Kit (ConvertKit) Review 2026: The Creator's Email Platform Tested

What Is Kit (ConvertKit)?

Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit until its rebrand in late 2024, is an email marketing platform designed from the ground up for online creators. Founded in 2013 by Nathan Barry, the platform has grown to serve over 600,000 creators including bestselling authors, top podcasters, and YouTubers with millions of subscribers.

Unlike traditional email marketing tools that try to serve every type of business, Kit focuses specifically on the creator economy. This means you will not find a hundred pre-built email templates or a complex drag-and-drop email designer. Instead, you get powerful subscriber tagging, a visual automation builder that actually makes sense, and a text-forward email style that lands in the primary inbox rather than the promotions tab.

The platform has expanded well beyond email in recent years. Kit now includes a creator network for cross-promotion, a built-in recommendation engine, paid newsletter subscriptions, and a digital commerce system for selling products directly through your emails. Think of it as an operating system for the creator business rather than just an email sender.

Visual Automation Builder: Kit's Standout Feature

If there is one feature that separates Kit from every other email platform in its price range, it is the visual automation builder. We have tested automation tools from Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and MailerLite, and Kit strikes the best balance between power and usability.

How It Works

The builder uses a flowchart-style canvas where you map out subscriber journeys visually. Every automation begins with an entry point, which can be a form submission, tag application, custom field change, purchase event, or an API trigger. From there, you drag and drop actions, conditions, and delays onto the canvas.

Actions include sending an email, adding or removing a tag, moving a subscriber to another sequence, updating a custom field, or sending a webhook to external tools. Conditions let you branch the flow based on tag presence, custom field values, link clicks, or email opens. And delays can be set as fixed wait times, specific dates, or "wait until a condition is met" triggers.

Real-World Example We Built

During our testing, we built a 14-day onboarding automation for a fictional course creator. New subscribers entered through a landing page opt-in, received a welcome email immediately, then hit a conditional branch: if they clicked the "interested in premium" link, they got a 5-email sales sequence with 2-day intervals. If they did not click, they received educational content for 10 days before a softer sell.

We added a parallel path that checked whether the subscriber had purchased within 7 days. Buyers got tagged and moved to a customer nurture track. Non-buyers received a final discount offer. The entire flow took about 25 minutes to build, including writing placeholder email content. In ActiveCampaign, a comparable automation took us roughly 40 minutes due to the more cluttered interface.

What Could Be Better

The visual builder does not support A/B testing within automations. If you want to split-test subject lines or send times inside an automated flow, you need to create separate conditional paths manually. ActiveCampaign handles this better with built-in split actions. Kit also lacks a global automation analytics dashboard; you need to click into each email within the flow to check individual performance stats.

Free Plan Breakdown: Up to 10,000 Subscribers

Kit's free tier is easily the most generous among creator-focused email platforms. While Mailchimp limits its free plan to 500 contacts and MailerLite caps at 1,000, Kit allows up to 10,000 subscribers at no cost. That alone is a significant differentiator for creators just starting out.

What You Get for Free

• Up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited email broadcasts
• Unlimited landing pages and forms with customizable templates
• Basic email automations (but not the visual automation builder)
• Subscriber tagging for manual organization
• Community support with access to the Kit creator community
• Audience growth tools including the recommendation network
• Digital product sales for up to 1 product with a 3.5% + $0.30 transaction fee

What You Do Not Get

The free plan excludes the visual automation builder, automated email sequences, newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and priority live chat support. You also cannot remove Kit branding from your emails and landing pages on the free tier. For many solo creators building their first audience, these limitations are perfectly acceptable. But once you cross 1,000 subscribers and want to build multi-step automations, the Creator plan becomes well worth the investment.

Deliverability Testing Results: 93%+ Inbox Placement

Deliverability is the most important metric that most people ignore when choosing an email platform. It does not matter how beautiful your emails look if they land in spam or the promotions tab.

Our Testing Methodology

We sent 12 test campaigns over 4 months to a seed list of 200 email addresses spread across Gmail (40%), Outlook (30%), Yahoo (15%), and Apple Mail (15%). Each campaign contained a mix of text and a single image. We tracked inbox placement, spam folder placement, and missing (neither inbox nor spam) rates using GlockApps and Mail-Tester.

The Results

Kit achieved an average inbox placement rate of 93.2% across all providers. Here is the breakdown by provider:

• Gmail: 94.8% inbox, 3.1% promotions tab, 2.1% spam
• Outlook: 91.5% inbox, 6.2% junk, 2.3% missing
• Yahoo: 93.0% inbox, 5.8% spam, 1.2% missing
• Apple Mail: 95.1% inbox, 3.4% spam, 1.5% missing

These numbers place Kit in the top tier alongside ActiveCampaign (93.8%) and above Mailchimp (89.4%), MailerLite (90.1%), and Sendinblue (87.6%). Kit benefits from its text-first email philosophy. Plain-text or lightly formatted emails consistently outperform heavily designed HTML emails in inbox placement tests, and that is exactly the style Kit encourages.

DKIM, SPF, and Authentication

Kit makes it straightforward to set up custom sending domains with proper DKIM and SPF records. The setup wizard walks you through adding DNS records step by step, and verification typically completes within a few hours. This is critical: authenticated domains see measurably better deliverability. Kit also supports DMARC alignment, which became increasingly important in 2025 when Gmail and Yahoo tightened their sender requirements.

Pricing: Three Plans, No Hidden Fees

Kit keeps its pricing straightforward. There are three plans, and the price scales based on your subscriber count. All pricing below is based on monthly billing for 1,000 subscribers. Annual billing saves you roughly 2 months (about 16% discount).

Feature	Newsletter (Free)	Creator ($29/mo)	Creator Pro ($59/mo)
Subscribers included	Up to 10,000	Up to 1,000	Up to 1,000
Email broadcasts	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Visual automations	No	Yes	Yes
Automated sequences	No	Yes	Yes
Third-party integrations	Limited	Full access	Full access
Newsletter referral system	No	No	Yes
Subscriber scoring	No	No	Yes
Advanced reporting	No	Basic	Full
Priority support	Community	Live chat & email	Priority live chat
Kit branding removed	No	Yes	Yes

As your list grows, costs increase. At 5,000 subscribers the Creator plan is $79/month and Creator Pro is $111/month. At 25,000 subscribers those jump to $199/month and $259/month respectively. At 55,000 subscribers you are looking at $379/month for Creator and $519/month for Creator Pro. Compared to ActiveCampaign's equivalent tiers, Kit runs about 15-20% cheaper at most subscriber counts. Compared to Mailchimp's Standard plan, Kit is roughly equivalent at lower tiers but becomes more affordable above 10,000 subscribers.

Landing Pages & Forms

Kit includes a landing page and form builder on every plan, including the free tier. This is particularly useful for creators who do not have a website yet or who want to spin up a quick opt-in page for a specific lead magnet.

The landing page builder offers around 50 templates organized by use case: lead magnets, waitlists, product launches, webinar signups, and link-in-bio pages. Templates are clean and professional, though they lean toward a minimalist aesthetic that matches Kit's overall design philosophy. You can customize colors, fonts, images, and copy. There is no drag-and-drop page builder in the traditional sense; instead, you work within structured template sections, which keeps things fast but limits creative flexibility.

Forms come in three types: inline (embedded in your site), modal (popup), and slide-in. Each type supports custom fields, tag assignment on submission, and integration with Kit automations. We particularly like the inline form embed, which inherits your website's CSS by default for a seamless visual fit.

One significant gap: Kit does not provide built-in analytics for landing page traffic. You get conversion rate data (visitors versus subscribers), but there is no heatmap, scroll depth, or traffic source breakdown. For that, you need to connect Google Analytics or a dedicated landing page tool like Unbounce.

Pros & Cons

Who Should Use Kit

Kit is the right choice if you fit into one of these categories:

• Bloggers and writers who want text-focused emails that feel personal and land in the primary inbox. Kit's plain-text style is proven to generate higher open and reply rates than designed newsletter templates.
• Podcasters and YouTubers building a direct relationship with their audience outside of algorithm-dependent platforms. Kit's tagging and segmentation make it easy to send relevant content to different audience segments.
• Course creators and coaches selling digital products. Kit's built-in commerce and automated delivery sequences handle the entire transaction and onboarding without third-party integrations.
• Newsletter operators growing through recommendations. Kit's creator network and referral system help you organically grow your list by tapping into audiences of aligned creators.
• Early-stage creators on a budget who need a platform they can grow into. Start free with up to 10,000 subscribers and upgrade only when you need automations.

Kit is NOT the best fit if: you run an e-commerce store and need deep product catalog integration (use Klaviyo), you need advanced reporting with revenue attribution (use ActiveCampaign), or you want highly designed, visual newsletters with brand-heavy templates (use Mailchimp or Beehiiv).

Kit vs Mailchimp: Head-to-Head Comparison

Mailchimp is the most well-known email platform, so this comparison comes up constantly. Here is how the two stack up based on our testing:

The bottom line: Kit wins for individual creators who want clean automations, excellent deliverability, and a generous free tier. Mailchimp wins for businesses that need advanced design tools, deep e-commerce integrations, and comprehensive analytics. The two platforms serve fundamentally different audiences, and choosing between them should come down to your business model rather than a feature checklist.