Comparing Top Email Editors, So You Don’t Have to

Just like Consumer Reports, we tested products side-by-side and distilled our favorites so that you don’t have to. After trying out more than 10 responsive email editors, these were our five top choices. Ease of use and flexibility were the most important attributes in the judging process; winners were easy enough to use, didn’t require coding, and offered flexibility to move beyond the template and create an email we loved. Losers — not so much.

Note that some of these are solely email editors, while others are email campaign creators and editors (the latter can be pricier). We denote what’s what in the descriptions, and we included pricing options so that you won’t be blindsided.

So let’s get to the list. First up: Bee.

Bee

Besides being adorably named, Bee is easy to use. Creating an email is as easy as dragging and dropping basic content — text, images, social sharing buttons, and the like — into whatever template you choose. The experience is intuitive and simple, so that most people won’t need any sort of tutorial to start using it.

When you log in, you choose between basic or rich templates, and among four options — simple, promo, newsletter, or e-commerce.

The pre-fab options mean you can pick one and simply switch out their text and photos for your own, or move, add, and delete modules to make something new.

You can’t do much beyond changing typefaces, colors, photos, buttons, and margins (it’s high on ease of use, low on flexibility). Still, Bee has the essentials. Simple emails aren’t a bad thing, and Bee will allow to create a nice one.

Pricing: Right now, Bee is free. That may change in the future; on the website, there’s a tab called “Go Pro” that asks users whether or not the company should build a more robust option and charge a small monthly fee.

Stamplia

The main difference between Bee and Stamplia at first sight is that the interface is flipped. While neither are as flexible as others on the list (what you see above in terms of modules is more or less much what you get) they’re both really easy to use.

When you log into Stamplia, you have the option to choose from six free templates (you can buy more online), or start from scratch. You can either use them as-is or mold them to your own needs by adding additional columns, images, and text.

Because the module options are so simplistic and straightforward — there are only a few modules, and each one shows clearly what it does — building from scratch isn’t as intimidating as it is with other editors. It sort of feel like some creative puzzle for kids.

Stamplia also has a pretty sweet photo editor (pictured below). And the templates they offer are beautiful in their own right, so as long as you like the options, most of the work is done for you.

Pricing: Stamplia is free, but if you want to branch out beyond their six free templates without building your own, you’ll have to pay. Most of the online templates we saw were between $10 and $20 on sites like Themeforest.

EDM Designer

Other than the fact that it’ll allow you to create emails, EDM Designer is completely different from both Bee and Stamplia. Heavy on flexibility, it will allow you to do a ton of stuff, such as making things rounded or square, or defining the size of different headings.

The downside is that interface isn’t as intuitive or pleasing to look at (for me, anyhow). It requires manual clicking and entering text rather than dragging and dropping, and its myriad of options make it more intimidating to start an email from scratch.

But if you feel roped in by the lack of flexibility in other editors, EDM should vindicate you, allowing you to add borders, bullets, alter spacing on each side of a photo down to the individual pixel level, and much more. And it honestly shouldn’t take you longer than five or 10 minutes to figure it out.

Pricing: EDM’s pricing has four tiers, so it’s simpler to screenshot than explain, but it ranges from free to $39.90 before getting into unique pricing options.

Knowtify

The options we’ve described so far skew toward one side or the other of flexibility and ease of use. Knowtify is good at both. The catch is that it’s also an email campaign creator, and it doesn’t allow you to export emails into other products (like Mailchimp or Autopilot); you’re tied to sending emails with Knowtify. Because of that, it’s also more expensive.

The interface is intuitive, easy to use (drag-and-drop), and beautiful. While you could manually do many of the same things on Stamplia, Bee and EDM Designer, Knowtify has already thought about what you might want to create — call-to-action modules and progress bars, for instance — and created buttons to allow you to include them. With more than 30 modules to choose from (as opposed to five or six for other editors) it’s robust.

Pricing: Because Knowtify is also an email campaign creator, so it’ll cost you a bit more. Pricing starts at $59/month and goes up from there. Check out the full pricing options here.

Mailchimp

Like Knowtify, Mailchimp is both flexible and easy to use, though slightly less so in both categories. The plus is that while Mailchimp will also fire an email campaign for you, it gives you the option to export your email and send the content with whichever product you like most.

When you log in, you’ll have to go through a fairly lengthy process tied to creating an entire email campaign (it involves picking from about 20 options, like whether you want to track clicks and who you want the email to come from).

The interface is drag-and-drop, and pretty easy to figure out. It doesn’t have as many pre-built modules (13, to be exact), but you could create something similar if you’re willing to put in the time. There are more than 20 template options, and because they’re in grayscale, it’s easy to visualize your own content.

There’s also a nice built-in photo editor, and it caught when my photo was too big, or as it put it, big enough to “obliterate inboxes.”

Pricing: Like Knowtify, Mailchimp is an email campaign creator, so it can get pricier than the options above. But it does have a free plan that’ll allow you up to 2,000 subscribers, and 12,000 emails per month. Check out the full pricing options.

Now it’s your turn.

What email editing tools have you had success with — or not? Any impressions of the tools described above based on your own personal use? Let us know in the comments below.

This content was originally published on the Autopilot Blog.