Your company's marketing team is drowning in spreadsheets. Your newsletter goes out, but you've got no idea who actually clicked through—or which links are driving real engagement. You're juggling three different tools just to send emails, track opens, and manage contacts. Sound familiar?
Newsletter software has become the backbone of modern marketing. It's not just about blasting emails to a list anymore. The tools that win today combine email delivery with analytics, contact management, and automation that actually talks to the rest of your stack. But the market is crowded, and most platforms force you to choose: do you want simplicity or power? Do you pay for email sending, or link tracking, or deal pipeline management?
Here are some of the newsletter software tools and platforms worth considering—each with different strengths depending on what your team actually needs.
# Clkly
Clkly is the simplest way to track what happens after you send a newsletter. It does link tracking, outreach, and contact management without expensive monthly overheads or feature bloat. You can be set up in 30 seconds—no card, no demo, no sales call.
- Send cold emails with real-time open and click tracking, no setup fee
- Build branded short links on your own domain, plus styled QR codes with logos
- Track which countries, cities, and devices are clicking your links
- Manage all your contacts in one place with lifecycle stages, custom fields, and lists
- Automate sequences with conditional logic and delays, triggered by link clicks or opens
# Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the oldest and most recognisable email marketing software platforms. It started as a free email tool and has evolved into a broader marketing automation suite. The free tier includes basic email sending, list management, and automation, which makes it popular with small teams and freelancers. Paid tiers add segmentation, A/B testing, and deeper integrations. The platform is designed for marketers who want to manage subscribers and send campaigns rather than run individual cold outreach, and it's often positioned as a Mailchimp alternative for teams that have outgrown its limitations.
# HubSpot
HubSpot operates as a full-stack CRM and marketing automation platform, with email, landing pages, forms, and contact management built in. It's commonly used by mid-market teams and sales organisations that need a single hub for leads, deals, and marketing campaigns. HubSpot's free CRM layer is genuinely useful, but meaningful email marketing and automation features sit behind paid tiers. The platform emphasises alignment between sales and marketing, with deal tracking and lead scoring as core features. Many teams use HubSpot as a Mailchimp alternative when they need deeper CRM functionality alongside email.
# ConvertKit
ConvertKit was built specifically for creators—writers, podcasters, and online educators. It focuses on newsletter delivery, subscriber segmentation, and monetisation tools like paid subscriptions and exclusive content. Unlike general email marketing software, ConvertKit integrates creator economics directly into the product: you can charge subscribers, sell digital products, and track revenue per subscriber. It's less of a ConvertKit alternative search and more of a category-specific choice if your business model relies on direct reader relationships and content monetisation.
# Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the dominant email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands. It's built around customer data—capturing behaviour from websites, apps, and integrations, then using that data to segment and personalise campaigns. Klaviyo handles complex lifecycle marketing, abandoned cart flows, and post-purchase engagement at scale. It's not a lightweight tool, and it reflects that in pricing, but teams searching for a Klaviyo alternative are usually looking for similar depth in behaviour-driven segmentation and automation, which narrows the field significantly.
# ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign positions itself as a customer experience automation platform that bridges email, CRM, and sales automation. It's used by mid-market teams that want sophisticated segmentation, automation, and reporting without the enterprise price tag of Salesforce or HubSpot Premium. The platform includes contact management, pipeline tracking, and conditional workflows, and it integrates with many third-party tools. Pricing is transparent and scales with contact count, making it predictable for growing teams.
# Brevo
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that includes email, SMS, chat, and CRM features. It positions itself as an affordable alternative to enterprise platforms, with a generous free tier and competitive paid plans. Brevo is often chosen by small and medium-sized businesses that want multi-channel outreach—email and SMS together—without piecing together separate tools. The platform is strong on automation workflows and segmentation, though UI and user experience lag behind some competitors.
# Lemlist
Lemlist is purpose-built for cold email outreach and sales development. It combines email sending, landing pages, and detailed campaign analytics for sales teams and agencies running outreach at scale. Lemlist includes deliverability tools, inbox warmup, and click tracking, alongside automation and personalisation features. The platform emphasises open rates, click rates, and reply tracking—metrics that matter for outbound sales. It's positioned against other outreach-first tools rather than general email marketing software.
# Instantly
Instantly is a cold email platform designed for high-volume outreach with AI-driven personalisation. It includes multiple sending accounts, advanced automation, and real-time tracking of opens and clicks. The product focuses on speed and volume while maintaining inbox placement, with features like warm-up sequences and detailed campaign reporting. Instantly is built for sales and growth teams running large-scale outreach, not newsletter publishers.
# Close
Close is a sales-focused CRM with built-in email, SMS, and call logging. It's designed for sales teams that live in their CRM and want to avoid tab-switching between separate tools. Close includes pipeline management, activity tracking, and reporting, with email sending and tracking as a core component rather than a bolt-on feature. The platform emphasises the sales workflow—logging activity, managing deals, and staying on top of follow-ups—over marketing-oriented features like segmentation or subscriber nurture.
# Choosing your newsletter software
The right newsletter software depends on what problem you're actually trying to solve. If you're sending marketing newsletters to build audience and drive traffic, you need something like Mailchimp or Brevo. If you're running cold outreach campaigns for sales, you need Lemlist or Instantly. If you're managing a creator business, ConvertKit or Substack might be the fit. If you want e-commerce segmentation and personalisation, Klaviyo is the standard.
But if you want to send newsletters—or cold emails—and genuinely understand who's clicking what, you need link tracking that works across your email platform. That's where most newsletter software falls short. They track opens and clicks inside their own system, but they don't give you the detail you need: which countries, which devices, which referrers. And they certainly don't connect those clicks back to your contacts and deals.
The best approach is to pick a newsletter software that fits your primary use case, then layer in tools that fill the gaps. Clkly gives you the link tracking and analytics you're missing, plus the contact management and email sending capabilities if you want to keep everything in one place.
# Why Clkly stands out for newsletter workflows
Clkly removes the friction from tracking and follow-up. You get branded short links you can include in any email, real-time click data tied to individual contacts, and automated workflows that trigger off link clicks. No vendor lock-in, no massive monthly bill.
- Send emails with full click and open tracking without monthly overheads
- See exactly where your newsletter traffic is coming from—city, device, browser, referrer
- Build workflows that automatically tag or move contacts based on link clicks
- Use a lightweight CRM to manage all your subscriber data in one place
- Connect your newsletter stack together without paying for bidirectional integrations you'll never use