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Over the years, I’ve migrated more than a hundred clients onto Kit (formerly ConvertKit), as a Kit Certified Expert and a Kit Migration Specialist, and not one of them off it. That’s not because I never recommend other tools, it’s because Kit has consistently been the right fit for the kinds of businesses I work with.
So when someone asks me what email marketing tool I’d recommend, I almost always say Kit. This post is the long version of that answer, with the bias declared upfront. 
I’m also an affiliate, but that’s because I believe in the platform, not the other way around.
What I want to share is what Kit actually feels like to use in a real business, and why I keep recommending it. There’s also a section on who Kit isn’t for, because no tool fits everyone, even one I love this much.
For context on who else trusts it: Kit serves more than 600.000 creators, sending over 2.5 billion emails every month. That isn’t proof it’s right for you, but it does mean you’re not stepping into something obscure or unstable.
Here’s how I think you can see whether Kit is the right fit for you.
Why I recommend Kit to almost every business owner I work with
Some platforms started life as enterprise email tools and added creator features later. Kit was built the other way around. From the beginning, it was designed for people who are the face of their brand, running solo or with a small team, using email to build real relationships with their audience. You might not feel like you are a creator, but what they mean is that Kit was built with coaches, course creators, service providers and authors in mind.
It shows up in how Kit handles your list. You’re not managing one monolithic audience. You’re tracking what people do, what they care about, what they’ve bought, and where they are in their journey with you. Kit’s tagging architecture means every subscriber has a profile that reflects their actual behaviour, and you can build flows, segment, and send based on that. No duplicates, no rigid buckets, no having to choose between list A and list B.
This flows into the pricing model, which is where I’ve seen the most relief when clients switch especially if their former email platform was Mailchimp. Mailchimp counts by list, not by subscriber so they’ve been paying for the same person multiple times. If someone is on three of your lists, you’re billed three times. I’ve seen people with the same subscriber on six lists. Picture that across a few thousand contacts with any meaningful overlap, and you can see how the bill quietly inflates.
Kit doesn’t work that way. One subscriber is one subscriber, no matter how many tags, sequences, or automations they’re in. You’re paying for the human, not the database entries.
One thing worth saying clearly: Kit counts every subscriber on your list, including the ones who went quiet two years ago. So good list hygiene matters. Regular cleaning keeps your costs accurate and your open rates meaningful. That’s true of most platforms, but it’s worth knowing going in.
This also fits how I think about marketing more broadly. Marketing is about the human, and humans don’t follow a straight line. They might request several freebies, be on your newsletter for months and then buy something. Your email tool needs to handle all of that without breaking. The way Kit lets you build non-linear flows is exactly why it fits the Marketing Circles approach rather than fighting against it.
Forms and landing pages help you capture subscribers wherever people find you. The Creator Network gives you another way to grow entirely. It lets you cross-promote with other creators at no cost, one of the few genuine growth tools built into a platform rather than bolted on.
Kit also supports the business model most creators are actually running. If you want, you can sell digital products directly through Kit Commerce without needing a separate Stan Store or Gumroad. You can even run paid newsletter subscriptions, which most platforms still don’t support natively. And if you do end up selling digital products or running a paid subscription through Kit, they won’t take a transaction fee. Stripe’s fee applies, as it always does, but Kit adds nothing on top. Most platforms take between 2 and 5 percent of every sale. Over a year of consistent revenue, that difference adds up.
Most of the time, that’s enough to know it fits. The features almost follow from there.
The features that make Kit stand out
Visual automations
Visual automations are the feature that tends to stop people in their tracks when they first see them. You build your automation as a visible flowchart: where it starts, where it branches, what triggers each path, and where each path ends. The whole logic is in front of you at once.
Compare that to Kajabi, where every piece of automation logic is a separate rule. You build rule one, then rule two, and over time the logic is scattered across the system. When something fires unexpectedly, you’re retracing which rule fired and in what order. ActiveCampaign asks you to nest conditional splits inside conditional splits. Six conditions stacked becomes genuinely hard to read. In Kit, those six conditions become six parallel visible paths. You can spot a broken branch in seconds.
Automations can be triggered by a subscriber joining a specific form, a tag being added, a purchase being made, a sequence completing, or a subscriber matching certain conditions. Once an automation is running, you can edit it without breaking what’s live. That’s not always the case on other platforms.
If you want to see how visual automations actually work before you commit, my beginner’s guide walks through them step by step.
Sequences
Sequences are Kit’s term for an email series: a set of emails sent automatically, one after another, to anyone who triggers them. You can run unlimited sequences on the Creator plan, which means a different welcome series for each lead magnet, onboarding sequences for different products, and nurture series that run in parallel without clashing. Each sequence can be as short or as long as you need, and you control the timing between each email.
Sequences become even more powerful in combination with Visual Automations, as you can see which sequences are being used in each automation.
Tagging
Tagging is the engine underneath everything else in Kit. Tags reflect what subscribers actually do: downloading a freebie, clicking a link, making a purchase, completing a sequence, or hitting a custom condition you’ve set. Each of those actions can add or remove a tag automatically, and that tag can trigger a new automation, move someone into a different sequence, or update a segment.
The result is a subscriber profile that reflects real behaviour rather than just which form someone originally signed up through. That matters more than it sounds. When you want to send something specific to people who’ve bought one thing but not another, or who joined six months ago but haven’t yet engaged with your main offer, tagging is what makes that possible without a workaround.
Custom fields
Tags track what subscribers do. Custom fields store what you know about them. Things like their business name, what they’re working on, when they last bought a product or simply what their last name is. You define the fields, and the data sits on the subscriber profile where you can use it for personalisation and segmentation.
In practice, this means you can send an email that opens with their full name, not just their first name, if that makes sense. Or segment your list by the answer someone gave when they signed up. Or route subscribers differently based on a field value rather than a tag. It’s a layer of personalisation that most people don’t realise Kit supports until they need it.
Custom fields work especially well paired with tools that ask for more information like Tally, Typeform or quiz systems. Someone fills out the information, their answers flow into Kit as custom field values, and the automation takes it from there.
Forms and landing pages
Kit includes unlimited forms and landing pages on every plan, including the free one. That means you can build opt-in pages, lead magnet delivery pages, and multi-step signup experiences without needing a separate tool.
The forms are clean and functional rather than design-heavy. And with the new Landing Page builder you can create a landing page exactly as you want. You need forms and landing pages that convert and don’t look out of place. With Kit you can do that.
Kit also has a Newsletter Profile, which functions as a simple homepage for your newsletter, products, and links. Think of it as a Linktree with more substance behind it.
Creator Network and Paid Recommendations
Most email platforms have no growth tool built in. Kit has two.
The Creator Network lets you cross-promote with other creators directly inside Kit. You recommend their newsletter to your subscribers, they recommend yours to theirs. It’s free, it’s built in, and you don’t need to coordinate anything outside the platform.
Paid Recommendations takes this further. You can get paid when you recommend other newsletters to your list, or pay for recommendations from other creators with audiences that match yours. It turns cross-promotion into a potential revenue stream, which no other major email platform has built natively.
Kit Commerce
If you want to sell a digital product or run a paid newsletter subscription, you can do it directly through Kit without connecting a separate tool. Kit Commerce handles the transaction, and as mentioned earlier, Kit takes no transaction fee beyond what Stripe charges.
This won’t replace Kajabi or Teachable if you’re running a course with a full student portal. But for a PDF guide, a paid newsletter, a small workshop, or a lower-ticket product, it means one fewer tool in your stack.
Integrations
Kit connects with most of what coaches and course creators are actually running, but what matters isn’t just the list of tools. It’s what those connections can do.
When a native integration is in place, an action in the other tool can trigger something in Kit automatically. Someone buys a product in Kajabi or Teachable, and Kit tags them and starts an onboarding sequence. Someone fills in a Typeform, and their answers flow into Kit as custom field values. Then an automation is started that personalises every email they receive from that point on. Someone purchases through Shopify, and a post-purchase sequence fires without you doing anything. The tool doing the work is Kit. The trigger came from somewhere else.
The depth of those connections varies, and it’s worth knowing the difference. Native integrations, where the other tool talks directly to Kit, include Shopify, Typeform, Kajabi, and Teachable. These give you the richest triggers and data flow. The Kit plugin for WordPress brings WooCommerce in. Other tools, like ThriveCart, connect at a lower level, sending subscriber data and tags rather than a full sync.
For most setups, that list covers everything you’re running. And where it doesn’t, Zapier or Make can close the gap, acting as bridges for anything more custom, and almost any trigger you can name becomes possible through them.
Thinking about joining Kit? Click on the link below and start with your 30-day free trial!
When Kit isn't the right fit
Visual, design-led brands
Kit’s email builder has come a long way and your emails will look clean, professional, and readable across devices. But it’s not a pixel-perfect design tool, and there’s something worth knowing on top of that: what you build in the editor often isn’t exactly what your subscribers see. Email readers are notorious for rendering things differently. That’s true of most platforms, but it matters more when design precision is the whole point.
If you’re a brand where the visual execution of every email is as important as the words in it, Flodesk is genuinely the better choice. It was built for that. Kit wasn’t.
Heavy ecommerce
The Shopify integration is solid and covers most scenarios where someone runs a small shop alongside coaching or service work. If that’s you, Kit handles it well.
If the shop is the business, and you need browse abandonment flows, deep cart recovery logic, and product-level revenue attribution across a large catalogue, you’re asking Kit to do something it wasn’t designed for. Klaviyo is the better tool. Go there.
When price is the deciding factor
This one has three different situations that look the same but aren’t.
If you genuinely just need to send a newsletter, maybe sell a product but you’re not ready to build any automation yet, Kit is still right because it has a free plan. It goes to 10.000 subscribers but only includes one automation.
If you need more than that, you’re on the Creator plan at around $33 per month at 1.000 subscribers. If you have a small list, you’re not expecting it to grow substantially, and you want a handful of simple automations, Kit is probably too expensive for what you’re actually using. A tool like MailerLite covers that scenario at a lower price point. No shame in that. Match the tool to the stage you’re at.
But if you’re looking at Kit’s pricing and comparing it to something cheaper because the monthly number is lower, make sure you’re comparing the same thing. Kit includes unlimited landing pages and forms, visual automations with unlimited sequences, built-in digital product sales without a transaction fee, and the Creator Network. A lot of tools that look cheaper either cap those features or don’t include them at all.
So: if the basics are genuinely enough for where you are, go simpler. If you need the full stack, price it properly before you decide Kit is too expensive.
So, should you choose Kit?
If your business is built around email, you sell services, courses, or digital products, and you want automation that reflects how people actually move through your marketing, Kit is very likely the right fit. That’s true whether you’re setting up serious automation for the first time or you’ve been on another platform for years and something about the experience has always felt slightly off.
The question usually isn’t whether Kit is good. It’s whether it’s the right tool for where your business is right now and heading towards, and whether the investment makes sense at your current stage. The sections above should have given you a clear picture of that.
If you’re still deciding, the best way to know is to try it. Through my affiliate link you get a 30-day free trial on the Creator plan, double the standard 14 days, which gives you enough time to build something real rather than just poke around. Start your 30-day free trial here.
If you’re on another platform and thinking about migrating, the first step is to audit and map your current setup. Read more about what that process looks like.
The next step depends on the size of your audience. If you have 10.000 or more subscribers, I can migrate you for free through Kit’s Migration Specialist programme. That covers only the literal moving of what is currently there. If you have fewer than 10.000 subscribers, migration is still straightforward but it isn’t covered by the programme. Tech Hours is the way to handle that: buy a block, send me your task list, and I get it done. Jump on a free call if you want to know more.
The best email platform is the one that fits your business, not the one with the longest feature list or the lowest price. If you’re still working out which tools belong in your stack at all, 5 Steps to Choose the Right Tech Tools is worth reading before you commit to anything. You now have enough to make that call about Kit.
