Pros & Cons
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- Full marketing hub
- Extremely easy to use
- Convenient email templates and helpful reports
- Improved AI recommendations and automation
- Optional web hosting plans
- Respectable free tier
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- The lower tiers have fewer features than before
- Relatively expensive as plans scale
Mailchimp Specs
| A/B Testing | |
| CRM Integration | |
| Drag-and-Drop Creation | |
| Free plan | |
| Image Library | |
| Limited Free Trial | |
| Marketing Automation | |
| REST API | |
| Search Marketing | |
| Social Media Integration | |
| Social Media Marketing | |
| Survey Tool | |
| Unlimited Email | |
| Unlimited Sequencing |
Mailchimp is a titan in the email marketing world, evolving a lot over the past decade. Email remains its foundation, but the platform has matured into a comprehensive marketing hub with an integrated CRM, a sophisticated automation builder, and AI-driven recommendations, while maintaining its signature ease of use. However, its pricing is less competitive: Lower tiers now have fewer features than before, and the free plan has more restrictions. Despite those changes, Mailchimp remains a powerhouse for multichannel marketing and retains our Editors' Choice award alongside the equally excellent Brevo and HubSpot Marketing Hub.
Plans and Prices: Modernizing the Marketing Hub
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.
(Credit: Mailchimp/PCMag)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.
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.
Building a Marketing Campaign With Mailchimp
As mentioned, Mailchimp is extremely easy to use despite its robust feature set. You need only activate your service, integrate your store or website, add your contacts, and start sending out campaigns. I began by importing test contacts from an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps I botched the formatting, but these didn’t quite align correctly in the contact fields. I had to go in and individually tweak names and mailing address information. It’s a cumbersome process, though our sample size of several dozen contacts wasn't too bad. That said, Mailchimp syncs with Eventbrite, Jotform, MailMunch, Salesforce, Squarespace, SurveyMonkey, and WordPress, so you can import your contacts by connecting your accounts. If you do not have a sync-friendly service, you can export the contacts as a CSV file and import them into Mailchimp.
Once I entered my contacts, I began creating a campaign. It was simple. First, you must decide whether your entire audience will be part of the campaign or just a specific segment. Then you create segments to filter contacts based on purchase activity, email- open rate, or location, to give a few examples. Next, choose a name for your campaign and set a timeframe. Mailchimp gives you a set of marketing goals, such as advertising a sale or promotion, educating or informing, gathering sign-ups, or promoting an event. These options make it easy to track your success throughout the campaign's lifetime. Last, you'll finalize the campaign by choosing how Mailchimp tracks emails. Opens and clicks are tracked by default, but you can also check plain-text clicks, auto-convert video, Google Analytics, and e-commerce link tracking. You can also choose to use your Mailchimp Inbox to manage replies from all campaigns and automations, or you can enable it on a per-campaign basis.
You can further personalize campaigns with automation, which Mailchimp calls flows (formerly known as customer journeys). The idea is that you create an automated email sequence (for example, a welcome series) for your contacts. These can be built from scratch, or you can choose one of several prebuilt automation templates to tackle specific tasks. Prebuilt flows can welcome new contacts, recover abandoned carts, celebrate birthdays or holidays, or re-engage lost customers. There are dozens of specific examples in each flow category, so you can use these templates to handle most audience engagement needs.
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If you need something more specialized, or if you're an Essentials subscriber, you can create a custom flow. In essence, you create a string of automated tasks based on criteria you establish in the builder. A client joining your mailing list is one such example. From there, you assign a follow-up task, such as sending a welcome email at a specific time. You can adjust and customize these tasks to cater to your marketing needs. In practice, this system is impressively streamlined and easy to use. Mailchimp even offers suggested actions when customizing a journey, making the entire process a cinch.
(Credit: Mailchimp/PCMag)However, each action in the builder uses flow steps. The number of flow steps is based on the plan you subscribe to. Essentials subscribers have only four steps per flow, while Standard plan subscribers get 200 flows to play with, which produces a long list of automated conditions to complement your email campaigns. If you're serious about automation, you almost certainly want what’s offered in the Standard or Premium tiers, as the Essentials plan is quite limiting. Mailchimp's automation features are intuitive, putting it roughly on par with Zoho Campaigns.
Email Builder and AI: Easy Ways to Send Your Message
The Email Builder remains a beefy, template-based tool. It let me choose from dozens of stylish layouts, and further customize them with drag-and-drop functionality, color modification, or HTML editing. In addition, a handy template reference guide has code examples and suggestions that helped me tailor emails. That said, it has evolved from a simple drag-and-drop creator into an AI-powered workstation. The previous "beta" AI features have matured into the Newsletter Content Generation tool, now available across all subscription tiers.
Instead of staring at a blank canvas, I used Mainchimp's AI to generate fully designed newsletter sections, article summaries, and event promotions. If you want to leverage even more AI power, the Mailchimp app for ChatGPT lets you build a data-backed, omnichannel plan via text prompts and import it directly into the builder. The layout options are somewhat rigid, but the agentic tools significantly lower the barrier to entry for creating professional-looking campaigns. Of course, I could still tweak templates manually, or use HTML editing and import functions for complete design freedom.
I designed a few emails for testing purposes. In one example, I created a product reveal for a new coffee brand, with a complementary landing page for more product details. After importing logos and images, I slapped together fluff text and saved the draft. Mailchimp prompted me to update each section of a template with new text, so I never had to worry about annoying "insert text here" messages in my email blasts. I also designed a landing page for the coffee reveal using a Mailchimp-provided page template. This was also updated with fresh text and new images. After previewing both, I scheduled the post, specified my audience, and let the email fly.
Tracking Campaign Performance
Simplicity is Mailchimp's strength. Once my emails were out in the wilds of the internet, I used Mailchimp's dashboard tools to check out the analytics. This data highlights information about your audience and campaigns, and both reports are easy to find and read. From the campaign page, select the campaign you wish to inspect, and select its report. Mailchimp produces a report with an overview of your campaign's performance, including audience activity and click performance, demographics, time, social performance, and geolocation. You can filter these results by bounces, clicks, opens, and unsubscribes. In addition, Premium subscribers get comparative reporting, which lets you compare your campaigns.
(Credit: Mailchimp/PCMag)At the Standard and Premium tiers, Mailchimp provides content optimization recommendations, scoring your campaign on skimmability, text and visuals, typography, and links. This report also has suggestions for keeping your emails tight and concise. The Premium tier goes one step further with comparative reporting, which analyzes how your campaigns perform against each other over time. Essentials and free users do not have access to these tools. If basic analytics is all you need, the Essentials subscription tier should suffice. However, if you want more in-depth tools for advanced marketing and client engagement, you should at least get a Standard plan, but Premium gives you the most data for your buck.
Mobile Mailchimp and SMS Campaigns
Mailchimp is available on the go with the company's Android and iOS apps. With the app installed, I crafted and sent campaigns from my phone, enjoying all the functionality you expect from the browser version. In fact, Mailchimp even offers unique mobile-exclusive conveniences, such as support for Apple's Handoff feature, which lets me swap between devices and pick up where I left off. Android users can install handy widgets on the home screen, which let them check account sections without opening the app.
If SMS campaigns are important to your business, Mailchimp has you covered. SMS campaigns use a credit-based system. They are bought in blocks (starting at 1,000 credits for $20), and the credit cost varies by sending country and message type. For example, an SMS to Canada costs three credits, while an MMS costs five credits. Conveniently, you can build Customer Journeys to coordinate both email and SMS campaigns.
Mailchimp has aggressively expanded its SMS capabilities, moving well beyond simple text notifications. The service now covers 37 countries and territories across Australia, Europe, and North America. Marketers can also save time with the new AI SMS follow-up tool, which automatically transforms existing email campaigns into SMS-ready content. These elements are unified in the updated dashboard, giving Standard and Premium users a single useful view to compare how email, SMS, and automations drive revenue.