How we compare email marketing software
We list 13 email marketing platforms available to Australian businesses, and 13 providers publish a rate card we can cost from. Nearly everything here is self-serve, so the pricing page is the real pricing page rather than a lead-capture form.
That abundance creates a different problem. These platforms do not all bill on the same thing, so a single "from" price tells you almost nothing until you know what it is a price per. Our estimate takes your list size and your sending volume and costs each platform on its own meter, then ranks on the result. Ranking is arithmetic on published rates. Commission never moves a provider, and we do not sell prominence.
Prices are stored per platform and re-read at source, so the figures in the table and in this guide are the same numbers, not a copy of them.
Contacts or sends: the two meters email marketing software bills on
This is the single most useful thing to understand before you compare anything, and it is invisible on a pricing page that only shows a monthly figure.
Most platforms in this table meter on stored contacts. You pay for the size of your database, and how often you mail it is capped by fair use rather than priced. Brevo meters the other way: its model is Per email volume, and its contact position is Unlimited contacts (billed by sends). HubSpot is a third shape again, at Per seat, where the contact allowance caps which plan you may sit on rather than setting the monthly figure directly.
The practical consequence is that the two meters invert. A retailer with a large list that mails a promotion once a month is buying storage, and a contact meter charges them for every dormant record between sends. A consultancy with a small list that mails several times a week is buying volume, and a contact meter is close to free for them while a send meter climbs with every extra campaign.
Work out which of the two describes you before you look at a monthly figure, because it decides which half of this table is even relevant.
"Unlimited sending" is usually a fair use ceiling, not an absence of one. Contact-metered plans commonly allow a multiple of your contact tier per month rather than genuinely unlimited volume, and the multiple is in the terms rather than on the pricing page. Transpond states its own ceiling openly as Active contacts (fair use: 12x contacts /mo in sends). If your sending pattern is high frequency, check the multiple before you assume a contact meter has made volume free.
Which contacts your email marketing software counts, including the ones you cannot email
The same list can be billed at two different sizes, because vendors do not agree on what a contact is. A rate quoted against "5,000 contacts" is not quoted against the same 5,000 records everywhere.
Mailchimp bills All contacts including unsubscribed. ActiveCampaign bills All contacts (active + inactive). Omnisend bills All contacts including non-subscribers. Klaviyo takes the opposite position at Active profiles only (excludes suppressed), as does MailerLite at Active subscribers, AWeber at Active subscribers (unsubscribes excluded) and Kit at Active subscribers.
For an Australian sender this is more than an accounting quirk, because the Spam Act requires you to stop mailing anyone who has unsubscribed. On an all-contacts meter you are therefore paying to store the exact people the law forbids you to email, and on an established list those records accumulate faster than new signups arrive. A list that has been running for years can carry a substantial unsubscribed and hard-bounced tail, and on one meter that tail is billable while on the other it is not.
The obvious response, deleting them, is the wrong one. A deleted record is no longer proof that the person opted out, so a later import from a spreadsheet or a point-of-sale export can quietly re-add them and start mailing again. Suppress rather than delete, and treat the storage cost as the price of keeping your consent record intact. If that cost is material at your list size, the fix is a platform on the other meter, not a tidier database.
Both meters reward regular hygiene on genuinely dead addresses. Only one of them pays you for it.
Klaviyo and Mailchimp: where these two email marketing software platforms diverge
Australian and wider APAC searchers ask about this head-to-head constantly, and the usual answer, that one is for e-commerce and one is for everyone, is too coarse to decide anything.
They meter the same list differently. Klaviyo is Active profiles only (excludes suppressed), Mailchimp is All contacts including unsubscribed. On a young list this barely registers. On a list with years of churn behind it, the two are counting noticeably different numbers before either rate card is applied.
Automation is gated differently. Klaviyo's position is Advanced (flows, triggers, predictive on every paid plan), Mailchimp's is Basic (Essentials), Advanced (Standard+). If abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows are the reason you are buying at all, compare the plan that actually carries them rather than the entry rung, because the entry figures are not describing the same capability.
SMS is the clearest yes-or-no split for an Australian sender. Klaviyo's AU SMS status is Yes (AU supported). Mailchimp's is No (US only). A platform marketed as omnichannel that cannot originate a message to an Australian mobile is an email platform for you, whatever the feature list says. HubSpot is in the same position at No, while ActiveCampaign is Yes (AU supported), Brevo is Yes (AU supported) and Omnisend is Yes (AU supported).
Entry pricing. Klaviyo is $28/mo (Email) and Mailchimp is $19/mo (Essentials). Both climb in steps rather than sliding, so crossing a rung by a single contact moves you a whole rung, and the two ladders do not step at the same places. The entry figure is the least useful number in the comparison. Put your real list size into the table and read the row.
What a free email marketing software plan actually caps
Free tiers in this category are capped on two axes at once, and reading only one of them is how a business ends up on a paid plan a fortnight after signing up.
Mailchimp's free tier is Yes (250 contacts, 500 sends /mo), Klaviyo's is Yes (250 profiles, 500 emails /mo), MailerLite's is Yes (250 contacts, 2,500 emails /mo) and Omnisend's is Yes (250 contacts, 500 emails, 60 SMS /mo). In each case the send allowance is the binding constraint long before the contact allowance is: a list at the contact cap, mailed weekly, exhausts a monthly send allowance in the first campaign or two.
Brevo's free tier inverts that, at Yes (300 emails /day, unlimited contacts), which is the same send-metered logic as its paid plans. A daily ceiling suits a transactional or drip pattern and suits a monthly newsletter blast to a big list very badly.
The third cap is on features rather than volume. Kit's free tier is Yes (10K subscribers, 1 automation, no A/B), Transpond's is Yes (250 contacts, 3,000 sends /mo, no automation), and Spreeflo's is No (forms only). A free plan with no automation is a broadcast tool, which is fine if broadcasting is what you are doing and useless if you signed up to build a welcome sequence.
Treat a free tier as a way to test deliverability and the editor with a real list, not as a plan you will still be on next year. The realistic question is what the rung above it costs at your list size, which is the number the table above is calculating.
The Spam Act, consent and email marketing software built for other markets
Australian rules are stricter than the American ones most of these platforms were designed around, and the gap is not visible in any price.
The Spam Act 2003 requires consent before you send commercial electronic messages, clear identification of the sender, and a functional unsubscribe that is honoured within five working days. Consent may be express or inferred, and inferred consent is narrower than most marketers assume: a business card in a bowl or a public email address on a website does not automatically extend to a newsletter. ACMA enforces this and its penalties are commercial in scale, not nominal. The practical requirement is that you can produce, for any address on your list, a record of when and how they opted in.
Every platform in this table ships consent and unsubscribe tooling, so compliance is not a differentiator on the feature grid. Where the offshore origin actually shows up is elsewhere:
Reachability. SMS origination to Australian mobiles is genuinely absent on several platforms here, as above. Transpond's SMS add-on, for instance, is No (SMS add-on is UK customers only).
Support in your working day. Campaign Monitor lists its origin as Australia, and its support as AU business hours. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your sends go out in Australian business hours and whether a stuck campaign is an emergency for you.
Sender authentication. Google and Yahoo's bulk sender rules mean SPF, DKIM and a DMARC record on your own sending domain are now table stakes rather than optional hardening, with the strictest requirements applying above roughly 5,000 messages a day to their addresses. Every platform here supports domain authentication. Doing it is still your job, and skipping it costs you inbox placement no rate card will show.
Moving a list between email marketing software without breaking consent
Nothing in this category locks you in contractually. Contract status across the table is uniformly no, Mailchimp's included at No, so switching is an operational cost rather than a legal one. That makes the migration risk easy to underestimate.
Your suppression list has to move with your subscribers, and it is a separate export. Most people export subscribers, import them, and leave the unsubscribed and hard-bounced records behind, which means the new platform has no idea those people opted out. The first campaign then mails them. That is a Spam Act problem, not a housekeeping one, and it is a common way a clean migration produces a complaint.
Your consent records have to move too. Opt-in date and source are ordinary fields in an export and ordinary fields in an import, and they are also the evidence you would need if a complaint were ever made. Map them deliberately rather than accepting whatever the importer guesses.
Sender reputation does not transfer. Reputation attaches to the sending infrastructure, so a list that inboxed reliably for years can land in spam on day one somewhere else. Re-authenticate your domain before the first send and warm up by mailing your most recently engaged segment first, rather than the whole list at once.
Expect the meter to change what you pay, independently of the rate card. Moving from a platform that bills all contacts to one that bills active subscribers will drop your billable count without your list changing at all, and moving the other way will raise it. Cost the destination on its own definition of a contact, not on the number your current platform shows you.
The export is the easy part; the automations are not. Templates and flows do not port between platforms, and rebuilding a mature automation set is usually the real cost of switching. Count that work before you count the monthly saving.