Choosing an email platform feels easy until you hit pricing cliffs, automation limits, or deliverability issues—and that’s why mailerlite vs mailchimp keeps coming up for creators and SaaS teams alike. Both tools can send newsletters, build forms, and automate campaigns, but they optimize for different kinds of users (and different tolerance levels for complexity).
1) UI, workflow, and time-to-first-campaign
MailerLite is built for speed. You can spin up a list, form, landing page, and welcome email without feeling like you need a certification. The editor is straightforward, and most features are where you expect them.
Mailchimp is more “suite-like.” It has more surface area: audiences, tags, segments, journeys, analytics, creative assistant, and add-ons. That’s powerful, but it also means more toggles and more chances to configure something you didn’t mean to configure. If you’re sending your first 5 campaigns, that complexity can feel like friction.
Opinionated take: if your main bottleneck is execution (shipping emails consistently), MailerLite tends to get you moving faster. If you’re managing a more complex marketing program with lots of stakeholders, Mailchimp’s structure may be worth the overhead.
2) Automation depth: simple sequences vs real journeys
Automation is the practical differentiator for many teams.
MailerLite handles the fundamentals well:
- Welcome/onboarding sequences
- Basic branching based on clicks, groups, or form source
- Simple tagging and segmentation
Mailchimp can go further in “journey” building, but some of the advanced capabilities often push you into higher tiers, and certain workflow constraints can feel opinionated (sometimes in ways you don’t want).
If automation is your main reason for paying, also consider specialized competitors:
- activecampaign is widely regarded as the automation-heavy option (CRM-ish, lots of conditional logic).
- convertkit is popular with creators for sequences and tagging that feel natural.
In other words: MailerLite and Mailchimp cover 80% of typical use cases; if you need the last 20% (lead scoring, sales pipelines, deeply branched logic), you’ll likely feel it quickly.
3) Pricing and “gotchas” that matter at scale
Most comparisons hand-wave pricing, but the shape of pricing matters more than the entry point.
Common realities:
- As your list grows, cost becomes a product decision, not a line item.
- You pay for “audience management mistakes” (duplicates, messy segments) more in some tools than others.
- Features like multi-step automations, advanced segmentation, and reporting are frequently tier-gated.
MailerLite is usually perceived as more cost-efficient for straightforward newsletter + automation setups. Mailchimp can become expensive as you scale, especially if you’re using multiple audiences or need higher-tier automations and reporting.
If you’re running a lean program and you care about predictable costs, MailerLite often wins the “no surprises” category. If you’re already in the Mailchimp ecosystem and actively using its broader features, switching costs may outweigh monthly savings.
4) Deliverability, segmentation, and measurement (the stuff that moves revenue)
Deliverability is hard to judge from marketing pages. Both platforms can perform well if you do the basics: clean lists, sane send frequency, authenticated domains (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and consistent engagement.
Where users feel differences day-to-day is segmentation and reporting:
- MailerLite: simple segments and groups that are easy to reason about.
- Mailchimp: powerful segmentation options, but it’s easier to end up with a taxonomy you regret.
Measurement: both give opens/clicks and campaign reports, but the real question is whether you can answer: “Which sign-up source leads to conversions?” If you’re not pushing events back to your app/website, you’re mostly doing directional marketing.
Actionable example: track email clicks with UTM tags
No matter which tool you choose, standardize UTM parameters so Google Analytics (or any analytics tool) can attribute traffic and conversions.
https://yourdomain.com/pricing?
utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch_april&utm_content=cta_button
Practical tip: bake this into your process. Every campaign gets a utm_campaign, and every main link gets a unique utm_content. You’ll quickly learn which topics and CTAs produce real downstream value.
5) So which one should you pick? (and when to consider alternatives)
Pick MailerLite if:
- You want a clean UI and fast execution
- Your automations are mostly onboarding, nurture, and light branching
- You want solid value without paying for a bigger “marketing suite” than you use
Pick Mailchimp if:
- You’re already embedded in its workflows/integrations
- You value its broader suite and reporting structure
- You have a team that benefits from more rigid organization
And if you’re reading this thinking “I need serious automation, not just email blasts,” you’ll likely be happier evaluating activecampaign, getresponse, or brevo alongside these two. They each have different strengths (automation depth, omnichannel features, or pricing models), and the best choice depends on whether your business is creator-led, ecommerce-heavy, or sales-driven.
Soft conclusion: start with the platform that makes you ship consistently for 90 days. The best tool is the one that keeps your list warm, your segments clean, and your experiments measurable—then you can justify switching (or not) with real data.
