Mailchimp alternatives

12 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What Mailchimp is

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform for holding a contact list, sending campaigns to it and automating the follow up. Audience tooling covers segmentation, tags, customer profiles, behavioural targeting, predictive demographics and sign up forms, and the product also includes landing pages, webhooks, a Content Studio for creative assets and generative AI copy tools. Four marketing tiers are sold: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium. What separates them is less the feature list than the sending allowance, which is set as a multiple of the contact count: 10 times on Essentials, 12 on Standard and 15 on Premium. Seats and audiences follow the same ladder, from 1 seat and 1 audience on Free, to 3 and 3 on Essentials, 5 and 5 on Standard, and unlimited on Premium. The Free plan caps the audience at 250 contacts and sending at 500 emails a month or 250 a day, and it pauses sending once either limit is passed. Paid plans behave differently. Exceeding a contact or send limit triggers an overage charge instead of a pause, so a fast growing list raises the bill rather than stopping the sending, which is worth understanding before it happens. Essentials limits automation to flows of up to 4 steps, which covers a welcome sequence and not much more. Standard supports up to 200 automation flows and adds custom coded templates, dynamic content and custom reports. Premium adds multivariate testing, predictive segmentation, phone and priority support, a dedicated onboarding specialist and migration services. SMS marketing is available on paid plans only. Optimisation features include A/B testing, send time optimisation and a subject line helper, and more than 300 integrations are listed. Audiences above 200,000 contacts need a custom quote from the sales team. For anyone who mails infrequently there is a credit based Pay As You Go option instead of a subscription, and qualified nonprofit organisations get a 15 percent discount. The pricing page can be switched between sixteen currencies, including GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD, INR and ZAR. Transactional email is priced separately, in blocks, where one block is a credit for 25,000 emails. The rate falls with volume, from 20 USD per block for 1 to 20 blocks down to 10 USD per block at 161 blocks and above. Unused credits do not carry from one month to the next, so buying ahead of demand wastes money. Verifying a sending domain earns up to 500 free sends, and a dedicated IP is a 29.95 USD monthly add on.

beehiiv

A newsletter platform built by people who grew one, with the growth side treated as a first-class feature rather than an add-on: referral programmes, recommendation networks, an ad marketplace and paid subscriptions. Deliverability and segmentation are solid. Most useful for a newsletter that is the business rather than a channel for one.

Freemium

Buffer

Queue social posts once and let them publish on a schedule across the networks you use. Deliberately narrow (scheduling, a shared calendar, straightforward analytics and an engagement inbox), which is why small teams pick it over suites that do ten other things. The free plan covers one person managing a few accounts.

Freemium

HubSpot

Marketing, sales and support working from one contact record, which is the whole argument for it: no syncing between three systems that disagree. Email, landing pages, forms, pipelines, ticketing and reporting are included. The free CRM is real and widely used; costs climb steeply as contact counts and add-ons grow, and that is the thing to model before committing.

Freemium

Resend

Transactional email designed for developers. Templates are React components, the API is small enough to learn in a sitting, and webhooks report delivery, opens and bounces. Deliverability tooling (domain authentication, dedicated IPs, suppression handling) is the part that actually determines whether the mail arrives, and it is taken seriously here.

Freemium

Loops

Email for software companies without the enterprise campaign builder. Two concepts do most of the work: transactional messages triggered by an event, and loops that send a sequence based on user attributes. It integrates with the tools a small SaaS already runs and stops well short of a marketing suite, which is the point.

Paid

LottieFiles

The ecosystem around Lottie, the format that ships vector animation as JSON. Animations stay sharp at any size, weigh a fraction of a GIF or video, and can be recoloured or controlled at runtime. The platform hosts a large library, converts from After Effects, and provides players for web and mobile.

Freemium

Warp

A terminal that treats each command and its output as a block you can navigate, copy and share, rather than an endless scroll. Input behaves like a text editor, history is searchable, and an assistant can read a failing command and suggest the fix. Workflows save parameterised commands for a team. Some of it requires an account, which is the objection people raise most.

Freemium

Glide

Generates mobile and web apps from a table your team already maintains. Rows become screens, columns become fields, and the result is installable and works offline. Best for internal tools (inventory, inspections, field data, directories), where the alternative is a spreadsheet somebody edits on a phone.

Freemium

Open-Launch

Daily product launches with a badge and a backlink, run transparently, the ranking rules and the code are public, which is unusual in this category. Free and premium submission paths, with the paid one skipping the queue. Positioned as an open alternative to the closed boards, and worth watching for that reason as much as the traffic.

Freemium

Bubble

Full web applications without writing code: a database, workflow logic, an editor for the interface, and a plugin ecosystem for the rest. Genuinely capable (real businesses run on it), and it is a platform commitment rather than a prototype tool. Performance and cost at scale are the recurring criticisms.

Freemium

Cursor

VS Code rebuilt around a model that can see the whole repository. Beyond autocomplete it edits across files from an instruction, answers questions about unfamiliar code, and applies a diff you review before it lands. Keybindings and extensions carry over from VS Code, so switching costs an afternoon. The multi-file edit is the feature people stay for.

Freemium

Mixpanel

Event analytics for questions that begin with 'how many users who'. Funnels, retention curves, cohorts and flows are the core, built on events with properties rather than pageviews. Strong at behavioural questions and weaker at the simple traffic reporting a marketing team wants, which is why it often sits beside a web analytics tool.

Freemium