# Mailchimp Alternatives in 2026: One We Measured in Full, Five We Priced, and Two We Cannot Yet Compare

> Mailchimp alternatives, ranked by how much we actually know: ActiveCampaign measured in full and scored, five rivals' pricing pages read the same day, and the two the market asks about most that are not in our catalogue.

_Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/mailchimp-alternatives — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-08_

---

People look for alternatives to Mailchimp 1,300 times a month, and they ask the same
question a second way, as alternatives to mailchimp, a further 1,300 times. Another 480 search
for competitors. That is a lot of people trying to leave the largest brand in the category.

Before the list, one piece of honesty about what this article is and is not.

**OUR TAKE:** We have measured one alternative to Mailchimp in full. It scores 3.44 against Mailchimp's
3.46, which is close enough that the choice is about character rather than ranking. For five more we read their own pricing pages on the same day, from the same
American address, and nothing else. And the two alternatives the market asks about most are not in
our catalogue at all, which we would rather tell you than paper over. What follows is organised by
how much we actually know.

## Why people leave, in their own words

We read one hundred Mailchimp reviews in full and sorted them by star rating. The themes that
separate the unhappy from the happy are not about features.

| Theme | Share of 1-2 star reviews | Share of 4-5 star reviews | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing and charges | 33% | 3% | +30 |
| Support | 52% | 26% | +27 |
| Cancellation | 17% | 0% | +17 |
| Locked out of the account | 16% | 0% | +16 |
| Price and increases | 11% | 0% | +11 |
| Interface | 3% | 13% | -10 |

So the reason to switch, if you have one, is almost certainly commercial rather than functional.
The interface is the one thing reviewers name more in praise than in complaint. Keep that in mind
while reading any alternatives list, including this one: if you are leaving because the software
annoys you, you may be solving the wrong problem.



> 💡 **undefined:** Check which contacts each vendor bills before comparing prices. Mailchimp excludes archived and cleaned, ActiveCampaign counts everything, and Kit prices on subscribers. Same list, three different bills.

## The structural reason to look elsewhere

Mailchimp's published price is promotional for twelve months and the rate that follows is not
published to an American reader. The vendor states the rule in its terms, naming an introductory
discount "for the first 12 (twelve) months of service, starting from the date of enrollment
followed by the then-currently monthly list price based on your contacts and email
sends"[8], and renders the figure as an empty slot or a bare zero in the markup it
serves[2].

Derived from the vendor's own fifteen percent, the three card prices become about fifteen
twenty-nine, twenty-three fifty-three and four hundred and eleven seventy-six a month. On Premium
that is seven hundred and forty-one dollars a year more than the card shows.

Two of the five rivals below publish their annual rate with the saving computed on the page. If
year-two certainty is why you are reading this, that difference matters more than any feature
table.

## The one alternative we have measured in full

**ActiveCampaign**, which scores 3.44 on our scale against Mailchimp's 3.46. On the email
category's weighting, where value for money is one of the two heaviest axes, the two end up
within two hundredths of each other.

It is the deeper automation product and the more expensive entry. There is no free tier at all,
only a fourteen-day trial, and the cheapest published way in is fifteen dollars a month on annual
billing, which is one hundred and eighty committed up front. Every price its pricing page displays
is an annual rate; the monthly rates of nineteen, fifty-nine, ninety-nine and one hundred and
seventy-nine appear on no page of its site.

Where it beats Mailchimp: it publishes its entire billing catalogue, including a contact ladder
reaching forty-nine bands, which means you can price your own growth. Where it loses: it has no
free tier, six add-ons are named on its pricing page and none is priced, and its help centre
states the harsher contact rule, that every contact counts toward your limit regardless of list
status. Mailchimp excludes archived and cleaned contacts from billing and documents how to use
that[15].

Its cancellation theme runs at 38% of low reviews against 4% of high ones, which is worse than
Mailchimp's 17% against zero.



> 💡 **undefined:** Compare send allowances carefully. A multiple of the contact limit and an unlimited-sends plan are not the same unit, and no single column can hold both honestly.

## Five alternatives whose pricing we read today

Same method on all five: the vendor's own pricing page, served from the United States on 8 October
2026, counting dollar amounts in the visible text.

| Product | Dollar amounts in visible text | Published entry | Basis the vendor states | Annual rate published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | 12 | $13 / $20 promotional | 500 contacts, 12 months | no, sales-gated |
| GetResponse | 14 | $19, or $15.58 annual | the vendor states -18% | yes |
| Kit (ConvertKit) | 9 | $33, or $390 a year | 1,000 subscribers, -17% | yes |
| Beehiiv | 6 | $49 | yearly billing shown | partially |
| MailerLite | 3 | $12 | not stated on the card | not in visible text |
| Brevo | 0 | none in visible text | prices render client-side | no |

**GetResponse** publishes the most figures of the six and states both terms plainly: nineteen
dollars a month, or fifteen fifty-eight paid annually, with the saving marked as eighteen percent
on the page. Its entry plan advertises unlimited monthly sends, which is a different pricing model
from Mailchimp's send multiple.

**Kit**, formerly ConvertKit, is the creator-focused option and the dearest entry at thirty-three
dollars a month for one thousand subscribers, or three hundred and ninety a year with the
seventeen percent saving computed on the page. It prices on subscribers rather than on all
contacts, which for a list with many unsubscribes is a materially different basis.

**MailerLite** is the cheapest published entry at twelve dollars, and publishes the fewest figures
of the five that publish any. Its free tier covers a thousand subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails.

**Beehiiv** starts at forty-nine dollars and is built for newsletters with monetisation rather
than for marketing automation. It publishes a take rate of zero percent on paid subscriptions.

**Brevo** publishes no dollar amount at all in the visible text of its pricing page. The figures
exist in the markup and are assembled in the browser, which is the same pattern we measured on
HubSpot. If you shortlist it, price it inside the product rather than from the page.

## The two alternatives we cannot yet compare

This is the gap worth naming, because the market cares about it more than about anything above.

The single largest comparison anyone searches for in this category is Mailchimp against **Constant
Contact**, at 1,600 searches a month. Second is Mailchimp against **Klaviyo**, at 720. Both figures
are larger than Mailchimp against MailerLite at 1,180 only in the sense that Constant Contact beats
it outright; Klaviyo sits just behind.

Neither product is in our catalogue. We have measured neither, and we are not going to summarise
somebody else's review of them.

What makes the gap more pointed is that Mailchimp itself treats Klaviyo as its principal rival. On
the vendor's own comparisons hub, Klaviyo is named seven times, ActiveCampaign and Brevo five each,
Constant Contact four and HubSpot twice[24]. The vendor's view of its competitive set and
the market's search behaviour agree with each other, and our catalogue currently agrees with
neither.

Both will be measured. Until they are, treat their absence from this list as our limitation rather
than as a judgement about the products.




> 💡 **undefined:** Ask what happens at the limit. Some vendors grow the bill and keep sending; others stop sending. Decide which failure you would rather have on a campaign morning.

## The free tiers, compared where they can be

If you are leaving Mailchimp over cost rather than capability, the free tiers are where the
comparison actually bites, and they are not built the same way.

Mailchimp's free tier is two hundred and fifty contacts, five hundred sends a month and two
hundred and fifty a day, with no band above it[5]. Reaching the limit holds your sending
rather than charging you, which makes it the only plan in the product whose bill cannot
move[5]. What it gives up is long: fifteen capabilities read "Not included" in that column,
among them email scheduling, A/B testing, dynamic content and the generative features[3].

MailerLite publishes a free tier covering a thousand subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails, with
all three of its email editors included. That is four times the contacts and five times the sends.

ActiveCampaign has no free tier at all. The cheapest published way in is fifteen dollars a month
on annual billing, which is one hundred and eighty committed before you have sent anything.

Kit, Beehiiv and Brevo all advertise free entry points of some kind, and we did not measure their
limits, because we measured only their pricing pages. We are naming that rather than guessing.

## What the ratings will tell you, and what they will not

Any alternatives list you read will quote scores at you. Two cautions, both measured on this
product rather than assumed.

The first is that a displayed score is not the average of the platform's own published
distribution. Mailchimp shows two point five on Trustpilot from one thousand five hundred and
thirty-eight reviews, while that page's own histogram averages two point nought eight. On Gartner
Peer Insights it shows four point three from one thousand two hundred and sixty-eight, while its
histogram averages four point four. Both platforms weight toward recency, and on these two sites
the weighting pushes in opposite directions.

The second is that different platforms measure different relationships. Across the two app stores
Mailchimp carries 74,983 ratings at four point nine and four point seven. Across Trustpilot it
carries one thousand five hundred and thirty-eight at two point five. People like using this
software and dislike buying it, and a single averaged score hides exactly that.

Four of the nine review properties we tried refused to be read, including two of the three the
vendor itself cites when it claims thirty-three thousand reviews. We did not substitute figures
from search snippets.



> ⚠ **undefined:** If you are leaving Mailchimp because of the interface, check your reasoning. It is the only theme its reviewers name more in praise than in complaint.

## What to check before you switch, whichever you pick

The questions that cost money are the same across all of these vendors, and the answers differ
more than the feature lists do.

Which contacts are billable? Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed, and
excludes archived, cleaned and deleted[5]. ActiveCampaign counts all of them. Kit prices on
subscribers. Three different bases, three different bills for the same list.

How are sends allowanced? Mailchimp gives a multiple of the contact limit, ten, twelve or fifteen
times by tier[5]. GetResponse advertises unlimited monthly sends on its entry plan. Those are
not comparable numbers and no comparison table that puts them in one column is telling you the
truth.

What happens at the limit? On Mailchimp's paid plans the bill grows and sending continues[6].
On its free plan sending stops[5]. ActiveCampaign stops sending rather than billing. Decide
which failure you would rather have at nine o'clock on a campaign morning.

And how do you leave? Mailchimp publishes the cancellation path through to the final click for
monthly plans, and routes annual plans through sales[16]. That is better than the category
norm and worth checking wherever you go next.


## What the vendor says about its own rivals

Mailchimp runs a comparisons hub, and reading whom it chooses to argue with is more informative
than reading the arguments.

Across that page Klaviyo is named seven times, ActiveCampaign and Brevo five each, Constant Contact
four and HubSpot twice[24]. So the vendor's own competitive set is led by a product the
market also asks about most and that we have not measured, which is a coincidence worth stating
plainly rather than quietly.

There is a second thing in that list. GetResponse, MailerLite, Kit and Beehiiv are not named at
all, although four of them are the rivals whose prices we could actually read today and three of
them publish more clearly than Mailchimp does. A vendor's comparison page is a marketing document;
it picks fights with the products it loses customers to, not the products that undercut it.

Treat any vendor-run comparison the same way, including the ones on the alternatives' sites.



> ⚠ **undefined:** ActiveCampaign has no free tier at all, and its cheapest published entry requires one hundred and eighty dollars committed up front.

## The cost of leaving, which nobody puts in a table

Switching costs are not a feature column, and three of them are published facts about this product
rather than generalities.

The refund position depends on the term you are on. Monthly: "You won't be entitled to a refund or
credit from us under any circumstance on monthly Paid Marketing Plans."[8] Annual: a sixty-day
money-back guarantee[8]. So leaving mid-year costs you the remainder of the month on one term
and nothing on the other, and the term with the guarantee is the one whose price is not published.

The exit path also depends on the term. A monthly plan is closed in the app, and the vendor
publishes the steps through to the final click[16]. An annual plan is closed by contacting
sales[8].

And the promotional clock does not care what you do. Pausing does not pause it, and cancelling
during the period forfeits the offer outright[8]. If you are weighing a switch at month ten,
the discount you would be walking away from has two months left on it regardless.

Those three facts together make the cheapest moment to leave this product the end of a monthly
cycle in month twelve, which is also the moment the price changes.

## Where Mailchimp is genuinely hard to beat

A fair alternatives article has to say this part. Mailchimp's free tier is a real tier, not a
trial: two hundred and fifty contacts, five hundred sends a month, and no band above it, which
makes it the only plan in the product whose bill cannot move[5].

Its documentation is the best we have measured in this category. It publishes the expensive
answers without being asked, including that the bill runs on "the peak contact total during your
billing period"[6] and that archiving takes a contact off the invoice while preserving the
data and the reports[15].

And the usability evidence is not close. Across the two app stores the product carries 74,983
ratings at 4.9 and 4.7. No alternative in this list has a comparable base of evidence that people
enjoy using it.



> ⚠ **undefined:** This list omits the two alternatives with the most measured demand, because we have not measured them. That is our gap, not a verdict on those products.

## One thing no alternative fixes

Whichever product you choose, the contact count is the meter, and the habits that control it are
yours rather than the vendor's.

Every vendor in this list prices on the size of your list, and every one of them bills you for
people who will never open another email. Mailchimp is unusual in publishing two documented ways
to take those people off the invoice, through archiving and through automatic cleaning of failed
addresses[15][14]. ActiveCampaign publishes the opposite rule. Kit changes the basis
entirely by counting subscribers rather than contacts.

So before you migrate, work out what your list would cost at each vendor using that vendor's own
definition of a billable contact. Three vendors, three totals, same people. The spread between
them is usually larger than the spread between the headline prices, and it is the number the
comparison tables never show.



## FAQ

**What is the best alternative to Mailchimp?**

Of the products we have measured in full, the two land two hundredths apart: Mailchimp at 3.46 against ActiveCampaign's 3.44, so the choice is about character rather than ranking. ActiveCampaign is the deeper automation product with a wider integration catalogue, no free tier and a dearer entry. Mailchimp is the better value at the entry band, the easier product to live with, and the only one of the two with a permanent free tier. But the two alternatives the market asks about most, Constant Contact and Klaviyo, are not in our catalogue yet, so this is an answer about what we have measured rather than about the whole field.

**Why do people switch away from Mailchimp?**

On the evidence of one hundred reviews read in full and sorted by rating, for commercial reasons rather than functional ones. Billing appears in 33% of low reviews against 3% of high ones, cancellation in 17% against zero, and loss of account access in 16% against zero. The interface runs the other way.

**Is there a cheaper alternative to Mailchimp?**

MailerLite publishes the cheapest entry of the five we priced, at twelve dollars a month, and its free tier covers a thousand subscribers. Comparing it fairly against Mailchimp's thirteen requires noting that Mailchimp's figure is promotional for twelve months and the rate afterwards is not published.

## How to read this list in three months

Six of the seven products named here will have had the full treatment this one has: pricing read
from the United States, the terms read in full, ratings counted with the shared-ownership
platforms counted once, and a corpus of reviews cross-tabulated by theme. Two more, Constant
Contact and Klaviyo, have to enter the catalogue first, and the demand measured here is the
argument for putting them there.

When that happens this article gets rewritten rather than appended to. If you are reading it
later and the comparisons still say we measured only a pricing page, the work has not landed yet
and you should weight it accordingly.




## Sources

[1] Mailchimp vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/ (2026-10)
[2] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison table — https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/ (2026-10)
[3] Mailchimp vendor marketing-plans page — https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/ (2026-10)
[4] Mailchimp vendor documentation on plans — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/ (2026-10)
[5] Mailchimp vendor documentation on additional charges — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-additional-charges/ (2026-10)
[6] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing tiers — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/mailchimp-pricing-tiers/ (2026-10)
[7] Mailchimp standard terms of use — https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/terms/ (2026-10)
[8] Mailchimp promotional offer terms — https://mailchimp.com/en/legal/promotional-offer-terms/ (2026-10)
[9] Mailchimp vendor pay-as-you-go page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/pay-as-you-go (2026-10)
[10] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pay-as-you-go — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-the-pay-as-you-go-plan/ (2026-10)
[11] Mailchimp vendor transactional email page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/transactional-email (2026-10)
[12] Mailchimp vendor SMS page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/sms-marketing (2026-10)
[13] Mailchimp vendor documentation on cleaned contacts — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-cleaned-contacts/ (2026-10)
[14] Mailchimp vendor documentation on archiving — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/archive-unarchive-contacts/ (2026-10)
[15] Mailchimp vendor documentation on closing an account — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/close-an-account/ (2026-10)
[16] Mailchimp vendor about page — https://mailchimp.com/en/about/ (2026-10)
[17] Trustpilot, displayed score and distribution — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com (2026-10)
[18] Gartner Peer Insights, published histogram — https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/ailchimp-594139131 (2026-10)
[19] TrustRadius, structured data — https://www.trustradius.com/products/mailchimp/reviews (2026-10)
[20] Apple App Store listing — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mailchimp-email-marketing/id366794783 (2026-10)
[21] Google Play listing — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mailchimp.mailchimp (2026-10)
[22] Mailchimp vendor AI tools page — https://mailchimp.com/en/solutions/ai-tools/ (2026-10)
[23] Mailchimp vendor comparisons hub — https://mailchimp.com/en/resources/mailchimp-comparisons/ (2026-10)