MailChimp vs. SendInBlue: Who Wins at Email Marketing?

Email marketing remains one of the most effective and versatile ways for a business to promote its brand, products, and services. More than a starting point in reaching out to contacts, email marketing can help chart the customer journey, build loyalty, and even propel sales or try out new concepts. But how exactly a business leverages email for marketing can take several forms. Some might go "all-in" and decide email is simply their most effective marketing tactic, which generally takes the form of a value-add newsletter delivered to a gated community of subscribers. But other organizations might want to tie their emails to other marketing channels as well as their their product feedback and sales engines. These kinds of companies often look to provide special offers and deals to email recipients, usually redeemable through the email itself. Still other brands might use simply as a smaller cog in a larger digital marketing and sales mechanism, where email might be used primarily as a service desk or customer relationship management (CRM) touch point.

All the leaders in our email marketing review category are able to address any of these needs, through direct-touch features as well as third-party integrations. Exactly how you'd implement each depends not only on you mode of business, but more importantly on how well each tool is designed, how intuitive it is to access advanced functionality (particularly in the areas of integration and analytics), and, of course, how much damage it'll do to your marketing budget's bottom line. To get a handle on how two of our top performers measure up, we compare MailChimp and SendInBlue head-to-head to see who comes out the overall winner. 

Meet the Contenders

MailChimp and SendInBlue are two standout players in the email marketing arena, each aimed generally at small to midsize businesses (SMBs). MailChimp is a long standing Editor’s Choice pick for its famed ease of use and expansive feature set. MailChimp has also spent the last year evolving its platform into a complete marketing solution by adding branding via targeted ad placement, website hosting, and domain hosting services.

SendinBlue has grown from a decent tool for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) needing email and text message marketing to a significantly more versatile marketing solutions hub. The push towards automation, and the addition of some basic but workable CRM features, make it a more compelling solution for smaller businesses and startups with modest needs.

MailChimp and SendInBlue both offer an expanding solution set built on a solid email marketing foundation, both are evolving into larger marketing ecosystems intended to make them more valuable to their subscribers, though success here for both will depend on how well they understand just what those customers need.  

Round 1: Pricing and Packages

Pricing is always a key selection criteria for any marketing tool, but especially when the customer is an SMB looking to spend money on something as potentially soft as marketing. Since there's no one-size-fits all solution, we look at what is being offered for free as well as the entry pricing and feature set.

SendInBlue has a generous free tier that allows businesses up to 300 emails a day and unlimited contacts. All of SendinBlue's plans include unlimited contacts, with tiered pricing based on the number of emails you want to send each month. Its Lite plan costs $25 per month for 40,000 emails, its Essential plan costs $39 per month for 60,000 emails, and its Premium plan costs $66 per month for 120,000 emails. There is also an Enterprise plan with custom pricing for companies that need to exceed the 120,000 email threshold (and, ideally, for companies needing 350,000 emails per month or more). SendinBlue is ramping up its feature set for 2020 with additional language support (including Italian and and Dutch), a new editor for forms, the ability to support different accounts per company, and an expanded App Center and integration page.

Mailchimp starts at $9.99 per month, though there's also a free plan that can cover 2,000 contacts and 10,000 email sends and bundles automations, basic templates, a marketing CRM and surveys and even websites. The Essentials Package at $9.99 per month is geared toward heavy email users and makes all of Mailchimp's email templates available. It accommodates up to 50,000 contacts as well as A/B testing. MailChimp’s CRM-approach also informs the scaling of subscription prices based on the number of contacts. Businesses needing larger capacities can enter the number of estimated subscribers on the handy calculator available on Mailchimp's website to get an exact price. For example, a monthly plan for 5,000 subscribers costs $74.99 per month.

Round 1 is a tie as both solutions offer free plans and have relatively affordable initial plans with a wide set of value added services.

Round 2: Managing Subscribers

SendInBlue and MailChimp each let you add contacts manually by uploading a.CSV containing basic contact information or by importing that data from a third-party contact repository, such as Microsoft Exchange. Focusing on simply the amount of available integrations, MailChimp clearly offers compatibility with many more services, including popular names like SalesForce and Zendesk.

Overall, my experience creating new data fields and matching existing ones back to source data was a little convoluted with SendinBlue. With manual input, you can't add custom fields but you can with uploads or data from a submission form. After you import your file, you have to map the fields to SendinBlue's corresponding fields. This can be a mixed bag as I found that it recognizes email addresses and names, but not dates, such as birthdays or some other text fields such as gender. The process could use some simplification.

Mailchimp does a great job helping businesses get started on the platform. The dashboard lays out the steps very clearly: Start designing your first email, add your contacts, and send your first email. When we dragged and dropped the Excel file in MailChimp, all of the contact fields ended up in the same column. However, when we copied and pasted the text into the contacts field in Mailchimp, we were able to have the contact info appear in separate columns for first name, last name, and email address.

Round 2 goes to MailChimp for its variety of importing contacts and its ease of use.

Round 3: Creating and Sending Campaigns

Even though its been working to expand its platform, which can often result in more complexity since it necessitates more features, Mailchimp has managed to dodge that particular bullet and has kept its core email marketing capabilities in a very intuitive workflow that's easy for anyone to pick up. Mailchimp prompts you to finish account setup, then connect your store (if applicable). After that it helps you create your first email, add contacts, and finally send the first email in your new campaign. Mailchimp's straightforward user experience and impressive mail and newsletter design tools don't feel like a chore, so it's no surprise that it has generated a loyal user following with SMBs.

During our SendInBlue review, I used the new drag-and-drop form builder to create a newsletter template. I found that a quick and responsive process. You can either start by dragging and dropping elements to the page or use a pre-designed template. If you start without a template, then the newsletter is pre-populated with a logo, image, text, and button, though you can swap out any of those elements for your own. Businesses will value the addition of certain elements like an anti-robot CAPTCHA functionality. There's also a new landing page builder, which is a tool that SendInBlue says it created based on customer feedback.

Round 3 is a tie as both solutions are good at offering various approaches to creating campaigns using intuitive template builders.

Round 4: Tracking Campaigns

These days, marketing success is all about business analytics. Once you send out your  newsletter campaigns, SendInBlue and MailChimp each have a reporting tab ("Statistics" in SendInBlue’s case), where you can see open and click-through rates and other subscriber data. You can link up both SendInBlue and MailChimp with Google Analytics, and the latter also links up with Salesforce and a handful of other third-party software.

SendInBlue’s Statistics section offers a convenient calendar interface flanked by important data including Open Rate, Click Rate and Unsubscription Rate. It also differentiates Email Campaigns from SMS Campaigns, which is a large part of its capability. 

Mailchimp is strong in analytics. On the dashboard there's a section for "Predicted Demographics," in which it predicts the demographics of your contacts. This data can help with forming segments and developing focused email campaigns. You can filter by total recipients, opens, and clicks. Mailchimp says you can choose an audience and segment by sign-up source, so you can target the people who subscribe from your landing page. We were able to see a report showing Average Order Revenue, Total Revenue, and the open rate for emails.

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Round 4 goes to MailChimp for its vast range of tracking and analytics which can give SMBs a fuller picture of how their campaigns are going.

Round 5: Customer Support

Mailchimp relies on self-service to address most customer questions and issues. You can look through guides, Knowledge Base (KB) articles, and tutorials for information. Mailchimp offers help sections for some of its new features like automation.

You'll also find helpful videos on topics like "Create an Automated Email." In addition, an "Email Us" button to reach technical support and billing, but it's a little hard to find. Next to it is a "Chat With Us" button for help through online chat. Upon signing up with the service, we received various invitations to learn more about the service by attending online tutorials. Phone support is available in the more premium tiers although it isn't 24/7 support.

SendInBlue offers decent support resources. A Help button on most pages offers context-relevant help. You can also view tutorials and search FAQs, which are organized by category, though it takes several clicks to actually get to the content. You can also request technical support by creating a ticket, contacting SendinBlue by web form, or by calling a toll-free number.

Round 5 is also a tie as both solutions offer self-service support solutions but lack white glove onboarding or 24/7 support.

And the Winner Is ….

Both MailChimp and SendInBlue represent some of the best email marketing solutions in the market right now, not just as pure email design, scheduling, and tracking solutions -- but as flexible platforms that can feed into more expanded marketing automation, and CRM solutions. MailChimp and SendInBlue were very close in various areas including pricing, the availability of free and affordable pricing services, as well as the ease of use of their email design templates.

MailChimp, our Editors' Choice selection in email marketing, edged out SendInBlue by being more intuitive and packing in the analytics and tracking features. Even as it is has become a more full-service marketing platform, MailChimp still defines the email marketing segment for SMBs.

Winner: MailChimp