Best Mailchimp Alternatives in 2027: Five Options and How They Differ

Mailchimp is where most small businesses start with email, and for good reasons: the brand is familiar, the templates are good, the free tier gets you going, and the editor is forgiving. The reasons people leave are just as consistent. The price steps up as the list grows, including for people you never email. Features that used to be included moved to higher tiers. Seats are limited on lower plans. Audiences, the word Mailchimp uses for lists, are counted separately, so the same person in two audiences costs twice. And SMS, if you want it, is a separate product.

None of that makes Mailchimp a bad tool. It makes it a tool priced for a particular shape of business, and if your shape is different, one of the five below may fit better. We have tried to be fair. We make one of them, we say so, and we have left the dollar figures out of this post because they change; the email marketing pricing guide carries the figures we have verified, with the date.

How it prices: by subscriber count, in tiers, like Mailchimp but generally lower at the same list size, and with a free tier that allows more sends.

What is different: a cleaner editor, landing pages and forms included, automation available on the entry plan, and a straightforward interface that owners can run without training. Fewer integrations than Mailchimp and a thinner ecommerce layer, though Shopify and WooCommerce are covered.

Who it suits: newsletters, creators and small businesses that mostly send campaigns and want the same model as Mailchimp at a lower price. If your list is large but your sending is light, you still pay for the list.

How it prices: mainly by email volume, not contacts. You pay for the emails you send each month, and contacts are not metered on its email plans. This is the structural difference most people are looking for when they leave Mailchimp, and Brevo has offered it for years.

What is different: a built-in CRM, transactional email through the same account, SMS and WhatsApp as paid add-ons, and a free tier limited by daily sends rather than list size. The template library and editor are serviceable rather than beautiful, and some features that are included elsewhere sit on higher tiers.

Who it suits: businesses with a big list and modest sending, and anyone who wants marketing and transactional email in one place. The pricing can be harder to predict if your volume swings.

How it prices: by active profiles, with email and SMS priced separately and the SMS side metered by message. Costs rise quickly with list size, and Klaviyo is rarely the cheap option.

What is different: the deepest store integrations of the five, predictive analytics, product recommendations and a flow builder that was built around orders, carts and browsing from the start. Reporting is tied to revenue by default. Segments can use almost any store data.

Who it suits: online stores doing enough volume that the extra revenue from better targeting outweighs the price, and that have someone to run it. For a service business or a small shop it is more tool than you need.

How it prices: by contacts and sends together, with email and SMS in one plan and a free tier shaped by a small contact cap.

What is different: store-focused like Klaviyo, with pre-built ecommerce flows, product pickers in the editor and SMS and push notifications in the same workflows. Less depth in analytics and segmentation than Klaviyo, and a smaller ecosystem, but considerably simpler to set up. Strongest on Shopify.

Who it suits: small and mid-sized stores that want cart recovery, post-purchase flows and SMS in one place without a specialist running it.

How it prices: 25 credits per 1,000 emails sent, with contacts free and unlimited. Plans start at $20 a month, cancel any time, or 100 credits for $5 with no plan. The same credits pay for SEO, the website builder, audits and the marketing tools, and they never expire. This is our product, so weigh what follows accordingly.

What is different: the structural one is the price basis. A list that doubles costs nothing until you email it, and automation, segments, 19 templates and your own sending domain are open on every account including free. SMS and WhatsApp run on the same contacts and consent records from the $50 plan, as steps inside the same flows, with numbers bought and registered in the app. The trade-off is scope: Brainito is a marketing workspace that includes email, not an email specialist, so it has fewer third-party integrations than Mailchimp and less ecommerce depth than Klaviyo. Eleven ready flows, not dozens.

Who it suits: small businesses and agencies that want email, SMS, WhatsApp, a website, SEO and analytics on one login and one balance, and that would rather pay for what they send than for the list they hold. If you only want email and nothing else, one of the four above may be the simpler choice. The Mailchimp comparison sets the two side by side feature by feature.

• Count your sends, not your contacts. If you email a large list rarely, a send-based price (Brevo, Brainito) will usually beat a contact-based one (Mailchimp, MailerLite, Klaviyo). If you email a small list often, the contact-based tools can be cheaper.
• Decide whether SMS matters. If yes, prefer a tool where it shares the contact list and consent records rather than living in a separate product.
• Check what is gated. Automation, your own domain, seats and reporting are the usual tier boundaries. Make a list of the five features you use and check each vendor's plan page for where they sit.
• Run a real migration test. Export your list, import it, send a campaign to yourself and switch on one flow. An afternoon of testing tells you more than a month of reading.

Mailchimp remains a reasonable choice for many businesses. The point of an alternative is not that it is better in general; it is that it is priced and shaped for you.