Campaign Monitor vs. Mailchimp — Which is the Best Email Marketing Tool?

Before we get into comparing their features, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of both platforms.

First, let’s take a look at some of Campaign Monitor’s pros and cons, according to its users.

Now, let’s compare Klaviyo’s best and worst, according to their customers:

Now, let’s see which of these email marketing platforms have the features, customer support, and pricing that’ll satisfy your needs.

Both platforms have great tools to launch and automate email campaigns, but they do have slight differences.

In this section, we’ll compare their:

You’ll need a tool that’ll allow you to create, customize, and launch email campaigns based on your marketing needs.

Both platforms have great email marketing features, but you’ll soon see that one offers more than the other…

You can optimize your email marketing campaigns by using their time zone sending feature.

It lets you set a specific time to send your emails and Campaign Monitor will send them based on the recipient’s time zone.

If you have several people working on your email’s design, you can lock sections and grant permissions to specific users.

Lastly, their link review feature lets you test all your email links to make sure that they’re working properly.

All their templates have a clean and simple design, but you’ll need to be on a paid plan to get rid of Mailchimp's branding and to add your own.

You can also do A/B testing to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Winner: Campaign Monitor — for offering more features to improve email design and letting you add your own branding.

Campaign Monitor: 1 - Mailchimp: 0

Segmenting your audience is an important step to launching successful email marketing campaigns.

It lets you guarantee that you’ll always send relevant content to your email list.

Unlike Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp has a serious limitation when segmenting your contacts.

Keep reading to learn more.

These tools will let you:

An example of the last point would be:

Depending on what your contacts do, they’ll be placed in different groups.

To import contacts, Campaign Monitor supports:

You don’t get tags, so you can’t classify contacts when they complete a specific action, like a purchase or a complaint about your service.

However, Campaign Monitor’s main difference over Mailchimp is that you can send emails to contacts from multiple lists — which is useful if you have contacts that qualify for multiple email campaigns.

These features do a good job of giving you ways to manage your contacts, but the lack of flexibility can be an issue for medium-sized or large businesses or experienced email marketers.

Winner: Mailchimp — for offering more features to segment your contacts and analyze data to improve future campaigns.

Campaign Monitor: 1 - Mailchimp: 1

One of the key features every email marketer looks for in an email marketing tool is advanced automation.

It reduces your workload by handling your contacts, campaigns, and sales processes for you.

Both Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor have good automation tools, but you won’t get any advanced features with them.

You can also set up “and” and “or” conditions for your workflow, so you can build different automated paths.

For example:

You’re selling an online course and a coaching session that your contacts can purchase together or separately.

For these products, you created 3 automated workflows:

However, to add a new email to a customer journey, you’ll need to put your campaign on hold to add it, while Mailchimp lets you do it instantaneously.

Lastly, you can automate email broadcasts by triggering them through RSS — although you can’t use the same templates you get for your regular emails, so the content might look off-brand.

The downside is that you can only use “and” conditions for your workflow, meaning that you can only set a single automated path for your customers to follow.

Winner: Campaign Monitor — for allowing you to include more conditions with their automated workflows.

Campaign Monitor: 2 - Mailchimp: 1

Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp are very popular platforms that offer many integration possibilities with various well-known plugins and add-ons.

We recommend doing some research on the plugins you plan on using to help you complement your platform.

Or, if you don’t want to spend money on integrations, turn your attention to systeme.io — our free, all-in-one platform that offers all the email marketing features you need without having to worry about any clunky integrations.

If none of their available integrations appeals to your needs, you can build your own integration with their API, which gives you even more integration possibilities.

And much more!

Mailchimp’s integrations will let you improve many of its features, like its CRM, email builder, email automation, etc.

Winner: Mailchimp — for offering a bigger app gallery and giving many more integration possibilities.

Campaign Monitor: 2 - Mailchimp: 2

If you’re just getting started on these platforms or it’s your first time doing email marketing, you might want to get some assistance to set everything up.

Fortunately, Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp offer good customer service, but both platforms seem to take the same approach — if you want customer support, you’ll have to pay for it.

Email support is only available from their Basic plan, as for phone support, you’ll have to be on their Premier plan.

Many users say that the customer support is great and that the platform is very user-friendly, so you can expect to get a good service for what you’re paying for.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, seems to have mixed opinions in regards to its customer support.

The guides and articles that you’ll find will teach you everything you need to know about:

In their “Experts Directory”, you can find all kinds of professionals that you can hire to work alongside you and help you optimize your business.

For example, you can find:

Just to mention a few.

To get in contact with Mailchimp’s support team, you’ll have to be on a paid plan — the Essentials plan for email and chat support and the Premium plan for phone support.

Free plan users can only access the Help Center.

Winner: Campaign Monitor — for offering overall better customer support and more resources for users of their lower plans.

Campaign Monitor: 3 - Mailchimp: 2

Now that we’ve covered their features, it’s time to see which of these email marketing software is lighter on your budget and delivers more for the price.

Both platforms have the same pricing model — they charge based on the number of subscribers and features available, so the cost grows alongside your contact list (unlike systeme.io, which has a fixed price for every plan).

If your contact list surpasses 50,000 subscribers, you’ll need to contact their sales team for a personalized pricing plan.

All plans give you:

You also get all the core email marketing features, like:

Their most advanced features are only available for the Unlimitedand Premier plan like the time zone sending and email section locking.

Now, let’s take a look at Mailchimp’s pricing.

Each plan has a maximum number of contacts, and if you surpass it, you’ll have the option to pay for overages or upgrade your plan, but your campaigns won’t be stopped.

If you reach 200,000 contacts and have a Premium account, you can contact the sales team to build a custom plan for you.

You also have the option of using the Pay As You Go plan, which lets you buy credits and use them every time you send an email, instead of paying a monthly fee.

If you don’t plan on sending emails on a regular basis, this is a great option to consider.

Winner: Campaign Monitor — for offering more features and benefits, like unlimited emails, for a fair price

Campaign Monitor: 4 - Mailchimp: 2

If Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp don’t have the features you’re looking for or they exceed your budget, we can present you with a powerful free alternative where you can build and launch automated email marketing campaigns.

Our other tools will let you create and launch:

You get access to all of these features in our Free plan (except webinars), and our new customers love it because they can get started without having to pay anything.

You get unlimited emails on every plan and 24/7 email support, so you can get in contact with us and we’ll answer in approximately 2 hours.

Sign up for our Free plan and start launching successful email marketing campaigns that’ll grow your online business!

Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp are great email marketing platforms that offer many tools for their users to design, automate, and launch email marketing campaigns.

However, their pricing will grow alongside your audience, so it can eventually become very expensive — not to mention that their customer support is only available for paid users.

Systeme.io, on the other hand, has everything you need to launch successful email marketing campaigns, build automated workflows, and easily segment your contact list.

You’ll also be able to send unlimited emails to your contacts, and you’ll never be on your own with our 24/7 email support.

Most importantly, our paid plans have fixed prices, so you won’t have to worry about it increasing to $100+/month and you won’t have to pay to get started.

Sign up for our Free plan, test our tools, and upgrade only after seeing results!