Last verified: 25 August 2026. Every plan limit on this page was read off that platform’s own pricing page on that date, and each one links back to the page it came from, so you can check any line of it yourself.

You are probably here for one of two reasons: a price step you did not want to take, or a feature that turned out to sit two tiers up. The trap on the way out is picking one of the many Mailchimp alternatives off a roundup nobody has re-checked since it was written, while plan limits keep moving. A comparison with no date on it cannot tell you whether it still holds, which is why this one carries a date and fifteen links.

One of the fifteen platforms below is ours. Its entry says so.

What is an email marketing platform?

An email marketing platform stores your contact list, builds and sends campaigns to it, and reports back on what happened to each send. Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp all do that much. Where the fifteen Mailchimp alternatives below differ is what you get before you pay, whether your emails carry the platform’s own name, and which other channels sit beside email.

If the category itself is new to you, our step-by-step guide to how email marketing works covers the mechanics this comparison assumes.

How to compare Mailchimp alternatives: five criteria that decide it

Where the free tier or trial stops

Some platforms cap subscribers, some cap emails per month, some cap emails per day, and some cap more than one at once. Which cap binds you depends on whether you hold a large list you email rarely or a small list you email often.

Whether your emails carry the platform’s branding

A free plan often pays for itself by printing the vendor’s name on your mail. Sender and EmailOctopus both state this outright on their pricing pages. Where a platform does not print it, ask before you move a list across.

Whether the platform authenticates your sending domain

SPF and DKIM are records you publish in your own domain’s DNS so that receiving mail servers can check that mail claiming to come from you really did. A platform that issues those records and verifies them for you takes the fiddliest part of setup off your desk, and it is worth settling before your first send. The rest of that groundwork is in our guide to keeping emails out of the spam folder.

Whether you can pay for it from where you are, and in what currency

Ten of the fifteen pricing pages read for this article answer this on the page itself, and the answer is mostly the same one: Visa and Mastercard, often with PayPal beside them. A Ghanaian card therefore transacts with most of the platforms that publish an answer, and the question left over is usually your own bank’s international-transaction settings rather than the vendor’s rules. Two go further than cards — Mailjet states that it also takes wire transfers and prepaid accounts, and Zoho Campaigns states that it takes bank or check transfer on yearly subscriptions, which are useful routes if you do not hold a card that works abroad. Flodesk answers the other half outright, stating that it is available worldwide and usable from any country. The remaining five do not print it on the page we read, and the table below names which five rather than lumping them together. Put a card through before you migrate a list, as a final check rather than as your only source of an answer.

Whether it covers the other channels you need

If you also send SMS or WhatsApp, running them from separate providers means separate reports and separate invoices at the end of the month. Our guide to combining email with SMS and WhatsApp sets out how the channels divide the work.

What are the best Mailchimp alternatives? All 15 at a glance

Four notes on reading this table. Where a cell is thin, the detail was not printed on the pricing page read on 25 August 2026; that is not a claim the platform lacks it. The same goes for the five payment cells that read “not stated on the page we read” — MailerLite, Sender, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign and AWeber all take payment somehow, they just do not print how on the page that answers the rest of these questions, so that is the one thing to ask them before you commit. And a trial and a free plan are different products, because one expires and one does not — several platforms here run both at once, which is why the second column names each of them separately. And one note on what is not here: Constant Contact and HubSpot are absent because their pricing pages returned no readable content to us on 25 August 2026, so we had nothing to quote — not because we assessed them and ruled them out.

If currency and channels are the criteria that keep stalling your decision, weigh them on Arkesel’s email marketing platform alongside the fourteen below.

Which Mailchimp alternatives have a free plan, and where does it stop?

Eleven of the fourteen third-party platforms below run a free plan you can stay on: Brevo, MailerLite, Sender, Omnisend, Klaviyo, Mailjet, SendPulse, EmailOctopus, Zoho Campaigns, GetResponse and Flodesk. Ten of those eleven let you send email on it. Flodesk is the exception: its Free plan builds forms and landing pages but does not send, so emailing anyone on Flodesk means the trial first and a paid plan after it. The other three — Moosend, ActiveCampaign and AWeber — give you a trial that expires with no free tier behind it. The fifteenth is ours, and its entry tier is set out in its own section below.

Which ceiling binds you first is what separates the ten that do send. Some cap the size of your list, some cap emails per month, some cap emails per day, and Mailjet applies a monthly and a daily cap at once. Every figure sits in the table above, read off that vendor’s own pricing page on 25 August 2026 and linked back to it.

The 15 Mailchimp alternatives, one by one

The alternatives for Mailchimp below are grouped by what you get before you pay: a free plan you can stay on, or a trial that expires with nothing behind it. Fourteen third-party platforms follow. The fifteenth is ours, and it has its own section after them.

Platforms with a free plan you can stay on

Brevo

Brevo’s pricing page states that once your account is approved for sending, the free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day. The same page states that all Brevo plans give you access to transactional email features, including RESTful APIs and SMTP. Choose it if your sending is steady rather than spiky, or if you want marketing and transactional email from one provider. Before you commit: the free cap is daily, not monthly, so one large announcement can hit the ceiling in a single afternoon.

MailerLite

MailerLite’s pricing page puts the free plan at up to 250 subscribers, 2 user seats, and 2,500 monthly emails. That works out at roughly ten sends a month to a full list, which suits a weekly newsletter to a small audience. Choose it if you are building a first list and expect to send often. Before you commit: two seats covers a founder and a marketer, and stops there.

Sender

Sender’s pricing page puts its Free Forever plan at up to 2,500 subscribers, and the plan card states that the plan contains Sender branding. The same plan card caps sending at 15,000 emails per month, so check that ceiling against how often you mail as well as against your list size. Choose it if list size is the constraint that keeps knocking you off other free plans. Before you commit: your subscribers will see Sender’s name on your mail, which reads differently on a customer newsletter than on a personal one.

Omnisend

Omnisend’s pricing page states that on the free plan you can use all the features of the paid plans, and that the only limitations are that you can send up to 500 emails per month to up to 250 contacts. The page also lists channels included at that tier, among them SMS, push notifications, Google Customer Match and Facebook Custom Audiences. Choose it if you want to evaluate the full product rather than a cut-down version. Before you commit: 500 emails a month is an evaluation budget, not an operating one.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s pricing page states that on the free tier you are limited to up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends per month. That reading came from Klaviyo’s UK page, which is the page that loaded when we checked. Choose it if your list is small enough to sit inside 250 profiles while you evaluate. Before you commit: check the pricing page that loads for your own region, because regional pages can carry different figures.

Mailjet

Mailjet’s pricing page states that there is no credit card required for the free plan at sign up, and that you can send up to 6,000 emails per month with a sending maximum of 200 emails per day. Choose it if your sending is regular and evenly spread. Before you commit: two ceilings apply at once, so a single burst can stop you well short of the monthly figure.

SendPulse

SendPulse’s pricing page states that with the Free plan, you can send emails to up to 500 subscribers. Choose it if you email a small list frequently. Before you commit: the page frames the paid step as a move up in list size, so plan the point at which you cross it.

EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus’s pricing page states that it does not offer a free trial and recommends starting on the free plan instead, which covers 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month and carries EmailOctopus branding on emails. Choose it if you want a large free list allowance and can live with the vendor’s name on your mail. Before you commit: there is no trial of the paid tier to fall back on, so you evaluate the paid features by paying for them.

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns’ pricing page carries a Forever free plan alongside a 14-day trial, and states that once the trial expires your account is automatically downgraded to the forever-free plan. That free plan allows you to add and manage up to 2,000 contacts and send up to 6,000 emails to them. The trial itself gives access to all features, against the same 2,000 contacts and three email campaigns. Choose it if you want to test the full product and still have somewhere to land at the same list size. Before you commit: the contact count survives the trial but the feature set does not, so spend the fortnight on the features you would actually miss rather than on the ones the free plan keeps.

GetResponse

GetResponse’s pricing page states that it offers a 14-day free trial account, and that for the first 14 days you get access to the premium features. The same page states that after that you lose the premium features but are still able to log in and use the free version, and that the GetResponse badge is added to every message you send from a free account. Choose it if you want to test the top of the product without the account closing behind you if you decide not to upgrade. Before you commit: the page describes what the free version gives up rather than what it allows, and prints no subscriber or send ceiling for it, so ask GetResponse for those figures before you plan a list around them.

Flodesk

Flodesk’s pricing page states that Flodesk offers both a Free plan and a free trial. The Free plan lets you build forms, landing pages and link-in-bio pages at no cost, and the same page states that it does not include email sending or workflow automations. The free trial covers the paid features, including email sending, templates and automations, with no credit card required, and the page states that an account which does not pick a paid plan when the trial ends moves back to the Free plan with its subscriber data preserved. Beyond that, Flodesk offers three paid plans with unlimited email sends based on your active subscriber count, and prices scale as your subscriber list grows, with no hidden fees and no per-email charges. Choose it if you send heavily to a list that grows slowly, since send volume is not what you are charged on. Before you commit: the free tier is for building a list rather than mailing it, so budget for a paid plan from the day you want to send anything, and remember that your bill tracks your subscriber count, which makes pruning inactive subscribers a billing decision as much as a hygiene one. Its e-commerce side is narrower than its email side: Flodesk states that Checkout’s payment processing is currently supported in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Euro Area countries, so a Ghana-based business gets the email platform and not the storefront.

Platforms that give you a trial that expires

Moosend

Moosend’s pricing page offers a 30-day free trial with no credit card required, then a plan that scales with your business. It lists a trial rather than a free tier. Choose it if you can run a real evaluation inside a month. Before you commit: put the trial end date in a calendar on day one, because nothing catches you if it lapses.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign’s pricing page offers a 14-day free trial with email sign-up and states that no credit card is needed. Choose it if automation is the reason you are leaving Mailchimp and you want to build one before deciding. Before you commit: map the automation you actually need first, so the fortnight goes on building rather than exploring.

AWeber

AWeber’s pricing page lists two paid plans, Lite and Plus, each opening with a 14-day trial. Plus carries unlimited automations and landing pages, advanced subscriber and message insights, and priority support; Lite carries 3 email automations. Choose it if you can name how many automations you need, because that is the line the two plans divide on. Before you commit: count your planned automations against the Lite allowance before you pick a tier.

Two things people still say about these platforms that are no longer true

Until this update, this page told you that Flodesk offered flat-rate pricing with no subscriber limit. Flodesk’s own pricing page says the opposite: prices scale as your subscriber list grows. What is unlimited is email sends, not subscribers.

This page also told you, twice, that Brevo offers a free plan with unlimited contacts. That line is not on Brevo’s current pricing page. What the page prints is a daily send limit of up to 300 emails per day.

Both were corrected on 25 August 2026 by opening the two vendors’ pages and reading them. Neither was invented, and both simply aged. That is the ordinary life cycle of a pricing claim, and it is why the date at the top of a list of Mailchimp alternatives matters more than the fifteen names on it.

Do you still need a physical address in your emails if you leave Mailchimp?

Yes, if you email people in the United States. The requirement is not a Mailchimp setting you can switch off by switching platform. It is a legal duty on you as the sender, so it follows you to whichever platform you move to.

Mailchimp’s help centre states that anti-spam laws and its Terms of Use require you to include certain information in every email you send, and lists your physical address among that required footer content. A second help page goes further on where that duty comes from: Mailchimp describes it as the FTC’s CAN-SPAM Act requirement for a physical address, and tells senders who work from home that there may be alternative addresses they can use, as long as they are able to receive mail there. The regulator says the same thing in its own words. Under the heading “Tell recipients where you’re located”, the FTC’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide for business states that your message must include your valid physical postal address, and that this can be a street address, a post office box registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency.

So the thing you can change is which address you print, not whether you print one. If you are searching for a platform that removes the requirement, no platform on this list does, because the requirement was never the platform’s to remove.

One scope note: this is United States law, binding senders who email US recipients. To work out whether it reaches you, check your own list for US-based subscribers, because a single one puts that send inside the rule. What your own country’s rules require of you is a separate question, and this article does not answer it.

Which Mailchimp alternative handles transactional email?

Brevo is the clearest answer. Its pricing page states that all Brevo plans give you access to transactional email features, including RESTful APIs and SMTP, alongside outbound webhooks and log retention. Sender is worth a look beside it: Sender’s pricing page lists transactional emails among what the Free Forever plan includes, and its FAQ states that SMTP is included in the service rather than sold as a separate feature.

Transactional email is a different job from campaign email. A transactional message is fired by your own application when one person does one thing: a receipt, a password reset, an order update. A campaign goes to a list you built.

The first job needs a way for your code to hand the platform a message, which is what Brevo’s page means by RESTful APIs and SMTP; the second needs a campaign builder. Check that a platform covers the job you actually need before you judge it on the other one.

Which platforms have the best delivery rates?

There is no single delivery-rate figure that would let you rank these fifteen platforms against each other, and a published one would not carry across to your list anyway. Much of what decides delivery sits on your side of the line: an authenticated sending domain, a list built from people who asked to hear from you, and a message type your recipients expect.

Compare the mechanisms instead. Does the platform issue and verify SPF and DKIM records for your sending domain? Does it report bounces and spam complaints per campaign, so you can see a problem developing rather than discovering it after a send? Those two answers tell you more than any headline percentage, and they are the ones you can check before you migrate.

What integrations should you check for automating an online store?

Start with the store, not the email platform. Whatever software runs your store has to appear on the vendor’s own integrations list, and a pricing page will not tell you that; the vendor’s integrations directory will. Check yours by name before you shortlist anything.

On the pricing pages themselves, the useful signal is which channels come with the plan. Omnisend’s page, for example, lists channels such as SMS, push notifications, Google Customer Match and Facebook Custom Audiences on the free plan alongside email. Once the store is connected, the campaigns that pay for themselves are the triggered ones, and segmenting your list is what makes them worth sending.

Is there an email marketing platform based in Africa?

Yes, and it is ours: Arkesel Email Marketing, the fifteenth platform on the table above. We publish this page, so that is worth saying plainly. What follows is held to the same rule as the fourteen entries above, which is that it states only what our own product records confirm.

Arkesel’s email marketing page lists coverage in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, and the plans on it are listed in Ghana cedis (GHS). For a business already invoicing in cedis, that removes a conversion step from the decision. Current prices are on the pricing page rather than here, because printed prices are exactly the detail that goes stale.

The entry tier is a plan called Free: up to 1,000 subscribers, up to 5,000 emails per month, Arkesel branding on emails, statistics stored for 30 days, and basic support. One scope note. Our pricing page publishes Email Marketing plans under the Ghana and South Africa tabs; the Nigeria and Tanzania tabs carry bulk SMS and other products, with no Email Marketing pricing on them. If you are sending from Nigeria or Tanzania, ask us where the free plan stands before you count on it.

The platform runs email campaigns and newsletters, automation flows for welcome, follow-up and reminder sequences, contact segmentation, and A/B and split testing on subject lines and content variants. It supports SPF and DKIM authentication for your sending domain: you add the domain, the platform issues the DNS records to publish, then checks them and marks the domain verified.

Every campaign reports a bounce rate and a spam-complaint rate against messages delivered, with per-recipient logs you can open from the campaign itself. There is an API at email.arkesel.com under /api/v1.

Choose it if the currency question is the one stalling your decision, or if email is not the whole job. Arkesel also runs bulk SMS and the WhatsApp Business API, so the other channels do not have to come from somewhere else.

Before you commit: if what you need is transactional mail fired from your own application code, that is Brevo’s answer above rather than this one. Arkesel’s automation is lifecycle email built and triggered inside the platform.

Which Mailchimp alternative should you choose?

• A small list you want to test the full product on. Omnisend gives you the features of the paid plans at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. MailerLite gives you more sending room at 2,500 monthly emails to 250 subscribers.
• A larger list on a free plan. Sender and EmailOctopus both stretch to 2,500 subscribers, and both put their own branding on your emails in exchange. The monthly send ceilings differ: 15,000 emails on Sender, 10,000 on EmailOctopus.
• Marketing and transactional email from one provider. Brevo, whose pricing page states that every plan includes transactional features.
• A full evaluation of the paid features before you decide. Moosend gives you 30 days; ActiveCampaign, AWeber, GetResponse and Zoho Campaigns each give you 14. On GetResponse and Zoho Campaigns a free tier is waiting when the fortnight ends. On Moosend, ActiveCampaign and AWeber it is a paid plan or nothing.
• Sending that is heavy but to a slow-growing list. Flodesk charges on subscribers rather than sends. Budget for a paid plan from the start, though: its free tier builds lists rather than mails them.
• Billing in Ghana cedis, or email running beside SMS and WhatsApp. Arkesel Email Marketing, whose free plan runs to 1,000 subscribers and 5,000 emails a month, with Email Marketing pricing published for Ghana and South Africa.

If you want the wider view of the category first, our comparison of email marketing services for African businesses revisits many of the same platforms from an African buyer’s angle and adds Maildroppa and tinyEmail, which this page does not cover, and the types of email worth sending is the place to start once you have chosen.

Start sending

The Mailchimp alternatives that suit you are the ones whose caps sit where your list and your sending pattern actually are. Pick on that constraint rather than on the longest feature list, and re-check the plan page on the day you sign up. Limits move, which is the whole reason this page carries a date.

Ready to run campaigns, automation flows and segmentation from a platform priced in cedis? Create an account and set up your first list, or see current pricing first.

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