Equipment vs. Mailchimp: Which is finest? [2025]

What do Lil Jon, Matthew McConaughey, and Mandy Moore have in widespread? The widespread thread is not backing vocals on “Get Low” or cameos in Interstellar—it is truly e mail advertising. All of them use Equipment (previously ConvertKit). And whereas it would not make fairly as catchy of an anecdote, the Georgia Museum of Artwork, Jittery Joe’s Espresso, and a model of child sun shades known as Babiators all use Mailchimp.

Equipment is constructed before everything for “manufacturers of 1,” like authors, artists, performers, and—above all—on-line creators. And whereas Mailchimp just about targets everybody, it is best identified for serving small companies, businesses, and direct-to-consumer eCommerce manufacturers.

In the event you match into one of many above demographics, take into account it a robust early trace as to which course it’s best to go in. However there are many edge instances and have variations to contemplate too, particularly when you have a particular use case in thoughts to your e mail advertising.

I’ve used Mailchimp for years on behalf of purchasers, and I just lately migrated one in every of my facet initiatives over to Equipment to benefit from their “free till 10,000 subscribers” plan. On this article, I will examine the options of each apps so you may work out which is sensible for you.

Desk of contents:

Equipment vs. Mailchimp at a look

Here is a high-level overview of the distinction between these two instruments:

• Equipment is finest for creators who need to monetize their e mail record. With distinctive development and income-generating options like paid suggestions, sponsored adverts, and cross-promotion with different newsletters, it is unmatched for content material creators and solo entrepreneurs.

• Mailchimp is finest for small companies on the lookout for a whole advertising suite. With SMS campaigns, social media scheduling, AI-powered automations, and sturdy eCommerce instruments, it is excellent for groups managing multi-channel advertising efforts.

Equipment is less complicated to work with, however Mailchimp is extra customizable

Imagine it or not, Mailchimp—a famously beginner-friendly platform with a monkey emblem—has a steeper studying curve than Equipment. Mailchimp is not onerous to make use of by any means, however Equipment presents a extra easy expertise and makes it easier to rapidly ship stunning emails to your record and keep away from getting caught tinkering together with your e mail advertising for hours.

My favourite instance of that is Equipment’s Guidelines characteristic. With most e mail platforms, it’s a must to assemble a full automation sequence even if you happen to simply need to do one thing easy, like mechanically eradicating a tag from sure customers. Equipment places these easy “if this, then that” automations into their very own class and allows you to set them up with only a few clicks.

To do that in Mailchimp, there are many choices to wade by means of: you should title a brand new visible automation, select from a bunch of triggers and actions, and assessment your “circulation settings.” It is an excessive amount of horsepower for such a easy activity.

After all, if you happen to truly need to create a posh visible automation with a number of triggers and actions, Mailchimp’s setup is precisely what you need. Wish to add if/else guidelines, look ahead to sure triggers, ship SMS messages as an alternative of emails, or combine Meta Customized Viewers or webhook information? Mailchimp can do it. Whereas Equipment has a visible automation builder, it isn’t as highly effective or customizable as what Mailchimp presents.

If you’re designing and sending emails, you may see one thing related at play: Equipment makes the method sooner and simpler, however Mailchimp has extra choices.

Equipment’s small collection of templates—particularly the creator-produced choices in its market—are attractive and straightforward to edit. In the event you love tinkering together with your e mail designs, nevertheless, you would possibly discover Equipment’s editor restrictive: you may add a lot of widgets and a handful of prebuilt layouts, however you may’t create your individual multi-column format from scratch.

Mailchimp is kind of the other. You get unrestricted drag-and-drop freedom, which is nice—however the facet impact is that you simply would possibly find yourself making a cluttered design that does not show properly in your customers’ inboxes. Mailchimp’s 200+ templates are stable, however they are not fairly as polished as Equipment’s.

Mailchimp is a one-stop store for advertising, whereas Equipment is all about serving to creators earn cash

If there’s one space the place Mailchimp and Equipment are most differentiated, it is right here.

Mailchimp helps you to run just about your entire advertising efforts from its platform, which means customers with primary wants would possibly have the ability to use Mailchimp for his or her total advertising stack. Equipment, however, has little interest in serving to you schedule Instagram posts. As an alternative, it focuses on a narrower set of options that show you how to develop and monetize your record.

Let’s begin with Mailchimp. Along with emails, Mailchimp can even work as your advertising hub for:

• SMS advertising

• Google remarketing adverts

• Social media posts

• Pop-up varieties

• Touchdown pages

• Web sites

• Surveys

Mailchimp features a social media scheduler and a advertising calendar, so it is well-equipped for managing your social media campaigns.

If design is not your strongest skillset, you would possibly profit from Mailchimp’s Inventive Assistant, which makes use of AI to spin up designs impressed by your model colours and typography. You may choose the format you need (like Instagram Story or Fb advert), animate the design with one click on, and save to your design library to be used in your campaigns.

SMS is a massively essential channel for a lot of small companies, particularly anybody coping with appointment reminders, bodily product deliveries, or loyalty packages. Mailchimp helps you to run SMS packages to ship product reductions, transactional follow-ups, and customer support messages. It is a paid add-on, however a reasonably cheap one, with credit beginning at $20 for 1,000 messages. You may as well create automations that set off each emails and SMS messages at completely different touchpoints.

It is astonishing how few of the above options are current in Equipment. You will not discover any point out of SMS, social posting, or Google Advertisements administration as you scroll by means of Equipment’s options. As an alternative, you will discover an ecosystem of options that work collectively that can assist you develop and monetize your record.

Listed here are the core elements of Equipment’s creator ecosystem:

• Creator Profile: A touchdown web page that tells customers about you, hosts your content material and merchandise, and lets individuals join your record.

• Suggestions: A characteristic that allows you to cross-promote your publication with different creators.

• Paid Suggestions: You will get paid for recommending different Equipment creators in your publication.

• Paid Newsletters: Flip your publication right into a product and promote entry to it.

• The Equipment Sponsor Community: Let Equipment discover advertisers and place adverts in your publication.

• Equipment Commerce: Promote, host, and ship digital merchandise to your viewers with one-time and recurring cost choices.

• Ideas: Let readers assist you on a one-off foundation with ideas.

Equipment has accomplished a formidable job of really listening to what creators want, after which constructing these issues. Consequently, a lot of Equipment’s development and monetization options are distinctive to its platform and can be onerous to duplicate elsewhere. When you may most likely arrange a half-baked model of Equipment’s options your self, it might be messier and costlier than simply utilizing Equipment.

As cool as all of Equipment’s creator options are, it is essential to level out that they are actually optimized for digital merchandise, not bodily merchandise. You may promote easy bodily merchandise too, and Equipment does have a Shopify integration if you wish to attempt to hack one thing collectively, however that is not likely the aim of the platform.

Mailchimp is not as highly effective for eCommerce advertising as rival platforms like Klaviyo, but it surely’s a significantly better wager than Equipment if you happen to run a web based store and want an e mail instrument for following up with clients, sending transactional emails, and selling merchandise primarily based on buy historical past.

Mailchimp is a better option if AI and analytics are essential

Equipment would not provide any AI options aside from a topic line generator, making it an outlier amongst e mail advertising platforms nowadays. It is also not an ideal possibility if you happen to love digging into information and analytics: Equipment’s Creator plan solely presents primary analytics, although if you happen to improve to the Creator Professional plan, you get entry to an Insights Dashboard that gives in-depth analytics.

Mailchimp, however, presents its total menu of analytics options—together with customized reporting—on its mid-range Commonplace plan. It additionally embeds information insights all through the platform in a means that is truly helpful. A very good instance is a characteristic known as “anomaly detection” that mechanically highlights when you will have emails that considerably underperform and suggests subsequent steps.

You additionally get entry to a robust menu of reporting options with Mailchimp, together with a advertising dashboard providing high-level visualizations that present how your numerous campaigns have carried out.

Mailchimp has been fairly aggressive about integrating AI into its platform. Like most legacy apps that bolt on AI options, the result’s a combined bag by way of its sensible affect.

Let’s begin with one of the best half: AI-powered automations. Creating detailed automations manually is tedious work, from mapping out the steps of the automation to writing out the precise e mail content material. And discovering an automation template that completely fits your use case is not all the time doable. Mailchimp’s “AI-powered flows” deal with each the automation itself and the accompanying emails.

It is an ideal idea, though presently there are solely three AI-powered flows accessible: Welcome new contacts, Recuperate deserted carts, and Recuperate misplaced clients.

Mailchimp additionally has a lot of AI options that goal to streamline the artistic facet of e mail advertising. Whereas this sounds good, it is tough to get proper in follow: Mailchimp’s AI-generated designs aren’t as good as its templates, and its AI author can wrestle to nail your model’s tone of voice. Like every LLM-produced content material, it is okay for breaking by means of author’s block—however you most likely need to give it a critical edit earlier than sending it out to your record.

Equipment has one of the best free plan within the business, and its plans scale higher

Normally, free e mail advertising plans are designed to make you hit limits rapidly so that you’re pressured to improve. Mailchimp is an effective instance: its free plan caps your record at 500 contacts and your month-to-month sends at 1,000/month, which signifies that you would possibly solely have the ability to ship a pair emails monthly. You do not get any e mail automations, both—Mailchimp used to supply restricted free automations however just lately eliminated that characteristic.

Equipment is completely different. Its E-newsletter plan is free for as much as 10,000 subscribers and contains limitless e mail sends, limitless touchdown pages, stable segmentation options, and one automated e mail sequence. You even get superior options like A/B testing, conditional e mail content material, and opt-in incentives. Have a listing of hundreds of subscribers? Wish to ship tens of hundreds of emails monthly? No drawback—it is all free.

If you’re able to improve, Equipment’s Creator plan begins at $29/month for as much as 1,000 contacts and contains limitless automations together with extra promotional instruments that can assist you develop your record. The Creator Professional plan, at $59/month for 1,000 contacts, provides subscriber engagement scoring, superior analytics, and Fb customized audiences. You may as well add limitless customers to your account on the Creator Professional plan.

Mailchimp’s entry-level paid plans are a bit cheaper than Equipment’s, however they’re additionally much less beneficiant. There is a low-cost Necessities plan beginning at $13/month for 500 contacts, which is good if you happen to want a worth level between “free” and “premium,” but it surely’s fairly restricted: your e mail sends are capped at 5,000/month, your automations can solely be 4 steps lengthy, and options like segmentation, reporting, and optimization are virtually nonexistent. Mailchimp’s Commonplace plan prices $20/month for 500 contacts or $45/month for 1,500 contacts. It additionally removes most of the restrictions of the Necessities plan and opens up entry to the Mailchimp advertising suite, although you continue to do not get entry to limitless sends.

When you rise up into larger subscriber ranges, Mailchimp loses its pricing edge. For five,000 contacts, you will pay $100/month for Mailchimp’s Commonplace plan however solely $79/month for Equipment’s Creator plan.

Each have loads of integrations—and hook up with much more apps by means of Zapier

You most likely will not have bother discovering the integrations you want with both Mailchimp or Equipment. In the event you use Mailchimp, you will get entry to 300+ apps. Equipment presents a bit much less at 130+, however you will discover extra on the Equipment App Retailer.

With Zapier, you may join each Mailchimp and Equipment to hundreds of different apps, creating absolutely automated methods to your e mail advertising. For instance, you may mechanically summarize marketing campaign efficiency, draft personalised follow-up emails utilizing AI, or section contacts primarily based on sentiment evaluation. It is extra than simply app-to-app connections—it is full AI orchestration that turns your advertising workflows into clever, hands-free methods.

Be taught extra about the right way to automate Mailchimp and the right way to automate Equipment, or use one in every of these pre-made workflows to get began.

Equipment vs. Mailchimp: Which do you have to select?

In the event you’re nonetheless weighing your choices, listed here are some remaining ideas that can assist you resolve.

Go along with Equipment if you happen to’re a solo creator targeted on monetization. Its unbeatable free plan (as much as 10,000 subscribers), creator-specific options like paid newsletters and sponsor networks, and beginner-friendly interface make it excellent for authors, coaches, and on-line entrepreneurs who need to generate profits from their e mail lists with out getting slowed down in complicated instruments.

Go along with Mailchimp if you happen to want a complete e mail advertising platform. Whereas its free plan is extra restricted, Mailchimp’s paid plans provide you with highly effective automation capabilities, AI options, SMS advertising, and stable eCommerce instruments. Its in depth integrations and detailed analytics make Mailchimp a sensible choice for small companies that need to handle all their advertising efforts from one platform.

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This text was initially printed in August 2019 by Emily Esposito and has additionally had contributions from Amanda Pell and Bryce Emley. The latest replace was in August 2025.