Buyer's guide
Answer these in order. Most people start at question four, which is why so many teams end up paying for a platform that does the half of the job they were already doing themselves.
This is the question that decides everything else, and almost nobody asks it first. Open a blank document and list what exists today: the website, the pages a campaign could point at, the articles worth linking, the offer, the images. If that list is short, a sending platform will not help you. It will sit there, correctly configured, waiting for content that has not been written.
If the list is short, your first tool should be one that produces assets. If the list is long and the problem is that nobody reads any of it, your first tool should be one that segments and sends.
Every tool on our list charges against something that grows: contacts stored, emails sent, active profiles, or records in a database. Find the meter before you compare headline prices, because the headline is set at the vendor's smallest tier and yours will not stay there.
Take your real numbers, contacts and monthly sends, to two vendors' pricing calculators. The gap between them is usually larger than the gap between their feature sets.
Not who bought it, and not the consultant who set it up. The person who will open it in six months, when the launch is over and the agency contract has ended. Marketing automation platforms fail quietly, not loudly: the workflows keep running and nobody edits them again.
If that person is a founder with four other jobs, weight time to first result heavily and treat every feature that needs a specialist as a cost, not a benefit. If it is a marketing team of five with an ops person, buy the ceiling instead.
There is usually exactly one integration that must work perfectly, and a long list of ones that are nice to have. For a store it is the ecommerce platform. For B2B it is the CRM. For a SaaS product it is your own event stream.
Check that one integration in the vendor's documentation, not in their marketing copy, and specifically check what it syncs both ways. A one directional sync that pushes contacts but never reads order status will quietly break your segments a month after launch.
Look at the next tier up and ask whether it is a step or a cliff. ActiveCampaign steps: $15, then $49, then $79. HubSpot cliffs: $20 a seat, then $890 a month plus a $3,000 onboarding fee. Neither is wrong, but only one of them can be absorbed without a budget conversation.
The cliff matters most for tools you will grow into deliberately. It matters less for tools you expect to replace. Be honest about which this is.
Two answers do most of the work. If question one says production is your bottleneck, start with a generator and add a cheap sender later, which for most small teams means ChattyPage plus Brevo. If question one says distribution is your bottleneck, question four decides the rest: a store goes to Klaviyo, a B2B team with a sales function goes to HubSpot, a SaaS product goes to Customer.io, and anything with genuinely complicated branching goes to ActiveCampaign.
The full scoring behind those picks is on the comparison page, and the criteria are defined on the methodology page.
Our buyer's guide asks the five things that actually narrow the list, starting with the one most people answer last: what do you already have to send?