Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign: Pricing and Feature Comparison [2026]

Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign both want your email marketing budget, but they’re playing completely different games. One bets you want simplicity and fast setup without multi-step flow building. The other assumes you’re willing to climb a learning curve for sophisticated automations and CRM-driven campaigns.

At SendPulse, we spent days testing Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign to pinpoint which approach actually delivers and for whom. Read on to find out how each platform stacks up across key areas.

TL;DR Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign at a glance

If you want a quick overview, this table summarizes the key strengths, limitations, and best-fit scenarios for Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign.

Keep reading for details about our experience and the most significant differences between Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign.

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Head-to-head Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign comparison

In the following sections, we’ll compare Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign across automation, contact management, email design, integrations, AI features, customer support, and other areas. Each section will show you who wins, by how much, and when those differences matter.

First up: pricing, and why Mailchimp’s advertised cost tells only half the story.

Pricing plans

⭐ Mailchimp: 9/10 | ActiveCampaign: 8.8/10

Disclaimer: Pricing reflects publicly available information as of January 2026. Always check current pricing pages before making your final decision.

At first glance, Mailchimp appears significantly cheaper than ActiveCampaign. But there’s a critical detail that most comparisons overlook: Mailchimp’s advertised pricing only applies to your first year. After 12 months, costs effectively double across all tiers.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

The pattern is clear: Mailchimp wins on price during your first year, but once that promotional period ends, the math shifts. The graph below shows the real pricing trajectory across it and ActiveCampaign. We also included SendPulse as one more reference point for how a clear pricing model compares.

If pricing transparency matters more than brand recognition, or if you’re scaling quickly and want to avoid steep jumps in monthly costs, consider exploring less popular but more affordable solutions.

Another difference between Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign lies in how pricing scales with feature access. ActiveCampaign’s costs rise as more complex automation and CRM capabilities are unlocked on higher tiers. Mailchimp offers clearer, more accessible entry-level pricing, but many advanced automation, analytics, and segmentation features remain gated behind higher plans.

Ease of use and interface

⭐ Mailchimp: 9.5/10 | ActiveCampaign: 8.8/10

Ease of use makes up 20% of our total score because it directly affects how quickly your team becomes productive and whether they actually use the features you’re paying for. An email marketing platform might have powerful tools, but if routine actions feel difficult or slow, those features tend to sit unused.

We evaluated Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign across five critical usability factors, and here’s what we found:

The difference between these platforms is most evident when you track how quickly users move from initial setup to competence. Here’s what the typical progression looks like for each:

Mailchimp offers guided setup, simplified interface, and linear workflows so that most teams can launch campaigns quickly. ActiveCampaign, in turn, requires navigating through more interface layers, but you gain access to capabilities like multi-touch automations and CRM-integrated email series.

The ease-of-use decision between Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign comes down to three key questions:

1. How quickly do you need results?
2. How much technical expertise does your team have?
3. What level of complexity do you actually need in your workflows?

Email builder and templates

⭐ Mailchimp: 9.4/10 | ActiveCampaign: 9.3/10

Your email builder is where strategy meets execution. A clunky interface slows down every campaign. A flexible one lets you move fast without sacrificing brand consistency or design quality. We tested both platforms’ email-building tools across key areas; here’s how Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign compare:

Mailchimp’s templates are designed as near-final products. You select one that matches your campaign goal, swap in your brand colors and logo, add your content, and you’re ready to send. This works exceptionally well when you’re a non-designer needing to move fast or when your campaigns use similar layouts.

ActiveCampaign’s templates act more like frameworks rather than finished designs. They’re intentionally more flexible so that you can easily customize them with on-brand assets and conditional content visible to relevant segments based on tags, merge fields, or recipient data.

On top of that, ActiveCampaign positions AI-assisted template creation as the core of modern email design, enabling marketers to generate, adapt, and scale emails automatically rather than rely on fixed layouts.

Contact management

Mailchimp: 7.5/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9.5/10

Contact management defines how precisely you can target people and how intelligently your automations respond to real behavior. Poor contact management limits what you can build. Flexible one enables elaborate workflows that adapt in real time.

The 2-point gap between Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign reflects fundamental architectural differences that have a bearing on your automation capabilities, the amount of manual work you’ll do to keep data synchronized, and even your billing costs.

Attention to Mailchimp’s duplicate contact problem: the platform’s architecture creates a hidden cost issue that affects most growing businesses.

Contacts live in separate audiences (mailing lists) that don’t share data. If someone subscribes to your newsletter, then later downloads a lead magnet, then registers for a webinar, they exist as three separate contact records if those campaigns use different audiences. As a result, you’re essentially billed for the same person multiple times.

ActiveCampaign uses a unified database where one email address equals one contact profile, period. You’re billed once per unique email address, regardless of how many lists or campaigns they’re in.

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Marketing automation

Mailchimp: 7.8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 10/10

The gap between Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign is wide in the automation capabilities, and this is not an abstract claim. Here’s what happens when teams actually switch from one platform to the other – this G2 review captures the experience better than any feature list could:

The reviewer points out three specific pain points they solved by migrating from Mailchimp to ActiveCampaign: automation depth, contact data organization, and time efficiency. These aren’t marketing talking points but tangible issues that show up in daily work. Our testing revealed the same patterns.

Here’s how these differences translate to actual features:

The automation template libraries tell you exactly what each platform expects you to build.

Mailchimp bets you need common, straightforward scenarios to welcome new subscribers, recover abandoned carts, re-engage inactive contacts, or confirm purchases. These are step-by-step workflows where step A leads to step B, which leads to step C. You can launch them quickly with minimal setup.

Compared to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign wants you to build something more sophisticated. It can be a multi-touch nurturing flow that branches dynamically based on email interactions or website activity, a sales pipeline that triggers notifications to your reps when a deal moves into a specific stage, or an onboarding flow that adapts to how users engage with your product.

ActiveCampaign wins this category, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs its complexity. Mailchimp’s automation is more than enough for teams running typical 2-5 step flows and those that don’t have time to build and maintain enterprise-grade automations.

Deliverability

⭐ Mailchimp: 10/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 10/10

Here’s the short version: both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign deliver emails reliably when you follow deliverability best practices. This is why deliverability accounts for only 10% of our overall score – it’s critical, but modern email marketing platforms rarely differ dramatically when they meet current infrastructure standards.

Yet, that 20% your ESP controls matters more than it sounds. Even when you follow best practices, poor platform infrastructure can still hurt your deliverability.

These seven issues indicate ESP-level problems rather than sender mistakes:

1. Poor IP reputation management. Allowing low-quality senders on shared IPs without strict vetting damages the reputation for all users within that infrastructure. Mailbox providers evaluate abuse patterns at the ESP level, not just individual accounts.
2. Weak list-quality enforcement. Tolerating purchased mailing lists, scraped data, or cold emailing increases complaint rates across the network. This affects all senders sharing the same infrastructure.
3. Inadequate automated suppression. Failure to automatically suppress hard bounces, repeated soft bounces, or spam complaints creates ongoing negative signals that hurt platform-wide reputation.
4. No engagement-aware sending controls. Platforms that allow unrestricted sending to long-unengaged contacts, without warnings or guardrails, enable behavior that mailbox providers penalize.
5. No structured IP or domain warm-up mechanisms. Leaving IP warming entirely to users without tooling or guidance increases the likelihood of new senders triggering spam filters.
6. Limited transparency. Not surfacing spam complaints, reputation indicators, or feedback loop data prevents users from identifying problems early.
7. Inconsistent sending policy enforcement. Allowing high-volume offenders to continue sending emails signals poor governance to mailbox providers.

Neither Mailchimp nor ActiveCampaign showed these red flags during our testing. Both support domain authentication, automatically suppress bounces and complaints, and enforce clear sender policies and anti-spam requirements to protect their services.

The difference lies in how strictly they enforce infrastructure controls as your sending volume grows:

Integrations

Mailchimp: 7.7/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9/10

For eCommerce businesses, your email marketing platform is only as good as its Shopify integration. For SaaS teams, it’s the Salesforce connection. Integrations determine whether your tools work together seamlessly or result in hours of manual data entry each week.

Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer extensive integration libraries, but the real differences show up when data starts flowing between tools and automations trigger based on that data.

ActiveCampaign’s most significant integration advantage isn’t actually an integration. It’s what you don’t need to connect.

The platform includes a built-in CRM with deals, tasks, lead scoring, automated sales workflows, and engagement tracking. Marketing and sales data live in the same system by default, so you can follow a contact’s journey from the first email open through multiple touchpoints to a closed deal without relying on platforms like Pipedrive, HubSpot, or Salesforce.

Mailchimp, by contrast, offers basic audience management – contact records, tags, and custom fields – but no native deal tracking, pipelines, or sales automation. To manage sales workflows, you’ll need external CRM integrations.

AI features

Mailchimp: 7.2/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.9/10

AI won’t revolutionize your email marketing or replace marketing judgment, but it can become a meaningful productivity booster, reducing time spent on writing copy, building flows, and optimizing campaigns. Here’s where Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign’s AI actually help in day-to-day work:

The 1.7-point scoring gap reflects ActiveCampaign’s deeper AI integration into each workflow. It’s a true AI powerhouse with goal-aware agents that learn from your specific industry, use cases, and customer journey as they go.

However, for most businesses, AI features are a useful bonus, not a primary decision factor. Choose the platform that matches your email and automation needs first, then take advantage of whatever AI capabilities come with it.

Reporting and analytics

Mailchimp: 7.8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.4/10

Reporting and analytics aren’t the main factor in our overall score – and that’s by design. Today, solid reporting is a given: it should be accurate, easy to access, and help you understand what’s working. While analytics alone rarely determine which email platform is a better choice, the way each tool approaches data can tell you a lot. Here’s how Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign compare in this area:

Both platforms offer rich and detailed insights. ActiveCampaign exports in six formats (CSV, TXT, Excel, JSON, HTML, Markdown) vs Mailchimp’s CSV-only exports. Overall, if you need export flexibility and deal reporting too, then ActiveCampaign is the go-to.

Customer support

Mailchimp: 7/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 7.3/10

Customer support accounts for only 2% of our total score because it is rarely a deciding factor on its own. Still, when platforms score close overall, support quality can tip the balance. Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer adequate customer support, with minor differences outlined below.

The gap in this category isn’t dramatic, but it could matter when you’re racing against the clock. Take SendPulse as a Gold Standard: we provide 24/7 support via live chat and email in five different languages, no matter what pricing plan you choose.

Your decision checklist

Phew – quite a journey, right? By now, you probably know which email marketing platform fits your business best. But just in case, here’s a super-quick checklist. Use it to match platforms with your actual needs, not which one sounds more impressive on paper.

Final verdict and recommendations

⚖️ Final scores: Mailchimp – 8.7/10 | ActiveCampaign – 9.2/10

Totaling up the points, Mailchimp has scored 8.7/10, and ActiveCampaign has 9.2/10 — but that half-point difference doesn’t mean one platform is objectively better. The key question is whether your business actually needs what the more complex platform offers.

Mailchimp is a user-friendly solution that gets you productive in days and keeps your email marketing simple. It works brilliantly when email supports your marketing rather than driving revenue directly. The cost: automation ceilings you’ll hit as you scale and year-two pricing that doubles your monthly billing.

ActiveCampaign takes weeks to master, but then unlocks behavior-driven automation, unified contact data, and CRM integration that eliminates external tools. The trade-off is the extra complexity you might not need for years.

Ultimately, the right platform is whichever one solves your pain points and addresses your current business needs.

If neither platform feels like the perfect fit, consider exploring Mailchimp alternatives or ActiveCampaign alternatives to see how other platforms stack up on pricing, features, and ease of use.