6 Best Free Mailchimp Alternatives to Switch to
Mailchimp recently announced that they are decreasing their free plan limit from 2000 to 500. This means you can now manage only 500 email subscribers/contacts on their free plan, compared to 2000 contacts that you could use earlier.
Mailchimp had possibly the largest free tier limit and offered bloggers and entrepreneurs who were just starting out a breathing space in email marketing for free. But recently, they announced that they would be setting the free account's contact limit to 500 and the email sends limit to just 2500 per month.
Earlier, the send limit was a whopping 10,000 per month. When Mailchimp got acquired by Intuit, I knew something was coming. So, I started looking for alternatives to Mailchimp and found a few for my needs.
When I say "a few", that means more than one because I have to use multiple tools for multiple needs. And in addition to that, I set up email marketing for my clients as well.
While I mostly use paid email marketing tools, some Mailchimp alternatives offer generous free tiers.
I will be covering only those which offer such generous free tiers and have a higher send limit.
In this article, I have listed the best free Mailchimp alternatives that you can try for free as long as you want.
Table of Contents
Overview
Here's how these free Mailchimp alternatives compare with Mailchimp:
| Service | Contacts | Emails per month |
|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | 500 | 2500 |
| Sendinblue | Unlimited | 9000 |
| Sendfox | 1000 | Throttled |
| Mailerlite | 1000 | 12000 |
| Hubspot | Unlimited | 2000 |
| Mailpoet | 1000 | 5000 |
| Revue | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Let's review these one by one.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is probably the only dedicated email marketing service that lets you store unlimited contacts for free. You heard it right. Sendinblue offers unlimited contacts at no cost to you.
But there is a restriction on how many emails you can send.
In the free version, they limit you to 300 emails sent daily, which still is around 9000 emails per month and way more than what Mailchimp offers.
Sendinblue's free tier also allows you to use their drag-and-drop email builder, their email templates library and email personalization.
Overall, Sendinblue is the best Mailchimp alternative, without a doubt.
You can signup for Sendinblue here.
Sendfox
Sendfox is the next best alternative to Mailchimp and to be honest, it is incredible if you choose to pay just $49 once.
Sendfox allows you to have 1000 contacts for free with throttle email sending, 1 email form and up to 3 contact lists.
Sendfox's "Lifetime" version, which is available on AppSumo for a single payment of $49, allows you to store 5000 contacts (7000 contacts, if you can complete some tasks) and send unlimited emails. In this you can use as many email forms as you want and create unlimited lists, automations & custom fields.
You can learn more about Sendfox here and try it risk-free for 60-days to see if it suits your needs. I have 6-licenses of Sendfox for different clients and it is possibly the best & wisest investment I ask my clients to make to.
Mailerlite
Mailerlite is an affordable and highly loved email marketing service — and by the time I am writing this article, it offers the most email sends per month for free.
Mailerlite's free plan covers a total of 1000 contacts in your lists and allows you to send 12000 total emails every month.
In addition to these, Mailerlite offers a drag & drop editor, an email automation builder, free websites and up to 10 landing pages.
You can sign up for Mailerlite here.
Hubspot
Hubspot's email marketing services are built mostly for business. But as their CRM offers unlimited contacts, you can integrate their free email marketing plan to save unlimited contacts and send 2000 emails every month.
2000 emails aren't too much, but Hubspot can be used effectively if you are looking for cold email outreaches.
To be honest, I haven't used Hubspot's email marketing as much as I have the others on this list, but online reviews speak highly of Hubspot email.
You can signup for Hubspot email here.
Mailpoet
Mailpoet is a WordPress-powered email marketing tool that you can host on your site and send emails via Mailpoet's premium sending servers. Mailpoet allows you to store 1000 contacts in your account to whom you can send 5000 emails per month using the Mailpoet sending service.
🔥 Mailpoet alternatives: If you are using WordPress, there are some other plugins that you can use.
You can use these four for free to some extent, and that's why I am listing these here.
Revue
Warning: Revue is retiring.
If you want to use an email marketing service just for sending newsletters — you can use Revue.
Revue is a free newsletter service owned by Twitter that allows you to write newsletters and send them to your audience.
There is no limit to how many subscribers and times you can send the emails.
You can also set a subscription fee that the subscriber needs to pay before they can get access to your newsletter content. So, if your needs are limited or you need a platform that can help you earn from your newsletters, give Revue a try.
🔥 Revue alternatives: There is Substack, a newsletter subscription tool identical to Revue. Like Revue, Substack too can help you send newsletters to your audience and bill them for premium content.
Conclusion
So, this is all for now. To be honest, there are actually too many Mailchimp alternatives out there.
Some offer 100 free contacts while others go up to 500. For example, GetResponse offers 500 free contacts and so does ConstantContact. But 500 is what Mailchimp offers, right? So these couldn't be better Mailchimp alternatives.
Therefore I took the liberty to list only those which offer at least 1000 contacts for free and other features equivalent to Mailchimp.
Choose one of these free alternatives to Mailchimp and see how they work for you. After all, all these are free.