Sendinblue vs. Mailchimp: which email marketing software is best?

Founded in 2001 as a bootstrapped side project, Mailchimp has grown to over 11 million active customers and has a whopping total audience of 4 billion. Although it's best known as an email marketing giant, in the past couple of years Mailchimp has been expanding to a full marketing platform.

However, despite Mailchimp's authority, there are many competing email marketing tools out there with incredibly loyal user bases and tip-top software to boot. Sendinblue is one of them.

Sendinblue shines brightest as a reliable email marketing software that won't break the bank, but – like Mailchimp – it's been building a brand as something bigger: an all-in-one relationship marketing platform.

When comparing the two tools, Sendinblue stands out by offering the most value at the lowest price point. Both tools also offer superb email marketing features – drag & drop editors, advanced segmentation, A/B testing and automation – alongside their own unique value-adds.

But can Sendinblue match Mailchimp's huge feature set and rapidly developing technology? It all comes down to your business, your budget and the features that matter most to you.

Here's our comparison of Sendinblue vs. Mailchimp email marketing software to help you choose the best tool for your business.

• Introducing Sendinblue and Mailchimp
• When to choose Sendinblue
• When to choose Mailchimp
• Feature comparison
  • Design and templates
  • Landing pages and signup forms
  • List management
  • Automation
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Deliverability
• Pricing comparison
• Summary – comparing Mailchimp vs. Sendinblue email marketing software
• Connect Mailchimp and Sendinblue to your other apps

Introducing Sendinblue and Mailchimp

About Sendinblue

With 80,000 users in over 160 countries, Sendinblue sends 100 million emails and SMS every day. The company has a great feature set and a loyal following – especially among customers who want the most value at a lower price point. However, there are other reasons why Sendinblue might be a better email marketing platform for your company.

Comparing Sendinblue's feature set to Mailchimp, Sendinblue excels when it comes to its:

• Customizable dashboard letting you focus on what matters
• Easy list management and segmentation
• User-friendly automation workflows
• Added features like SMS campaigns and built-in live chat
• Multilingual support team

About Mailchimp

Voted the 8th best software company of 2020, it's hard to argue against Mailchimp's dominance in the email marketing sector and wider technology sector. It's evolving into a great all-round marketing tool to solve more needs than just email.

Looking at its features, Mailchimp thrives when it comes to:

• Easy-to-use drag & drop templates
• A huge integrations library
• Insightful analytics and reporting, including sales conversion data

When to choose Sendinblue

To dig in deeper to the differences between the two email marketing platforms, here are three of the main reasons why you might choose Sendinblue as a Mailchimp alternative.

1. You need to send transactional emails

Although Mailchimp offers transactional email with scalable pricing (starting at $20/month per block of 25,000 emails), Sendinblue saves your budget with an all-in-one solution for any price plan that tends to be better suited for smaller businesses.

Sendinblue has several different setup options for your transactional emails: API, SMTP Relay, eCommerce plugins and marketing automation. After you've chosen, it's easy to set up order confirmation emails, password reset messages and other email notifications for your customers.

As with other Sendinblue emails, you can select pre-made templates or start from scratch with the drag & drop editor. You can then personalize as much as you'd like with dynamic content like contact information or parameters such as order details.

Sendinblue's transactional email functionality is especially valuable for ecommerce businesses who want to up their game by streamlining their customer experience.

2. You want the most value at the best price

When people are choosing between Mailchimp and Sendinblue, the most common differentiator is price. In nearly all cases, Sendinblue works out cheaper than Mailchimp.

It's hard to compete with 40,000 emails a month from $25 – especially when all Sendinblue plans allow unlimited contacts. You can also get send-time optimization, automation and A/B testing at a much lower price than Mailchimp.

3. You're based in Europe

Mailchimp is based in the US, but Sendinblue is born and bred in Paris. The French email service provider is by no means a bad fit for customers outside of Europe, but their location is an extra win for European clients.

They offer customer support in 6 languages – One of Sendinblue's stand-out perks is their multilingual team and product. They support their customers in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German. Impressive, right?

They're more GDPR-compliant – Sendinblue is based in Europe and your data is held there too – not in the US, as with Mailchimp. If GDPR is bringing you out in a sweat, this will be music to your ears.

When to choose Mailchimp

Here are three of the main reasons why you might choose Mailchimp instead of Sendgrid as your email marketing tool.

1. You want more in-depth analytics

One way that Mailchimp stands out is with its insightful analytics and reporting.

If you're using Mailchimp for your all-in-one marketing tool, you'll get all your marketing data in one place, updated in real time – including email, automation and social ads data.

If you're just using Mailchimp for email, you also get a lot of handy data to understand your audience and campaign performance, including growth, engagement and revenue reports.

Where Mailchimp really stands apart from Sendinblue is with its detailed revenue reports, which Sendinblue lacks. With Mailchimp, you can:

• Track sales from an email click all the way to purchase
• Identify which customers purchased after opening your campaign and see what they bought
• Understand the ROI of your campaign by seeing how much money it's earned

2. You want Mailchimp's performance and reliability

Mailchimp is especially loved by SMEs and entrepreneurs who want to grow their business with a quirky and user-friendly tool by their side. Their team has a reputation to uphold – and they do so by delivering top-class performance, reliability and an unforgettable brand.

Mailchimp's deliverability isn't always perfect, especially compared to tools like SendGrid, but some research has shown it to be better than Sendinblue's deliverability in the last couple of years.

However, one issue with Mailchimp's deliverability is that emails frequently end up in the Promotions tab of Gmail, which tends to happen less with Sendinblue.

3. You want more native integrations

Mailchimp has 254 native integrations in their directory as of the time of writing, compared to 50+ Sendinblue native integrations.

Although Sendinblue has integrations with most top apps – including Eventbrite, Facebook Lead Ads and Shopify – the sheer number of apps in Mailchimp's marketplace means they're more likely to fulfill your niche requirements.

However, both email marketing platforms are connected to PieSync, which vastly increases your options for integrating apps.

• See how PieSync connects your apps with Mailchimp
• See how PieSync connects your apps with Sendinblue

Mailchimp and Sendinblue feature comparison

Both Mailchimp and Sendinblue are superbly well-rounded email marketing platforms with similar feature sets. But when you dig in deeper, you can find more differences.

Design and templates

Both Sendinblue and Mailchimp offer easy-to-use drag and drop builders with a great range of email templates.

When you create a free account with Sendinblue, you get full access to 60+ well-designed and fully responsive email templates. If you want more freedom, you can also use the WYSIWYG HTML Email Editor to code your email directly.

You can preview by device or email client before sending, and also view the HTML code or plain text email.

Mailchimp similarly offers 100+ ready-made email templates and layouts to speed things up for your next newsletter. With free plans you can only preview by device, but with paid plans you can also preview by email client.

Landing pages and signup forms

With Sendinblue you can create targeted pages for each of your campaigns with a drag and drop landing page builder or one of their dozens of pre-made templates. You can also link follow up pages to these, such as a thank you page once a contact has submitted a form.

Mailchimp also makes it simple to create landing pages, optimize them for conversions, and enable retargeting.

List management

Both Mailchimp and Sendinblue have similar monthly sending limits for their Free plans (10,000 and 9,000 respectively). With these plans, Mailchimp lets you send 2,000 emails in one go, whereas Sendinblue is restricted to 300 (although they have a clever Re-queue System to send pending emails on consecutive days).

However, Sendinblue stands out from Mailchimp with unlimited storage for all plans – including its Free plan – while Mailchimp limits its Free plan to 2,000 contacts.

This makes Sendinblue a great choice if you're a small business (with a small database and budget) looking to use the software as a CRM as well as an email marketing tool.

Sendinblue filters make it easy to segment your audience and you can even automate workflows that create new lists based on demographics, lead score or behavior.

To personalize your Sendinblue emails, the platform offers simple dynamic personalization for email content and subject lines, plus attribute conditions for advanced personalization.

It's easy to divide up contacts (e.g. by demographic or behavior) and regroup into new lists before sending with Mailchimp, which sets it apart from Mailchimp for list management.

Mailchimp lists are called 'Audiences' and keep your different contacts separate. For some companies, this can be too siloed. It's difficult to manage all of your contacts holistically and create segments that span different lists.

When personalizing your emails with Mailchimp, it's really easy to insert customization tags and preview these before sending.

Automation

Sendinblue enables you to send welcome emails with marketing automation with any plan. Even the Free plan allows you to send marketing automation workflows to up to 2000 contacts, which is a great perk.

There's also built-in functionality for transactional emails, which makes Sendinblue a great email marketing solution for ecommerce businesses.

Mailchimp alternatively offers only one-click automations in its Free plan, but as you scale your plan and budget you can access much more automation power.

Mailchimp has also introduced transactional emails with scalable pricing on top of your general plan. You can try it for free, but on the longer term you'll need to pay per block of 25,000 emails, which starts at $20/month.

Reporting and analytics

Sendinblue's reporting suite includes all the key insights you need and Google Analytics integration, but it lacks social and conversion data. This might not be a problem for many businesses, however, especially smaller teams.

Mailchimp offers a great reporting suite that offers more complexity on its upper-tier price plans, including advanced analytics and conversion data to understand the ROI of email marketing throughout the customer journey.

Deliverability

In research from EmailToolTester in July 2019, Sendinblue had 88.8% deliverability and was less likely to end up in Promotions tab in Gmail.

Mailchimp had 90.6% deliverability but was more likely to end up in the Promotions tab.

Here's a comparison of other Sendinblue vs. Mailchimp features:

Sendinblue pricing vs. Mailchimp pricing

Mailchimp bases its price plans on the number of email sends and contacts you need. You can choose between four price plans, ranging from Free to Premium which starts at $299/month and can scale far beyond that with large contact databases and email send volumes.

Sendinblue, on the other hand, offers unlimited contacts for all price plans and tends to be a cheaper alternative to Mailchimp. Plans range from Free to Enterprise which depends on a custom quote.

Here's how the two email marketing tools stack up when it comes to pricing per number of contacts in your database:

Comparing Mailchimp vs Sendinblue support

Sendinblue supports a huge number of languages, which backs up its origins and large customer base in Europe. You can access email support with all plans and phone support for the first 60 days of Free and Lite plans, or throughout your customer journey on upper plans.

Mailchimp similarly restricts phone support for lower-tier price plans, but offers email and live chat support for Essentials plan and above.

If you're choosing between Sendinblue and Mailchimp free plans, your best options for support are with Sendinblue, as Mailchimp has very limited options here.

Summary – comparing Mailchimp vs. Sendinblue email marketing software

While Sendinblue offers top-class personalization, segmentation and workflow-based automation, Mailchimp is the market leader offering advanced analytics, beautiful templates and reliability.

Here's a quick summary of when to choose Mailchimp versus Sendinblue, based on where the two systems excel:

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Connect Mailchimp and Sendinblue to your other apps

To get the most out of your email marketing platform, whether you choose Sendinblue or Mailchimp, make sure it's connected to your wider tech stack.

You can achieve this with native integrations, but it's more effective and reliable to use PieSync to keep your contact data in a two-way sync between apps in real time.

As one example, you could sync Mailchimp with Intercom to enrich both apps with your latest customer data. This puts you in the best position to provide a strong customer experience with Intercom and the most personalized emails with Mailchimp.

Get started with a 14-day free trial of PieSync to start syncing your contact data between all of your key apps.