Loops vs Mailchimp
Both are marketing tools. Here is what separates them.
What Loops is
Loops is email software aimed at SaaS teams, covering marketing, product and transactional email in one product rather than splitting them across separate tools. Emails are assembled from themes and reusable components so designs stay consistent across sends, and workflows are built from triggers, branching logic and audience filters. The free plan allows up to 1,000 subscribed contacts and 4,000 sends a month, includes unlimited team seats with no per-seat charge, and adds a Loops footer credit to every email. Paid plans put no cap on the total number of emails a team can send, and Loops charges no separate fee for those sends. Throughput differs too: free accounts are capped at 10 emails per second and paid teams at 1,000, and anything submitted above the per-second limit is queued rather than rejected. Transactional templates can be built in the visual editor or imported as MJML code, though the data variables passed into them accept only string or number values. A transactional email has to be published and its sending domain verified before the API will send it, which is the usual first thing to trip over when wiring up a new project. The API lives at app.loops.so/api and authenticates with a bearer token generated in dashboard settings. Standard endpoints allow 10 requests per second per team, while the content endpoints covering campaigns, components, email messages, themes, transactional emails, uploads and workflows are limited to 60 requests per 60 seconds per team. Requests over the limit return HTTP 429, with response headers reporting the limit and how much of it remains. Each value in a request body is capped at 500 characters including quotes. Loops publishes an OpenAPI specification in both YAML and JSON, official SDKs for Go, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Nuxt, and a CLI that installs by curl script or Homebrew tap and reads its API key from the LOOPS_API_KEY environment variable for use in CI. Setting up sending requires SPF, DKIM, MX and CNAME records supplied by Loops, and the recommendation is to send from a subdomain rather than the root domain. Free platform subdomains from Vercel, Netlify or Shopify cannot be used as a sending domain, which rules out the quickest route for a project still hosted on default infrastructure. Prebuilt integrations cover Stripe, Supabase, Clerk, Zapier, Make, Segment, Webflow, Bubble, PostHog, Auth0 and Framer. The Stripe integration accepts 21 event types spanning customers, subscriptions, invoices, checkout sessions, disputes and quotes, and ignores any event that arrives without an email address on it.
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.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.