Comparison

7 Mailchimp Alternatives for Small Teams in 2026 (Pricing Checked)

Mailchimp counts unsubscribed contacts toward your bill and its free plan is now 250 contacts. Here are seven Mailchimp alternatives, with pricing checked October 2026 and a migration checklist that keeps your suppressions intact.

By Sangeeth · June 2026 · 14 min read

Mailchimp is where a lot of small businesses send their first campaign, and for a few hundred contacts it does the job. The trouble starts when your list grows, your store starts syncing every customer into it, and the bill rises in steps that don't match what you send or earn from email.

This guide compares seven Mailchimp alternatives for small teams, with pricing taken directly from each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026. It also covers what usually matters more than the sticker price: which contacts each tool bills for, how deep its store integration goes, and what a migration from Mailchimp really involves.

Prices change often. Every price and limit below was checked on the vendor's own pricing or help page in October 2026 and is linked so you can confirm it. Several vendors run introductory discounts, show prices in your local currency, or change tiers without notice. Treat the numbers as a starting point and check the live page before you commit.

Why small teams leave Mailchimp

Most people don't leave Mailchimp because it stopped working. They leave because the pricing model stops fitting how a small business uses email. These are the facts behind that, taken from Mailchimp's own documentation.

Unsubscribed contacts count toward your bill

Mailchimp's pricing plans help article states that subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts are all included in your contact count. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts are not. In practice, an ecommerce store that syncs every customer into Mailchimp can be paying for thousands of buyers who never opted into marketing, plus everyone who has unsubscribed since.

You can reduce this by archiving contacts, but it's a recurring chore that's easy to forget.

Send limits are tied to contact limits

On paid plans, Mailchimp sets your monthly send allowance as a multiple of your contact limit: 10 times on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium, according to the same help article. If your contact total goes over your plan's limit mid-cycle, Mailchimp doesn't stop your sending; it adds an overage charge to your bill.

The free plan is now very small

The Mailchimp Free plan allows up to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month, with a daily limit of 250, one audience and one seat. If you exceed 250 contacts, Mailchimp places a hold on sending until you upgrade or reduce your contact count. Older guides that quote 500 or 2,000 free contacts are out of date.

How to choose a Mailchimp alternative

Feature grids make every platform look the same. These five questions separate them faster.

1. How is the bill calculated?

There are three common models. Per contact (Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit, Klaviyo, Omnisend, Moosend) charges by the size of your list, with send limits attached. Per email (Brevo's main model) charges by monthly send volume. Hybrid plans mix the two with caps on both. The detail that matters is which contacts are billable. Klaviyo's billing documentation, for example, bills on active profiles and excludes fully suppressed and unsubscribed profiles. Mailchimp includes unsubscribed contacts. Two tools with similar headline prices can produce very different invoices for the same list.

2. How deep is the ecommerce integration?

"Integrates with Shopify" can mean anything from a nightly customer sync to real-time order, product and cart events. Check whether it syncs products (so you can add them to an email without copying images and prices by hand), receives cart and checkout events (needed for abandoned cart flows), and can tell a first-time buyer from a repeat customer. If you run on WooCommerce, check the WooCommerce integration specifically; it's often less mature than the Shopify one.

3. Which automations are included, and on which plan?

Several free and entry plans exclude automation entirely or limit it. Kit's free plan doesn't include visual automations. Brevo lists unlimited multi-step workflows as a Standard-plan feature. For a store, the three flows that pay for the tool are welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase. Confirm all three are available on the plan you'll actually buy.

4. Will authentication and deliverability be set up properly?

Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC record, support one-click unsubscribe and keep spam complaint rates low. Every serious platform supports this, but they differ in how much help you get. Look for a guided setup that checks your DNS records live and tells you exactly which record is wrong, rather than a list of TXT values and a "verify" button. See our deliverability guide for the details.

5. How much work is the migration?

Moving contacts is the easy part. Recreating automations, rebuilding templates, re-mapping tags and merge fields, and warming up a new sending setup take most of the time. Some vendors offer free migration help; that's worth more to a two-person team than a slightly lower monthly price.

Per-contact vs per-email pricing, worked through

Here's a simple way to see why the billing model matters more than the headline price. Take a store with 10,000 contacts in Mailchimp. A realistic breakdown might be 6,500 subscribed, 1,500 unsubscribed and 2,000 non-subscribed customers who bought but never opted into marketing. Of the 6,500 subscribed, perhaps 3,000 have opened or clicked anything in the last 90 days.

On Mailchimp, all 10,000 are billable, because subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count.
On a tool that bills only reachable profiles, roughly 6,500 are billable. The unsubscribed contacts stay in the account as suppressions but don't push you into a higher tier.
On a per-email tool, you pay for what you send. If you send weekly to your 3,000 engaged contacts and monthly to the rest, that's about 12,000 plus 3,500, so roughly 15,500 emails a month, regardless of how many contacts are stored.

These numbers are illustrative, not a benchmark. Pull your own breakdown by status from your Mailchimp audience and run it through each vendor's pricing calculator. It takes ten minutes and settles more than any feature comparison.

Per-email pricing isn't automatically cheaper. If you send three or four campaigns a week to your full list, a per-contact plan with a generous send multiple can cost less. Per-email pricing rewards teams that segment and send to engaged contacts; it punishes teams that blast everyone.

The 7 alternatives at a glance

Prices are in USD as shown on each vendor's page in October 2026. Where a vendor didn't publish a fixed price we could read, we describe the model instead.

Platform	Billing model	Free plan (as listed)	Entry paid plan (as listed)	Best fit
Brevo	Monthly email volume	Up to 300 emails/day	Starter, $9/month, from 5,000 emails/month	Multichannel, transactional + marketing
MailerLite	Subscribers	Up to 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/month	Comfort, from $12/month	Newsletters, simple automations
Kit	Subscribers	Up to 10,000 subscribers, no visual automations	Creator, $33/month for 1,000 subscribers	Creators, digital products
Klaviyo	Active profiles	Up to 250 active profiles, 500 sends/month	See calculator (not published as a fixed price)	Data-heavy ecommerce
Omnisend	Contacts	Up to 250 contacts, 500 emails/month	Standard, 500 contacts, 6,000 emails/month (introductory discount shown)	Ecommerce with email + SMS
Moosend	Subscribers	No free plan; 30-day trial up to 1,000 contacts	Pro, price set by subscriber count	Unlimited sends on a budget
SendDoggie	See pricing	See pricing	See pricing	Small Shopify and WooCommerce stores

The alternatives in detail

1. Brevo

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) prices its marketing plans mainly on monthly email volume. On the Brevo pricing page, the Free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day once your account is approved. In October 2026 the Starter plan was listed at $9/month from 5,000 emails per month and the Standard plan at $18/month, both billed monthly in USD, with higher volumes costing more.

Pros: email, SMS and transactional messages in one account, which suits teams that want order confirmations and newsletters on the same platform. Volume-based pricing means a large, mostly dormant list doesn't automatically push up your bill.

Cons: unlimited multi-step automation workflows and A/B testing are listed as Standard features, so Starter is mostly a campaign tool. Additional seats and logo removal on Starter are paid extras, and the add-on structure takes some reading to price accurately.

Who it's for: teams that send moderate volumes to large lists, and anyone who wants SMS and transactional email alongside marketing.

2. MailerLite

MailerLite charges by subscriber count. Its pricing page lists a Free plan for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, the Comfort plan starting at $12/month and the Power plan starting at $25/month. Comfort includes a monthly send allowance of ten times your subscriber tier; Power offers unlimited monthly emails under a fair use policy.

Pros: a clean editor (drag and drop, custom HTML and a simple text-style editor), websites and landing pages built in, and an automation builder that's easy for a non-specialist to follow. It's one of the gentlest moves from Mailchimp.

Cons: the free plan is now small, and once you exceed it, campaigns and automations are locked until you upgrade or remove subscribers. Ecommerce features are present but lighter than the ecommerce-first tools below.

Who it's for: newsletter-led businesses, service businesses and small stores that mostly send campaigns plus a welcome sequence.

3. Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit is built for creators: writers, course sellers and podcasters. The Kit pricing page lists a Free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, landing pages and forms, and tagging and segmentation. The Creator plan was $33/month for 1,000 subscribers billed monthly, and Pro was $50/month for the first year at the same size, then $66/month.

Pros: the most generous free subscriber limit in this list, a tag-based subscriber model that's simple to reason about, and built-in selling of digital products and subscriptions.

Cons: visual automations and email sequences are paid features, so the free plan won't run a welcome series. It isn't designed around physical-product ecommerce, so product blocks and store-triggered flows are not its strength.

Who it's for: creators and anyone selling digital products.

4. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is the ecommerce specialist that many growing Shopify brands move to. Its pricing page lists a Free plan for up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, plus $5 of mobile messages. Paid pricing comes from a calculator rather than a published table. Billing is based on active profiles: according to Klaviyo's billing help article, fully suppressed and unsubscribed profiles are not included in your billable count.

Pros: deep store data, detailed segmentation on purchase behaviour, and email and SMS in one platform. Not paying for unsubscribed profiles is a real advantage over Mailchimp.

Cons: it rewards teams with time to build segments and analyse data; for a two-person store much of that power goes unused. Plans don't downgrade automatically after a list clean-up, so you have to select a lower tier yourself.

Who it's for: ecommerce brands with enough volume and staff time to use advanced segmentation.

5. Omnisend

Omnisend targets the same ecommerce buyer as Klaviyo with a simpler product. The Omnisend pricing page lists a Free plan for 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. The Standard plan covers 500 contacts and 6,000 emails a month and was shown at $11.20/month with a 30% discount for the first three months. The Pro plan starts at 2,500 contacts with unlimited email sends.

Pros: ecommerce-focused automation, SMS and web push in the same tool, and a free migration offer on the pricing page.

Cons: the headline price is an introductory one, so model your costs on the full monthly rate. SMS is billed separately, and AI personalisation features are add-ons that scale with your list.

Who it's for: Shopify and WooCommerce stores that want ecommerce flows and SMS without Klaviyo's learning curve.

6. Moosend

Moosend has no free plan. The Moosend pricing page offers a 30-day free trial for up to 1,000 contacts, after which the Pro plan is priced by subscriber count, from 500 up to 1,000,000 contacts, with unlimited email sends on every plan. The page also lists pay-as-you-go email credits.

Pros: unlimited sends on every plan make costs predictable if you mail frequently, and the trial is long enough to run a real migration test before paying.

Cons: no permanent free tier, and the price per tier wasn't readable from the page without the interactive selector, so you'll need to check it for your list size. The integration ecosystem is smaller than Mailchimp's or Klaviyo's.

Who it's for: teams that send often to a moderately sized list and want a fixed monthly cost.

7. SendDoggie

SendDoggie is our product, so read this entry with that in mind. It's built for small ecommerce teams: it syncs products from Shopify and WooCommerce so you can drop product blocks into an email, and it runs store-triggered sequences for abandoned carts, review requests and welcoming new customers. Magic Email drafts a branded email from a product URL, and you can send true plain-text campaigns rather than HTML styled to look plain. Domain authentication is guided, with live DNS checks that show which record is missing or wrong. Current plans are on the pricing page.

Pros: store sync, product blocks and the core ecommerce flows work without a separate integration project, and the authentication setup is hard to get wrong.

Cons: it's a newer platform with a much smaller integration ecosystem than Mailchimp, so if you depend on a long tail of third-party apps, check the list before moving. It's focused on email; teams that want SMS, WhatsApp or a CRM in the same tool will find more in Brevo, Klaviyo or Omnisend.

Who it's for: small Shopify and WooCommerce stores that want ecommerce email without the setup overhead of a larger platform.

Migrating from Mailchimp: the checklist

A rushed migration is how teams end up emailing people who unsubscribed years ago, or landing in spam for their first month on a new platform. Work through this in order.

Export everything, not just subscribers

Mailchimp's export guide explains that a full audience export can arrive as a ZIP file with separate CSVs for subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed and cleaned contacts. You need all four. The unsubscribed and cleaned files become your suppression list on the new platform; cleaned contacts are addresses that hard bounced or soft bounced repeatedly, as described in Mailchimp's cleaned contacts article. Exports stay available for 30 days.

Full audience export downloaded, including unsubscribed, non-subscribed and cleaned CSVs
Tags, groups and merge fields included as columns and mapped to the new platform's fields
Consent fields kept: opt-in date, source and IP where available
Templates and the HTML of your best-performing emails saved
Each automation documented: trigger, delays, conditions and every email's content
Recent campaign reports exported, since contact exports don't include engagement history

Set up the new platform before you import

Sending domain authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and verified as aligned
Unsubscribed and cleaned contacts imported as suppressions first, so they can't be emailed by mistake
Store integration connected and the first sync finished before importing customers from CSV
Automations rebuilt and tested with an internal address, then left paused
Unsubscribe link and footer address checked on every template

Switch over gradually

First campaigns sent only to contacts who opened or clicked in the last 30 to 60 days
Volume increased over two to four weeks as complaint and bounce rates hold steady
Mailchimp automations turned off only once the replacements are live, to avoid double sends
Signup forms and store checkout opt-ins pointed at the new platform
Mailchimp's DNS records removed after the final send

If the new platform sends through Amazon SES, a typical authentication setup for example.com looks like this. Your platform will give you the exact values; the shape is what matters.

; DKIM: three CNAMEs supplied by the platform
abc123._domainkey.example.com  CNAME  abc123.dkim.amazonses.com

; Custom MAIL FROM subdomain, so SPF aligns with your domain
mail.example.com  MX   10 feedback-smtp.us-east-1.amazonses.com
mail.example.com  TXT  "v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all"

; DMARC: start by monitoring, tighten once reports look clean
_dmarc.example.com  TXT  "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc-reports@example.com"

Note that the SPF record lives on the MAIL FROM subdomain, not the root. If you also add an include to your root SPF record, keep it to a single SPF record and stay under the 10 DNS lookup limit defined in RFC 7208, or SPF will fail with a permerror.

Common mistakes

Importing only the subscribed CSV

This is the most damaging mistake and the most common. Without the unsubscribed and cleaned lists, a later customer sync from your store can quietly re-add people who opted out, and you'll email them. Import suppressions first, every time.

Choosing on the first-year price

Mailchimp, Kit and Omnisend all showed introductory discounts in October 2026. Compare the regular monthly rate at the list size you expect in 12 months, not the promotion.

Moving dead weight to a new platform

Migration is the cheapest moment to clean a list. If a contact hasn't opened or clicked in a year, moving them just moves the problem, and on a per-contact plan you pay for them again. Our list cleaning guide walks through a sunset process.

Troubleshooting

Open rates dropped sharply after migrating

Check authentication before anything else. Open the raw headers of a message in Gmail and look for dkim=pass, spf=pass and dmarc=pass. If DMARC fails while SPF and DKIM pass, the signing or MAIL FROM domain doesn't align with your From address. If authentication is clean, the cause is usually volume: cut back to your most engaged segment and increase again over two weeks. Apple Mail Privacy Protection also inflates opens, so compare clicks between the old and new platforms.

Unsubscribed contacts received a campaign

Usually a store sync or a later CSV import overwrote the suppression status. Stop the sending, export the affected contacts, re-import your Mailchimp unsubscribed file as suppressions and check whether your store integration has a setting that respects existing marketing consent. Then reply to any complaints personally.

Customers are getting abandoned cart emails twice

Both platforms are running the flow. Mailchimp automations keep running until you turn them off, and a store app left installed keeps sending cart events to it. Turn off the old flow and disconnect the old store integration.

Domain verification is stuck

Most DNS providers append your domain automatically, so entering abc123._domainkey.example.com as the host creates abc123._domainkey.example.com.example.com. Enter only the part before your domain. If the record is correct, give DNS time to propagate; a TTL of an hour or less helps during setup. Our spam troubleshooting guide covers the other common authentication failures.

Key takeaways

Mailchimp bills on subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts. Its free plan is 250 contacts and 500 sends a month.
The billing model matters more than the headline price. Check which contacts are billable and model costs on your own status breakdown.
Check the ecommerce integration and automation limits on the plan you'll actually buy, not the top tier.
Export all four contact statuses and import unsubscribed and cleaned contacts as suppressions before anything else.
Authenticate first, then ramp up gradually from your most engaged contacts.
Verify every price on the vendor's page. The figures here were checked in October 2026 and will change.

There's no single best Mailchimp alternative. A creator selling courses, a newsletter publisher and a 200-order-a-month Shopify store need different things. Decide which billing model fits how you send, shortlist two tools, and run a real migration test with a small engaged segment before moving everything.

Running a small Shopify or WooCommerce store? SendDoggie syncs your products, runs abandoned cart, review and welcome sequences, and walks you through domain authentication with live DNS checks. See the current plans and try it with a small segment before you move your whole list.

Sources

All vendor pages checked October 2026.