Mailchimp vs Omnisend
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
Both sides assessedMailchimp compared with Omnisend
Omnisend does the ecommerce job Mailchimp does adequately, but properly, with prebuilt cart and post-purchase flows and unlimited sends on its Pro plan. Mailchimp is broader outside commerce and far better known. Pick Omnisend if you run a store and want the standard flows working cheaply; pick Mailchimp if email is one of five things you need from the same tool.
Omnisend compared with Mailchimp
Omnisend does the ecommerce job Mailchimp does adequately, but properly: better prebuilt store flows, better commerce segmentation, unlimited sends on Pro, and no billing for people who explicitly unsubscribed. Mailchimp is broader outside commerce and has vastly more integrations and better creative tooling. If you run a store, Omnisend. If email is one of five things you need, Mailchimp.
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.
Choose Omnisend if
Small and mid-size ecommerce stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix that want the standard revenue-producing flows working quickly and cheaply, especially stores that send frequently enough for Pro's unlimited email sending to pay for itself.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Mailchimp | Omnisend |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $0 (free up to 250 contacts), then about $13/mo on Essentials at 500 contacts (free plan available) | $0 (free up to 250 contacts), then $16/mo on Standard (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Self-serve tiers priced by contact count, where both subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages are billable and only unsubscribed contacts are excluded. Standard caps monthly emails at twelve times the contact count; Pro removes the email send meter entirely. SMS is a separately metered Pro-only add-on for new subscriptions since May 2026. |
| Free plan | 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. | 250 contacts, 500 emails per month, and 500 web push notifications, with full access to automations, segmentation, forms, and landing pages. SMS is billed separately. |
| Free trial | 14 days on Standard; the free plan otherwise serves as the evaluation path | No fixed-length trial; the free plan is the evaluation path and includes full feature access |
| Best for | 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. | Small and mid-size ecommerce stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix that want the standard revenue-producing flows working quickly and cheaply, especially stores that send frequently enough for Pro's unlimited email sending to pay for itself. |
| Setup time | 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. | A day to have the core flows running. The store connector installs quickly, syncs products, orders, and customers, and the prebuilt workflows can be enabled with default content immediately. A full migration including domain authentication and testing typically takes around five business days. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low, and deliberately so. This is the most approachable serious ecommerce marketing tool in the category. The workflow builder is legible to someone who has never built an automation, and the prebuilt library means most stores never start from a blank canvas. The one thing to understand early is the contact-counting rule, because it determines your bill. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, Email builder with custom HTML support | Web application, Onsite tracking script, Native connectors for a dozen ecommerce platforms |
| Compliance | 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 | GDPR with a published data processing agreement, CCPA-aware privacy policy |
| Founded | 2001 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Atlanta, Georgia, United States | London, United Kingdom, with engineering in Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Ownership | Owned by Intuit, acquired November 2021 for approximately $12 billion | Effectively bootstrapped and independent; an early convertible note was repaid once the company became profitable and no venture capital has been taken since |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Omnisend
Strengths
- Unlimited email sending on Pro removes the send meter entirely, which is a genuine structural advantage over every contact-plus-send-cap competitor.
- The prebuilt ecommerce workflow library gets abandoned cart, welcome, browse abandonment, and post-purchase live in a day, which is where most of the money in store email actually comes from.
- Cross-channel steps inside a single workflow, so email, SMS, and web push run from one sequence and one consent record rather than parallel automations.
- 24/7 live chat and email support with a real human on every plan including Free, with advertised response times measured in minutes. Nothing else in this category does that.
Limitations
- Billing counts non-subscribers who received automated messages, so guest checkouts and imported contacts without an opt-in date inflate the bill beyond your actual marketing list size.
- SMS credits were removed for new subscriptions on 4 May 2026, making SMS a Pro-only metered add-on and quietly raising the cost of the omnichannel proposition.
- Hitting the Standard send cap blocks campaigns and cancels contacts out of running automation workflows, which breaks live sequences rather than just charging you more.
- No customer data platform, warehouse sync, identity resolution, or predictive lifetime value modelling, so a brand that outgrows the flows will eventually look at Klaviyo anyway.
Pricing compared
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.
Omnisend
Self-serve tiers priced by contact count, where both subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages are billable and only unsubscribed contacts are excluded. Standard caps monthly emails at twelve times the contact count; Pro removes the email send meter entirely. SMS is a separately metered Pro-only add-on for new subscriptions since May 2026.
- Free$0
- Standard$16 at 250 to 500 contacts, about $20 at 1,000, about $132 at 10,000, about $413 at 50,000
- Pro$59 flat from the entry band up to roughly 2,500 contacts, about $150 at 10,000, about $715 at 50,000
- CustomQuoted
Omnisend is the value play in ecommerce email and is priced with a clear view of who it is taking customers from. At 10,000 contacts you are looking at roughly $132 on Standard or $150 on Pro against roughly $150 on Klaviyo's Email plan, which is a wash on headline price but not on terms, because Pro carries no send cap while Klaviyo's allowance is ten times your profile count. At 50,000 contacts the same comparison runs roughly $413 or $715 against roughly $720. So the saving is not enormous at the top, and the real argument is unlimited sending plus getting the standard flows working in a day. Two things erode the case: the inclusive contact meter that bills non-subscribers, and the May 2026 removal of bundled SMS credits, which quietly raised the true cost of the omnichannel pitch the product is named for. For a store that mails often and does not need a customer data platform, it remains the best money in this category.
Editorial verdict on each
Mailchimp
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 profileOmnisend
Omnisend is the sensible default for a small or mid-size online store that wants the flows that actually make money working quickly, without buying a customer data platform it will not use. The prebuilt workflow library, the cross-channel steps, the capture tooling, and 24/7 human support on every plan including free make it the most approachable serious ecommerce marketing tool in the category, and unlimited email sending on Pro is a real structural advantage over every competitor that caps sends at a multiple of your list. Two caveats deserve weight before you sign: the contact meter counts non-subscribers who received automated messages, which inflates the bill for stores with heavy guest checkout, and the May 2026 removal of bundled SMS credits quietly raised the cost of the omnichannel promise. Buy it if you run a store, mail frequently, and want revenue flows live this week. Look at Klaviyo instead if the reason you are shopping is segmentation depth, and look at MailerLite if your email programme is really just a newsletter.
Read the full Omnisend profileMailchimp profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Omnisend last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.