One of Mailchimp’s standout features is its freemium pricing structure, which gives you access to key features even with a free account. You simply sign up with your email to explore the one-step automations, the marketing CRM, multichannel marketing tools, prebuilt email templates, brand tools like the Creative Assistant (a design tool for your campaign), web hosting, and domains. It’s a low-risk taste of what the platform has to offer.
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That said, your company may find the no-cost tier highly limiting, as Mailchimp has aggressively scaled back what you get for free. What was once a generous 2,000-contact and 10,000-email send limit has dwindled to just 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends—a significant reduction since our last review. Should you need greater capacities, you must upgrade to a paid plan or purchase credits to send more emails. You can purchase 5,000 credits for $200 (one email sent costs one credit).
Mailchimp has three service tiers when you’re ready to graduate to a paid plan. The Essentials plan starts at $13 per month and includes 500 contacts, 5,000 email sends, and support for three users. This plan increases in cost as contact counts increase. You’re capped at 50,000 contacts with the Essentials plan, after which you’ll pay $385 per month. Regardless of the size of your contact list, Essential gives you A/B testing, the automation builder (a tool that helps you create automated marketing workflows for a contact), behavioral targeting for more personalized marketing, and more than 100 prebuilt email templates. The marketing calendar is available to any company on the Essentials tier or higher, making it a handy visual tool for campaign scheduling and analysis.
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Standard is the next tier up and the entry point for Mailchimp’s new Site Tracking Pixel tool. It’s designed to turn browsing behavior (like product views) into actionable marketing data, helping you send targeted emails based on what people actually do on your site. For $20 per month, you get 500 contacts, 6,000 email sends, support for five users, and all previously mentioned services, as well as prebuilt automation templates, custom-coded templates, and the Campaign Manager tool. You can have up to 100,000 contacts in the Standard tier, with a monthly price cap of $800.
Finally, the Premium package, designed for advanced marketers, starts at $350 per month. This is the service tier I tested for this review. This plan provides a generous 10,000 contacts and 150,000 monthly email sends. If you have 200,000 contacts, you’ll pay $1,600 per month. Need more than that? You must contact Intuit sales. Premium plans include unlimited users, so your entire team can work in the software. You also get multivariate testing for up to eight campaign variations, comparative reporting to see how your campaigns perform against one another, and advanced segmentation for optimized email targeting.
(Credit: Mailchimp/PCMag)
Despite Mailchimp’s robust feature set and ease of use, it has become a costly email marketing solution. By comparison, Brevo provides a comprehensive suite of email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing and charges based on email volume rather than the number of contacts. You also get access to Brevo’s Aura AI assistance for text and image generation. Its Free tier is a good value with a 300 daily email send limit, but paid plans start at $9 for 5,000 email sends, scaling to the supercharged Professional plan ($499 per month) with a 150,000 email sent limit.
Mailchimp’s web hosting plans are mostly the same, providing unlimited monthly data transfers, SEO tools, SSL certificates, and other essential features. They mainly differ in transaction fees, number of users, and the ability to connect a custom domain. Check out Mailchimp’s web hosting comparison page for more details.
