Campaign Monitor Pricing: Too Expensive? 2025

Let’s be honest: finding the right email marketing solution without breaking the bank is a real headache. Campaign Monitor caught my attention because it actually delivers a pretty solid package compared to its competitors.

What I found particularly appealing about Campaign Monitor was their pricing.  Jump up to just $11/month, and you’ll get 24/7 email support, email automation and multi-user access. Meanwhile, for only $28/month you get unlimited email, A/B testing, transactional emails and whatnot.

While the price-to-quality ratio is impressive, the real question is: How does it stack up against other online email marketing tools and does its budget-friendly pricing structure truly reflect the quality of the overall package? Let’s find out.

Campaign Monitor Pricing at a Glance

Campaign Monitor Plans & Costs Reviewed

Free Trial Reviewed

Campaign Monitor’s 30-day trial is ideal for beginners exploring email marketing or testing the platform’s features before upgrading. It’s perfect for small lists and solo users who want to try the drag-and-drop builder and basic templates. 

However, Campaign Monitor’s free plan limits you to 500 contacts, 500 email sends and basic reporting. Advanced automation and segmentation are also unavailable, and support is email only. You’ll need to upgrade once your list grows, you want better analytics, or you need multi-user access. 

Lite Plan

The Lite plan starts at $11/month and it’s pretty good for individuals, freelancers or really small businesses just getting started with email marketing. You can start with up to 500 subscribers and 2,500 emails per month, and move to bigger numbers (and pricetag) as your subscriber list grows.

I like that it includes their drag-and-drop email builder and some professionally designed templates. You’ll get basic reporting and can set up simple automations like welcome emails.

The Lite Plan is affordable and easy to use, but, like most entry plans, it’s definitely limited. You won’t be able to run dynamic campaigns or make decisions based on detailed data. If you’re growing your list or need more advanced features (such as email templates, advanced A/B testing, etc.), you’ll outgrow this plan pretty quickly.

Essentials Plan

The Essentials Plan kicks off at $28/month and feels designed for small to mid-sized businesses that need more powerful tools but don’t want to spend a fortune.

With Essentials, you can send unlimited emails (not including the transactional emails), unlock design and spam testing, advanced link tracking, over 100 pre-made templates, and countdown timers for your campaigns.

This is where things get more interesting for marketing teams. You can start building data-driven targeted campaigns using real-time metrics and create more sophisticated automation flows.

I particularly like the scheduled sending and time zone features, not to mention that Campaign Monitor integrates well with popular tools like Salesforce, WordPress, and Shopify. That said, if you’re sending huge volumes or running an agency, you might eventually find its testing, AI-driven tools and automation options a bit limiting.

Premier Plan

The Premier Plan starts at $153/month and is one of Campaign Monitor’s top offerings. It’s clearly aimed at large-scale marketers and enterprise teams. You get unlimited users, pre-built automation templates, an intuitive visual journey designer, multivariate testing, and behavior-based segmentation that’s quite powerful.

I like that they include custom onboarding and predictive analytics—these advanced tools can genuinely enhance campaign performance over time. However, given the steep price, platforms like Sender or MailerLite offer nearly the same features for much less.

If you’re running frequent campaigns across multiple audiences, this plan makes a lot of sense. It’s best suited for companies with dedicated sales teams or agencies managing multiple clients. Smaller operations, however, might find themselves paying for additional features they rarely use unless they’re regularly running sophisticated, segmented campaigns.

Enterprise Plan

Finally, the Enterprise plan is tailored for large teams and enterprise-level marketers, offering the most comprehensive set of features. You get pre-built journey templates, a dedicated account manager, advanced engagement segments and proactive deliverability monitoring. Additional perks include integrations that allow for HIPAA compliance and custom infrastructure setups.

This plan is ideal for organizations running complex campaigns across multiple audiences, needing precise analytics, and managing high-volume sends. Smaller teams might find the plan overkill, since you have to be ready to commit to a one-year contract.

Campaign Monitor Hidden Fees & Extra Costs

While Campaign Monitor is upfront about its base pricing, there are several sneaky instances where the platform tries to squeeze more money out of you—usually, without you suspecting a thing.

For instance, the Pay-per-Campaign pricing model includes both a base fee and a per-recipient charge. But exceeding your subscriber or email limits can trigger an automatic upgrade. Some features, such as SMS marketing, advanced analytics, or send-time optimization, are only available as paid add-ons or in higher-tier plans.

Finally, currency conversion and small increases in your subscriber count can affect your overall cost, so it’s important to budget carefully.

Campaign Monitor Pricing by Subscriber Count

Campaign Monitor Pay-As-You-Go Costs 

When Pay-As-You-Go Makes Sense

Pay-as-you-go model makes a lot of sense for event marketers, agencies, or businesses that only send occasional campaigns and don’t want to commit to a monthly subscription. Instead of paying for a monthly plan you may not fully use, you can simply purchase credits and send emails as needed—ideal for one-off campaigns, seasonal promotions, or client-based work.

Credit System Explained

Each credit equals one email sent to a single contact—so sending to 1,000 subscribers would use 1,000 credits, plus an additional 500 credits as a sending fee per campaign. Perhaps the best part about this system is that these credits never expire, making the Pay-As-You-Go option perfect for businesses with irregular or seasonal sending habits. 

With Pay-As-You-Go, you also get full access to Campaign Monitor’s key features, including the drag-and-drop builder, customizable templates, automation tools, segmentation, and advanced reporting.

Meanwhile, Campaign Monitor also offers a Pay-Per-Campaign option, which is great for users who don’t need to send emails regularly. Instead of committing to a monthly plan, you simply pay $5 per campaign plus 1 cent per recipient. They don’t demonstrate full pricing for this option, so it’s difficult to say if it doesn’t come with some caveats that inflate the final cost.

Campaign Monitor Transactional Plans Breakdown

Transactional emails come with all Campaign Monitor paid plans, except the Lite plan. However, unlike Mailchimp Transactional or Amazon SES, it doesn’t charge you extra or require you to buy ‘blocks’ (which, in Mailchimp’s case, are converted to transactional email bundles).

For Essentials and Enterprise plan users, transactional emails are capped at 10 times your current pricing tier’s subscriber limit. For example, if your plan allows up to 500 subscribers, you can send 5,000 transactional emails per month. With 5,000 subscribers, your limit increases to 50,000 transactional emails, and so on.

Campaign Monitor SMS Pricing & Costs

When it comes to SMS marketing, you pay for messages using SMS credits, and how many you need depends on things like the message length, the characters you use, and where your recipients are.

Since Campaign Monitor chose not to reveal their SMS marketing pricing, I was only able to get the following prices for certain countries. Here’s how much a simple SMS to 100 people would cost:

Meanwhile, the SMS composer will show you how many credits a campaign will use, and you get a cost estimate before you hit send. Longer messages or special characters can push the credit count up, sometimes doubling what you might expect for the same number of recipients.

Campaign Monitor vs. Competitors: Which Costs Less?

Overall rating:

4.1

/5

G2:

4.1

Trustpilot:

3.8

Capterra:

4.5

See other alternatives

Overall rating:

3.9

/5

G2:

4.3

Trustpilot:

2.8

Capterra:

4.5

See other alternatives

Is Campaign Monitor Worth the Price?

There are many good reasons to consider Campaign Monitor. It’s intuitive, beginner-friendly, and packed with marketing essentials, including beautifully designed email templates, automation and signup forms. While it’s simple enough for newcomers, Campaign Monitor offers enough depth to satisfy more experienced marketers. 

However, the platform does have some notable drawbacks. It lacks a built-in landing page builder, advanced split testing options, and robust subscription form customization—also, the phone support is only available for the Premier plan users. When you stack it up against tools like Sender, Moosend, or MailerLite, they offer pretty much the same package for a lot less money.

At the end of the day, Campaign Monitor is worth its price tag if you need the essentials, like automation journey builder, sign-up forms, segmentation, but can do without countdown timers and time zone sending, as these extras will cost you an additional $130.

Campaign Monitor Pricing FAQs