GetResponse vs MailerLite (2026): Wide Setup or Deep?

MailerLite's pricing page makes a simple promise above its plan cards: "Every paid plan gets our full feature set. You only pay more for a bigger list or more sending."

Its help center describes the cheaper of those two paid plans a little differently. In an article last edited July 7, 2026, MailerLite says the Comfort plan "provides up to 50 active automations, 10 forms, 10 landing pages and websites combined, and 5 digital products." Go over one of those numbers and existing items keep running, but "you cannot create, activate, or edit automations, forms, websites, landing pages, or digital products until you get back under the plan limit."

MailerLite would say both statements hold: Comfort gets the tools, and the limit is on how many of each you can have switched on. (A few extras, such as multiple automation triggers, appear only on Power's plan card.) That second rule arrived on June 16, 2026, when MailerLite renamed Growing Business to Comfort and Advanced to Power, repriced both, and cut its free plan in half. The comparisons I found for this search still line the two tools up by list size, which is the half of the price that didn't change.

Before comparing these two, count what's live in your account: forms and pop-ups, landing pages, websites, automations, digital products, seats, and how many emails go out in a month. Since June, that count decides which MailerLite plan you're on. GetResponse prices a different part of the same inventory.

Your list size picks the tier. The shape of your build picks the plan. MailerLite Comfort charges for width: how many forms, pages and products you have live. GetResponse Starter charges for depth: it allows one custom automation workflow and puts no published count on forms or landing pages. If your setup is deep, MailerLite Comfort costs less than the GetResponse plan you'd need at every list size up to 100,000. If it's wide, GetResponse Starter costs less than the MailerLite plan you'd need at every size up to 25,000.

Find your shape

Every build has a shape: wide, deep, light, or both. Count your live items first, then read across. "Wide" means more than 10 active forms (MailerLite's FAQ treats pop-ups and promotional forms as forms) or more than 10 landing pages and websites combined. "Deep" means more than one custom automation beyond a welcome series.

The rest of this article is how I got those answers, what June 16 did to people who were already customers, and where my own recommendation stops holding.

What each plan actually counts

Here is the inventory side by side for the two entry plans. The MailerLite column comes from its pricing page and its "Moving to the new Comfort and Power plans" FAQ. The GetResponse column comes from its pricing page, its plan comparison table and its help article on automation pricing.

Two rules make the MailerLite column bite harder than it looks.

The first is how each limit is enforced. Going over a feature cap on Comfort doesn't upgrade you. It freezes that part of the account: nothing new can be created, activated or edited until you're back under, or on Power. Going over the email cap works the other way. MailerLite's billing article says that if you exceed the monthly email limit, "your plan auto-upgrades, then returns to the tier that matches your subscriber count at renewal." Its own example is a 5,000-subscriber account that sends more than 50,000 emails and is moved to the 8,000 tier, which on today's prices turns $49 a month into $69 until renewal.

The second is what counts. MailerLite counts active, published items only. Drafts and paused automations are free to keep. That's generous, and it also means the cap measures what your business is doing right now, not what you've stored.

GetResponse's limits run along the other axis. Starter doesn't care how many pages you publish or how many emails you send, but a second custom workflow means Marketer, and a website means Creator. I went through the workflow side in detail in my Kit matchup, so I won't repeat it here. On GetResponse, then, automation depth is the expensive part.

Power removes the feature and sending caps (sending falls under a fair-use policy) for $13 to $70 a month more than Comfort, depending on list size, up to 100,000 subscribers. That premium is the real price of width on MailerLite.

Four builds, four answers

All prices below are monthly list prices from October 8, 2026. MailerLite's annual billing takes 10% off. GetResponse's takes 18% off, which matters more than it sounds, so I've noted where annual billing changes the winner.

Light builds: Comfort vs Starter. This is the comparison most articles make, and it's a near tie. At 1,000 subscribers both cost $19. GetResponse is $4 cheaper from 1,001 to 2,500; MailerLite is $5 to $10 cheaper from 2,501 to 8,000; GetResponse is $10 cheaper from 8,001 to 10,000. Above that the lead keeps changing hands: GetResponse wins 20,001–25,000 and 45,001–50,000, MailerLite wins the stretches in between and everything from 50,001 to 100,000, where the gap reaches $100 to $180 a month. On annual billing GetResponse's bigger discount takes over more of the ladder. At 1,000 subscribers a year of Comfort costs $205.20 and a year of Starter $186.96. For a light build, the band your list sits in decides it.

Deep builds: Comfort vs Marketer. Once you need a second custom workflow on GetResponse, the comparison stops being close. Comfort is cheaper than Marketer at every size from 1 to 100,000: $19 against $59 at 1,000, $49 against $95 at 5,000, $89 against $114 at 10,000, $319 against $359 at 50,000. Annual billing narrows the gap without closing it. This is the half of the story most comparisons do get right, usually boiled down to 50 automations against one.

Wide builds: Power vs Starter. Now turn the build sideways. A coach with a landing page and a form for each of a dozen free downloads, one welcome series and a weekly newsletter is over both Comfort's form cap and its page cap, with almost no automation. On MailerLite that's Power. On GetResponse it's still Starter. Starter is cheaper at every size up to 25,000: $19 against $39 at 1,000, $54 against $69 at 5,000, $79 against $129 at 10,000, $174 against $239 at 25,000. MailerLite is cheaper only from 25,001 to 30,000 and above 50,000. On annual billing GetResponse wins everything up to 50,000.

Wide and deep: Power vs Marketer. When the build is both, it's MailerLite at most sizes. Power undercuts Marketer by $15 to $34 a month up to 8,000 subscribers and by $110 to $180 above 50,000. GetResponse is cheaper at 8,001–10,000 ($114 against $129), 15,001–25,000 and 45,001–50,000, and the two tie at 40,001–45,000. Annual billing hands GetResponse the 35,001–45,000 stretch too.

Websites and products: Comfort vs Creator. If you want a website, courses or digital products alongside email, the GetResponse plan is Creator. MailerLite puts websites on Comfort, inside the 10-pages-and-sites cap, along with up to 5 digital products. Comfort is cheaper than Creator at every size, from $50 a month at 1,000 subscribers to $95 at 50,000. GetResponse's free plan won't hold a website for you either: its help center lists creating websites among the premium features that end with the 14-day trial. In March 2026 a GetResponse customer who'd been on the free plan for over two years wrote: "I just lost access to my website after I upgraded from the free plan to the Starter… I won't get it back until I upgrade to a more advanced option which I cannot afford." On today's plan list, GetResponse's website builder sits on Creator.

One worked example. In November 2024 a Hacker News commenter described exactly the light build: "I have 6,000 subscribers and literally all I want to do is send them an email maybe once a month," plus a signup API and a welcome automation. "That's all. And I pay like $700 annually for that." On today's ladders, 6,000 subscribers falls in MailerLite's 8,000 tier: $69 a month, or $745.20 a year billed annually. GetResponse's nearest tier is 10,000: $79 a month, or $777.36 a year. One email a month to 6,000 people is 6,000 sends against Comfort's 80,000 cap, so the cap never matters. MailerLite stays the cheaper of the two for that build, by $32.16 a year on annual billing.

Sends are part of width too, though it takes a lot of them to matter. Comfort's cap is ten times the tier's ceiling, so a list near the top of its tier can send each subscriber about ten emails a month before the cap forces a bigger tier. Daily senders hit it. A 1,000-subscriber list mailed every day (about 30,000 sends) needs Comfort's 5,000 tier at $49, so Power at $39 becomes the cheaper MailerLite plan. GetResponse Starter, at $19, doesn't count sends at all.

What June 16 changed for people already inside

The plan change hit three groups differently, and all three show up in this year's reviews.

Free users. MailerLite's free plan dropped from 500 to 250 active subscribers and from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails. Over 250, "sending campaigns, running automations, and adding subscribers… will be paused" until you upgrade or trim the list. A reviewer in August described the result: "We have 317 subscribers and only send 1–2 newsletters per month… Now our account is locked and we can't send anything." For that list the ways out are Comfort's 500 tier at $12 a month, or GetResponse's free plan, which holds 500 contacts but switches automations off once its 14-day trial ends. This is also the second cut, not the first. A Hacker News commenter in 2023 described MailerLite's free tier as "12,000 emails per month but limited to 1,000 subscribers." One August review traced the whole slide: "First, the free subscriber limit went from 1000 to 500. Okay, sucks. But I rolled with it… they halved the free subscriber limit again. From 500 to 250."

Paid customers on the old plans. They move to Comfort or Power "at its next renewal date or when the plan is manually upgraded/downgraded." MailerLite's FAQ asks the obvious question itself: "Can I keep my current plan or lock in my current pricing? No." The terms say the same in general form. All plans renew "at the then-current price," with at least 14 days' notice of changes. Archived copies of the pricing page show what moved. On June 1, 2026 it said Growing Business "starts at $10/month" and included "an unlimited number of websites and landing pages". A capture from June 6 holds the full price table behind the slider. On monthly billing, Growing Business cost $73 at 10,000 subscribers, $39 at 5,000, $25 at 2,500, $15 at 1,000 and $10 at 500; Advanced cost $110, $50, $40, $30 and $20 at those sizes, and no tier showed a cap on monthly emails. Going down the same sizes, Comfort now costs $89, $49, $33, $19 and $12, and Power $129, $69, $49, $39 and $25. That's 17% to 32% more for Comfort across the first six tiers, and up to 38% more for Power (at 5,000). Annual billing took 10% off in both versions.

Customers whose builds are wide. These are the people the new caps land on hardest, and the clearest review is a two-part complaint from August. "My current annual cost has been about £252. Under the new pricing, the Comfort plan I'm being forced to migrate to would cost me roughly £407 per year, yet it introduces strict caps on the very features I rely on most: landing pages, forms and automations." Then: "To retain unlimited access comparable to what I already had, I would need to move to the Power plan at around £546 per year. That is more than double my previous annual cost." Another reviewer asked support about loyalty pricing and was told there was none; "the only suggestion was to delete active subscribers and send fewer emails." The same two-star review calls the support team polite and quick; the complaint is the policy.

Trace a wide build through the new rules. The free cut pushes a 300-subscriber list onto Comfort. Comfort's caps push a lead-magnet business with a dozen forms onto Power, which costs $13 to $70 a month more. At Power prices, GetResponse Starter is cheaper for that build at every size up to 25,000, so the business looks at moving. But Starter allows one custom workflow, and a business with a dozen lead magnets often wants more than one follow-up sequence, so the realistic GetResponse plan is Marketer. And at Marketer prices, MailerLite Power is cheaper again at most list sizes. Each fix opens the next problem, and where it ends depends on which band your list sits in. So count the build first, then price either tool.

MailerLite says the caps reflect "most of our customers' needs, so most accounts already fall within the new feature use limits." I have no way to check that, and it may well be true. The reviews come from the minority it isn't true for.

The builds MailerLite prices best are the hardest to move

My one-line description of a MailerLite paid plan used to be that you pay for the list and get everything. The pricing page still says something close to that. For Comfort, it stopped being true on June 16.

That's not the uncomfortable part. The uncomfortable part is what the reviews above say about my own recommendation. I've just told deep builds to go to MailerLite, because Comfort undercuts GetResponse Marketer everywhere. A deep build is also the most expensive thing to rebuild somewhere else, and the £252 reviewer is what that looks like. Their setup was wide and deep, built under rules that set no cap on pages, and when the rules changed the choice was a bigger bill or a smaller business. Even staying put can mean a rebuild. One June reviewer with a 10,000-subscriber account on Classic, MailerLite's older platform, said they now had to "pay my assistant to spend hours manually migrating data, rebuilding email automations, setting up new forms, tagging fields, and attempting to salvage past newsletter campaigns."

GetResponse isn't safer on paper. Its terms say a new price list "applies to new Accounts and all current Accounts – from the beginning of any subsequent Billing Period," with only its older legacy plans exempt. MailerLite's terms say renewals happen "at the then-current price." Neither company promises that today's caps or prices will hold. MailerLite is simply the one that changed them this year.

So the build-shape rule needs a second line. Pick the plan by the shape of your build today, and price what it would cost to rebuild that shape somewhere else. Every automation, form and page you add makes the next repricing harder to walk away from, on either tool. A free-plan reviewer put the business logic more bluntly than I would: "let users build dependency, then tighten the screws once switching costs are high enough that paying is easier than leaving."

I don't think this is a MailerLite quirk. Meter the number of live forms, pages and automations, and you can keep the list-size price low for newcomers while charging the businesses that have built the most. I expect more vendors to price the cheap tier this way, with "unlimited" moving up to the top plan, the way it now sits on MailerLite Power and, for automations, on GetResponse Marketer. If that's right, "how many subscribers do you have?" will matter less every year as the question that sets your price.

The first send

One cost appears on neither pricing page, and it lands when a migration feels finished: the first campaign to an imported list. MailerLite reviews accounts before approving their full limit and lists suspension thresholds, such as bounces above 5% or complaints above 0.2%, that an old list can cross in one send; its terms also rule out a refund after a suspension. GetResponse doesn't pre-screen, but its help center says the account is limited automatically when its checks flag unusual activity, with most reviews finished within a day. Which list to send first, and why that test comes before any yearly payment, is the subject of test the import before you prepay.

Pick by shape

If your build is deep, MailerLite Comfort is cheaper than GetResponse Marketer at every list size up to 100,000. If your build is wide, GetResponse Starter is cheaper than MailerLite Power at every size up to 25,000. Light builds are close enough that your list's size band and your billing period decide.

• Pick MailerLite Comfort if you run several automations and stay within 10 active forms, 10 pages and sites, and 5 products. It's also the cheaper way to get a website and products next to your email.
• Pick GetResponse Starter when your automation stops at a welcome series plus a single extra workflow but you publish lots of forms, pop-ups and landing pages, or send daily. It doesn't count any of those.
• Pick MailerLite Power if your build is both wide and deep and your list sits outside 8,001–10,000, 15,001–25,000 and 45,001–50,000. That's also the pairing to compare if you need more than three seats, since Comfort and Starter both stop at three.
• Pick GetResponse Marketer or Creator if you're wide and deep inside those bands, or you need webinars. MailerLite doesn't list a webinar tool.
• Think twice about MailerLite if you're moving an old list over from another platform and can't afford the account to be paused after the first campaign.

The tier prices here are exact for October 8, 2026, and MailerLite has already changed its plans once this year. A build that's light today can be wide by next spring, so the count is worth redoing whenever you add a lead magnet.

Check both price lists before you decide: GetResponse pricing · MailerLite pricing

FAQ

Is MailerLite's free plan still 500 subscribers?

No. Since June 16, 2026 it's 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month.

What happens when I go over a Comfort limit?

It depends on which limit. Going over the monthly email cap upgrades you automatically to a bigger subscriber tier for that cycle, and you return to the tier that matches your list at renewal. Going over a feature limit doesn't upgrade you: everything already running keeps working, but you can't create, activate or edit automations, forms, websites, landing pages or digital products until you're back under. Drafts and deactivated items don't count, so you get back under by pausing automations, switching off pop-ups and unpublishing pages you no longer use. Embedded forms can't be switched off, only deleted, and anything you deactivate while over a limit stays off until your total is back under. If you're exactly at a limit, you can still save drafts but can't publish anything new in that category.

Is GetResponse cheaper than MailerLite?

For a wide build with simple automation, yes: GetResponse Starter costs less than MailerLite Power at every size up to 25,000. For a deep build, no: MailerLite Comfort costs less than GetResponse Marketer at every size up to 100,000. For a light build it flips by list size, and GetResponse's 18% annual discount (against MailerLite's 10%) moves several bands its way.

How do I move my list to MailerLite without getting suspended on the first send?

Nobody outside MailerLite can promise that, and its terms let it terminate accounts without investigation. The safer first send goes only to people who have opened or clicked recently on the old platform, with the long-quiet part of the list left for later. Remove hard bounces and old role addresses before you import, since the anti-spam policy flags bounces above 5%. Make sure every contact opted in and that you could show it, because MailerLite may ask for evidence of consent. Authenticate your sending domain before that first campaign. And on the account side, wait until MailerLite approves the account before you rely on a paid plan, since its terms rule out refunds after a suspension.

My MailerLite form says "success" but the subscriber never appears. Is that a plan limit?

On a paid plan, MailerLite's documentation doesn't list that as a limit. On the Free plan it can be one: over 250 subscribers, adding subscribers "manually, via API, or through integrations" is paused. Two WordPress.org reviewers this year describe the symptom with the official signup-forms plugin, one writing that "forms display a success message, but users are NOT added to any list," and saying it happened from MailerLite's own interface too. I'd check double opt-in settings and the connected group before blaming the plan.

Does GetResponse count contacts the same way MailerLite does?

No. MailerLite counts each active subscriber once, even if they're in several groups, but anyone active during the billing cycle counts until the cycle resets, even if you delete them. GetResponse counts the same person again on every list they're on, and anyone added that month still counts after removal. The Brevo comparison walks through what that does to a bill: GetResponse vs Brevo.