Mailchimp Review: I tested it across 8 areas

Mailchimp is arguably the most popular email marketing platform worldwide. In fact, our own migration data backs this up – out of over 130 tools it was the most migrated-to tool. But does it merit this position?

After testing it across eight areas, I found the easiest email campaign builder I’ve ever used. Things get a bit more nuanced when it comes to AI features and advanced automation, which I’ve explained below. You can check out my full testing video here, or read on to see how Mailchimp stacks up.

Here’s a video of my latest Mailchimp test:

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What are Mailchimp’s pros/cons?

01How much does Mailchimp cost?

Mailchimp has four email marketing plans: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium.

The free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 monthly email sends. Essentials starts at $13/month for up to 500 contacts, Standard starts at $20/month for up to 500 contacts, and Premium starts at $350/month.

Standard is the plan I would expect most serious users to land on. Essentials is fine if you want basic email sending, but the AI and automation limits will be felt quickly.

Premium makes sense for larger teams that need priority support and advanced segmentation, while most owner-operated businesses will struggle to justify it.

I compared Mailchimp against Constant Contact, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign and HubSpot at list sizes from 500 to 50,000 contacts. MailerLite is cheaper at smaller list sizes, but it has less depth once you need stronger automation and reporting.

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot give you more automation power. They also cost more once you compare like-for-like plans, especially HubSpot when you need Professional-level automation.

That makes Mailchimp’s price easier to defend than its reputation suggests. In our switching data, cost is one of the main reasons companies leave Mailchimp, but in the current market the bill is reasonable if you value ease of use.

Score: 4/5. Fair pricing for the usability and feature set, although budget-driven newsletter senders can spend less elsewhere.

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02Building an email: 5/5

I rebuilt a Slack campaign from Really Good Emails inside Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor. This is the test where most email tools start slowing me down.

Mailchimp got out of the way. I reached about 90% of the original design in eight minutes, which is the fastest I have managed across HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend, Constant Contact and the other tools I have tested.

The small touches add up. Images can come from Canva, Instagram, Giphy, stock libraries or a file upload, and the block controls appear exactly where you expect them.

I kept thinking of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. At no point did I have to stop and wonder where a setting lived.

The limitation is still the nature of a template editor. If you want developer-level control over every breakpoint and interaction, you will eventually hit a wall.

Most teams choosing Mailchimp will not care. They want attractive campaigns that do not take half a day to build.

Score: 5/5. The easiest email builder I have tested.

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03AI and the Claude connector: 3/5

Mailchimp takes a different approach to AI campaign creation.

Some tools let you drop in a prompt and generate the template, design and copy in one go. Mailchimp still asks you to pick a template first, then use Intuit Assist inside the editor to generate or reshape content block by block.

I have mixed feelings about that. The slower approach produces more usable campaigns, because one-shot AI builders usually give you something 80% finished and then leave you rebuilding half of it anyway.

Mailchimp’s AI can generate text variants, suggest subject lines and populate content blocks. The article summary block was the best example: I gave it a URL, and it pulled in a sensible title, summary and image.

The downside is maturity. The AI still feels close to a writing assistant, when I wanted it to critique the email, suggest a better structure and tell me how to improve clicks.

Mailchimp does have an Optimize tab, but the suggestions I saw were generic. Useful, yes. Strategic, less so.

The Claude connector was more interesting, and more awkward.

I asked Claude whether it could create a Mailchimp campaign directly. It initially looked limited to analytics questions, campaign plans and rendered content, rather than building real campaigns or automations.

Then I pushed it. Claude created a multi-channel plan for a coffee roastery, opened it in Mailchimp, and Mailchimp imported four email drafts plus a social post.

The workflow is backwards, but the outcome was useful. I had editable drafts in Mailchimp rather than a plan trapped in a chat window.

That gave me more confidence in where this is going. It was still odd that I could not simply ask for one campaign and have it created cleanly.

Mailchimp’s native Analytics AI is likely more useful day to day. I asked it to summarise campaign performance for the last 30 days, and it returned a plain-English analysis with key insights and recommendations.

The test account had almost no data, so I could not judge the quality of the insight at scale. The format is right though, and most small teams will get more from this than exporting reports into Claude.

Score: 3/5. Useful AI support inside the workflow, but campaign creation and strategic critique need to mature.

04Deliverability defaults: 5/5

For deliverability, I created a campaign using Mailchimp’s default settings and sent it to Mail Tester.

The raw score came back as 5/10, which looked worse than it was. Three missing points were caused by my test domain not having a DMARC policy, which was my fault rather than Mailchimp’s.

One more point came from Google Fonts links that blocked the tester’s crawler. Those links were not broken for a real recipient.

After adjusting for those test-account issues, the campaign scored 9/10. The HTML structure and SpamAssassin checks were clean, which is what I wanted to see.

The only caveat is that default infrastructure cannot rescue a bad sender. Your own deliverability still depends on authentication, list quality and whether people want the emails you send.

Score: 5/5. Strong defaults, with no obvious template or spam-filter problems in my test.

05Automation flows: 3/5

I built a three-email welcome sequence from Mailchimp’s “Welcome new contacts” automation template.

The builder felt as intuitive as the email editor. I added a one-day delay, created a split path, added extra emails and checked the conditional logic without needing help documentation.

The condition options were better than I expected. You can branch based on contact details and behaviour, including whether someone has interacted with earlier campaigns.

This is plenty for most small businesses building welcome flows, nurture sequences and basic customer follow-up. It is also calmer than some of the more advanced builders, which can feel like opening the wiring cupboard.

The trade-off is power. I could not ask AI to critique the flow, build branches for me or advise how many emails each path should contain.

I also did not see first-party actions for third-party apps inside the automation builder. In other platforms, I can add a row to Google Sheets or update a Shopify contact directly from the journey.

Mailchimp may handle some of this through native integrations or Zapier. I prefer having those actions inside the builder, because it keeps the automation logic visible.

Score: 3/5. Easy and capable for simple flows, but less powerful than ActiveCampaign or HubSpot.

06Customer support: 5/5

I tested support with a deliberately awkward billing question.

The question had a false premise, required product knowledge and pushed the agent towards recommending a lower bill for me. That is a decent way to find out whether you are talking to a script.

The chat form was annoying because it capped the first message at 170 characters. I had to compress the question before it would send.

Within four minutes, an agent corrected the false premise: billing is based on the peak contact count during the billing cycle. She did not answer the second part immediately, so I asked again.

By the eight-minute mark, she recommended archiving contacts rather than deleting them, so the data would be retained without counting towards billing.

That is the right answer, and it would make Mailchimp less money.

Score: 5/5. Fast access to a useful human answer, with only a small stumble on the first reply.

Rating Details

I rated Mailchimp across the eight areas I tested in September 2026.

Email builder

★★★★★

5.0 / 5

I rebuilt a designed Slack campaign in eight minutes, faster than I have managed in any other email marketing tool. The trade-off is that advanced designers will still hit the limits of a template editor.

AI and Claude connector

★★★

3.0 / 5

Intuit Assist is useful for block-level copy, summaries and subject lines. The Claude connector created an importable multi-campaign plan, but direct campaign creation felt awkward and the optimisation advice was still generic.

Deliverability

★★★★★

5.0 / 5

The default test campaign scored 9/10 in Mail Tester after adjusting for my missing DMARC policy and a crawler-blocked Google Fonts link. HTML and SpamAssassin checks were clean.

Pricing

★★★★

4.0 / 5

Mailchimp is cheaper than HubSpot and ActiveCampaign for simpler email marketing, while offering more depth than the lowest-cost newsletter tools. It loses a point because MailerLite and Brevo can be cheaper if price is the main constraint.

Automation

★★★

3.0 / 5

The automation builder is easy to use and strong enough for welcome sequences, delays, split paths and behavioural branches. It lacks the AI planning help and native third-party actions I would want for complex journeys.

Customer support

★★★★★

5.0 / 5

I reached a useful chat agent in eight minutes, and the answer corrected a false premise while recommending a billing approach that reduced the cost.

Mailchimp scored 34 out of 40 in total, which gives it a 4.3/5 star rating.

Who is Mailchimp best for?

Mailchimp is strongest for people who want email marketing to feel simple.

If you are an owner-operator, a small business or a non-technical marketer, that matters. Saving 30 minutes every time you send an email compounds quickly.

I would shortlist Mailchimp if your main work is newsletters, welcome sequences, product announcements, simple lead nurturing or early-stage eCommerce email. You will get attractive emails out quickly, and the learning curve is kind.

I would be more cautious if your business runs on CRM stages, sales pipeline data or complex automation logic. ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are better suited to those use cases, though both ask more from your budget and your team.

For eCommerce, Mailchimp is a good starting point. If you are running advanced Shopify or WooCommerce flows with SMS, push notifications and revenue attribution at the centre, Omnisend deserves a look.

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What are the best Mailchimp alternatives?

The right alternative depends on why Mailchimp feels wrong.

If ease of use is your main reason for choosing a tool, Mailchimp is the one I would test first. If automation depth matters more, start with ActiveCampaign.