The free plans: same number, very different plan
Both free plans now cap at 250 contacts, and that coincidence hides the real gap. MailerLite's free tier gives those 250 subscribers 2,500 emails a month, automation workflows, a website, a landing page, signup forms, and two user seats. Mailchimp's free tier gives the same 250 contacts just 500 sends a month with a 250-per-day ceiling, no email scheduling, no automation, and Mailchimp branding on every send.
The Mailchimp numbers are recent. Effective 17 February 2026, the free plan dropped from 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly sends to 250 and 500, the latest in a series of cuts since the 2021 Intuit acquisition: the same plan covered 2,000 contacts in 2022. Automation had already been stripped from the free tier by mid-2025. Many comparison pages still quote the old limits, so check the date on anything you read, including this page's checked-July-2026 stamp.
Run the arithmetic on Mailchimp's current free plan and it gets tight fast: 500 sends across 250 contacts is two full-list emails a month, before a single test send, and test emails count toward the cap. MailerLite's free plan covers ten full-list sends a month for the same list. If you're choosing a free plan to actually run a small newsletter rather than to trial an interface, this one isn't close.
Who counts toward your bill
This is the least advertised difference and over a year it can matter more than the sticker prices. Mailchimp's pricing documentation states that subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your plan limit. Someone who opted out in 2023 still occupies a paid slot until you archive them by hand, and the same person sitting in two audiences counts twice. Cross your contact limit mid-cycle on a paid plan and Mailchimp bills the overage automatically rather than pausing your account.
MailerLite bills active subscribers only. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts drop out of your tier count on their own, though anyone active at any point in a billing cycle counts for that cycle.
The practical consequence: a Mailchimp bill drifts upward on autopilot unless someone regularly archives dead contacts, and independent pricing reviews consistently report real-world Mailchimp spend running well above the listed plan price once overages and add-ons stack up. A MailerLite bill tracks the list you can actually email. For a set-and-forget small business, that difference compounds quietly.
What the entry paid plans include
The entry tiers are a dollar apart and a feature set apart. Mailchimp's Essentials starts at $13 a month for 500 contacts with sends capped at ten times your contact count, and it adds scheduling, A/B testing, the full template library, and removes Mailchimp branding. What it still leaves out is multi-step automation. Since Mailchimp deprecated its classic automation builder in June 2025, behavior-driven sequences with branches live exclusively on the Standard plan, from $20 a month.
MailerLite's Comfort plan starts at $12 a month and includes nearly everything: unlimited templates, campaign auto-resend, multivariate testing, dynamic content, the AI writing assistant, no branding, and the automation builder it already gave you for free. Its constraint is volume, a monthly send ceiling of ten times the top of your subscriber tier. Outgrow that and the Power plan removes the ceiling entirely, unlimited monthly sending under a fair use policy, from $25 a month at the smallest tier. Mailchimp has no self-serve equivalent to unlimited sending; even its Premium plan, from $350 a month at 10,000 contacts, caps sends at fifteen times your contact count.
So the entry question mirrors the one in our Brevo vs MailerLite comparison: what would you rather have gated? MailerLite gates volume and hands you the features. Mailchimp gates its best features behind Standard and meters both contacts and sends on every tier.
Where Mailchimp is genuinely ahead
An honest read of the published feature lists gives Mailchimp real ground on three fronts. First, e-commerce intelligence: Standard and above carry predictive segmentation, customer lifetime value estimates, send-time optimization, and retargeting ads, the kind of machinery an online store with meaningful revenue can actually convert into money. Second, integrations: Mailchimp's directory is one of the largest in the industry, and if your stack is unusual, the odds a connector already exists favor Mailchimp. Third, the Intuit connection, which makes it the path of least resistance for businesses already living in QuickBooks.
MailerLite counters with a different bundle entirely: native websites, landing pages, paid newsletter subscriptions, and digital product sales, a creator business-in-a-box rather than an e-commerce marketing suite. Which bundle is worth paying for depends on whether you sell products through a store or sell content and services as yourself.
Transactional email is an add-on either way: Mailchimp sells it as Mailchimp Transactional on top of your plan, MailerLite routes it to MailerSend, a separate product with its own billing. Neither includes it in the base price, which is one place Brevo beats them both.
Deliverability: what can honestly be said
Both platforms send from shared IP pools on their standard plans, so inbox placement rides heavily on your own list quality and sending habits. We haven't run our own seed-list placement tests on either platform yet, so we won't quote inbox rates here. Our MailerLite review tracks the current published testing data for that platform and will carry our own figures once testing completes; a standalone Mailchimp review is on our list.
Which one should you choose?
Choose MailerLite if you're a small business, creator, or newsletter operator who mostly sends email and wants the bill to stay predictable. It's cheaper at entry, automation arrives on the free plan instead of at $20, unsubscribes don't inflate your tier, and the Power plan's unlimited sending is a cost model Mailchimp simply doesn't offer. The built-in websites, paid newsletters, and digital product sales make it a full stack for a solo operation.
Choose Mailchimp if you run an e-commerce store big enough to exploit predictive segmentation and retargeting, if a niche integration in its directory is load-bearing for your business, or if consolidating with Intuit matters. Go in with clear eyes about the meter: the good features start at Standard, sends are capped on every tier, and your contact count includes people who left. For how ten email platforms meter you side by side, see our email platform pricing index.
If neither model fits because your list is large and rarely mailed, that's the profile Brevo's send-based pricing serves; our Brevo vs MailerLite comparison covers it. And if you're weighing heavier automation platforms instead, start with ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse. For the workflow concepts all these tools implement, see our email automation guide.