CurationWeb review
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is best when familiarity and integrations save real work
Mailchimp remains a sensible all-round choice, especially when your staff, agency and connected tools already use it. It offers more room to grow than a basic newsletter service, but its contact rules need active management as your audience expands.
Who should choose Mailchimp
- A business whose staff or agency already knows Mailchimp.
- A team that expects integrations and broader marketing features to matter.
- A moderate automation programme that does not need a CRM-first system.
- A buyer willing to keep audiences and contact states tidy.
What Mailchimp does well
- Familiar campaign creation and a large range of integrations.
- Useful segmentation, customer journeys and reporting.
- Forms, landing pages and several marketing tools in one account.
- Pay-as-you-go credits for some occasional senders.
- Clear guidance for importing contacts and authenticating a domain.
Mailchimp can reduce training and agency hand-off when it is already part of the business. That practical familiarity is a better reason to choose it than brand recognition alone.
What to weigh up
- Free is limited to 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends.
- Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts can still count until they are archived.
- The same person in separate audiences can make billing and suppression harder to manage.
- Costs rise noticeably as the list grows.
- Phone support and the deepest features sit on higher plans.
What Mailchimp costs in practice
Mailchimp has Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium plans, plus pay-as-you-go credits. The real cost depends on your contact tier, monthly sends, contact states, separate audiences and any overages.
Standard is the practical comparison point for a team that needs stronger automation and segmentation. Reprice the exact list and send frequency before buying. Archive inactive contacts deliberately rather than deleting the records that stop them being emailed again.
Before you switch
Map consent, tags, groups, custom fields and unsubscribes before importing. If you are leaving Mailchimp, export audiences, templates, automations, forms and suppression data separately. Moving contacts alone does not recreate the programme.
When another platform fits better
- MailerLite easier and usually better value for straightforward email marketing.
- Constant Contact stronger when events and live guidance matter most.
- Brevo better when send volume, SMS or transactional email drives the choice.
- Sender stronger for free capacity or occasional bursts.
- GetResponse better for funnels, webinars and deeper follow-up.
Verdict
Choose Mailchimp when its integrations and existing place in the business save enough switching work to justify the price. If you are starting a simple email programme from scratch, MailerLite is the better first option.