EmailOctopus Review (2025): Is it the Best Cheap Email Marketing Tool?

No complaints here – EmailOctopus is one of the most beginner-friendly tools we’ve tested. Because of their pared-down feature set, navigating the tool is very straightforward.

A 5-step “Getting started” checklist, video tutorials, and an ever-present Help button also help to make it a breeze to use.

Unfortunately, the ease of use has its drawbacks, especially when it comes to the flexibility of the editor. There are only 9 content blocks you can use, and they’re all fairly basic (text, images, etc).

There are also a few issues with the editor’s behavior – for example, making changes to the background color sometimes results in the appearance of new elements that aren’t easily removable. It also lacks undo and redo buttons.

With the help of EmailOctopus’s merge tag cheatsheet you can personalize with first name, email address and even custom data. You can also include conditional content based on contact data, but it requires a bit of (basic) coding.

• Marketing emails
• Transactional emails
• SMS
• Web push
• Mobile push
• Live chat / conversations

With a narrow focus on email marketing, EmailOctopus only allows you to send marketing emails (campaigns + automated).

Transactional emails via SMTP are only possible if you connect via EmailOctopus Connect (EmailOctopus’s Amazon SES-based product).

Unlike with other tools, A/B testing isn’t possible.

Upon signup you’re asked to upload logo, brand colours, font and socials, which EmailOctopus uses to design a unique set of emails, landing pages, forms. But you also get access to a range of 100+ modern-looking email templates, and can also upload your own HTML designs.

A nice touch is that your logo is automatically applied to all emails – which is a seriously underrated timesaver!

As a tool focused on helping users send simple marketing campaigns, automation isn’t one of EmailOctopus’s strong suits. While you can automate email sends, tags, and data updates via its workflow editor, it lacks standard automation features such as pre-defined workflows, and the ability to trigger an automation based on email opens and clicks.

More advanced features such as web tracking and abandoned cart campaigns also aren’t possible. Similarly-priced alternative Moosend is much stronger in this area.

The segmentation features are pretty intuitive to use, letting you create segments based on criteria like campaign activity (like email opens and clicks), or active vs inactive contacts.

However, there are no plugins to help you import contacts from other tools (e.g. another ESP or your website builder).

While they don’t charge for unsubscribed or bounced contacts, contacts that exist in multiple lists will be counted (and charged) multiple times. A good way to get around this is to make sure you only have one list, and to use segments or tags to organize your contacts.

EmailOctopus provides a handful of form templates for inline, popup, slide-in, and “hello bar” forms. You can tweak them with a visual editor, although options to customize layouts are a little limited (e.g. you can’t edit CSS), and you can only embed forms using Javascript.

What’s great is that you can enable invisible reCAPTCHA functionality to filter out bot signups.

Note: on the free plan, the EmailOctopus logo will be displayed.

• Email and subject line copy
• Email design
• Product recommendations
• Send time optimization
• Segments and workflows
• Win probability

EmailOctopus doesn’t provide any AI-powered tools at the moment.

• Paid newsletters
• Ads / paid recommendations
• Memberships
• Sell digital products
• Online courses

Rather than providing built-in monetization tools, EmailOctopus relies on integrations with tools like Payhip to support digital product sales.

Helps to optimize deliverability by enforcing authentication, suppressing bounced and complaints (which can also be viewed), facilitating the removal of inactive contacts, and enforcing strict policies around using purchased lists. EmailOctopus also manually reviews emails and automations before you can send them.

However, it lacks any kind of deliverability dashboard or scoring, and doesn’t offer any dedicated deliverability consultation beyond its standard customer support. While it provides guidance around warming up IPs, dedicated IPs are only available to EmailOctopus Connect users.

Sets up DKIM, SPF, DMARC for your domain, and provides instructions on how to add records for various DNS providers.

The reports are pretty basic. You can see opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints, as well as automation reports. But we found that these didn’t get updated in real time, meaning we often had to check back in again later.

It’s also missing click heatmaps, custom reports, and revenue-related reports.

The platform and support are only available in English, and it doesn’t support any automated or AI-powered translations. If these features are important to you, we’d recommend a tool like MailerLite.

Offers basic tools such as the ability to test send emails, preview mobile versions of emails, and see how a personalized email would look. However, it’s missing email client previews (e.g. in Apple Mail or Outlook), and a spam checker.

Tracking domains in emails can only be changed if you’re an EmailOctopus Connect customer. However, you can change landing page domains.

Only available for paid users, with access levels including Admin, Manager, Analyst and Accountant. One big plus is there’s no limit on the number of users you can add.

Just a handful of direct integrations are available. Most of the others are via Zapier (e.g. for Shopify or Woocommerce). What’s more, the WooCommerce zap only allows you to update data – it doesn’t trigger automations or abandoned cart emails.

A landing page builder is available with 5 ready-to-go templates, although the designs are more similar to a full-page form and the layouts aren’t super customizable (e.g. you can’t add videos, or place elements exactly where you’d like). However, you can drag and drop in basic content blocks like title, text, images and social buttons.

EmailOctopus is a self-service platform, meaning it doesn’t provide any direct support when it comes to moving over your data from another platform. That said, the team does provide decent customer support for any general enquiries (see next row).

We were pretty happy with the support provided. The help center is comprehensive, and the live chat support was very responsive – they often went above and beyond to provide detailed answers, suggestions, and even share relevant documentation from external sources.

Note that chat support is only available to free (Starter) users for the first 30 days. While EmailOctopus don’t offer 24/7 support, they do promise to respond to all support queries within 24 hours.