5 Mailchimp Alternatives (2026 Reviews)

Mailchimp is a great email marketing automation tool that allows users to easily collect subscriber email addresses and create personalized email campaigns to market to these subscribers. Its free plan now stops at 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, and paid plans start at $13 per month. Prices checked September 2026.

However, this doesn't mean it's a good option for everybody. Some users might want something more advanced, others something more barebones, so we decided to write this guide.

We've tested countless Mailchimp alternatives and below, we'll talk about the best ones for each specific use case:

1. Best form-building Mailchimp alternative: FormBuilder
2. Best automation features: ActiveCampaign
3. Best Mailchimp alternative for creators and small businesses: Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
4. Best for large ecommerce stores: Klaviyo
5. Most generous free plan: MailerLite

1. Best form-building Mailchimp alternative: FormBuilder

Although our tool, FormBuilder isn't a marketing automation tool, it does allow you to create a signup or survey form with AI, share it with your email subscribers by link, and send every response to your email tool.

To do this, simply log into your FormBuilder account, and you'll find a "Create a Form" button on your dashboard. Select it, and you can build your form from one of our templates. Alternatively, you can use our AI form generator to create a custom form within seconds by entering a prompt; you don't have to build a form yourself.

Once you're happy with how your form looks, click the "Publish" button in the upper-right-hand corner, and you'll see different options to share your form.

To send your form to your email subscribers, copy the form link and paste it into your newsletter as a button or link. Email clients do not run embedded forms, so a link is the reliable way to do this. Then connect FormBuilder to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo through Zapier so every new signup lands on the right list.

2. Best automation features: ActiveCampaign

Our pick for the best Mailchimp alternative is ActiveCampaign due to its advanced marketing automation features. After testing ActiveCampaign, we can safely say that this tool can automate almost any email marketing process you can think of, from something as basic as sending an email to a team member when a user performs a certain task to setting up SMS blocks.

We also like that ActiveCampaign has an automation map where you can view all your automations and see if they work well together or if you're making a mistake somewhere. This is a feature that not many email marketing tools have.

Like most email marketing tools, ActiveCampaign has hundreds of third-party applications, from Zapier to Salesforce, Shopify, and Google Analytics. This allows you to send data to these applications when a user completes a specific action.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign currently has four pricing plans, priced by contact count. For someone new to the platform, we suggest the Starter plan, which costs $15 per month for 1,000 contacts billed yearly and should contain everything you need to run a small email marketing campaign. However, you can always upgrade to the Plus, Pro, or Enterprise plans, which cost $49, $79, and $145 per month, respectively, at the same contact count.

3. Best Mailchimp alternative for creators and small businesses: Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Another tool that stood out to us was Kit, which rebranded from ConvertKit in 2024, due to its clean, focused design. While ActiveCampaign is for Mailchimp users looking for more advanced features, Kit is for those looking for a simpler tool.

We've read reviews about marketers complaining about the lack of features inside Kit; however, in our opinion, Kit isn't targeted toward marketers. It's targeted towards creators and small business owners who just want the basic features required to collect email addresses and send newsletters.

That said, Kit does offer flexible contact management features, decent automation capabilities, and countless landing page templates. And if you're looking for more workflow automation features, you can connect Kit with Zapier and send data to various applications like Gmail, Slack, and Google Analytics.

Pricing

Kit has three plans: a Newsletter plan, a Creator plan, and a Pro plan. The Newsletter plan is free for up to 10,000 subscribers and includes unlimited landing pages and forms, but it does not include automations or email sequences. This is a good way to get a feel for the platform.

If you want unlimited email sequences and visual automations, you can sign up for the Creator plan, which costs $33 monthly for 1,000 subscribers ($390 per year). This plan adds features such as third-party integrations and an additional team member.

The last plan is the Pro plan, which costs $66 monthly for 1,000 subscribers ($790 per year). It contains everything the other plans have, plus Facebook custom audiences, a newsletter referral system, and advanced reporting.

4. Best for large ecommerce stores: Klaviyo

For large ecommerce brands that need access to more advanced features, Klaviyo is a good choice. Klaviyo's features are customized around the needs of ecommerce companies, as it offers features like abandoned cart recovery, alerts for price drops, order updates, predictive analytics, automatic optimizations, and content generation tools.

It also allows you to segment customers based on user behavior, demographics, and geographic location. This is perfect if you plan to send users different emails based on their actions on your website.

We also liked that Klaviyo has industry-specific benchmarks for ecommerce businesses, so business owners can compare their performance against other companies and see how they're doing.

Pricing

Klaviyo offers a free plan for up to 250 active profiles and 500 monthly emails. If this is a bit limiting for you, the Email plan is priced by active profiles and starts at around $20 per month for the smallest tier, with roughly $30 per month at 1,000 profiles.

Alternatively, if you also want to send text messages, the Email and SMS plan starts at around $35 per month and includes a base allocation of SMS/MMS credits, with additional credits billed on usage.

5. Most generous free plan: MailerLite

MailerLite stood out to us because its free plan still offers good features like a built-in AI writing assistant and dynamic, pre-designed content blocks. This way, your email newsletters can contain more than just images and videos.

An example of these dynamic content blocks is the countdown timer. Let's say you're launching a new product. You can send an email to your subscribers, notifying them of this, and add a countdown timer to this email that shows the time remaining before you launch your new product. This countdown timer works well for limited time sales too.

In addition, MailerLite has audience segmentation and automation features on its free plan, which covers up to 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails per month and 2 user seats. So, you can split up your audience based on user behaviors and send each segment separate email campaigns.

Pricing

If you want to upgrade from the free plan, you can sign up for the Comfort plan from $12 per month, which allows 3 user seats, or the Power plan from $25 per month, which lets you invite unlimited users and adds advanced automation workflows. Both prices are for 500 subscribers and rise with list size.

Why we believe we're the best online form builder

These are the core factors that set us apart from most online form builders and email marketing tools' built-in forms:

• AI form builder
• Form analytics
• Signature and payment collection
• Integrations with every email tool on this list

AI form builder

If you don't feel like creating a form from scratch, use our AI form generator to create one for you. Click "Create with AI" on your dashboard, type what you want the AI to build, and the AI will respond with a draft after a few seconds.

This form isn't perfect, and you'll have to edit it, but it's a better starting point than generic form templates.

Form analytics

The signup forms built into most email marketing tools tell you how many people subscribed and not much else. FormBuilder shows views, starts and completions for every form, so you can see whether people are opening your survey and leaving, or never opening it at all, and fix the right problem.

For example, if you see that most respondents stop before a payment field, you might conclude that they aren't ready to buy just yet and move the payment step to a follow-up email.

Signature and payment collection

The last problem we found when talking to users is that email marketing tools' native forms rarely let them collect signatures or payments. This is why FormBuilder includes a signature field, Stripe payment fields and file upload fields. Drag the field onto your form, share the form link with your subscribers, and they can sign, pay or upload a document from the page that opens.

Integrations with every email tool on this list

FormBuilder sends submissions to Google Sheets natively, to any webhook, and through Zapier to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Kit, Klaviyo, MailerLite and more than 100 other apps. See the integrations page for the full list.

Next steps

If you like the features we mentioned above and want to try FormBuilder for yourself, you can sign up for free here. The free plan includes 5 active forms and 100 responses per month with no credit card required.