The state of marketing automation tools in 2026

Everyone has an opinion about the marketing automation landscape, and who’s winning the market. But most of these opinions are built on funding rounds, G2 grids, and conference booths, not on what companies have actually deployed.

So we went and looked at what’s deployed.

We analyzed the DNS records of over 5 million companies, spanning every employee-size band from solo shops to 10,000+ employee enterprises. For each one we inspected the SPF record on its domain, the published list of services a company has explicitly authorized to send email on its behalf (ie Hubspot or Mailchimp).

The goal? To figure out which marketing email tools companies are actually running, which kinds of companies gravitate toward which tool, and where the conventional wisdom about this market falls apart.

Across those 5 million companies, 703,516 had at least one of the 17 tools we tracked configured in their SPF record. Everything below is measured against that population, companies that demonstrably send marketing email. Because many companies authorize more than one provider, these shares describe penetration, not mutually exclusive market share, and they sum to more than 100%.

1. Mailchimp is on 44.8% of all email-sending companies, more than the next two tools combined

Mailchimp is not just leading this market. It is on nearly half of it. At 44.8% penetration, Mailchimp appears in more SPF records than the second and third place tools combined. Mailchimp has been the default answer to “we need to send a newsletter” for so long that it functions less like a product choice and more like critical infrastructure.

The real surprise is who is in second. Brevo takes the runner-up spot at 18.3%, ahead of HubSpot (16.3%). Right behind HubSpot sits Klaviyo at 13.9%, which is remarkable for a platform that is used mostly by ecommerce companies.

After those four, the floor drops out considerably. MailerLite (5.1%) and Constant Contact (4.4%) form a distant second tier, and every remaining tool we tracked lands under 2.5%. Though this space is littered with many tools, the reality is that the market is dominated by four tools and a very long tail.

The most counterintuitive part of this chart is what is at the bottom. Pardot, Act-On, and Oracle Eloqua, the names that dominate enterprise marketing-automation discourse, barely register, together accounting for under 3% of companies. That is not because nobody serious uses them. It’s simply a side effect of of our methodology: we treat a 20-person agency on Mailchimp and a 40,000-person enterprise on Eloqua as one company each. Counting by company systematically shrinks tools that sell to a small number of very large organizations.

Marketo (now owned by Adobe) belongs in that same group. One of the most recognized names in enterprise marketing automation, it shows up on just 4,774 companies, or 0.7% of the market.

2. The enterprise tools look invisible by company count, but they quietly own the enterprise

Counting companies makes the enterprise marketing-automation tools look dead. Pardot, Act-On, and Oracle Eloqua barely cleared 3% combined in the last chart. But raw count is the wrong lens for tools that sell to a small number of very large organizations. When we break penetration down by company size, the picture inverts.

Each tool occupies a distinct shape as you move up the size bands. The clearest way to see it is to plot penetration within each employee band.

Five different shapes tell five different stories. Klaviyo is a cliff: it peaks at 23% among 2 to 10 employee companies and falls away steadily after that, exactly what you would expect from a tool built for small online stores. HubSpot is a hump, climbing from almost nothing at the bottom to a 24.3% peak at 51 to 200 employees before fading in the enterprise. That hump is the textbook mid-market profile, and it matches HubSpot’s reputation.

Pardot and Constant Contact do the opposite. Both rise with company size. Pardot is near zero among small companies and reaches 9.0% at 10,001+, the unmistakable signature of an enterprise sales tool. Constant Contact’s climb is the quiet surprise: a tool with a small-business reputation actually gets more common as companies get larger, nearly tripling from 3.7% at the bottom to 9.7% at the top.

And then there is Mailchimp, which refuses to pick a single lane. It leads across every single size band, from solo operators (54.8%) all the way up to 10,001+ employee enterprises (54.3%), dipping only slightly in the middle. No dedicated enterprise tool ever overtakes it, not even at the very top. The reason is that large companies don’t place Mailchimp, they add to it. They keep a Mailchimp for newsletters and bolt a Pardot or an Eloqua on top for automation.

Which brings us back to the tools that looked invisible. The right question is not how many companies use them, but what fraction of their customer base is enterprise. On that measure, the ranking completely reverses.

Oracle Eloqua is the most concentrated enterprise tool in the entire dataset by a wide margin. Just 337 companies use it, the smallest footprint of anything we tracked, but 10.4% of those companies have 5,000 or more employees. That is roughly thirteen times the 0.8% baseline across all tools. Eloqua is not a small tool. It is a tool that exists almost entirely inside the Fortune 500, and counting companies one for one was always going to make it disappear.

Pardot tells the same story in less extreme form: 2.8% of its base is enterprise, three and a half times the baseline, consistent with its position as Salesforce’s B2B automation arm. Emma is the oddity, with 4.9% of its customers in the 5,000+ band, far higher than its modest profile would suggest, though its small sample means that number should be read as directional rather than precise.

At the other end sit the tools built for individuals and tiny teams. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) has effectively zero enterprise presence, with 0.03% of its base above 5,000 employees, which fits a product designed for creators and solo operators. Klaviyo, despite its huge overall footprint, also skews small, because its home is the independent online store rather than the large corporation.

The takeaway is that the marketing email market is really two markets wearing the same label. One is a high-volume SMB market where Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and Brevo compete for millions of small companies. The other is a low-volume enterprise market where Pardot and Eloqua command a tiny number of very large accounts. A leaderboard sorted by company count only ever shows you the first one.

3. Mailchimp wins almost every country on earth, except the three where it doesn’t

The global ranking hides a more interesting question: who wins each individual country? We took the twelve largest markets in our dataset and asked which tool the most companies actually use in each one. Mailchimp’s dominance turns out to be close to universal, but not quite.

Mailchimp leads nine of the twelve largest markets, usually by a wide margin. It captures a majority of email-sending companies in the Netherlands (60.6%), Belgium (58.5%), Switzerland (55.7%), the UK (54.0%), and Canada (52.7%). In the Anglosphere and most of the smaller European economies, the contest is not close.

The exceptions are what make the map interesting. In exactly three of the twelve biggest markets, a local player beats Mailchimp outright, and in none of them is that player HubSpot.

France is the most lopsided. Two out of every three French companies that send marketing email use Brevo (67.0%), more than three times Mailchimp’s 21.0% share of the same market. Brevo also takes Germany, where it leads with 37.6% against Mailchimp’s 28.8%. This is the entire explanation for Brevo’s surprising #2 finish in the global ranking. It is not broadly popular across the world. It is overwhelmingly dominant in continental Europe’s two largest economies, and that is enough to vault it past HubSpot worldwide.

Brazil belongs to RD Station, the local marketing-automation platform, which leads with 53.4% of Brazilian email senders. Mailchimp does not even register in RD Station’s home market in a meaningful way. This is the same dynamic the cloud world sees with regional providers: once a homegrown tool reaches critical mass in its own country, the global incumbent struggles to displace it.

That regional concentration becomes a defining trait for several tools. We measured how much of each tool’s customer base sits in its single biggest country, and how heavily that skews relative to the country’s overall share of the dataset.

RD Station is the most geographically captive tool in the entire dataset. A staggering 94.9% of its customers are Brazilian, which means it appears in Brazil roughly 46 times more often than its overall share would predict. It is less a global product than a Brazilian institution that happens to be software. SendPulse plays the same role further east, concentrated in Ukraine, Russia, and Brazil, where it over-indexes by more than 85 times against its tiny baseline. MailerLite, founded in Lithuania, shows a clear Polish and Baltic signal, over-indexing roughly 12 times in Poland.

At the other extreme sit the all-American tools. Emma (83.7%), Constant Contact (81.7%), and Act-On (72.0%) draw the overwhelming majority of their customers from the United States. These are not global products with a US bias, they are essentially domestic tools that never meaningfully crossed a border. Constant Contact’s earlier-noted strength among larger US companies now reads more clearly: it is a US small-and-midmarket institution with almost no international footprint.

The genuinely global tools are the ones near the bottom of this chart. Mailchimp (34.0% US), Brevo (19.2% France), and HubSpot (45.1% US) spread their customer base across many countries rather than leaning on a single home market. Mailchimp’s relatively low home concentration despite its enormous size is the clearest possible signal of how broadly it has spread: it is the closest thing this market has to a default everywhere at once.

4. Every tool owns a vertical, except the one that wins by owning none

So far Mailchimp has looked unbeatable: the leader in nearly every size band and nearly every country. Industry is where the picture finally fractures. When we group companies by sector and ask which tool over-indexes where, almost every competitor turns out to be quietly dominant inside one specific slice of the economy. We measured this as an over-index: how concentrated a tool’s customer base is in a sector, relative to that sector’s share of all email-sending companies. A value of 2x means the tool shows up twice as often in that sector as you would expect by chance.

Klaviyo is the most extreme case. Roughly 47% of its entire customer base is a retail or apparel company, and once you add the adjacent consumer-product categories it sells into, cosmetics, food and beverage, personal care, sporting goods, close to three in five Klaviyo customers are a consumer brand. It over-indexes in retail by about 4.5 times. Klaviyo did not win a slice of the email market so much as it annexed ecommerce entirely, riding the Shopify boom into a near-monopoly on the online store.

Kit, is even more concentrated in proportional terms. Coaches, course creators, and training businesses make up a share of its base roughly ten times what their presence in the broader economy would predict. Kit is not a general email tool with some creators on it, it is the creator economy’s email tool, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

The pattern repeats across the field. HubSpot leans hard into software and technology companies, where about a quarter of its customers sit and where it over-indexes by 2.4 times, exactly the B2B SaaS profile its reputation implies. Pardot skews toward financial services and regulated B2B, consistent with its life as Salesforce‘s enterprise automation arm. Constant Contact is the tool of American nonprofits, churches, and civic organizations, over-indexing 2.4 times in that group. Emma quietly owns universities, hospitals, and other large institutions, though its smaller sample means that read is directional. Each of these tools has effectively retreated into a defensible niche where it is the local favorite.

And then there is Mailchimp, whose chart is remarkable for how flat it is. Its single largest skew is a mild 1.4 times toward nonprofits, and beyond that its customer base mirrors the overall economy almost exactly: retailers, agencies, software firms, consultancies, builders, restaurants, all represented in roughly the proportions they exist in the wild. Where every competitor has carved out a vertical, Mailchimp has carved out everyone. That is the real source of its dominance. The specialists win their niches, but Mailchimp wins the long, undifferentiated middle of the entire economy, which turns out to be far larger than any single niche.

The strategic picture that emerges across all four findings is consistent. This is not one market with a clear leaderboard. It is a generalist incumbent sitting on top of a collection of vertical monopolies, each tool defended less by features than by the specific industry, country, or company size that adopted it and never left.

5. Mailchimp is winning the present, but Brevo is winning the future

Installed base tells you who won the last decade. To see who is winning now, we counted how many companies newly adopted each tool over the past year and measured it two ways: in raw volume, and as a share of each tool’s existing base. The two rankings disagree, and the disagreement is the whole story. A note on method: because we are counting newly appearing companies rather than tracking departures, these figures represent gross customer acquisition, not net growth. A few tools are excluded here for insufficient data in the time window.

By raw volume, Mailchimp is still the gravitational center of the market, pulling in 26,928 new companies in a single year. But the striking number is right behind it. Brevo added 18,084, roughly two thirds of Mailchimp’s haul, despite starting from a base less than half the size. No other tool is in the same conversation: HubSpot added 7,380 and Klaviyo 5,040, both a fraction of Brevo’s intake. In absolute terms, this is already a two-horse race for new customers.

Once you adjust for size, the order reshuffles entirely, and the incumbents fall down the board.

Brevo leads here too, with 14.0% of its entire customer base having signed on in just the past year, well above the 8.7% market average. MailerLite (12.2%) and Kit (10.4%) follow, meaning the three fastest-growing tools in the market are a European all-rounder, a Lithuanian-built lightweight sender, and the creator economy’s email tool. The momentum is concentrated entirely among challengers and specialists, not the household names.

Mailchimp’s 8.5% is quietly impressive in this light. For a tool already sitting on 315,000 companies, growing its base by roughly a twelfth in a single year, right at the market average, shows the incumbent is not coasting. It is still adding more companies than anyone, just no longer at the rate of the insurgents.

The bottom of the chart is where the warning signs are. Klaviyo, despite its commanding position in ecommerce, is growing below average at 5.1%, a possible sign that the Shopify-era land grab has matured and the easy retail adoption is behind it. Constant Contact (4.7%), Emma (4.1%), and Drip (2.3%) bring up the rear. These are the tools we have repeatedly seen described by their installed base rather than their trajectory: heavily US, heavily small-business or legacy, and now adding new customers at less than a third of Brevo’s rate. Drip in particular, at 2.3%, is barely replacing itself.

Put the volume and rate charts together and the forecast writes itself. Mailchimp owns the present by a wide margin and is not declining. But Brevo is the only tool both adding customers at near-Mailchimp volume and doing so at the fastest rate in the market. If these trajectories hold, the gap between first and second place narrows every year.

6. Klaviyo users run Shopify, HubSpot users run sales software, and Mailchimp users have nothing in common

For this last cut we left the email category entirely. We took the companies using each major tool and asked which of the other 1,500-plus technologies in our panel they over-index on, using significant-terms analysis to surface the tools that are genuinely characteristic of each base rather than just popular everywhere. The result is the sharpest finding in this entire analysis: the email tool a company picks is a near-perfect tell for what kind of company it is. After stripping out universal infrastructure that everyone runs, like Microsoft 365 and Google Tag Manager, four completely different companies emerge.

A Klaviyo company is a Shopify store, full stop. Klaviyo users are roughly 19 times more likely than average to run Shopify, and their entire signature stack reads like a tour of the Shopify app store: Recharge for subscriptions, Gorgias for support, Attentive for SMS, and a wall of reviews-and-loyalty apps like Yotpo, Stampe, Okendo, Loox, and Smile.io. There is almost no ambiguity in a Klaviyo company. It sells physical products directly to consumers online, and it runs the standard direct-to-consumer toolkit to do it. This is the most internally consistent customer base of any tool we looked at.

A HubSpot company sells software to other businesses. Its signature stack is the mirror image of Klaviyo’s. HubSpot users over-index hard on ZoomInfo (about 7.7 times) and LinkedIn Ads, the core tools of B2B outbound sales and account targeting, and at the same time on Atlassian, GitHub, and Slack, the tools of a company that builds its own software. Outbound sales motion plus an engineering org is the textbook profile of a B2B SaaS business, and HubSpot’s customers wear it openly.

A Mailchimp company is, statistically, anyone at all. Here is the most revealing result in the whole study. Mailchimp’s customers over-index on essentially nothing. Their single strongest affinity to any non-Mailchimp tool is Microsoft 365 at a mild 1.4 times, and almost every other technology in our panel shows up at below-average rates among Mailchimp users. That is not a weakness in the data, it is the entire point. A tool with a distinctive customer base produces a distinctive stack. Mailchimp produces no stack at all because its customers are a representative cross-section of the whole economy. It is the only tool whose users have nothing in common except Mailchimp.

Brevo, fittingly, looks like Mailchimp with a European accent. Its customers also over-index on almost nothing, the same flat generalist signature, with the only real tells being GDPR consent-management tools like Axeptio and Cookiebot and the outbound tool Lemlist. It is a broad SMB base like Mailchimp’s, just centered on the other side of the Atlantic, which is exactly what every earlier section predicted.

This is the cleanest evidence yet for the thesis running through this entire piece. The specialist tools have specific customers, so specific you can reconstruct their whole business from their tech stack. The generalists have no signature because they serve everyone. Klaviyo owns a stack, HubSpot owns a stack, and Mailchimp owns the absence of one.

The takeaway

Across five cuts of the data, the same shape keeps appearing. The marketing email market is not one leaderboard with Mailchimp on top. It is a single generalist incumbent sitting above a collection of defensible monopolies: Klaviyo owns ecommerce, HubSpot owns B2B software, Pardot and Eloqua own the enterprise, Constant Contact owns American nonprofits, RD Station owns Brazil, Brevo owns continental Europe. Each is nearly unassailable inside its niche and nearly invisible outside it.

Mailchimp wins not by beating any of these tools on their home turf, but by being the default everywhere none of them has planted a flag, which turns out to be most of the economy. The one tool with both the scale and the momentum to challenge that position is Brevo, and it is doing so the same way everyone else carved out their territory: by owning a region so completely that the global incumbent cannot follow.

Methodology

Everything in this post is based on first-party data we collect by directly inspecting company infrastructure. No surveys, no self-reported data, no vendor-supplied customer counts. Here is exactly how it works.

The panel

We track infrastructure signals across more than 5 million companies, sourced from LinkedIn and spanning every employee-size band from solo operators to 10,000+ employee enterprises. For each company we record the employee-size range, primary industry, and headquarters country, which lets us segment tool adoption the way we do throughout this post.

Detecting which email tools a company uses

We detect marketing email tools by inspecting each company’s SPF record, the DNS entry that lists every service a domain has authorized to send email on its behalf. An SPF include such as spf.brevo.com or servers.mcsv.net is a deliberate configuration choice, not an inference. Someone on the company’s team added that provider, which makes SPF one of the cleanest available signals for which email platform a company actually runs. We map each known include and sending domain back to its parent product, accounting for rebrands so that legacy entries like Sendinblue resolve to Brevo and ConvertKit to Kit.

Counting companies, not records

Every figure in this post counts distinct companies, deduplicated by domain, rather than raw detection records. A company that shows the same tool across multiple records is counted once for that tool. The 703,516 figure is the number of distinct companies in our panel with at least one of the tracked tools configured, and every penetration percentage uses that population as its denominator. Because many companies authorize more than one provider, the shares describe penetration rather than mutually exclusive market share, and they sum to more than 100%.

Over-indexing and significant terms

For the size, country, and industry sections, we report over-indexing rather than raw counts. Over-indexing measures how concentrated a tool’s customer base is in a given segment relative to that segment’s share of the overall population, so a value of 2x means a tool appears twice as often in that segment as chance would predict. This is what lets a tool with a small absolute footprint, like Oracle Eloqua, correctly register as enterprise-dominant. For the tech-stack section, we used significant-terms analysis across a panel of more than 1,500 technologies to surface the tools genuinely characteristic of each email tool’s customers, rather than the tools that are simply popular everywhere, and we filtered out universal infrastructure such as Microsoft 365, Google Tag Manager, and Cloudflare.

Adoption and growth

For the growth section, we count companies that newly appeared with a given tool over the past year. These are one-directional adoption events, so the figures represent gross customer acquisition rather than net growth. We do not observe departures, which means we cannot measure churn or claim that any company switched from one tool to another. A few tools are excluded from the growth section because we did not have sufficient data for them in the time window.

Limitations

A few caveats worth stating plainly. Our distinct-company counts above roughly 40,000 are approximate to within about 1%, which is immaterial to the rankings but means individual figures should not be read to the last digit. The 703,516 population is a floor, not a ceiling: companies that flatten their SPF records, send from subdomains we did not probe, route email through their main domain, or use tools outside our tracked set are undercounted. GoHighLevel was excluded entirely because its agency-and-sub-account sending model makes it systematically invisible to domain-level SPF detection. And because we count companies rather than email volume or revenue, tools that serve a small number of very large enterprises are structurally underrepresented in any raw ranking, which is precisely why we segment by company size.