Mailchimp

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is one of the best-known email marketing platforms, built to help small businesses design campaigns, manage subscriber lists, and automate customer outreach. Acquired by Intuit in 2021, it has expanded from a pure email tool into a broader marketing platform that includes landing pages, signup forms, SMS in some markets, automation, and a lightweight marketing CRM.

The product’s appeal has always been accessibility. A drag-and-drop editor, a large template gallery, and a free starter plan make it a common first step for businesses sending their first newsletters. The trade-off, and the thing most buyers underestimate, is the pricing model. Mailchimp bills by the number of contacts you store, not the number of emails you send, and the details of how contacts are counted matter more than the headline tier prices.

How the pricing actually works

Mailchimp’s paid plans come in three tiers, Essentials, Standard, and Premium, plus a Free plan for very small lists. Every tier is priced by contact count: you pick a plan level, and the monthly price scales in bands as your audience grows. A list of 5,000 contacts costs several times what 500 contacts costs on the same tier, so your bill rises with your list even if your feature needs never change. Entry pricing for the lowest paid tier sits in the low tens of dollars per month at the smallest contact band; check Mailchimp’s pricing page for current figures, because both the bands and the rates have changed several times over the years.

Two counting behaviors deserve attention before you commit:

1. What counts as a contact. Mailchimp has historically counted more than just active subscribers toward your billable total. Non-subscribed contacts (people captured through integrations or e-commerce activity who never opted in) and, for long stretches of the product’s history, unsubscribed contacts have counted against your plan’s contact limit. Mailchimp has adjusted these rules more than once, so verify the current definition of a billable contact on their pricing page, and get in the habit of archiving contacts you no longer message. Archived contacts do not count toward billing.
2. Duplicates across audiences. Mailchimp organizes contacts into “audiences” (lists), and the same person stored in two audiences counts as two contacts for billing. Teams that segment by creating separate audiences instead of using tags and segments within one audience routinely double or triple their effective bill. The practical rule: run one audience and slice it with tags, groups, and segments.

The Free plan supports a small list with limited monthly sends, one audience, one seat, and Mailchimp branding in the email footer. It is genuinely usable for testing, but it no longer includes meaningful automation, which brings us to the second gate.

What each tier unlocks, and where automation sits

• Free: basic campaigns, a small contact cap, limited sends, one seat, no real automation beyond single welcome-style messages, Mailchimp badge on emails.
• Essentials: removes Mailchimp branding, adds A/B testing, scheduled sends, and basic automated journeys with a small number of steps, plus 24/7 email and chat support. This tier suits a newsletter operation, not an automation-driven one.
• Standard: this is where Mailchimp’s automation actually lives. The full Customer Journey Builder with branching logic, behavior-based triggers, send-time optimization, predictive segmentation, dynamic content, and retargeting integrations all arrive here. If “automation” is the reason you are buying Mailchimp, budget for Standard, not Essentials.
• Premium: advanced segmentation, multivariate (not just A/B) testing, comparative reporting across campaigns, the highest seat allowances, and phone support. Priced for large lists and teams; most small businesses never need it.

Seat limits also step up by tier, so a marketing team of four or five will hit the seat ceiling on the lower plans regardless of contact count.

Mailchimp vs Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign

Klaviyo is the honest answer for e-commerce stores that have outgrown basic campaigns. Its Shopify and WooCommerce integrations sync order and browsing events natively, its segmentation runs on that store data (customers who bought X twice but not in 90 days), and its flow reporting attributes revenue per automation out of the box. Mailchimp’s e-commerce features are decent, but Klaviyo was built around the store-data model and it shows. The catch: Klaviyo is also contact-priced and typically costs more than Mailchimp at the same list size. If you run a content newsletter or a service business, Klaviyo’s advantages mostly do not apply to you.

ActiveCampaign wins on automation depth. Its visual automation builder handles long, branching, multi-condition sequences that Mailchimp’s Journey Builder struggles to express, and it bundles a real sales CRM with deal pipelines, which Mailchimp’s marketing CRM is not. B2B teams running lead nurture with scoring and sales handoff generally get further with ActiveCampaign. The cost is a noticeably steeper learning curve and an interface that assumes you know what a workflow is. Mailchimp remains easier to hand to a non-technical owner.

Mailchimp’s genuine edge over both is approachability plus breadth: templates, landing pages, forms, and a huge integration directory in one place, at a lower entry price, with a real free plan.

Who should use Mailchimp, and who should skip it

Pick Mailchimp if you are a small business, solo marketer, or early-stage store that wants capable email marketing without a setup project, and your list is small enough that contact-based pricing stays reasonable. It is also a sane default when a non-marketer will be the one running it.

Skip it if any of these describe you:

• A Shopify-first store doing real volume. Klaviyo’s store-native segmentation and revenue attribution will pay for the price difference.
• A B2B team living on multi-step nurture and lead scoring. ActiveCampaign’s automation and built-in sales CRM fit that job better.
• A large list you rarely email. Contact-based billing punishes big, quiet lists; you will pay every month for people you message quarterly.
• A team of five or more marketers on a budget. Seat limits push you up tiers faster than features do.

The bottom line

Mailchimp remains a dependable way to start with email marketing: easy to learn, broad enough to grow into, and backed by one of the deepest integration directories in the category. Go in with clear eyes on the two things that surprise people, contact-based billing (including how non-subscribed contacts and cross-audience duplicates inflate the count) and the fact that serious automation starts at the Standard tier. Budget for the plan you will actually need at the list size you expect in a year, not the entry price at signup.

Pros & cons