ConvertKit vs Mailtrap

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.

Founded in 2011 by Railsware Product Studio, Mailtrap is a bootstrapped product owned by Railsware with company headquarters in Kyiv, Krakow, and Los Angeles.

Not beginner-friendly, since you need to code while creating emails.

The service is geared for developer and product teams. Although not easy for the general public, its interface makes it easy for professionals to adopt the tool.

Bloggers, coaches, course creators, writers, and everyone who makes content for living.

SMEs and enterprises who require detailed, well-laid-out analytics, high deliverability, as well as transactional and marketing emails within a highly scalable and stable solution.

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

Yes, 3,500 emails per month with 150 emails/day throughput, one domain and one user seat.

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

Mailtrap offers four pricing plans, billed monthly, and based on the number of emails and contacts, features, data retention and additional services.

Basic starts from $15 per month for 10,000 emails and up to 50,000 contacts.

• No daily email throughput limit
• 5 domains
• 5 days of email log and body retention
• Click rate tracking
• 3 user seats 
• 2FA

Business starts at $85 per month for 100,000 emails and up to 750,000 contacts.

• Everything you get in Basic +
• 3,000 domains
• 15-day email log retention
• 7-day email body retention
• Max email size up to 30MB
• Dedicated IP
• Auto warm-up
• HTTPS link branding
• 1,000 user seats
• 2FA & SSO
• 24/7 customer support (email & live chat)
• Priority support
• Deliverability expert assistance
• Migration assistance

Enterprise starts at $750 per month from 1,5M emails and up to 2.5M contacts.

• Everything you get in Business +
• 30-day email log retention
• 15-day email body retention
• Activity logs

Mailtrap for big senders

• Custom pricing
• Deliverability manager
• Onboarding assistance
• Unlimited user seats

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.

Email support available to all plans, Knowledge Base, well-documented APIs and SDKs, YouTube tutorials, documentation available on all plans. 

Live chat and priority support available on higher plans (Business, Enterprise, and Mailtrap for big senders). This also includes migration and deliverability expert assistance and live chat and priority support – available 24/7.

On lower-tier plans, email support is available 20-hours per day, Monday to Friday.

• 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

• Separate sending streams for bulk and transactional emails
• SMTP & API (+SDKs for major programming languages)
• Email campaigns with scheduling, segmentation and automation
• Industry best analytics 
• Drag-and-drop email builder with AI assistance and fee image library
• Email template code editor
• Email templates and the template API
• Fast delivery and high inboxing rates.

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.

• Two simple out-of-the-box templates with the option to import your own. 
• Templates API that allows you to programmatically send emails from your app or service.

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.

18+ integrations including VS Code, Cursor, Replit, Gemini, Heroku, Zapier, Make, and more.

• Web app only

✅Available only on the web.
❌No installable solution.

English

English Portuguese Spanish French Italian German Polish Ukrainian Japanese

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.

Setting triggers, actions, and rules available in Alpha at the time of writing.

• 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

✅ High inboxing rates

✅ Fast email delivery 

✅ Industry best analytics

✅ Safe and fast scaling

✅ 24/7 expert support

• 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

❌Automations in Alpha stage
❌Requires intermediate coding skills