The choice between Flodesk vs Elastic Email isn’t simple — it’s pretty situational.
Both platforms are amazing. On one hand, Flodesk works beautifully for specific types of creators at particular stages. Meanwhile, Elastic Email works exceptionally well for various creators with diverse needs.
Neither is universally better.
It’s essential to determine which one aligns with where your business is headed (not where it is currently), because switching platforms within 12 months is expensive, risky, and precisely what you’re trying to avoid.
As an email marketing consultant who has helped hundreds of growing creators scale from 5k to 50k+ subscribers without sacrificing inbox placement, I’ve seen both platforms deliver incredible results and spectacular failures.
Therefore, I’ve put in all my knowledge and experience (alongside thorough unbiased research) to pen down a detailed Flodesk vs Elastic email comparison guide that covers:
- Flodesk vs Elastic pricing breakdown
- Scenarios where each platform shines or stumbles
- Deliverability differences between Flodesk vs Elastic
- Migration strategies that protect your sender reputation
- Flodesk vs Elastic feature comparison for automation, segmentation, testing
Let’s dive in and explore both platforms in detail.
TLDR — Flodesk vs Elastic (Quick Skim)
Don’t have the time to read the entire piece? Here’s a quick overview of how these platforms stack up:
| Factor | Flodesk | Elastic Email |
| Starting price | $35/month (Pro plan) | $19/month (after free tier) |
| Best for | Creators prioritizing design speed and brand aesthetics | Growing businesses need automation depth and testing |
| Design flexibility | Gorgeous templates, but limited to predefined blocks | Full drag-and-drop freedom with AI template generator |
| Automation power | Basic workflows with simple triggers | Advanced triggers (link clicks, opens, custom conditions) |
| A/B testing | Not available | Included (subject lines, content, send times) |
| Deliverability support | Standard authentication setup | Strict thresholds with clear complaint/bounce policies |
| Monetization tools | Sales pages and checkouts (Advanced plan at $59/month) | Built-in checkouts and paid newsletters (included in Pro at $49/month) |
| Support | Email support | 24/7 human support (even on free plan) |
Protect your inbox placement before switching platforms
Switching email platforms feels exciting until your deliverability tanks overnight.
I’ve watched businesses lose 40% of their inbox placement simply because they migrated without warming their domain properly on the new system.
Well, your ESP doesn’t determine your sender reputation — your domain does. When you switch platforms or ramp up volume quickly, mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook get suspicious.
They need to see consistent, gradual sending patterns from your domain before they trust you. EmailWarmup is an all-in-one email solution to mitigate this problem, offering:
- Dedicated IP address for complete sending control
- Real-time inbox placement monitoring across major providers
- Personalized email warmup that gradually builds your sender reputation
- Unlimited deliverability consultations with specialists who understand creator businesses
Moreover, we also offer free email marketing consultations to help you make an informed decision between Flodesk vs Elastic Email with clarity.
Flodesk vs Elastic Email — Pricing comparison
Let’s talk money because this is where things get interesting (and where Flodesk’s story is changing significantly).
Flodesk’s pricing structure
Right now, Flodesk offers two plans with a straightforward promise: unlimited subscribers, unlimited sends.
| Plan | Price | Features |
| Pro Plan | $35/month | Unlimited emails, basic workflows, and forms |
| Advanced Plan | $59/month | Sales pages, checkouts, Stripe integration, plus Pro Plan features |
However, there’s a major shift happening. Flodesk announced that starting November 28, 2025, new customers will move to contact-based pricing instead of the unlimited model.
Existing customers keep their unlimited plans (for now), but if you’re signing up fresh, you’re looking at a different pricing structure entirely.
The company hasn’t published exact contact-based rates yet, which makes long-term budget planning challenging.
Elastic Email’s pricing structure
Elastic Email uses transparent tiered pricing based on your contact count and feature needs.
| Plan | Price | Contacts | Monthly sends | Features |
| Free Tier | Free | Up to 100 | Limited | Perfect for testing, limited features |
| Starter Plan | $19/month | 2,500 | 37,500 | Basic features |
| Pro Plan | $49/month | 2,500 | 75,000 | Automations, A/B testing, checkouts, paid newsletters |
As your list grows, pricing scales predictably. At 10,000 contacts, you’re looking at around $76/month for Starter or $196/month for Pro.
The key difference is that you know exactly what you’ll pay at every growth milestone without any surprises or sudden pricing model changes.
Which platform, between Flodesk vs Elastic Email, gives you better email design control?
You probably started an email so gorgeous you immediately thought, “I need that.” That’s where design control comes into the picture.
Flodesk
Flodesk’s design game is strong.
Flodesk’s template gallery looks like a curated Pinterest board for email marketing. Every template feels modern, on-brand, and ready to ship with minimal tweaking.
The editor is intentionally simple with predefined content blocks you can rearrange, customize, and style. The learning curve is maybe 15 minutes.
But here’s where simplicity becomes limitation. Those predefined blocks are your only options. You can’t create custom layouts that break out of Flodesk’s structure. So, if you’re looking for advanced customization options like custom CSS or HTML, it’s not available.
For many creators, constraints force you to ship instead of endlessly tweaking. For others, it feels limiting.
Elastic Email
Elastic Email’s drag-and-drop builder gives you actual freedom. If you want a four-column layout, you can build it. If you need a custom header with unconventional spacing, you can also get that.
Every element can be positioned, styled, and customized without requiring any code changes.
Moreover, the real power move is their AI Template Designer. You literally type a prompt like “create a minimalist product launch email with a hero image and three feature sections” and watch the AI generate a mobile-optimized template.
Then you customize it to match your brand.
How do Elastic Email and Flodesk stack up with automation and segmentation?
Beautiful emails mean nothing if they’re going to the wrong people at the wrong time. That’s why automation and segmentation are crucial factors:
Flodesk
Flodesk offers workflow automation, but the trigger options are limited. You can start an automation when someone subscribes through a specific form or when they’re added to a segment. That’s basically it.
So if you want to trigger a workflow when someone clicks a specific link in your email, you can’t do it. If you need to send a follow-up based on whether they opened your last campaign, even that’s not possible.
For simple welcome sequences and basic nurture campaigns, Flodesk handles things fine. But if you’re trying to build sophisticated customer journeys, you’ll hit walls quickly.
Moreover, for A/B testing, Flodesk falls short completely — there is no A/B testing. You can’t test subject lines, different content versions, or send times. You’re essentially guessing what works.
Elastic Email
Elastic Email treats automation like an actual marketing automation platform should. Triggers include:
- Email opens
- Time-based delays
- Contact field values
- List membership changes
- Link clicks on specific URLs
- Subscription to specific lists
You can build genuinely complex conditional workflows. So, if someone clicks your pricing page link but doesn’t make a purchase, it will trigger a sequence.
They open three emails in a row but never click, then Elastic Email allows you to send them something different.
Moreover, Elastic Email includes proper A/B and multivariate testing in the Pro plan. You can easily test subject lines, sender names, content variations, or even send times. The platform automatically sends the winning variation to the rest of your list.
For a creator running product launches, where a 2% increase in open rates means thousands of dollars in additional revenue, A/B testing is the difference between guessing and knowing what works.
Elastic Email vs Flodesk — Who is better at deliverability and sender reputation?
Every email platform promises high deliverability rates. Most of them are lying (or at least being misleading).
Your email service provider doesn’t control whether your emails reach inboxes. Your sending practices and domain reputation do. The platform just provides the infrastructure.
Elastic Email takes a strict approach to deliverability. They publish exact thresholds and enforce them:
- Bounce rate
- Engagement
- Complaint rate
If you cross these thresholds, Elastic Email throttles your sending or suspends your account until you fix the issues. Sounds harsh, but there’s method to this strictness. They’re protecting their IP reputation, which directly protects your deliverability.
The risk arises when you lack good practices and are unaware of it.
Flodesk won’t necessarily stop you from sending to a poorly maintained list with high bounce rates. You’ll only discover the problem when your open rates mysteriously tank.
Even if you’ve been sending successfully for years on Platform A, moving to Platform B means mailbox providers see sends from a new IP address. They don’t automatically trust it.
You need to gradually ramp up sending volume over 2 to 4 weeks, starting with your most engaged subscribers and slowly expanding to your whole list. Skip this step, and you risk your emails going straight to spam for weeks.
Neither Flodesk nor Elastic Email offers built-in warming services. They expect you to handle it manually (which most creators don’t know how to do properly).
That’s why you can go for an all-in-one email platform like EmailWarmup, which creates the right balance between automation and personalization — warming up your domain and making sure that your emails increase sales, instead of spam or promotions.
Which platform, out of Flodesk or Elastic Email, should you actually choose?
Enough comparison. Let’s get practical about decision-making.
| Choose Flodesk if you prioritize | Choose Elastic Email if you need |
| Gorgeous emails shipped quickly with a focus on design excellence and simplicity. | Sophisticated marketing automation with behavior-triggered workflows, conditional splits, A/B testing, and data-driven segmentation. |
| Strong visual consistency for your brand identity. | Significant growth projections (5,000+ subscribers today, aiming for 25,000+ within 18 months) with transparent scaling costs. |
| Welcome sequences, regular newsletters, occasional product announcements, and basic segmentation. | Paid newsletters or subscription products with native support for gated content and recurring subscriptions (no percentage fees). |
| Good value at smaller list sizes, especially with unlimited plans. | A/B testing, testing, and optimization of subject lines, content, and send times, to make data-driven decisions. |
How do you migrate to Flodesk or Elastic Email without tanking your deliverability?
The critical mistake people make is that they export their entire list from Platform A, import it to Platform B, and immediately send a campaign to everyone announcing the switch. Within days, their sender reputation is trashed.
Why? Mailbox providers notice sends coming from new IP addresses without the gradual ramping they expect. They don’t care that you’ve been sending successfully for three years.
To them, you appear to be a brand new sender who has just acquired a large list (exactly how spammers behave).
We’ve prepped a migration checklist for you to do it DIY — or let professionals like EmailWarmup.com do it for you:
- Begin gradual warming sends.
- Export and clean your contact list.
- Recreate essential workflows and templates.
- Set up domain authentication on the new platform.
A typical warming schedule looks like:
| Days | Target Audience |
| Days 1 to 3 | Send to your top 5% most engaged subscribers |
| Days 4 to 6 | Send to the top 10% engaged |
| Days 7 to 10 | Send to the top 25% engaged |
| Days 11 to 14 | Send to the top 50% engaged |
| Days 15 to 21 | Gradually expand to the full list |
Watch your bounce rates, complaint rates, and engagement metrics like a hawk during the first month. If bounce rates exceed 2% or complaints exceed 0.1%, stop and investigate the issue.
Frequently asked questions about Flodesk vs Elastic Email
Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about Flodesk and Elastic Email:
Technically, yes, but it rarely makes sense. You’d be paying for two separate email platforms, managing contacts in two places, and potentially confusing your audience. The only scenario where this works is during migration, keeping your old platform active temporarily while warming up the new one. Otherwise, pick one platform and commit.
Your email list belongs to you, not the platform. You can export your subscriber data as a CSV file from virtually any email platform (including both Flodesk and Elastic Email) and import it elsewhere. You won’t lose subscribers during a switch. The real risk is damage to deliverability if you migrate poorly, rather than losing access to your contact data.
Yes, temporarily, but that’s why warming exists. Your domain reputation stays with you, but mailbox providers need to see consistent sending patterns from the new platform’s IP addresses before they fully trust you again. Without proper warming, your emails might land in spam for weeks, even though you’ve been a responsible sender for years. With warming, you rebuild trust gradually and maintain inbox placement throughout the transition.
Elastic Email does. Their SMTP relay and API let you send transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets, account notifications, shipping updates) through the same platform that handles your marketing campaigns. Flodesk focuses exclusively on marketing emails and doesn’t offer transactional capabilities. If you need both marketing and transactional sending, Elastic Email gives you one unified system.
