Drip vs MailerLite: Pricing and Automation Compared

Take a store with 5,000 people on its list. Drip's slider shows $89 a month for 4,501 to 5,000 people. MailerLite shows $49 for Comfort and $69 for Power at 5,000 subscribers. Over twelve months that is $1,068 a year for Drip against $588 a year for Comfort or $828 a year for Power. At 10,000, Drip costs $1,848 a year, Comfort $1,068 a year and Power $1,548 a year.

Two details shift that picture. MailerLite lists cheaper yearly billing (Comfort $10.80 a month instead of $12, Power $22.50 instead of $25, quoted at 500 subscribers), whereas Drip's slider readout is a single monthly figure per size. And at the bottom of the range MailerLite's free plan means $0 for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, while Drip has nothing beyond its 14-day trial, so even a small list you want to keep warm costs $39 a month there.

MailerLite's pricing page spells out how many automations each plan runs: 3 active automations of up to 5 steps on Free, 50 with up to 100 steps on Comfort, and unlimited automations on Power, which also adds multiple automation triggers. A store that wants a welcome series, an abandoned-cart flow, a post-purchase flow and a win-back flow needs four automations, so the free plan is enough to test an idea but not to run the program; Comfort covers it with room to spare.

Drip's plans list up to 50 workflows and do not tier that by price, so the practical difference between the two is the free plan rather than the ceiling. If you are on Power only because you want one automation to start from several different events, check whether you can restructure it into two before paying the gap.

Both vendors list store connections. Drip names Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce and says there are more than ninety other one-click integrations; MailerLite's plan table lists ecommerce triggers, ecommerce sales tracking and Shopify and WooCommerce integrations. What differs is how each frames revenue. Drip's page says revenue is "traced back to the email that earned it. Not opens and clicks. Orders." MailerLite lists sales tracking as one feature beside websites, landing pages and digital products.

Run a break-even test on your own numbers. At 5,000 people Drip is 40 dollars a month more than MailerLite Comfort. If a Drip workflow you could not build in MailerLite earns your store more than that in margin each month, it pays for itself. If every flow you plan is a welcome series, a cart reminder and a win-back, either tool can send those and the premium buys you little.

MailerLite's plan table includes websites and landing pages (one of each on Free, up to ten on Comfort, unlimited on Power), signup forms, three email editors, and on Power digital products and bookings, plus 24/7 live chat. If the goal is one login for site, signup form and drips, that bundle is the argument for it.

Drip's pricing page lists onsite campaigns (pop-ups), SMS priced by subscribers and message segments, and transactional email billed inside the same usage model, and it does not list a website builder. Its support also scales with list size: email support at 5,000 people, chat and email from 10,000, and free migration with personalized onboarding on the 25,000-person plan.

MailerLite's help text says that on a free account, once active subscribers pass the 250 limit, sending is locked for campaigns and automations until you upgrade or remove subscribers. If you are moving a larger list from Drip, start on a paid plan rather than the free one. The same help text says every account gets 14 days to test certain premium features, which is the closest MailerLite equivalent of Drip's 14-day trial.

In the other direction, Drip's free migration is listed only on the 25,000-person plan, so a smaller list does the import itself: export the MailerLite subscriber list, map groups to tags and rebuild the automations by hand, as the migration table below describes.