MailerPress vs MailPoet: The 2026 comparison

This is the difference most users feel within their first year, so we’ll lead with it.

MailPoet charges per contact. Once you cross 500 subscribers, you move to a paid plan. The price scales linearly with your list size: €10 / month at 500 subscribers, climbing as you grow. At 10,000 subscribers, MailPoet’s Business plan is in the €60–80 / month range. At 50,000, you’re looking at $250–300 / month. Pricing is published transparently on their site and follows the SaaS norm pioneered by Mailchimp.

MailerPress charges per site, not per contact. One license — $49 / year for 1 site, $99 / year for 3 sites, $199 / year for unlimited sites — and you can have 500 or 500,000 subscribers without your bill changing. Your sending cost shifts to your provider (Amazon SES is roughly $0.10 per thousand emails; Postmark and Resend are competitive on similar tiers). For most use cases above 5,000 subscribers, the combined cost of MailerPress license + a transactional SMTP provider is dramatically lower than MailPoet’s scaling tier.

The implication is structural: if your list is small and stable, MailPoet’s per-contact pricing is competitive at the entry level. If you expect your list to grow, MailerPress’s flat-rate model means your operating cost stays predictable as your audience expands.

This one matters more than it sounds, because it changes how the product feels every time you use it.

MailerPress reuses the WordPress design language across its entire admin. The email editor adopts the visual codes of the Block Editor (Gutenberg) — block insertion, sidebar settings, drag-and-drop layout — but it’s powered by a proprietary engine built specifically for email rendering. Beyond the editor, every other MailerPress admin screen (lists, subscribers, automations, integrations, settings) uses the same typography, spacing, components, and navigation conventions you’d find anywhere else in wp-admin. The result: if you know how to use WordPress, you already know how to use MailerPress. No new UI to learn, no friction when you onboard a new team member.

MailPoet is in the middle of a UI transition. The classic MailPoet email editor — stable, drag-and-drop, custom interface — is what most users still see. In parallel, MailPoet has published a new block-based email editor in alpha that runs on top of WordPress’s native Block Editor. The alpha is exciting in principle but has known limitations: Gutenberg was designed to publish web pages, not multi-client responsive emails. Email rendering across Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, dark mode, and mobile clients requires fallback layouts and constraints that the core Block Editor doesn’t model. The MailPoet team is iterating, but the editor is officially in alpha as of 2026 — not the production-grade tool users should rely on for their main newsletter.

MailerPress’s bet, made years ago, was different: borrow the look and feel users already know from Gutenberg, but power the editor with a custom engine purpose-built for email. That’s what’s shipping in production today. MailPoet is now playing catch-up on a problem MailerPress solved at architecture level from day one.

Deliverability is the underrated half of email marketing. The plugin you choose only matters if your emails actually arrive in the inbox.

MailPoet centers around the MailPoet Sending Service — its own infrastructure for delivering email, included in the Starter, Business, and Agency plans. It’s a competent service with a published 98.5% deliverability target. The trade-off: your domain reputation, sender authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI), and warm-up are managed by MailPoet, not by you. If you want to use a third-party SMTP or your own setup, you’d choose the Creator plan, which excludes MailPoet Sending Service.

MailerPress is provider-agnostic from the start. You bring your own email service provider. Native integrations ship for Amazon SES, SendGrid, Postmark, Brevo, Mailjet, Mailgun, Resend, Emailit, and SMTP2GO. You can also use any SMTP server — including the native WordPress wp_mail() function, which makes MailerPress compatible with widely-used SMTP helpers like WP Mail SMTP and Gravity SMTP.

The practical consequence: with MailerPress, you own your sender domain, your deliverability stack, and your sending cost. You can optimize each lever yourself (Amazon SES at $0.10 / 1,000 emails is the budget-friendly default; Postmark or Resend for transactional reliability; SendGrid or Brevo if you already have an account). With MailPoet, the sending service is built into the product and into the price.

MailPoet was acquired by Automattic in 2021. Automattic owns WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and a portfolio of WordPress-adjacent businesses. The acquisition gave MailPoet stability, capital, and integration into WooCommerce — but it also tied the product to a much larger corporate roadmap and to Automattic’s strategic priorities.

MailerPress is an independent company, founded and run by a team that has shipped WordPress plugins for over a decade. The founders are also behind SEOPress, a WordPress SEO plugin used on more than 300,000 sites, so the track record on building and maintaining serious WordPress products is established. But MailerPress itself answers to no one but its users.

Whether this matters to you depends on your priorities. If you value the stability and scale of a large parent company, MailPoet’s Automattic ownership is reassuring. If you’d rather work with a focused independent team that ships fast, communicates directly, and isn’t subject to portfolio-level shifts, MailerPress is the cleaner choice.

Honest comparison demands honesty about scale: MailPoet is older, bigger, and has more market presence. It has 500,000+ active installations to MailerPress’s 1,000+ as of mid-2026. MailPoet has been on the market since 2011; MailerPress launched its Pro version in October 2025. If install count and brand recognition matter to you for board reporting or risk management, this is real.

That said, two countervailing data points are worth knowing. First, MailerPress’s WordPress.org rating is 5.0 / 5 (across 15+ reviews) — every single user who has rated the product has rated it five stars. MailPoet’s rating is 4.4 / 5 across more than 1,000 reviews. Both are good. The MailerPress signal is unusually positive for an early-stage product. Second, MailerPress released a major v2 in April 2026 that introduced a visual automation builder (beta), full WordPress and WooCommerce transactional email customization, three new native email service providers (Resend, Emailit, SMTP2GO), and enterprise-grade developer tooling. The product is moving fast.

If you need a battle-tested plugin with a massive support footprint, MailPoet has it. If you’re comfortable being an early adopter of a product that’s improving monthly and shipping ahead of the competition on key features, MailerPress is the asymmetric bet.