How We Review Email Tools (and Why Our Rankings Change) — 2026–2027
Affiliate disclosure: Critingo is reader-supported. If you sign up through links on this page we may earn a commission — it costs you nothing extra and never changes our verdicts. We verify pricing and terms regularly, but they change often: always confirm on the vendor's site before buying.
Every “best email marketing software” list on the internet was written once and updated never. You can tell because they still recommend the same five tools they recommended in 2021, at prices that no longer exist.
We built this site to be the opposite. Here’s how it works.
The scoring system
Each tool gets four scores, each from 1 to 5:
- Ease of use — how quickly can a non-technical person send a real campaign?
- Features — automations, forms, landing pages, integrations, analytics, at each pricing tier.
- Value for money — what you get per dollar, including how badly pricing breaks as your list grows.
- Support — channels, responsiveness, and what users actually report.
The published score is the average. A tool can be brilliant and still score 3.5 if it’s painful to use.
Why rankings change
Vendors reprice constantly. Free plans shrink. Features get promoted from “enterprise” to “standard” or quietly removed. Our monitors watch vendor blogs, changelogs and pricing pages every day. When something material changes, the tool’s record is updated and every page that mentions it regenerates — which is why a ranking you read here might be different from the one you read last month.
The money question
We earn commissions when you sign up through our links. That’s it. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no “featured” badges for sale.
Does that bias us? Here’s the honest answer: it creates a temptation we manage with structure, not willpower:
- Scores come from fixed criteria, not vibes — and the criteria are published above.
- Tools without affiliate programs appear anyway. You’ll find them ranked alongside (sometimes above) the tools that pay us.
- Every commercial link is marked
rel="sponsored"and disclosed on-page, as the FTC requires. - The “last verified” date on every review tells you when we last confirmed the numbers.
If we get something wrong, that’s a bug, not a business model — tell us and we’ll fix the record.
Prices and terms in this post were accurate when published — check the linked pages for today's numbers.