Moosend vs. Mailchimp — A Battle for the Better Email Marketing Platform

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Both Moosend and Mailchimp offer many similar email marketing features to help you stay in contact with your audience, but which one comes out on top?


In this post, we’ll help you identify the best email marketing tool for you, by looking at their relative merits, features, and pricing.


Which platform will give you the boost your campaign needs?


Keep reading and find out.

1. What is Moosend?

Moosend logo

Moosend logo

Moosend was founded in 2011 by Panos Melissaropoulos and Yannis Psarras (who remains the lead developer of the platform).


Although younger than its counterpart, Moosend still has thousands of users that trust the software to support their email marketing efforts.


Like other digital marketing SaaS businesses, Moosend has begun shifting towards offering an all-in-one solution, rather than just audience management and email campaigns.


However, their email marketing features are still the star of their show and what draws most of their users in.

2. What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp logo

Mailchimp logo

Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started Mailchimp in 2001, with the idea to create an email service, especially for small businesses.


Their software has developed into something more like an all-in-one digital marketing solution in the last 20+ years.


Mailchimp has also made a joint effort to remain an affordable and scalable option, with several industry-specific pricing options.


With so many years under their belt, you’d assume that Mailchimp dominates the digital marketing space.


Popularity and experience make Mailchimp a common starter platform, but that doesn’t mean their users stick it out.


Keep reading to find out why this platform might not be the right choice for you.

3. Moosend vs. Mailchimp: Pros and cons

How does Moosend, the newer kid on the block, measure up to Mailchimp’s years of industry experience?


Let’s find out!


Here’s a list of Moosend’s pros and cons, compiled by combing through hundreds of verified user reviews:

Pros

  • User-friendly interface and a simple dashboard make navigation easy
  • Innovative automation features and continuous updates to improve the software
  • Excellent customer service rating with a quick response time
  • 30-day free trial includes all advanced features so that you can test the platform thoroughly

Cons

  • The landing page and email builders can be a bit slow and buggy
  • Email and page design templates are outdated
  • No customer support available on the weekends
  • No forever-Free plan available any longer

Now, let’s see how Mailchimp’s pros and cons stack up against this formidable, younger opponent — according to their users:

Pros

  • Clean interface with a smooth email editor that’s fast and effective
  • The email and page templates available are attractive and modern
  • Includes an online store builder, as well as other built-in ecommerce features
  • Full Freemium plan available with fairly generous contacts allowance

Cons

  • You have to pay extra to send transactional emails
  • Very few email templates available, especially on the Free plan
  • Affiliate marketing is prohibited and will get you locked out of your account
  • You only get email support for 30 days on the Free plan

Want to know more about what makes these platforms tick?


Keep reading to discover what Moosend or Mailchimp can do for you.

4. Comparing the main features

If you’re still interested in using either Moosend or Mailchimp, you’ll need to know exactly what each platform is capable of.


We’ve done the research for you and laid out a handy, in-depth comparison of the features.

4.1. Email marketing

Sending a carefully crafted and personalized email can mean the difference between making a sale and being sentenced to the spam folder.


Let’s see what Moosend and Mailchimp can do to help you effectively communicate with your audience.

4.1.1. Moosend’s email marketing tools

Moosend’s email templates

Moosend’s email templates

Moosend acknowledges that sending great emails directly impacts your business’ growth — as such, there are several powerful tools built into their marketing and email features.


With Moosend, you can:

  • Create email newsletters with the drag-and-drop builder
  • Save time with automated campaigns and responsive designs
  • Send personalized messages to your audience with custom fields in your subject line and email body
  • Review custom reports and analytics to track any email campaign
  • Customize 40+ free templates and perform spam and design tests before you send
  • A/B test your emails and use the winning email design

Unfortunately, since Moosend was acquired by Sitecore in 2021, their Free plan is no longer available, and you’ll need to pay to use any of their email marketing features.


Let’s see what Mailchimp offers when it comes to email marketing.

4.1.2. Mailchimp’s email marketing tools

Mailchimp’s email content optimizer

Mailchimp’s email content optimizer

Mailchimp is first and foremost an email marketing platform and has focused on providing comprehensive tools to improve users’ emails.


They have several innovative features to help you send appealing emails to your audience:

  • 2 email editors and A/B testing to help create your newsletters and email sequence
  • Personalize emails by using merge tags to add a contact’s name or details into the email body
  • Customize modern email template designs to save you time and impress your contacts
  • Manage email bounces with automatic hard bounce removal
  • Get personalized suggestions from the Content Optimizer to improve your email content
  • Gain detailed insights from advanced email analytics

Mailchimp’s email stands out because of their modern appearance and flexible customization options — something all business owners appreciate, so they can keep their branding consistent.


However, the 200 email daily limit does put a real damper on their email functionality.


In terms of email marketing, Moosend is the winner because of their unlimited email sends and tons of templates.

4.2. Marketing automation

This is the ultimate time-saver for any online business owner — streamlining your sales process, personalizing your marketing messages, and improving overall efficiency.


But, is Moosend or Mailchimp better at marketing automation? Let’s find out!

4.2.1. Moosend’s automation tools

Want to set your business up to complete tasks for you while you put your feet up? Moosend’s marketing automation could be the perfect solution.


Their automation feature set stands out because of the ready-made workflow recipes they provide to simplify scaling your business:

An example of Moosend’s workflow templates

An example of Moosend’s workflow templates

Here are some of the automation workflows and pre-built templates that Moosend offers, built to save you time and effort:

  • Reminding attendees about events
  • Onboarding new users
  • Recovering abandoned carts
  • Scoring leads
  • Pushing conversions
  • Sending VIP offers

On top of this, the automation builder itself includes a pretty nifty interface with the following features:

  • Workflow notes and sharing so that team members can easily collaborate
  • Easy access to reports and the ability to reset statistics for new campaigns
  • Complete descriptions of each step in your workflow
  • The ability to zoom out and view your entire automation sequence from start to finish

While almost all of these automation rules are email-based, they’re still a godsend if you need to enroll students or remind invitees to attend your webinar.


For a fledgling marketing automation platform, Moosend sets a pretty high standard — can Mailchimp hold their own?

4.2.2. Mailchimp’s automation tools

Like Moosend, Mailchimp concentrates much of their automation efforts on your email.


This gives users a real chance to achieve email marketing’s potential return on investment (ROI) of 4200%!

An example of Mailchimp’s customer journey automation rules

An example of Mailchimp’s customer journey automation rules

Mailchimp refers to their email sales funnels as “customer journeys”, and they also provide several pre-built automation templates for you to use:

  • Welcome sequence
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Product recommendation and retargeting
  • Product and purchase follow-up sequences
  • Special offers for loyal customers
  • Order and payment notifications

Finally, Mailchimp offers data-based scheduling automation, so that you can send the right message at the right time, without needing to worry.


In terms of automation, it’s a stalemate — if you want more advanced automation options, go for Moosend, if not, Mailchimp’s a better choice.

4.3. Audience management

Personalization is essential in this day and age.


Without it, you’ll frustrate and alienate up to 70% of your audience.


How you grow, manage, and segment your audience plays a massive role in this, so you’ll need to know if Moosend and Mailchimp can deliver.

4.3.1. Moosend’s audience management

Moosend’s audience management capabilities

Moosend’s audience management capabilities

Moosend’s answer to audience management comes in 2 parts: Segmentation suggestions and customer relationship management (CRM).


With their tools, your list management can be as simple, or as complex, as you’d like:

  • Segment by demographics — Age, location, gender, etc.
  • Segment by preferences — Purchase history, recent products, identified interests
  • Segment by behavior — Fresh data about each action users take on your site and emails

On the CRM side, Moosend offers the following features:

  • Contact imports (from Google contacts to CSV files)
  • Easy contact tagging, and bulk actions
  • Detailed audience data tracking, and filtering with custom fields

Moosend has also grown to include high-converting landing pages and simple sign-up forms to further assist in lead generation and conversion.


This is a move in the right direction, but Mailchimp has even more to offer when it comes to your audience.

4.3.2. Mailchimp’s audience management

Mailchimp’s mobile app and CRM software

Mailchimp’s mobile app and CRM software

All of Mailchimp’s audience management features promise to guide and provide valuable insights into your campaigns.


However, Mailchimp takes each of them one step further.


Here are Mailchimp’s segmentation features:

  • Segment by demographics or sign-up source
  • Create contact tags to automatically add new subscribers to the right list
  • Filter your contacts based on whichever details you need with custom form fields

On top of this, the following CRM features are also available:

  • One customer dashboard filled with all relevant data
  • A mobile application so that you can monitor your audience, even on the move (bear in mind that this gives some users a real headache)
  • Automated sequences for upselling and cross-selling relevant products
  • Dynamic content blocks provide a highly-personalized experience for your contacts

Even with the buggy mobile app, Mailchimp takes the lead here with their advanced audience management tools.

4.4. Reporting and analytics

There are several reasons why in-depth data reports and analytics are vital to your marketing campaigns:

  • They help you measure your success
  • You’re able to locate any bottlenecks and how to improve them
  • If you’re looking for outside investment, they’ll need to get a measure of your business’ potential

Can Moosend and Mailchimp provide you with this necessary insight? Let’s find out.

4.4.1. Moosend’s reporting

Moosend’s analytics dashboard

Moosend’s analytics dashboard

There’s a variety of marketing metrics that Moosend can report on — providing you with the data you need to make timely, well-informed decisions to help you improve your business.


Moosend’s data reporting and analytics tools consist of:

  • Overview of your entire campaign’s progress
  • Customer location reporting, click-by-click heatmaps, and device usage data
  • Easy, 1-click report sharing with your digital marketing team

However, Moosend's data is compiled into 1 tab and focuses on email marketing, so the data reports for your landing pages and forms aren’t as comprehensive.


If you’re after insights that offer a broader scope, check out what Mailchimp can do for you.

4.4.2. Mailchimp’s reporting

Mailchimp’s audience dashboard

Mailchimp’s audience dashboard

Mailchimp’s reporting and analytics include, but are not limited, to the following:

  • Mobile device, campaign, and revenue reports
  • Audience dashboard and reporting
  • Sender score and reputation
  • Feedback surveys for data collection
  • Smart insights and audience predictions
  • Campaign benchmarks for your business

However, Mailchimp’s analytics aren't as easy to understand as Moosends, so again, we’ll call this feature a tie.


Currently, the scores are even — can some extra features sway you in one direction or another?

5. Extra features

Depending on your niche, your business will have different needs.


Here’s a table comparing some of the bonus features offered by Moosend and Mailchimp, to help you work out which one is the better fit:

Extra features

6. Pricing

Have you made your choice?


Now, let’s crunch the numbers and see how much each platform will cost you.

6.1. Moosend’s pricing options

Moosend’s pricing plans

Moosend’s pricing plans

Moosend’s platform provides users with just 2 pricing options:

1. Pro plan — Starts at $9/month for 500 subscribers, unlimited emails, automation workflows, forms, and landing pages

2. Enterprise plan — Custom pricing for all the Pro features plus account management and priority support

The pricing for the Pro plan adjusts based on your contact list, so 150,000 subscribers will cost a whopping $936/month!


As we’ve mentioned, their Free plan is a thing of the past.


The 30-day free trial isn’t really long enough to get a real feel for the platform, but at least no credit card information is required.

6.2. Mailchimp’s pricing options

Mailchimp’s Marketing pricing plans

Mailchimp’s Marketing pricing plans

Technically, Mailchimp offers 7 different pricing plans divided between Marketing and Websites & Commerce, as well as bulk transactional email blocks, especially for developers.


For the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on their 4 Marketing plans:

1. Free Forever plan — $0/month for 2,000 contacts and 10,000 emails

2. Essentials plan — Starts at $11/month for 500 contacts and 5,000 emails

3. Standard plan — Starts at $17/month for 500 contacts and 6,000 emails

4. Premium plan — Starts at $299/month for 500 contacts and 7,500 emails

Just like Moosend’s Pro plan, Mailchimp’s paid plans also adjust based on the size of your contact list, and so do their monthly email send limits.


While starting out on Mailchimp is cheaper, when your list starts to grow, so will their price tag. Also, the strict email limits will limit your ability to contact your audience, putting further strain on your business.


If your budget isn’t up to the strain, we suggest you look elsewhere.


Luckily, there’s a digital marketing software platform packed with all the tools you need but without the hefty price tag — introducing systeme.io!

7. Systeme.io — The best all-in-one tool for your email marketing campaigns

systeme.io logo

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io was built to give small, growing businesses everything they need to scale in one place, at one affordable price — starting with email.


With our email marketing features, you can:

  • Send unlimited emails to your audience (just like Moosend)
  • Use contact tagging to easily segment your email list
  • Set up automated email sequences and link them to your sales funnels
  • Create and schedule newsletters using visual or plain-text options and templates
  • Track each campaign with in-depth statistics and real-time analytics

Systeme.io takes your marketing even further than Mailchimp does.


You’ll get access to the following features, without the need for clunky integrations:

  • Sales funnels and website building
  • Business automation and workflows
  • Online courses and membership sites
  • Blog building for content marketing
  • Ecommerce features to sell products and services

With functionality like this, you’d expect to pay more than Moosend and Mailchimp — not with us.

7.1. Systeme.io’s pricing

systeme.io’s pricing plans

systeme.io’s pricing plans

There are 4 simple and scalable pricing plans on offer with systeme.io:

  • Free Forever plan $0/month for 2,000 contacts and 1 email campaign
  • Startup plan — $27/month for 5,000 contacts and 10 email campaigns
  • Webinar plan — $47/month for 10,000 contacts and 100 email campaigns
  • Unlimited plan — $97/month for unlimited contacts and email campaigns (also, unlimited access to all of our features)

Signing up and starting is 100% free and we don’t need your credit card details until you’re ready to upgrade to a paid plan.


If you’re ready to commit, why not opt for one of our paid premium plans?


You can save a further 30% if you choose to pay annually, plus we’ll make the move to our platform a breeze by migrating your entire business for you, free of charge.

8. FAQs about Moosend and Mailchimp

Moosend_Mailchimp_FAQs

Still not sure which platform is going to fulfill your business’ needs? Keep reading because we’ve got the answers . . .

2. Is Mailchimp easy to learn?

Compared to Moosend, Mailchimp is easier to learn.


They have an intuitive interface and a more extensive knowledge base, including:

  • A beginner series called “Mailchimp 101”
  • A marketing library
  • Different communities

However, if you want phone support, you’ll need to opt for one of their premium plans.

1. Does Moosend have CRM features?

Yes, but they’re focused on email marketing.


To get more advanced CRM features, you’ll need to integrate with (and pay for) Salesforce.

4. Is Mailchimp blacklisted?

Because anyone can get blacklisted, it’s possible for your Mailchimp server to suffer the same fate.


While the SaaS company does their best to prevent you from being added to a denylist, it is possible.


We suggest you monitor your delivery rates carefully and contact the company’s support should anything go awry.

3. Does Moosend go to spam?

Yes and no.


Moosend has a built-in spam checker to help you avoid triggering any spam filters.


However, how effective this is will depend on your email’s content.

9. Conclusion

In the battle of Mailchimp vs. Moosend, Mailchimp is the winner — with a feature-rich platform, a better user interface, and a completely Free plan, it’s easy to see why.


However, winning this contest doesn’t make them the best option available.


When compared to systeme.io, they fail to keep their winner’s title.


Our learning curve is even smaller, and with everything you need in one place, at one price, you can wave goodbye to technical headaches and hidden costs.


There really is no contest — systeme.io is the best!


Sign up for free and build a business that serves your audience, and your lifestyle, today!

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