Mailchimp
Marketing · Freemium
Overview
An email marketing platform. It began in 2001 in Atlanta as a side product of a web design firm run by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, and grew into one of the best known tools for sending newsletters and marketing email. Intuit, the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks, bought Mailchimp in 2021, and it now trades as Intuit Mailchimp. Beyond email it offers audience management, automations, landing pages, a basic website builder, digital ads, and social posting. It is used mostly by small businesses, creators, and marketing teams that want templates and automation without a steep setup.
What people use it for
Businesses use Mailchimp to send regular newsletters and promotional campaigns to a subscriber list. They build automated sequences, for example a welcome series for new signups or a reminder when someone leaves items in a cart. Ecommerce sellers connect a store so purchase history feeds segmentation and product recommendations. Marketers use the audience tools to tag and group contacts, then send different messages to each group. Many use the landing pages and signup forms to collect email addresses in the first place. Smaller teams run their whole marketing presence from Mailchimp, adding social posts and Facebook or Instagram ads alongside email. Developers use the transactional email service to send receipts and password resets. Reporting is used to track opens, clicks, and revenue per campaign.
Key capabilities
Mailchimp has a drag-and-drop email builder with a large template library and a generative AI tool that drafts copy and subject lines. The Customer Journey Builder creates multi-step automations from triggers and branching rules. Audience tools include tags, segments, behavioral targeting, predicted demographics, and contact profiles. It also builds landing pages, signup forms, and simple websites, and posts to and buys ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. A separate transactional email product handles receipts and other system messages. Reporting covers opens, clicks, e-commerce revenue, and send-time optimization. Mailchimp lists more than 300 integrations, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, Canva, and Zapier. Pricing is based on the number of contacts in your audience, and Mailchimp counts every contact, including people who have unsubscribed or gone inactive, unless you delete them. Plans come in Essentials, Standard, and Premium tiers, plus a small free plan and a custom enterprise option. Monthly send limits are tied to the contact tier.
Limitations
The billing model is the common complaint. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and inactive contacts toward your paid tier unless you manually remove them, so old dead weight inflates the bill. The price curve is steep as a list grows past a few thousand contacts, and going over the monthly send limit adds automatic charges. The free plan was cut in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with branding on every email and no multi-step automation. Public reviews report billing disputes, hard cancellation, and slow support on lower tiers, and the Trustpilot score is low. Deeper automation and journey features are gated to higher plans.
Insight
Mailchimp is easy to start with and fine for a straightforward newsletter, which is why so many small businesses land on it. The problem shows up later. Because pricing counts every contact, including people who unsubscribed years ago, the bill creeps up unless someone prunes the list on a schedule, and most people do not. As a list grows the cost gets hard to defend against tools that price the same volume lower. The free plan is now too small to test anything real. If email is central to the business and the list is growing, price the alternatives early, before there are years of automations and templates locked in. For a stable, small list that does not grow much, Mailchimp is a reasonable place to stay.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30