in dollars.

  Try 14 days without a card

• When you need a CRM and text messages

  Brevo

  Email, text messages, transactional emails and a CRM in the same account, and a 10,000-name list costs €28/month at two newsletters a month.

  Start free — 300 emails/day

EmailOctopus and six alternatives

Prices are monthly prices excluding VAT, read from the services’ own price lists on 3 September 2026. For each we took the cheapest paid plan that supports that list size. EmailOctopus’s column is the monthly price on annual billing — monthly billing costs €12 more a year at 500 subscribers and €48 at 10,000.

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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.
• GetResponse and ActiveCampaign: the smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts, so the 500-contact column shows that price.

Three situations where switching pays

EmailOctopus is not deficient but narrow: deficiencies get fixed, narrowness is a choice. Three situations where the choice points the wrong way:

1. The automation needs a conditional branch. EmailOctopus’s automations are straight sequences. If the path should branch by what the reader did, it is not built in this tool.
2. The email quota fills before the contact limit. Every tier has, besides the subscriber count, a monthly quota for emails sent. For a frequent writer that is the limit that comes up first.
3. The same address costs several times over. Contacts are counted per list, so overlapping lists raise the bill without the audience growing.

If none of these applies to you, the bottom line is honestly this: stay with EmailOctopus. At a 2,500-subscriber list it is the cheapest in the comparison, and every alternative means either a higher bill or an interface with a lot you never open.

How many newsletters fit in the quota

This is EmailOctopus’s only limit that the price list does not state in the tier names. The quota is ten times the subscriber count on almost every tier — the exception is the smallest tier, where it is twenty times — so the number of newsletters is practically the same on every tier.

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Subscriber counts, prices and email quotas read from EmailOctopus’s price list on 3 September 2026, excluding VAT; the price is the monthly price on annual billing. The last column is our own calculation: the quota divided by the subscriber count, i.e. how many times you can send to the whole list a month. It assumes every newsletter goes to the whole list — with segmented sends more newsletters fit.

Ten newsletters a month is enough for almost everyone, which is why the quota is usually invisible. Two points are still worth knowing: the free plan holds 2,500 subscribers but only four newsletters, so a weekly newsletter does not fit there, and moving from 500 subscribers to 1,000 halves the number of newsletters from twenty to ten, because the quota does not grow with it until the next tier.

If ten newsletters are not enough, the alternative is GetResponse, where sending is unlimited on every paid plan. The opposite extreme is Brevo: there the eleventh newsletter is not a quota overrun but the next price tier.

What replaces EmailOctopus in which situation

• The automation needs conditional branches → ActiveCampaign: conditional content starts on the Plus plan and lead scoring on the Pro plan; at EmailOctopus there are no branches at all. Try it free
• The email quota fills mid-month → GetResponse: sending is unlimited on every paid plan, so the number of newsletters no longer drives the choice of tier. Try it free
• You need forms and landing pages → MailerLite: both are included in the price, and the tiers are stepped by subscriber count alone, not by features. Try it free
• You need a CRM, text messages or transactional emails → Brevo: all three are in the same account, and no other tool compared does that. Try it free
• You want funnels and courses in the same price → Systeme.io: the free plan holds 2,000 contacts with no sending limit, and funnels and a course platform come in the same price. Try it free (ad)

Automation is the limit money cannot move

The quota and the contact limit can be bought open by moving up a tier. A conditional branch cannot: it does not exist on any tier. If the automation should do something different depending on whether the reader opened the previous email, the wrong thing is the tool, not the tier.

At ActiveCampaign conditional content starts on the Plus plan and lead scoring on the Pro plan, and the cheapest Starter plan limits automation to five actions — there too the feature is priced, not given. At MailerLite automation is thinner but included in the cheapest paid plan. The question is not who does automation, but how multi-step a path you need — and the price difference is tangible: at a 2,500-contact list ActiveCampaign costs €39 a month and EmailOctopus €16.

The same address on six lists is six contacts

The counting rule can be read on the service’s own help page — unlike at most competitors. The unsubscribed do not count toward the tier limit, nor do hard bounces, spam complaints or those awaiting confirmation. All of this works in the reader’s favour.

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The rules are read from the providers’ own help pages. “Not read” means the rule could not be opened in the original source — we do not guess it in either direction.

• EmailOctopus. Unsubscribed contacts do not count toward the limit, nor do hard bounces and spam complaints, which are marked as unsubscribed automatically. Contacts awaiting double opt-in do not count either. One trap: the same address is counted separately for every list — an address on six lists is six contacts.
• MailerLite. The limit counts subscribers in Active status; unsubscribed and bounced do not count. One trap in the billing period: the period is counted cumulatively, so an address that was active at any point in the period counts toward the limit until the end of the period, even if you delete it immediately. Cleaning the list shows on the bill only in the next period.
• Brevo. The price is set by monthly sending volume rather than contact count, so the question of counting unsubscribed contacts does not apply to Brevo the way it does to the others. The flip side is that the same list costs more the more often you write to it.
• Mailchimp. An unsubscribed contact counts toward the monthly limit, as do non-subscribers who ended up in the account by other routes. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not count, so lowering the bill takes a separate step: the contacts have to be archived, not just allowed to unsubscribe.

The rule only turns on the number of lists: the same address is counted separately for every list, so a subscriber on the newsletter, customer and webinar lists is three contacts. The fix is one list and tags inside it. If the bill has grown faster than the audience, this is the first place to look — and it is not a reason to switch tools.

Deliverability: the basics are there, the tools are missing

We do not measure deliverability ourselves. Read from the help pages, EmailOctopus handles the basics — authentication from the app, bounces and complaints removed automatically, purchased lists banned — but the tools are missing: no meter, no built-in cleaning, no dedicated IP. The help page tells you to go through the list by hand and warm up the domain yourself.

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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.

If inbox placement is the reason to switch, the closest alternative is MailerLite: “Clean up inactive” cleans out the inactive in the app, and a dedicated IP and a deliverability team open up from 50,000 weekly emails. A large part of deliverability is still the sender’s own responsibility and moves with you when you switch: what Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.

What you lose by switching

EmailOctopus’s strengths are the kind you only notice once they are gone:

• The price. €16 a month at 2,500 subscribers is the cheapest paid plan in the comparison. The closest equivalent, MailerLite, asks €29 for the same list.
• The 2,500-subscriber free plan. MailerLite’s and Mailchimp’s free plans are 250 contacts, a tenth. EmailOctopus branding in the emails is the price of the free plan.
• The simplicity. The tool has no features you do not use, and therefore no menus you never open.

One thing, on the other hand, does not change: the data location stays in the EU if you end up with MailerLite, Brevo, GetResponse or Systeme.io.

How to migrate without the list suffering

1. Export the contacts as a CSV file and include the subscription date and source — consent has to be demonstrable afterwards.
2. Merge overlapping lists before importing. If the same address has been on many lists, it has been many contacts — and into the new tool it is worth taking one list and tags, not six lists.
3. Clean out the unsubscribed and hard bounces. At EmailOctopus they did not count toward the limit, but in the new tool they may.
4. Authenticate the sender domain in the new service (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) before the first send.
5. Rebuild the automations before you close the old account. A straight sequence transfers as is; if the reason for switching was a conditional branch, that is new work, not copying.

The data protection side of the move: email marketing and GDPR. If one alternative remains, compare it directly: Brevo vs EmailOctopus.

For whom EmailOctopus is still the right choice

In three situations switching would be a mistake. The list is 500–2,500 names and you send it a newsletter: there EmailOctopus is the cheapest in the comparison and the quota never comes up. The list grows fast but the budget does not: the 2,500-subscriber free plan carries further, measured by contacts, than any other tool compared. And the automation is a welcome sequence that needs no conditional branches.

In other cases switching is settled by one question: does the automation branch. If not, everything else is a price question — and there EmailOctopus is hard to beat.