Mailchimp vs MailerLite

MailerLite wins for creators and small lists, and the free tier decides it before pricing enters the conversation.

Twice the subscribers and twelve times the monthly sends at the same zero cost, plus landing pages and an automation that Mailchimp gates behind payment, is not a close call for someone emailing a list of a few hundred people every week.

Mailchimp wins on integration breadth and on the tooling concentrated in its upper tiers, and it is the defensible choice when those integrations are already load-bearing in your business.

It is the wrong choice on price at a small list, and its headline prices are quoted at 500 contacts, which flatters it in exactly the comparison most buyers run.

Mailchimp loses for the weekly-newsletter creator. MailerLite loses when you need an integration it does not have, or reporting that only Mailchimp's Premium tier carries.

Model your own contact count and sending cadence through our creator pricing calculators before you commit to an annual term on either.

The two platforms meter different things, and that is the whole comparison. MailerLite prices on active subscriber count and gives paid plans unlimited sends. Mailchimp prices on contact count and also caps monthly sends per tier.

A list of 800 subscribers emailed twice a week is well inside MailerLite's free plan and over Mailchimp's free send limit in the first fortnight.

MailerLite's free tier covers up to 1,000 subscribers with 12,000 sends a month, plus 10 landing pages, embedded signup forms and one automation workflow, with no card required.

The free tier is a working newsletter setup rather than a demonstration, which is why creators tend to stay on it until the list crosses 1,000.

Mailchimp's free tier covers 500 contacts and 1,000 sends a month, limited to one audience, with Mailchimp branding in the footer and no automation, split testing or custom templates.

It functions as an evaluation path into the paid tiers rather than a place to run a newsletter from.

Above the free tiers the shape differs again. MailerLite has two published self-serve plans, Comfort at $12/mo and Power at $25/mo, with Enterprise quoted.

Mailchimp has three, Essentials at $13/mo, Standard at $20/mo and Premium at $350/mo, with the first two quoted at 500 contacts and Premium at 10,000. Our Mailchimp review and MailerLite review carry the detail.

Choose MailerLite if you are a creator with a list under 1,000 who emails regularly.

The free tier's 12,000 monthly sends covers a weekly newsletter to the full list with room to spare, the signup forms and landing pages are included rather than gated, and the first paid tier at $12/mo removes the send ceiling rather than raising it.

Choose Mailchimp if its integrations already sit in your stack, or if you need the reporting and automation that land on its upper tiers.

The caution is the price curve: our snapshot records Premium at $350/mo for 10,000 contacts, and that is the tier where Mailchimp's distinctive features concentrate. If you are shopping on price at a small list, this is the wrong platform.

Compare the free tiers at a realistic sending cadence and the result is not close. A 500-contact list emailed twice a week is 4,000 sends a month, which is four times Mailchimp's free allowance of 1,000 and a third of MailerLite's 12,000.

Mailchimp's free plan is sized for a monthly send to a small list, not a weekly newsletter.

At the first paid tier the dollar figures nearly match, at $13/mo for Mailchimp Essentials and $12/mo for MailerLite Comfort, but what they buy does not. MailerLite paid plans drop the send cap entirely.

Mailchimp's Essentials tier keeps metering sends, and its published figures are quoted at 500 contacts, so the price you see is the floor rather than the price of the plan.

The one claim neither of us can make for you is the mid-sized price. Our verified Mailchimp snapshot records figures at 500 contacts and at 10,000 contacts, and nothing between.

A price at 500 and a price at 10,000 does not give you the price at 2,500, so put your own contact count into Mailchimp's own calculator rather than scaling our numbers.

Mailchimp also bills on audience size rather than on subscribed contacts, which means unsubscribed contacts left in an audience can still count toward the threshold unless archived.

Confirm the current rule on Mailchimp's billing documentation before you estimate, because it changes the number you are comparing. For the wider field, see our newsletter platform guide and the newsletter platforms category.

MailerLite, as checked on 2026-10-01: Free at $0/mo for up to 1,000 subscribers with 12,000 sends a month, Comfort at $12/mo or $10.80/mo billed annually, Power at $25/mo or $22.50/mo billed annually, and Enterprise quoted. Annual billing saves roughly a tenth.

Paid plans carry no monthly send limit.

Mailchimp, as checked on 2026-06-10: Free at $0/mo for 500 contacts with 1,000 sends a month, Essentials at $13/mo or $9.75/mo billed annually, Standard at $20/mo or $15/mo billed annually, and Premium at $350/mo or $262.50/mo billed annually.

The Essentials and Standard figures are quoted at 500 contacts. The Premium figure is quoted at 10,000.

That last detail is the one most comparisons get wrong. Mailchimp's headline $13 is a 500-contact price, not the price of the plan, so a creator with 4,000 subscribers reading a $13 figure is reading a number that does not apply to them.

MailerLite's $12 is also a floor, since it bills by subscriber count, but it comes without a send cap layered on top.

The jump from Standard at $20/mo to Premium at $350/mo is the sharpest edge in either rate card, and the two figures are quoted at different contact counts, so they are not directly comparable.

Treat Premium as a separate product rather than the next step up, and price it against your own contact band on Mailchimp's site.

MailerLite records a 30-day free trial of its paid features. Mailchimp's free plan serves as the evaluation path, with promotional trials varying.

Full tier tables sit on the Mailchimp pricing page and the MailerLite pricing page, each with the date we last read the vendor's page.

Both platforms import a subscriber list from CSV and both generate hosted signup forms, so getting a list in is a 20-minute job on either. The difference appears at the second step.

MailerLite includes 10 landing pages and one automation workflow on its free tier, so a full capture-to-welcome sequence can be built without paying. On Mailchimp, automation sits behind a paid tier.

Deliverability setup is identical in substance: authenticate your sending domain with the DNS records the platform gives you, and send from an address on a domain you control rather than a free mailbox.

Neither platform can fix a list built by scraping, and both will suspend an account for the complaint rates that follow.

Migrating out of Mailchimp is where the audience model bites.

Export the contacts you want rather than the whole audience, because unsubscribed and cleaned contacts carried into a new platform will drag your complaint rate and may have counted toward the bill you were trying to cut.

Decide which segments you intend to keep before you export.

Automations do not transfer between platforms in any form. Rebuild them, which is a real cost if you run several multi-step sequences, and a reason to make the move early rather than at 10,000 subscribers.

If you are weighing a creator-specific platform instead, the Beehiiv and MailerLite comparison and the Kit and Mailchimp comparison cover those options.