Buyer guide
Best Mailchimp alternatives
Mailchimp is still the most complete marketing platform available, and for a marketing department using landing pages, forms, ecommerce integrations, and branching journeys, it earns its price. Teams leave when they are paying for all of that and using a fraction of it — most often when per-contact pricing crosses the point where the invoice is hard to defend.
Prices verified September 4, 2026 from public pricing pages. Everyone here changes them — check before you switch.
Why teams leave
- Per-contact pricing scales sharply: roughly $100 a month at 5,000 contacts and about $310 at 25,000 on Standard.
- Transactional email is a separate paid add-on rather than part of the platform.
- Contact limits have historically counted archived and unsubscribed addresses, which is a common source of surprise bills.
- The feature surface is large, and most teams use a small part of it.
The options
1MailerLite
The closest like-for-like replacement — newsletters, forms, landing pages, and automations at a fraction of the price.
- Pricing
- Paid plans from around $12/mo, with a usable free tier.
- The catch
- Transactional sending lives in a separate product, MailerSend, so an API integration means a second account.
2Brevo
Teams wanting marketing automation plus SMS and a light CRM, billed by send volume rather than list size.
- Pricing
- Free tier around 300 messages a day; paid plans from roughly $9/mo.
- The catch
- Volume pricing is poor value if you mail a small list very frequently — the opposite of Mailchimp's weakness.
3SendKernel
A compact transactional-plus-broadcast workflow with enforced domain and consent checks.
- Pricing
- $36/mo for 5,000 contacts, $18/mo for 50,000 transactional emails.
- The catch
- No landing pages, forms, template gallery, or automation journeys. If you use Mailchimp's journeys, you will miss them.
4Kit
Creators selling subscriptions, courses, and digital products, where the list is the business.
- Pricing
- Around $33/mo at 1,000 subscribers.
- The catch
- Priced per subscriber and aimed at creators, so it is expensive and oddly shaped for a conventional company newsletter.
Moving your list
Export each audience as CSV and keep the unsubscribe status column — any decent platform honours it on import rather than mailing people who already opted out. Check whether your new provider counts unsubscribed contacts toward its limit before you compare prices; on a list a few years old that is commonly 15–25% of the meter.
Questions people actually ask
- What is the cheapest Mailchimp alternative?
- MailerLite for like-for-like newsletter features, from around $12 a month with a genuinely usable free tier. If you mail a large list infrequently, a volume-priced provider such as Brevo can be cheaper still, because you stop paying rent on addresses you rarely contact.
- Will I lose my automations if I leave Mailchimp?
- Yes, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether you use them. If you run genuine multi-step lifecycle journeys, stay — no cheaper option reproduces them. If you have three automations set up two years ago that nobody has looked at since, you will not notice they are gone.
- Do other platforms charge for unsubscribed contacts?
- Some do and some do not, and it is rarely stated on the pricing page. Look for the definition of a billable contact in the billing documentation — the words to watch are 'stored' versus 'subscribed'. The difference is commonly a fifth of a mature list, which is frequently what pushes an account into the next tier.
- Can I move my transactional email at the same time?
- Yes, and it is a good moment to do it, since Mailchimp's transactional add-on is billed separately anyway. Keep the two streams distinct at the new provider — either as separate products or separate subdomains — so a campaign cannot pull receipts and password resets into the spam folder.
Go deeper
Try one option for free before you move a list
2,000 transactional emails and 500 contacts, free and not time-limited. Enough to verify a domain and send a real campaign while your current provider is still live.
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