Ok....so I have been testing Bee Free and MailStyler all day and here is my take....
Both are really good in being able to easily layout html emails.
Both are rich in features and can do most anything you want in terms of email structure and formatting.
MailStyler is a stand alone desktop app for Windows and really need to purchase to be usable. The Free version does not export HTML that you can read. It is scrambled.
However the Base version ($99 for life) allows you to export and has a limited image library....The Pro version ($199 for life and 5 computers) comes with 2,000 image library and
the added benefit of ...... You can use it with Aware without having to edit the path to your images in the html. You can also save as many email templates as you like and then edit
them later. See here.... http://www.newslettercreator.com/
Bee Free has a Pro version in the wind but at the moment you can only basically work on one email template at a time. You can export it and then open that one up again to edit. But
if you do any major changes and then want to go back and edit the first one...your dead in the water. Also, if you use any images in your email then you will need to edit the final html to ensure the image path is valid from the mail recipients location... ie. needs to be reachable from the internet.
You can get to Bee Free here.... http://beefree.io/
Both result in structured html code with all inline CSS. I think MailStyler's code is a little cleaner and certainly easier to locate anything you are looking for.
I mention above that with the Pro Version of MailStyler...you don't need to edit your image paths. This is a nice feature that some will be ok with... like me (some wont). MailStyler gives you the option of automatically saving your images on their cloud server (Amazon S3) and it automatically embeds the link to that image in your email. Nice touch and works perfectly.
After scouring the internet for a week I have come to the conclusion that for html / css novices like me these two tools certainly make life easier rather than having to mess around coding the emails up yourself.
I think Bee Free will definitely be a tool to keep an eye on in the future once the Pro Version is released.....very low cost (current version free) and needs a bit of polish but is very promising.
MailStyler is the way to go if you want to part with the bucks.
If you are looking for other tools.... remember that the need to export clean HTML and preferably inline css (if not inline css then you can use other tools to convert is as Tom mentioned above - albeit another step)
Hope this helps others.
Happy to send sample emails to anyone interested and also happy to design and do up emails for a modest fee. (Need to recover the cost of MailStyler 😉 )
