Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact: Pros, Cons, Tips for Choosing (2026)

With nearly 4.6 billion users worldwide, email remains one of the most popular and widely available marketing channels for ecommerce merchants. From abandoned cart reminders to post-purchase surveys, merchants use email marketing platforms to create, manage, and optimize all kinds of email marketing campaigns.

Two of the largest email marketing software tools for merchants are Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Each comes with pros and cons, but both could be a great fit for your business, depending on your needs. Learn more about how each platform works, how much they cost, and how they differ.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a platform designed to help merchants manage their digital marketing efforts over email, as well as marketing channels like social media, SMS texts, and digital ads. Mailchimp offers a suite of software tools for creating and personalizing emails, setting up automation flows for email campaigns, and tracking campaign performance. 

Mailchimp also includes a drag-and-drop tool for designing simple websites and landing pages. This includes lead-generation pages to capture information from potential customers and click-through pages for conversions like product purchases. 

Merchants using Shopify as their ecommerce platform can integrate Mailchimp by downloading the Mailchimp app from the Shopify App Store.

Mailchimp pros

Mailchimp offers a broad toolkit that goes beyond basic email sends. These are the benefits merchants tend to value most:

• Variety of features. Mailchimp offers a wide range of software tools for email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and simple website building.

• Detailed analytics. Mailchimp includes reporting and analytics tools merchants can use to review several important metrics, including click-through rate (CTR), delivery rate, average order value (AOV), and predictive data about future customer behavior.

• Free plan available. Mailchimp offers a free plan that allows for one user, 250 contacts, and 500 email sends per month, as well as basic reporting tools. This means merchants can test out the Mailchimp platform before spending money on a paid account with more features.

Mailchimp cons

Mailchimp has drawbacks as well. Here are a few worth considering:

• Paywall for many features. Although merchants can use a basic version of Mailchimp for free, many features fall behind a paywall, including automation flows, A/B testing, comparative reporting, and SMS marketing.

• Customer support considerations. The Basic plan includes email support for 30 days. The Essentials plan and Standard plan both include chat support. Only Premium plan users have access to phone support, meaning merchants on simpler plans don’t have access to immediate personal customer support.

• Learning curve. The breadth of Mailchimp’s features means certain tools—particularly the automation builder and segmentation dashboard—can take time for beginners to learn.

What is Constant Contact?

Constant Contact is an email marketing platform that merchants use to create, send, and track email marketing campaigns. Constant Contact lets merchants build and manage contact lists, sign-up forms, and audience segmentation based on customer engagement levels and shopping activity. 

Constant Contact offers basic automation software for setting up targeted email sequences that send after specific triggers—like a customer purchasing a product or abandoning a shopping cart. The platform also offers software tools that turn emails into social media content, allowing you to schedule posts across multiple platforms from one dashboard.

Additionally, it offers tools for hosting in-person or virtual events by creating invites, hosting event pages, and managing tickets. Shopify merchants can integrate Constant Contact with their Shopify store by downloading the Constant Contact app.

Constant Contact pros

Constant Contact provides a straightforward experience for merchants who want to launch email campaigns and events without a steep learning curve:

• Simple interface. Constant Contact offers a user-friendly interface with a drag-and-drop editor tool for building email campaigns with content blocks, images, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons. 

• Large library of templates. Constant Contact includes a larger library of customizable templates than many other ecommerce marketing platforms—with more than 600 email templates for different campaign goals like newsletters, product promotions, and event invitations. 

• Customer service availability. Multichannel customer service and onboarding assistance are included with every Constant Contact plan, including live phone support, AI chatbot support, and a live onboarding session with an expert.

Constant Contact cons

As your marketing needs grow, some limitations become more apparent:

• Narrow selection of tools. Constant Contact focuses primarily on email, SMS, and event marketing, with a less diverse array of features than some other platforms like Mailchimp.

• Only paid plans. Although Constant Contact offers a 30-day free trial, it doesn’t have a free plan. Every user must pay at least $12 per month, with higher rates for Standard and Premium plans.

• Automation and reporting constraints. Constant Contact includes straightforward tools for building automations and analyzing email campaigns, but it offers less sophisticated tools for these tasks than some other platforms, including Mailchimp.

Key differences between Mailchimp and Constant Contact

Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact are email marketing software tools that let merchants create, edit, and monitor email campaigns like newsletters, welcome emails, post-purchase emails, and abandoned cart reminders. Here’s where Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact diverge most:

Pricing structure

Constant Contact’s pricing model includes only paid plans (after a 30-day free trial), while Mailchimp offers a free plan with basic features. Constant Contact’s Lite plan starts at $12 per month, and Mailchimp’s Essentials plan starts at $13 per month.

Ease of use

Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp offer user-friendly interfaces for setting up email campaigns, but Constant Contact uses a simpler design that can benefit beginners. Mailchimp includes a more elaborate layout covering a wider range of features.

Automation capabilities

Constant Contact offers an Automation Path Builder tool that merchants can use to set up marketing automation workflows based on triggers like customers clicking a CTA button or signing up for a newsletter. By contrast, Mailchimp offers a wider range of automation tools, including more than 60 automation templates and AI-powered automation features for customizing workflows. That added flexibility lets merchants build sequences that adapt to customer behavior over time, rather than relying on static triggers alone.

Event management tools

Whereas Mailchimp offers a wider range of marketing tools, like a website builder and CRM, Constant Contact offers a unique feature set for merchants hosting virtual or in-person events. Its built-in dashboard handles creating, managing, and ticketing events using customizable registration forms, which makes it especially useful for merchants who sell through workshops, product launches, or community events and need to drive attendance and registrations from the same platform they use for email.

Reporting tools

Constant Contact offers analytics features like a campaign comparison tool that lets merchants compare up to five campaigns. Mailchimp includes more advanced reporting tools that use AI to help merchants identify which campaigns, subject lines, and send times generate the strongest return on investment (ROI), which can directly inform decisions about where to invest your email marketing budget.

AI tools

Mailchimp users have access to more advanced features powered by AI than Constant Contact users. Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant generates layouts and graphics, saving merchants time on design work, and additional AI tools recommend ideal email send times and content improvements to help boost open rates and engagement.

Level of support

Constant Contact offers more customer support, including phone support and onboarding assistance for every paid plan. Only Premium users on Mailchimp have access to phone support and dedicated onboarding assistance.

Email list segmentation

Mailchimp has a more advanced segmentation feature than Constant Contact, with an audience dashboard for analyzing and segmenting specific audiences based on AI-powered analytics.

How to choose between Mailchimp and Constant Contact

The right platform depends on where your business is today and how complex your email marketing needs to be.

If you’re just getting started with email marketing and want a guided setup experience, Constant Contact is worth considering. Its simple interface and phone support for paid plans mean you can get campaigns running quickly without troubleshooting alone. Its more than 600 email templates also make it easier to produce professional-looking emails before you’ve developed a design system.

If you need more sophisticated automation workflows informed by AI-powered analytics, Mailchimp gives you more room to grow. Its more than 60 automation templates, Creative Assistant for generating layouts, and advanced segmentation feature let you build targeted campaigns that evolve with your customer data. The free plan also means you can explore the platform before committing budget.

If budget is the deciding factor, Mailchimp’s free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month. Constant Contact requires a paid plan starting at $12 per month after its 30-day free trial. As your contact list scales, compare pricing at your expected subscriber count, since per-contact costs differ between the two.

If you run events as part of your marketing strategy, Constant Contact’s built-in event management tools give it a clear advantage over Mailchimp for creating invites, managing registrations, and handling tickets from one dashboard.

Ecommerce merchants running an online store can benefit from choosing an all-in-one ecommerce platform with built-in messaging tools for running email and SMS marketing campaigns. For example, Shopify merchants have access to a built-in software tool called Shopify Messaging, which lets merchants easily design branded emails, automate email sequences, and analyze campaign performance from a single dashboard, with no third-party integration required.