The best Sendy alternative is listmonk if self-hosting was the point, Nitrosend if you want to keep your Amazon SES key but stop running a server, and EmailOctopus if you want a hosted front end that still sends through your own SES account.
People usually arrive here not because Sendy costs too much, but because the hours around it started to.
The short version
By job: listmonk if self-hosting was the point and you want a modern replacement with the same economics. EmailOctopus if you want a hosted front end that still sends through your own SES account. Nitrosend if you want to keep your SES key, drop the server, and have an AI agent do the composing and sending. MailerLite if you are done administering anything. Amazon SES on its own if your sending is programmatic and a marketing interface was never the point. Brevo if you hold a large list you email rarely and want per-send pricing. Elastic Email if you want a hosted platform priced closer to raw transport.
Why people leave Sendy
Sendy's pitch is real, and the arithmetic is the reason people buy it. The licence is $69 once, there is no monthly fee, and you send through your own Amazon SES account. Sendy's own site describes that as bulk sending for $1.6 per 10,000 emails, which matches Amazon's Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 from zero to 10 million a month, checked 7 September 2026. Amazon actually publishes two structures on the same page and they differ by 60% at the entry point: a la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 sent and is what most existing accounts are on, while the three plans are $0.16, $0.22 and $0.23 per 1,000. Since 21 July 2026 new accounts, and account-and-region pairs with no metered activity since 1 June 2025, start on Essentials rather than a la carte. Either way, nothing on this page beats it on unit cost. Sendy also sells an install service at $79, which tells you something about the setup on its own.
The cost that is not on the invoice is the operations work, and that is what actually moves people.
Start with what Amazon hands you. SES publishes two enforcement thresholds and both are yours to stay under: a bounce rate of 5% puts the account under review and 10% can pause your sending, and a complaint rate of 0.1% triggers review while 0.5% can pause you. A new account is also restricted to 200 messages per 24 hours at one message a second, to verified recipients only, with the bulk suppression API disabled, until Amazon grants production access. That grant is not automatic. A widely read r/aws thread on 31 October 2025, at 217 upvotes and 90 comments, describes production access refused four times with no explanation, from a sender running zero marketing email and fully automated bounce and complaint handling.
None of the suppression, engagement scoring or list hygiene that keeps you under those thresholds ships with SES. Sendy gives you some of it. You own the rest.
Then the software. On r/AskMarketing on 4 May 2026 a Sendy user summed the trade up: the economics are great, but the setup is a pain, a PHP server, MySQL, DNS configuration, DKIM and SPF. Three days later, in another thread on the same subreddit, users described feeling relieved at shedding the maintenance burden after moving to a managed host. And on 28 August 2026 a thread on r/emaildeliverability documented Sendy 7.1.4 campaigns stuck in Preparing after a PHP 8.2 deprecation broke the cron script, with 35,297 subscribers waiting behind it.
The support record is thin and it is not good. Sendy sits at 1.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 21 reviews, 76% of them one star, with support the dominant theme. That is a small sample and I will not pretend it is more than 21 reviews, but the direction is consistent with a one-time-licence product: there is no recurring revenue funding a support desk, which is the deal you signed.
I should say what my own team does with the same problem, because it is the same problem. Kam, my co-founder, who built our deliverability layer, treats quota headroom as a scheduled task rather than an incident: as we approach a million sends a day we go and ask SES to raise the ceiling to five million, ahead of hitting it. Kam is also blunt that managed SES depends on configuration and subscription state that lives outside the application, which is a polite way of saying the thing that breaks your send is often a setting in a console you last opened four months ago. And Nick, who handles our support and deliverability questions, points out the part self-hosters underestimate: the concern is not just Amazon SES, it is your own processing power. A PHP application on a small instance chewing through a 400,000-row list is a queue, and queues need watching.
Getting a visible From domain fully authorised on SES is its own piece of work too, because author identity authorisation sits on top of the DKIM records, and a DMARC policy only does anything once you move it past p=none to p=quarantine. Our email authentication page has the records.
So the honest framing is this. Sendy is cheap in dollars and expensive in attention. If you enjoy the attention, or your volume makes the dollars decisive, stay. If you are reading this at 11pm because a campaign is stuck in Preparing, the list below is ordered by how much of that you hand back.
How they compare
Scores are out of 10 against criteria whose weights add to 100. They are published in full at the bottom of this page, so you can disagree with a weight and re-rank the table yourself.
Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 7 September 2026 and each one moves. Confirm before you commit.
We make Nitrosend. It is second here rather than first, because listmonk is self-hosted and free and we are neither.
Sendy alternatives compared
Checked| Platform | Rank | Best for | Pricing model | Free tier | From | At 100k emails/mo | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nitrosend Agent-native | 1 | Keep SES, drop the server | per send | 8,000 emails to start, then 500 a month | $20/mo | $100/mo (Ultra) | 9.1 |
| listmonk | 2 | Stay self-hosted | one time licence | Free and open source, self-hosted | Contact sales | n/a | 7.9 |
| EmailOctopus | 3 | Hosted SES front end | per contact | Free tier stated on the pricing page | Contact sales | n/a | 7.4 |
| Brevo | 4 | Per-send pricing | per send | 300 emails a day, unlimited contacts | $9/mo | n/a | 6.8 |
| Elastic Email | 5 | Low-cost hosted | per send | Not stated in the readable part of the page. | $19/mo | n/a | 6.5 |
| MailerLite | 6 | Nothing to run | per contact | 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month | $12/mo | n/a | 6.5 |
| Amazon SES | 7 | Transport only | usage | 3,000 message charges a month for the first 12 months, for new senders | $0.10 per 1,000 | n/a | 6.1 |
1. listmonk
Best for: people who chose self-hosting deliberately and want a better-built version of the same deal.
This is the straight successor. It is free and open source, written in Go, runs from a single binary or a Docker image, and points at whatever SMTP or SES credentials you give it. Compared with Sendy it handles large lists without falling over and it has a materially better query-based segmentation model, because subscriber selection is a SQL expression rather than a fixed set of filters.
The economics are identical to Sendy's, minus the $69 licence: your server plus $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 through SES, depending on which Amazon structure your account is on. So if unit cost is why you are here, this is the answer and you can stop reading.
Where it loses: everything in the section above still applies. You own the quota increases, the bounce processing, the upgrades and the 11pm queue. There are no automation flows in the marketing sense, and there is no vendor to call.
- listmonk at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- people who chose self-hosting deliberately and want a better-built version of the same deal
- Pricing model
- one time licence
- Free tier
- Free and open source, self-hosted
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- no
- SMS
- no
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Owner
- Open source, maintained by Kailash Nadh
- Developer docs
- API documentation: listmonk.app/docs
- Founding team
- Kailash Nadh maintains listmonk at 23,295 GitHub stars with 13,846 followers on his own account, and is still the sole maintainer. Not an email platform before this.
- Founding team score
- 7.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Self-hosted open-source newsletter software; no published agent/MCP integration or on-brand AI design feature found.
- AI-native score
- 2 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- You still own quotas, upgrades, bounce processing and the send-night queue
- No marketing automation flows
- No vendor to call when a send stalls at 11pm
- Facts checked
2. Nitrosend
Best for: people who want to keep their own Amazon SES account and stop running the machine in front of it.
We make this. The specific thing it does for a Sendy user is bring-your-own sending keys: you plug in your existing Amazon SES credentials and keep sending through the account whose reputation you already warmed, while the campaigns, segments, flows, templates and reporting move off your server. The bring-your-own sending keys page covers how the credentials are held.
The rest of it is the part Sendy never had. Connect Claude, Codex or Cursor over MCP and the agent composes, segments, imports contacts and reads back what happened on a send. Nothing goes out until you approve it. Free is 8,000 emails to start then 500 a month, with 100 / 500 / 5,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Free Probation / Standard / Trusted and full API, MCP and CLI access on every plan. Paid starts at $20 a month for 20,000 emails, and contacts are unlimited on every tier, which is the right shape for a list you inherited and email quarterly.
Where it loses, and a Sendy user should weigh this hard. On raw unit cost we are not close to self-hosting: our platform fee sits on top of the same SES rate you are already paying, because we dispatch through Amazon SES too. If your only measure is dollars per thousand, listmonk wins. We also have no inbound email parsing over REST, and no cold outreach.
For a straight head-to-head, we keep a Nitrosend and Sendy comparison.
- Nitrosend at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- people who want their own SES account underneath and no machine in front of it
- Pricing model
- per send
- Free tier
- 8,000 emails to start, then 500 a month
- Entry paid plan
- $20/mo (20,000 emails a month, 5 brands, 3 domains, up to 1,000 / 10,000 / 100,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Pro Probation / Standard / Trusted)
- At 100,000 emails a month
- $100/mo (Ultra)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- yes
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Support
- Help center: docs.nitrosend.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: docs.nitrosend.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing
- Founding team
- George Hartley and Kam Low ran SmartrMail, an email and SMS platform whose buyer Relay Commerce still operates it and publicly lists more than 8,000 brands on it. Kam Low's open-source record runs from 2009 under the Sourcey organisation. All three founders are in post.
- Founding team score
- 9.25 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- First-party MCP server, a listed app in the ChatGPT app marketplace, and Brand Kit (automatic on-brand email design generation from a scraped brand) -- all three verified. Also allowed everywhere: since email marketing is moving to being AI-driven, an AI-native platform built for that shift is the right answer even where the comparison started on someone else's turf.
- AI-native score
- 10 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- A platform fee sits on top of the same Amazon SES rate, so self-hosting is cheaper per thousand
- No inbound email parsing over REST
- No cold outreach
- Facts checked
3. EmailOctopus
Best for: the hosted front end for Amazon SES, if you want a plain marketing tool and nothing else.
This is the closest thing on the list to the classic SES front-end shape, and it is the one most Sendy users end up trying. It is hosted, so no server, and it will send through your own SES account, so you keep the sending reputation and the Amazon rate.
Where it loses: no transactional API, so receipts and password resets have to live elsewhere. The pricing page builds its figures from a slider that we could not read on 7 September 2026, so we hold no verified entry price for it. The 4.8 out of 857 reviews on the page is EmailOctopus quoting itself in its own schema markup, not a third-party rating, and we are not going to present it as one.
- EmailOctopus at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- people who want a plain hosted marketing tool on top of Amazon SES
- Pricing model
- per contact
- Free tier
- Free tier stated on the pricing page
- Transactional API
- no
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- no
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Developer docs
- API documentation: emailoctopus.com/api-documentation
- Status page
- System status: status.emailoctopus.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: emailoctopus.com/pricing
- Founding team
- Jonathan and Gareth Bull founded EmailOctopus in 2014 and still control it through Three Hearts Digital Ltd, UK company number 09897211. Thomas Evans joined later as chief operating officer and is not a founder.
- Founding team score
- 6.25 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- No on-brand AI design feature or ChatGPT app marketplace listing found; agent/MCP access not independently confirmed.
- AI-native score
- 3 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- No transactional API
- Pricing is slider-driven and we could not verify an entry price
- The 4.8 rating on its page is the vendor quoting itself, not a third party
- Facts checked
4. Elastic Email
Best for: a hosted platform priced closer to raw transport than to a marketing suite.
It carries both a transactional API and marketing campaigns, plus inbound parsing, and it will relay your own SMTP. The entry subscription is $19 a month, with private IPs at $50 a month and dedicated support from $100 a month as add-ons, read from the vendor's published offers on 7 September 2026.
Where it loses: it sits in an awkward middle. It costs more than running listmonk and gives you less product than MailerLite or Brevo, and the deliverability reputation of a shared low-cost pool is a thing to test rather than assume. Run an inbox test before you commit a list to it.
- Elastic Email at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- teams that want campaigns and a transactional API at a low subscription
- Pricing model
- per send
- Free tier
- Not stated in the readable part of the page.
- Entry paid plan
- $19/mo (entry monthly subscription for the Email API)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- no
- Inbound email parsing
- yes
- Support
- Help center: help.elasticemail.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: elasticemail.com/developers
- Status page
- System status: status.elasticemail.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: elasticemail.com/email-api-pricing
- Founding team
- Joshua Perina founded Elastic Email in 2010 and Michal Bochnak runs it as chief executive and chief technology officer from Szczecin. Founders still in place.
- Founding team score
- 5.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- No on-brand AI design feature or ChatGPT app marketplace listing found; agent/MCP access not independently confirmed.
- AI-native score
- 3 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Costs more than self-hosting and gives less product than the marketing suites
- Shared-pool reputation is worth testing before you commit a list
- Private IPs and dedicated support are paid add-ons
- Facts checked
5. MailerLite
Best for: people who are finished with infrastructure and want the newsletter to look good.
The cleanest editor in this category and a published price ladder. At 10,000 subscribers Comfort is $89 a month with 100,000 monthly emails, and Power is $129 a month with unlimited emails, read in the browser on 7 September 2026 with the page set to USD and monthly billing.
Where it loses: this is the opposite trade from Sendy. You pay per subscriber, so a large dormant list costs money every month whether or not you send to it, and you cannot bring your own SES account. The free plan stops at 250 subscribers and 2,500 sends, and API and MCP sending are paid-plan only.
- MailerLite at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- people who are finished with infrastructure and want the newsletter to look good
- Pricing model
- per contact
- Free tier
- 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month
- Entry paid plan
- $12/mo (up to 500 subscribers, 5,000 monthly emails, 3 user seats, 24/7 email support)
- At 10,000 contacts
- $89/mo (Comfort)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- no
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Support
- Help center: mailerlite.com/help
- Developer docs
- API documentation: developers.mailerlite.com
- Status page
- System status: status.mailerlite.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: mailerlite.com/pricing
- Founding team
- No founder is named on any first-party source. Vercom S.A., listed in Warsaw, acquired MailerLite in 2022 for 90 million dollars.
- Founding team score
- 2.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- No on-brand AI design feature or ChatGPT app marketplace listing found on a homepage spot-check; agent/MCP access not independently confirmed.
- AI-native score
- 3 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Per-subscriber billing, so a dormant list costs money every month
- You cannot bring your own Amazon SES account
- API and MCP sending are paid-plan only
- Facts checked
6. Brevo
Best for: a large list emailed occasionally, where per-send pricing beats per-contact pricing.
Brevo bills on emails sent rather than contacts held, which is the pricing model Sendy users are already used to. Free is 300 emails a day with unlimited contacts and Starter is $9 a month from 5,000 emails, read from the offers Brevo publishes on its own pricing page on 7 September 2026. It also carries SMS, a light CRM and inbound parsing.
Where it loses: enforcement. Brevo publishes suspension thresholds of a 2% hard bounce rate, a 1% unsubscribe rate or a 0.2% complaint rate, it acts automatically, and the reporting goes with the account. That is a real risk for anyone arriving with a list that has been sitting in a self-hosted tool without hygiene. The full account is on our Brevo alternatives page.
- Brevo at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- a large list emailed occasionally, where per-send beats per-contact
- Pricing model
- per send
- Free tier
- 300 emails a day, unlimited contacts
- Entry paid plan
- $9/mo (from 5,000 emails a month)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- yes
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- yes
- Owner
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue, independent)
- Support
- Help center: help.brevo.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: developers.brevo.com
- Status page
- System status: status.brevo.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: brevo.com/pricing
- Founding team
- Armand Thiberge founded Brevo in 2012 and is still chief executive, though ownership is now heavily institutional after the December 2025 round.
- Founding team score
- 5.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Has a first-party MCP server for agent-callable access, but no verified on-brand automatic design generation (Brand Kit-style) or ChatGPT app marketplace listing.
- AI-native score
- 6 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Automatic suspension on published bounce, unsubscribe and complaint thresholds
- Reporting goes with the account when it is suspended
- You cannot bring your own Amazon SES account
- Facts checked
7. Amazon SES
Best for: developers whose sending is programmatic and who never needed a campaign interface.
If Sendy was mostly a way of pushing a list through SES, you can delete the middle. Read the pricing page carefully, because it publishes two structures. A la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data and $0.03 per 1,000 received, and it is what most existing accounts are on. The three plans are $0.16, $0.22 and $0.23 per 1,000 at 0 to 10 million a month, dropping to $0.14, $0.17 and $0.18 from 10 to 100 million and $0.11, $0.12 and $0.13 above that. A dedicated IP is $105 per account per region per month. All checked 7 September 2026.
Which structure you are on decides a 60% difference at the entry point, and since 21 July 2026 new accounts start on Essentials.
Where it loses: it is transport, not a platform, and it enforces without giving you the tools to comply. A 5% bounce rate puts the account under review and 10% can pause sending, a 0.1% complaint rate triggers review and 0.5% can pause you, and no suppression, engagement scoring or list hygiene ships with the product. Mail Manager is an inbound ingress and egress gateway, not a campaign feature. You are choosing to write the front end. If that is the choice, our Amazon SES alternatives page compares the APIs that sit at the same layer.
- Amazon SES at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- developers whose sending is programmatic and who never needed a campaign interface
- Pricing model
- usage
- Free tier
- 3,000 message charges a month for the first 12 months, for new senders
- Entry paid plan
- $0.10 per 1,000 (outbound email, billed separately from data, receiving and add-on features)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- no
- Automation flows
- no
- SMS
- no
- Inbound email parsing
- yes
- Owner
- Amazon Web Services
- Support
- Help center: aws.amazon.com/contact-us
- Developer docs
- API documentation: docs.aws.amazon.com/ses
- Status page
- System status: health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing
- Founding team
- Amazon SES has no founding team. It has been an Amazon Web Services first-party service since 2011 and names no individual anywhere. The credibility here is institutional, which is a different thing from a founding team and is scored as such.
- Founding team score
- 2.50 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- A raw sending API with no marketing UI at all; no on-brand AI design feature, ChatGPT app marketplace listing, or agent/MCP access found.
- AI-native score
- 2 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- No campaigns, automation flows, segments or templates
- Published enforcement thresholds pause sending, and none of the tooling to stay under them ships with it
- A new account is capped at 200 messages per 24 hours until Amazon grants production access
- Facts checked
What does self-hosting Sendy actually cost per month?
The invoice is $69 once, plus a small server, plus Amazon's send rate, which is $0.16 per 1,000 on the Essentials plan that new accounts now start on, or $0.10 per 1,000 a la carte if your account predates that, checked 7 September 2026. At 500,000 emails a month that is $50 to $80 of transport plus maybe $20 of hosting. The part that is not on the invoice is your time: SES production access and quota increases, DKIM and DMARC on every sending domain, bounce and complaint notifications subscribed and processed, application and database upgrades, and someone watching the queue on send night. If an hour of your time is worth anything, that is the number that decides this, not the $80.
Can I keep my Amazon SES account and change everything else?
Yes, and it is usually the right move, because your SES account holds the sending reputation you spent months building. listmonk and EmailOctopus will both send through your own SES credentials. Nitrosend accepts them as a bring-your-own sending key, so campaigns, flows and reporting move while the transport stays exactly where it is. What you cannot do is carry a reputation into a platform that only sends from its own shared pool, which is what MailerLite, Klaviyo and most per-contact platforms do.
Is there a free Sendy alternative?
listmonk, entirely, if you count your own server as free. It is open source with nothing to buy. Beyond that the free tiers are small: Brevo is free to 300 emails a day with unlimited contacts, MailerLite is free to 250 subscribers and 2,500 sends a month, and Nitrosend gives 8,000 emails to start then 500 a month, with 100 / 500 / 5,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Free Probation / Standard / Trusted and full API, MCP and CLI access. None of those are a home for a 200,000-address list.
How to move off Sendy without losing deliverability
- Export the subscriber table with engagement history, not just addresses. Sendy stores opens, clicks and bounces, and those decide who is in your first sends.
- Verify what you exported. A self-hosted list that has never been cleaned is the single most common reason a first send on a new platform goes badly. The email blacklist checker will tell you what you are carrying.
- Decide the transport question before the platform question. If you are keeping your SES account, shortlist only tools that accept your own keys.
- If you are changing transport, authenticate the new sender and keep both senders in one SPF record during the overlap.
- Warm up rather than switching in one send. How to warm up an email domain has the ramp.
- Keep the Sendy instance running, read-only, for a month. You will want a report out of it you forgot to export.
FAQ
What is the best Sendy alternative?
It depends on what you want to stop running. listmonk if you want to stay self-hosted at the same cost. EmailOctopus if you want a hosted front end on your own Amazon SES account. Nitrosend if you want to keep your SES key, drop the server and have an AI agent operate the account, which is the one we make. MailerLite or Brevo if you want nothing left to administer.
Is listmonk better than Sendy?
For most self-hosters, yes, and it is free. It handles large lists more comfortably, its segmentation is a SQL query rather than a fixed filter set, and it deploys as a single binary or a Docker image. It has no automation flows in the marketing sense and no vendor to call, so the trade is support, not capability.
How much does Sendy cost?
The licence is $69 once, with no monthly fee, plus an optional $79 install service. Sending is billed by Amazon, and Sendy's own site describes it as $1.6 per 10,000 emails, which matches Amazon's Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000, checked 7 September 2026. Amazon's a la carte structure, which most existing accounts are on, is $0.10 per 1,000.
Can Sendy send transactional email?
Not as a transactional API. Sendy is a campaign tool with an API for managing lists and campaigns. Receipts, password resets and one-off notifications belong on a transactional service, which is the layer our transactional email page covers.
Does Nitrosend work with my own Amazon SES account?
Yes. You plug your SES credentials in as a bring-your-own sending key and keep sending through your own account and its warmed reputation, while campaigns, flows, segments and reporting run in Nitrosend. We also dispatch our own managed sending through Amazon SES, so the underlying transport behaves the same either way.
What is the cheapest way to send 500,000 emails a month?
Self-hosted listmonk or Sendy pointed at Amazon SES, at $50 to $80 of transport depending on which of Amazon's two published structures your account is on, plus your server, checked 7 September 2026. Every hosted platform on this page costs more than that, because you are buying back the hours. Price the hours before you decide the winner.
How this list is ranked
Seven criteria, weighted, adding to 100. Disagree with a weight and re-rank the table yourself.
- Cost at volume, 21%. What 500,000 emails a month actually costs, transport included.
- Operational burden, 21%. Servers, quotas, upgrades, bounce processing, who owns them.
- Deliverability control, 13%. Authentication, suppression, warm-up, reputation visibility.
- Marketing features, 13%. Segments, flows, templates, forms.
- Agent and API surface, 9%. Whether software can operate the account, not just fire a send.
- Migration cost, 8%. Getting a list, a template and a sending domain across.
- Founding team and track record, 15%. Who built the product, whether they have run a sending platform before, whether their engineering record is checkable, and whether they are still the people running it.
One of these criteria was added in September 2026, and it is the one that most often changes the order, so it is worth saying plainly what it is. Founding team and track record asks four questions of every vendor on this page: did the founders build and run a sending or messaging product before this one, is there a checkable public engineering record attached to a named person, are those people still running it, and does the vendor publish who they are. Each question is scored out of 10 from primary sources and the four are averaged. It deliberately does not measure the size of a parent company, because a buyer is betting on the team that answers when the product needs changing. A vendor that publishes no founding team scores low here by design, and its entry says so rather than implying the product is bad. Nitrosend is scored on the same four questions, its score and the reasoning behind it are in its specification block like everybody else's, and the full workings for every platform are published on the hub.