Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
MailerLite
Score 8.2 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
MailerLite is an email marketing platform. Users can create professional newsletters, landing pages and websites using a drag & drop editor with AI generator or by customizing pre-designed templates. And manage campaigns on-the-go in the iOS app. MailerLite helps to connect with an audience using advanced targeting, automations and surveys. It integrates with Zapier, Stripe, WordPress, Shopify and other tools and platforms. MailerLite offers a Forever Free account including 24/7 support and a 30…
$10
per month
Pricing
Gist
MailerLite
Editions & Modules
Professional
$29.00
per month
Premium
$99.00
per month
Forever free plan
$0
1,000 subscribers
Growing
$10
per month 3 users
Advanced
$21
per month Unlimited users
Enterprise
Custom pricing
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gist
MailerLite
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$10 2500 subscribers
Additional Details
—
Additional 30% discount available to Non-profit organizations.
If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.
The tool is really very complete. I have created regular campaigns, Workflows, and A/B tests in my campaigns and I have not had any limitations. I have tried other platforms that are not as complete in the free version like MailerLite. This makes me want to upgrade to the premium version and I'm sure you will get the same benefits.
Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.
Offers a user-friendly interface, making it simple to create beautiful forms, group subscribers, and automate emails.
Includes email automation workflows in their free plan - the only provider I know of that doesn't charge you after one month or hit you with "transaction fees".
Excellent video tutorial library so you can learn email marketing as a beginner without feeling overwhelmed.
Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.
I would add more types of inbox previews so people can see their campaigns across more channels
Mailerlite could definitely use a few more default fields, and more field types. This is an area where we get stuck writing more custom fields than we like. I want to see a variety of fields, from text box, to radio buttons, drop downs and more date options.
Custom fields should be able to be organized according to the list type. Custom fields that are added show up on ALL subscriber profiles, so if you were building a list that had a field for the type of pet someone had because you run a Dog Walking Business, but also had a list that only served Sponsors, that dog walking option would show up on all your subscriber types. If there's a way to change this and I missed it, my bad, but I haven't yet found that to be the case.
I'd really like to see Mailerlite have the option of adding a subscriber midway through the process, and a RESEND option, whether that is to non-openers or people who are new to a list. While you can set up drip campaigns or triggers to send certain emails when people change their status, it seems a bit too time consuming.
I'd love to see a date specific reminder email template for meetings. That would be awesome and speed things up quite a bit.
Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder
Mailerlite is awesome and it does everything I need and then some. They're always innovating and adding new features, and their team is flippin' amazing. Can't see myself ever switching. They may not have everything, but looking at how well their team works, they'll get there for sure and I'm willing to wait.
It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.
Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.
Timely responses, quality answers to my questions, showing that the support are knowledgeable and cares about my results. I've had other experiences with competitors, so I'm delighted that this team cares about my business. It's good to know there are real experts ready to jump in when you need help
Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.
The company I wanted to mention isn't in your dropdown list: BEACONS. While they're more like LinkTree, they also have a great feature to build a newsletter following and their AI prompts encourage you to send more newsletter blasts and then help write the e-mail for you with the blogs/YouTube videos already embedded for example.
They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.
Gives us the ability to track the popularity of content in our email as well as who has read the content.
The customizable layout gives us the opportunity to be creative and have our culture shine through our company communication.
The ability to see who has un-subscribed helps our HR department to see who isn't receiving important company information so we can ask them to re-subscribe.
Helps our company to be more transparent and communicate more effectively.
