Mailchimp

Verdict: pick Mailchimp for a newsletter or a list you message a few times a month; pick Klaviyo the moment emails need to know what someone bought.

What it does

Mailchimp is general-purpose email marketing: campaigns, a drag-and-drop editor, basic automations, landing pages, and audience management. It integrates with Shopify and other carts, and the Standard plan adds multi-step automation and behavioral targeting. The ecommerce features exist; they are shallower than Klaviyo’s and the Shopify sync is less granular.

Pricing (checked 20 October 2026, at 500 contacts)

• Free: 250 contacts, 500 sends a month (250 a day), one seat, Mailchimp branding.
• Essentials: $13/mo. Sends up to ten times your contact count, scheduling, A/B testing.
• Standard: $20/mo. Twelve times send allowance, multi-step automations, predictive segmentation, custom templates.
• Premium: $350/mo, includes 10,000 contacts, phone support.

Prices scale with contact count. A 14-day free trial covers Essentials and Standard. Nonprofits get 15% off; there is no general annual discount below 10,000 contacts.

Who it is for

Sellers who want a reliable, cheap way to send a monthly email to a few thousand people, and brands at the “newsletter” stage before purchase-triggered flows matter. It is also the right tool for a content list that is separate from the store’s customer list.

Who should skip it

Shopify stores that depend on abandoned-cart and post-purchase automation. The automations work, but Klaviyo’s are deeper and its data model is built for exactly that job. Paying for Standard to get close to Klaviyo’s free tier is the wrong trade.

Runs our store

Mailchimp handles a list in our stack that is not the storefront’s customer base: the audience we talk to about content and launches rather than orders. For that, the Essentials price is hard to beat.

The honest caveats

Contact counting includes unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts on some plans; clean your audience or you pay for ghosts. The free plan is small. Intuit’s ownership has brought steady price increases and more upsells inside the product.

Bottom line

Good tool, right price, wrong fit for a store’s core flows. No affiliate link; the vendor link is below.

See Mailchimp pricing