Kit vs. Mailchimp: Which is best? [2025]

What do Lil Jon, Matthew McConaughey, and Mandy Moore have in common? The common thread isn't backing vocals on "Get Low" or cameos in Interstellar—it's actually email marketing. All of them use Kit (formerly ConvertKit). And while it doesn't make quite as catchy of an anecdote, the Georgia Museum of Art, Jittery Joe's Coffee, and a brand of baby sunglasses called Babiators all use Mailchimp.

Kit is built first and foremost for "brands of one," like authors, artists, performers, and—above all—online creators. And while Mailchimp pretty much targets everyone, it's best known for serving small businesses, agencies, and direct-to-consumer eCommerce brands.

If you fit into one of the above demographics, consider it a strong early hint as to which direction you should go in. But there are plenty of edge cases and feature differences to consider too, especially if you have a specific use case in mind for your email marketing.

I've used Mailchimp for years on behalf of clients, and I recently migrated one of my side projects over to Kit to take advantage of their "free until 10,000 subscribers" plan. In this article, I'll compare the features of both apps so you can figure out which makes sense for you.

Table of contents:

• Kit vs. Mailchimp at a glance

• Kit is easier to use, but Mailchimp is more customizable

• Mailchimp is a one-stop shop for marketing, while Kit is all about helping creators earn money

• Mailchimp is better for AI and analytics

• Kit has the best free plan in the industry, and its plans scale better

• Both have plenty of integrations and connect to Zapier

• Kit vs. Mailchimp: Which should you choose?

Kit vs. Mailchimp at a glance

Here's a high-level overview of the difference between these two tools:

• Kit is best for creators who want to monetize their email list. With unique growth and income-generating features like paid recommendations, sponsored ads, and cross-promotion with other newsletters, it's unmatched for content creators and solo entrepreneurs.

• Mailchimp is best for small businesses looking for a complete marketing suite. With SMS campaigns, social media scheduling, AI-powered automations, and robust eCommerce tools, it's perfect for teams managing multi-channel marketing efforts.

Kit is easier to work with, but Mailchimp is more customizable

Believe it or not, Mailchimp—a famously beginner-friendly platform with a monkey logo—has a steeper learning curve than Kit. Mailchimp isn't hard to use by any means, but Kit offers a more straightforward experience and makes it simpler to quickly send beautiful emails to your list and avoid getting stuck tinkering with your email marketing for hours.

My favorite example of this is Kit's Rules feature. With most email platforms, you have to assemble a full automation sequence even if you just want to do something simple, like automatically removing a tag from certain users. Kit puts these simple "if this, then that" automations into their own category and lets you set them up with just a few clicks.

To do this in Mailchimp, there are lots of options to wade through: you need to name a new visual automation, choose from a bunch of triggers and actions, and review your "flow settings." It's too much horsepower for such a simple task.

Of course, if you actually want to create a complex visual automation with multiple triggers and actions, Mailchimp's setup is exactly what you want. Want to add if/else rules, wait for certain triggers, send SMS messages instead of emails, or integrate Meta Custom Audience or webhook data? Mailchimp can do it. While Kit has a visual automation builder, it's not as powerful or customizable as what Mailchimp offers.

When you're designing and sending emails, you can see something similar at play: Kit makes the process faster and easier, but Mailchimp has more options.

Kit's small selection of templates—especially the creator-produced options in its marketplace—are gorgeous and easy to edit. If you love tinkering with your email designs, however, you might find Kit's editor restrictive: you can add lots of widgets and a handful of prebuilt layouts, but you can't create your own multi-column layout from scratch.

Mailchimp is more or less the opposite. You get unrestricted drag-and-drop freedom, which is great—but the side effect is that you might end up creating a cluttered design that doesn't display nicely in your users' inboxes. Mailchimp's 200+ templates are solid, but they aren't quite as polished as Kit's.

Mailchimp is a one-stop shop for marketing, while Kit is all about helping creators earn money

If there's one area where Mailchimp and Kit are most differentiated, it's here.

Mailchimp lets you run pretty much all of your marketing efforts from its platform, meaning users with basic needs might be able to use Mailchimp for their entire marketing stack. Kit, on the other hand, has no interest in helping you schedule Instagram posts. Instead, it focuses on a narrower set of features that help you grow and monetize your list.

Let's start with Mailchimp. In addition to emails, Mailchimp can also work as your marketing hub for:

• SMS marketing

• Google remarketing ads

• Social media posts

• Pop-up forms

• Landing pages

• Websites

• Surveys

Mailchimp includes a social media scheduler and a marketing calendar, so it's well-equipped for managing your social media campaigns.

If design isn't your strongest skillset, you might benefit from Mailchimp's Creative Assistant, which uses AI to spin up designs inspired by your brand colors and typography. You can select the format you want (like Instagram Story or Facebook ad), animate the design with one click, and save to your design library for use in your campaigns.

SMS is a hugely important channel for many small businesses, especially anyone dealing with appointment reminders, physical product deliveries, or loyalty programs. Mailchimp lets you run SMS programs to send product discounts, transactional follow-ups, and customer service messages. It's a paid add-on, but a pretty reasonable one, with credits starting at $20 for 1,000 messages. You can also create automations that trigger both emails and SMS messages at different touchpoints.

It's astonishing how few of the above features are present in Kit. You won't find any mention of SMS, social posting, or Google Ads management as you scroll through Kit's features. Instead, you'll find an ecosystem of features that work together to help you grow and monetize your list.

Here are the core components of Kit's creator ecosystem:

• Creator Profile: A landing page that tells users about you, hosts your content and products, and lets people sign up for your list.

• Recommendations: A feature that lets you cross-promote your newsletter with other creators.

• Paid Recommendations: You can get paid for recommending other Kit creators in your newsletter.

• Paid Newsletters: Turn your newsletter into a product and sell access to it.

• The Kit Sponsor Network: Let Kit find advertisers and place ads in your newsletter.

• Kit Commerce: Sell, host, and deliver digital products to your audience with one-time and recurring payment options.

• Tips: Let readers support you on a one-off basis with tips.

Kit has done an impressive job of actually listening to what creators need, and then building those things. As a result, many of Kit's growth and monetization features are unique to its platform and would be hard to replicate elsewhere. While you could probably set up a half-baked version of Kit's features yourself, it would be messier and more expensive than just using Kit.

As cool as all of Kit's creator features are, it's important to point out that they're really optimized for digital products, not physical products. You can sell simple physical products too, and Kit does have a Shopify integration if you want to try and hack something together, but that's not really the goal of the platform.

Mailchimp isn't as powerful for eCommerce marketing as rival platforms like Klaviyo, but it's a much better bet than Kit if you run an online shop and need an email tool for following up with customers, sending transactional emails, and promoting products based on purchase history.

Mailchimp is a better choice if AI and analytics are important

Kit doesn't offer any AI features apart from a subject line generator, making it an outlier among email marketing platforms these days. It's also not a great option if you love digging into data and analytics: Kit's Creator plan only offers basic analytics, though if you upgrade to the Creator Pro plan, you get access to an Insights Dashboard that offers in-depth analytics.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers its entire menu of analytics features—including custom reporting—on its mid-range Standard plan. It also embeds data insights throughout the platform in a way that's actually useful. A good example is a feature called "anomaly detection" that automatically highlights when you have emails that significantly underperform and suggests next steps.

You also get access to a powerful menu of reporting features with Mailchimp, including a marketing dashboard offering high-level visualizations that show how your various campaigns have performed.

Mailchimp has been pretty aggressive about integrating AI into its platform. Like most legacy apps that bolt on AI features, the result is a mixed bag in terms of its practical impact.

Let's start with the best part: AI-powered automations. Creating detailed automations manually is tedious work, from mapping out the steps of the automation to writing out the actual email content. And finding an automation template that perfectly suits your use case isn't always possible. Mailchimp's "AI-powered flows" tackle both the automation itself and the accompanying emails.

It's a great concept, although currently there are only three AI-powered flows available: Welcome new contacts, Recover abandoned carts, and Recover lost customers.

Mailchimp also has lots of AI features that aim to streamline the creative side of email marketing. While this sounds nice, it's tricky to get right in practice: Mailchimp's AI-generated designs aren't as nice as its templates, and its AI writer can struggle to nail your brand's tone of voice. Like any LLM-produced content, it's ok for breaking through writer's block—but you probably want to give it a serious edit before sending it out to your list.

Kit has the best free plan in the industry, and its plans scale better

Usually, free email marketing plans are designed to make you hit limits quickly so you're forced to upgrade. Mailchimp is a good example: its free plan caps your list at 500 contacts and your monthly sends at 1,000/month, which means that you might only be able to send a couple emails per month. You don't get any email automations, either—Mailchimp used to offer limited free automations but recently removed that feature.

Kit is different. Its Newsletter plan is free for up to 10,000 subscribers and includes unlimited email sends, unlimited landing pages, solid segmentation features, and one automated email sequence. You even get advanced features like A/B testing, conditional email content, and opt-in incentives. Have a list of thousands of subscribers? Want to send tens of thousands of emails per month? No problem—it's all free.

When you're ready to upgrade, Kit's Creator plan starts at $29/month for up to 1,000 contacts and includes unlimited automations along with more promotional tools to help you grow your list. The Creator Pro plan, at $59/month for 1,000 contacts, adds subscriber engagement scoring, advanced analytics, and Facebook custom audiences. You can also add unlimited users to your account on the Creator Pro plan.

Mailchimp's entry-level paid plans are a bit cheaper than Kit's, but they're also less generous. There's a low-cost Essentials plan starting at $13/month for 500 contacts, which is nice if you need a price point between "free" and "premium," but it's pretty limited: your email sends are capped at 5,000/month, your automations can only be four steps long, and features like segmentation, reporting, and optimization are almost nonexistent. Mailchimp's Standard plan costs $20/month for 500 contacts or $45/month for 1,500 contacts. It also removes many of the restrictions of the Essentials plan and opens up access to the Mailchimp marketing suite, though you still don't get access to unlimited sends.

Once you get up into higher subscriber levels, Mailchimp loses its pricing edge. For 5,000 contacts, you'll pay $100/month for Mailchimp's Standard plan but only $79/month for Kit's Creator plan.

Both have plenty of integrations—and connect to even more apps through Zapier

You probably won't have trouble finding the integrations you need with either Mailchimp or Kit. If you use Mailchimp, you'll get access to 300+ apps. Kit offers a bit less at 130+, but you can find more on the Kit App Store.

With Zapier, you can connect both Mailchimp and Kit to thousands of other apps, creating fully automated systems for your email marketing. For example, you can automatically summarize campaign performance, draft personalized follow-up emails using AI, or segment contacts based on sentiment analysis. It's more than just app-to-app connections—it's full AI orchestration that turns your marketing workflows into intelligent, hands-free systems.

Learn more about how to automate Mailchimp and how to automate Kit, or use one of these pre-made workflows to get started.

Kit vs. Mailchimp: Which should you choose?

If you're still weighing your options, here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

Go with Kit if you're a solo creator focused on monetization. Its unbeatable free plan (up to 10,000 subscribers), creator-specific features like paid newsletters and sponsor networks, and beginner-friendly interface make it perfect for authors, coaches, and online entrepreneurs who want to make money from their email lists without getting bogged down in complex tools.

Go with Mailchimp if you need a comprehensive email marketing platform. While its free plan is more limited, Mailchimp's paid plans give you powerful automation capabilities, AI features, SMS marketing, and solid eCommerce tools. Its extensive integrations and detailed analytics make Mailchimp a good choice for small businesses that want to manage all their marketing efforts from one platform.

Related reading:

• ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp: Which should you use?

• Kit vs. ClickFunnels: Which should you use?

• MailerLite vs. Mailchimp: Which email marketing platform is best?

• MailerLite vs. Kit: Which should you use?

• Kit vs. ActiveCampaign: Which is best?

This article was originally published in August 2019 by Emily Esposito and has also had contributions from Amanda Pell and Bryce Emley. The most recent update was in August 2025.