Buttondown vs. Cakemail

Cakemail is a Canadian-based email marketing service with a focus on two main value propositions:

1. A focus on marketing emails for brick-and-mortar businesses. They've invested a lot into rich visual email templates and complex email builders. This can be very useful for certain businesses that are trying to use email largely as one of many marketing channels (like say a bakery or boutique) but is less useful for text-heavy emails or for businesses that are trying to use email as a primary communication channel (like say a SaaS company).
2. An emphasis on enterprise and agency customers. Cakemail has a lot of features that are useful for large businesses and agencies who need an account manager and a lot of support.

Cakemail's pricing is reasonable and competitive; Buttondown is a little bit cheaper at most price points, but it is not a dramatic difference.

Cakemail offers some functionality that Buttondown does not, such as automated workflows with complex branching logic for drip campaigns and A/B testing.

However, if you're not interested in those features — which are largely the domain of enterprise use cases — then Buttondown may be a better fit to let you quickly and easily set up your newsletter and then go back to really running your business.