Our verdict

Mailchimp

The most polished, best-integrated email platform most small businesses will ever use — and the one that punishes you hardest for growing a list you never clean.

7.6/10 Overall score

Pros

• The best campaign editor and template library in the category
• Enormous integration ecosystem, most connectors built by the vendors themselves
• Customer Journey builder handles genuinely complex branching
• Mature reporting plus newer AI analytics and content tools
• Documentation is thorough and actually maintained

Cons

• Billed on contacts stored, including unsubscribed and non-subscribed records
• Costs escalate steeply past roughly 10,000 contacts
• Free plan is now very small: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month
• Advanced segmentation, transactional email and coded templates sit behind higher tiers

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Free plan available, no card required.

What Mailchimp is now

Mailchimp is no longer an email tool. It is a marketing platform that started as one, and that difference explains most of how it is priced and who it is built for.

Intuit acquired Mailchimp in 2021 in a deal valued at around $12 billion, and the product has moved steadily upmarket since. Landing pages, websites, appointment booking, SMS, social posting, e-commerce reporting and AI features now sit on top of the newsletter tool people signed up for. Recent releases confirm the direction: Intuit Mailchimp shipped conversational analytics — its Analytics AI, announced in May 2026 — plus expanded data integrations, all pitched at brands with real revenue and real data. At the same time, the free plan shrank sharply.

Read those two facts together and the strategy is clear. Mailchimp wants the growing e-commerce business that will pay three figures a month for one system that does everything, and it is comfortable losing the bottom of the market to get there. That is legitimate and well executed. But “everyone uses Mailchimp” is no longer a reason to.

How Mailchimp scored

How Mailchimp scored

Overall 7.6/10

Criterion	Score	/10
Deliverability & sending infrastructureWeighted 30%		8.2/10
Pricing & value at scaleWeighted 25%		5.8/10
Automation & segmentationWeighted 20%		7.8/10
Ease of use & editorWeighted 15%		9.0/10
Support & documentationWeighted 10%		8.0/10

Those weightings come from our scoring rubric, applied identically to every platform we assess. The scores are editorial judgements, not measurements.

Infrastructure scores well: a long-established sender with proper authentication tooling, dedicated IP options higher up and a serious abuse-prevention team. Ease of use scores near the top because the editor is the best in the category. Value at scale scores badly because the billing model charges for records that generate no revenue. Automation sits mid-table because the segmentation depth that makes journeys worth building is gated to Standard and above.

Pricing: the contact-based model

Mailchimp bills per contact stored, per month. Your tier sets a contact ceiling and your monthly send allowance is a multiple of it: on Mailchimp’s published documentation at the time of writing, 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard, 15 times on Premium.

The detail that catches people out is what counts as a contact. Mailchimp’s help documentation states that subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your total; archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not. So 8,000 active subscribers plus 4,000 old unsubscribes you never archived means paying at the 12,000 tier for an audience of 8,000. That is documented rather than hidden, and arguably defensible since Mailchimp still stores those records — but it accumulates silently, and it is the most common reason a Mailchimp bill grows faster than the business does.

Going over mid-cycle produces an overage charge rather than an automatic upgrade, and Mailchimp removes that charge if you move permanently to a higher tier. On the free plan, exceeding the ceiling pauses sending entirely, test emails included. At the time of writing that free plan covers 250 contacts, 500 sends per month and 250 sends per day — enough to evaluate the product, not enough to run a business on, and smaller than several competitors give away. See free plans compared across 10 tools.

Paid tiers run Essentials, Standard and Premium. Prices change too often to quote as fixed facts, but the shape is stable: cheap at small list sizes, competitive in the low thousands, expensive past roughly 10,000 — particularly on Standard, the tier most people actually need. Budget separately for Mandrill transactional email, metered SMS and a custom sending domain.

Editor and templates

This is where Mailchimp earns its reputation, and we want to be unambiguous: the campaign editor is the best in the category. Not marginally. Clearly.

The drag-and-drop builder is fast, content blocks behave predictably, and undo history works the way you expect. Rearranging a layout does not break spacing elsewhere, and mobile previews are accurate rather than approximate. Brand kit settings pull your fonts, colours and logo into every campaign, so a non-designer produces something deliberate on the first attempt.

The template library is large and, more importantly, maintained. Plenty of competitors ship templates clearly designed in 2016. Mailchimp’s look current, render reliably across the major clients, and survive editing by someone who does not know HTML. AI tools sit on top for subject lines, copy and layout — useful as a starting point rather than a finished draft. One restriction to flag: custom-coded HTML templates are not available on the lowest tiers.

Automation and Customer Journeys

Automation lives in the Customer Journey builder, a visual canvas where you set a starting point and branch on conditions, delays and actions. It is capable software: multi-branch journeys with if/else splits, percentage splits, waits, tag changes and jumps between journeys. E-commerce triggers are well covered — abandoned cart, first purchase, product retargeting, order notifications — and most revenue-generating automations exist as pre-built journeys you adapt rather than construct.

The frustration is tier gating. Basic automation exists on Essentials, but the multi-condition segmentation that makes journeys worth building requires Standard. The natural path is: start on Essentials, find the automation thin, upgrade. Defensible design, and also the sort of thing that makes people feel steered rather than served.

Against a purpose-built automation platform the logic is rigid, and there is no visual debugger to show why a contact took a particular path. For most small businesses that never matters. For serious lifecycle marketing, it will.

Deliverability

Mailchimp’s sending infrastructure is among the most established in the industry. It supports SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment through a verified sending domain, enforces authentication in line with the Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender rules, and polices its own platform hard — accounts importing purchased lists get shut down fast. That is what you want from a shared-IP provider, because other senders’ behaviour affects your placement.

Higher tiers offer a dedicated IP for senders with the volume to warm one. Below that volume, shared IPs managed by a reputation-conscious provider are the better outcome anyway. The usual caveat applies: deliverability is mostly a function of list hygiene, authentication and sending consistency, not your vendor’s logo.

Integrations and ecosystem

The integration directory is Mailchimp’s second genuine advantage, and it is a large one. If you use business software with any market share there is almost certainly a native connector, and the vendor probably built it. Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, Salesforce, Zapier, Canva, Stripe, Eventbrite — the list runs into the hundreds. Intuit ownership adds tight QuickBooks integration.

This matters more than feature checklists suggest. The cost of an email platform is not just the subscription; it is the hours spent wiring it into your stack and the breakage when a connector goes unmaintained. Mailchimp usually turns that into a ten-minute OAuth flow, and the API is mature, stable and well documented.

Where Mailchimp falls short

The core problem is that the pricing model works against the product’s own success. Mailchimp is very good at helping you grow a list. It then charges you per record on that list, including records that will never open another email. The better it is at the first thing, the more the second costs you — and nothing in the interface nudges you to clean up. Archiving unsubscribed contacts is a manual habit you must build yourself, and Mailchimp has no commercial reason to remind you to do it.

Cost escalation compounds this. Around 10,000 contacts the Standard bill reaches a level where several competent competitors cost a fraction as much for the same core job. You are paying for breadth — websites, landing pages, social tools, AI analytics — whether or not you use it. If you only want to send good email, that breadth is dead weight you are financing.

Tier gating is the second recurring complaint, and it is not confined to exotic features. Comparative reporting, multivariate testing, custom-coded templates, transactional email, phone support and the more useful segmentation all sit above the entry plan. The published feature matrix is honest about this. The practical experience is still discovering the limitation at the moment you need the feature.

The free plan, at 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends, is now a trial rather than a tier. That is a defensible business decision, but it is a real reduction from what Mailchimp historically offered, and anyone recommending Mailchimp on the strength of “great free plan” is working from outdated information.

Support is decent but tiered. Email support comes with paid plans, chat higher up, phone only on Premium. Free-plan support is a short initial window, then the knowledge base. The documentation is good enough that this is survivable, but a human on the phone during a botched send is a Premium-tier privilege.

Finally, the product has grown broad faster than it has grown deep. Websites, appointments, social posting, SMS and analytics now sit alongside email, and the seams show. Some areas feel considered; others feel like features shipped to fill a comparison table. A focused tool that does five things properly is often more pleasant to live in than one that does twenty at varying quality. None of this makes Mailchimp a bad product. It makes it a product you should re-evaluate periodically rather than settle into by default.

Who should use Mailchimp — and who shouldn’t

Use Mailchimp if you are a small business or e-commerce store with a list under roughly 5,000 contacts, you want the best editor available, and you would rather pay a little more than spend your own time on setup. If design quality is what stands between you and sending consistently, Mailchimp removes that obstacle better than anything else.

Look elsewhere if your list is large relative to your send frequency. Plainly: if you hold 50,000 contacts and email them twice a month, a per-send billing model costs dramatically less than a per-contact one. Brevo is the obvious example — see Brevo and Mailchimp head-to-head, or our Brevo review. Also look elsewhere if you need developer-grade automation logic, or if you are a newsletter writer with simple needs and a tight budget.

Mailchimp alternatives

Brevo suits anyone whose list is bigger than their send volume: you pay per email sent, and transactional email and SMS are bundled. The editor is a step down and the integration directory smaller, but Brevo’s free plan is far more generous.

MailerLite gives you Mailchimp’s simplicity at a lower price if you accept fewer integrations. It bills on subscribers too, but at a gentler curve — Brevo vs MailerLite covers how it compares to per-send billing.

ActiveCampaign is the pick when automation depth is the priority: stronger logic builder, better segmentation, a real CRM. Harder to learn, and no cheaper.

Klaviyo is the e-commerce specialist. If your revenue comes from a Shopify store and you want attribution treated as a first-class citizen, it beats Mailchimp on outcomes.

Frequently asked questions

Does Mailchimp charge for unsubscribed contacts?

Yes. Mailchimp’s help documentation states that subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your billing total. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not, so archiving unsubscribed records is the standard way to keep the bill down.

What are Mailchimp’s free plan limits?

At the time of writing, the free Marketing plan covers up to 250 contacts, 500 sends per month and 250 sends per day. Exceeding the contact limit places a hold on sending, test emails included. These limits changed recently, so check current figures.

How many emails can I send on a paid plan?

Your monthly send allowance is a multiple of your contact tier. Mailchimp documents 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium, so a 5,000-contact Standard plan allows 60,000 sends a month.

What happens if I go over my contact limit?

On a paid plan you are charged an overage rather than upgraded automatically, and Mailchimp removes that charge if you move permanently to a higher tier. On the free plan, sending is paused instead.

Is Mailchimp good for deliverability?

The infrastructure is solid: full SPF, DKIM and DMARC support, strict anti-abuse enforcement, dedicated IPs on higher tiers. But deliverability is mostly determined by your own list hygiene and sending consistency. No provider rescues a stale list.

Does Mailchimp include transactional email?

Not in the base plans. It runs through Mandrill, a paid add-on available from Standard upward and sold in blocks of sends. Budget for it separately, or choose a platform that bundles it.

Is Mailchimp still worth it in 2026?

For small lists where design quality and integrations matter more than per-contact cost, yes. Past roughly 10,000 contacts, or if you email infrequently, the value case weakens sharply and a per-send platform usually costs less for the same result.

How did Intuit’s acquisition change Mailchimp?

Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021 and has pushed it upmarket since, adding e-commerce analytics, AI features, deeper data integrations and QuickBooks connectivity. Broader and more capable, but aimed at larger businesses than the newsletter tool it started as.

Our verdict

Mailchimp scores 7.6 out of 10 because it is a genuinely good product with one structural problem.

The good part is not in dispute. The editor is the best in the category, the templates are current, the integration ecosystem is unmatched, and the sending infrastructure is mature. If you have never sent a marketing email, Mailchimp gets you to a professional-looking campaign faster than any competitor.

The problem is the billing model. Charging per contact stored, unsubscribed records included, means costs track list size rather than list value, and the gap between those numbers only widens. Add tier gating on the features that make the platform worth using, and you get a tool that is excellent value at 1,000 contacts and questionable value at 25,000.

So: start on Mailchimp if you are small, want things to look good, and value not thinking about integrations. Re-run the maths past 10,000 contacts and be honest about whether you use the breadth you are paying for. If you do not, a per-send platform will serve you better. Mailchimp deserves its reputation. It no longer deserves to be the default answer for everyone.

See Mailchimp’s current plans