Constant Contact vs Mailchimp
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentConstant Contact compared with Mailchimp
The two best-known names in small-business email, and closer on price than either would like to admit. Mailchimp has the better editor, far more integrations, a proper customer journey builder, and a free tier. Constant Contact has events, phone support, social ads management, and a fairer contact-counting policy, since Mailchimp's plans have historically counted contacts you no longer mail. Mailchimp is the better product for someone comfortable teaching themselves; Constant Contact is the better product for someone who is not.
Choose Constant Contact if
Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact.
Choose Mailchimp if
General small businesses that need one marketing tool rather than a specialist one: service businesses, nonprofits, restaurants, local retail, and consultancies who want campaigns, a landing page, a signup form, and a welcome journey from a vendor their bookkeeper has already heard of.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Constant Contact | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) | $0 (free up to 250 contacts), then about $13/mo on Essentials at 500 contacts (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message. | Self-serve tiers priced by contact band, where the billable contact count includes Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Non-subscribed contacts but excludes Archived, Cleaned, Pending, and Deleted. Monthly email sends are capped at a multiple of contacts per plan, and exceeding either cap produces an automatic overage charge rather than a block. |
| Free plan | No | 250 contacts, 500 emails per month capped at 250 per day, 1 audience, 1 seat, Mailchimp branding required, no send scheduling, and no multi-step automation. Cut from 500 contacts and 1,000 sends in January 2026. |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days on Standard; the free plan otherwise serves as the evaluation path |
| Best for | Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact. | General small businesses that need one marketing tool rather than a specialist one: service businesses, nonprofits, restaurants, local retail, and consultancies who want campaigns, a landing page, a signup form, and a welcome journey from a vendor their bookkeeper has already heard of. |
| Setup time | An afternoon to import a list, authenticate a domain, and send a first campaign. The template library and brand kit mean the design step is fast, which is deliberate given the audience. | An hour to a first campaign. Account creation, a CSV import or store connector, a template, and a send is genuinely same-day work, and the interface assumes no prior marketing knowledge. Building a proper branching journey with considered segmentation is a one to two week project. |
| Learning curve | The lowest in this category, by design. Everything is arranged around a marketing calendar and the terminology avoids jargon. The tradeoff is that the ceiling is low: once you want conditional automation or expressive segmentation, the simplicity becomes a constraint. | Low for campaigns, moderate for journeys. The concept people trip over is audiences versus tags versus segments, because the intuitive move (one audience per customer type) is exactly the wrong one and doubles your bill. The second thing people learn late is archiving, which is the difference between a controlled invoice and a creeping one. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, REST API, Webhooks | Web application, iOS and Android apps, Email builder with custom HTML support |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 | SOC 2 Type II (annual), GDPR with a published DPA and 2021 SCCs, EU-US Data Privacy Framework, CCPA and CPRA, CAN-SPAM and CASL enforced in the terms |
| Founded | 1995 | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Atlanta, Georgia, United States |
| Ownership | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group | Owned by Intuit, acquired November 2021 for approximately $12 billion |
Strengths and limitations
Constant Contact
Strengths
- Native event registration with ticketing and payments, which no other mainstream email platform does properly and which alone justifies the price for organisations that run events.
- Real phone support with US hours, plus local seminars, a partner network, and paid done-for-you services, aimed at owners who want to be taught rather than documented at.
- Unsubscribed contacts are excluded from billing, so list churn does not quietly inflate the invoice.
- Automated and triggered emails are excluded from the monthly send multiplier entirely, which is more generous than it first appears when designing flows.
Limitations
- Expensive. At $120 for 10,000 contacts on the entry tier it costs several times what MailerLite, Brevo, EmailOctopus, or Sender charge for comparable or better email functionality.
- Automation is the weakest part of the product: Lite offers a single welcome email, Standard offers templates, and real branching paths are Premium-only and still shallow next to ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo.
- Bounced addresses count toward your contact limit even though they cannot receive mail, so poor list hygiene costs money directly.
- No free plan at all, only a 14-day trial, in a category where permanent free tiers are now standard.
Mailchimp
Strengths
- Genuine breadth in one account: campaigns, branching journeys, landing pages, forms, surveys, ads, SMS, and ecommerce reporting without assembling a stack.
- The Customer Journey Builder on Standard is a real automation tool with conditional branching, splits, goals, and cross-channel steps.
- Creative tooling is the best in the small-business tier, with a Creative Assistant that builds on-brand designs from your website and a shared Content Studio asset library.
- Predictive lifetime value and purchase likelihood, plus send time optimization, are capabilities most competitors at this price do not offer at all.
Limitations
- Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward the bill unless you archive them, which is the least defensible billing decision in this category.
- Exceeding the contact or send cap produces an automatic overage charge rather than a block or a warning, so surprise invoices are a structural feature rather than an accident.
- Expensive at scale relative to every direct competitor, with third-party-tracked increases of roughly 43 to 92 percent on Standard since 2022 and no published historical pricing.
- The free plan was cut in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends, which makes it a demo rather than a viable starting plan.
Pricing compared
Constant Contact
Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message.
- Lite$12 at 500 contacts
- Standard$35 at 500 contacts
- Premium$80 at 500 contacts
- Above 50,000 contactsCustom
Modelled at this directory's three reference points: 1,000 contacts costs $30 on Lite, $55 on Standard, or $110 on Premium. Ten thousand contacts costs $120, $160, or $275. Fifty thousand contacts costs $430, $460, or $575. Those are among the highest prices in this category for the email functionality delivered. MailerLite, EmailOctopus, Sender, and Brevo all cost a fraction of it at the same list sizes and several of them automate better. The defence is that you are not buying email alone. Event registration with ticketing, social posting and ads, SMS, landing pages, a phone support line, local training, and a partner network are all in the price, and if you genuinely run events or genuinely need to be taught how to do this, the alternative is buying three subscriptions and still having nobody to call. The nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent shifts the arithmetic further. If you are only sending a newsletter, you are overpaying substantially and should look elsewhere.
Mailchimp
Self-serve tiers priced by contact band, where the billable contact count includes Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Non-subscribed contacts but excludes Archived, Cleaned, Pending, and Deleted. Monthly email sends are capped at a multiple of contacts per plan, and exceeding either cap produces an automatic overage charge rather than a block.
- Free$0
- EssentialsAbout $13 at 500 contacts, about $110 at 10,000, about $385 at 50,000
- StandardAbout $20 at 500 contacts, about $135 at 10,000, about $450 at 50,000
- PremiumAbout $350 at 10,000 contacts, about $815 at 50,000
Mailchimp is no longer the value choice and has not been for several years. What you are buying now is breadth and familiarity: a competent journey builder, real predictive segmentation, landing pages, forms, surveys, ads, and SMS in one account from a vendor everyone recognizes, backed by Intuit. For a general small business with a list under about 5,000 that wants one tool and no specialist learning curve, Standard is defensible. Above roughly 10,000 contacts the arithmetic turns against it hard, because MailerLite and EmailOctopus deliver the core job for a fraction of the price, Brevo does not charge for stored contacts at all, and Klaviyo does ecommerce properly. Add the inclusive contact meter and the silent overage billing and Mailchimp is the platform most likely in this category to cost more than the buyer planned.
Editorial verdict on each
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is the most expensive way to send a newsletter in this category and the best way to run a small organisation's marketing if you are not a marketer. Those two statements are both true and they resolve into a simple test. If you run events, sell tickets, manage social and ads alongside email, and want a phone number to call when something breaks, the bundle is worth the money and the nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent makes it genuinely competitive. If you are sending a monthly newsletter to 10,000 people, you are paying $120 for what MailerLite or Sender will do better for a fraction of it, and you should leave. The billing is fairer than most, with unsubscribes excluded and contacts counted once across the account, though bounced addresses still count and the send multiplier caps frequency on the lower tiers. The automation is the real ceiling: shallow at every tier and barely present below Premium. Buy it for events, for the support line, and for the fact that the owner will actually use it. Do not buy it as an email platform on the merits of the email.
Read the full Constant Contact profileMailchimp
Category LeaderMailchimp is a competent, broad, well-supported marketing platform that most small businesses will find perfectly usable and increasingly hard to justify on price. The Customer Journey Builder is genuinely good, the creative tooling is the best in its tier, and the predictive segmentation is a real capability rather than a marketing claim. Against that sits an inclusive contact meter that bills you for people who unsubscribed, overage charges that appear without warning, a free plan that was gutted in January 2026, and years of steep price increases. Buy it if you want one recognized tool covering campaigns, journeys, pages, forms, and ads for a general small business under roughly 10,000 contacts, and archive aggressively from day one. If you run a store, look at Klaviyo or Omnisend; if you mail a big list occasionally, look at Brevo; if you just want good email cheaply, look at MailerLite. Mailchimp is no longer the default answer, only the default assumption.
Read the full Mailchimp profileConstant Contact profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Mailchimp last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.