Best Email Templates and Tools in 2026: The Complete Guide

Stripo has earned its reputation as one of the most versatile email template builders on the market. Its library of over 1,500 pre-designed templates covers every conceivable email type, from minimalist transactional receipts to richly designed holiday promotional campaigns. Each template is fully responsive and can be customized using the intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

The platform supports both visual editing and raw HTML/CSS modification, which makes it accessible to marketers and developers alike. One of Stripo's standout features is its export capability -- you can push finished templates directly to over 70 email service providers with a single click, including Mailchimp, HubSpot, Brevo, Campaign Monitor, and many more.

The free tier allows you to create and export a limited number of templates per month, making it an excellent choice for small businesses or freelancers who need professional email templates without a monthly subscription. Paid plans unlock additional templates, team collaboration features, and priority support.

Beefree, formerly known as BEE Pro, is the email template builder you want when multiple people need to touch the same email design workflow. Its role-based permission system lets you define who can edit templates, who can approve them, and who can only view final versions. This governance layer is critical for organizations that need to maintain brand consistency across teams and departments.

The editor itself is polished and responsive. Templates snap together from pre-built content blocks -- headers, hero images, product grids, text sections, footers -- that you can rearrange and customize. Beefree's design system feature lets you lock down brand colors, fonts, and spacing rules so that anyone on your team can create emails that stay on-brand without design oversight.

At $15 per month for the base plan, Beefree offers strong value for small to mid-sized teams. The template library includes over 1,200 designs across all major email categories, and every template renders correctly on mobile devices. If collaboration is your primary concern when choosing an email template tool, Beefree is the platform to evaluate first.

Mailchimp remains one of the most recognizable names in email marketing, and its template builder has improved steadily over the years. While it does not offer the depth of a dedicated template builder like Stripo or Beefree, Mailchimp's strength lies in its all-in-one approach. You can design templates, build automations, segment audiences, and track analytics from a single dashboard.

The template library includes over 100 professionally designed layouts that can be customized with Mailchimp's drag-and-drop editor. The platform's AI content optimizer can suggest improvements to your subject lines and email copy, though it is not as comprehensive as Sequenzy's full AI template generation. Mailchimp's free tier supports up to 500 contacts and 1,000 email sends per month, making it a reasonable starting point for new businesses.

Where Mailchimp falls short compared to dedicated template tools is in design flexibility. Power users may find the editor limiting, and the template library is smaller than what Stripo or Beefree offer. However, for businesses that want email templates, automation, and analytics in one platform, Mailchimp remains a solid choice.

Litmus is not a template builder in the traditional sense -- it is the quality assurance layer that ensures your email templates render correctly everywhere. With previews across over 100 email clients and devices, Litmus catches rendering issues that would otherwise go unnoticed until your subscribers see a broken layout on their phone or a missing image in Outlook.

The platform includes a basic email editor, but its real value lies in testing, analytics, and accessibility checks. Litmus scans your templates for common accessibility issues like missing alt text, insufficient color contrast, and keyboard navigation problems. Its engagement analytics go beyond open rates to show how subscribers interact with different parts of your email.

At $79 per month, Litmus is an investment best suited for teams that send high-volume campaigns or operate in industries where email presentation is critical. Pair it with a template builder like Sequenzy or Stripo for a complete email creation and testing workflow.

Chamaileon targets enterprise teams that need strict control over their email template creation process. Its modular system lets you build a library of approved content blocks -- headers, product showcases, testimonial sections, footers -- that team members can assemble into new emails without straying from brand guidelines.

The platform includes approval workflows, version history, and the ability to lock certain template elements from editing. For large organizations with multiple brands or regional teams, Chamaileon provides the governance layer that prevents email design from becoming chaotic. The starting price of $40 per month reflects its enterprise positioning.

MJML is the developer's answer to email template creation. Instead of wrestling with the fragmented mess of email client HTML rendering, you write clean, semantic MJML components that compile into fully responsive, cross-client HTML. A simple component like <mj-section> containing <mj-column> and <mj-text> elements produces the complex table-based HTML that email clients require.

The framework integrates with modern development workflows through npm packages, VS Code extensions, and CI/CD pipelines. You can version-control your email templates alongside your application code, run automated builds, and maintain a consistent development process for both web and email.

MJML is completely free and open source. It includes over 30 starter templates, comprehensive documentation, and an active community on GitHub. If your team has development resources and prefers code-based workflows, MJML is the best free option for creating professional email templates.

Postcards stands out for the visual quality of its design components. Each of the 900+ pre-built blocks has been individually designed with attention to typography, spacing, and visual hierarchy. The result is email templates that look noticeably more polished than what most drag-and-drop builders produce.

The builder works on a component-based system: you select blocks from categories like headers, features, pricing tables, testimonials, and footers, then stack and customize them to create your email. Every component is responsive by default. At $17 per month, Postcards is well-priced for startups, freelancers, and agencies that value design quality.

Brevo occupies a unique position by handling both transactional and marketing emails within a single platform. Its template editor is straightforward and includes around 60 responsive templates that cover common use cases. Where Brevo really shines is its transactional email API, which lets developers send order confirmations, password resets, and account notifications with reliable deliverability.

The free tier is generous for transactional use cases, allowing up to 300 emails per day. Paid plans add marketing automation, landing pages, and advanced segmentation. If you need a single platform that handles both your template-based marketing campaigns and your developer-driven transactional emails, Brevo is a practical choice.

Unlayer serves a different purpose than most tools on this list. Rather than being a standalone email template builder, it is an embeddable editor that SaaS companies can integrate into their own products. If you are building a platform that needs to let users create emails -- think marketing tools, CRM systems, or communication platforms -- Unlayer provides the editor component so you do not have to build one from scratch.

The JavaScript SDK is well-documented and can be customized to match your platform's design language. Unlayer includes over 100 templates and supports custom content blocks. At $12 per month for the base plan, it is an affordable way to add email editing capabilities to your product.

Moosend is the budget-conscious marketer's go-to for email templates and automation. At just $9 per month, it delivers a clean template editor, over 80 pre-designed email templates, and pre-built automation workflows that rival platforms costing three to four times as much. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive, and the automation builder supports branching logic, conditional content, and event-triggered sequences.

The platform also includes AI-powered product recommendation blocks for e-commerce emails, which automatically display items relevant to each subscriber based on browsing and purchase history. For small businesses and startups that need professional email templates without a significant monthly investment, Moosend delivers outsized value.

Maizzle brings the Tailwind CSS developer experience to email template creation. If your team already uses Tailwind for web development, Maizzle lets you use the same utility classes to style your emails. The framework handles the transformation from utility classes to inline styles that email clients require, so you write modern CSS and get email-compatible output.

The build pipeline supports PostCSS processing, markdown content, template layouts, and environment-specific configurations. Maizzle is free and open source with a growing collection of starter templates. For development teams that want to unify their web and email styling workflows, it is an excellent choice.

Mailmodo pushes the boundaries of what email templates can do by leveraging AMP for Email technology. Instead of sending static HTML that links to an external page for interaction, Mailmodo lets you embed interactive elements directly inside the email. Subscribers can fill out forms, answer surveys, browse product carousels, and even complete purchases without leaving their inbox.

The template library includes over 300 designs with built-in interactive elements, and the editor makes it straightforward to add AMP components to any template. Interactive emails have been shown to increase conversion rates significantly compared to static designs. At $39 per month, Mailmodo is priced for businesses ready to move beyond traditional email template formats.

Dyspatch is purpose-built for enterprise organizations that produce email templates at scale and need rigorous production workflows. Its modular template architecture lets you define reusable components with locked and editable regions, ensuring that anyone in the organization can create emails without breaking brand guidelines or introducing rendering issues.

Version control, approval chains, and audit logs provide the governance layer that compliance-conscious organizations require. Dyspatch integrates with major ESPs and supports dynamic content through Handlebars-style templating. Pricing is customized based on team size and volume, making it best suited for organizations with dedicated email teams.

Topol.io is the tool for people who want to build an email template quickly and without fuss. The interface is deliberately minimal -- no overwhelming feature menus, no complex configuration panels. You drag blocks onto the canvas, customize content and colors, and export clean HTML. The whole process takes minutes rather than hours.

The template library includes over 100 designs, and the editor produces responsive HTML that works across major email clients. At $10 per month, Topol.io is one of the most affordable paid options on this list. It is ideal for solo marketers, small businesses, and anyone who prioritizes speed and simplicity in their email template workflow.