Short answer: If you want a free, full-featured newsletter plugin that runs entirely inside WordPress, MailPoet is the safest pick for most sites. If you want a deeper CRM with automations and segmentation, FluentCRM is the strongest paid option. If you send to 10,000+ subscribers, stop using a WordPress plugin as your sender and pair the plugin with a third-party SMTP relay (or move sending to a SaaS like Mailchimp, Kit, or Brevo entirely). The plugin you pick matters less than the relay you send through – deliverability is decided at the SMTP layer, not the WordPress layer.
| Plugin | Free / Paid | Best for | Skip if |
|---|---|---|---|
| MailPoet | Free + paid ($10/month+) | Most sites – solid free tier, optional MailPoet Sending Service, WooCommerce integration | You need deep CRM features (segmentation by behavior, multi-step automations) |
| Newsletter (Newsletter Plugin) | Free + paid ($69/year+) | Owners who want the simplest possible signup form + broadcast workflow with no SaaS coupling | You expect modern UX or visual automation builders |
| FluentCRM | Paid ($129/year+) | Sites that want a full CRM (lists, segments, automations, lead scoring) running self-hosted | You only need to send a weekly broadcast – it is overkill |
| Kadence Conversions | Paid (in Kadence Pro $129/year) | Kadence theme users wanting Gutenberg-native popup + signup blocks | You are not on the Kadence stack |
| Sendy + plugin | Paid ($69 one-time + Amazon SES) | High-volume senders who want SES pricing without leaving self-hosted control | You are not comfortable running a separate PHP app + cron |
| Mailchimp for WordPress / MC4WP | Free | Sites already using Mailchimp who only need a signup form | You want sending and lists managed inside WordPress |
| Brevo (Sendinblue) plugin | Free + Brevo plan | Sites using Brevo for transactional + marketing in one stack | You prefer to keep newsletters separate from transactional mail |
The honest framing most newsletter-plugin roundups skip: choosing a plugin is the easy half of this decision. The hard half is sending mail that actually lands in inboxes. WordPress plugins generally fall into two camps – “send through this plugin’s bundled SaaS” or “send through your own SMTP relay.” The first is convenient and limited. The second is unbounded and requires you to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly. There is no third option where you click install on a plugin and inbox placement just works.
Why your sending infrastructure matters more than the plugin#
A newsletter plugin does three jobs: it captures subscribers, it stores those subscribers in a list, and it sends mail to that list. The first two are entirely WordPress’s problem and every plugin handles them adequately. The third is where every newsletter plugin lives or dies, and almost none of them solve it on their own.
The reason is structural. WordPress runs on a shared hosting IP that has no sending reputation – or worse, has a poor reputation because of years of compromised neighbours. Inbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) score every sending IP against a track record. A WordPress plugin sending through PHP’s
mail()
function on a shared IP starts from the bottom of that ranking and stays there.
This is why every modern newsletter plugin offers an SMTP relay option, and why most managed hosts (including Hostney) block outbound port 25 entirely. Port 25 is the port servers use to deliver mail directly to recipient mail servers; blocking it forces every site to send through an authenticated relay, which is exactly what good deliverability requires anyway.
The practical implication: when you evaluate a newsletter plugin, the first question is not “does the UI look nice?” The first question is “what relay does it send through, and how easy is it to swap that relay if my volumes grow?” A plugin that locks you into its own SaaS relay is fine at small scale and a problem at large scale. A plugin that lets you point arbitrary SMTP credentials at any provider scales with your list.
For the full deliverability stack – SMTP relay choice, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup – see setting up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM for a WordPress site. The principles apply to every newsletter plugin in this list.
How we picked these seven plugins#
The WordPress plugin directory has hundreds of “newsletter” plugins. Most of them are abandoned, broken on modern PHP versions, or thin wrappers around
wp_mail()
with no real sending infrastructure. We covered the seven that are actively maintained, have meaningful user bases (50,000+ active installs or a credible commercial customer count), and represent architecturally distinct approaches: send-through-WordPress, send-through-bundled-SaaS, full-CRM, theme-native, self-hosted-with-SES, and connect-to-third-party-SaaS.
What we deliberately skipped: TinyLetter (discontinued by Mailchimp), Subscribe2 (development stalled, no updates since 2022), Newsletter Manager and the dozen “WordPress newsletter” plugins that are clearly thin marketing fronts for bulk-mail SaaS with no real WordPress integration, and Newsletter Glue (interesting Substack-style angle but very small user base and uncertain roadmap).
For each plugin: what it does, when it is the right pick, when it is not, and what to expect after installing.
MailPoet (free + paid, $10/month+)#
MailPoet is the most popular WordPress newsletter plugin by a wide margin – over 700,000 active installs and now owned by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack). It runs the full lifecycle inside WordPress: signup forms (Gutenberg blocks, popup, slide-in, fixed bar), subscriber lists, broadcast campaigns, automated welcome series, and post-notification emails that pull from your latest published posts.
The free version covers up to 1,000 subscribers and uses your own host’s SMTP (so you must pair it with WP Mail SMTP or similar). The paid plans switch to the MailPoet Sending Service – their own relay infrastructure – and unlock higher subscriber counts, automation, and detailed analytics. The cheapest paid tier is $10/month for up to 500 subscribers via their relay; the price scales with list size.
Use it if: You want the safest mainstream choice. The free version is enough for most sites under 1,000 subscribers, the paid version handles deliverability for you via the MailPoet Sending Service, and the WooCommerce integration is the deepest of any plugin in this list (abandoned cart emails, first-purchase emails, order-based segmentation).
Do not use it if: You need deep CRM features (multi-condition segmentation, lead scoring, complex automation branches) – FluentCRM does that better. Or if you want to bring your own SMTP relay at high volume – the MailPoet Sending Service is the upgrade path, and bringing external SMTP works but is not where the product is heading.
What you get from the free version: Up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited sends through your own SMTP, signup forms, post-notification emails, basic broadcast campaigns. No automation beyond welcome series, no advanced segmentation, no analytics beyond opens and clicks.
Common gotcha: Sending through your own SMTP at the free tier is technically supported but practically painful – any shared host without a configured SMTP relay will send mail that lands in spam. Configure WP Mail SMTP to route through SendGrid, Mailgun, Brevo, or SMTP2GO before sending a single broadcast. This is true for every plugin in this list, but MailPoet users hit it most often because the free tier suggests “send through your site” as a default.
Newsletter (Newsletter Plugin) (free + paid, $69/year+)#
Newsletter is the no-frills, no-SaaS option. It has been around since 2011, has over 300,000 active installs, and operates on a different philosophy from MailPoet: keep everything inside WordPress, charge for nothing the user does not strictly need, and make no assumptions about what relay the user wants to send through.
The free version covers signup forms, list management, broadcast campaigns, double opt-in, and a built-in unsubscribe flow. The paid add-ons (which can be bought individually or as a $69/year bundle) add automation, advanced segmentation, WooCommerce integration, GDPR consent tools, and a few specialized features (geolocation, surveys, custom fields).
Use it if: You want a mature, lightweight plugin with no SaaS coupling, no upsell pressure, and full ownership of your data. Newsletter does what it says on the box, configures cleanly with any SMTP relay, and has a long track record of stability.
Do not use it if: You expect modern UX. The admin interface looks and feels like a 2014 WordPress plugin – functional, but not visually competitive with MailPoet or FluentCRM. The visual campaign builder is basic, and the documentation is sparse compared to commercial competitors.
What you get from the free version: Unlimited subscribers, unlimited sends, signup forms, broadcast campaigns, double opt-in, basic segmentation by list. No automation, no detailed analytics, no advanced segmentation rules.
The honest assessment: Newsletter is a perfectly reasonable choice for technical owners who want a plugin that will not be acquired, rebranded, or pushed toward a SaaS upgrade path. It is not the right choice for marketers who want a polished, automation-first product.
FluentCRM (paid, $129/year+)#
FluentCRM is what happens when someone takes the “everything inside WordPress” idea seriously and builds a full CRM around it. It is not just a newsletter plugin – it is contact management, list and tag-based segmentation, multi-step automation funnels, lead scoring, and broadcast campaigns, all running self-hosted inside your WordPress install. Over 30,000 paid customers and growing.
There is no free tier. The cheapest license is $129/year for one site, scaling up to $499/year for unlimited sites and the Pro feature set (which adds advanced reporting, more integration triggers, and a deeper automation builder). Sending happens through your choice of SMTP relay – FluentCRM bundles with FluentSMTP (the same vendor’s SMTP plugin) for that part of the stack.
Use it if: You want CRM-grade features – tagging contacts by behavior, building automations that branch on whether someone opened an email or clicked a specific link, integrating with WooCommerce / LearnDash / Easy Digital Downloads / forms – and you want it all running on your server, not in someone else’s SaaS. The price is dramatically lower than equivalent SaaS CRMs (ActiveCampaign, Drip, ConvertKit) at the volumes most WordPress sites operate at.
Do not use it if: You only need to send a weekly broadcast. You are paying for the CRM half of the product even if you never use it. MailPoet at $10/month or Newsletter free are both better fits for simple broadcast workflows.
What makes it architecturally different: Self-hosted CRM data. Most marketing automation tools store contact data in their cloud and bill per contact. FluentCRM stores everything in your WordPress database and bills per site. At 50,000 contacts, ActiveCampaign costs roughly $3,000/year. FluentCRM costs $499/year flat. The tradeoff is that you are responsible for your own database performance, backups, and SMTP relay – which most managed WordPress hosts handle automatically anyway.
The hidden gotcha: Database size. A FluentCRM install with 100,000 contacts and a few years of email activity logs can grow into tens of gigabytes. Make sure your hosting plan allows that, and consider regular database optimization to keep automation queries responsive.
Kadence Conversions (in Kadence Pro $129/year)#
Kadence Conversions is the newsletter / popup / signup-form plugin bundled with Kadence Pro – the premium tier of the Kadence theme and block ecosystem. If you are already on the Kadence stack (Kadence theme + Kadence Blocks Pro), Conversions is essentially free with the bundle and integrates as native Gutenberg blocks rather than as a separate plugin admin.
What it covers: signup forms (block-based, fully editable in the block editor), popup signup forms, slide-ins, fixed bars, exit-intent triggers, A/B testing for forms, and direct integration with MailerLite, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and a handful of others. It is not a full sending platform – it is a signup-form layer that hands captured emails to your real ESP.
Use it if: You are already running Kadence theme + Kadence Pro. The native block-editor integration is genuinely better than the popup plugins it replaces (no extra admin UI, fully responsive by default, instant preview).
Do not use it if: You are not on the Kadence stack. There is no architectural advantage to picking Kadence Pro just for Conversions when standalone alternatives (MailPoet for full lifecycle, OptinMonster for popups, Brevo plugin for the SaaS hand-off) cover the same ground.
The category caveat: Kadence Conversions is a signup-form plugin, not a sending plugin. If you do not already use Mailchimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, or one of the other supported services, Conversions does not solve your problem on its own. It is the front door to a SaaS ESP, not a replacement for one.
Sendy + WordPress plugin (paid, $69 one-time + Amazon SES)#
Sendy is a self-hosted PHP application that sends mail through Amazon SES at SES’s wholesale prices (roughly $1 per 10,000 emails). It is not strictly a WordPress plugin – it runs as a standalone PHP app on your server (or a separate VPS) and connects to WordPress via API or one of several community plugins (Sendy Subscribe is the most common).
The economics are dramatic. At 100,000 subscribers sending one email per week, MailPoet Sending Service costs roughly $99/month. ActiveCampaign costs roughly $370/month. Mailchimp costs roughly $300/month. Sendy + SES costs roughly $4/month for the same volume – the SES delivery cost. Sendy itself is a one-time $69 license.
Use it if: You send to 50,000+ subscribers and the SaaS pricing has become a real cost line. Or you have engineering resources to manage a separate PHP application and want full control over your sending infrastructure.
Do not use it if: You are not comfortable setting up Amazon SES (which has its own learning curve – sandbox approval, IP warming, bounce/complaint webhook handling), running a separate PHP application with its own cron jobs, and managing the bridge between Sendy and WordPress yourself.
The architectural reality: Sendy is the cheapest option only because it offloads the hard parts to you. Amazon SES handles delivery, but you handle bounce processing, complaint handling, IP warm-up, and any deliverability tuning. A SaaS like MailPoet or ActiveCampaign hides all of that behind their pricing. Sendy makes you the ESP.
Mailchimp for WordPress / MC4WP (free)#
MC4WP is the most-installed Mailchimp integration for WordPress – over 2 million active installs. It does not send mail, store subscribers, or run campaigns from inside WordPress at all. What it does is provide signup forms (shortcode and block) and a checkbox integration for WooCommerce checkout, contact forms, and registration forms – and hand all captured emails to Mailchimp via their API.
Mailchimp itself is the SaaS doing the sending, the list management, the automation, and the analytics. MC4WP is just the WordPress front door.
Use it if: You are already using Mailchimp and want a clean way to capture signups from your WordPress site. The plugin is well-maintained, free, and does its one job (push emails to a Mailchimp list) reliably.
Do not use it if: You want to manage subscribers and campaigns inside WordPress. MC4WP is intentionally minimal – it does not show subscriber lists, send campaigns, or provide analytics. All of that lives in Mailchimp’s interface.
The category caveat: This is one half of a stack. Pair it with a Mailchimp account and you have a working newsletter setup. Without Mailchimp, the plugin does nothing useful. The same caveat applies to ConvertKit’s WordPress plugin, the Kit (formerly ConvertKit) plugin, and similar SaaS-front-door plugins.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) plugin (free + Brevo plan)#
The Brevo plugin is the official integration between WordPress and Brevo’s marketing platform. Like MC4WP, it does not handle the sending itself – it handles signup forms, contact list synchronization, and (this is the differentiator) WordPress transactional mail routing. The same plugin can replace WP Mail SMTP for transactional email and hand newsletter signups to Brevo’s marketing platform, all under one account.
Brevo’s free plan covers 300 emails/day across both transactional and marketing – enough for a small site but not for serious newsletter volume. Paid plans start at $25/month for 20,000 marketing emails/month plus unlimited transactional.
Use it if: You want one vendor handling both transactional WordPress mail (password resets, WooCommerce receipts) and marketing newsletters. Brevo’s combined approach is genuinely useful for sites that do not want to manage SendGrid + Mailchimp as two separate accounts.
Do not use it if: You prefer to keep newsletters separate from transactional mail (a defensible position – if your marketing relay gets blacklisted, your transactional mail keeps flowing because it is on a different sender). Or if you have already standardized on Mailchimp / Kit / ActiveCampaign for newsletters.
The pricing reality: Brevo’s combined transactional + marketing pricing is competitive at low-to-mid volumes. At high volumes (100,000+ marketing emails/month), specialized providers (Postmark for transactional, Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign for marketing) usually price better.
Quick reference: which plugin fits which situation#
| Situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Free, full lifecycle, under 1,000 subscribers | MailPoet (free) + WP Mail SMTP routed through Brevo or SMTP2GO |
| Free, no SaaS coupling, technical owner | Newsletter plugin (free) + own SMTP relay |
| Paid, want CRM features | FluentCRM ($129/year) + FluentSMTP + Amazon SES or SendGrid |
| Already on Kadence Pro | Kadence Conversions + your existing ESP (Mailchimp / MailerLite / ActiveCampaign) |
| 50,000+ subscribers, cost-sensitive | Sendy + Amazon SES |
| Already use Mailchimp | MC4WP free + Mailchimp paid plan |
| Want one vendor for transactional + marketing | Brevo plugin + Brevo paid plan |
| WooCommerce store under 5,000 customers | MailPoet paid + MailPoet Sending Service |
| WooCommerce store over 5,000 customers | FluentCRM with WooCommerce integration |
| Substack-style paid newsletters | MailPoet paid (premium content via WooCommerce Subscriptions) or move to Substack/Beehiiv entirely |
A few clarifying notes on this table.
The “WooCommerce” rows reflect a common upgrade path – MailPoet is the simpler integration up to a few thousand customers, and FluentCRM’s segmentation becomes worth the price once your customer base is large enough to benefit from behavior-based automation (cart abandonment with branching logic, post-purchase upsell sequences, win-back campaigns). The cutoff is approximate.
The “Substack-style paid newsletters” row is honest about the limit: WordPress newsletter plugins are not optimized for paid subscriptions the way Substack and Beehiiv are. If your business is paid newsletter subscriptions specifically, the SaaS specialists do that better. WordPress is a content management system that happens to support newsletters; Substack is a paid-newsletter platform that happens to support content.
How long does it take to see results#
Newsletter plugins have a different “results” timeline than caching or backup plugins. The time-to-value is dominated by deliverability ramp-up, list growth, and content cadence – none of which the plugin controls.
| Metric | First send | After 30 days | After 6 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbox placement | 50-70% (cold IP / shared relay) | 75-90% with proper SPF/DKIM/DMARC | 90-95% with consistent sending and engagement |
| List size | Whatever you imported | +5-15% from signup forms | +20-50% with consistent content |
| Open rate | 35-45% (high – first send to clean list) | 25-35% (steady state) | 20-30% (mature list with churn) |
| Click rate | 5-10% | 2-4% | 1.5-3% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 1-3% (high – first send to clean list) | 0.2-0.5% | <0.2% |
The numbers above are rough industry medians for B2C newsletter content. B2B newsletters skew higher on opens (30-40% steady state) and lower on unsubscribes. E-commerce newsletters (promotional content) skew lower on opens (15-25% steady state) and higher on unsubscribes.
Two things matter more than which plugin you picked: whether you authenticate properly with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (guide here), and whether you send consistent enough volume that inbox providers learn your sending pattern. Sending one campaign every six weeks looks like spam to Gmail regardless of how good your plugin is.
Common mistakes#
Seven failure modes we see often, in roughly the order they happen.
Sending through PHP’s
mail()
function. Every newsletter plugin will technically send through
mail()
if you do not configure an SMTP relay. Every send will go to spam. Configure WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP, or your plugin’s built-in relay before sending a single broadcast. This is a deliverability problem, not a plugin problem.
Skipping SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Inbox providers now require authentication. Without those three DNS records, a meaningful percentage of your mail will land in spam regardless of your relay’s quality. The records take 15 minutes to set up and are the single highest-leverage deliverability action you can take.
Importing a stale email list. Lists older than 12-18 months without engagement have high bounce rates and high spam-complaint rates. Sending to a stale list damages your sender reputation enough that future sends to engaged subscribers also land in spam. Either re-permission the list (send a “are you still subscribed?” email and remove anyone who does not click) or start fresh.
Treating the plugin’s free tier as production. Most free tiers either limit subscribers (MailPoet at 1,000), require external SMTP that you have not configured (Newsletter free), or hand sending to your own host’s
mail()
(anything that does not specify). At small scale this is fine. At any scale where deliverability matters, the free tier is a starting point, not a destination.
Running two newsletter plugins. One plugin owns your signup forms and one owns your sending – if they are different products, you will eventually lose track of which list is the source of truth. Pick one full-stack plugin (MailPoet, Newsletter, FluentCRM) or one signup-only plugin pointing at one ESP (MC4WP + Mailchimp), not both.
Ignoring double opt-in. Single opt-in collects bot signups, spelling-mistake addresses, and people who did not actually mean to subscribe. Double opt-in (the “click the confirmation email” step) cuts that noise out and dramatically improves your sender reputation. The 10-15% drop in nominal signup rate is more than offset by the 50%+ reduction in bounces and complaints.
Treating a newsletter plugin as a substitute for transactional email. Password resets, order receipts, and form notifications need to arrive immediately and reliably. Newsletter plugins are optimized for batch sending – some of them queue transactional mail behind newsletter campaigns, which means a customer waiting for a password reset can wait 20 minutes. Use a separate transactional SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP) for transactional mail and keep the newsletter plugin focused on broadcast campaigns.
What we run on Hostney#
Hostney does not bundle a newsletter plugin – newsletter is a content/marketing decision, not an infrastructure decision, and there is no architectural advantage to coupling it to the host. What we do provide is the sending infrastructure that every newsletter plugin in this list depends on:
- Outbound port 25 is blocked to keep our IP reputation clean for everyone, which forces every site to send through a proper authenticated relay (which is what good deliverability requires anyway).
- Built-in DNS management with one-click SPF, DKIM, and DMARC record creation for the major SMTP relays (SendGrid, Mailgun, SMTP2GO, Brevo, Amazon SES).
- Container isolation per account – your newsletter sending volume cannot affect another site’s deliverability and vice versa.
- Daily off-server backups that include your subscriber lists and campaign history regardless of which plugin manages them.
- PHP version selection per site (5.6 through 8.5) – relevant because some newsletter plugins (especially older builds of Newsletter and Sendy bridge plugins) still target older PHP versions.
What Hostney does not do for newsletters: we do not act as your SMTP relay. Sending bulk newsletter mail requires dedicated IP reputation management, bounce/complaint handling, and unsubscribe processing – all of which are full products in their own right (SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Brevo, Amazon SES). Pair your newsletter plugin with a dedicated relay and you have a working stack on Hostney; we handle the WordPress half, the relay handles the delivery half.
For the deliverability side – which SMTP relay to pick, how to configure SPF and DKIM for your relay of choice, how to interpret DMARC reports – see setting up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM for a WordPress site. For the broader plugin stack, best WordPress backup plugins (free and paid) and best WordPress caching plugins (honest comparison) cover two more pieces of the production-WordPress puzzle.
Summary#
Pick the plugin that matches your situation, then spend the rest of your time on the parts that actually move deliverability: an authenticated SMTP relay, clean DNS records, consistent sending cadence, and a list you have permission to mail. The plugin choice is a 30-minute decision. The deliverability stack underneath it is the work that matters.
For most sites, MailPoet free + WP Mail SMTP through Brevo or SMTP2GO is enough. For high-volume senders, FluentCRM + Amazon SES (via FluentSMTP) is the stronger architecture. For sites already on Mailchimp or ConvertKit, MC4WP keeps the WordPress side clean and lets the SaaS handle what it is good at. Whichever path you pick, set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before your first send.