MailChimp

Mailchimp is probably the best-known name in email marketing, and its history tells the story of an industry's evolution: from a simple newsletter tool it became a full marketing suite. It remains the reference point for small businesses, with a free tier that shows you how it works before asking for payment.

Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform, now part of Intuit. The core service is contact list management and email campaign sending: you import your list, create the email with the drag & drop editor or from a template, segment the audience and send, with analytics on opens, clicks and bounces. Over time Mailchimp has added behavioral automations — welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, post-purchase follow-ups — and expanded the offering toward complete marketing: landing pages, forms, website, integrated Google and Facebook advertising, SMS and a CRM with contact management. The editor is intuitive and the documentation excellent; both factors drove its success among those approaching email marketing for the first time. A critical aspect of the pricing model is that Mailchimp counts unsubscribers in the total contact count unless you manually archive them — a detail that can inflate costs for older databases.

For small businesses, ecommerce stores and marketers starting with email marketing who want a reliable platform, rich in integrations and with a solid free tier to begin without upfront investment.

Mailchimp's free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month (1 email per month to the whole list). Essentials starts at $13 per month for 500 contacts and 5,000 monthly sends, scaling quickly as the list grows; Standard starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts with advanced automations; Premium from $350 per month for 10,000 contacts with advanced reporting and unlimited users. Note: the price grows significantly with contacts, and Mailchimp counts unsubscribers in the total if not manually archived. It's worth comparing the actual cost with alternatives like Brevo, which applies a send-based model.