The read · 2026-08-31
This is a deliverability category wearing a marketing label
Email & Marketing sounds like it should be about newsletters and campaigns. It isn't. Of the twelve biggest plugins here, most exist to get a site's mail out the door at all: WP Mail SMTP alone holds 31% of the category's 12.8M installs, and FluentSMTP, Easy WP SMTP, GoSMTP and Post SMTP stack up behind it. The actual marketing tools, MailPoet and Newsletter, sit at 500K+ and 200K+, well below the plumbing.
That tells you where the real problem is. WordPress sites still struggle to send email reliably, and the plugins solving that get installed everywhere. Campaign tools compete with Mailchimp, Klaviyo and everything else outside WordPress, so they stay smaller by default.
The top is in good shape, which is bad news for challengers
Incumbents here aren't coasting. MC4WP shipped 11 days ago, MailPoet 6, Post SMTP 6, and Popup Maker and FluentSMTP both sit near the top of our health scoring with strong ratings. The one soft spot at the top is WP Mail Logging, whose last release was 193 days ago, and Pinterest for WooCommerce, which holds 300K+ installs on a 2.6 star average. That's a plugin people install because WooCommerce points them at it, not because they like it.
Hostinger Reach reaching 1M+ is the standout, and it's a distribution story rather than a product one. A host bundling its own email marketing plugin can reach seven figures quickly, and its 4.27 rating suggests the installs came faster than the affection.
Movement at the bottom, nothing at the top
Everything climbing this window is tiny. iConvert Email Marketer went from 70 to 500 installs, Pinova reached 900. Real growth, no threat to anyone. The plugins falling are equally small, MailingBoss slipping from 600 to 400 being the largest.
Category downloads fell 27.9% over the same three months, which is steep enough to matter but could be seasonal or a shift in how updates get counted. Four plugins left the directory since early August, three of them at their author's own request.
This is a moat, not an opening. One plugin holds nearly a third of installs, the leaders ship regularly, and 550 of the 1,295 tracked plugins score in our lowest health band. A newcomer would need a distribution deal, which is exactly what Hostinger had.
This is a deliverability category wearing a marketing label
Email & Marketing sounds like it should be about newsletters and campaigns. It isn't. Of the twelve biggest plugins here, most exist to get a site's mail out the door at all: WP Mail SMTP alone holds 31% of the category's 12.8M installs, and FluentSMTP, Easy WP SMTP, GoSMTP and Post SMTP stack up behind it. The actual marketing tools, MailPoet and Newsletter, sit at 500K+ and 200K+, well below the plumbing.
That tells you where the real problem is. WordPress sites still struggle to send email reliably, and the plugins solving that get installed everywhere. Campaign tools compete with Mailchimp, Klaviyo and everything else outside WordPress, so they stay smaller by default.
The top is in good shape, which is bad news for challengers
Incumbents here aren't coasting. MC4WP shipped 11 days ago, MailPoet 6, Post SMTP 6, and Popup Maker and FluentSMTP both sit near the top of our health scoring with strong ratings. The one soft spot at the top is WP Mail Logging, whose last release was 193 days ago, and Pinterest for WooCommerce, which holds 300K+ installs on a 2.6 star average. That's a plugin people install because WooCommerce points them at it, not because they like it.
Hostinger Reach reaching 1M+ is the standout, and it's a distribution story rather than a product one. A host bundling its own email marketing plugin can reach seven figures quickly, and its 4.27 rating suggests the installs came faster than the affection.
Movement at the bottom, nothing at the top
Everything climbing this window is tiny. iConvert Email Marketer went from 70 to 500 installs, Pinova reached 900. Real growth, no threat to anyone. The plugins falling are equally small, MailingBoss slipping from 600 to 400 being the largest.
Category downloads fell 27.9% over the same three months, which is steep enough to matter but could be seasonal or a shift in how updates get counted. Four plugins left the directory since early August, three of them at their author's own request.
This is a moat, not an opening. One plugin holds nearly a third of installs, the leaders ship regularly, and 550 of the 1,295 tracked plugins score in our lowest health band. A newcomer would need a distribution deal, which is exactly what Hostinger had.
