Flodesk Review 2026: Best Email Marketing Platform for Small Businesses?

Guys, in this video, I'm reviewing Flowdesk, an email marketing platform built for solopreneurs, small businesses, and creators. And we will cover Flowdesk's pricing, design tools, automations, and how it compares to MailChimp. And generally speaking, the problem I often see with email marketing is that either you're on some kind of free plan, like with MailChimp, where you basically have no features, or you're on an enterprise plan where you have all these features that you're overpaying for and never use. So for those small businesses where maybe it's just you or a few people on the team, but not a full-on designer or a person for email, then this is a really good solution. So that's why we're reviewing it in this video. And that in mind, let's get into it. So first, in terms of what the platform is, if you've never heard of it, Flowdesk is a fully bootstrapped business, which is pretty rare nowadays, so cool to see, that was founded in 2019 by Rebecca and Martha. Today, they have about $36 million in ARR, over 100,000 businesses on the platform, and I think something like 13 billion emails sent last year. And again, it's built for that niche of the small businesses or solo creators or entrepreneurs who need to send emails. And the platform, in my estimation, covers five things, email marketing, automations, forms and landing pages, e-commerce checkout, and analytics. And that is all wrapped into your brand identity and making sure it's cohesive across those verticals. That's what we're about to jump into in this video. And if you want to follow along and just get started with the platform, if this is a fit for you while we're watching this video, so just do what I do and what you see on the screen, there is a 30-day free trial on every Flowdesk plan with no credit card required. And you do help support the channel if you click the link in the description or go to flowdesk.com. Again, that is no credit card required, completely free to follow along with what you're about to see in this video. So we're going to jump into email design first. And again, that is flowdesk.com to follow along. And let's go. We can navigate through the platform at the top here. So we have our forms, workflows, checkouts, and a lot more, most of which we'll get to in this video. But I want to start off with the core value add, which is you being able to easily send really nice looking emails for your business. Let's go ahead and click on new email. And here we can see the Flowdesk set of templates. There's lots of these just depending on what you're looking for. Let's go ahead with a countdown offer. Let's say you're selling a product. You have an email list of, say, prior customers, and you want to get information about a new product or launch to them. I'll click on details and then customize. So here we can see a super flexible, easy interface to go ahead and customize and edit that email. So we'll drop our logo in here. We can customize what the offer is, and then the link that this is going to convert to as well. For example, let's say this is the of my business. I'll download that, drop it into the manage logo button. I'd enter my website. Let's say it's fax.com. And then now on every email that will be included by default. And then maybe I sell consulting services. So only a few hours left to get, let's say, $5,000 off of one year of support or whatever it is that you're selling. And then we can go ahead and customize and personalize emails as well. It's a super important part of email outbound and inbound marketing. Let's click. So what I can do, so what I can do is use the at key to do that. So I can say, so let's say, hey, at first name, we'll click insert. So now if we're sending this to, so now if we're sending this to Stacey, then this, when the email is sent, we'll say, hey, Stacey, for a limited time, we offer such and such. The counter. Now, if you want to customize anything as far as style or the color set or fonts go, you just do that once. You can save the style, you can save the fonts, and then that can be your default across all of your emails, which is really important for the brain consistency. So people get to know you and your unique style or email. So if, so when you're doing this, right, you want to go through, you want to customize everything, then you'll click next. And then here I have a sender email address. You can have multiple of those for different facets of your business. And then let's say I'm sending from John, let's click continue. And now you have the last few components of the email. So the subject line, let's say, say 5,000 on one year, and then the preview text as well. And we've, and we've covered on this channel, how to do email outbound, whether to a warm or cold audience in other videos. So if you want some help on that, those videos will be a resource for you. Let's click continue. And then, and then for recipients, either you upload a CSV with emails, or if they're already inside of the flow desk platform, you can just select the segments. And I'll show you how to do that in a sec. So I've added one and we'll send it now. Now let's click view sending progress. And now we can go ahead and see that email address. And that was sent and delivered immediately. So that is the core flow. If you want to send a beautiful looking emails for your business, maybe for free, depending on your volume, and with very little design effort, that is the exact flow you can use to do it. And it was quick to show you because it is quick for you to do as well. But there's more to explore. Let's head back up to emails. And I mentioned you can have email or audiences within flow desk, let's click here. So what you can do is you can upload all of your customers or subscribers into flow desk. And then you can segment them out by for example, what product they bought or demographics. So you know who and when to send emails. So you have the people you're sending to, then you have the emails themselves. And then to automate both of those things, we can look into workflow. Let's go ahead and click on new workflow. So these are going to be automated sets of multiple emails that automatically send at a certain cadence depending on some kind of rigor or something that happens. For example, if someone abandons a cart on your ecommerce store, say on Shopify, on Wix, on whatever platform it may be, then this could send say four or five emails to them over a number of days. Or you may have a long term nurture kind of content focused sequence. There's a lot here to look through. Let's go ahead and use the most common, the highest yield in a lot of cases sequence that'll be an abandoned cart workflow. Let's click on view details. We can see this on mobile and web, and I'll click customize. So what we have here, we have time delays, the trigger or what initiates it. And then we have all of the various emails that are sent. So a very intuitive workflow here, or if you've never seen this before, it will be if you play around with it for a few minutes. Let's click as view trigger abandons a cart. And so we could say when someone abandons a cart, we wait for, I don't want an hour, I'll go 30 minutes. And then we send this email, which just like previously, we just go ahead and click edit and then make it how we want. We could delineate by subscribers or unsubscribed individuals. And then we wait another hour. I would make this something like three. We're going to send a second follow-up, wait another two days, another follow-up. And you can make that as long and complex or simple as you would like. And it's the same degree of ease of use there. After you edit the emails and you set your trigger and your delays, you just go ahead and click publish and you're done. And every single time someone abandons their carts, that workflow will automatically be triggered. Now you saw there that you can connect your store as far as how to do that. If we click on the top, right, and then integrations over here, you can go ahead and see Shopify. That's where most of you will have your stores, Squarespace, and then Wix as well. There's also a lot more integrations. Zapier, I think it might be the most useful, at least in my opinion. And then the other settings feature that I want to point out here is branding. We kind of touched on this earlier, but again, if you just set your logo to brand colors, your custom fonts, and your company details here, then across every email you ever send, those will all be there by default. Now I want to pause for a moment and share the pricing with you. Again, what I think is really awesome here is you can use this for free if you want to. Again, compared to all of the much heavier duty plans, like say on MailChimp, you can go ahead, you can pay 20 bucks a month, and that is going to be pretty much everything you need. Unlimited email sends, email analytics, 25,000 subscribers, and a workflow as well. You pay five dollars more per month and you get unlimited workflows there. And like I mentioned earlier, you can try out all of this and just design things completely for free. So if you're wondering, this is what that range of pricing looks like, and this is 100% on the lower end for comparable email marketing platforms. And generally in terms of Flowdesk versus MailChimp, Flowdesk is going to be cheaper. The design is a lot simpler, the ease of use and the ecosystem ease of use is superior. MailChimp is going to be the heavier duty solution, either if you have a lot more scale, or if you need hundreds and hundreds of integrations to integrate into your email ecosystem. They are both great platforms, it's just a question of where you're at and what kind of solution is better for you. Now that in mind, I want to double click on one more core feature, that is checkout. And this is exactly what it sounds like. It lets people actually buy things that are integrated into your email so that you sell through email and into the Flowdesk platform. We can see the templates for these here, just like the email templates. Let's go ahead over here to service, and let's say we want to sell our time, we want to sell a session. We would have a sales page that looks like this, that we'll customize. A similar flow to something like Shopify, if you set up a store on there before, and then a thank you page thereafter. If we go ahead and click on customize, then we would want to spend some time going through and editing all of this. If we click publish and connect with Stripe, then that is immediately going to be live. And so if you, for example, only sell in person and you want to start selling something online, this is just about the lowest friction way to do that. Then this is an extremely low friction way to do that, right? You already have the email subscribers, you just connect Stripe. If you click on setup here, you customize the product description, you set the price, you can set an upsell if you want, and then you just click publish, you're good to go, and you can include that. And you can include that in all of your emails. So that is the core of what I wanted to show you on how to use Flowdesk and its advantages and disadvantages. The two things I didn't mention, we'll do super quickly, are number one, forums. If you click on new forums, this is if you want information from the people you're sending to, and same exact flow as far as being able to customize that. And then if we click on analytics, this just shows you all the data from all the emails you send and the subscribers you send them to. That in mind, the overall verdict, again, is that it's just a test for you. Flowdesk is awesome. Comparables like MailChimp are awesome. Flowdesk is going to be lighter, more user-friendly, much cheaper. If you want something like SMS, AB testing, then you can go for something like MailChimp. And overall, kudos to the Flowdesk team for building something like this for a lot of you and myself as the solopreneur or running the small business. And there you go, that is Flowdesk. And again, you can try it completely free for 30 days with no credit card required at flowdesk.com or the link in the description and you support the channel when you do that. Either way, I hope you enjoyed the video and learned something and hopefully Flowdesk is a fit for you. If not, thanks for spending some time with me here today and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.