Welcome to my Flodesk vs MailerLite review.
In this post, I’m going to compare the main features of both email marketing services to find out which will give you a better chance to achieve your goals.
Flodesk and MailerLite have been around for a long time and can arguably be called some of the best email marketing services on the internet. That being said, depending on your goals one can be a better fit than the other.
That’s why I’m going to go over the most important features of these email marketing services to highlight the differences so you can make an informed decision before purchasing one of these email marketing services.
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Reasons to get Flodesk:
Since I value your time I’ll give you a review spoiler right now. Flodesk has had some problems with glitches in the past but right now it’s a great solution for creating email marketing campaigns.
Here are a few reasons I personally think Flodesk is a good email marketing service.
- 30-day free trial
- Ease-of-Use
- Internal check-out functions for e-commerce included
- Visually appealing templates
- A fixed price for every plan
- No cap on subscribers and emails
Reasons to get MailerLite:
Since I value your time I’ll give you a review spoiler right now. Mailerlite is a great option for those looking for a beginner-friendly option for creating email marketing campaigns.
Here are a few reasons I personally think Mailerlite is a good email marketing service.
- Free Plan
- 30-day free trial
- Ease-of-Use
- High-quality customer service
- Quality service for a cheap price
- Internal check-out functions for e-commerce included
- A/B Testing features
- Visually appealing templates
- Blog services included
- It’s allowed to insert affiliate links in your emails
Free Plans and Limitations
MailerLite and Flodesk both have great free options at their disposal for determining in they’re the right fit for what you’re trying to achieve. They both offer a 30-day free trial with access to all premium features they currently have.
What sets MailerLite apart from Flodesk when it comes to their free options is that they also offer a limited forever free plan.
I can imagine this being handy for people that haven’t created a consistent source of traffic yet but still want to be able to give people the option to join their email list.
This is why I’d say when it comes to their free options that MailerLite is the winner.
Ease-of-Use
MailerLite and Flodesk both focus on creating a beginner-friendly experience for new users but in my opinion, their approach has some slight differences.
Flodesk has created a beginner-friendly experience by taking a minimalistic approach to email marketing and not adding advanced features to their service that could confuse people that don’t have prior experience with email marketing services.
MailerLite creates beginner-friendly experiences by focusing on the navigation and the visual elements of its platform. They chose to keep all the advanced features but they organized their website in a way that doesn’t overwhelm new users.
They both are great for people that are new to email marketing or simply need to make simple email marketing campaigns but for me, MailerLite is the winner because you still have the advanced features at your disposal.
Website Builder and Landing Pages
When comes to the website builder and Landing pages that you can create with Flodesk and MailerLite are very similar. They both use WYSIWYG website builders.
WYSIWYG is an acronym for what you see is what you get. So all the changes you make to a website are immediately visible because you can click on the element you want to change and decide how to modify them.
As a result, you don’t need to learn any web design or code to create a website that you can use to capture email addresses.
They also both provide their users with vissually apealing landing page templates that you can modify.
That being said, there is a huge difference in what is capable with both email marketing services when it comes to websites.
Flodesk focuses on creating one-page websites used for lead generation.
MailerLite has the capability to create one-page websites but is also able to create a full-fledged website with multiple pages and even a blog that can be promoted with SEO to appear on Google.
This is why I think MailerLite is the winner when it comes to creating websites and landing pages.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is one of the main benefits of an email marketing service.
It’s the feature that makes it possible to put the communication between you and your email subscribers on autopilot.
MailerLite and Flodesk both use automation workflows that can be modified to oversee the entire process from the point the email subscriber signs up to where they make a purchase.
You can choose to:
- Automate emails and sequences.
- Delay messages until a time of your choosing
- Tag subscribers to create segments
- Communicate with people that abandoned their carts
When it comes to marketing automation you can’t go wrong with both of them.
It’s a tie when it comes to marketing automation capabilities.
Reporting
Reporting is in my opinion very important when it comes to email marketing because it makes the information you get about the performance of your email marketing campaigns easily understandable.
The moment you understand what you can tweak in your marketing campaigns you can immediately take action and see improvements as soon as possible.
Flodesk and MailerLite both provide fairly basic reporting about:
- Open rate
- Clickthrough
- Delivery rate
- Link performance
While there are other email marketing services that provide you with more in-depth reports I do think this is more than enough to enhance the performance of your campaigns
Since they both offer the same information and the reports they provide are similar I’d have to consider this a tie between Flodesk and MailerLite.
Management and Segmentation
MailerLite and Flodesk both have email list management and segmentation features.
These are valuable features because they help you to segment your email subscribers into different groups based on all types of factors.
After doing that, you can start to personalize your communication for every group and increase open rates, clicks, sales, and other actions you’re trying to stimulate.
Here are just a few factors that email marketing services allow you to use to create segments:
- Email address
- Groups
- Fields
- Sign-up source
- Sign-up date
- campaigns
- Location
- Automation workflow
- Stats
- Activity
- etc.
When comparing the factors you can use for segmentation, MailerLite seems to be the winner because it has twice as many factors that you can use for segmentation.
A/B Testing
A/B Testing makes it possible to send variations of the same email to different segments of your email list. The reason this feature has value is that you can test what version performs better and use that as a template for sending emails in the future.
MailerLite has pretty advanced A/B testing features that allow you to experiment with the name of the sender, the subject line, and the content within the email.
Most email marketing services only allow you to perform an A/B test based on the subject line so this is a huge plus.
Flodesk has decided to not offer its user A/B testing features because they want to take a minimalistic approach to email marketing.
While I do agree that split testing can be a bit overwhelming to people that don’t have any experience with email marketing I do think it’s a valuable tool to have.
This is why I consider MailerLite the winner when it comes to A/B testing.
Integrations
Flodesk
Most email marketing services offer integrations so you can connect other software applications to them. This is where Flodesk is lacking a bit in my opinion.
Flodesk has decided to stick to 3 integrations by being able to connect to your Instagram, Shopify account, or Zapier account.
I suspect the thought process behind this decision was to let Flodesk connect to apps indirectly through Zapier.
That being said, if you for example use other apps you’re going to have to invest in Zapier to connect them to Flodesk. I can imagine not everyone is willing to do that.
MailerLite
MailerLite offers more than 130 integrations that you can use to connect Mailerlite with other software and create a seamless process to achieve your goals.
The usual suspects such as Zapier, Facebook, Stipe, and Paypal are all included making MailerLite a great option for people that value having a large variety of integrations.
MailerLite has a lot more integrations that you can work with. This is why when it comes to integrations MailerLite is the winner.
Customer Support
Flodesk
I have read some older reviews about the customer support of Flodesk and I have to say I haven’t experienced any of the complaints. So either Flodesk has aggressively solved all their problems or the complaints weren’t accurate.
There are 4 sources that people can use to get customer support.
1. Flodesk insiders group on Facebook
Facebook group that functions as a community for every Flodesk user.
Rather than it being a place where you can get technical support it’s more like a place where people can share their ideas about how to get the most out of Flodesk and email marketing in general. At the moment, it seems to be very active and contains more than 16K people.
2. Submit a support ticket
You can submit a support ticket by sending us an email to support@flodesk.com. They have a helpdesk called the member experience team that helps with:
- setup guidance
- general product questions,
- account and billing matters, among others.
According to their website, they answer within 2 business days but in the 2 times I have used it I got a response within 2 hours.
MailerLite
MailerLite provides its members with great customer support.
Support is provided through email or chat and dependent on your plan the availability of the customer support team will differ.
Members that use the free plan have the support team at their disposal from Monday to Friday while all the members that have a paid plan have 24/7 access to the support team.
The response time of the team is very short the longest I heard free members wait for a response was an hour which isn’t that bad in my opinion. I have dealt with software applications for which the response time was 48 hours.
I think the winner when it comes to customer support is Flodesk. For the most part, both email marketing services offer the same channels for support but I think the big difference maker is the Facebook group.
Sometimes getting the perspective of other users can help with solving problems.
Pricing
Comparing the pricing to see which email marketing service is better is a bit complicated because they offer different features and start out at different price sets.
So I’m going to share with you a few findings and let you decide what you like better.
- Starting Price
MailerLite starts out cheaper but the more subscribers you get, the more you’re going to pay. Flodesk starts at a more expensive price but you get unlimited subscribers. - Price vs Features
Mailerlite offers more features at a reduced price but at a certain point becomes more expensive than Flodesk. - Price for ecommerce functions
When you add transactional e-commerce features to MailerLite it becomes more expensive than Flodesk when you add transactional features.
Feature Gaps
There are some differences in the features that MailerLite and Flodesk offer. I thought it’d be a good idea to make a list of them so you have a good idea of what you’re getting or not getting with each email marketing service.
Only MailerLite offers A/B Testing
Split testing gives you the ability to experiment with different versions of the same email to find out which works better for getting your email subscribers to open emails, click on links, and purchase products and services.
Only MailerLite Offers Blog Features
Most email marketing services will only let you create one-pagers that you can use as an opt-in page from your email list. Email marketing services will give you a lot of options for the page but they don’t offer the possibility to create an entire website.
Only MailerLite has a Forever Free plan
MailerLite offers a Forever Free plan with limited features next to its full access 30-day trial. Flodesk only offers a 30-day trial.
MailerLite Offers More Integrations
Both Flodesk and MailerLite use integrations but the number of integrations that you can use differs. MailerLite has 130 more integrations that you can use to connect other applications to it.
Conclusion
I don’t think you can go wrong with both email marketing services.
They’re both geared toward making the experience as beginner-friendly as possible.
That being said, I’d probably go with MailerLite because despite of the beginners-friendly user experience it has a lot more features that’d benefit email marketers as they gain more experience.
Click here to see the MailerLite pricing plans
