Buttondown vs. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a tool that's focused on ecommerce stores with big ad budgets; Buttondown is affordable and polished.

CampaignMonitor's splash page describes it as an email marketing platform, and that's what it is: a large and powerful tool for eCommerce platforms like the ones it calls out as happy customers: Ripcurl, the Red Cross, and other million-dollar organizations that have entire marketing departments devotes to their tooling.

If that's your use case, then Campaign Monitor is likely a good fit; it offers things like automated "email journeys" and A/B testing behind a hefty price tag. Campaign Monitor's ideal user is a marketer, not a writer.

Buttondown, on the other hand, is a small, elegant tool for producing newsletters.

The minimalist interface makes it easy for you to write great emails; the automation acts like the editorial assistant you wish you had, by checking for typos, broken links, or malformed images; the portable subscription widget makes it really easy to grow your audience from wherever you host your site.

And then Buttondown gets out of your way. Buttondown's emphasis is on speed and ease of use over complex featuresets or powerful automation.

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Feature	Buttondown	Campaign Monitor
Analytics	Dive into individual email performance, client information, and more
Email scheduling	Write an email on Thursday and send it out on Friday; queue up an entire month's worth of letters.
Free for your first thousand subscribers	Because it shouldn't take a credit card to get a newsletter off the ground.
Free archives	Because sometimes you don't want your newsletters to disappear into the ether.
Embeddable widget	Have your own personal site? We'll hook you up with the code.
Markdown support	Buttondown also supports HTML and good old fashioned plain text: whatever your preference is!
Drag and drop image uploading	Images are uploaded quickly and securely.
Free RSS support	I mean, some people _really_ like RSS.
Clean, usable design	Design is more than just how it looks, and Buttondown is designed top to bottom to make it easy to use.
Smart embeds	Embed tweets, Youtube videos, and more just by dropping in the link.
Autosaving	Never worry about accidentally closing a tab ever again.
First-party API	Everything you can do on Buttondown's interface, you can also do with our REST-ful API.
Paid subscriptions	Buttondown makes it easy and painless for you to get paid for your newsletters. Want to have a free tier? That's possible, too!
Third-party integrations	Setting up your Buttondown account to work with Zapier, IFTTT, Weebly, Squarespace, Ghost, and more.
Privacy-first	Buttondown is GDPR-compliant — and then some. I don't collect any data about you (or your subscribers), and you can turn off pixel tracking and link tracking with a click of a button.
Multiple newsletters	Want to run more than one newsletter from the same account? Buttondown's got you covered.
'Pay what you want' mode
Discussion threads

Kind words from happy writers.

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