Campaign Monitor pricing and review

Reachkit makes a cold email tool, which is a different job from Campaign Monitor’s email to people who opted in. Every Campaign Monitor price here was checked in October 2026 against its own pricing page and help center. I mark the figures only third parties list.

Campaign Monitor pricing starts at $11.70 a month for Lite, billed yearly, for up to 500 contacts, per the US-dollar version of its pricing page in October 2026, which shows larger tiers only in its slider.

Until 3 January 2027, new customers get an extra 20% off Essentials yearly: $22.32 a month.

The monthly column and the bigger tiers below come from third-party trackers (SendX and Sequenzy), and match the yearly prices without the 10% discount.

Above 50,000 contacts, ask sales. Lite charges extra for design and spam tests; Premier adds phone support and includes the website builder ($10 a month on Lite and Essentials).

How contacts are counted: active subscribers across all your lists, so one address on three lists counts three times (billing help). Unsubscribes and bounces don’t count. Per that page, Journeys or scheduled campaigns sent over your tier move you up “without being prompted”; the pricing page promises a notice. Accounts opened from 3 August 2026 move up after a short grace period.

Pay per campaign suits rare senders: 500 credits per campaign plus 1 per recipient. No dollar price per credit is published, and credit prices rose 20% in January 2025, so older “$5 plus 1 cent” quotes are stale.

A typical list (my math, on the third-party prices): 2,000 subscribers mailed weekly is about 8,700 sends, inside Lite’s 12,500 cap: $47 a month. Mail 10,000 people twice a week (87,000 sends) and you pass Lite’s 50,000 cap: Essentials at $182.

Campaign Monitor sends marketing email to people who asked for it. You grow lists through imports, signup forms, landing pages or integrations, segment them, then send campaigns, drip series, automated Journeys and transactional email. It isn’t a CRM, but Salesforce, Shopify and WordPress are among its 250+ integrations.

Permission is the house rule. Its permission guide requires every contact to have “directly and explicitly opted in” and says of third-party lists: “There is no situation where it would be allowed.” Mail leaves from Campaign Monitor’s own servers, with no inboxes to buy or warm.

AI and building on it: AI Writer drafts copy on every paid plan, and Marketing Studio (August 2026, Essentials and up) turns your website URL and a goal into an on-brand campaign. Developers get a REST API with webhooks. I found no official MCP server, the connector that lets Claude work in your account, as of October 2026.

Strengths

• Email design. Style Factory says its key strength “lies in the quality, flexibility and robustness of its templates”.
• Room for a team. The pricing page lists unlimited users on every plan.
• Agency tooling. Client sub-accounts and admin dashboards, updated in November 2025 and July 2026 (what’s new).
• Reporting. PCMag found “a surprisingly well-rounded set of campaign tracking and reporting tools”.

Drawbacks

• Overlapping lists cost money. Duplicates count once per list, and over-tier sending moves you up on its own.
• Support follows the plan. Phone support starts at Premier, on weekdays; Lite gets basic email support (plan comparison).
• Idle accounts. Several Trustpilot reviewers since December 2025 say their inactive account was deleted with no email warning. I found no published policy on it.

Campaign Monitor rates 4.1 out of 5 on G2 from over 700 reviews and 4.5 on Capterra from about 505, per search results in October 2026. Trustpilot shows 2.2 from 200 reviews, though 73% are five-star: its score weighs recent reviews more, and all five from the past year are one-star.

Praise centers on templates and ease of use; its homepage shows a G2 badge for Best Support for small business. Complaints are mostly about cost as a list grows, as in the Capterra review title “Solid tool but not for scale”. Recent Trustpilot reviews mostly describe deleted accounts: “No notification, they just delete the account” (September 2026).

Campaign Monitor fits brands and agencies sending designed newsletters and Journeys to opted-in lists, with every teammate in the account at no seat fee.

Look elsewhere if your contacts sit on many overlapping lists (unless you merge them into segments), or if you want phone support below Premier. If you mail a few times a year, pay per campaign keeps the bill down, but export your lists in case the account goes idle. And if the people you want to reach never signed up, Campaign Monitor rules that out; I run prospecting from separate domains and inboxes, apart from any newsletter tool (here’s that setup).

• Mailchimp: free for 250 contacts and Essentials at $13, but Essentials holds 3 seats and unsubscribed contacts count.
• AWeber: round-the-clock phone, chat and email support on every plan, and a free plan for 500 subscribers.
• MailerLite: Comfort at $12 for 500 subscribers, and a free tier for 250.
• Brevo: charges by emails sent rather than contacts stored, starting at $9 for 5,000 emails.
• ActiveCampaign: automations triggered by contact behavior, at $15 a month on yearly billing for 1,000 contacts.
• Reachkit (our product): for outbound to prospects, which Campaign Monitor never allows, with one workspace per client, each on its own flat plan. It registers separate domains ($15 a year), sets up Google or Microsoft inboxes ($5 a month each) that warm automatically, and finds verified leads with 1,000 credits a month on the $39 Growth plan.