Top 5 Mailchimp alternatives to consider in 2026

TL;DR

• While Mailchimp once dominated due to affordability, its growing limitations are driving many users to consider more capable alternatives.
• Users often switch from Mailchimp because of inefficient billing model, limited automation capabilities, deliverability issues, and slow support.
• Top 5 Mailchimp alternatives to consider in 2026 include Maropost Marketing Cloud, Omnisend, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, and Moosend, offering better value for money.
• Maropost Marketing Cloud delivers higher deliverability, deeper insights, and more scalability than Mailchimp, making it a stronger choice for growing ecommerce brands.

Mailchimp has been around for a while now, helping businesses handle their email marketing needs. And for a good reason. With its affordable pricing, it was the top email marketing platform of choice for many small to medium-sized businesses. But it isn’t the right email marketing software for everyone.

If Mailchimp’s limited automation and customization options, deliverability issues, inefficient pricing model, and customer support challenges have you searching for alternatives – you’re definitely not alone. Fortunately, there are plenty of other options that are worth exploring.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through the top 5 best Mailchimp alternatives worth your attention in 2026, pointing out their key capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, and ideal use cases. On top of that, we’ll show you how Maropost Marketing Cloud stacks up against Mailchimp and why it might be just the right email marketing automation software for your needs.

NB: The information below is accurate as of December 2025.

Why should you consider a Mailchimp alternative?

There might be various reasons why users might choose to step away and look for alternative email services like Mailchimp. So first things first, let’s take a look at the most common ones (based on user reviews):

• Pricing and billing structure: Mailchimp has increased its pricing several times over the past years, often without adding significant new value. As of today, it can be up to 6x more expensive than its alternatives. Beyond that, costs can quickly start to add up as your contact list grows because Mailchimp charges you for every contact, including duplicates across multiple lists, inactive contacts, and unsubscribed users.
• Limited automation: While Mailchimp does offer basic automation tools, it falls short for businesses needing more advanced automation capabilities like behavior-based triggers, multi-step workflows, dynamic landing pages, and advanced A/B testing tools.
• Deliverability issues: With Mailchimp, users often face deliverability issues (i.e., emails landing in spam/ promotions rather than inboxes). Based on independent research, Mailchimp’s email deliverability rates have varied from 82% to 95% over the past decade. This suggests that nearly 1 in every 10 emails might not reach the intended inbox. Users often attribute Mailchimp’s deliverability problems to shared or overused IPs.
• Customer support quality: When it comes to customer support, users have been reporting slow response times and less personalized assistance (especially with lower-tier plans) compared to some Mailchimp competitors. While this may not seem critical at first, for businesses that rely on quick support (e.g., for deliverability issues, contact list problems, or campaign errors), poor support can be a deal-breaker.

Top 5 Mailchimp alternatives in 2026 and how they compare

1. Maropost Marketing Cloud

Maropost Marketing Cloud is an ecommerce marketing automation platform. It makes a compelling Mailchimp alternative for mid-market ecommerce and retail merchants, especially for those that have outgrown the “starter kit” stage and need deeper automation, better deliverability, and more scalability. Where Mailchimp is often praised for being great for basic newsletters or small-list campaigns, Maropost is designed to support large-scale email and multichannel marketing. On top of that, with Maropost’s eRFM reporting, you can segment customers by value and engagement to deliver more personalized, retention-driving campaigns.

Key features:

• Cross-channel campaigns (emails+SMS+Meta ads)
• Unlimited users, contacts, lists, and journeys with the Enterprise plan
• Dynamic landing pages + a drag-and-drop page builder
• AI-powered product recommendations
• Send-time and conversion-time optimization
• Advanced customer segmentation with eRFM reporting
• A/B testing campaigns
• One-click third-party integrations
• Access to a dedicated deliverability support team
• 24/7 chat support across all plans 

Best for: Mid-market to enterprise-grade ecommerce and retail brands, high-volume senders, businesses needing complex, multi-channel marketing orchestration.

2. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing software built specifically for ecommerce businesses. It combines email, SMS, and push notifications into unified workflows and offers lots of built-in ecommerce features (like dynamic product recommendations and discount-code insertion). Compared to Mailchimp, Omnisend delivers more value for online stores: its automation and multi-channel capabilities are more advanced by default, and even free/entry-level plans unlock segmentation and ecommerce-specific automations.

Key features:

• Unlimited monthly emails with higher-tier plans
• Cross-channel campaigns (email+SMS+push notifications)
• Popups, signup forms, and landing pages
• Behavior-based segmentation
• Contact list cleaning tool
• Personalized product recommendations
• Sales and performance reporting
• A/B testing and automation splits
• Pre-built integrations and APIs
• 24/7 live chat and email support

Best for: Small to mid-sized ecommerce brands looking for a budget-friendly ecommerce email marketing tool.

3. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is also built specifically for ecommerce businesses. It offers advanced segmentation, event-triggered automation, and predictive analytics that let you send highly personalized email/ SMS campaigns based on customer behavior. Unlike Mailchimp’s basic reporting, Klaviyo provides stronger insights into revenue, customer lifetime value, and lifecycle-based marketing performance, making it a better choice for growing online stores that care about ROI.

Key features:

• Email and SMS campaigns
• Generative AI for faster content creation
• Multi-channel segmentation
• Product recommendations
• Multi-channel A/B testing
• Email deliverability score
• Customer profiles with all-time data
• Product reviews (added cost)
• Predictive analytics and advanced reporting
• Built-in integrations with third-party tools 

Best for: Ecommerce brands that rely on repeat purchases, lifecycle marketing, and personalized customer journeys.

4. ActiveCampaign

Compared to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign is a more full-featured and advanced platform that actually goes beyond marketing automation. It combines email marketing, advanced segmentation, and an integrated CRM, letting you build complex, behavior-driven customer journeys, trigger cross-channel messages, and do lead scoring and deal tracking in one place. Ultimately, this makes ActiveCampaign more expensive than Mailchimp, but also significantly better for businesses that want more flexibility and scalability.

Key features:

• Email, SMS, WhatsApp messaging campaigns
• Landing page builder
• AI-powered automation builder
• Generative AI with higher-tier plans
• A/B testing tools
• Predictive sending
• Advanced segmentation
• Conversions tracking and revenue reporting
• Marketing CRM
• Extensive library of third-party integrations 

Best for: Small to mid-sized businesses, ecommerce stores, or growing companies that want a single platform for marketing, sales, and CRM.

5. Moosend

Moosend is a budget-friendly email marketing platform that gives many of the essentials you’d expect from a larger system. Compared to Mailchimp, Moosend often wins on affordability and simplicity. Its drag-and-drop builder, basic automation workflows, list segmentation, and reporting make it especially attractive for small businesses or marketers new to email campaigns. Moosend is a great fit if you want straightforward email marketing – it’s easy to set up, easy to run, and cost-effective.

Key features:

• Unlimited email campaigns/ sends
• Marketing automation workflows
• Automation builder and email templates
• Landing pages and forms
• Email newsletter builder
• AI-powered product recommendations
• Custom reporting
• A/B testing capabilities
• Deliverability optimization with the Enterprise plan
• Third-party integrations and API access 

Best for: Small businesses that want a basic email marketing service with minimal overhead.

Maropost Marketing Cloud vs Mailchimp: what’s the right solution for your business?

Mailchimp might be one of the most recognized names in the email marketing industry – but it isn’t the right tool for everyone, especially for growing businesses. Here’s a more detailed overview of how it compares to Maropost Marketing Cloud to help you decide between the two platforms.

Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp at a glance

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: pricing model

Mailchimp’s pricing model charges per contact (even duplicates or inactive ones), which can become pretty costly as your list grows. It basically means that if one customer appears in two different lists, you’ll have to pay twice. With Maropost Marketing Cloud, you pay for the emails you send – not for how many contacts you store in your database. No wasted spend.

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: deliverability

Maropost Marketing Cloud is known for excellent email deliverability. While Mailchimp’s deliverability rate typically ranges between 82% and 95%, Maropost Marketing Cloud ensures a 98% deliverability rate on your email marketing campaigns by using adaptive sending technology, maintaining a high-trust sender environment, providing real-time deliverability analytics, and offering dedicated deliverability support and remediation.

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: engagement-based analytics

While Mailchimp does allow you to track basic campaign performance metrics and purchase behavior with the ecommerce integration, Maropost goes a lot further than that. With Maropost’s eRFM reporting, you can see your customers grouped by recency, frequency, and monetary value, as well as their engagement patterns. These insights make it easier for you to target the right groups with specific campaigns and improve personalization and retention.

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: scalability

Mailchimp scales well for small to mid-sized businesses. It can comfortably handle growing subscriber lists from a few hundred to tens or even hundreds of thousands. But Maropost Marketing Cloud is built from the ground up for enterprise-level scalability. It can easily handle massive contact databases and high-volume sending without any drop in performance. Maropost’s infrastructure is optimized for speed and deliverability at scale.

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: customer support

Users on G2 frequently point out the higher quality of support they receive from Maropost, which holds a 9.0 rating compared to Mailchimp’s 8.0. Many note that Maropost’s responsive and knowledgeable customer service team is a real advantage, especially for businesses that need immediate help.

✔️ Maropost Marketing Cloud vs. Mailchimp: beyond marketing automation

Mailchimp is a solid marketing automation platform, but ultimately, it’s just that – a tool built to help small businesses automate their email and SMS campaigns. Maropost goes far beyond that. Marketing Cloud is part of the Maropost Unified Commerce platform – a solution that lets you run your marketing, ecommerce, merchandising, and customer support from one system – eliminating the chaos of juggling disconnected tools.

Book a demo now to experience Maropost Marketing Cloud in action and see whether it’s the right solution for your marketing automation needs.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any free Mailchimp alternatives?

Yes, there are many free and freemium email marketing platforms similar to Mailchimp, especially for small businesses or beginners. For example, MailerLite, Brevo, Sender, and Klaviyo all provide free plans that let you manage subscriber lists and send emails without paying upfront. Many companies like Mailchimp provide generous limits on the number of contacts or emails you can send monthly compared to Mailchimp’s current free tier.

What is the best Mailchimp alternative?

That heavily depends on your marketing automation needs, the size of your business, and your industry. Active Campaign might be a better option if you need sophisticated marketing automation and CRM capabilities. Klaviyo would be a great choice for ecommerce businesses needing deep behavioral targeting and store integrations. Maropost Marketing Cloud is another strong alternative for growing ecommerce brands that want advanced segmentation, high deliverability, and effortless scalability.

Why should I switch from Mailchimp?

Many users switch to cheaper Mailchimp alternatives because Mailchimp’s pricing can climb quickly as your audience grows. Some businesses also want better segmentation, stronger deliverability, and more advanced automation – areas where Mailchimp often falls short. Many companies end up choosing Maropost Marketing Cloud because it’s easier to scale with.