Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the email platform that everyone tries first, and for good reason—it’s the safe choice. But I want to be honest: it’s a legacy product that’s still searching for its identity. The free tier will get you moving with basic email sends, but you’ve only got 500 contacts before you need to pay. That means you’re evaluating the product on a very tight leash.

Once you move to paid ($13 for Essentials is fair), the feature set starts to make sense. You get basic automation, segmentation, A/B testing—the fundamentals of email marketing. The template library is solid if you’re not a designer, and if you’re running an e-commerce business on Shopify, the integration works. The problem is that the UI feels like it’s been through a hundred product redesigns and never landed on a coherent vision. You’ll figure it out, but it takes longer than it should.

Here’s where I’d pick Mailchimp: you’re a small team doing email marketing on a shoestring budget and you need something that just works. But if you’re serious about email as a growth channel, or if you need sophisticated automation, look at beehiiv or even HubSpot first. Mailchimp gets the job done, but you’ll outgrow it faster than you think, and the upgrade path isn’t smooth. It’s a good starting block. Just don’t expect to build your empire on it.