In search of a new email provider for 2025?
Over 300 billion emails are sent each day. Depending on whether you want to send personal or business emails, your email needs might differ.
Some email platforms offer excellent privacy, whereas others might be too expensive. So it’s important to make the right choice!
No matter what you are searching for in an email service provider, you’ll find a full list of free and paid options to consider below.
💡Good to know: If you are a business in search of a new email tool, we provide a free Mailchimp migration service.
Free Email Service Providers For Personal Use
General email providers include lots of free email platforms that will give you a personal email address to use. With a free account, you’ll be able to customise the first section of the email address, though the email domain (i.e. @gmail.com) can’t be changed.
The platforms that currently allow you to create a personal email address for free include:
AOL Mail
Gmail
GMX Mail
iCloud Mail (Apple)
Mail.com
Mailfence
Neo
Outlook
ProtonMail
Tuta
Yahoo Mail
Yandex Mail
What are personal email addresses for?: Non-business related activities such as online shopping, registering online accounts, booking concert tickets or communicating with friends and family.
The most popular personal email providers include Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and Yahoo. But the good news is that if none of these meets your needs, lots of lesser known providers also exist.
Some also offer enhanced privacy and other features you’ll appreciate for your everyday email sending.
Free Email Service Providers For Businesses
Technically, you could use any of the above free email providers for personal use for your business too. However, personal providers may not offer the level of privacy or features you need to do email marketing.
Instead, you could try opting for a free plan from any popular email tool. This option is going to suit startups and similar email marketing newbies the best.
Some free email plans from popular service providers include:
Mailchimp Free Plan
1,000 monthly email sends
1 seat
1 audience
Email support for the first 30 days
Limited analytics
Limited template access
MailJet Free Plan
6,000 monthly email sends (max 200 per day)
1,500 contacts
Advanced email builder
Basic statistics
Form builder
APIs, SMTP Relay and Webhooks
MailerLite Free Plan
12 monthly email sends
1,000 subscribers
1 seat
Email automation features
Additional tools for landing pages and signup forms
Reporting
Customer support for first 30 days
SendGrid
100 emails per day
1 seat
APIs, SMTP Relay
Analytics
Deliverability insights
Ticket support
Zoho Forever Free Plan
6,000 monthly email sends
2,000 subscribers
5 seats
Signup forms
Limited templates
Compliance check
Considerations with free email tools for business use: Free email tools have a lot of limitations, meaning if you want full access to all the features you need you’ll likely have to switch to a paid plan. If the email provider doesn’t include a custom email domain, your emails won’t look professional in front of your customers. Some free email tools also don’t include verification. It’s also up to you to check they comply with data privacy laws.
Paid Email Service Providers For Business Use
Most businesses pay for their email service provider to get all the features they need, while also ensuring their customer data will be secure.
We’ve listed some of the top paid email service providers below.
In terms of pricing, we’ve listed all plans starting at the cheapest paid plan. But as you might expect, the plan may be more expensive if you require more features or have a large contact list.
Bird
3,000 contacts
Global SMS and WhatsApp messaging
Subject line generator
Templates
GDPR compliant
Pricing: From £38/$45 per month
Visit Bird
Brevo (Formally Sendinblue)
5,000 email sends per month
500,000 contacts
1 inbox address
Template builders
Advanced segmentation
Support
GDPR compliance
Pricing: From £6/$9 per month
Visit Brevo
Campaign Monitor
2,500 email sends per month
Multiple seats
Template builders
Real-time reporting and analytics
Integrations
Additional agency features
Pricing: From £10/$11 per month
EcoSend
4,000 monthly email sends
1,000 contacts
Marketing automation tools
Drag and drop template builder
100+ integrations
Reduces the carbon footprint of your campaigns
Plants trees on your behalf
Pricing: From £29/$29 per month
Visit EcoSend (or stay on this website! 😎)
Google Workspace
1 user
Up to 30GB of storage
Custom email domain
Security tools
100 participant video meetings
Pricing: From £5/$6 per month (minimum 1 year commitment)
HubSpot
1,000 contacts
1 inbox
50 active lists
10 email automation actions
Remove HubSpot branding
Standard analytics
Pricing: From £14/$15 per month
Mailchimp
5,000 monthly email sends
3 seats
3 audiences
24/7 support
Limited analytics
Remove Mailchimp branding
Integrations
Pricing: From £10/$13 per month
You may also be interested in: The Mailchimp alternative for purpose-driven brands
MailerLite
Unlimited monthly emails
3 users
Unlimited templates
Website and digital product features
24/7 support
Pricing: From $9 per month
Mailtrap
10,000 monthly email sends
No daily send limit
1,000 sending domains
Templates
Pricing: From $15 per month
Microsoft 365
1 user
Custom email domain
Web and mobile versions of Microsoft products
Up to 1 TB of Cloud storage
Spam and malware filtering
Pricing: From £4.90 per month + VAT
Sender
30,000 monthly email sends
2,500 subscribers
Multi-user access
Template editors
Segmentation
Forms
Analytics tools
Pricing: From £12.02/$15.83 per month
Zoho
Unlimited email sends
500 contacts
10 users
Email templates
Basic segmentation
Pricing: From £2.40 per month
What To Consider When Choosing An Email Provider For Business Use
Email is an essential tool for any business, whether you use email to provide customer service or to perform email marketing.
Before you choose an email provider, take the time to research the tool fully. That’s because the wrong choice could limit the potential for your business to grow (email has an average of $42 ROI for every $1 spent).
Likewise, poor security or lots of downtime could reflect badly on your business, especially if your customers are affected.
What to check before you choose an email service provider:
Analytics and reporting
Anti-spam measures
API and webhooks
Custom email domains
Customer service (not chatbot)
Email automation
Email deliverability
Email template builders
Features
GDPR compliance
Integrations with other tools
Monthly email send limit
Number of seats
Pricing (including the frequency of price hikes)
Relevancy of features to what is actually needed
Reliability
Scalable packages
Security features
Storage
Support resources
Sustainability
User-friendliness
Email providers should also keep up with sender changes including the major updates which happened in 2024 with Google and Yahoo. Otherwise, if your campaigns aren’t compliant your deliverability and ultimately your ROI could fall.
P.S. Curious to know what a sustainable email provider is? Wholegrain Digital has a helpful explanation on their blog.
Email Provider FAQs
Still have questions about email service providers? We’ve answered the top queries below, but for anything else related to finding an email service provider for email marketing please drop us a message.
What Is An Email Service Provider?
An email service provider (ESP) is a platform that facilitates the sending and receiving of emails.
There are two main types of email service providers, including general email providers and email marketing service providers.
As you might expect, general email providers are aimed towards everyday users who are in search of a free email tool.
Businesses tend to opt for paid email marketing service providers. That's because they have a need for premium features such as custom domains, marketing automation, analytics tools and similar aspects to grow their business and maintain customer engagement.
What Is The Best Email Service For Personal Use?
We’re big on privacy here at EcoSend, so we’d have to go for Apple Mail, also known as iCloud.
What To Consider When Choosing An Email Provider For Personal Use
Privacy is the biggest concern with personal email addresses, especially since most of us use our personal email to shop online and perform similar important tasks involving our personal data. Free email providers have to make their money somehow, and unfortunately some opt for selling user data to advertisers. So you must research the platform carefully to check how they handle and protect your personal information.
How To Change Email Providers
When using a free email tool such as Gmail or Outlook, you can simply create a new email address by logging out of your account and creating a new account elsewhere.
For businesses, you will need to migrate your list over to your new provider. Once you’ve selected the email platform you wish to move to, the provider should offer a migration service or have resources to show you what to do.
What Are The Most Popular Email Providers?
Based on email client share (i.e. the number of users), the most popular email providers are Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo.
The most popular paid email tools include Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 (Outlook), Apple iCloud Mail, ProtonMail, Zoho Mail and Mailchimp.
Do You Lose Your Email Address When You Change Providers?
Not necessarily. If you are using a free email provider (i.e. Gmail or Yahoo), then you won’t lose access to your email address so long as the account remains active. However, if you close your account then your email address will likely be deleted. If so, the provider should warn you in advance.
As a business with a custom email domain, you won’t lose your email address if you switch from one provider to another. At EcoSend, we even offer a free migration service to help you move all your contacts across from your current provider to us.
How Do Email Providers Make Money?
Email providers make money in lots of different ways depending on whether they offer a free or a paid service.
When an email provider charges for their services (i.e. for business use), then the subscription fee is the main method of earning revenue. Email providers may also generate additional revenue through affiliates or partnerships with other companies.
Unfortunately, some free email providers have been associated with less desirable ways of making money, including through monetising their email list data. For instance, allowing customers to be sent advertising mail which they didn’t sign up for. Free email providers are also more likely to display advertising on their website to generate revenue, similar to how news websites also make money in the digital age.
Both paid and free email providers can also make money through other types of services they provide at a cost, i.e. Google Workspace.
What Are The Best Free Email Providers?
Apple’s iCloud offers one of the best free email tools for personal use, owing to the high levels of privacy as well as the ease of integration. If you’re an existing Apple user it can make sense to use iCloud on your phone, iPad or laptop. For business use, some free email providers to consider include Mailchimp, MailJet, MailerLite, SendGrid and Zoho.
EcoSend - Making The World Of Email Sustainable
Whether you’re in search of a new email provider for personal or business use, we hope the above list has proved helpful.
If by any chance your business uses email as a marketing tool, then you may also want to check out EcoSend while you’re here.
EcoSend offers sustainable email tools to reduce the carbon footprint of your campaigns.
We’d like to welcome you onboard with a free trial of EcoSend.
Or if you have any questions about what EcoSend has to offer your business, feel free to drop us a message and we’ll be with you shortly.
