Head to head · GetResponse re-checked 23 August 2026, free plan and billing terms 27 August · Kit 24 August
Kit vs GetResponse: both have free plans, and they're opposites
Short answer: Kit's free plan gives you 10,000 subscribers but no email sequences. GetResponse's gives you 500 contacts and one autoresponder. If you're collecting subscribers and broadcasting to them, start on Kit. If you need a series of emails to send themselves in the next month, start on GetResponse. That's the whole decision — everything below is working out which wall you'd rather hit first.
GetResponse pays us a commission. Kit pays us nothing. Read what follows knowing that — and note that this page still sends most readers to Kit, in the same words it used before GetResponse became an affiliate. How this works
Both are email marketing platforms with a free tier, which makes them look interchangeable at the top of a comparison table. They aren't. The free plans are built on opposite assumptions, and picking the wrong one means hitting a wall in week one.
The short answer
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Building a list, nothing to sell yet | Kit | 10,000 free subscribers is an enormous runway |
| You need a welcome sequence now | GetResponse | Kit's free plan doesn't include sequences |
| You sell through webinars | GetResponse | Native webinar hosting. Kit has none — but it sits on a higher tier, not the $19 entry plan |
| Newsletter or creator business | Kit | Tag-based, built for exactly this reader |
| Large list, tight budget | Neither — see below | Both get expensive; a third option is cheaper |
What each costs
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Kit Newsletter | Free | 10,000 subscribers, unlimited broadcasts, landing pages, forms, sell digital products. One basic automation, and no email sequences. |
| Kit Creator | $33 | $39 monthly, at 1,000 subscribers. Adds sequences, unlimited visual automations, integrations |
| Kit Creator Pro | $66 | $79 monthly. Subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, your own affiliate program |
| GetResponse Free | Free | 500 contacts, 2,500 emails a month, landing pages, signup forms. One autoresponder — but not the automation workflow builder |
| GR Starter | from $19 | At 1,000 contacts. Unlimited sends, and where the workflow builder starts — but exactly one custom automation workflow |
| GR Marketer | $59 | Unlimited automation workflows, segmentation, scoring. The real starting point if you automate |
US dollars per month, annual billing where a discount applies. Both scale with list size — see below. GetResponse re-checked 23 August 2026, when it also renamed its plans: guides referring to Email Marketing and Marketing Automation mean Starter and Marketer. Its free-plan automation limits and billing terms were checked again 27 August. Kit re-checked 24 August — every figure held. Confirm both on the vendors' own pages before committing.
Kit's upgrade trigger is not list size
This is the single most useful thing to understand here, and Kit's pricing page doesn't put it this way.
You will almost certainly never reach 10,000 subscribers on the free plan. What you will reach, probably early, is the moment you want a series of emails to send themselves — a welcome sequence, a course drip, a follow-up chain after someone downloads something.
The free plan includes a single basic automation, which is enough to trigger one action. It does not include email sequences, and a sequence is what almost every one of those jobs actually is. So Kit's free tier is best understood as an excellent place to collect and broadcast to subscribers, and not a place to run automated follow-up.
GetResponse's entry plan has the same shape of ceiling
Worth stating as plainly as we state Kit's, because we're paid on this one. GetResponse's Starter plan at $19 includes one custom automation workflow. Not one type of automation — one.
So if your marketing is a newsletter plus a single welcome sequence, Starter is genuinely fine. The moment you want a second automated path — a different follow-up for buyers, a re-engagement sequence, a course drip running alongside — the real price is Marketer at $59, not $19.
Two more things we'd rather you heard from us than found out later. GetResponse's annual plans are non-refundable — cancel mid-term and the prepaid months are gone, so test on monthly before committing to a year. And the AI email, subject-line and landing-page generators are capped at three uses each on Starter.
GetResponse's free plan is smaller, and less complete than it looks
500 contacts is not many, and we want to be precise about what you get, because the word "automation" does a lot of hiding here.
The free plan gives you one autoresponder — a scheduled series that goes out after someone subscribes. That is a real capability and it is the thing Kit's free plan cannot do at all. What it does not give you is the automation workflow builder, the visual tool with triggers and conditions. That starts on Starter, and Starter allows exactly one workflow.
So the honest framing is narrower than "free automation": you can build a list, send to it, and run one scheduled follow-up series. If your goal is to test whether a simple funnel converts, that's enough. If you were expecting branching logic, it isn't there at any free tier.
Where the price actually goes
Both climb with list size, both climb faster than the headline suggests, and — this is the part worth knowing — both move you up a band automatically when you cross a threshold.
Kit: roughly $59 at 3,000 subscribers, $89 at 5,000, $139 at 10,000, $199 at 25,000. Kit moves you to the next band automatically when you cross it and never interrupts sending — convenient, but the bill ratchets up on its own. Cleaning your list back down to a lower band is a manual request.
GetResponse: around $19 at 1,000 contacts and roughly $79 at 10,000 on Starter — gentler than Kit at the top end. But the bumping works the same way and arrives sooner: pass 1,000 contacts and you are moved to the 2,500 tier at $29 without being asked, and the same happens at every threshold above it. A good list-building month raises the invoice by itself.
Getting back down is the part neither vendor advertises. On Kit, dropping to a lower band after you clean your list is a manual request rather than something that happens by itself. On GetResponse we don't know — we haven't been able to confirm whether the tier falls automatically when your list shrinks, and we'd rather tell you that than guess. Ask before you prepay for a year, because it's the difference between a bill that breathes and one that only inflates.
One difference in how the two count what you're billed for. Kit states on its own pricing page that subscribers are counted only if they are unique and active, so duplicates across lists and unsubscribes don't inflate your band. GetResponse advertises something similar, but we haven't verified it and would rather you confirmed it than took our word — ActiveCampaign changed exactly this policy for new accounts in late 2025, and it's the sort of term that moves quietly. On the tool we're paid on, an unchecked point in its favour isn't one we're willing to state flat.
Two things people miss:
- Kit's September 2025 price rise moved Creator from $29 to $39 a month — roughly a third, and the equivalent annual rate moved to $33. Any comparison written before then is quoting numbers that no longer exist, and plenty of them still rank. Watch for reviews mixing the old annual rate against the new monthly one, which makes the increase look far larger than it was
- Selling through Kit costs roughly 3.5% + 30 cents per transaction, on every plan including free. About $2.05 on a $50 product. It isn't in the plan price and it isn't zero
What only one of them can do
GetResponse hosts webinars natively. Kit doesn't. If webinars are how you sell, that's a second subscription avoided — but check the price before you count the saving, because webinars are not on the $19 entry plan. One caveat we'd rather flag than gloss: GetResponse's own documentation and several current pricing guides disagree about which tier they sit on, so confirm it for your list size before signing up on that basis.
Kit counts subscribers by tag, not by list. One person on three of your lists counts once — Kit's own pricing page confirms it bills only for unique, active subscribers. If you segment heavily, that's a real and permanent saving over list-based tools.
Kit's email designer is deliberately plain. It leans toward text, which suits newsletters and frustrates anyone who wants image-rich, heavily designed emails. That's a taste question, not a defect — but know it before you commit.
If budget is the deciding factor, look elsewhere
Neither of these is the cheapest way to email a large list. If per-contact cost is your binding constraint, Moosend starts at $9 at 500 contacts — against GetResponse's $19 at 1,000 — and charges per unique email address, so one person on three of your lists is billed once.
The trade is that Moosend is email only — no SMS, no push, no webinars — and its price triples between 500 and 2,000 contacts. But if you're sending broadcasts to a big list and nothing else, it's the honest answer.
Moosend and Kit pay us nothing. GetResponse does — and we are still pointing this reader at Moosend, because for that specific situation it is plainly the right call. Our disclosure
Questions
Is Kit's free plan really free?
Yes — 10,000 subscribers, unlimited broadcasts, landing pages, forms and the ability to sell digital products, permanently, no card. The catch is not hidden but it is easy to miss: you get one basic automation and no email sequences, so any multi-step follow-up needs a paid plan.
Does GetResponse's free plan include automation?
Partly, and the word is doing some hiding. The free plan includes one autoresponder — a scheduled series that sends after someone subscribes — which is genuinely useful and is the thing Kit's free plan cannot do. It does not include the automation workflow builder with triggers and conditions. That starts on Starter at $19, where you get exactly one workflow.
When will I have to start paying?
On Kit, the day you want a sequence rather than a single triggered action — which is usually early, and arrives at a few hundred subscribers rather than at ten thousand. On GetResponse, when you pass 500 contacts or 2,500 emails a month, or when you want a real workflow rather than a single autoresponder. Those are different triggers, and which one arrives first for you is the actual decision.
Which is cheaper long term?
GetResponse, at most list sizes above a few thousand — roughly $79 against Kit's $139 at 10,000. Kit's advantage is the free runway at the start, not the price once you're paying. Both bump you into the next band automatically as you grow, so neither bill is as stable as the headline implies.
Does it cost anything to sell through them?
Kit takes around 3.5% + 30 cents per transaction on every plan, including free. Factor it into your margins rather than discovering it later.
You earn on GetResponse. Why does this page still recommend Kit?
Because for a reader who is collecting subscribers and broadcasting to them, Kit's free plan is the better tool, and a commission doesn't change that. The recommendations on this page are word-for-word what they were before GetResponse started paying us. Look at what our re-checks keep adding, too: GetResponse's entry plan allows a single automation workflow, its tiers bump automatically, its annual plans are non-refundable, its free plan turned out to be narrower than we had described it, and we've told you to verify its webinar tier and its contact-billing rule rather than trusting us on either. Our August re-check of Kit also corrected something in GetResponse's favour — we had described Kit's free plan as having no automation at all, and it has one — which we fixed without touching the recommendation. If we quietly rewrote this page in our own favour, nothing else on this site would be worth reading either.
What if I need serious automation?
ActiveCampaign does branching logic, lead scoring and conditional paths that neither of these attempts — at a higher price, and with automations you build as branching trees rather than as a linear sequence. It pays us nothing either. Choose it only when you can name the specific automation the others can't build.
How to decide today
Answer one question: do you need a series of emails to send themselves in the next month?
If no — you're collecting subscribers and broadcasting to them — start free on Kit and enjoy a runway nothing else offers. If yes, start free on GetResponse, because its free autoresponder will do that job and Kit's free plan won't at any list size. Just know that a second automated path means Starter, and a third means Marketer at $59.
And if you go to Kit and later need sequences, that's Creator: $39 a month, or $33 on annual billing.
Read the full GetResponse review →
Both links go to our own reviews and earn us nothing. GetResponse pays us a commission if you later sign up through the link on its review page; Kit pays us nothing at all.