Mailchimp vs MailerLite

321 domains dropped Mailchimp and now run MailerLite in the 90 days to August 25, 2026, against 82 that moved from MailerLite to Mailchimp. Counts are domains, not companies or contracts, and a drop means the Mailchimp tag disappeared from our crawl.

The most common G2 complaint is price once a list grows past the free tier. Since March 2026 we have watched more than 31,000 domains drop Mailchimp; of those that adopted a rival, most went to Klaviyo (3,113), then Mailgun (814) and SendGrid (530). MailerLite took 321 in the last quarter.

At 500 contacts, MailerLite Comfort is $12 a month ($10.80 on annual billing) against Mailchimp Essentials at $13 and Standard at $20. Both have a free plan up to 250 contacts: MailerLite's allows 2,500 emails a month and automations, Mailchimp's 500 sends. MailerLite Power at $25 removes the send cap; Mailchimp's send caps scale with the contact count (10x to 15x).

Neither leads on our data: Klaviyo is the destination both lose the most ecommerce-heavy domains to. Between the two, Mailchimp lists Shopify, WooCommerce, Square and Stripe among its 300+ integrations; MailerLite covers Shopify and WooCommerce among 100+ and adds selling digital products and paid newsletters without a commission.

Mailchimp, by 4.3x: 526,676 detected domains and 21.2% of the email marketing category against MailerLite's 122,973 and 5.0%, as of the August 2026 crawl.

It depends on list size and budget, and the movement between them is one-sided: 321 domains dropped Mailchimp for MailerLite in the 90 days to August 25, 2026, against 82 going the other way. G2 reviewers agree, putting MailerLite ahead on all 7 satisfaction criteria, with the widest gap on quality of support (9.3 to 8.3). Mailchimp is still the larger platform by a distance, running on 526,676 detected domains to MailerLite's 122,973, and it keeps the deeper integration catalogue and the only tier with phone support.

Yes, and it remains the most detected email marketing platform we track: 526,676 domains in the August 2026 crawl, which is 21.24% of the category and the number 1 position. 31,680 domains have dropped it since we began tracking, so there is real churn underneath, but the base is more than four times MailerLite's.

That depends what you are optimising for, and the domains that leave do not all go to MailerLite. Of the domains that dropped Mailchimp, the largest destination we measure is Klaviyo with 3,113, followed by Mailgun with 814, Sendgrid with 530, Amazon SES with 428 and Brevo with 390. Klaviyo tends to win ecommerce senders and the transactional services win senders whose volume is API-driven rather than campaign-driven.

MailerLite publishes a free plan for up to 250 subscribers with 2,500 emails a month, then Comfort at $12 a month for 500 subscribers ($10.80 on annual billing) and Power at $25 ($22.50 annual). Enterprise pricing above 200,000 subscribers is quoted rather than listed. Mailchimp's cheapest paid tier is Essentials at $13. Prices were read from each vendor's own pricing page on August 25, 2026.

In G2's own topic counts, reviewers most often name ease of use (43 mentions) and customer support (37) as strengths, and learning curve (14) and missing features (13) as complaints. That matches the ratings, where MailerLite leads Mailchimp on every criterion but rests on a much thinner panel: 1,113 reviews against 5,428.