MailerLite vs Moosend: the $7 entry plan against a free tier

Entry prices at 500 contacts

These prices come from each vendor's pricing page on 7 October 2026. MailerLite's slider starts at 500 subscribers; Moosend's contact drop-down was also on 500 in the capture.

The gap at this size is $3.80 a month between Moosend Pro and MailerLite Comfort, which is $45.60 over a year, and $15.50 a month between Pro and MailerLite Power, which is $186. Those are the numbers of a very small list. Moosend discounts further for commitment (its capture offers 15% for biannual and 20% for annual payment, and shows the monthly price struck through beside the $7), while MailerLite takes 10% off for yearly billing.

Past 500 contacts: published against selector-only

MailerLite lists its full ladder at monthly billing: Comfort $19, $49, $89 and $179, and Power $39, $69, $129 and $239 at 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 subscribers. So a SaaS with 5,000 users on Comfort pays $588 over twelve months of monthly billing, and at 10,000 users on Power $1,548. Moosend's page asks you to choose a contact count in a drop-down, and the readout used for this page captured only the 500 row, so a like-for-like figure at 5,000 must come from Moosend's own selector. The page also lists email-credit packs, 350,000 credits for $350 and 500,000 for $500, which works out at $1 per thousand credits; its capture does not say which plan buys them.

One behavioural difference deserves a line. Moosend's Pro list item says unlimited emails, so a daily send costs no more than a monthly one. MailerLite Comfort allows 10 times your subscriber-tier ceiling a month, which is 50,000 emails at the 5,000-subscriber tier, and removes the limit on Power.

Trials, free plans and branding

Moosend runs a 30-day free trial with no credit card and moves you to paid afterwards. MailerLite's Free plan has no expiry, and a 14-day trial of the paid features sits alongside it. MailerLite lists removing its logo as a Comfort feature, which implies the free plan carries its branding; Moosend's capture does not discuss branding, so test a send to see what a Pro email carries before you commit to a year.

Transactional mail: both say no

Moosend's Pro column ticks an SMTP server and marks Transactional Emails with a cross, and its separate Moosend+ plan, described as "build a plan based on your needs", is where add-ons live. MailerLite's pricing page puts transactional mail on its own tab, sold as MailerSend. For a SaaS the practical meaning is the same on both sides: keep receipts, password resets and trial-expiry notices on a transactional sender with its own domain authentication, and use either of these tools for the marketing and lifecycle layer.

Events, triggers and billing hooks

MailerLite's seven default triggers include Joins a group, Updated field and Joins a segment. Its webhooks report subscriber.created, subscriber.added_to_group, subscriber.unsubscribed, subscriber.bounced and the campaign events, signed with an HMAC header; your endpoint must answer within three seconds, and failures are retried after 10, 100 and 1,000 seconds. A handler for Stripe's customer.subscription.trial_will_end, invoice.payment_failed or customer.subscription.deleted can therefore call MailerLite's API to move the subscriber between groups such as trial-ending, payment-failed and churned, and each group can start its own automation.

Moosend's documentation describes a different shape. Its "When custom event is recorded" trigger starts an automation when an event arrives through custom-code website tracking; you choose whether it fires every time or only the first time, and an Identify event has to fire before other events count for a visitor. That suits browser events (pricing page viewed, upgrade button clicked) and is awkward for a card decline, which happens server-side. For that case you would use Moosend's subscriber API to update custom fields and use a field-based trigger, and Moosend's automations can also post a webhook out with a "Then post a webhook" step, sending JSON by POST to a URL of yours. None of this reads Stripe or Paddle directly, in either tool.

Moving between the two

1. Export subscribers with every custom field, and keep the unsubscribed and bounced contacts in a separate file to import as suppressed.
2. Map Moosend custom fields to MailerLite fields one by one before importing, because MailerLite's Updated field trigger depends on the field name.
3. Rebuild the automations, replacing website-tracking event triggers with group triggers your backend can set.
4. Authenticate the sending domain, then run the old welcome series alongside the new for a send cycle.

Verdict by situation

• Under 250 subscribers, pre-launch: MailerLite Free, since Moosend has no free plan.
• 500 to a few thousand contacts, budget first: Moosend Pro, then compare at your exact size on its selector.
• A backend that sets state per user: MailerLite, whose group and field triggers fit that pattern.
• Browser behaviour driving the flows: Moosend's website-tracking events are built for it.

Related reading: Mailchimp vs Moosend, Brevo vs Moosend, Moosend vs GetResponse, MailerLite vs Brevo and the comparison index.