Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing channel, with an average return of $42.24 for each dollar spent. Marketers all over the world use Mailchimp for their email marketing needs.
A long-time player in the email newsletter space, Mailchimp is commonly associated with small business email marketing. However, emerging Mailchimp competitors are changing the playing field. Although many know Mailchimp as one of the most widely known email marketing tools in the business, it’s not the best choice for every business.
So if you are looking for the best Mailchimp alternatives that can cater to your need, offer a reliable set of features, and have sensible pricing then go through our article where we mention 25 Mailchimp competitors for you to check out.
Below we’ve included all the main Mailchimp alternatives suitable for small businesses and ecommerce stores that are just getting started.
1. SendPulse
Price: Free and Paid
Sendpulse is another multi-channel platform that includes email, push notifications, chatbots, and SMS. One issue is that there are no comprehensive multi-channel plans, so you have to evaluate the plan for each channel against competitors individually.
The main focus of our comparison will be analyzing their email service, in particular. The free plan only includes 1-500 subscribers and restricts some of the features. You won’t have access to advanced segmentation, user access levels, or advanced analytics and reporting.
But with access to the email builder, templates, five automation rules, and basic segmentation, it’s definitely possible for early-stage businesses to take it for a long-term test-drive without investing in a paid plan. For email marketing, Sendpulse offers a single main subscription, along with a pay-as-you-go model.
- SendPulse is, and you can take advantage of the free plans for web push notifications (up to 10,000 subscribers).
- Facebook Messenger (up to 10,000 messages/month) to use it as a multi-channel platform for the price of email alone.
Key Features of Sendpulse:
- Email Builder.
- Email Templates.
- Segmentation & Personalization.
- A/B Testing.
- Email Analytics.
- Marketing Automation Workflows.
- API/Webhooks.
- Transactional Emails.
- Web Push Notifications (Separate Pricing).
- Facebook Messenger (Separate Pricing).
- SMS (Separate Pricing).
- Ecommerce Integration / Behavioral Targeting (WooCommerce, Opencart).
2. DotDigital
Price: Paid
DotDigital is one of those MailChimp alternatives that are innovative and aim to engage through creating the best marketing emails. Essentially a cloud-based engagement platform, DotDigital is a great tool that can integrate with all the basic platforms and send automated messages that can entice and engage.
Its automation builder is fairly easy to use and its email editor is more than enough to help you create email newsletters that will capture your users’ attention.
DotDigital offers a free 14-day trial that promises to help you create and retain your relationship with your customers by giving you a taste of their services. However, there is no clear and concise pricing plan.
If you’d like to use that MailChimp alternative, you should contact a representative and request a quote.
Key Features:
- DotDigital may come across as an engagement platform, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have all the tools needed to name it one of the best MailChimp competitors for 2021.
- Their drag-and-drop email editor is fairly easy to use and enables you to take advantage of all the content you need, in order to design emails like a pro!
- If you decide to go forth with DotDigital, you’ll get communication and segmentation tools that can help you out with all your endeavors.
- DotDigital’s software helps you make data-driven decisions and use product recommendations in order to boost your conversions.
- Apart from the real-time APIs and the integrations, DotDigital can offer plenty of things when it comes to email marketing and automation tools.
3. HubSpot Email Marketing
Price: Free and Premium
Similar to MailChimp, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform designed to help grow your business except it offers a lot more advanced functionality. One of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot is because their marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, operation hub, and more.
HubSpot Email Marketing uses marketing automation and personalization data from their advanced CRM which helps you deliver the most personalized user experience to boost sales and conversions. Their email platform includes all the features you would expect such as autoresponders, drip email campaigns, A/B testing, and landing pages.
But other than that, they also include features like live chat, popups, contact forms, and other growth tools to help you grow your email list. HubSpot seamlessly integrates with WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, other eCommerce platforms, other webinar platforms, various social media tools, and everything else that you need to get more email subscribers.
HubSpot makes an excellent Mailchimp alternative if you’re looking for an all-inclusive marketing platform that is built to grow with your business.
This is why both small businesses and enterprise both use HubSpot for their marketing platform.
4. ActiveCampaign
Price: Paid
ActiveCampaign’s email marketing service is just one feature of its many marketing software capabilities. ActiveCampaign makes it easy to personalize your emails using contact data.
You can also split test up to five different email versions to work out which content performs best. Plus, there’s also a built-in spam tester to check if emails are likely to go to junk.
Advantages as compared to Mailchimp:
- Automation and workflow recipes to get you started
- Suits the more advanced marketer
- Unfortunately doesn’t offer a free plan but you can do a 14-day free trial
- Languages available: English, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish
- Advanced marketers who are already familiar with automation
5. Emma
Price: Paid
Emma offers specific solutions to multi-location businesses and franchises like gyms, universities, restaurants, etc. Emma HQ was designed in partnership with Orange Theory, one of their customers.
They found themselves spending too much time approving (or not approving) emails from some of their franchises, so Emma streamlined the entire process. Emma HQ allows you to save time by simplifying the approval process and even locking templates so your hundreds—or even thousands—of locations can only use the fonts, images, or colors that you’ve approved in advance.
However, Emma doesn’t send transactional emails out of the box or include a survey tool.
If getting quick feedback or transactional emails are top priorities in your email marketing strategy, Emma might not be the tool you need to reach your goals as efficiently as possible.
6. Omnisend
Price: Free and Paid
Omnisend is probably the best Mailchimp alternative on this list simply because it’s so much more than an email marketing tool.
Omnisend harnesses the power of omnichannel marketing by allowing you to connect several channels into the same automated workflow. This means you can save time by consolidating marketing efforts into this one platform. With that said, email marketing sits at the core of Omnisend, and they certainly do it well.
An easy to use drag-and-drop visual email editor allows you to customize nearly any element in your email. Omnisend also provides an array of pre-built templates to make email creation even simpler.
They also offer interesting email capture options like landing pages, pop-ups, and lead generation forms that you can use to build your email and SMS list. However, what really makes Omnisend stand out is its sophisticated automation and segmentation.
Omnisend, like many other tools on this list, offers email automation complete with templates that make complex automation setup child’s play.
Their advanced segmentation allows you to target your customer in a variety of ways: based on profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior.
Key Features:
- Email capture using popups, static sign up forms, landing pages, and gamified forms
- Visual and customizable automation workflow builder
- Personalization to increase customer engagement and loyalty
- Ecommerce-ready elements like discount codes and customer rewards
- Advanced segmentation for precise targeting
- Workflow templates for browse and cart abandonment, welcome, order confirmation, and many more ecommerce-specific situations
- 24/7 customer service
- Product picker for automatic importation into your campaigns
- Live website tracking for behavioral data and A/B testing
- Smooth visual email campaign composer
- Integration of email, SMS, and web push notifications all in the same automation workflow
7. Mautic
Price: Free and Paid
There is a growing community of businesses and nonprofits who want to set up an open-source marketing platform.
This means the whole infrastructure is self-hosted and you can get everything for free, unlike Mailchimp and other paid services. Having said that, you need to have the expertise to host the project on your own.
Apart from that, many people use Sendy — an Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) service with Mautic to easily create trackable emails, newsletters, and more. This way, you can get things for cheap. As for features, Mautic has support for multi-channel automation, has support for themes and you can integrate WordPress with Mautic for better monitoring of user engagement.
All in all, I would say, if you want a free alternative to Mailchimp, Mautic is a very good free and open-source replacement that you should give a try.
Pros:
- Supports automations
- Free and open-source
- Vibrant community
- Integrate with your website
Cons:
- Need to maintain the infrastructure
- For expert users
8. Mailgun
Price: Free and Paid
Unlike the other email marketing tools, Mailgun has a different purpose for email marketing than the others.
It was specially designed for web developers as an email automation service for sending, receiving, and tracking emails. It is a cloud-based email service that is built for developers and it supports popular programming languages like Curl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, and Java.
With Mailgun, the complexity of the code is reduced for developers too.
Key Features:
- Easily track if messages are delivered or not, analyze engagements and trends, track performance of different emails, and find the best time to send emails.
- Easily process your incoming and outgoing emails on a large scale with free spam filtering and auto encoding of messages.
- Real-time validation of emails helps in integration with mobile apps.
- They claim that they have a track record of high uptime speed with 99.9% reliability for developers.
- With Mailgun, you can easily integrate emails into your mobile app for personalization and scheduled delivery.
9. Autopilot
Price: Paid
Autopilot differentiates itself from its competitors with a more natural, intuitive, visual interface.
But that doesn’t mean that there is less power under the hood. You can use a visual funnel/customer journey builder to add marketing automation actions ranging from emails to marketing audience creation, to creating/assigning tasks, or sending an SMS.
Key Features:
- Website Tracking
- Multi-User Accounts.
- Email Builder.
- Email Templates.
- Revenue/ROI Reporting.
- A/B Testing.
- Email Analytics.
- Marketing Automation Workflows.
- Ecommerce Integration / Behavioral Targeting (Shopify, BigCommerce).
- Native Marketing CRM.
- Customer Journey Maps.
- Product Recommendations.
- Segmentation & Personalization.
10. Moosend
Price: Paid
Moosend’s free forever plan is free, Forever! You can sign up here today, without any limitation when it comes to emails or which features you can use or how you can use them.
With Moosend, you get unlimited customer segmentation with any variant you could think of, even as a free user. Not only that, but mastering list management and powering up your sales funnel for your online store or agency becomes easier than ever.
What is more, the automation builder is fast, reliable and most of all, available for every pricing plan. In fact, Moosend is on average 30% cheaper than Mailchimp, making it the most affordable and value-for-money Mailchimp alternative.
In short, Moosend is an affordable, sophisticated choice for those of you that need a simple option but are on a shoe-string budget, with free email newsletter templates for every occasion, sophisticated segmentation, and fantastic customer service.
Key Features:
- Powerful drag-and-drop editor to go with the free email newsletter templates
- List segmentation options that will help you increase your open and CTR
- Real-time analytics that can guarantee success and integrations for all your favorite apps and services
- Landing pages you can create with an easy to use landing page builder
- Email marketing automation features that make repetitive tasks a thing of the past
11. ConvertKit
Price: Paid
ConvertKit is a popular email marketing software for bloggers, authors, and creators. They famously launched their brand with the slogan: power of Infusionsoft with the ease of Mailchimp.
ConvertKit offers advanced automation features with an intuitive drag and drop email sequence builder, so you can send automated emails based on user behavior. Their advanced segmentation feature allows you to further segment your contacts with tags based on how they interact with your emails.
They also offer a drag & drop landing page builder with beautiful landing page templates and customizable optin forms to grow your email list. ConvertKit integrates with many popular third-party CRM software, lead generation tools like OptinMonster, eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, and more.
ConvertKit is a nice alternative to Mailchimp with powerful marketing automation platform for marketers, bloggers, publishers.
12. Klaviyo
Price: Paid
Klaviyo’s email marketing service is built for ecommerce and integrates easily with Shopify. Klaviyo particularly excels when it comes to advanced analytics and insights.
If you want to dig deep into customer data, Klaviyo is one of the best Mailchimp alternatives for this.
Advantages as compared to Mailchimp:
- Granular segmentation: Klaviyo provides a ton of behavioral and transactional data with which you can segment contacts. It also has predictive analytics to determine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and the risk of churn.
- Measure email marketing ROI: Easily track all the sales coming directly from your email marketing efforts.
- Pre-built templates for automated workflows: Save time setting up automated workflows thanks to Klaviyo’s library of ready-made templates for your abandoned cart, welcome, and win-back flows.
Key features:
- Segmentation and personalization
- Signup forms and popups
- 1-click integrations
- ROI-based reporting
- A/B testing
13. SendGrid
Price: Free and Paid
SendGrid is a simple email distribution and marketing platform that you can consider if you are looking for a free alternative to Mailchimp.
Under the free plan, there is a cap of 100 emails per day, but there is no limit on subscribers which is just awesome. In addition, if you choose to opt for the Marketing Campaign plan then under the free tier, you store up to 2000 contacts and can send up to 6000 emails per month.
This is a considerable increase from Mailchimp’s 500 subscriber cap. Not to mention, you get other free features like code editors, subscriber segmentation using smart analytics tools, actionable insights, email automation, and more.
In summation, for a small team or a business, SendGrid is an excellent email marketing platform where you can get many premium features for free without paying for its premium plan.
Pros:
- Email automation
- Store up to 2000 contacts for free
- Actionable insights under free account
- Code editor
Cons:
- Bulk cleaning is complex
- Cap on emails per day
14. MailJet
Price: Free and Premium
Mailjet offers simple email marketing and automation for small businesses.
Like many others on this list, they offer a simple drag-and-drop visual builder. There are a lot of templates to choose from, but if I’m speaking honestly, they all tend to look the same. The biggest flaw with MailJet is that it’s a simple tool that’s not simple to use.
Some of their features feel hidden, and at times, the language around certain parts of MailJet is really difficult to understand. Automation in MailJet is basic enough. You can automate your campaigns to send welcome emails, custom emails, and date-based emails.
Apparently, anniversary/birthday emails are coming soon.
Key Features
- 24/7 support
- Basic automated drip campaigns
- Basic segmentation on campaign behavior and profile data
- A/B Testing
- Embeddable sign up forms with code
15. Zoho Campaigns
Price: Free and Premium
Even though there are some other options on this list that offer CRM features, if you’re looking for a Mailchimp alternative that’s also a very powerful and useful CRM platform, Zoho Campaigns is definitely worth a look-see.
Not only does Zoho Campaigns offer a very enticing free tier, it also supports advanced features including complex automations that can make your marketing life easier. Zoho brings a ton of cool templates for you to use with their email builder, and the service even supports Unsplash directly, which means you can easily import stock images into your marketing emails.
Further, the Mailchimp competitor offers support for A/B testing, drag and drop workflows for creating automations, contact path tracing, and more.
Zoho also makes segmentation a lot easier. However, even though the service offers some integrations, with platforms like Survey Monkey, Zapier, Salesforce, and more, it does lag behind Mailchimp when it comes to the number of supported integrations and ease of use.
Pros:
- Fully-fledged CRM platform
- A/B testing support
- Unsplash integration in email editor
- Complex automation support
Cons:
- Not as easy for beginners
- Doesn’t support as many integrations as Mailchimp
16. Constant Contact
Price: Paid
Constant Contact cannot be considered as an absolute product in the list but still, it can be the best alternative to MailChimp for newbies who are just getting started with email marketing.
Its features are very limited and they do not get integrated with e-commerce platforms but they offer basic features and some great tools for campaign management. The best thing about Constant Contact is that they focus more on promoting and supporting small scale businesses as well as not for profit organizations.
Another best thing about Constant Contact is that when you sign up for any of the paid plans, they will provide you with a free service for the first month.
Key Features:
- Easy to use with drag-drop functionality to design custom, professional, and mobile-friendly templates.
- Track your results and reports in real time interactions to make changes in no time.
- Manages your contact’s list by uploading them online and Constant Contact will manage and outlook your bounces, inactive emails, and unsubscribes.
- A/B testing and live support are also available.
- Limited automation but helpful in engaging customers, maintaining strong customer relations and driving more sales.
17. Keap
Price: Paid
InfusionSoft rebranded itself to Keap in 2019, as part of a move to diversify their target market, and split their main offering into a few different plans. The foundation is still a robust sales CRM with task management, pipeline automation, and other advanced features.
Keap Grow includes basic web sign-up forms, email segmentation, personalization, basic CRM functionality, and one-time-payment processing. Keap Pro includes recurring payments, sales pipelines in the CRM, A/B testing, and full integrations.
Infusionsoft includes a full-fledged ecommerce solution, fully-featured sales pipeline CRM, custom user roles, affiliate management, and more.
All plans are available for a 30-day free trial.
Key Features:
- Email Analytics.
- Pipeline Automation.
- Product Recommendations.
- Email Templates.
- Segmentation & Personalization.
- Native Sales CRM (InfusionSoft).
- Email Builder.
- Marketing Automation Workflows.
- Revenue/ROI Reporting.
- A/B Testing.
- Multi-User Accounts.
- Ecommerce Integration / Behavioral Targeting (Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce).
- Native Payment Gateway (InfusionSoft)
- Task Management.
18. MailerLite
Price: Free and Paid
MailerLite is simple and easy to use, has one of the best sets of email newsletter templates, fantastic customer support.
It helps with a bunch of things one would need help with when it comes to designing and implementing all of the strategies your team came up with when it comes to your email marketing campaign. One of the most helpful things MailerLite can do (albeit not its best feature), is creating PDF brochures that can be shared amongst customers.
Which can enhance your marketing efforts. In short, MailerLite is perfect for freelancers of all kinds (writers, designers, bloggers, etc), nonprofits, and, as I’ve already mentioned, SMEs.
Key Features:
- As I said, MailerLite is a feature-packed tool that can help you reach your end goals.
- You will also get a landing page builder, pop-ups, and even embeddable web forms.
- And of course, there are all the classic integrations, email automation tools, and anything one would expect from their email marketing software.
- Want to have a separate unsubscribe page? There is a builder for that.
- Customer service is strong as well, with a 24/7 agent ready to assist and both email and live support.
- You’ve got your editors, your newsletter templates, a file manager, and a subscription manager that can help you track and trace what your users love or love to hate.
19. Drip
Price: Paid
Drip is a popular email marketing automation service for eCommerce stores.
It features multichannel touch-points to reach customers by sending emails and SMS text messages. Their specialty is to allow you t store and mange users based on their interactions on your website. Their API script allows you to collect the user data and store it in tags, events, and custom fields.
Furthermore, their automation workflow builder helps you automate the process of reaching out to customers at the most impactful time based on their behavior during the buying journey. With advanced personalization, you can use the clients’ data to create custom discount codes, product recommendations, price-drop notifications, and more.
If you want to integrate your email marketing service with an eCommerce solution like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Shopify, then Drip is the best Mailchimp alternative with several integrations.
20. Sendinblue
Price: Free and Paid
Sendinblue is an affordable, user-friendly email marketing software but that’s not all.
It’s also an all-in-one sales and marketing toolbox. Alongside all the necessary email marketing tools, you’ll also get marketing automation, CRM, SMS, Chat, Shared Inbox and Facebook ads.
Advantages as compared Mailchimp:
A robust email deliverability infrastructure to help land your emails in the inbox
Transactional emails included in each plan: You can send transactional emails (like order confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets, etc.) over Sendinblue’s SMTP server as part of your monthly plan.
With Mailchimp, transactional emails are a paid add-on to your monthly plan.
Pricing based on the number of emails, not contacts: Sendinblue lets you store unlimited contacts across all its plans. No matter how big your email list grows, its size won’t impact the pricing.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, charges per contact stored. As one user describes Sendinblue: “No need to worry about growing your database and seeing your costs explode.”
Key Features:
- Dynamic personalization
- Unlimited subscribers
- Advanced list segmentation
- Customizable email templates
- Easy to set up double opt-in
- Advanced analytics
- Email subscription forms
- Drag-and-drop email builder & HTML editor
- Native integrations with WordPress and other CMS
- A/B testing
21. GetResponse
Price: Paid
While GetResponse offers services for both small and enterprise businesses, they thrive when providing email marketing solutions to small businesses. They boast over 500 responsive email templates and have a drag-and-drop email editor that’s both easy to use and appreciated by their customers.
Though it’s important to mention: The ability to create emails through the drag-and-drop email builder isn’t as robust as when customers edit emails through the code.
While they supply many great CRM and eCommerce integrations, GetResponse limits many of its advanced features to lists of a certain size.
These limits might make it difficult for small business email marketers to grow their email strategy over time.
22. Campaign Monitor
Price: Paid
Campaign Monitor is an internationally trusted email provider with over a decade of experience giving customers the tools and support they need to feel confident in their email marketing strategy. Customers get the most out of our responsive template library, as well as our drag-and-drop email builder. These tools make it easy to start sending beautiful, engaging emails to your audience quickly.
Plus, our visual journey builder makes advanced automations much more approachable, giving time-strapped marketers the ability to create sophisticated campaigns they might not be able to do otherwise. And with offices around the globe, customers in any timezone are able to connect with our support team — a frequent complaint among Mailchimp users and resolve their issues.
If you need an ESP to serve as an all-in-one marketing platform, Campaign Monitor might not be the best fit for you or your email strategy.
Similarly, if you have intricate and complex automation and personalization needs for a wide and varied audience, one of our partner enterprise solutions might be a better tool to help you reach your email marketing goals. But if you want to get the most out of your email strategy, receiving features and support from teams focused on and dedicated to email first and foremost, Campaign Monitor is your way to go.
23. Sender
Price: Free and Premium
If you’re looking for a Mailchimp alternative that’s easy to use, definitely take a look at Sender.
This tool offers a ton of features, and we will discuss those in a bit. However, the most enticing aspect of Sender is the fact that it’s free plan offers every single feature available in the paid plans.
The only catch is that you’re limited to 2,500 subscribers, and that there will be a Sender branding on your emails.
Feature wise, Sender comes with an email builder as well as email templates that you can use.
You also get support for A/B testing, complex automation workflows, integrations with ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce, as well as CMS such as WordPress and Magneto.
Therefore, Sender is great for you if you have an online store. Analytics are also available so you can get a good idea on how well your email marketing campaigns are working, this is especially useful for A/B testing.
Overall, Sender is a good Mailchimp alternative for people who are on a tighter budget.
Pros:
- Automation workflows
- Free tier offers all paid features as well
- Integration with e-commerce and CMS platforms
- Support for A/B testing
Cons:
- Not as feature rich as some other options on this list
24. AWeber
Price: Paid
AWeber is also the best alternative to MailChimp if you are running a small or medium-sized business.
The unique part about AWeber is that it provides ready to use stock photos. AWeber is a great tool for creating brand awareness, engaging customers, and customizing email marketing campaigns.
Although they provide a free trial for 30 days which includes unlimited sending of campaigns, it becomes more expensive as the list increases.
Key Features:
- High customer support services.
- Analyze, update, and improve your emails using split testing, email delivery rate, and email tracking.
- Automated email newsletters, HTML templates, drag-drop editor for ease of use.
- Collect subscribers using sign up forms, integrations, API’s, by importing a list, etc.
- The AWeber mobile app is also available to manage your account whenever you need it.
- Manage your subscribers by creating segments and targeting your audience.
AWeber has categorized its pricing plans according to the number of subscribers.
It mainly offers five different pricing plans starting from $19 per month and if your need is much higher than that then custom plans are also available.
25. Jilt
Price: Paid
Jilt is an email marketing provider that specializes in ecommerce stores. With robust integrations, analytics, advanced segmentation, and behavioral targeting out of the box, it’s a perfect partner for ecommerce stores that want to do more with email.
So far, it has native integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads.
(If you’re wondering which solution to choose for your store, check out comparison post on WooCommerce vs Shopify.)
Key Features:
- A/B Testing.
- Email Templates.
- Segmentation & Personalization.
- Multi-User Accounts.
- Email Analytics.
- Marketing Automation Workflows
- Website Tracking
- Product Recommendations.
- Automated Discount Flows.
- Ecommerce Integration / Behavioral Targeting
- Email Builder.
- Phone Support for All Plans.
- Revenue/ROI Reporting.
Conclusion
That’s pretty much it! So, there are Best Mailchimp Alternatives.
If you have any other favorite Best Mailchimp Alternatives then don’t forget to share them with us in the comment below. Also, if you liked this article, Share on your favorite Social media platform.
Source:
- https://kinsta.com/blog/mailchimp-alternatives/
- https://moosend.com/blog/mailchimp-alternatives/
- https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/top-10-best-mailchimp-alternatives/
- https://www.omnisend.com/mailchimp-alternative/
- https://beebom.com/best-mailchimp-alternatives/
- https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/mailchimp-alternatives/