Flodesk vs. MailerLite: Which provides better value in 2024?

The winner – Mailerlite

3.9

Not great not terrible

What Mailerlite features are better than Flodesk?

Flodesk and MailerLite are excellent email marketing tools with a lot to offer. 

And while they share some similarities in their features, their unique qualities genuinely set them apart.

If you need help choosing the best, this review will provide well-researched insights to help you make an informed selection. 

In this review, we’ll compare the key features side by side. 

So, which one do you think provides better value in 2023? Flodesk or Mailerlite?

Well, we’ll help you find out.

Flodesk vs. MailerLite: A quick overview

Flodesk and MailerLite equally offer comprehensive email marketing features for all business types. However, both tools aren’t ecommerce focused. 

MailerLite has earned a rating of 2.6 on the Shopify app store. Despite the lower rating, customers appreciate its affordability and ease of use. 

Flodesk, on the other hand, cannot integrate directly with Shopify. Zapier handles all integrations with Flodesk.

Does this make Flodesk complicated? No, it doesn’t. It expands its email marketing capabilities and provides further automation and optimization opportunities.

So, which email marketing tool is best for your business in 2023? 

Let’s see how these tools compare before we get into a detailed feature-by-feature Flodesk and MailerLite comparison.

Flodesk vs. MailerLite comparison: Feature by feature

Here, we’ll comprehensively compare these two email marketing software. We’ll be focusing on the following key aspects:

• Ease of getting started 
• Building an email campaign
• Marketing automation
• Signup forms and landing pages
• Segmentation
• Analytics
• Customer support
• Integrations
• Compatibility with other marketing tools
• Generative AI tools

We’ll crown a winner for each comparison criterion to make your decision-making process a breeze. 

Let’s get started.

Ease of getting started

Getting started with MailerLite is a breeze, thanks to its clear-cut and intuitive interface. It provides helpful instructions to make the onboarding process smooth. 

Even better, you don’t need a credit card during the signup. However, we did notice that the account confirmation process is quite strict. It feels like they manually confirm each account.

Flodesk, on the other hand, has a straightforward signup process and a clean and minimal interface that resembles a blank page. It’s uncommon to find a blank page instead of getting started wizard. However, the minimalist platform interface allows users to explore it without specific guidance. This approach suits those who prefer an intuitive and uncluttered experience. 

Modifying the sender’s email and adjusting other settings in MailerLite proves to be remarkably intuitive. 

The platform’s navigation boasts a highly user-friendly design, making it effortless for users to locate and modify their desired settings. 

We found the grouping of settings logical and straightforward. This structure enhances the overall user experience, ensuring that managing email preferences and other aspects feel seamless and effortless.

Although both platforms are extremely easy to use, Flodesk is a leader in this round. It doesn’t have an account confirmation process which can sometimes be a stopper.

Building an email campaign

Flodesk and MailerLite offer reliable email campaign builders. However, they do have unique features that set them apart. 

The email wizard in Flodesk is well-organized, guiding you through selecting a template, editing email design, and adding campaign details. 

The platform strongly focuses on visual appeal. But we noticed that its email design builder differs from others in the industry. 

MailerLite, on the other hand, has a simple email campaign wizard. 

What’s more interesting?

It offers three email campaign builders: a drag-and-drop builder, a rich-text editor, and a custom HTML editor. Sadly, it’s only available on the highest-tier plan. 

Flodesk boasts a collection of stunning and modern templates, making it visually appealing for users. The best part is that adding and editing all the main elements, including images, lines, menu bars, and social media elements is easy. 

MailerLite, on the other hand, provides various content blocks, including surveys, quizzes, and product listings, to enhance email engagement and cater to ecommerce requirements. Also, the tool offers templates with 90+ options only available in paid plans.

The email editor in Flodesk is simple in terms of features but excels in its visual emphasis. However, it lacks some advanced tools like A/B testing and auto-resending. 

Unlike Flodesk, MailerLite has A/B testing, auto-resending, and automatic RSS campaigns. These features make it a comprehensive solution for marketers seeking more in-depth campaign optimization. 

One of MailerLite’s distinctive features is its seamless integration of Twitter and Facebook posts into your emails. 

Furthermore, the platform provides an invaluable feature that automatically resends campaigns to non-openers, a rarity among email marketing tools. 

This function significantly enhances campaign performance, ensuring your message reaches a broader audience. 

This unique combination of features can only be found in Omnisend and MailerLite, making it a powerful and exclusive advantage for users of these platforms.

MailerLite wins this round: great templates and many additional features for email campaign success.

Marketing automation

Although automation is easy with MailerLite, it’s pretty limited compared to other email marketing services. 

The best part is that MailerLite extends automation capabilities to all users, even on their free plan. Users can easily create automation with the following triggers:

• When a subscriber joins a group
• When a subscriber clicks a form
• When a subscriber clicks a link
• Updated subscriber field
• The anniversary of a date
• The exact match of a date

MailerLite offers 15 pre-built customer journey templates. However, they don’t integrate other marketing channels. MailerLite is for sending emails only.

Meanwhile, Flodesk’s automation is fundamental. So far, it has only one trigger– when the subscriber enters the segment. On Flodesk, you can only find welcome sequence, sales sequence, nurture sequence, and lead magnet delivery automation. These kinds of automation usually suffice for personal branding specialists, bloggers, psychologists, educators, etc.

Just like MailerLite, Flodesk’s automated workflows are logic-ready. You have to edit the text and make it work for you.

MailerLite takes the win. It provides 15 pre-built customer journey templates, making it a better option for more business cases.

Signup forms and landing pages

Which tool offers the best signup forms and landing pages, Flodesk or MailerLite?

While both platforms offer efficient features for expanding your contact list, they vary in customization options and functionality.

Flodesk offers good functionality for signup forms. There are 40+ modern templates for signup forms. You can set up a popup, an inline form, or a full signup page. 

The best part is that after the subscriber signs up for your form, you can show them the thank you message or redirect them to the chosen landing page.

On the other hand, MailerLite offers many options for creating signup forms and landing pages. It provides over 49 visually appealing landing page templates you can choose from or build your own from scratch. 

Additionally, MailerLite allows you to add interactive elements to your landing pages, such as: 

• Countdown timers
• Scroll animations
• Quizzes
• Surveys
• Client testimonials 

What’s more?

Unlike some other tools, MailerLite allows you to identify subscribers and avoid counting them twice, even if they exist in different lists or segments. 

This intelligent approach prevents duplicate counts and ensures a more accurate representation of your subscriber base. 

Additionally, importing contacts into MailerLite is straightforward, and the data mapping is also a user-friendly experience, simplifying the overall management of your email contacts effectively.

Both Flodesk and MailerLite allow you to see analytics of your form performance. The dashboard includes signup form performance, conversion rates, and charts of subscriber growth over time. 

With MailerLite, you can conduct A/B tests to optimize the performance of your forms and landing pages, while with Flodesk, you can’t.

MailerLite wins since it offers comprehensive features and many pre-built landing pages.

Segmentation

Both tools provide basic segmentation capabilities with unique features that set them apart.

MailerLite, for instance, allows you to categorize your customers based on the following:

• Email engagements
• Geographical location
• Subscription date, groups
• Time inactive
• Personal details.

The “groups” feature enables you to categorize contacts based on their location manually. However, MailerLite needs advanced segmentation options based on the following:

• Onsite behavior
• Purchase behavior
• Lifetime value. 

This limitation makes it less suitable for ecommerce businesses that require more advanced segmentation capabilities.

Unlike other tools, we identified a different segment conception than usual with Flodesk. Instead of standard lists, you have segments and create them by filtering.

You can filter by activity date and status, source, belonging to other segments, and belonging to different data fields. 

On the flip side, Flodesk lacks pretty usual segmentation criteria, like demographics, and email activity, which makes it a bit tricky to use.

This round is a tie. MailerLite and Flodesk have similar offerings when it comes to segmentation. Both have basic segmentation capabilities.

Analytics

MailerLite provides a reporting dashboard with standard analytics features. It allows you to track various aspects, including:

• Email campaign activities
• Customer engagement
• Link tracking
• Click maps
• Open rates
• Bounce rates
• Number of orders and revenue per campaign

On the contrary, Flodesk offers a more limited set of analytical insights, lacking depth. With Flodesk, you can view:

• Number of active subscribers
• Entries
• Completions
• Open rate
• Click rate
• Unsubscribe rates
• Status
• Orders and total sales (for Checkout part only)

MailerLite’s visual presentation of data is simple and easy to interpret, making it user-friendly. The platform also allows for A/B testing on various elements of emails to optimize performance. 

It’s worth noting that advanced features like location-based reports and heatmaps are available with MailerLite’s paid plans.

MailerLite wins. Even though both tools offer similar analytical capabilities, MailerLite is more comprehensive.

Customer support

Unlike other platforms, Flodesk offers minimal customer support. There is no chat or phone support. It only provides email support from 6 am to 6 pm Eastern Time US. 

And this is quite a drawback. The good thing is you can take advantage of help center articles and Flodesk University.

Alternatively, MailerLite offers email and chat support 24/7. Free-plan users can get it for the first 30 days only. Email support is unlimited for paying customers, and live chat support is available only for the highest-tier users on the Advanced plan. 

And while the free users might not get the emails and chat support after 30 days, they can leverage the helpful tutorials on YouTube, a knowledge base, Mailerlite Academy, and a blog. 

MailerLite wins. It offers more support options.

Integrations

MailerLite boasts a wide selection of over 140 integrations, providing users with various connectivity options.

So far, Flodesk offers integrations with Shopify, Stripe, Instagram, a few more platforms. It also integrates with the Zapier connector, which opens vast opportunities to connect with almost any platform you might need.

MailerLite wins as it provides more integrations.

Compatibility with other marketing channels

Both platforms, unfortunately, aren’t compatible with other marketing channels and don’t support omnichannel marketing campaigns. 

However, MailerLite focuses on Facebook retargeting as an additional marketing channel. With the Advanced plan, you can leverage Facebook retargeting to reach your contacts on the popular social media platform.

Whereas, Flodesk isn’t compatible with other marketing channels. And this is a significant drawback.

MailerLite wins.

Generative AI tools

Mailerlite offers Ai assitance for email copywriting, subject lines. Meanwhile, Flodesk doesn’t have this feature so far.

Price Comparison

Pricing is often a concern when selecting email marketing software for your business.

As we conclude this MailerLite vs. Flodesk comparison, we will thoroughly examine their free and paid plans, considering both the costs and the features provided. 

Which software proves to be more budget-friendly: Flodesk or MailerLite?

Free plan comparison

MailerLite’s free plan further enhances its attractiveness, catering to beginner marketers with valuable features. 

Here are the features MailerLite offers in the free plan:

• 12,000 monthly emails
• Email automation
• Basic reporting
• One website
• Ten landing pages
• Signup forms.

Although the free plan is quite generous, it comes with certain limitations regarding features. 

Email templates, Facebook integration, dynamic emails, auto-resend capability, and the ability to incorporate multiple triggers in automation are available for paying customers only.

Consequently, this plan proves suitable primarily for basic tasks such as list building and manual email creation, requiring users to design their content from the ground up.

On the other hand, Flodesk doesn’t provide a free plan at all. But it offers a 30-day trial allowing users to explore all features without limitations during that period. The best part is it doesn’t require a credit card to leverage the free trial.

Depending on your specific needs and requirements, one of these options may be more suitable for your email marketing needs.

Paid plans comparison

MailerLite provides three pricing plans tailored to different use cases: 

• Advanced
• Growing Business
• Enterprise

Flodesk, on the other hand, offers three plans with flat rates and not related to the number of subscribers:

• Email Plan
• Checkout Plan
• Everything Plan

Let’s now compare these plans.

While Flodesk presents a higher starting price than MailerLite, it maintains consistent prices irrespective of the number of subscribers. 

Flodesk’s pricing appears relatively affordable, but its features aren’t good enough for the starting price. Also, it needs several crucial features necessary for ecommerce success. 

On the other hand, MailerLite offers reasonably priced and tailored plans. The best part is that the pricing plans for MailerLite are transparent, making it easy to understand the price model.

Summary: Which one wins?

Flodesk or MailerLite: Which provides better value in 2024? 

Let’s briefly recap the Flodesk vs. MailerLite comparison to assist you in making that decision.

Hopefully, this comparison between Flodesk and MailerLite has offered valuable insights to aid you in selecting the right platform according to your needs. 

While both tools cater to the core marketing requirements of solopreneurs and small businesses, they exhibit distinct differences.

MailerLite is an affordable and beginner-friendly option, making it an excellent choice for novice marketers. 

Its user-friendly interface and generous free plan can help you start your email marketing journey without significant financial investment.

On the other hand, some of Flodesk’s features may not justify its price, making MailerLite the clear winner.

For ecommerce businesses, it’s important to note that both tools lack essential elements. 

If you operate an online store and seek a platform that seamlessly integrates with your ecommerce platforms, we recommend GetResponse, Klaviyo, or Omnisend over MailerLite and Flodesk.

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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.