Sendinblue vs. Mailchimp – Which Email Tool Should You Use?

Are you looking for the best email tool to build your email list and grow your business? 

Whether you’re an online creator (e.g., a blogger) or looking to start your eCommerce site using Shopify or Wix, I wrote this comparison to guide you.

This is my SUPER in-depth comparison of SendinBlue vs. Mailchimp. 

However, I’ll help you make that important decision by sharing what I love about SendinBlue and Mailchimp, the features, costs, and which one is best suited for your business.

Should you use SendinBlue to build your email list and communicate with your prospects or should you pick Mailchimp instead? Which one is easier to use and offers more value for money? That’s exactly what we’ll find out.

Let’s dive in.

1. SendinBlue vs. Mailchimp At A Glance

Here, we shall take a glance at SendinBlue and Mailchimp to help you decide which email marketing software is most ideal for your online business. 

4.8	4.7
Best Overall. 5x cheaper email marketing plans. SMS marketing. Retargeting campaigns. Try for free.	Best for growing businesses. Easy to use. Audience management tools. Creative marketing tools. Try for free.
Try SendinBlue	Try Mailchimp

If you’re just getting started with your first email marketing campaign, you’ll love Mailchimp because it has a more intuitive user interface. But, SendinBlue gives you more email marketing and customer engagement solutions. It’s an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses.

So, how does SendinBlue differ from Mailchimp? Which email marketing platform is better for starting and scaling your business?

Here’s what I discovered based on my experience and after deep research:

SendinBlue is an all-in-one email marketing software, with more advanced automation and email segmentation features, and offers cheaper plans, while Mailchimp offers beginner-friendly email marketing solutions, a simple email editor, and a free plan for the first 2,000 contacts. SendinBlue costs $25/mo., while Mailchimp costs $9.99/mo.

2. Who Is SendinBlue Best For?

SendinBlue is an amazing email marketing software for small to medium businesses. It’s not recommended for enterprise companies. It offers one of the cheapest email solutions in the world — and a free plan for individuals/businesses that want to get started without spending money.

Companies like Fujitsu, Michelin, Groupe Casino, FrontLine, Tissot, and thousands of other popular brands happily use SendinBlue. 

3. Who Is Mailchimp Best For?

Mailchimp is best suited for growing businesses. So Startups, freelancers, authors, online marketers, course creators, bloggers, and eCommerce marketers can benefit from the rich features of Mailchimp.

Further study: 17 Best Online Course Platforms of 2021

Companies like TED, Vimeo, Fader, East Fork, Chronicle Books, and other trusted companies actively use Mailchimp to engage with their audiences.

4. A Close Look At The Features Of SendinBlue And Mailchimp

Let’s see how SendinBlue stacks up against Mailchimp. Here’s a summarized version of the key features:

Features
Easy-to-use marketing automation
Comes with free landing page templates
Comes with email sign-up form templates
Equipped with retargeting tools
Has free email plans
Has easy-to-customize email templates
Offers 24/7 customer support
Equipped with own live chat tools
Get started	Try SendinBlue	Try Mailchimp

5. Key Features Of SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a complete suite of email marketing solutions. From email marketing to CRM to landing pages, and more, you’re covered. 

Here are 5 key features of SendinBlue that make it great:

#1 Send Personalized Emails To Your Contacts

Are you ready to promote your brand and meet your customer’s needs with beautifully designed emails? If yes, then SendinBlue should come to mind.

You can easily design your message and bring life to it using one of the email templates. 

From the Campaigns tab, you’ll find the Templates Library:

Customize it as you want with blocks and style via the intuitive drag-and-drop builder.

To ensure your message gets delivered, you should personalize it properly. 

Choose your recipients carefully and send emails that get opened and read.

There are so many email marketing providers but SendinBlue has received a lot of customer reviews and positive testimonials. Small businesses like their approach to digital marketing, specifically email marketing; it’s simple but highly effective.

#2 Send Time-Sensitive Offers Via SMS Marketing

SendinBlue makes it easy to communicate directly with your prospects and customers via targeted SMS messages.

SMS messaging is important when you want to send time-sensitive information or product offering to your contacts. Special events, discounts, and one-time offers require a more stellar marketing approach — other than the typical email messages.

From your SendinBlue database, you can send targeted SMS messages to your contacts instantly. 

You’re in control; so feel free to schedule your messages to be sent whenever you want, choose your list, and even use a template that suits your brand.

Text messaging is hard to execute — even with dedicated SMS software. Thanks to SendinBlue, it’s now pretty easier to promote time-sensitive products and special events by reaching your audience via their mobile phones. How awesome can it get?

Burkhard Berger

#3 Boost Productivity With Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation is one of the defining features of SendinBlue. Your business will experience a boost in productivity — since you’ll be able to do more in record time. You save time and money by minimizing manual and repetitive tasks.

SendinBlue gives you the tools to automate your marketing and sales processes. There are tasks in your workflow that need to be triggered and executed using rules and conditions. 

These actions can include sending a number of emails to new subscribers once they confirm their subscription, sending out your SMS message (which has been scheduled), organizing your contacts into separate segments, updating contact information in the database, etc. The list is endless.

Whether you’re using SendinBlue because of the email marketing features, the SMS capabilities, or the CRM system, you can use marketing automation to streamline your workflow and get dramatic results.

#4 Create Stunning Landing Pages For Your Business

Your website visitors want a more customized experience. Of course, you need the right web hosting (I recommend Bluehost or DreamHost), however, it can be difficult to create memorable experiences with your website alone — especially if it caters to a wider audience.

Hence, you need to create landing pages for your marketing campaigns. Whether you’re running Facebook ads or you have a dedicated promotion for your email subscribers, a custom landing page can increase your conversions.

With SendinBlue, you can build landing pages that represent the true essence of your business. You don’t need any coding skills to do so. Pick a template from the stunning templates library or build from scratch using the drag and drop landing page builder.

You can also choose the goal of your landing page, create a ‘guided process’ by adding new pages, and publish your page to a specific segment of your contact list. You’re in control!

#5 Create Facebooks Ads and Retargeting Campaigns

Sendinblue takes online marketing to the next level by letting you create Facebook ads from your account. 

With these Facebook ads, you can retarget a number of contacts (i.e., subscribers) who took a particular action or retarget a new audience based on their behaviors.

Retargeting isn’t a buzzword. It’s a superior way to show ads to your visitors and contacts as they browse other websites and re-engage them. And SendinBlue’s retargeting campaigns are easy to execute.

Once you log into your SendinBlue account, you can create your Facebook ad creative, upload images, enter your ad text, then choose a call-to-action to match your goal: promote your content, sell more, spread the word, or highlight an upcoming event.

With its lead scoring feature, you can find new leads that are similar to your best content — and retarget these Lookalike audiences. All of these can be done inside SendinBlue.

How many email marketing platforms allow you to create Facebook ads and run retargeting campaigns from within the dashboard? Not too many? It’s a game-changer if you’re a Facebook advertiser. No need to visit the Facebook Ads portal to run ads, save time with SendinBlue.

6. Key Features Of Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms in the world. It offers an all-in-one email marketing solution to growing businesses.

Let’s consider the 5 key features of Mailchimp and how they can help you grow your business:

#1 Mailchimp Audience Management Tools

With countless email marketing tools out there, being able to manage your contact list effectively is critical. Sending emails to subscribers is fun with Mailchimp, it’s the easiest process ever — it’s easier than ActiveCampaign.

That’s why Mailchimp is a leading email tool to rely on, which offers Marketing CRM, Signup forms, Segmentation, and Behavioral Targeting to help you actualize your marketing goals.

You’ll gain access to all Audience Tools — which means they’ll always be at the heart of your business.

Easily turn audience data into insights that help drive better campaigns and results.

You can use one of the stunning Signup forms on your website or landing page to collect your visitor’s details. Customize your form via the Style, Layout, and Settings tab.

In the Audience Dashboard, you can quickly spot patterns and utilize the insights to run profitable campaigns.

Email segmentation is also a critical aspect of email marketing. With Mailchimp, you can seamlessly filter your audience by behavior or demographics to find their interests and all. 

Build better relationships by sending targeted emails based on the accurate insights you have about your contacts.

#2 Mailchimp Creative Marketing Tools

Modern marketing best practices involve creativity. No one is applauded for being boring or traditional.

Mailchimp makes it easier to send highly-targeted emails to subscribers using creative tools. Here are some ways Mailchimp rewards you with creative tools:

Dynamic Content: This allows you to personalize individual content blocks with engaging emails. This adds a layer of personalization to your email campaigns.

Subject Line Helper: Don’t know what to write to hook your recipients? The Subject Line Helper will take your creative gems to the next level. It’s so simple to use.

Creative Assistant: Using the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Mailchimp saves you time by generating hyper-focus and branded email designs. The beautiful part of this is you can customize your designs using the drag and drop feature.

Content Studio: Never lose your images and files, the Content Studio lets you sync, store, and edit all your images in one place.

#3 Marketing Automation Features and Tools

How do you keep your contacts engaged when you’re asleep or on holiday? The magic word is Automation.

This is where Mailchimp excels more than a host of email marketing platforms. Marketing Automations help you connect with people when it matters, and be able to turn online contacts and shoppers into customers.

Track the customer journey and create personalized, automated marketing workflows for individual customers — based on their specific needs, behaviors, and persona.

Mailchimp also has a high deliverability rate. This means you can optimize when you send emails out, remove the guesswork, and only press “send” when you know your recipients are online.

Mailchimp marketing automation also extends into Transactional emails. It allows you to create, schedule, and send trigger-based email messages about purchases and account activity, especially when you use rules to set conditions. 

Marketing Automation will show you the visual journeys, custom triggers, pre-built automation, scheduling tools, and other important information you need to build rapport with your audience — whether you’re online or offline.

#4 Mailchimp Audience Insights & Analytics Tools

The goal of collecting data and digging into insights about your subscribers is to be able to create winning email campaigns.

Mailchimp offers one of the richest customer insights. For one, the platform has 11 million+ users, which means millions of insights.

You can see what’s working with your email campaigns and what operations to ignore. A few concerns you’ll be able to find insights on include:

• How do your email campaigns compare? 
• What’s the Open rate? 
• How many recipients added products to the Shopping cart? 
• What percentage of these customers purchased the products? 

And so on.

With Mailchimp, you can run A/B Testing campaigns (e.g., test subject line). This lets you eliminate the guesswork — so that you’re able to track sales, and audience growth, and dive deeper into audience engagements in real-time. 

I’m loving the Audience dashboard that Mailchimp provides. It lets me view important user metrics about my contacts so that I can understand their behaviors and interests. Every marketer needs such insights.

Burkhard Berger

#5 Mailchimp Website Builder: Start and Market Your Business Online 

Mailchimp is offering a ton of other marketing solutions. The team is helping growing businesses — so there’s a need to support their growth as well.

To get started online, a business needs a domain name and web hosting.

That’s where Mailchimp comes in. You can create a custom domain and connect to Mailchimp with the built-in marketing tools and intuitive drag-and-drop builder. Choose from the rich collection of stunning website templates.

While WordPress offers a more robust CMS for building your websites, it can be a hassle for beginners. 

Get started with Mailchimp and get your website up and running in no time.

Don’t just build a website, you should market it too. That’s the solemn belief of Mailchimp. 

Hence, you get all the required tools to market your new business/website — including landing pages, social ads, emails, postcards, and more from one place.

7. SendinBlue vs. Mailchimp – Pros And Cons

SendinBlue has 175,000 users already in over 100 countries. It’s a great email marketing software for small businesses and mid-size ventures. It’s relatively easy to use compared to Constant Contact and Drip. 

SendinBlue:

Pros	Cons
Clean and easy to use interface	No phone support is provided
Modern and easy to customize email templates	The Reporting view can be improved
SendinBlue is quite cheap compared to ActiveCampaign	Lacks direct social media integration
Good email template support	No auto-renew or a subscription option for SMS service
It’s easy to set up and configure

Let’s summarize the pros and cons of Mailchimp to help you make well-informed decisions:

MailChimp:

Pros	Cons
It’s easy to set up and use	Text formats are limited
Beautiful email templates to choose from	Mailchimp can get expensive as your contact list starts to grow
Drag and Drop builder with image and video embedding options	Basic email automation. More advanced features can be introduced
Easily create Workflows that suit your business
Quickly schedule email blasts
Mailchimp offers 24/7 expert support

8. Where Do I Get The Most For My Money?

So which email marketing platform offers the most for your investment? Here’s a breakdown of the pricing structures of SendinBlue and Mailchimp (with screenshots).

SendinBlue Pricing Plans

SendinBlue offers 4 simple pricing options. Take a look at what you can expect to pay and the features you’ll enjoy in each plan:

• Free ($0.00/mo.): The Free plan gets you started with SendinBlue. You can send up to 300 emails per day, capture unlimited contacts, gain access to the Mobile-friendly email designer, SMS marketing, and more.

• Lite ($25/mo.): If you’re a new marketer, it makes sense to take baby steps with any new endeavor. Email marketing is fun but can be complicated and requires a learning curve. So choose a paid plan you can afford at the early stages of your business. Send up to 100,000 emails, no daily sending limit, access email support, and more with the SendinBlue Lite plan.

• Premium ($65/mo.): Marketing pros like this plan — because they’re able to send 1,000,000 emails, execute marketing automation, Facebook & Retargeting Ads, Landing pages, and more.

• Enterprise: You need to contact the “Sales” team to get a quote. If you want more advanced email marketing tools and features, the Enterprise plan is your best shot. It comes with everything in Premium + 10+ users, Customer success manager, priority support, 20+ landing pages, etc.

Mailchimp Pricing Plans

Mailchimp offers 4 flexible pricing plans to support your business now and when you scale. Here’s the breakdown:

• Free ($0.00/mo.): When you’re ready to grow your business online, Mailchimp gives you a free email marketing plan. This allows up to 2,000 contacts, Marketing CRM, Creative Assistant, Signup Forms & Landing pages, etc. 

• Essentials ($9.99/mo.): If you’re only interested in sending emails only, and some great customer support, The Essentials plan is what Mailchimp offers. It allows up to 50,000 contacts, A/B testing, 24/7 email & chat support, etc. 

• Standard ($14.00/mo.): Access advanced automation and email marketing optimization tools. This can help your business grow faster. It has all the features in “Essentials” plus 100,000 contacts, 5 Audiences including Behavioral targeting, Dynamic content, Custom templates, etc.

• Premium ($299/mo.): Professional email marketers and online entrepreneurs who need more customization features can benefit from the Premium plan. It’s feature-rich with everything in Standard, plus Advanced Segmentation, Phone Support, Multivariate testing, Comparative Reporting, and more. 

9. Conclusion – Which Is Better: Sendinblue Or Mailchimp?

To wrap up this SendinBlue vs. Mailchimp comparison, here’s my verdict:

If you want an all-in-one email marketing solution that’s simple and affordable, Mailchimp is the best option. It’ll give you email signup forms to embed to your landing page or social media page. In 15 minutes, you can start building your email list and growing your business. 

If you ever face challenges along the way, Mailchimp offers 24/7 customer support, including phone support to get your questions answered on time.

SendinBlue, on the other hand, is a great Mailchimp alternative and offers a more useful email platform and marketing solution. 

This platform will help a business with its email marketing services. It aids in capturing email contacts, has a ton of opt-in options, sends targeted emails, builds professional landing pages, manages customer data, and turns new leads into customers via Live chat.

10. SendinBlue vs. Mailchimp – FAQ

In this SendInBlue vs Mailchimp comparison guide, let’s wrap it up by answering 3 of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs): 

Is SendinBlue Free?

SendinBlue offers a completely free plan that lets you send 300 emails/day and engage with unlimited contacts. The Lite (Basic) plan costs $25/mo. and only allows 10,000 emails to be sent each month.

Is Mailchimp Easy to Use?

Yes, Mailchimp is very easy to use with its drag-and-drop editor and clean user interface. As you use it consistently, you’ll get familiar with the integrations of plugins, navigations, and adding pop-ups. In the beginning, though, you have to learn how to use the Merge Tags.

Is Mailchimp a CRM?

Mailchimp is primarily an email marketing software. However, it offers basic CRM features and tools for growing businessess which is why its ease of use is so high from its users. It makes it easy for them to aggregate, organize email clients, and manage audience data from one central place.