Omnisend vs. MailerLite: Features, pricing & more

MailerLite is best for newsletters and building a website; Omnisend is best for ecommerce stores and omnichannel reach. 

On price, MailerLite is cheaper at every contact tier, starting at $12/month against $16/month. The gap narrows to $8/month at 10,000 contacts once MailerSend, a separate product, covers your transactional email.

Our Omnisend vs. MailerLite comparison details their features, use cases, and costs up to 20,000 contacts, with email and pop-up examples from brands using both tools.

Omnisend vs. MailerLite: Overview

Accurate as of September 2026.

Omnisend: Overview and best use cases

Connect your store to Omnisend, and it syncs your customer and sales data. You can then segment customers and build flows that target them when they sign up, abandon a cart, purchase, reach a date milestone, and more.

It suits:

• Ecommerce stores of all sizes, from startups considering their first email marketing tool to established players looking to switch from MailerLite or other platforms
• Small businesses that sell online, such as those selling products (including digital ones) alongside services
• Serious marketers interested in customer lifetime value (CLV), average order value (AOV), return on investment (ROI), and integrations with other tools

Where Omnisend goes further than MailerLite:

• Automations: These can be built on event-based, behavior-based, and segment-based triggers. It also brings omnichannel capabilities and a drag-and-drop builder to your workflow. Includes pre-built flows for abandoned carts and checkouts, back-in-stock alerts, welcome series, and order follow-ups.
• Segmentation: There are 30+ pre-built segment templates, including Added product to the cart but didn’t place an order, Window shoppers, Celebrating birthday, Deal hunters, At risk to churn, and Frequent store visitors.

• AI features: Including AI customer lifecycle maps based on recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) analysis, a segment builder, a writing assistant and subject line generator, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) in all plans. Forms AI and Reports AI are available in paid plans.
• Personalization: All customer touchpoints can include order, cart, browsing, and personal information, such as names, and adding these only requires dragging items into your emails or selecting a tag in editor dropdowns.
• Campaigns: For one-time and scheduled email, SMS, and web push campaigns to all customers or segments, as a means to share information and promote yourself during seasonal events.
• 24/7 support: Via live chat and email across all plans. If you want the same support level with MailerLite, you need the Power plan.

MailerLite: Overview and best use cases

MailerLite suits:

• Newsletter creators, bloggers, and podcasters with preexisting audiences, plus those wanting to build from scratch
• Coaches, consultants, and other service providers wanting to nurture leads and manage customer experiences via email
• Digital product sellers not requiring a complete store infrastructure (MailerLite’s website and blog builder could be sufficient)

Here’s why MailerLite suits these use cases:

• Generous free plan: It supports 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails/month, a 10x send limit, and has access to all three email builders.
• Unlimited sends: Power plans have unlimited sends; pick your list size, and you won’t move to a higher tier due to exceeding a send quota.
• Website, blog, and landing page builders: You can sell products on these with Stripe integration. Forms and email marketing sync automatically.
• Newsletter features: A drag-and-drop editor, comparative reporting, campaign auto-resend, and 120+ email templates on paid plans.

Ecommerce is where the limits show. The Comfort plan only allows 50 automations and 10 sign-up forms. Promotion pop-ups, smart sending, and multiple triggers need the Power plan. The abandoned cart flow isn’t available on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Squarespace.

Pricing comparison

Both tools have unlimited emails in their top plans. Omnisend Pro starts at 2,500 contacts and has a higher entry cost than MailerLite Power.

Accurate as of September 2026. The prices above don’t include discounts. You can pay three months upfront with Omnisend and save 30%; MailerLite has a 10% discount on annual plans.

Compare Omnisend vs. MailerLite pricing and additional tools in our calculator:

Do transactional emails cost extra?

Yes in MailerLite, no in Omnisend.

MailerLite requires a MailerSend plan billed on top of your marketing plan. It’s free for the first 500 emails, then it’s $7/month for up to 5,000 emails in Hobby. The next step is $35/month for 50,000 emails in the MailerSend Starter plan.

Omnisend supports transactional emails in all plans with pre-built order, shipping, and cancellation templates. They count toward your monthly send quota.

At 10,000 contacts, MailerLite is $89/month for Comfort, plus $35/month for MailerSend Starter, a total of $124. Omnisend Standard is $132 for the same list with transactional email included, so the $43 difference between the two marketing plans drops to $8.

How are contacts counted?

Omnisend bills for subscribed and non-subscribed contacts, but not unsubscribed ones. Anyone who gives you their email at checkout or abandons a cart counts toward your bill until they unsubscribe, whether or not they ticked an opt-in box.

MailerLite counts active subscribers. That means anyone who hasn’t unsubscribed or bounced. It runs cumulatively, so a contact who was active at any point still counts toward your bill even after you delete them. It clears on your billing date.

Email marketing features

MailerLite offers 120+ email templates on paid plans, whereas Omnisend has 250+ available across all plans, including Free. They’re suitable for a variety of email campaigns, including welcome emails, newsletters, and promotional offers.

You can customize these templates with your branding and messaging. Omnisend has AI brand assets, which auto-apply your logo and colors to templates. You can manually edit any element using the drag-and-drop builder:

Omnisend lets you use the custom HTML item, which you can drag into your email to create unique content and layouts.

MailerLite provides a custom HTML editor alongside a simple editor and a drag-and-drop newsletter editor. The HTML editor lets you import HTML code, build from scratch, or ask AI (beta) to generate an email from scratch or edit your code.

The Product recommender item in Omnisend can recommend recently added products, most viewed products, and best-sellers. If you’re on the Pro plan, you can show products based on your customers’ recently viewed products and previous purchases:

You can write subject lines and email content with Omnisend’s built-in AI writing assistant on all plans. MailerLite restricts its AI writing assistant to the Comfort plan.

All Omnisend and MailerLite plans support campaign A/B tests. You can create two versions of an email and pick the winner based on engagement.

MailerLite supports testing email subject, from name, email content, and sending time; Omnisend lets you test the subject line, sender name, sender email address, and email content.

As for automated emails, Omnisend’s are built on store events; MailerLite’s are built on list events with ecommerce triggers added.

Omnisend’s event-based triggers suit ecommerce. They include Placed Order, Started Checkout, Added Product to Cart, and Search submitted. They carry event data you can use in trigger filters, split conditions, and message personalization.

A single flow can combine email and web push in Free and Standard plans, plus SMS in the Pro plan. Email is the only native channel that MailerLite supports.

MailerLite and Omnisend can start a workflow based on subscriber activity, such as when someone joins a group, submits a form, clicks a link, or matches a date field. 

There are six ecommerce triggers, including abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, purchase frequency, buys any product, buys from category, and buys specific product. An abandoned cart needs the customer logged into their store account, and it isn’t available on Shopify at all.

Omnisend vs. MailerLite AI features, plan by plan

Accurate as of September 2026.

MailerLite’s AI landing page builder generates three landing page versions for review based on your industry and goals.

The AI segment builder in Omnisend is a capability MailerLite lacks. You can prompt it and refine your segment in chat, without touching any filters. It saves time when Omnisend’s 30+ pre-built segment templates don’t cover what you need.

Marketing channels

Omnisend lets you create standalone email, web push notification, and SMS marketing campaigns, in addition to omnichannel automations, such as for an abandoned cart series, containing all those channels.

Free and Standard plans support email and web push. You get 500 web pushes in Free and unlimited in Standard. The Pro plan supports SMS, with credits sold separately from $10/month for 1,111 U.S. messages.

All plans support Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match; native apps sync your segments to create targeted ad campaigns.

MailerLite covers email marketing only, with its transactional SMS reserved for the MailerSend Starter or Professional plans at an extra cost of at least $35/month. Facebook Custom Audience support requires the Comfort plan.

Ecommerce features

Omnisend and MailerLite integrate with ecommerce platforms (including Shopify and WooCommerce) in addition to third-party apps, including Zapier, to create automations.

Both can also add products from your store to your campaigns, including individual products and products from categories.

Adding products to an email

Omnisend’s Product Picker adds the same products to every recipient. For emails that change per person, the Product Recommender item shows recently viewed products or items similar to past purchases on the Pro plan.

MailerLite’s Manual product block works the same way as Omnisend’s Product Picker: you import from your connected store and pick the items, so recipients see the same products. You can display up to three products per block. 

Nothing in MailerLite changes products per recipient. You decide who enters a flow based on their purchase history, then choose the products they see.

Recovering an abandoned sale

Omnisend helps you recover sales from visitors who abandoned their cart and checkout. It also has browse, search, and product abandonment templates.

Emails reach subscribed and non-subscribed contacts; customers who bought without opting in still get their reminder. MailerLite sends only to subscribers.

MailerLite’s abandoned cart trigger isn’t available on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Squarespace. Where it does work, on WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shoper, and Wix, the customer has to be logged into their store account.

Abandoned checkout is available in MailerLite for Shopify, but only for returning customers who have placed at least one previous order.

What Omnisend and MailerLite emails look like

Here are four emails, two per tool, sent to subscribers.

Welcome and collection emails

Omnisend customer Amundsen Sports created a new collection email for its Chukka Shorts and integrated product listings to encourage clicks.

The Omnisend email builder supports product listings that pull products from your store, and dynamic product blocks that show products based on customer engagement, such as recently viewed products.

MailerLite customer ProShot created a welcome email, leading with an image of the founders and providing a code for 10% off.

The email builder in MailerLite has a Coupon block you can configure with a code per campaign and Navigation blocks to match ProShot’s design.

Service business emails

Ovoko created an email in Omnisend to build trust and encourage subscribers to search its marketplace. A key element is the Trustpilot image above the first CTA button, which Omnisend supports with an Image block that can link to websites.

MailerLite customer Privyr built an onboarding email with emojis and plain text. The email builder has Content sections for Simple content and Box content, either of which you can use to replicate Privyr’s email design.

Email list-building features

Both Omnisend and MailerLite give you pop-ups, landing pages, sign-up forms, and a wheel of fortune game with configurable prizes and win probabilities.

On performance, Omnisend’s 2025 data across 1.24 billion pop-up displays puts the wheel of fortune at a 3.5% sign-up rate against a 2.1% average for all pop-ups.

Accurate as of September 2026.

There are 100+ pre-built form templates in Omnisend compared to 30+ pop-up and 10+ promotion pop-up templates in MailerLite.

Paid Omnisend plans include Forms AI, which builds a custom, on-brand form for you from a prompt. MailerLite doesn’t have this feature in any plan.

The form builder is drag-and-drop, with the same layout as the email editor. Elements for the Wheel of Fortune and Countdown timer help you gamify and add urgency to your forms.

CoinGate Gift Cards built a flyout form in Omnisend for discounts. It opens on click, offering a discount and early access in return for an email address.

MailerLite’s website builder is a list-building feature Omnisend doesn’t have. There are 19 pre-built templates for ecommerce, galleries, lead capture, and service businesses. 

You build a website in a drag-and-drop editor with blocks rather than using code, although there’s also an HTML code block for custom elements inside the template. 

Quizzes are embeddable on websites and in emails; these can help you collect more customer information at sign-up, such as their product preferences.

Live The Creed publishes MailerLite pop-ups on its store. The pop-up below matches the store’s branding and triggers on the first page visit.

Segmentation

Segmenting in MailerLite is a manual process using the builder if the seven templates aren’t suitable: Devoted customers, Frequent clickers, Active openers, Not active lately, No opens yet, Location-based segment, and Time zone-based segment.

MailerLite segments on subscriber fields, groups, and email activity, plus automation status: whether someone is active in a workflow, has completed it, or never entered one.

Omnisend has 30+ pre-built segment templates based on shopping behavior, store activity, likelihood to buy/churn, and engagement.

You can segment using profile data, location, engagement, subscription status, shopping and purchase behavior, products, custom events, and spending. There are more pre-applied rules and filters in many of Omnisend’s segment templates compared to MailerLite’s.

Lifecycle stage maps list customers who you’re about to lose, can’t lose, champions, loyalists, and more. You can build a segment from these stages with the logic pre-applied.

Customer support

Accurate as of September 2026.

Omnisend vs. MailerLite: Final verdict

The cheapest tool is MailerLite, with the Comfort plan saving $1/month at 1,000 contacts, $32/month at 5,000, and $43/month at 10,000 compared to Omnisend Standard.

What MailerLite doesn’t do at that price: 24/7 live chat, an AI segment and forms builder, lifecycle maps, and unlimited automations. It also doesn’t do web push notifications in any plan and requires a separate plan for transactional email.

The savings at 10,000 contacts reduce to $8/month if you also need transactional email and purchase the $35/month MailerSend Starter plan for up to 50,000 emails.

Choose Omnisend if:

• You sell on Shopify and want cart recovery. Omnisend has five abandonment templates, whereas MailerLite has no abandoned cart trigger on Shopify.
• Omnichannel reach is important to your business. Omnisend includes 500 web push notifications in Free and unlimited in Standard. The Pro plan supports SMS. MailerLite doesn’t natively support web push or SMS marketing.
• Retention is core to your strategy. Omnisend sorts customers into eight lifecycle stages based on their purchase history, which MailerLite doesn’t offer on any plan.

Choose MailerLite if:

• You sell digital products or bookings without a store. MailerLite’s $12/month plan lets you sell five of them with Stripe integration for its own landing pages and websites.
• Your email program is built around a regular newsletter. MailerLite has RSS campaigns and auto-resend in Comfort plans, plus three email editors to build custom newsletters.
• Online courses and memberships are part of your business. Two of MailerLite’s 18 pre-built automations cover them: weekly course lessons and membership renewal reminders.

Omnisend has a free migration service for customers with 250+ contacts. It includes importing contacts and rebuilding your selected automations, segments, forms, and templates by hand.