You are probably here after a renewal, not before a purchase
Mailchimp is the tool most people in this category already have, so the useful question is rarely what it does. It is whether the bill is normal and what the alternatives cost.
So the useful review is not a feature tour. It is an answer to that question, priced at a real list size, against the tools you would actually move to.
Mailchimp scores 7.5 here, and the shape of that score tells the story: it is the best connected product in the category and among the most expensive things you can be subscribed to at a list size that matters.
What it costs at a real list size
We price every service in this category at ten thousand contacts. At that band Mailchimp Standard has a standing price of $135 a month, and it includes 120,000 monthly sends, five seats, five audiences and up to 200 automation flows.
Now the comparison. MailerLite Comfort is $89 for 100,000 sends. beehiiv Scale is $96 with no send cap at all. Kit is free at that list size. Klaviyo is $150 and gives you a hundred thousand sends plus a full ecommerce data model.
Mailchimp is not outrageous. It is simply not competitive on price, and the gap is roughly fifty percent against the obvious alternative.
The price you see is a first year price
Worth reading the small print, because this is the mechanism behind a lot of the anger.
At the ten thousand contact band the page leads with a promotional figure of $114.75 a month for twelve months, and states the standing price separately as from $135. That is about an eighteen percent step up on the anniversary, on top of any growth in your list.
Premium at the same band showed $297.50 a month for twelve months and did not display its standing price at all on the page we read.
None of that is concealed. It is all on the pricing page, in the footnote, in a sentence beginning "Then, starts at". It is simply not the number anybody remembers signing up for.
Two ceilings, and overages against both
This is the part that no other vendor in this comparison does, and it deserves naming.
Mailchimp states that overages apply if the contact limit or the email send limit is exceeded. Both ceilings are live at the same time and they move independently. Your list can grow past its band without you sending any more, and a heavy month of campaigns can breach the send limit without your list growing at all. Either triggers charges.
Everywhere else in this category you are metered on one thing. MailerLite ties sends to your subscriber band as a ratio. beehiiv does not meter sends at all. Brevo meters only sends. Mailchimp meters both, which means a bill can move for two independent reasons.
If you are on Mailchimp and your bill surprised you, that is very likely where it came from.
The one thing it still does better than anyone
Integrations. This is not a small point and it is the honest reason a lot of people should stay.
Mailchimp has the largest integration surface in the category by a distance. When some other tool in your stack lists one email connector, it is a Mailchimp connector. If your business runs on a chain of services that all speak to it, the switching cost is not the export, it is rebuilding those connections, and for some businesses that is worth more than the price gap.
The free plan is worth a sentence too, mostly as a warning: it stops at 250 contacts with one audience and no marketing automation flows at all.
Who should leave and who should stay
Leave if you chose Mailchimp by default, use it as a sender, and your list is growing. You are paying a brand premium for a job three cheaper tools do as well, and MailerLite is the closest like for like move.
Stay if the integrations are load bearing, if several people need seats and role based access, or if you have automation flows built up that would take a week to rebuild. Also stay if you are still under a few thousand contacts, where the gap in absolute money is small enough not to be worth an afternoon.
Prices, send limits and plan contents on this page were read from the USD view of the vendor plan comparison with the contact band set to five thousand to ten thousand, on . Our method is on how we rate, and the full category is at best email marketing services.
