Drip
Two-month digests that keep circling the same theme: get your data out of Drip and into your own stack.
Comparison · Mkt Auto
Craft CMS vs MailerLite
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Craft CMS and MailerLite — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Craft CMS vs MailerLite: at a glance
What is Craft CMS?
Craft 6 is being rebuilt on Laravel, and the alphas are breaking plugins to get there.
Craft runs two trains at once: a 6.0.0 alpha series rearchitecting the CMS, and 5.10.x patches that are single-bug fixes shipped within hours of each other. The alphas carry the work — queue jobs and dependency resolution moved onto Laravel's service container, control-panel serialization switched to Illuminate helpers, the imagine image library replaced with intervention/image, and a first-party control-panel component library added. Alpha 14 shipped with an explicit breaking-changes notice for plugin authors.
What is MailerLite?
MailerLite put an AI agent in its HTML editor and split abandoned cart from abandoned checkout
Releases land every few weeks with a tight scope: brand styles, templates, and e-commerce automation triggers. May replaced the rich-text editor with a distraction-free Simple editor and rebuilt the Custom HTML editor with live preview, syntax highlighting and an integrated AI agent that edits HTML from plain-English instructions. June split abandoned cart into two triggers, and July added variant-level targeting to the purchase trigger, shipping on Wix first with other platforms rolling out.
Craft CMS vs MailerLite: editorial side-by-side
Craft CMS
6.3MKT AUTO
Craft 6 is being rebuilt on Laravel, and the alphas are breaking plugins to get there.
◆ Current state
Craft runs two trains at once: a 6.0.0 alpha series rearchitecting the CMS, and 5.10.x patches that are single-bug fixes shipped within hours of each other. The alphas carry the work — queue jobs and dependency resolution moved onto Laravel's service container, control-panel serialization switched to Illuminate helpers, the imagine image library replaced with intervention/image, and a first-party control-panel component library added. Alpha 14 shipped with an explicit breaking-changes notice for plugin authors.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is a Laravel-native Craft: Artisan command discovery, container-resolved queue jobs, Illuminate helpers, and plugins that no longer register through composer extra fields or automatic trait lifecycle hooks. The image pipeline swap brings libvips and formats like HEIC, JPEG XL and TIFF along with it. Meanwhile 5.10 receives nothing but same-day bug fixes, which is what a maintenance branch looks like once the team's attention has moved.
◆ Prediction
Expect further alphas to keep narrowing the plugin API surface ahead of a beta, with the 5.10 line continuing at one or two same-day patch releases a week.
MailerLite
5.0MKT AUTO
MailerLite put an AI agent in its HTML editor and split abandoned cart from abandoned checkout
◆ Current state
Releases land every few weeks with a tight scope: brand styles, templates, and e-commerce automation triggers. May replaced the rich-text editor with a distraction-free Simple editor and rebuilt the Custom HTML editor with live preview, syntax highlighting and an integrated AI agent that edits HTML from plain-English instructions. June split abandoned cart into two triggers, and July added variant-level targeting to the purchase trigger, shipping on Wix first with other platforms rolling out.
◆ Where it's heading
Two threads. Brand styles are being pulled out of settings and into the places people work — their own section, then a save-as-brand-style button inside the builder, then templates that populate from them automatically. Meanwhile the e-commerce side is getting more precise about shopper intent: cart versus checkout abandonment as separate moments, and product variants rather than products as the trigger unit. Both are depth in an existing product, funded by a clearer picture of what a small store's automations need.
◆ Prediction
Variant support shipped on one platform with the rest listed as coming, so the near-term work is finishing that rollout across BigCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Shoper and the e-commerce API.
Alternatives to Craft CMS and MailerLite
Other Mkt Auto products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Craft CMS or MailerLite.
Formidable Forms
The forms plugin just opened its data to AI agents through an MCP adapter.
Pimcore
A security-hardening train: nine advisories across six patch releases, no feature work in sight.
n8n
Three release lines running in parallel, all of them shipping nothing but fixes this week
OpnForm
OpnForm is turning its V2 platform into an automation surface, one integration at a time.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social opens its management surface to AI assistants via MCP.
See all Craft CMS alternatives → · See all MailerLite alternatives →
Recent activity from Craft CMS and MailerLite
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 6d agoCraft CMSAlpha 16 fixes double-required migrations and a widget gap
- 6d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.2 fixes a SQL error on empty Categories fields
- 7d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.1 restores rendering of sanitized SVGs
- 7d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 swaps its image pipeline to intervention/image and libvips
- 14d agoMailerLite2 new templates, styled to match your brand 🎨
- 20d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 alpha 14 breaks plugin providers and lifecycle hooks ⚡
- 26d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 moves queues and DI onto Laravel's container
- 1mo agoMailerLitePurchase specific product trigger gets variant support
- 1mo agoMailerLiteSave brand styles directly from the email builder
- 1mo agoMailerLiteNew e-commerce automation triggers
- 2mo agoMailerLite4 new email templates for writers
- 3mo agoMailerLite✍️ New email editors! Write, code, create in flow ⚡
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Craft CMS and MailerLite?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Craft CMS better than MailerLite?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Mkt Auto products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Craft CMS?
Top Craft CMS alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Craft CMS alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/craft-cms for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to MailerLite?
Top MailerLite alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "MailerLite alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mailerlite for the full list with editorial commentary on each.