Campaign Monitor vs ConvertKit
Trying to choose between Campaign Monitor vs ConvertKit as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 4.6 TrustPilot
- 4.6 Capterra
- 4.1 G2
Average 4.4 / 5
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a global technology company that provides an email marketing platform that’s easy to use yet extremely powerful. It powers media moguls, tech giants, nonprofits, and other industries.
Pricing
From $9 to $989 a month depending on the tariff and the contact list size
Key features
- No-code email editor
- Automated sequence builder
- List management and segmentation
- Personalization
- Analytics
- A/B testing
Support
Online support with limited working hours, the Help center on the website, video tutorials, courses
- 4.7 GetApp
- 4.7 Capterra
- 2 TrustPilot
Average 3.8 / 5
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a tool for marketing automation and monetization for independent creators.
Pricing
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Analytics
- A/B testing
- Tools for content monetization
Key features
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Analytics
- A/B testing
- Tools for content monetization
Support
Community support for all users, email and chat support for paid users
General info about company
Campaign Monitor
Founded in 2004 by Ben Richardson, based in Nashville. Belongs to CM Group, along with other marketing software companies like Sailthru and LiveClicker.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit was founded in 2013 and is based in Idaho, the US. It was created by Nathan Barry, a blogger and creator who needed a better way to promote his books and courses.
Difficulty
Campaign Monitor
The email editor is WYSIWYG and the platform provides users with a great choice of templates and an automated email builder for your brand — no coding or design skills are required. Campaign analytics come in the form of digestible graphs that are easy to interpret for junior marketers.
ConvertKit
Not beginner-friendly, since you need to code while creating emails.
Best for
Campaign Monitor
Marketing agencies, small organizations, publishers
ConvertKit
Bloggers, coaches, course creators, writers, and everyone who makes content for living.
Free plan
Campaign Monitor
No free plan, free trial only.
The free trial only allows sending test campaigns to 5 people or less, importing contact lists, and creating customer journeys without sending them
ConvertKit
The forever free plan includes the contact list of up to 1,000 subscribers and the following features:
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited forms
- Unlimited “broadcasts”, or one-off email campaigns, sent right away or scheduled
- Audience tagging and segmentation
- Selling digital products & subscriptions
- Community support
- Free recommendations
Pricing
Campaign Monitor
Dynamic, depends on the contact list size and the tariff type:
- Basic: $9–$299/month
- Unlimited: $30–$699/month
- Premier: $158–$989/month
All tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts.
ConvertKit
Dynamic pricing depends on the size of your contact list and the features of interest.
Creator: $9–1,916/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the free features plus:
- Live chat & email support
- Paid recommendations
- Free migration from another tool
- Automated email sequences
- Visual automation builders
- Third-party integrations
- One additional team member
Creator Pro: $25–2,166/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the Creator features plus:
- Newsletter referral system
- Subscriber scoring
- Advanced reporting
Support
Campaign Monitor
An in-app Digital Assistant tool. Support agents around the world are available in the following hours:
- America: Mon to Fri 6 am to 5 pm PST/PDT
- Australia and Asia: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm AEST/AEDT
- Europe: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm BST/GMT
Limited support (unspecified working hours) is available on weekends and during holidays. Support phone numbers are only available for Premier users.
Aside from online support, Campaign Monitor offers:
- Video tutorials for newbies and experienced users
- A 30-minute Getting Started course
- Email Academy — an email marketing course
- Resources for developers
- The in-app Help Center with documentation
ConvertKit
Community support:
- The internal forum where you can ask questions and receive answers from ConvertKit support specialists and other platform users
- Available even on the free plan
Email and live chat support:
- Available for Creator users
- Priority support via email and live chat available for Creator Pro users
ConvertKit also provides a knowledge base and a YouTube channel with tutorials. The platform also runs online workshops for newbies in marketing.
Features
Campaign Monitor
- Supports SMS notifications
- Advanced segmentation — available for Premier users
- Link Review — checks for broken links
- Free email template builder
- Campaign analytics
- CAN-SPAM compliance checker
- Integrations with CRM systems and more
ConvertKit
- Email builder
- Email marketing automation
- Landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Tools for selling digital products and paid subscriptions
- List segmentation
- Lead scoring
- A/B testing
- Reporting and analytics
- Internal referral systems for creators to earn off putting links in your newsletter or paying to get promoted by other creators
Templates
Campaign Monitor
108 free mobile-friendly templates available without signing up, templates sorted by email types from announcements to transactional.
If you don’t like templates, you can build emails from scratch using blocks in the email builder.
Recently launched their own stock with free images.
Campaign Monitor also has an automated custom template builder where you fill in the questionnaire and get a bunch of email templates with the logo of your business and custom design.
ConvertKit
25 email templates made for content creators by content creators, includes templates for:
- Newsletters
- Content promotion
- Product sales pitch
- Waitlist
The templates are sourced from other users and you can create and share your own.
ConvertKit also offers 50+ landing page templates not specified by purpose.
Video/screenshots
Campaign Monitor
ConvertKit
Integrations
Campaign Monitor
- Data for marketing: Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify +
- List growth: Intercom, OptinMonster, Unbounce +
- CRM: Raiser’s Edge NXT, Lexer, Qgiv +
- Advertising: AdRoll, Facebook Lead Ads, Rungopher+
More than 100 integrations are available for CRM, list management, surveys, and more
ConvertKit
120 integrations with third-party apps for:
- Memberships and courses
- Analytics
- Lead capture
- E-commerce
- Giveaways
- Quizzes
- Workflows
- Webinar
- Affiliate management
- CRM
- Scheduling
- Email verification
ConvertKit also supports Zapier for even more integrations and provides users with the API docs for custom integrations.
Devices
Campaign Monitor
- A web app accessible from phones
- No mobile app
ConvertKit
- Web app only
Languages
Campaign Monitor
English
ConvertKit
English
Automation
Campaign Monitor
The drag-and-drop interface for creating automated email sequences that includes:
- Triggers — subscribers’ actions that start or continue the sequenc
- Yes/No rules for personalization
- Timers — for example, you can send emails 3 or more days after a certain subscriber’s action or the previous email in the sequence
The sequence is visualized like an activity diagram where every element is customizable.
ConvertKit
10+ visual automation templates for starting a paid newsletter, releasing a new podcast, crowdfunding for a music album, and other tasks that professional content creators might face.
Pros
Campaign Monitor
- Good WYSIWYG email editor interface
- Easy and simple email automation
- Easy-to-understand campaign reports with good infographics
ConvertKit
- Good platform for content creators
- Great deliverability
- Supports paid newsletters and has a “tip jar” functionality for free donations from subscribers
- A flexible tagging and segmentation system for targeted campaigns
Cons
Campaign Monitor
- No live chat support + no 24/7 support
- All of the tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts
- No functional free trial you can actually use for work
- Contact importing is difficult when matching custom fields
- Split testing only allows 2 email versions
- No landing page builder
ConvertKit
- Very basic reporting
- Expensive compared to other email marketing tools
- Not great for midsize and large businesses
- No drag-and-drop builder which makes it harder to design emails from scratch
Reviews from experts
Campaign Monitor
“Feature-wise, there’s not really much to fault it on, but ‘power’ email marketing users will find the A/B testing feature a bit basic and will notice the absence of a fully fledged landing page creator.”
“It’s easy to find all features, which means you can get up and running quickly and get the most out of the solution without having to spend days playing around with it. If you sell products online, you’ll love the focus on optimizing transactional emails and tracking their performance so you can understand what works in terms of customer engagement.”
ConvertKit
If you’re a blogger, vlogger, frogger, YouTuber, digital course creator, or anyone who makes their own digital content for sale under a single business entity, ConvertKit is 100% the tool for you, and it’s not even close.
It has everything you need to grow your business, including direct integrations with tools specifically designed to make your life easier like course, webinar, blog, and lead magnet plugins.
If you’ve got a stable business and over 1,000 subscribers, you’ll reap all of the benefits of the world’s most streamlined email autoresponder tool at a price that won’t break the bank and is silly easy to use.
We bought this software after reading the Capterra reviews here, however we find it very limited in customization so it's mainly take it or leave type of features. We could not block freemailers from subscribing, or use custom CSS for the same purpose. In general, it is not a tool to use if you care about following a brand identity of your own.
The set-up process is tedious with Wordpress websites. We were not happy so we canceled, so instead of letting the current paid period last the software deactivated the account immediately and blocked us out of the software. We could not export our subscribers nor our content.
*This information is current as of 02/13/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
