Key takeaway
"Services" means two different purchases here, and they differ in price by an order of magnitude. Software you run yourself starts around $9 to $20 a month, and your team does the work. An agency buys strategy, copy, design and campaign management on top of whichever platform you already pay for. This page is the software half.
Every card below carries the same four things: a published price you can check, the free route in, whether transactional and campaign sending share one account, and how much of the platform an agent can reach. Watch the number under the sticker price. HubSpot's Marketing Hub opens at $800 a month with a required $3,000 onboarding fee on top, and in my experience software nobody operates is the most common reason a B2B programme produces nothing.
The ten worth looking at for a B2B program.
1. Nitrosend
Campaigns, flows, segments, templates, contacts, and transactional sending in one product, priced on emails sent rather than on the size of the list. Free is 8,000 emails to start and then 500 a month, Pro is $20 for 20,000, Ultra is $100 for 125,000, and Enterprise is a published $300 from 500,000 to over 4 million.
The operating surface is the reason to pick it here. Every capability is an API endpoint and an MCP tool before it's a screen, so an agent can build the segment, run the send test, and take the approval as well as press send. BYO sending keys on Pro and above route the mail through Amazon SES, Resend, Postmark, Mailgun, or SendGrid, so the platform and the transport stop having to move on the same day.
Where it wins
- Unlimited contacts on every plan, including Free
- MCP, REST, and CLI cover the whole platform, not a read-only slice
- BYO sending keys keep your existing transport on Pro and above
Where it runs out
- Email only. No SMS, WhatsApp, push, or live chat
- Sender-side only, so nothing here receives or parses inbound mail
- No product-feed sync with an ecommerce storefront
2. Encharge
Marketing automation for B2B SaaS, where behavior emails are the product rather than a feature bolted to a campaign builder. At 2,000 subscribers, Growth is $99 a month and Premium $159, both with unlimited flows and unlimited seats, and both 20% cheaper billed annually. There's no free plan, only a 14-day trial.
The meter is subscribers held, and the send allowance comes off it: 10x the subscriber limit on Growth, 12x on Premium, and $100 for every 100,000 emails beyond that. Transactional email is Premium-only, and a transactional send to an address the account doesn't hold creates that person, so your receipts move the number the subscription is priced on.
Where it wins
- Behavior triggers and event-based segmentation aimed squarely at SaaS
- Native billing triggers for Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly, Chargify, and Paddle
- Company profiles carry account-based sequences, not one address at a time
Where it runs out
- No free plan, so every evaluation runs on a 14-day clock
- Transactional email and API events sit behind the higher tier
- No MCP server, CLI, or SDK in the published developer documentation
3. ActiveCampaign
The one here that's genuinely a CRM as well as an email platform, with an automation builder people stay for. At 1,000 email contacts billed annually, Starter is $15 a month, Plus $49, Pro $79, and Enterprise $145. There's no free plan, a 14-day trial, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The price is quoted per channel bundle first and per contact count second, and the meter is contacts rather than sends, with allowances at 10x the contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12x on Pro, and 15x on Enterprise. Attribution tracking and conditional content start at Pro, two tiers above the entry price.
Where it wins
- Strong visual automation builder for multi-branch flows
- CRM and marketing running against one contact record
- Claude and ChatGPT access over MCP is listed on the plan table
Where it runs out
- No permanent free plan, and every published price is billed annually
- One seat on the two cheapest plans, and five actions per automation on Starter
- Pipelines, deal records, and lead scoring sit in a paid CRM add-on
4. Brevo
Priced on emails sent rather than contacts held, which is already the right shape for a small list mailed often. Free is 300 emails a day with the Brevo logo on every send, Starter is $9 a month, Standard $18, and Professional $499. Transactional sending, an SMTP relay, a REST API, and webhooks are on every plan, the free one included.
Two things to know before you sign up. The free cap is per day rather than per month, so 500 receipts in one afternoon fail where a monthly allowance would have absorbed them. And the MCP server is broad rather than a demo: 27 modules covering contacts, campaigns, templates, senders, the CRM, and configuration, which is the widest agent surface here after ours.
Where it wins
- Transactional sending on every plan, the free one included
- An MCP server that writes as well as reads, across 27 modules
- Channels beyond email against the same contact record
Where it runs out
- The free plan brands every send and allows one user
- The published rungs jump from $18 to $499
- The MCP module list names no billing, approvals, or send tests
5. GetResponse
An all-in-one built around email, with landing pages, a website builder, webinars, and a course creator in one subscription. Free covers 500 contacts and 2,500 newsletters a month. At 1,000 contacts, Starter is $19 a month, Marketer $59, and Creator $69, 18% off billed annually, and sends are unlimited on every paid plan.
The catch is what the contact count means. Billing is set by the peak number of active subscribers in the month plus every contact added during it, so an import you reversed on the Tuesday still prices the whole cycle. Starter allows one automation workflow, which isn't a lifecycle program. There's no MCP server of GetResponse's own either, only a community-built one, so agent access here means the REST API.
Where it wins
- Unlimited sends on every paid plan
- Three seats on the entry plan and five above it
- A free plan with no time limit and no card
Where it runs out
- Billed on the peak subscriber count, so a spike prices the whole cycle
- One automation workflow on the entry plan
- Transactional email is quoted rather than published
6. Campaign Monitor
Email marketing and automation with agency work as a first-class concept: separate clients, each with their own lists, campaigns, and billing, under one login. At 500 contacts, Lite starts from $13 a month, Essentials from $31, and Premier from $159. There's no permanent free plan, only a 30-day trial capped at 500 contacts and 500 emails.
Clients are a resource in the v3.3 API rather than a dashboard convenience, which is what makes it worth the money for a consultancy running ten accounts. Lite caps sends at roughly 5x the contact count a month. Journeys are effectively read-only over the API: you can fetch one, summarize it, and copy it, and nothing published builds one.
Where it wins
- Agency client accounts exposed in the API, not only in the dashboard
- Unlimited sends from the middle tier up
- Transactional sending on the same account and the same API
Where it runs out
- No permanent free plan, so an evaluation has a clock on it
- The entry tier caps sends at roughly five times the contact count
- No MCP server or agent tooling in the API documentation
7. Mailchimp
The default nobody gets fired for, and for a marketer who wants to pick a template and send this afternoon it's still hard to beat. Free covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month. Essentials opens at $13 a month and Standard at $20, both at up to 500 contacts, and Premium is $350 at up to 10,000.
The bill tracks the list rather than the work the list does, and the definition of the list is a generous one: subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward the tier, and archiving is the only way to stop paying for an address you can never mail again.
Where it wins
- A template library decades deep
- Your next hire already knows the interface
- 300+ integrations, listed on every plan
Where it runs out
- Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts keep counting toward the tier
- Four automation steps on the entry plan
- The official MCP covers transactional sending only, on a static key
8. Outfunnel
Not an email platform, and it's on the shortlist because B2B buyers keep meeting it. Outfunnel is the layer between a CRM and a marketing tool: contact sync, engagement sync, web visitor tracking, and lead scoring, all writing into HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper, Salesforce, or Attio. Basic starts from $29 a month, Professional from $99, and Scale from $299, metered on active contacts synced.
Campaign sending is discontinued for new users, so nobody signing up today can buy it as a sender. What it does instead is put sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes into the record a salesperson already works from, as notes, activities, or custom fields. That's the job most B2B teams are quietly failing at. For an agent there's nothing to send from here, so the reach on offer is over the CRM record rather than over the mail.
Where it wins
- Two-way contact sync kept live between a CRM and an email tool
- Engagement written back where sales works, down to the link clicked
- Lead scoring from engagement and web activity, written into the CRM
Where it runs out
- It sends nothing, so the bill is additive on top of an email vendor
- No free plan, and the top tier is billed annually only
- The meter is contacts synced, so a quiet list costs what an active one costs
9. Maropost
Marketing Cloud is the email half of a commerce platform, bought on its own ladder: Essential from $251 a month, Professional from $849, and Enterprise from $1,699. There's no free plan and no trial, the route in is a demo, and contracts carry a 12-month commitment. Professional and above put a dedicated deliverability manager on the account.
Two meters run at once. The contact tier sets the plan, a send limit sits over it, and emails past that limit take a per-email overage at a rate that isn't published. The entry rung covers 250,000 contacts, so a 2,000-contact B2B list pays what a 250,000-contact one pays.
Where it wins
- A dedicated deliverability manager on the plan from Professional up
- Transactional email included on every plan, not a second product
- REST and GraphQL APIs, with open-source clients in six languages
Where it runs out
- The center of gravity is commerce retention rather than a B2B pipeline
- No free plan and no trial, and contracts run 12 months
- Journeys are rationed below the top plan, at five and then 20
10. Emarsys
An enterprise engagement platform, renamed SAP Engagement Cloud in February 2026 and sold in a base and an enterprise edition. There's no published price, no free tier, and no self-serve signup, so buying it is a procurement exercise rather than a card and a click. Ten channels run against one contact record, from email and SMS through to direct mail, in-store, and the contact center.
For an agent-run program, the thing to know is that the AI story is gated twice. Joule with SAP Engagement Cloud is an early-adopter capability on the enterprise edition, and what it does today is find campaigns and duplicate them by prompt.
Where it wins
- Segmentation runs against the SAP CDP rather than in a second tool
- AI-assisted report building across email, mobile app, and push
- Event attribution exposed in Open Data for external analytics
Where it runs out
- No published price, no free tier, and no self-serve signup
- The agent capability is early adopter and enterprise edition only
- Several 2026 features are pilot rather than generally available
Two purchases go by this name, and a third thing that is neither.
Search for B2B email marketing services and you get two kinds of page that never mention each other. One sells software you run. The other sells a team that runs it for you. They rank against the same phrase, they quote prices an order of magnitude apart, and neither says the other exists. I've sat on both sides of that gap, and the buyers who regret the decision are almost always the ones who never priced the option they didn't pick.
- Software you run yourself: a monthly subscription, roughly $9 to $20 a month at the small end, where your team writes the emails and builds the flows.
- An agency: a monthly retainer an order of magnitude above the software, buying strategy, copy, design, and campaign management on top of the platform you already pay for.
- A sync layer: a tool that moves engagement between your CRM and your email platform and sends nothing at all, which is what Outfunnel is today.
The first two aren't competing quotes. An agency is bought on top of the software rather than instead of it, so the retainer and the subscription are two lines on one budget. The shortlist above is the software half, because that's the half we're in.
If nobody will own the sending, no platform here fixes that. Software nobody operates is the most common reason a B2B program produces nothing, and the fix for it is a person.
What every card reports, and who's not on the list.
Four things, and they're what every card below reports rather than a bar an entry had to clear. Four of the ten miss at least one of them, and each of those cards says which. A published price a buyer can check. A way in that isn't a sales call, meaning a free plan or a trial you can start yourself. Transactional and campaign sending on one account, because in B2B the receipts, the invites, and the password resets are usually the majority of what a company sends. And a documented API, because a program that can't be driven from outside the dashboard can't be driven by an agent. That's the line between a dashboard with an AI button on it and an AI-native email platform, and it's the fourth thing every card below reports.
Two names that rank on this phrase everywhere aren't on the shortlist. Drip is built around a storefront, with onsite popups, segmentation on storefront customer data, and an ecommerce app listing as its front door: a good product pointed at a different problem. HubSpot is the other, and not for quality. Marketing Hub is a module of a CRM suite and prices like one, with Professional starting at $800 a month and a required one-time onboarding fee of $3,000 on top of it.
One of the ten publishes no price at all. Emarsys quotes everything, and Maropost publishes a ladder from $251 with the send limit that sits over it left inside the quote.
The meter is the decision.
Every platform above bills on one of four meters, and the meters differ far more than the feature lists do. Two products with near-identical builders can hand the same program bills that aren't close, because one counts the list and the other counts the sending. I'd work out which of the two your programme is shaped like before reading a single feature page.
- Contacts held: you pay for the size of the list whether you mail it or not, which is ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and Outfunnel.
- Emails sent: you pay for the work the list does, which is Brevo and Nitrosend.
- Both at once: a contact tier with a send ceiling over it and overage past the ceiling, which is Maropost, and Encharge's 10x and 12x multiples of the subscriber limit.
- Seats and add-ons: a second meter that moves with the team rather than with the list, which is where a single-seat entry plan costs real money.
Inside each of those, the definition of the unit is where the money actually is, and it's rarely on the pricing page. GetResponse bills on the peak count of active subscribers during the month plus every contact added during it, so a list you imported and reversed still prices the whole cycle. Mailchimp counts subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts toward the tier, and archiving is the only way to stop paying for an address you can never mail again. Encharge counts anybody a transactional message reaches.
HubSpot's meter is shaped for B2B. Only marketing contacts count toward the paid tier, and contacts you store and never market to sit in the same account free, up to 15 million of them. That suits a company whose CRM is full of closed-lost records and whose newsletter goes to 4,000 people. The catch is the rung it arrives on, because $800 a month is where the automation depth starts.
A meter is only cheap while the shape of your program matches it. The B2B case is a small list mailed often, and that's the exact shape a contact meter prices badly and a send meter prices well. Work out your monthly sends against your contacts held before you shortlist, because that ratio decides more than any feature comparison. The meter decides what the program costs; whether the platform answers to an agent or only to a person clicking decides who has to run it.
What B2B actually changes.
In B2B the recipient is at work, so the mailbox is their employer's and the filtering is their employer's IT policy rather than a consumer spam folder. That one fact moves more than segmentation strategy does.
Two mechanics change how you read your own numbers. Microsoft 365 scores inbound bulk mail on a bulk complaint level from 0 to 9, and at the default threshold of 7 the message goes to Junk. Inbound links are rewritten and scanned before delivery, with unknown URLs detonated in the background, which is why a B2B click rate reads high and means less than it looks like. Something in the security stack clicked your call to action, not a buyer.
The sender requirements are worth meeting, and they aren't what stands between you and a corporate inbox. Google's are written for personal Gmail accounts, the addresses ending @gmail.com or @googlemail.com. Authenticate anyway, keep complaints low anyway, then treat the corporate gateway as a separate audience.
None of that is a feature you can shop for. What you can shop for is whether the platform will send from a domain and a transport you already control, which is what BYO sending keys do on Pro and above. The saving is real: teams running their own Mailgun or SES behind a thin automation layer can cut costs by 70 to 80 percent at scale doing it that way.
Head to head, one at a time.
Every vendor above has a full comparison against Nitrosend: the two pricing ladders side by side, the migration steps in order, and what that vendor does better than we do.
- Nitrosend vs Encharge
- Nitrosend vs ActiveCampaign
- Nitrosend vs Brevo
- Nitrosend vs GetResponse
- Nitrosend vs Campaign Monitor
- Nitrosend vs Mailchimp
- Nitrosend vs Outfunnel
- Nitrosend vs Maropost
- Nitrosend vs Emarsys
- Nitrosend vs Drip
Drip is on that list without being on this one, because the storefront question comes up on every B2B shortlist that started life as an ecommerce one.
If your list is small and you mail it often, a contact meter prices you worst, and it's the meter most of this page runs on. Start on the free tier and send something real through it: 8,000 emails to begin with, then 500 a month, unlimited contacts, and the MCP, API, and CLI switched on with no card. Point one message type at it, watch a week of numbers, and read the pricing ladder once you know what your volume really is.
Sources
- Microsoft Learn, bulk complaint level: inbound bulk mail is scored from 0 to 9, and the default threshold of 7 sends a message to Junk.
- Microsoft Learn, Safe Links: inbound URLs are rewritten and scanned before delivery, with unknown URLs detonated in the background.
- Google, Email sender guidelines: the requirements are scoped to personal Gmail accounts, the addresses ending @gmail.com and @googlemail.com.
- HubSpot, Marketing Hub pricing: Professional starts at $800 a month with a required one-time onboarding fee of $3,000, and the paid tier is metered on marketing contacts.
- HubSpot, Model Context Protocol tools: the remote MCP server reads and writes CRM objects and exposes campaigns read-only, so sending a marketing email is outside its capabilities.
Common questions
Two purchases share the name and they aren't the same size. One is a platform subscription you run yourself, in the tens of dollars a month; the other is an agency retainer an order of magnitude higher, buying people to plan, write, and run the program on a platform you still license separately. A sync layer like Outfunnel is neither, since it moves engagement between your CRM and your email tool and sends nothing itself. Both kinds of page rank on this phrase and neither mentions the other, so work out which purchase you're making before any shortlist means anything.
It isn't an either-or, because an agency is bought on top of a platform rather than instead of one. The real question is whether anybody on your team will own the sending. If somebody will, buy the software and skip the retainer for now. If nobody will, the software alone won't produce anything, and a retainer is buying the owner rather than the tool. Either way you're still choosing a platform, and you're the one who pays for it.
In practice, less than the category pages imply. The products are the same products; what changes is which trade-offs hurt. A B2B list is small and mailed often, so a bill counted on contacts held prices it badly and a bill counted on emails sent prices it well. Deep CRM sync matters more than a product feed, transactional volume is usually larger than campaign volume, and the recipient sits behind a corporate mail filter rather than a consumer spam folder. Pick on those, not on a feature grid.
ActiveCampaign, if you want the CRM and the email program to be one tool, since a CRM layer sits on all four of its plans. HubSpot, if the CRM is already the center of your company and email is a module of it. Outfunnel, if the gap is narrower than that: it syncs contacts both ways and writes sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes back into HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper, Salesforce, or Attio, but it sends nothing itself, so it's an addition to an email vendor rather than a replacement for one.
The entry rungs cluster tightly. Brevo opens at $9 a month, Mailchimp Essentials at $13, ActiveCampaign Starter at $15 billed annually, GetResponse Starter at $19 at 1,000 contacts, and Nitrosend Pro at $20 for 20,000 emails. Above that the ladders separate fast, and they separate on the meter rather than the features: a contact-priced plan climbs with the size of your list, a send-priced plan climbs with what you actually mail. Enterprise-side platforms start much higher, with Maropost Marketing Cloud from $251 a month and Emarsys quoted only.
You can start one. Brevo's free plan is 300 emails a day with its logo on every send, GetResponse gives 500 contacts and 2,500 newsletters a month, Mailchimp gives 250 contacts and 500 sends, and Nitrosend gives 8,000 emails to begin with, then 500 a month, with unlimited contacts and the MCP, API, and CLI switched on. Six of the ten platforms here have no free plan at all, and three of those offer only a trial. Free tiers are sized for proving the thing works, not for running a pipeline through.
Because the mail passes through the recipient's employer before it reaches the recipient. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/safe-links-about" rel="nofollow noopener">rewrites and scans inbound URLs</a> before delivery and detonates unknown ones in the background, so clicks get recorded that no human made. Image proxying and privacy features do the same to opens. Neither number is worthless, but in B2B they're directional at best. Reply rate, meeting bookings, and pipeline are the ones worth putting on a dashboard.
Part of one, on most platforms, and the part varies a lot. Brevo's MCP server covers 27 modules and writes as well as reads. Mailchimp's only official server covers Mailchimp Transactional and authenticates with a static account key. GetResponse's is community-built rather than theirs. HubSpot's remote server <a href="https://developers.hubspot.com/ai-tools/mcp" rel="nofollow noopener">reads and writes CRM objects</a> and exposes campaigns read-only, so it can't send one. Nitrosend is MCP-first: every capability is an API endpoint and an MCP tool before it's a screen, which is the difference between an agent that drafts a subject line and an agent that runs the send.