Mailchimp

What Mailchimp is

Mailchimp is the incumbent. It is the tool your accountant has heard of, the one with an integration in every e-commerce platform and CRM, and the one most people mean when they say “email marketing”. That ubiquity is a real feature: if you need Mailchimp to talk to something, it almost certainly already does.

What it is not, any more, is a simple newsletter tool. Since the Intuit acquisition the product has grown a CRM, e-commerce features and an analytics layer, and the pricing has grown with it.

Pricing

The free plan is the tightest in this comparison (250 contacts, 500 emails a month, 250 a day) and functions as a demo rather than a starting point.

Beyond that, the thing to understand is what you are charged for. Mailchimp prices on contacts stored, not emails sent, and your tier counts contacts whether or not you email them. A list of 5,000 people you mail once a quarter costs the same as one you mail weekly, which is why Mailchimp bills tend to surprise people who have been collecting addresses for years.

What it does well

• The widest integration ecosystem of anything here, by a large margin
• Mature reporting, segmentation and automation that hold up at scale
• Multiple interface languages, unlike most creator-focused competitors
• Familiar enough that hiring someone who knows it is trivial

Where it falls short

• The most expensive option here at most list sizes
• Contact-based pricing punishes large or dormant lists
• US hosting only, which is a blocker for some European businesses
• Nothing for newsletter creators: no paid subscriptions, referrals or discovery