MailerLite's 2 New Email Editors: Simple Writing and AI-Powered HTML

Most email tools force you into the same editor regardless of what kind of email you are writing. Whether it’s a five-paragraph founder update or a pixel-perfect product launch, you end up in the same drag-and-drop grid, hunting for a place to type plain text. On May 13, 2026, MailerLite split that workflow in two. The platform shipped a stripped-down writing editor for text-led emails, and rebuilt its custom HTML editor with a chat-style AI agent baked in.

The release matters less because of any one feature and more because it acknowledges something the category has avoided: the person writing a personal weekly newsletter and the person hand-coding a Black Friday campaign want different tools. Forcing both through the same interface is what every other email platform does. MailerLite’s launch post frames the change as a question of creative flow, but the strategic message is sharper: the one-editor-fits-all era is ending.

What MailerLite Actually Shipped

The two new editors live alongside MailerLite’s existing drag-and-drop builder. You pick which one you want when creating a campaign. Here is what each one does.

The Simple email editor is a Notion-style writing surface. One column, plenty of whitespace, keyboard shortcuts, and Markdown commands. You can paste from Google Docs, Apple Notes, or any AI tool and the formatting survives the trip — bold stays bold, lists stay lists, links stay clickable. It replaces MailerLite’s old Rich-Text Editor, which had become the weak link in the product. It is available on every plan, including Free.

The Custom HTML editor is a rebuild of MailerLite’s old code editor with live preview, syntax highlighting, real-time validation, search-and-replace, one-click code formatting, and automatic CSS inlining. The headline addition is an AI agent that lives inside the editor. You can describe what you want in plain English — “add a responsive hero with a 600px max-width and a centered CTA button” — and it writes the HTML for you. You can also drag-and-drop ZIP files from Canva up to 10MB. This editor is available on both of MailerLite’s paid plans — Comfort and Power — but not on Free.

The Simple Editor Is for Writers, Not Designers

The Simple editor solves a real problem. Many newsletter creators want something close to writing a personal email — type words, hit send, no decisions about column structure or hero images. Until now, MailerLite users either fought the drag-and-drop builder for plain-text emails or migrated to a creator-focused platform like Beehiiv or Substack.

Where the Simple editor wins is the paste workflow. If you draft in Notion, Google Docs, or ChatGPT — which is where a lot of newsletter writers actually work — you can paste the draft into MailerLite and your formatting stays intact. That sounds trivial. It is not. Most email editors strip or mangle pasted formatting in ways that mean you redo half the work in the editor.

Where it falls short matters too. The first release is intentionally lean. No tables. No video blocks. No AI writing assistant inside the editor itself (you can paste from an AI tool, but there is no built-in Compose or Rewrite). For text-led emails this is fine. For anyone who relies on richer block types, the drag-and-drop editor is still the answer.

A second weakness: the Simple editor is a replacement for the legacy Rich-Text Editor, not an upgrade path for existing campaigns. If you have old templates built in the Rich-Text Editor, you will need to either keep them in that legacy environment or rebuild them.

The AI Agent Inside the HTML Editor

This is the more ambitious half of the release and the part more likely to influence buying decisions. MailerLite is the first mainstream email marketing platform to put an AI coding agent directly inside its HTML editor. You write a prompt, it produces HTML. You ask for an audit, it points out missing alt text and broken markup.

Two workflows look particularly useful in practice. The first is asking the agent to handle the boilerplate of email development — bulletproof button markup, CSS that survives Outlook, dark mode fallbacks. These are the parts that eat hours and that most developers would rather not touch. Letting an AI agent generate the scaffold while you handle structure and creative direction is a sensible division of labor.

The second is the Canva-to-campaign workflow. You design in Canva, export as a ZIP, drag the file into the editor, and MailerLite processes the design and images automatically. The 10MB import limit covers most Canva exports, and you can then ask the AI agent to tweak spacing, colors, or copy. For solo marketers and small teams without an in-house email developer, this collapses what used to be a multi-hour copy-paste-and-debug process into minutes.

Where it falls short: the AI agent is gated behind a paid plan, so Free users don’t get it — the real dividing line here is free versus paid, not which paid tier you pick. The agent is also explicitly not designed for richly interactive components like quizzes or countdowns — MailerLite recommends its drag-and-drop builder for those. And as with every AI coding assistant in 2026, the agent will produce confident output that occasionally needs human review. Test sends in the major clients are still required.

Why This Release Matters for the Broader Market

The interesting thing about MailerLite shipping two specialized editors is what it implies about the category. For years, email platforms competed on the promise of one editor that worked for everyone. Drag-and-drop builders got more powerful, more layered, more configurable. The result is editors that intimidate writers and frustrate developers — too many options for the first group, not enough control for the second.

MailerLite is making a bet that the future is the opposite: separate tools for separate jobs. A writer wants a writing surface. A developer wants a real code editor with AI assistance. A designer wants drag-and-drop. Forcing all three into one editor is a compromise that serves no one fully.

This matters competitively because two of MailerLite’s biggest rivals — Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign — still funnel every email through their primary drag-and-drop builder. Neither has shipped a comparable simple-writing editor or an in-editor AI coding agent. Brevo and GetResponse are in the same boat.

The closest comparison is Beehiiv, which is built around a writing-first editor by design. But Beehiiv is a newsletter platform, not a general-purpose email marketing tool — it lacks the e-commerce automation and segmentation depth that MailerLite has. The MailerLite release lets it claim both: writer-friendly editing and full email marketing infrastructure.

If you are comparing MailerLite to Mailchimp specifically, the editor difference now matters more than it did six months ago:

For a deeper look at how the two stack up beyond just the editor, see our full MailerLite vs Mailchimp comparison.

Who Should Care About This Release

Three groups should pay attention.

Newsletter creators and solo writers. If you publish a text-led newsletter and have been frustrated by drag-and-drop builders, the Simple editor is built for you. The fact that it is on the Free plan means you can test the writing experience without committing. Compare it directly against Beehiiv and Buttondown before deciding — those tools still have an edge on creator-specific features like paid subscriptions and referral programs, but MailerLite’s editor finally closes the writing-experience gap.

Agencies and freelance email developers. The HTML editor with AI agent is meaningful if you build custom email templates for clients. The combination of live preview, syntax highlighting, AI-assisted boilerplate, and Canva imports could materially shorten production time. It’s included on the entry-level Comfort plan at $12/month, so the cost of access is modest — for anyone billing client time, the math probably works. Agencies managing multiple client accounts may still want Power for its unlimited user seats.

Existing MailerLite users on the old Rich-Text Editor. This release is also a migration prompt. The legacy Rich-Text Editor is being replaced by the Simple editor, so existing text-led campaigns and templates should be reviewed. Plan the switch deliberately rather than getting caught out when MailerLite eventually retires the old editor for good.

Who should not care today: anyone whose email workflow lives entirely in the drag-and-drop builder for richly designed campaigns. The two new editors do not affect you. The drag-and-drop builder is unchanged. If you have not used the legacy Rich-Text Editor and you do not write HTML, this release is not aimed at you.

What This Doesn’t Fix

Three real MailerLite weaknesses are not addressed by this release.

The first is pricing on larger lists. MailerLite is competitive at small scale but scales aggressively above 10,000 subscribers. The new editors do not change that math. Compare the MailerLite pricing against GetResponse and Brevo at your actual list size before assuming MailerLite is the cheapest option.

The second is support. MailerLite has cut back live support availability over the past two years, particularly for Free plan users. Email support response times have stretched. Neither new editor changes that — support quality is a separate axis from which editor you use, and Free-plan users get the weakest support regardless of which editor they pick.

The third is e-commerce depth. For Shopify-first brands, Klaviyo and Omnisend still have more developed e-commerce automation libraries. The new editors are interface improvements, not new automation logic.

How to Try the New Editors Today

Both editors are live now. Sign in or create a MailerLite account, go to Campaigns, click Create campaign, and choose Start from scratch. You will be offered the Simple editor and the Custom HTML editor as options alongside the drag-and-drop builder.

If you want to test the AI agent specifically without committing, MailerLite offers a free trial of its paid plans, so you can try the AI agent on Comfort without paying for Power’s extra features you may not need. Use it to see whether the agent produces useful HTML for the kind of emails your business actually sends — every email program is different, and the agent’s value depends on whether it speeds up your particular boilerplate, not the demo examples in MailerLite’s launch post.

For anyone weighing MailerLite against alternatives, the two new editors should move the platform up the list for writers and developers. They should not move it up for marketers focused on advanced segmentation, e-commerce automation depth, or rock-bottom pricing at scale. The release is targeted, not universal.

If you want a broader comparison of the field, our guide to the best email marketing platforms covers where each one actually wins.

The bigger takeaway is that the era of one-editor-fits-all email tools is ending. The platforms that recognize different users need different surfaces — and ship those surfaces without sacrificing the underlying marketing infrastructure — will pull ahead. MailerLite is the first to make that bet visible. Watch whether ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, and others follow over the next twelve months.

Sources

1. MailerLite — New Email Editors Announcement — accessed 2026-07-23
2. MailerLite — Pricing — accessed 2026-07-23