Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the right first email platform for most small businesses and increasingly the wrong long-term one. That is a more useful summary than either the nostalgia or the backlash it usually attracts.

What it still does better than anyone: getting a non-marketer from zero to a decent-looking campaign. The template library, the editor and the onboarding are the most forgiving in the category, and the free tier — 500 contacts, 1,000 monthly sends — is enough to prove the channel works before spending anything. For a local business, a small nonprofit or a founder sending a monthly update, that is the whole requirement.

The problems arrive with scale and specialization. Pricing is contact-based and counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts on some plans, which produces bills that surprise people. Automation is capable but noticeably behind ActiveCampaign for branching logic, and its ecommerce triggers are a pale version of Klaviyo’s. Several tiers of features that competitors include as standard sit behind Standard ($20/mo at 500 contacts) or Premium ($350/mo).

Our guidance: start on Mailchimp if you have never run email marketing and want the shortest path to a first send. Move to Klaviyo when revenue attribution and catalog-driven flows start mattering, or to ActiveCampaign when your automations outgrow simple sequences. Staying on Mailchimp past that point is the most common way businesses in this category overpay.