ActiveCampaign Vs. Mailchimp (2024 Comparison)

While both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are all-in-one email marketing software solutions, there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences between the platforms. Understanding these differences is critical.

Mailchimp has a solid reputation for being beginner friendly and budget friendly, which makes it popular among entrepreneurs and small businesses with limited marketing funds. While ActiveCampaign plans are generally priced higher than Mailchimp’s plans, ActiveCampaign delivers advanced automations, impressive customizability and a robust CRM, which makes the platform popular among medium to larger-sized businesses with more complex email marketing needs.

Mailchimp

4.8

Our ratings take into account a product's cost, features, ease of use, customer service and other category-specific attributes. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

Starting price

Free; $13 per month paid yearly

Free trial

One month

Standout features

Creative assistant, automated customer journeys and landing pages

Free; $13 per month paid yearly

One month

Creative assistant, automated customer journeys and landing pages

Editor's Take

Mailchimp was designed with ease of use in mind. The software features a drag-and-drop email design editor and over 100 email design templates that ensure anyone can create a professional-caliber email in mere minutes. You can also use Mailchimp to create landing pages and simple websites.

Other popular Mailchimp features include surveys, predicted demographics, social post scheduling, pop-up forms and a Customer Journey Builder for creating automated email campaigns. Mailchimp also lets you create and segment audiences for your campaigns and features performance insights and analytics that help you evaluate campaign effectiveness.

Mailchimp pricing is straightforward, and there is an affordable plan for every budget. The Forever Free plan allows you to manage up to 500 contacts and send up to 1,000 emails per month. Mailchimp’s budget-friendly paid plans start at just $13 per month for up to 500 contacts when paid yearly.

Learn more: Read our Mailchimp review.

Pros & Cons

• Beginner friendly
• Affordable starter plans
• 300-plus third-party integrations
• Landing page builder
• Behavioral targeting
• Includes basic website builder

• Plans can get pricey as your contact list grows
• SMS marketing is an add-on service
• Phone support only offered on Premium plan
• Limited features on free plan
• Email send limits on all plans

ActiveCampaign

4.4

Our ratings take into account a product's cost, features, ease of use, customer service and other category-specific attributes. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

Starting price

$29 per month paid yearly

Free trial

14 days

Standout features

850-plus marketing automation recipes, landing pages and e-commerce integrations reports

Learn More

Read Forbes' Review

$29 per month paid yearly

14 days

850-plus marketing automation recipes, landing pages and e-commerce integrations reports

Editor's Take

ActiveCampaign stands out from other email marketing platforms for its comprehensive marketing automation capabilities. Choose from more than 850 automation recipes to create effective automated email campaigns for nearly every buyer journey you can envision.

ActiveCampaign offers a broad suite of marketing features, including free contact migration services, split testing, landing pages, e-commerce integrations, lead scoring, conversion tracking, abandoned cart monitoring, analytics and reports, conditional content and lead attribution tools. SMS marketing is available as an add-on service.

As you might expect, ActiveCampaign plans are priced somewhat higher than Mailchimp plans. The starting ActiveCampaign Lite plan gives you up to 1,000 contacts for $29 per month. You can upgrade to higher tiers as your business needs grow.

Learn more: Read our ActiveCampaign Review.

Pros & Cons

• High email deliverability rate
• 150-plus email templates
• Advanced marketing automations
• Robust CRM
• Free contact migration service
• Excellent reporting and analytics

• No free plan
• SMS marketing is an add-on service
• Limited features on the Lite plan
• Short free trial
• Modest to steep learning curve

Mailchimp is a beginner-friendly email software option that offers a variety of affordable plans perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses with modest email marketing needs.

ActiveCampaign costs more than Mailchimp, but businesses with more advanced email marketing needs will appreciate that ActiveCampaign is somewhat more challenging to use, primarily due to its advanced features, including a full-fledged CRM and over 850 automation recipes.

-	ActiveCampaign	Mailchimp
Free Plan	No	Yes
Free Trial	14 days	One month*
Starting Price	$29 per month for up to 1,000 contacts (paid yearly)	$13 per month for up to 500 contacts (paid yearly)
Monthly Send Limits	10x to 15x contact limit (except on free trial)	1,000 to 15x contact limit
User Seats	One to 10	One to unlimited
Pre-Built Email Templates	150-plus	100-plus
Social Posting	Requires third-party app integration	✔
Email Scheduling	✔	✔
Pop-Up Forms	✔	✔
A/B Testing	✔	✔
Audience Segmentation	✔	✔
Reporting and Analytics	✔	✔
Built-In CRM	Advanced	Simple
SMS Marketing	Add-on feature	Add-on feature
Support	Chat, email and phone support on all plans	30-day email support on free plan; unlimited email and chat on all paid plans; phone support on Premium plan
Read Reviews	Read ActiveCampaign Review	Read Mailchimp Review

See MoreSee Less

*Mailchimp offers the first month free for its Essentials and Standard plans.

User Seats

Before selecting email marketing software for your business, you need to consider how many software users there will be on your team. Most software providers limit the number of users allowed on each plan.

The free Mailchimp plan comes with one user seat, while the Essentials plan includes three, the Standard plan includes five and the Premium plan allows unlimited user seats. The ActiveCampaign Lite plan includes one user seat, the Plus plan includes three, the Professional includes five and the Enterprise plan starts with only 10 user seats.

Email Send Limits

Email send capacity is another feature that varies by email software provider. Be sure to select a plan that will accommodate your email capacity needs. Most email marketing solutions, including Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, establish email send limits relative to the total number of contacts you manage through the platform.

With Mailchimp’s free plan, you can only send 1,000 emails per month. The Mailchimp Essentials plan allows you to send up to ten times your plan’s total contacts, while the Standard allows for 12 times and the Premium allows 15 times your total contact base. ActiveCampaign lets you send up to 10 times your plan’s total contacts for the Lite and Plus plans, 12 times for the Professional plan and 15 times for the Enterprise plan.

Email Design

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to create polished, professional email designs. Mailchimp offers more than 100 design templates, while ActiveCampaign has more than 150.

Emails developed with the Mailchimp free plan include Mailchimp branding, but you can remove that branding on paid plans. You can create dynamic email content with Mailchimp using merge tags stored in your audience profiles. Conditional content is available on every ActiveCampaign plan except Lite.

Social Marketing

All paid Mailchimp plans allow you to post on various social channels—including Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter)—from within the Mailchimp platform. ActiveCampaign does not allow you to post directly to social marketing channels from within the platform, but you can set up social posting by integrating with a third-party app.

Marketing Automation

Every Mailchimp plan includes access to a Classic Automations Builder that allows users to create simple automated email sequences, such as a multi-contact welcome email series or a pre-event or post-event email series.

Mailchimp also offers a more sophisticated automated Customer Journey Builder for paid plan users. Essentials plan users can use the Customer Journey Builder to create basic automated workflows that send relevant messages based on how customers interact with the brand. Standard and Premium plan users have access to the enhanced Customer Journey Builder that includes branching points for creating more complex automated personalized customer journeys.

While Mailchimp’s automation tools are adequate for those with basic needs, ActiveCampaign shines when it comes to creating more complex marketing automations. With ActiveCampaign’s advanced tools, you can personalize and tailor marketing messaging and email workflows to optimize the experience for your users and drive sales for your business.

ActiveCampaign has a drag-and-drop automations builder that lets users define more than 20 triggers for email marketing automations. The platform has more than 850 proven automation recipes—such as abandoned cart reminders, webinar reminders and post-meeting follow-ups—that simplify your marketing workflows for you. Set up if/else statements, timed and conditional wait actions and dynamic yes/no paths based on relevant contact interactions.

With ActiveCampaign, you can customize your automations based on your business needs and goals, automating each stage of your customer life cycle. This high degree of customization comes with a steep learning curve, which makes ActiveCampaign a better choice for seasoned email marketers with strong technical skills.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Mailchimp offers audience segmentation tools that will help you target your emails effectively. You can track where your contacts come from, tag your contacts for targeted messaging and reach out to contacts based on how they interact with various emails you send.

Mailchimp automatically ranks your contacts based on a five-star rating system; those rated five are the most engaged, and those rated one are the least engaged. That’s about the extent of Mailchimp’s CRM capabilities.

ActiveCampaign offers a full-fledged CRM for managing relationships with your contacts. With ActiveCampaign, you can create sales pipelines, set up and manage user permissions for your sales team, create sales tasks and save notes about contact interactions. ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Automation lets you fully automate your sales process so you can engage, nurture and educate your contacts, and close sales.

ActiveCampaign has four plans, including Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. Mailchimp has a Forever Free plan plus three paid plans, including Essentials, Standard and Premium. With each of these email providers, pricing is based on both the specific plan you select and the number of contacts you manage in your plan.

The starting price for ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan is $29 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. The starting price for Mailchimp’s Essentials plan is $13 per month for up to 500 contacts or $26.50 for up to 1,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign’s mid-tier plan is called Plus, and pricing starts at $49 monthly for up to 1,000 contacts. Mailchimp’s mid-tier plan is called Standard, and pricing starts at $20 per month for up to 500 contacts and $45 for up to 1,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign’s Professional plan starts at $149 per month for up to 2,500 contacts or $339 for up to 10,000 contacts; custom-priced Enterprise plans are also available. Mailchimp’s top-tier plan is called Premium and is designed for those with 10,000 or more contacts; the starting price for Premium plan users is $350 per month.

Mailchimp has a price advantage for those with relatively small contact bases; however, ActiveCampaign is priced competitively for those with larger contact bases. If your business has more than 10,000 contacts to manage, ActiveCampaign offers a lower-priced solution.

You want to select email marketing software that has a solid reputation for quality and service. We analyzed hundreds of customer reviews from leading platforms such as Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra to gauge how Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign stack up in the eyes of their users. While both software platforms are highly rated, there are a few differences worth noting.

Mailchimp consistently gets higher marks for ease of use, ease of setup and template quality. Mailchimp users offer rave reviews for the platform’s drag-and-drop editor and the landing page and form builders. ActiveCampaign gets higher marks for support quality, personalization, audience segmentation, campaign analytics, email deliverability and automation workflow management.

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Free Live Phone And Chat Support

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Additional Features

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Marketing Automation

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Free Trial

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Features

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Forbes recently announced the top 10 best email marketing software, and Mailchimp was named the best overall all-in-one email marketing software available today. ActiveCampaign was included on the top 10 list as the best software for automated email marketing. The remaining eight solutions are all strong ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp alternatives. The chart below lists these top alternatives based on their Forbes rating.

-	Forbes Rating	Marketing Automation	Free Trial	Starting Price
Zoho Campaigns		✔	14 days	Free; $3 per month for up to 500 contacts
MailerLite		✔	30 days	Free; $9 per month for up to 500 contacts
Drip		✔	14 days	$39 per month for up to 2,500 contacts
GetResponse		✔	30 days	Free; $15.60 per month for up to 1,000 contacts
Campaigner		✔	30 days	$59 per month for up to 5,000 contacts
Moosend		✔	30 days	$9 per month for up to 500 contacts
Brevo		✔	Not available	Free; $25 per month for unlimited contacts
Constant Contact		✔	60 days	Free; $12 per month for up to 500 contacts

See MoreSee Less

Bottom Line

The contest between ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp comes down to what you’re looking for in your email marketing software. If you want an easy-to-use platform that’s also budget friendly, Mailchimp is the better solution for you. If your email marketing needs are more complex and you require advanced automations and customizations, ActiveCampaign could be the ideal solution for your business needs.

Mailchimp is best for:

• Beginners who require intuitive, easy-to-use email software
• Affordability—Mailchimp offers email marketing plans that fit any budget
• Simple audience segmentation

ActiveCampaign is best for:

• Medium to large businesses that require advanced marketing automations
• Email design and personalization flexibility
• Customized marketing workflows