Introduction
Mailchimp has been a household name in email marketing for over two decades. With millions of customers sending billions of emails annually, it remains the world's most recognized email marketing platform. But since Intuit's $12 billion acquisition in 2021, significant changes have left many marketers wondering: is Mailchimp still the best choice in 2025?
In this comprehensive review, we'll examine everything from Mailchimp's powerful features and intuitive interface to its increasingly complex pricing structure. Whether you're a small business owner just starting with email marketing or an established company considering a switch, this guide will help you determine if Mailchimp is the right fit for your needs.
Mailchimp Overview
Founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in Atlanta, Mailchimp has evolved from a simple email marketing tool into a comprehensive marketing platform. Today, it extends beyond email into SMS marketing, website building, social advertising, and customer relationship management.
The platform serves marketers of all sizes, from freelancers and small startups to enterprise-level organizations. Its core mission remains helping businesses design and send marketing emails, automate customer journeys, and analyze campaign performance.
Quick Stats: Mailchimp serves over 12 million users worldwide and is consistently rated as the #1 email marketing and automation platform based on customer numbers. The platform offers 300+ integrations and supports everything from basic newsletters to complex multi-channel marketing campaigns.
What's New in 2025
Mailchimp has introduced several updates this year. Automation features now go by "Flows," offering a modernized approach to email sequences. The interface includes new popup forms, enhanced content blocks with visibility icons for segment-specific display, and improved mobile email column stacking. Additionally, SMS now supports A/B testing, and new integrations with TikTok, Snapchat, and Google Leads allow contact syncing directly into your lists.
Key Features
Mailchimp offers an impressive array of tools designed to streamline your marketing efforts. Here's what you can expect:
Email Campaign Management
The drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy to create professional emails without any coding knowledge. You can add text, images, buttons, and more with just a few clicks. The platform offers customizable templates for newsletters, promotions, and announcements, plus access to Shutterstock photos directly within the editor.
Audience Segmentation
Mailchimp provides robust segmentation capabilities, allowing you to group contacts based on tags, personal details, activity, and acquisition source. This enables highly targeted campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments. The segment builder offers numerous conditions to make your targeting as specific as possible.
Analytics & Reporting
The platform delivers detailed analytics for tracking open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement. You'll find funnel visualizations, industry benchmarking, and performance reports that help optimize your marketing strategy. Higher-tier plans unlock predictive insights, such as likelihood to purchase.
Creative Assistant & AI Tools
Upload your logo, colors, and fonts, and Mailchimp's Creative Assistant generates email templates, social posts, and landing pages using your brand elements. The AI maintains basic brand consistency, though results often require some manual adjustments before campaigns feel fully authentic.
SMS Marketing
Available as an add-on to paid plans, SMS marketing allows you to reach customers directly on their phones. The feature now includes A/B testing capabilities, letting you optimize your text message campaigns alongside email efforts.
Ease of Use
Mailchimp's clean user interface is one of its strongest selling points. The left-side menu provides quick access to campaigns, audiences, automations, and reports. Most users find the overall navigation intuitive, especially for basic email marketing tasks.
The new drag-and-drop editor represents a significant improvement over the classic version, offering undo/redo options, various content blocks, and a smoother creative experience. Content elements like images, videos, surveys, and product blocks are easily accessible.
Learning Curve Note: While basic features are beginner-friendly, advanced capabilities like automation workflows, segmentation, and A/B testing can take time to master. Help documentation quality varies—some features have detailed guides with screenshots, while others provide only basic explanations.
Contact list management is generally straightforward, with easy importing and field mapping. However, list management across multiple audiences can be frustrating since Mailchimp siloes lists rather than allowing cross-list management. The platform recommends maintaining one primary audience with groups for optimal results.
Pricing Plans
Mailchimp offers four main pricing tiers, with costs scaling based on your contact count. Here's what you'll pay in 2025:
Free Plan
The free tier includes up to 500 contacts and basic email marketing features. However, it's significantly more limited than before—you won't get automations, A/B testing, or even email scheduling. It's suitable for testing the platform but quickly becomes restrictive for serious marketing efforts.
Essentials Plan
Starting at $13/month for 500 contacts, Essentials provides access to more templates, basic automation features, and 5,000 monthly emails. This plan includes 24/7 chat support and removes Mailchimp branding from emails. However, many users find it still quite restrictive for growing businesses.
Standard Plan
At $20/month for 500 contacts (scaling to around $100/month for 5,000 contacts), Standard unlocks the platform's most valuable features: dynamic content, send-time optimization, pre-built customer journeys, and predictive insights. This is Mailchimp's sweet spot for growing businesses that need serious automation capabilities.
Premium Plan
Starting at $350/month for 10,000 contacts, Premium delivers enterprise-level features including advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, comparative reports, unlimited users with role-based access, and phone support. The price tag is significant, and many experts suggest alternatives like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse may offer better value at this tier.
Pricing Warning: Mailchimp counts contacts across audiences separately—if the same email exists in two audiences, you pay twice. The platform also charges for inactive/cleaned contacts you can no longer email. These policies can significantly increase costs as your lists grow.
Automation & Customer Journeys
Mailchimp's automation capabilities have undergone significant changes. As of June 2025, the Classic Automation Builder was retired, with all automated emails now exclusively available through the Customer Journey Builder on paid plans.
Customer Journey Builder
The visual customer journey builder allows you to create sophisticated workflows with conditional logic and time delays. You can start from scratch or use pre-built journeys for common scenarios like abandoned cart recovery, welcome sequences, and re-engagement campaigns. The editor is user-friendly, letting you customize existing journeys or add new steps easily.
Automation Types
Available automations include welcome emails and onboarding sequences, abandoned cart reminders for e-commerce, order notifications and shipping updates, birthday and anniversary messages, re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers, and product recommendation emails based on purchase behavior.
Limitations to Consider
While automation is one of Mailchimp's strengths, it comes with caveats. Free plan users have no access to automations whatsoever. Even Essentials plan subscribers face restrictions on complex workflows. Users seeking highly advanced automation logic or complex conditional flows may find the platform limiting compared to specialized alternatives.
Integrations
Mailchimp boasts an impressive integration ecosystem with over 350 pre-built connections covering essential business tools. The integrations are organized into categories including e-commerce, analytics, social media, CRM, and more.
Popular Integrations
Key integrations include Shopify for e-commerce synchronization, WordPress for website and blog integration, Salesforce for CRM connectivity, Google Analytics for enhanced tracking, and social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. The Shopify integration is particularly powerful, enabling personalized product recommendations, abandoned cart reminders, and promotional emails based on shopping behavior.
Integration Quality
Users consistently praise the seamless connectivity with major platforms. The ability to automatically add customers from your online store to email lists, sync purchase data, and trigger behavior-based campaigns makes Mailchimp a solid choice for businesses already using popular e-commerce and marketing tools.
Pros & Cons
What We Like
- Intuitive Interface: Clean, user-friendly design that makes basic email marketing accessible to beginners
- Robust Template Library: Professional, customizable templates for various campaign types
- Powerful Automation: Customer Journey Builder offers sophisticated workflow capabilities
- Extensive Integrations: 350+ connections with popular business tools
- Comprehensive Analytics: Detailed reporting with actionable insights
- AI-Powered Features: Creative Assistant and smart optimization tools
- Brand Recognition: Industry-leading platform with proven reliability
What Could Be Better
- Escalating Costs: Prices increase quickly as contact lists grow
- Restrictive Free Plan: Limited to 500 contacts with no automation or scheduling
- Double-Charging for Contacts: Same email in multiple audiences counts as separate contacts
- Charging for Inactive Contacts: You pay for cleaned contacts you can no longer email
- Limited Free Plan Support: Only 30 days of email support, then nothing
- Complex Advanced Features: Steep learning curve for automation and segmentation
- List Management Issues: Siloed lists prevent cross-audience management
Top Alternatives to Consider
If Mailchimp's pricing or limitations don't fit your needs, several strong alternatives exist:
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
Brevo charges by emails sent rather than contacts stored, offering unlimited contacts on all plans. This makes it significantly more affordable for businesses with large lists but moderate sending volumes. It includes marketing automation, advanced segmentation, and built-in SMS marketing at reasonable prices.
MailerLite
Known for simplicity and value, MailerLite offers more reasonable pricing than Mailchimp with simpler list management. The free plan includes single trigger automation workflows, a landing page builder, and survey maker. There are no sending limits on paid plans, and you get unlimited users on advanced tiers.
ActiveCampaign
For businesses prioritizing advanced automation, ActiveCampaign offers more powerful workflow capabilities. While the interface has a steeper learning curve, the automation possibilities far exceed what Mailchimp provides, especially for complex customer journey mapping.
Constant Contact
Best for users seeking simple newsletters, event management, and responsive customer support. While it may lack Mailchimp's automation depth, it excels in ease of use and customer service quality.
Final Verdict
Mailchimp remains one of the most dependable email marketing platforms in 2025, offering an excellent balance of simplicity, automation capabilities, and analytics. The intuitive interface, professional templates, and extensive integration library make it a solid choice for small to midsize businesses looking to grow through email marketing.
Our Rating: 4.2/5 — Mailchimp excels in ease of use, template variety, and integration options. However, escalating costs, restrictive contact policies, and limited free plan features prevent it from earning a higher score.
Mailchimp Is Best For:
- Small businesses and startups just beginning with email marketing
- Users wanting an all-in-one marketing platform with email, automation, and CRM
- Businesses preferring a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface
- E-commerce stores needing robust Shopify/WooCommerce integration
- Marketers with smaller contact lists (under 5,000)
Consider Alternatives If:
- You have large, segmented audiences and want fair contact pricing
- You need highly advanced automation logic or complex conditional flows
- Budget is a primary concern and you need more features for less
- You want unlimited contacts with pay-per-email pricing
The bottom line? Mailchimp delivers excellent value for smaller lists and basic to intermediate marketing needs. As your business scales, carefully evaluate whether the increasing costs justify the features compared to alternatives that may offer better pricing structures for growing contact lists.
Ready to explore your options? Check out our comprehensive email marketing platform comparison to find the perfect solution for your business needs.