What changed
Validity acquired Litmus in April 2025 and MailCharts followed. In late 2025 the self-serve plans — the $49 to $149 a month tiers that most solo marketers and small teams were on — were retired. MailCharts now lives inside Litmus Enterprise, which means procurement, annual contracts, and a price that assumes you're a department rather than a person.
If you were on one of those plans, nothing about your work changed. Your budget did.
For what it's worth, the logic is sound from Validity's side: competitive intelligence is a natural upsell into enterprise email accounts, and self-serve was never where the revenue was. It's a reasonable business decision that happens to leave a specific group of people without a tool.
The distinction that actually decides this
Every list of MailCharts alternatives leads with pricing. Pricing is the least useful thing to compare here, because these tools split into two fundamentally different products that happen to share a category.
Curated index tools
MailCharts built an index of roughly 2,500 hand-selected brands and captured their email programs continuously. When you signed up, years of history were already there. You could pull up a brand's entire lifecycle sequence, compare send frequency against a retail benchmark, and see what a category did last Black Friday — on day one, with no setup.
That's genuinely excellent, and it's the thing people miss most when they leave. Milled works on a similar principle and is free.
The constraint is coverage. The index is curated, weighted heavily toward ecommerce and retail, and if the company you care about isn't in it, there's no mechanism to add them. For a DTC brand watching other DTC brands, that's rarely a problem. For a B2B SaaS company watching four specific competitors nobody has heard of, it's the whole problem.
Tracking address tools
The other model gives you a dedicated email address, you subscribe it to whichever companies you choose, and everything they send lands in a searchable workspace. Owletter, SendView, Newsletrix, Reyo and CompetitorTrack all work roughly this way.
The upside is that coverage is unlimited and entirely yours. Any company, any vertical, any size — if they send marketing email, you can track them.
The cost is history. You start from zero. Your archive begins the day you subscribe, and there is no way to buy back the eighteen months of a competitor's sends that MailCharts would have had waiting for you.
So the honest question isn't which tool is best. It's whether you need a library or a feed. If you were using MailCharts mainly to browse examples and benchmark against a category, you want another index. If you were using it to watch a specific short list of rivals, you want a tracking address — and you'd have been better served by one all along, because you were paying for 2,499 brands you never opened.
The alternatives, honestly
We describe how each tool charges rather than quoting figures, because published prices in this category go stale quickly — several comparison articles circulating right now carry numbers that are wrong by a factor of three. Each name links to its own pricing page for the current figure.
Do it yourself — free
Before any of the paid options, the method most marketers are actually using: a separate Gmail account that exists only to receive competitor mail.
Make a new account rather than a plus-address on your existing one. Plus-addressing — you+brand@gmail.com — is the advice you’ll find everywhere, and it fails in exactly the place you need it: a good number of ecommerce signup forms validate the address against a pattern that rejects the plus sign, so you get halfway down your list and start improvising. A clean second account also survives you changing jobs and can be handed to a colleague.
Subscribe it to each competitor, add one filter per brand — match on from:theirdomain.com, apply a label, skip the inbox — and you have a free, searchable, permanent archive that starts tonight.
For one or two competitors this is genuinely enough, and you should do it before you pay anyone, us included. It’s also the right first move even if you expect to buy something later, because the archive starts filling up this evening rather than after a procurement conversation.
Where it stops working:
- Gmail decides what you see, and it decides based on you. Promotions-tab and spam placement are personalised per recipient and driven by engagement — whether this particular account opens, clicks or deletes a given sender. A monitoring account never engages with anything, by definition. Over a few months competitor mail drifts into Promotions and some of it stops arriving at all, and nothing tells you it happened. You end up with an archive full of holes and no way to know which campaigns are missing from it.
- Search finds a message. It won’t show you a pattern. Gmail is built to answer “where is that email.” Competitive work asks different questions: how often do they send, what were all their discounts over 20% last quarter, did their cadence change after the funding round. Gmail can’t count, can’t aggregate, and can’t compare two senders across time.
- It falls apart somewhere around the fourth competitor. One label is tidy. Five brands mailing four times a week is twenty messages a day in an undifferentiated pile, and in practice you stop opening it by about week three.
- Nothing tells you anything happened. You find out about their Black Friday campaign in December, by scrolling.
- It lives in one person’s account. Sharing a finding means forwarding a screenshot.
Every paid tool below is, in essence, a fix for one or more of those five. Which one you want depends on which of them is currently costing you something.
Milled — free
A public, searchable archive of brand emails. Closest thing to MailCharts' browsing experience, costs nothing, and covers a large swathe of consumer brands. There's no way to add a company, no alerting, no private workspace, and no team features. If you were using MailCharts for inspiration rather than intelligence, start here before paying anyone.
Panoramata — flat monthly tiers
The broadest replacement. Tracks email alongside ads, SMS, landing pages and social, which makes it the closest thing to a full competitive marketing picture, and it's priced accordingly — the most expensive option here, for the most coverage. If email was one of several channels you were monitoring, this is the most complete swap.
Owletter — flat tiers by number of sites
Long-running, focused and deliberately narrow: capture competitor emails on a schedule and report on send frequency changes over time. Tiers are generous on volume — the entry plan covers ten sites and the top plan is unlimited — which makes it the cheapest route in this category once you're past a handful of competitors. Free trial, no card.
SendView — flat tiers by number of companies
Tracking addresses with a clean reading experience, not restricted to any vertical. Tiers scale by how many companies you follow, with seats included higher up and a managed option where their team runs the analysis for you. Priced above Owletter for comparable volume. Closest in shape to what MailCharts self-serve actually was, and the most natural landing spot if that's what you're replacing.
Newsletrix — free tier, then priced by analysis volume
The most aggressive on price, with AI analysis layered over each send — subject line scoring, CTA breakdown, ESP detection. Worth understanding the model before you compare it to anything else here: it charges by analyses per week rather than by competitor count. That's generous if your competitors send occasionally and restrictive if they send daily, so work out your actual weekly volume before picking a tier. Newer than the others, which cuts both ways.
Reyo — lower end of the range
An AI-summarised archive. Similar shape to the above with the emphasis on digesting what arrived rather than presenting it raw.
CompetitorTrack — first competitor free, $10/month each after
Ours, so read accordingly. It's a tracking-address tool built around the idea that you're watching a handful of named rivals rather than browsing a category: a dedicated address per competitor, a shared inbox your team can annotate, and blocked remote images so opening a competitor's campaign doesn't fire their tracking pixel.
Two things worth knowing. It charges per competitor, which makes it the cheapest option on this page for the first few — and free at one, which nothing else here matches outright — but the flat-rate tools overtake it once you're watching a handful. If you need fifteen brands, Owletter is cheaper, and we'd rather tell you that here than have you work it out on your second invoice. And like every tracking-address tool on this list, your archive starts the day you set it up.
For the wider category — including the enterprise platforms and what each kind of tool is actually good at — see our comparison of competitor email tracking tools.
Choosing
- You watch exactly one competitor, casually. A second Gmail account and a filter. Genuinely — don’t pay for this yet.
- You want a library to browse. Milled, free, first. Panoramata if you need it across channels and have budget.
- You watch one to three competitors. Per-competitor pricing wins here, which means CompetitorTrack — free at one, and a flat tier built for ten is mostly slots you won’t use. Reyo is worth a look at the same end of the range.
- You watch ten or more. Owletter's flat tiers are the cheapest on this page, by a distance.
- Your competitors are B2B, niche, or regional. Tracking address, necessarily — the curated indexes won't have them.
- You need email plus ads plus social in one place. Panoramata.
- You're replacing MailCharts for a team with a real budget. Talk to Litmus. If the enterprise price is genuinely fine, the product you liked still exists.
One piece of advice regardless of what you pick
Set up whichever tool you choose this week rather than next quarter. Every tracking-address product starts your archive from the day you subscribe, which means the cost of waiting isn't the subscription fee — it's the campaigns that go out in the meantime and are gone. If you're going to end up doing this, the cheapest day to start was the day MailCharts sent the email, and the second cheapest is today.