7 best SMS marketing software in 2025
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Choosing the best SMS software for your business is key to making the most of your marketing campaigns. Your choice of texting software facilitates urgent alerts regarding flash sales, limited-time discounts, and early access deals. You can also use texts for appointment reminders and confirmations, order updates, and delivery notifications.
Despite the rise of other modern platforms, SMS has remained a powerful tool in marketing. Text message marketing is ideal for time-sensitive promotions and allows for highly personalized messages. It also has a 98% open rate, which is impressively high compared to email’s 39.64%.
For this roundup, I reviewed various SMS marketing tools together with the rest of Cybernews’ team of tech experts. This list of the best text marketing software has a wide range of options and price ranges, enabling businesses of all sizes to take advantage of SMS marketing.
Top automated texting services – shortlist
- EZ Texting – the best SMS marketing software
- Textmagic – pay-as-you-go SMS marketing tool
- Klaviyo – great email and text marketing campaign management
- Brevo – easy-to-use email, SMS, and WhatsApp solution
- Mailchimp – email and SMS management with 300+ integrations
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The best SMS marketing software compared
Compare the best business text messaging software using the table below. Take a closer look at the different features these platforms offer along with their pricing plans.
| Standout Features | Starting Price | Free Version | Free Trial | |
| EZ Texting | 10DLC number, shortcodes, scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, AI-assisted writing, team management | $25/month | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Textmagic | 10DLC number, scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, team management | $24.50/month | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Klaviyo | Scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, team management | $20/month | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Brevo | Scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, team management | $9/month | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Mailchimp | 10DLC number, shortcodes, scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, AI-assisted writing, team management | $20/month | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| SimpleTexting | 10DLC number, shortcodes, scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, AI-assisted writing, team management | $39/month | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| SlickText | Shortcodes, scheduled texts, two-way text messaging, bulk contact uploads, automated responses using keywords, team management | $29/month | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
7 best text messaging services for business
The best SMS marketing tools ensure that you can easily send mass text messages that promote your business and provide updates to customers. Keep reading below to see my recommended SMS software for businesses.
1. EZ Texting – the best SMS marketing software
| Contact list size: | Up to 50,000+ contacts |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $25/month |
| Integrations: | Zapier, Squarespace, Mailchimp, Callfire |
EZ Texting has everything you need from an SMS marketing tool. It allows you to use a dedicated 10DLC phone number or shortcode and schedule mass text campaigns to keep your audience informed and engaged.
To make things easier for your team, EZ Texting implements bulk uploads of contact lists and has built-in team management tools. Its simple and intuitive interface can also boost your marketing managers’ productivity by streamlining the process of sending out texts.
I highly recommend EZ Texting for small and medium-sized organizations. Its cheapest plan ($25/month) allows for 6,000 texts annually, which you can upgrade for $0.03 per credit (1 credit = 1 SMS to 1 contact). Larger businesses will enjoy the Enterprise plan, which comes with a dedicated shortcode and accommodates bigger contact lists with its 200,000 monthly credits.
EZ Texting also guarantees setup within one business day, perfect for businesses who need to jumpstart their SMS marketing as quickly as possible.
2. Textmagic – pay-as-you-go SMS marketing app
| Contact list size: | Up to 100,000 contacts |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $24.50/month |
| Integrations: | Zapier |
Textmagic offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing scheme for as low as $24.50/month. This makes it ideal for small organizations that need cost-effective marketing solutions. With no monthly fees or long-term commitments, users only pay for the messages they send.
Like EZ Texting, Textmagic offers a simple and intuitive interface, as well as easy campaign setup, contact uploads, and response automation. Its Omnichannel consolidates all your communications in one dashboard, from where you can manage SMS, email, calls, and live chat. Textmagic also has mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can manage text campaigns on the go.
To provide data, Textmagic tracks SMS delivery and engagement. You can also monitor your team’s usage with audit logs and review credit spending in detailed statements, so you can stay on top of your budget.
3. Klaviyo – great email and text marketing campaign management
| Contact list size: | Up to 450,000 credits |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $20/month |
| Integrations: | Google Ads, Meta, TypeForm, Stripe, Shopify, and 350+ more |
Klaviyo is a trusted name in digital marketing as it provides multi-channel marketing solutions and powerful automation. If you need a marketing campaign that integrates both text and email, then I recommend Klaviyo.
What I like most about Klaviyo is the ability to easily target audiences, allowing me to compose and send different texts that are relevant to each audience segment. And like the other software on this list, Klaviyo has SMS automation, AI writing, MMS and GIF support, and more.
Klaviyo also has 350+ integrations with different eCommerce, productivity, advertising, customer service, and shipping web apps. Unfortunately, this level of integration comes at a cost: Klaviyo is more expensive than other SMS tools at $20/month (150 monthly SMS/MMS credits and 15,000 monthly email sends). As such, I only recommend Klaviyo if your marketing campaign primarily relies on email.
4. Brevo – easy-to-use email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing solution
| Contact list size: | Up to 1,000,000 emails per month |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $9/month |
| Integrations: | Google Ads, WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, and 150+ more |
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is my top pick for startups or small businesses that plan on DIY-ing a marketing campaign. This is because Brevo is extremely beginner-friendly, though it’s not quite as feature-rich as the other marketing software on this list.
Though primarily an email marketing platform, Brevo allows you to buy SMS credits anytime, with no expiration dates. This lets you create a precise budget for your bulk SMS needs.
You can also make use of Brevo’s WhatsApp automation, adding another channel for your promotions, announcements, and more. With over two billion active users, WhatsApp provides even more opportunities for conversions for your business.
Brevo’s paid plans start at $9/month, which comes with 5,000 monthly emails and basic reports and analytics. You can purchase 100 SMS credits (for US recipients) for $1.09. Prices vary per country.
5. Mailchimp – email and SMS management with 300+ integrations
| Contact list size: | Up to 150,000 emails per month |
| Free trial: | No |
| Pricing: | Starts at $20/month |
| Integrations: | Wix, Squarespace, Stripe, LinkedIn, and 300+ more |
Mailchimp is one of the leading newsletter platforms available, used by both organizations and individuals wanting to connect through email. What many may not know, however, is that Mailchimp also offers SMS marketing.
Unfortunately, Mailchimp doesn’t quite stand out from our list. It does have all the features I look for in an SMS marketing platform (bulk contact imports, tailored messaging, and audience segmentation). However, most of its features are for email marketing.
Of course, you can still leverage Mailchimp to enrich your marketing campaign, especially with Mailchimp’s real-time tracking and analytics.
Mailchimp’s Essentials plan starts at $20/month, though this only covers email marketing. SMS is a paid add-on (with its pricing not advertised). Given this, I only recommend Mailchimp for campaigns that primarily use email as its marketing and advertising channel.
6. SimpleTexting – straightforward SMS marketing tool
| Contact list size: | Up to 50,000+ texts per month |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $39/month |
| Integrations: | Zapier, MailChimp, HubSpot, Instagram, and more |
If you’re looking for simplicity, then as the name suggests, SimpleTexting is the way to go. This platform offers almost everything you need to start advertising or marketing through text. SimpleTexting has features ranging from bulk contact imports to mass texts, two-way texting, scheduled and event-based messaging, personalized texts, and team management.
Other standout features from SimpleTexting are its AI assistant and the ability to host polls and giveaways and shorten and track links. I also like its self-cleaning feature, which means it can detect and automatically remove dead numbers from your contacts list.
SimpleTexting plans start at $39/month (billed annually), which come with 6,000 credits (1 SMS = 1 credit, 1 MMS = 3 credits). This averages to 500 SMS messages per month. You can also easily upgrade or downgrade between higher-volume plans to better tailor your budget to your needs.
7. SlickText – analytics-focused text marketing platform
| Contact list size: | Up to 50,000+ texts per month |
| Free trial: | Yes |
| Pricing: | Starts at $29/month |
| Integrations: | Zapier, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Slack, and 15+ more |
SlickText is a standard business texting software whose standout feature is its rich analytics. This tool delivers contact growth and audience composition data, revenue attribution, click-through, and response rates, opt-in stats, and more.
Given this, I highly recommend SlickText as an enterprise SMS tool as it allows for a more accurate measurement of your SMS marketing campaign’s performance. What’s more, SlickText provides a great onboarding experience that will guide your team through the platform’s features.
When it comes to growing your contact list, SlickText is also a solid pick. You can collect customer phone numbers through various methods supported natively by the tool: opt-in web forms, website pop-ups, promo codes, loyalty programs, and more.
SlickText plans start at $29/month, which comes with 500 monthly texts and one premium sending number. It has a wide variety of plans that go up to 50,000 texts per month. Of course, you can also pick the Enterprise option, which allows for a tailor-made solution for your business needs.
How did we select these automated text message services for business?
To narrow down my list to only the best automated messaging services, I used the following criteria:
- Availability: These tools should be widely available to accommodate multinational operations. Still, I recommend checking if your chosen SMS tool can send messages to customers across the globe.
- Reliability: Your SMS software should be able to reliably and consistently send out your messages. This cuts down on troubleshooting and allows for quicker implementation of your marketing campaign.
- Cost: Choose an SMS service that has plans that match your business needs. Study how many texts you need to send on average, and find a plan that matches this number.
- Ease of use: The best SMS software I researched all had a well-designed and modern user interface, both easy enough to use for startups and sophisticated enough for enterprises.
What is SMS marketing software?
SMS marketing software allows businesses to send targeted text messages to customers. Tools such as EZ Texting or Textmagic allow for promotions, announcements, event reminders, and more to be sent directly to your customers’ phones.
Since your marketing material is delivered through a direct and highly accessible channel, you can expect text marketing to enhance customer engagement and drive conversions. Klaviyo estimates that SMS marketing averages $0.09 in returns per recipient.
Among the other benefits of SMS marketing is analytics. These SMS campaign management tools can provide detailed reports on campaign performance, including delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. In practice, this lets you further tailor your SMS marketing campaign in response to customer behavior.
The best SMS marketing tools let you send bulk messages and automate responses. You can also send MMS messages, so your texts can be accompanied by pictures or GIFs. Of course, you’ll need to plan a budget for these mass texts. Our list of software above has plans ranging from $8 to $30 per month, depending on your business needs.
Benefits of using SMS marketing software
There are many benefits of SMS marketing software. Here are a few:
- High open rates: SMS has a 98% open rate, which is significantly higher than email. For announcements, delivery and shipping updates, and other urgent information, text is the best way to reach your audience.
- Instant communication: Text has remained a popular marketing channel because of the instant delivery of messages. It also easily reaches customers on the go as they don’t need to be on their computers or at home to see your marketing content.
- Personalization content: Business text tools allow you to customize text messages by including customer names, for example. Personalized messages improve customer engagement, with studies showing that 54% of customers are more likely to make a purchase if the text they receive is customized.
- Cost-effectiveness: Text message marketing can be more cost-efficient than other platforms, allowing for better marketing ROI. For instance, you can send a text for as low as $0.01/text using Textmagic. This amounts to only $50 to reach 5,000 customers.
- Tracking and analytics: No marketing campaign is successful without customer data. SMS tools can analyze the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns so you can improve and tailor your content to your audience.
Key features to look for in SMS marketing software
Here are some of the key SMS software features you should look for when picking the perfect marketing platform:
- Mass messaging capabilities: SMS automation tools should be able to reliably send bulk messages to your contact list. Whether you're promoting a flash sale, announcing a product launch, or sending appointment reminders, mass messaging is essential for reaching large audiences quickly and efficiently.
- Automation and scheduling: Automation allows for control over the frequency, schedule, and triggers for your texts. Look for software that lets you set up recurring campaigns, schedule texts for specific dates, and trigger messages based on customer behavior or engagement, such as abandoned cart reminders or follow-up texts.
- Integration with CRM or email platforms: Integration lets you seamlessly recruit new contacts by asking them to opt-in to marketing communications over SMS. It also enables you to sync contact data, send targeted messages, and create unified marketing strategies across multiple channels.
- Analytics and reporting tools: The best SMS tool for business provides robust, accurate, and real-time data to help your marketing department better conceptualize, plan, and refine your campaigns.
Businesses need to prioritize these features from SMS automation tools to ensure that their marketing and advertising campaigns run smoothly. Make sure to pick an app with these text marketing software features.
How to choose the right SMS marketing software for your business
SMS platform selection is a straightforward process. To choose SMS marketing software for your business, consider these key factors:
- Business size and scalability: The size of your organization is the primary consideration for picking marketing software. Make sure you pick a tool whose plans can cover your customer base and that can accommodate any future plans to scale up your campaign.
- Accessibility and compliance: Ensure that your software can send texts to your customer locations and that their services comply with local laws and regulations regarding SMS marketing.
- Integration requirements: If you already have an existing roster of productivity, eCommerce, and advertising tools, it’s best to pick an SMS app that integrates with your chosen products. This reduces the need to improvise workflows between incompatible apps.
- Customer support: I always recommend picking platforms with responsive, informative customer support agents and various support channels. This makes sure you can get any issues resolved as soon as they pop up. This factor is especially important since many marketing campaigns are time-sensitive.
- Ease of use: Go for a platform whose dashboard is easy to navigate and whose setup is straightforward and simple, especially if you’re handing off management to a marketing team. This way, you reduce the opportunity for human error during campaign execution.
With these considerations in mind, you should be able to more easily pick the best SMS tools for business.
Success tips for SMS marketing campaigns
To run effective SMS campaigns, consider these actionable tips:
- Craft engaging messages. Focus on simple language with a strong call to action. Remember that text messages have character limits. Use emojis and personalization to make your texts more engaging, but don’t overly rely on them as this can undercut professionalism.
- Finetune your timing and frequency. Avoid sending messages too early or too late in the day. Don’t send messages too frequently either, as this may annoy customers and prompt them to unsubscribe. Generally, you want to aim for two to four texts per month.
- Ensure compliance with SMS regulations. Adhere to regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act). Doing so usually means obtaining consent before sending promotional texts and offering an easy way for users to opt out of your marketing list.
- Segment your audience. Segment your contact list based on demographics, purchase history, and other factors. This lets you tailor your messages to their interests, improving customer engagement.
- Track and optimize campaign performance. Use built-in analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your SMS campaign. Specifically, look at metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Use this data to adjust your messaging, timing, and frequency.
With these SMS marketing strategies in mind, you should be able to leverage these SMS marketing tips and tools to craft engaging and converting campaigns.
Conclusion
Ensure significant SMS marketing benefits for your business by using only the best SMS tools available. With these apps, you can improve engagement rates, communicate directly with customers, and get better ROI.
Ready to get started with SMS marketing? I highly recommend EZ Texting, the best SMS marketing tool for small to medium businesses that need user-friendly bulk texting and team management.
If you need email marketing in tandem with SMS, choose Klaviyo, Brevo, or Mailchimp. For marketing teams with limited budgets, opt for a pay-as-you-go solution like Textmagic.
By exploring these tools, you'll be able to craft more effective SMS campaigns that drive better customer engagement and business results.
FAQ
Is SMS marketing legal?
Yes, SMS marketing is legal as long as you follow regulations like the TCPA in the U.S. and GDPR in the EU, which require obtaining explicit consent and offering easy opt-out options.
Is SMS marketing worth it?
Yes, SMS marketing is highly effective, offering high open rates, instant and personalized communication, and a high return on investment.
Is it possible to do SMS marketing for free?
No, most SMS marketing platforms require a subscription or pay-per-text model. However, some tools offer free trials or limited free plans with basic features.
How much does SMS marketing cost?
SMS marketing costs vary. Prices typically range from $8 to $45 per month, depending on the platform and the number of messages you send. Some platforms also charge per text sent.
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