Home › Guides › MailerLite vs Mailchimp
Updated September 24, 2026 · Prices verified from vendor pricing pages, September 2026 · Affiliate disclosure
Most email-platform comparisons fail quietly because the vendors price different things: Brevo bills email volume, Kit prices by subscriber band but hides paid tiers behind a slider, ActiveCampaign publishes annual anchors only. MailerLite and Mailchimp both price a contact band — your list size picks the rung, the rung sets the bill. Same unit, same logic, so the differences that remain are the ones that actually matter: what each rung costs, what each plan includes, and what happens when your list grows past it.
What does not line up is access to the prices themselves. MailerLite's page publishes the whole ladder — ten bands from 500 to 30,000 subscribers, on both plans, on both billing cycles. Mailchimp's page holds roughly twenty bands from 0–500 up to 1,000,000+, but the figure for a band renders only after you select it, one plan at a time. Both approaches are official. Only one of them can be checked by a buyer with a notepad, and that asymmetry shapes everything below — including the cells we leave empty.
Mailchimp's smallest band is the one place its ladder publishes a US figure without a selection round-trip, so the 500-subscriber row is the only row where both sides are on the record. Everything Mailchimp publishes beyond it on the US page requires picking a band inside its selector, which is why rows two and three carry one verified number instead of three.
| List size | MailerLite Comfort | MailerLite sends/mo | Mailchimp (published) | Mailchimp sends/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $12/mo · $10.80 billed yearly | 5,000 | Standard $20/mo list · $10/mo for 12 months (0–500 band, US) | 6,000 on Standard (12×) |
| 2,500 | $33/mo · $29.70 billed yearly | 25,000 | Not published per band — renders only inside the plan selector | 25,000 Essentials (10×) · 30,000 Standard (12×) · 37,500 Premium (15×) |
| 10,000 | $89/mo · $80.10 billed yearly | 100,000 | Not published per band; annual billing only from this size, via sales | 100,000 Essentials · 120,000 Standard · 150,000 Premium |
USD, United States billing, from each vendor's own pricing page, September 2026. Mailchimp's send allowances are the published multipliers applied to the band ceiling; MailerLite's are its published rule of ten times the band ceiling. The one verified price gap, at 500 subscribers, is $8 a month at list rates — $96 a year — in MailerLite's favor, closing to −$2 a month for the twelve promotional months if you take Mailchimp's offer.
Two details in that table reward a second look. First, the send allowances converge as plans climb: at 2,500 contacts, Mailchimp Standard's 30,000 allowance beats MailerLite's 25,000, and Premium's 37,500 beats both — the multiplier ladder (10×, 12×, 15×) is Mailchimp's answer to MailerLite's flat rule of ten. Second, the 10,000-subscriber row is where Mailchimp's own footnote bites: annual plans exist for Premium and for Standard at 10,000-plus contacts through its sales team, so the list size where Mailchimp finally sells a year up front is exactly the size where MailerLite's 10% yearly discount has been available since the $12 band.
Neither vendor's free tier will carry a growing list, and it is worth being precise about how little separates them. Both cut off at 250: MailerLite at 250 subscribers, Mailchimp at 250 contacts. The difference is what you can do under the cap.
| MailerLite free | Mailchimp free | |
|---|---|---|
| Cap | 250 subscribers | 250 contacts |
| Monthly sends | 2,500 (ten full-list sends) | 500/month or 250/day, whichever comes first |
| User seats | 2 | 1 |
| Audiences | — | 1 |
| Automation flows | Not included | Not included |
| Email support | — | First 30 days only |
Five times the sending allowance and a second seat, for the same list size, at the same price. If a free plan is a trial rather than a home, the practical reading is that both vendors price their free tier to expire at exactly the moment a list becomes commercially useful — 250 is the size at which both start charging, and the paid comparison above begins.
Both vendors bill the band your list fits, not the count it has — and both keep counting addresses you have deleted, at least for a while. Beyond that, the mechanics split, and the split has real money in it.
MailerLite's pricing copy commits to one sentence: every paid plan gets the full feature set, and you only pay more for a bigger list or more sending. Automation, A/B testing and unbranded sending are therefore Comfort features at $12.
Mailchimp tiers features instead. Essentials (its entry paid plan) caps automation flows at four steps — enough for a welcome email, not a branching sequence — and allows three users and three audiences. The plan most buyers actually need is Standard, which lifts the flow cap to 200 and the seat count to five, and it is Standard whose $20 list price is the figure we could verify at 500 contacts. Premium removes the remaining caps at a price that scales with the band. So the honest feature-to-feature comparison at 500 subscribers is MailerLite Comfort $12 against Mailchimp Standard $20, not against Essentials — and the $96-a-year gap at list rates is the gap between a full toolset and a capped one.
Region shifts the math slightly. On the EU billing page Mailchimp's smallest band reads €11.43 for Essentials and €17.59 for Standard (re-checked September 24, 2026), against MailerLite's €11 for the 500-subscriber band — for a buyer billed in euros, the list-price gap at the entry tier is cents, not dollars, and the deciding factor becomes the feature caps rather than the sticker.
Run the first year at 500 subscribers and the promotion wins: $120 against MailerLite's $144 monthly (or $129.60 billed yearly). Run into year two and it flips hard: $240 against $144, with the cumulative cost on monthly billing crossing over in month fifteen — three months after the promotion ends. A buyer choosing on the promotional number is choosing on the one figure in this comparison with an expiry date printed next to it.
Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page or plan documentation, read in September 2026 and dated on the page. MailerLite's ten-band ladder was re-read on September 23, 2026 and matched its first recording on September 21; Mailchimp's US anchors and EU band prices were re-checked on September 24, 2026, catching a few cents of movement on the EU page. Where Mailchimp publishes no figure — every US band beyond 0–500 — the cell says so instead of carrying an estimate, because its selector renders one price at a time and we do not extrapolate a ladder from one anchor. For the platform Mailchimp buyers most often land on next, our Mailchimp alternatives guide prices five vendors from official pages; Mailchimp's own three caps are read line by line in our guide to its pricing and hidden costs; and the other cheap-pair head-to-head, Brevo vs MailerLite, compares these two vendors where their billing models stop matching. To price your own subscriber count across every plan we can verify, use the list-size cost calculator. Our methodology and affiliate disclosure explain how prices are verified and how the site earns.
At every size where Mailchimp publishes a figure we could verify, yes. At 500 subscribers MailerLite Comfort is $12 a month against Mailchimp Standard's $20 list price on the same 0–500 band — $96 a year at list rates. Mailchimp's twelve-month offer brings Standard to $10 a month for the first year — $24 cheaper than MailerLite over twelve months on monthly billing — then reverts to $20 in month thirteen. At 2,500 and 10,000 subscribers Mailchimp publishes no per-band figure, so no verified comparison exists at those sizes.
They stop at the same point — both cap free accounts at 250 — but the shape differs. MailerLite's free plan allows 2,500 emails a month and two user seats. Mailchimp's allows 500 emails a month or 250 a day, whichever comes first, on one seat, with one audience, no automation flows and email support for the first 30 days only.
MailerLite moves you to the next band's price at your billing anniversary, counting any address active at any point in the cycle even after deletion. Mailchimp bills an overage automatically and keeps campaigns running as long as it is paid on time. Both keep deleted addresses counting until the cycle resets, so mid-cycle list cleaning lowers neither bill.
MailerLite discounts every band 10% for yearly billing on both Comfort and Power. Mailchimp's own footnotes restrict annual plans to Premium and Standard plans of 10,000-plus contacts through sales; below that, the twelve-month promotional rate is the only discount, and it reverts at month thirteen.
MailerLite's: every paid plan carries the full feature set, so automation arrives with Comfort at $12. Mailchimp's Essentials caps automation at four flow steps and three users; branching workflows and five seats start on Standard — the plan whose $20 list price is the honest comparison point at 500 subscribers.