MailerLite vs Mailchimp: Cheaper at Every Published Size, Different at the Band Line

MailerLite versus Mailchimp is the most searched comparison in this corner of the market: 590 searches a month each way in the United States. It is also the comparison MailerLite most wants you to make, because it publishes a whole page about it. That page is a useful starting point and a poor finishing one. We checked its claims against our own Mailchimp measurement from September 2026, and the answer is more interesting than either vendor's version.

The short version: MailerLite is cheaper at every list size we can compare, publishes its whole price list where Mailchimp withholds most of it, and has the better review record by a wide margin. Mailchimp sends more per contact on its middle plan, and it does not move your tier without asking. Which of those matters depends on how your list grows.

The short answer

Choose MailerLite if you want the lowest published price for a full feature set and a price list you can plan against. Choose Mailchimp if your account already lives inside its integrations or you need its higher sending multiples, and you are comfortable reading its billing in the help centre rather than on the pricing page.

Our composite scores reflect that. MailerLite scores 3.71 and Mailchimp 3.46, on the same category rubric. The gap comes mostly from value and from user sentiment. Capability is close.

One fact frames everything else. MailerLite's pricing page script carries 29 subscriber bands with prices for both paid plans, monthly and annual ^[2]. Mailchimp's pricing page, as served to a reader in the United States, publishes the price of its entry band and nothing between that and two ceilings on a separate page. In practical terms, you can model a three-year MailerLite bill on a spreadsheet before signing up. You cannot do that with Mailchimp unless you are reading from Europe, where more of its prices are served.

Both vendors changed something this year. MailerLite repriced every paid plan on 16 June 2026 and halved its free plan. Mailchimp's cards carry promotional rates that expire after twelve months. So neither first-year price is the price you will be paying in year two.

## Price at the first rung

At 500 contacts, the comparison is straightforward.

Plan	Monthly, 500 contacts	Notes
MailerLite Comfort	$12	full feature set
MailerLite Power	$25	unlimited sending
Mailchimp Essentials	$13	15% first-year promotion
Mailchimp Standard	$20	15% first-year promotion

The Mailchimp figures are promotional. Mailchimp's own terms describe 15% off the monthly base price for the first twelve months, after which the then-current list price applies. That list price is not printed on the American pricing page. Dividing by 0.85 gives roughly $15.29 for Essentials and $23.53 for Standard. We derived those numbers; Mailchimp did not publish them.

So in year one MailerLite Comfort is $1 cheaper than Essentials and $8 cheaper than Standard. In year two, on our derivation, it is about $3 and $12 cheaper.

The plans are not equivalent, and the table hides that. MailerLite Comfort carries every feature the product has, including dynamic content and multivariate testing. Mailchimp tiers features across its plans. The fairer feature match for Comfort is probably Mailchimp Standard, which is the comparison MailerLite's own page draws against its Power plan instead.

Price beyond the first rung

Here the comparison mostly stops being possible, and that is a finding in itself.

MailerLite publishes every band. At 10,000 subscribers Comfort is $89 and Power $129. At 50,000 they are $319 and $389. At 100,000 they are $439 and $489 ^[2].

Mailchimp publishes two ceilings and almost nothing between. Its comparison page reads "Up to 50,000 contacts with our $385/mo tier" for Essentials and "Up to 100,000 contacts with our $800/mo tier" for Standard. At those two points we can compare directly:

Contacts	MailerLite Comfort	MailerLite Power	Mailchimp
50,000	$319	$389	$385 (Essentials)
100,000	$439	$489	$800 (Standard)

At 100,000 contacts Mailchimp Standard costs $800 against $489 for MailerLite Power, which is unlimited. That is the largest published gap in the category.

MailerLite's own comparison page also lists Mailchimp Standard at $60, $100, $135, $310 and $450 for 2,500 to 50,000 contacts ^[9]. We could not verify those against Mailchimp's own pages, because Mailchimp does not serve them to American readers, so we treat them as MailerLite's claim rather than as Mailchimp's price.

## How each one counts your list

MailerLite's comparison page puts it this way: "we only count your active contacts!" ^[9] It contrasts that with Mailchimp, where subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward the bill. That part is accurate. A Mailchimp account that keeps its unsubscribes in the audience pays for them. A MailerLite account does not.

The part the page leaves out is timing, and there the two behave alike. MailerLite counts "any email address that was Active at any point during the cycle", including addresses deleted later ^[3]. Mailchimp bills the peak contact total of the billing period, so a list that shrinks before the month ends is still billed at its high point. Neither rewards a mid-month clean-up.

So the honest comparison is this. On status, MailerLite is more generous: unsubscribes are free. On timing, they are the same: the peak sets the bill. If your Mailchimp audience carries a large tail of unsubscribed contacts, moving to MailerLite lowers your billable count by exactly that tail. If your audience is already clean, the counting rules give you no saving.

A small practical note. Mailchimp lets you archive contacts to stop paying for them. MailerLite does not need you to, for unsubscribes, because they never counted.

What happens at the band line

This is where the two differ most, and where MailerLite's comparison page is silent.

MailerLite moves your tier for you. Cross the subscriber ceiling, or on Comfort the sending allowance, and the plan upgrades: "Auto-upgrades apply to both subscriber and sending thresholds." ^[4] The upgrade is charged pro rata at once. Coming back down is a manual downgrade that waits for the end of the cycle ^[3].

Mailchimp does not move your tier. Your chosen contact limit sets the tier, and when the count goes past it Mailchimp adds contact blocks to the invoice and tells you to act. In its own words, "If the increase is permanent, update your pricing tier to increase your contact limit, and we'll remove the additional charges."

Which is better depends on what you dislike more. MailerLite's model means the right tier, chosen for you, with no overage line on the invoice, but also no moment where you decide. Mailchimp's model means the tier stays where you put it, with surcharges that continue until you change it. Neither has a surprise-free version.

MailerLite has one control Mailchimp's model does not need: "Click Cancel scheduled upgrade." ^[3] Use it when a spike is temporary.

## Sending allowances

MailerLite Comfort allows ten times the top of your subscriber band each month. "The multiplier is based on the top of your tier, not your exact subscriber count." ^[2] Power is unlimited under a fair use policy.

Mailchimp scales the multiple by plan: ten times the contact limit on Essentials, twelve on Standard and fifteen on Premium, according to our measurement of its help centre.

At the entry band:

Plan	Contacts	Monthly sends
MailerLite Comfort	500	5,000
MailerLite Power	500	unlimited
Mailchimp Essentials	500	5,000
Mailchimp Standard	500	6,000

So Mailchimp Standard sends 20% more than MailerLite Comfort per contact, and MailerLite Power sends more than either. For a weekly newsletter none of this binds. For an account that sends daily or runs heavy automation, it does.

What happens when you exceed it differs again. MailerLite Comfort upgrades the plan by one band for the rest of the cycle, then moves it back at renewal ^[3]. On the 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 and 100,000 bands that upgrade costs exactly the Power price, which makes Power the obvious choice for a heavy sender on those bands.

Free plans side by side

Both have one. Both cap it at 250 contacts.

	MailerLite Free	Mailchimp Free
Contacts	250	250
Monthly emails	2,500	500
Daily limit	none published	250
Seats	2	1
Support	community	email, first 30 days

MailerLite's free plan sends five times as many emails. It also carries three automations, a website, a landing page and three signup forms ^[2]. Mailchimp's free column excludes scheduling, A/B testing and its generative features, so it is a plan for sending now rather than planning ahead.

Both stop sending at the limit rather than billing you. MailerLite's notice says that if you are on a Free plan, "you'll only be charged if you choose to upgrade to a paid plan manually" ^[5].

MailerLite's free plan used to be much larger. On 16 June 2026, "Subscriber limit was reduced from 500 to 250 active subscribers." and "Sending limit was reduced from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails." ^[5] It is still the more useful of the two free plans. It is no longer the category outlier it was.

## Support and reliability

MailerLite tiers support by plan: community resources on Free, 24/7 email on Comfort, and live chat on Power or on Comfort from 50,000 subscribers ^[4]. Mailchimp's free plan gets email support for its first 30 days and then nothing published.

The review evidence favours MailerLite on support specifically. In our 100-review Trustpilot sample, support appears in 61 reviews and splits 46 positive to 15 negative, often with an agent named ^[12]. That split is the best we have measured in this category.

The weak point on MailerLite's side is account review. Eleven of the 100 reviews describe a suspended or terminated account, often early and on small lists, and the terms allow termination "with or without cause" ^[8]. If you are migrating a large list from Mailchimp, warm it up: send first to recent, clearly opted-in subscribers, and keep your consent records ready.

Both vendors publish a status page. MailerLite's showed 100% uptime across its components for July to October 2026 ^[16], though no incident history was readable.

What reviewers say

Trustpilot shows MailerLite at 4.1 from 3,362 reviews ^[12] and Mailchimp at 2.5 ^[23]. In our Mailchimp measurement the displayed 2.5 was higher than the 2.08 mean of its own published histogram. MailerLite's 4.1 sits close to the 3.95 mean of our sample.

The shapes differ too. MailerLite's sample is 70 five-star and 23 one-star with very little between. People love it or have been locked out of it. Mailchimp's complaints, in our earlier measurement, ran heavily to billing.

On the vendors' own app listings the picture is less one-sided. MailerLite's phone app scores 4.7 from 1,106 ratings ^[13], but its Shopify app scores 2.4 from 27 ^[15] and its WordPress forms plugin 3.0 from 40 ^[14]. If your list grows through Shopify, read those reviews before switching.

## Feature caps against feature tiers

The two vendors limit you in different places, and that changes which plan is the fair match.

MailerLite puts every feature on both paid plans and limits quantity instead. Comfort allows 50 active automations, 10 forms, 10 sites and landing pages combined, 5 digital products or bookings and 3 seats ^[3]. Power removes all of those. Exceeding a cap does not change your bill; it freezes creating and editing that kind of item until you are back under it ^[4].

Mailchimp limits features by tier and also limits structure. In our measurement of its comparison page, the free plan has one audience, Essentials three, Standard five and Premium unlimited. Role permissions rise from two roles on Essentials to four on Standard and five on Premium. Features such as scheduling and A/B testing start at Essentials; more advanced automation and optimisation sit higher. Customer success management is tied to a spend threshold of $299 a month rather than to a plan.

In practice, a small team that needs several people logged in with different permissions will feel Mailchimp's role limits and MailerLite's three-seat cap on Comfort at about the same moment. A creator who builds a page per product will feel MailerLite's ten-site cap first. A business that segments one list many ways will barely notice either, since segments are unlimited on MailerLite and audiences are a different concept from segments on Mailchimp.

The fair comparisons are MailerLite Comfort against Mailchimp Essentials or Standard for a single newsletter, and MailerLite Power against Mailchimp Standard for a team that sends heavily. On both pairings MailerLite is cheaper at every published price point.

Promotions, discounts and annual billing

The two vendors discount in opposite ways.

MailerLite's discounts are small and permanent. Annual billing takes 10% off every band, and nonprofits take 30% on proof of status, with only the larger of the two applied ^[3]. There is no first-year promotion on the cards; the price you see is the list price. Short sales do appear. The most recent, GOLITE50, gave half off the first month of a monthly plan to accounts on the free plan, between 25 August and 24 September 2026 ^[18].

Mailchimp's main discount is a first-year promotion: 15% off the monthly base price for twelve months on the paid cards, after which the then-current list price applies. In our measurement its annual billing exists only for Standard and Premium above 10,000 contacts, through sales, and its terms exclude annual plans from introductory and nonprofit discounts. MailerLite's comparison page lists Mailchimp's nonprofit discount as 15% ^[9], which we could not confirm on Mailchimp's own pages.

So a buyer comparing first-year prices sees a closer race than a buyer comparing year two. On the entry band, the year-one gap between Comfort and Standard is $8 a month. On our derivation of Mailchimp's list price, the year-two gap is about $11.50.

Neither vendor locks a price beyond its term. MailerLite's terms say plans renew at the then-current price, and its answer to keeping an old price was "No." ^[4] Mailchimp's promotion ends by design. Budget for the list price on both.

Moving from Mailchimp to MailerLite

MailerLite offers a Mailchimp importer that brings subscribers, custom fields and segments across ^[9]. The mechanics are easy. The billing is where to be careful.

First, import only subscribed contacts. Unsubscribed contacts do not count on MailerLite, but you gain nothing by bringing them, and a large import of cold addresses is what account review is designed to flag.

Second, size the plan before the import, not after. MailerLite's cumulative count means the import sets the band for the whole cycle, and the plan will upgrade itself if the import crosses a line.

Third, warm up. Send the first campaign to your most engaged segment, then widen.

Fourth, keep Mailchimp running until the first MailerLite campaign has gone out cleanly. Mailchimp bills the peak of its own period, so cancelling a day early saves nothing.

## Which to choose

Choose MailerLite if you are a creator, a small publisher or a small business that wants every feature at the lowest published price, and if you value being able to read the whole price list before you commit. It is cheaper at every point we can compare, sometimes by a lot: $489 against $800 at 100,000 contacts.

Choose Mailchimp if you rely on its integrations, if you send at twelve or fifteen times your list each month and do not want Power, or if you prefer a tier that stays where you put it, with surcharges you can see, over a tier that moves by itself.

In both cases, plan for your peak list size and for year two prices. Neither vendor's first-year number is the one you will keep.