Affiliate disclosure: This review contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This never influences our scores — see our testing methodology.

Our Mailchimp Review Verdict: 4.1 / 5

★★★★☆

Our mailchimp review finds Mailchimp remains the biggest name in email marketing for a reason: polished templates, the Creative Assistant’s AI design help, strong ecommerce integrations, and ~99% deliverability. But the price hikes of recent years are real — contact-based pricing that bills you for unsubscribed contacts unless you archive them makes growing lists expensive fast. The free plan is genuinely useful, yet limited enough to push you toward paid tiers quickly.

Best for: ecommerce stores, design-conscious brands, and tiny lists that can live on the free tier.

Try Mailchimp Free

Free plan: 250 contacts · 500 sends/month · No credit card required

Quick facts: Free plan: 250 contacts, 500 sends/mo | Acuizz rating 4.1/5 | ~99% deliverability | Paid plans from $13/mo.

Pricing & Plans

Mailchimp prices per contact — and that single fact dominates everything else about its pricing. Four tiers, all scaling with list size:

Plan	Price (500 contacts)	What’s included
Free	$0	250 contacts, 500 sends/month, 1 audience, basic templates, Mailchimp branding
Essentials	From $13/mo	500 contacts included, 5,000 sends/month, 3 audiences, remove branding, A/B testing, 24/7 email + chat support
Standard	From $20/mo	500 contacts included, 6,000 sends/month, 5 audiences, Customer Journey builder, retargeting ads, advanced insights
Premium	From $350/mo	10,000-contact minimum, 150,000 sends/month, predictive segmentation, multivariate testing, phone support, unlimited audiences

What it actually costs as you grow (Standard plan, monthly billing):

• 5,000 contacts → ~$100/mo (Essentials ~$75)
• 10,000 contacts → ~$135/mo (Essentials ~$110; Premium starts at $350)
• 25,000 contacts → ~$310/mo (Essentials ~$270; Premium ~$620)

Hidden cost — read this: Mailchimp bills you for unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts unless you archive them. A list of 10,000 “contacts” with 3,000 unsubscribed still bills at the 10,000 tier until you archive the unsubscribed ones. Archiving is free and easy, but many users never do it and overpay for months. None of its rivals bill this way.

Saving money: pay annually and save roughly 20%. Verified nonprofits get 15% off. Paid plans include a 14-day free trial. Pricing checked October 2026 — always confirm current plans on mailchimp.com.

Ease of Use

Mailchimp’s dashboard is polished and modern, though it has grown busier over the years as features piled up. New users can build and send a first campaign in roughly 40 minutes in our testing — slower than Constant Contact, faster than a power tool like ActiveCampaign. The guided campaign builder (regular email, automation, landing page, ad) keeps choices clear.

Contact management uses the “audience” model — each audience is a separate list, and contacts duplicated across audiences count (and bill) multiple times on some plans. Keep everything in one audience with tags and segments unless you have a real reason to split. This is the single most common Mailchimp billing mistake we see.

Bottom line: friendly enough for beginners, but the audience model and plan complexity reward a careful setup. Read the pricing section twice before importing your list.

Templates & Creative Assistant

This is Mailchimp’s crown jewel. The template library is the most polished in the industry — modern, varied, genuinely attractive designs across industries, all mobile-responsive. The drag-and-drop editor is smooth, with good image handling and content blocks.

The Creative Assistant is the standout: an AI design tool that pulls your brand assets (logo, colors, imagery) and auto-generates on-brand designs for emails, social posts, and ads. For a small brand without a designer, it produces surprisingly good results and saves real time.

Honest caveat: the very best templates and full Creative Assistant output lean toward paid plans, and heavy customization can still require HTML knowledge for pixel-perfect control.

Automation

Automation quality depends entirely on your plan:

• Free & Essentials: basic automations — welcome emails, order notifications, abandoned-cart emails (single email, limited branching).
• Standard: unlocks the Customer Journey builder — visual multi-step workflows with branching rules, delays, and segmentation. This is where Mailchimp’s automation becomes genuinely competitive.
• Premium: adds predictive segmentation (AI-predicted purchase likelihood, lifetime value), advanced journey branching, and multivariate testing.

The Customer Journey builder is good — visual, logical, and well-integrated with ecommerce data. It doesn’t match ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo for depth, but for standard ecommerce flows (welcome → browse abandonment → cart recovery → post-purchase), it’s more than adequate. Our gripe: meaningful automation is paywalled behind Standard ($20+/mo), while Brevo includes a comparable builder from $18/mo with cheaper scaling.

Ecommerce Tools

Mailchimp’s Shopify integration is best-in-class: deep data sync, product recommendation blocks you can drop into emails, abandoned-cart automation, and post-purchase follow-ups. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Squarespace integrations are solid too.

Product recommendations (AI-suggested “you may also like” blocks) genuinely lift revenue per email in our experience, and the revenue reporting attributes sales back to campaigns clearly. If you run a Shopify store, Mailchimp’s ecommerce depth is a legitimate reason to choose it over simpler rivals — just weigh it against Klaviyo, the ecommerce specialist, if email is your primary revenue channel.

Deliverability

Mailchimp posts around 99% deliverability in independent tests — among the best in the industry. Authentication (SPF/DKIM) is handled automatically, the compliance team keeps the shared-IP pools clean, and the pre-send checklist flags spam-trigger words and missing elements.

Dedicated IPs are available on Premium for high-volume senders. For typical small-business volumes, deliverability is a non-issue — this is one area where Mailchimp’s scale works in your favor.

Customer Support

Here’s the sore spot: phone support exists only on Premium (from $350/mo). Everyone else gets email and chat — 24/7 on paid plans, but limited to 30 days on the Free plan. In our testing, chat responses were competent but slow during peak hours (30–60 minute waits aren’t unusual).

The knowledge base is extensive and well-written, and the Mailchimp Academy courses are genuinely useful. But if “call a human when stuck” matters to you, Constant Contact offers phone support from $12/mo — Mailchimp can’t touch that.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Best template library and AI Creative Assistant in the industry
• ~99% deliverability — top tier
• Excellent Shopify/ecommerce integration with product recommendations
• Genuine free plan to start with (250 contacts)
• Customer Journey builder is solid on Standard+
• Predictive segmentation on Premium is genuinely advanced
• Huge integration ecosystem (300+ apps)

Cons

• Bills unsubscribed contacts unless you archive them — hidden cost
• Contact-based pricing gets very expensive as lists grow
• No phone support below the $350/mo Premium plan
• Meaningful automation paywalled behind Standard+
• Contacts duplicated across audiences can bill multiple times
• Free plan is limited (1 audience, Mailchimp branding)

Mailchimp vs Alternatives

How Mailchimp compares to the two tools buyers weigh it against most:

Feature	Mailchimp	Constant Contact	Brevo
Starting price	$13/mo	$12/mo	$9/mo
Free plan	✓ 250 contacts	No (60-day trial)	✓ 300 emails/day
Pricing model	Per contact (incl. unsubscribed*)	Per contact	Per contact
Cost at 25k contacts	$270–620/mo	$280–425/mo	Much cheaper
Template quality	✓ Best in class	✓ Good	— Decent
Ecommerce depth	✓ Excellent	— Basic	✓ Good
Automation depth	Moderate	Basic–Moderate	Moderate–Strong
Phone support	No (Premium only)	✓ All plans	No (higher tiers)
Deliverability	~99%	97%	~98%
Acuizz rating	4.1 / 5	4.4 / 5	4.5 / 5

*Unsubscribed contacts bill until archived. Full breakdown: Constant Contact vs Brevo vs Mailchimp · Constant Contact review · Brevo review

Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Mailchimp

Mailchimp is best for…

• Ecommerce stores — especially on Shopify: product recommendations, cart recovery, and revenue attribution are excellent.
• Design-conscious brands — the best templates and AI Creative Assistant in the business.
• Tiny lists starting free — under 250 contacts, the free plan is genuinely useful.
• Businesses wanting predictive analytics — Premium’s AI segmentation is a real differentiator at scale.

You should avoid it if…

• Your list is large and growing on a budget — contact-based pricing (including unsubscribed contacts) makes Brevo dramatically cheaper.
• You want phone support without paying $350/mo — Constant Contact includes it from $12/mo.
• You want the simplest possible tool — Constant Contact is easier for non-technical owners.
• You need advanced automation cheaply — Brevo’s Standard tier gives you more for less.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Mailchimp charge for unsubscribed contacts?
A: Yes — this is the catch most people miss. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts toward your billable total unless you archive them. Archiving is free: regularly archive unsubscribed contacts to avoid paying for people who can’t receive your emails.

Q: Is Mailchimp still free?
A: Yes — the Free plan includes 250 contacts, 500 sends/month, and 1 audience, no credit card required. It’s genuinely free, but limited enough that most growing businesses upgrade within months.

Q: Why did Mailchimp get more expensive?
A: Several price increases since the Intuit acquisition raised per-contact pricing substantially, and features that were once standard moved to higher tiers. The product improved too (Creative Assistant, predictive segmentation), but the value equation shifted — which is why alternatives like Brevo now win on price.

Q: Is Mailchimp better than Constant Contact?
A: For templates, ecommerce, and deliverability, Mailchimp usually wins. For ease of use, phone support, and event tools, Constant Contact wins. See our head-to-head comparison for the full breakdown.

Q: Can I get phone support on a cheap Mailchimp plan?
A: No — phone support is exclusive to the Premium plan (from $350/mo with a 10,000-contact minimum). Essentials and Standard plans get 24/7 email and chat support only.

Final Verdict

Our mailchimp review awards Mailchimp 4.1/5. It’s still a genuinely good product — best-in-class templates, excellent ecommerce tools, and ~99% deliverability. The problem isn’t quality; it’s the price trajectory. Contact-based billing that includes unsubscribed contacts makes it the most expensive option on this page for growing lists, and the support tiers feel stingy below Premium.

Our advice: start on the free plan if your list is tiny, and archive unsubscribed contacts religiously if you upgrade. But if your list is growing past a few thousand contacts, price out Brevo before committing — the savings are usually dramatic. And if simplicity and phone support matter more than design polish, read our Constant Contact review.

Try Mailchimp free — 250 contacts

No credit card required. Test the templates, the Creative Assistant, and the Shopify integration yourself — that’s what we did.

Start Your Free Mailchimp Account

Pricing checked October 2026 — always confirm current plans on the vendor’s site.