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.
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:
- Best form-building Mailchimp alternative: FormBuilder
- Best automation features: ActiveCampaign
- Best Mailchimp alternative for small businesses: ConvertKit
- Best for large ecommerce stores: Klaviyo
- Most advanced free plan: MailerLite
1. Best form-building Mailchimp alternative: FormBuilder
Although our tool, FormBuilder (previously MightyForms) isn't necessarily a marketing automation tool, it does allow you to create a form with AI, embed it into your email newsletter, and send it to your email subscribers.
To do this, simply log into your FormBuilder account, and you'll find a "Create New Form" icon on your dashboard. Select this icon, and you'll be prompted to create an email form using one of our many templates. Alternatively, you can use our AI feature 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, simply click the "Publish" button in the upper-right-hand corner, and you'll be taken to a screen with different options to share your form.
To send your form to your email subscribers, copy the shortcode and paste it into your email marketing tool of choice.
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. For someone new to the platform, we suggest the Lite plan, which costs $29 per month and should contain everything you need to run a small email marketing campaign. However, you can always upgrade to the Plus, Professional, or Enterprise plans, which cost $49, $149, and $259 per month, respectively.
3. Best Mailchimp alternative for small businesses: ConvertKit
Another tool that stood out to us was ConvertKit due to its basic, barebones design. While ActiveCampaign is for Mailchimp users looking for more advanced features, ConvertKit is for those looking for a more basic tool.
We've read reviews about marketers complaining about the lack of features inside ConvertKit; however, in our opinion, ConvertKit isn't targeted toward marketers. It's targeted towards small business owners who just want the basic features required to collect email addresses and send newsletters.
That said, ConvertKit 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 ConvertKit with Zapier and send data to various applications like Gmail, Slack, and Google Analytics.
Pricing
ConvertKit has three plans: a Newsletter plan, a Creator plan, and a Pro plan. The Newsletter plan is free and allows users to create one email sequence and one visual automation and collect up to 1,000 email addresses. This is a good way to get a feel for the platform.
If you want to upgrade to unlimited email sequences and visual automation, you can sign up for the Creator plan, which costs $25 monthly. This plan offers more advanced features such as API Access and RSS campaigns, and you can invite an additional team member.
The last plan is the Pro plan, which costs $50 monthly. It contains everything the other plans have, plus Facebook custom audiences, a newsletter referral system, and edit links in broadcasts.
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 that allows you to send 500 monthly emails. If this is a bit limiting for you, consider the Email plan, which costs $45 per month. On this plan, you can create up to 1,500 contacts and send 15,000 monthly emails.
Alternatively, if you prefer sending text messages, you could try the SMS plan, which costs $60 per month and offers everything the email plan has, plus 1,250 SMS/MMS credits.
5. Most advanced free plan: MailerLite
MailerLite stood out to us because it’s a completely free email marketing tool that still offers good features like a built-in AI 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 advanced automation features on their free plan. 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 Growing Business plan of $9 per month, which allows you to invite another two users, or the Advanced plan of $19 per month, which lets you invite unlimited users.
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:
- Automatic lead abandonment recovery
- AI form builder
- AI form analytics
- Signature and payment collection
Automatic lead abandonment recovery
A problem we found when testing many email marketing tools and form builders is that they don't allow you to see what a user typed into your form unless they submit it. This can make it harder to recover abandoned leads because if someone types their personal details into your form and then leaves, you won't be able to use these details to contact them and prompt them to submit their form.
This is why we allow users to see what respondents typed into their form, regardless of whether they submitted it or not. From here, you can set up automatic workflows to send recovery emails to users who bounced, prompting them to submit their forms. This feature is unique to FormBuilder.
AI form builder
If you don't feel like creating a form from scratch, feel free to use our AI analytics features to create one for you. Simply click on the "Create with AI" button on your dashboard, type what you want the AI to build, and the AI will respond with an output 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.
AI form analytics
We found that many form builders and email marketing tools don't analyze form data for users. The user needs to analyze this data themselves and make improvements to boost form completion rates. After talking to many different users, we learned that this often leaves them feeling frustrated because they'll constantly make changes to their form without seeing any results.
So, when designing FormBuilder, we wanted to solve this problem by adding an AI feature that analyzes a user's form data and suggests improvements. This way, users don't have to A/B split test different layouts and questions to see which works. They know exactly what will work and what won't.
For example, if our AI sees that users normally drop off before the Stripe payment field, it might conclude that users aren't ready to buy just yet and recommend removing the Stripe field.
Signature and payment collection
The last problem we found when talking to users is that many form builders and email marketing tools didn't allow them to securely collect signatures and payments without connecting to a third-party tool.
This is why we designed FormBuilder with a signature and payment collection feature. All users have to do is search for the signature or payment field on the left-hand side of their dashboard, drag and drop it on their screen, share their form with their email subscribers, and subscribers will be able to make payments or sign the form from inside their email inbox.
We found that this has the potential to boost conversions because users can do everything inside their email tab; they don't have to go to a website checkout page.
Next steps
If you like the features we mentioned above and want to try FormBuilder for yourself, you can sign up for a free trial here.