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Comparison

Kit vs EmailOctopus

Pricing, send limits, automation and features compared at your own list size. Prices checked 8 September 2026.
Jump to the calculatorKit reviewEmailOctopus review

Quick verdict

Both are aimed at people who write to an audience, and they diverge on how much of the business you want to run inside the tool. Kit sells to creators who monetise: native paid newsletters, digital product sales, a tag-based subscriber model and one of the best automation builders here, with a free tier up to 10,000 subscribers. EmailOctopus sells sending, cheaply, and nothing else. If you sell something to your list, Kit will likely pay for itself and EmailOctopus cannot do the job at all. If you publish a free newsletter and monetise elsewhere or not at all, EmailOctopus does the same sending for a fraction of the price.

Winner by use case

Different questions have different answers. Nothing here is a general claim that one platform is better than the other.
If you wantWinnerWhy
Selling to your listKitNative paid newsletters and digital products; EmailOctopus has neither.
Lowest costEmailOctopusCheaper than Kit at every paid band, and the lowest-priced contact-based plan we track from 5,000 to 50,000 subscribers.
Free tier sizeKit10,000 subscribers free against 2,500.
AutomationKitA strong visual builder against linear tag-triggered sequences.
SimplicityEmailOctopusFar less product to learn if all you need is sending.

Kit vs EmailOctopus at your list size

The same engine as the main calculator, limited to these two. Change the inputs and the whole page updates.

Cost calculator

Contacts you actually hold, after bounces.

Campaigns plus automated sends. This is what breaks plans.

Billing
Features you need

Ticking a box removes every plan that does not include it. Leave them all clear to see the full field.

Reset

Cheapest

Kit

Newsletter

$0/mo

≈ £0/mo

Lowest effective monthly cost of every plan that meets your requirements.

Visit Kit

Best value

EmailOctopus

Pro

£24.50/mo

Of the plans costing up to 2x the cheapest paid option, the one with the highest capability score.

Visit EmailOctopus

Best automation

EmailOctopus

Pro

£24.50/mo

Highest automation score among plans that actually include automation on that tier.

Visit EmailOctopus

Best free plan

Kit

Newsletter

$0/mo

≈ £0/mo

The most capable plan that costs nothing at your subscriber count.

Visit Kit
  • 1Kit

    Newsletter

    $0
    ≈ £0/mo
    CheapestBest free plan
    Monthly
    $0
    Annual (per mo)
    $0
    Subscribers
    10,000
    Emails/mo
    Unlimited
    Landing pagesEcommerceForms

    Up to 10,000 subscribers. Unlimited landing pages, forms and broadcasts, and you can sell digital products. No automation sequences, no third-party integrations, and Kit branding stays on emails.

    Visit KitRead more
    Verified8 September 2026source
  • £24.50
    ≈ £24.50/mo
    Best valueBest automation
    Monthly
    £24.50
    Annual (per mo)
    £22
    Subscribers
    5,000
    Emails/mo
    50,000
    AutomationLanding pagesForms

    Unlimited landing pages, forms and users. Reports kept indefinitely. Send allowance is 10x your subscriber band, with a 10,000-email floor.

    Visit EmailOctopusRead more
    Verified8 September 2026source

Ranked by the effective monthly cost on your chosen billing cycle, converted to pounds where a provider quotes in another currency. Only the cheapest qualifying plan per provider is shown. Prices are the provider’s own published rate. Always confirm before buying.

Side by side

Entry prices, free plan limits and send allowances, drawn from the same pricing rows the calculator uses.
 KitEmailOctopus
Cheapest paid plan$33/mo (Creator)£9/mo (Pro)
Same plan billed annually$32.50/mo£8/mo
Free plan10,000 subs · Unlimited emails/mo2,500 subs · 10,000 emails/mo
Uncapped sending availableYes, on at least one planNo
Automation score8.5/105.5/10
Ease of use score8.0/108.5/10
Deliverability score8.0/107.5/10
Support score7.5/106.5/10
Pricing bands published4115

Automation

Kit is well ahead. Its visual builder is one of the best here, and the tag-and-sequence model suits content businesses better than list-based tools: subscribers accumulate attributes rather than sitting in buckets. EmailOctopus offers time- and trigger-based sequences with tag conditions, which handles onboarding drips and nothing more complex.

Ecommerce features

Neither is an ecommerce platform in the store sense, but Kit sells digital products and subscriptions natively, including on its free tier, which is the form of commerce its audience actually needs. EmailOctopus has no commerce features at all. For physical products, both are the wrong tool and Omnisend or Drip are the answer.

Forms and landing pages

Kit includes unlimited landing pages and forms on every plan including free, with templates built for creator opt-ins and a link-in-bio style page. EmailOctopus allows one landing page and one form on free, unlimited on Pro, with a plainer builder. Kit is the stronger tool here, particularly for audience growth.

Email send limits

Kit does not cap sends on any plan, free tier included, which is a significant advantage for a frequent publisher. EmailOctopus allows ten sends per subscriber per month on Pro and 10,000 emails on free. A daily newsletter is comfortable on Kit and will breach the EmailOctopus ratio at most list sizes.

Free plan limits

Kit’s free tier is the largest here at 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends, unlimited landing pages and forms, and digital product sales, but no visual automation. EmailOctopus Starter carries 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails with EmailOctopus branding. For a large free list Kit is remarkable value; for a small one that needs sequences, neither free tier gives you automation.

Integrations

Kit’s catalogue is narrower but better targeted: Teachable, Circle, Podia, Stripe, Shopify and WordPress cover most of what a creator business runs on. EmailOctopus covers WordPress, Ghost, Carrd and Shopify plus Zapier. Both rely on Zapier for the long tail.

Deliverability

Kit scores higher on scale and staffing: a long-established sender with dedicated deliverability staff, SPF, DKIM and DMARC support, and a documented policy of removing cold and purchased lists. Its plain-text-leaning templates historically correlate with good placement. EmailOctopus is solid but smaller with no dedicated IP option. Neither number is a measured inbox rate.

Support

Kit offers email support on all plans, live chat on paid plans, and a genuinely active community that is useful in its own right. EmailOctopus is email-only in UK business hours at every tier. Kit’s support also understands the creator use case specifically, which shortens a lot of conversations.

Ease of use

EmailOctopus is easier to start; Kit is easier to grow into. The tag-based model is Kit’s learning curve (people arriving from list-based tools take a while to stop thinking in lists) but once it clicks the product is coherent. EmailOctopus has almost nothing to learn and correspondingly little to grow into.

Pros and cons

Kit

Built around creators and paid newsletters

Pros

  • Best-in-class automation builder for content and course businesses
  • Native paid newsletters and digital product sales
  • Free plan up to 10,000 subscribers, which is unusually high
  • Strong creator-focused integration catalogue

Cons

  • More expensive than the generalists at the same list size
  • Templates are intentionally plain, a poor fit for visual retail email
  • No SMS
  • Reporting is thinner than ActiveCampaign or GetResponse
Visit Kit

EmailOctopus

Low-cost sending for newsletters

Pros

  • Free plan carries 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month
  • Lowest-priced contact-based plan we track from 5,000 to 50,000 subscribers
  • UK-based, which simplifies invoicing and data questions for UK buyers
  • 20% lifetime discount for registered nonprofits

Cons

  • No ecommerce features, cart recovery or SMS at all
  • No CRM, no pipelines, no sales features
  • Free plan puts EmailOctopus branding on every email
  • Email-only support with no chat or phone escalation
Visit EmailOctopus

Alternatives worth checking

If neither of these fits, these are the providers we would look at next and why.

How we compared these two

Prices come from each provider’s own published pricing page. The source URL and the date we checked it are shown against every figure in the calculator above; where a band has not yet been confirmed against the source it is labelled “needs review” rather than presented as confirmed.

The ranking in the calculator is by price alone. Our editorial scores, automation, ease of use, deliverability, support, do not reorder it. They inform the verdict and the use-case winners above, and each score has its reasoning written out on the provider’s own page.

We do not run our own inbox placement tests, so nothing in the deliverability section should be read as a measured inbox rate. It reflects published sending infrastructure, authentication and IP options, and documented provider policy.

Pricing on this page was last verified on 8 September 2026. Read the full methodology.

Affiliate disclosure

Email King may earn a commission if you sign up through some of the links on this page, at no additional cost to you. Commission never affects the ranking: results are ordered by the price you would actually pay, calculated from published rate cards. Read the full disclosure.