Mailchimp vs Constant Contact: Both Pages Make the Same Claim, So Read the Meters

Mailchimp and Constant Contact each publish a comparison page about the other, and each claims the same return multiple. When both sides of a comparison claim the same result, the result cannot decide it. The pricing pages can: a contact meter, a send cap of 10 to 24 emails per contact per month, and the automations each plan includes.

Relvino replaces both kinds of tool for online stores, so read this as informed but interested. The rule this piece follows is the one it recommends: a vendor is a reliable source about itself and an interested party about its rival. Everything quoted below is from the vendors’ own pages, and anything one vendor says about the other is labeled as that vendor’s claim.

The same number on both pages

Mailchimp’s page, which ranks seventh for this search, leads with a return-on-investment multiple “seen by Mailchimp users”, stated as an “up to” average. Constant Contact’s page, which ranks tenth, leads with an “Up to” return-on-investment multiple “seen by users”. The two numbers are identical. The multiple is above anything this site publishes about its own product, so it is not repeated here; it is on both pages, in the same position, for the same purpose.

Mailchimp’s footnote explains how its figure was built: “Based on all e-commerce revenue attributable to paid plan users’ Mailchimp campaigns from August 2024 - August 2025. ROI calculation requires an e-commerce store that is connected to a Mailchimp account. Results vary.” Constant Contact’s figure carries an asterisk, and the page’s disclaimer block explains its other two claims but not that one.

None of this says either number is wrong. It says the number cannot settle a comparison between the two, because it does not separate them. A buyer comparing the two tools on outcomes is left with two identical promises and two different methods of counting. What separates the tools is written in the parts of their sites that are not arguments: the pricing grids.

What each page says about the other

Mailchimp’s page compares its Standard plan to Constant Contact’s Standard plan on eight rows, and says where the Constant Contact column came from: “Comparison based on features listed on ConstantContact.com as of 8/15/2025.” Its rows: email delivery rate 99% against 97%; SMS availability in 12 countries against US only; 60+ automation templates against 3; and, for the Constant Contact column, “Not included” on custom automations, predictive segments, custom reports, multivariate and A/B testing, and 24/7 customer support.

Constant Contact’s page answers with its own table: 600+ ready-to-send email templates against 340, and two rows where the Mailchimp column reads “Premium subscribers only”: live chat and phone support, and AI content generation. Its summary of the difference is the most candid sentence on either page. “Constant Contact is built for small businesses that need to send emails quickly and reliably.” And of its rival: “Mailchimp is a marketing platform that’s built for teams looking to grow their audience with a website builder and advanced testing and reporting features. It can show connections between your website, purchases, emails, and more, but those systems will require maintenance and oversight.”

Two of these claims about the rival are worth checking against the rival’s own grid, because the grids are easy to read. Constant Contact says AI content generation on Mailchimp is for “Premium subscribers only.” Mailchimp’s pricing grid lists generative AI features as a “No additional cost add-on” on both Premium and Standard. Constant Contact says live chat and phone support on Mailchimp is for “Premium subscribers only.” Mailchimp’s grid lists “24/7 Email & Chat Support” on Standard and Essentials, and “Phone & Priority Support” on Premium, so the phone half is right and the chat half is not. In the other direction, Mailchimp lists 3 automation templates for Constant Contact; Constant Contact’s own grid gives “3 automation templates” on Standard, the plan Mailchimp says it compared, and “unlimited templates” on Premium. Each party page describes the rival’s plan a little less generously than the rival’s own grid does. That is what a party page is for.

The meters, from the pricing pages

Both tools price by the number of contacts, and both attach a monthly send allowance to that number.

Mailchimp’s grid has a row called “Monthly Email Sends”: fifteen times the contact count on Premium, twelve times on Standard, ten times on Essentials (the grid writes each as a multiple of contacts), and “Max of 500/mo or 250/day” on Free. The Standard card with the contact selector on its lowest band reads “Send up to 6,000 emails each month” and “starts at $20/month”, with the footnote “Overages apply if contact or email send limit is exceeded.” Mailchimp also offers a 15% saving at 10,000 or more contacts, a pay-as-you-go credit plan it describes as “best for infrequent senders,” and a Free plan for businesses with “fewer than 250 contacts.”

Constant Contact’s page states the rule once, in a footnote (“Plan price is based on number of contacts and email sends. Overage fees may apply.”) and then in full in its FAQ: “Your price is based on the plan you choose (Lite, Standard, Premium), and how many contacts you have.” Then: “Every plan also includes a monthly email send limit tied to your contact count” and, in parentheses, the multiples: ten times the contacts on Lite, twelve on Standard, twenty-four on Premium. On going over: “What happens if you go over your limit? Nothing stops” and “your emails still go out.” The price of that: “Additional sends are billed at $0.002 for every send over the maximum send allowance. So, for every 1,000 sends over the monthly allowance, there will be a $2 fee. Increase your monthly send limit by upgrading your plan at any time.”

Read the two ladders as what they are. A send cap of 10, 12, 15 or 24 times the contact count is a ceiling on how many emails each contact may receive per month: ten on the entry plans, twelve on the middle plans, fifteen or twenty-four at the top. The upgrade path on both sides sells permission to message the same people more often. For a newsletter business with a weekly send, ten is more than enough and the cap never binds. For an online store running a welcome series, cart reminders, post-purchase sequences and a win-back program side by side, the cap is the thing that stops the flows from doing what they were set up to do, and the fix the pricing page offers is to raise it.

Automations, plan by plan

Mailchimp’s row “Marketing Automation Flows” reads “Up to 200 flows” on Premium and Standard, “Up to 4 flow steps” on Essentials, and “Not included” on Free. A disclaimer records that “Customer Journey Builder (CJB) was rebranded to Marketing Automation Flows (MAF) effective as of June 2025.” Older reviews that praise or fault the journey builder are describing the same feature.

Constant Contact’s row “Automation” reads “1 automation template” on Lite; “3 automation templates, AI campaign builder, and automatic resend to non-openers” on Standard; and on Premium, “Same as Standard, plus unlimited templates, custom automations, ecommerce templates, auto-send welcome emails.” Its contact management row meters segments the same way: 1 custom segment on Lite, 10 on Standard, unlimited on Premium.

Both ladders meter the same thing: the number of rules a person is allowed to build. Flows, templates, segments, steps. That is the model the two tools share, and it is the model a store is choosing between when it compares them: a person writes a rule, the platform waits for the condition and sends, and the plan decides how many rules and how many sends. One detail on the Constant Contact ladder shows how the meters interact. “Automatic resend to non-openers,” a Standard feature, spends the send allowance a second time on the contacts who ignored the first email. It is a sensible feature inside the model. It is also the cap being used to raise frequency on the least interested people on the list.

What neither page measures

Neither grid has a row for the question an online store cares about, which is whether the right shopper got the right message at the right moment and whether the wrong shopper was left alone. Both tools answer it the same way: a marketer builds the segment, writes the flow, sets the delay, and the send goes to everyone who matches. The plan ladder changes how many of those a team may build and how often they may fire. It does not change who decides.

Relvino is built on a different unit. For each shopper, it decides whether to act at all, on which channel (email, SMS/MMS or a pop-up), with what offer, and when, as one decision made in under 80ms from that shopper’s live store events, inside guardrails the brand sets once: margin floors, quiet hours, channel limits, brand voice. There is no send cap because there is no allowance to spend; declining to send is a decision the system records per shopper, which is why the registered result includes 80% less spam alongside lower send costs. For a brand on Mailchimp, the registered comparison is 2× revenue uplift year over year. The cheaper alternatives to Mailchimp guide covers what leaving costs, and Klaviyo vs Constant Contact covers the other half of this comparison for a store that has outgrown both.

The two tools and the alternative, side by side

In the list below, the Mailchimp and Constant Contact columns are assembled from each vendor’s own pricing page; quoted phrases are theirs and the rest is a plain reading of the grid. Where a vendor describes the other, the line says so. The Relvino column describes Relvino.

• Price basis · Mailchimp: Contact count, with a monthly send allowance per plan · Constant Contact: Contact count, “and email sends” · Relvino: Public pricing; no free tier, a 14-day pilot
• Monthly send cap · Mailchimp: Fifteen times contacts on Premium, twelve on Standard, ten on Essentials, “Max of 500/mo or 250/day” on Free · Constant Contact: Ten times contacts on Lite, twelve on Standard, twenty-four on Premium · Relvino: None; each send is a decision and declining is one
• Over the cap · Mailchimp: “Overages apply if contact or email send limit is exceeded” · Constant Contact: “$0.002 for every send over”; “Nothing stops” · Relvino: Not applicable
• Automations · Mailchimp: Free “Not included”; Essentials “Up to 4 flow steps”; Standard and Premium “Up to 200 flows” · Constant Contact: Lite 1 template; Standard 3 templates plus resend to non-openers; Premium unlimited templates and custom automations · Relvino: No flows to build; guardrails set once
• SMS · Mailchimp: Add-on on paid plans · Constant Contact: Premium includes 500 messages; Lite and Standard add from $10 a month for 1-500 · Relvino: SMS/MMS is one channel inside the same per-shopper decision
• What the rival’s page says · Mailchimp: Constant Contact: Mailchimp’s systems “will require maintenance and oversight” · Constant Contact: Mailchimp: custom automations “Not included” in Constant Contact’s Standard plan · Relvino: Not applicable
• Registered result · Mailchimp: 2× revenue uplift year over year for brands that moved from Mailchimp to Relvino · Constant Contact: No registered comparison · Relvino: 80% less spam, lower send costs
• Example · Mailchimp: mailchimp.com, by its own pages · Constant Contact: constantcontact.com, by its own pages · Relvino: Relvino

For a brand choosing between the two, the honest exercise takes ten minutes: open both pricing pages at the brand’s own contact count, note which send cap the current program would hit, and price the plan that clears it. For a brand asking whether a lateral move between two flow builders changes anything, the Klaviyo vs Relvino comparison sets up a 14-day pilot beside the current setup, and pricing is public. The Klaviyo vs Mailchimp for Shopify guide covers the comparison a store is more likely to be making, Mailchimp vs Omnisend covers the small end of the market, and Omnisend pricing reads a third vendor’s meters the same way.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Mailchimp’s biggest competitor?

By the comparisons people search for, Constant Contact, MailerLite and Brevo, which are the related searches Google shows next to this one. For a Shopify brand the comparison that matters more is Klaviyo vs Mailchimp, and the Klaviyo vs Mailchimp for Shopify guide covers it. Both Mailchimp and Constant Contact publish a page naming the other as the rival to beat, which is the clearest answer either vendor gives.

Is Constant Contact outdated?

Not by its own page, which positions it for small businesses that need to send emails quickly and reliably and manage email, SMS, social and events in one place. Its plan ladder is current: three automation tiers, a send cap of 10, 12 or 24 times the contact count, SMS included on Premium. What is dated is the job it is built for. A newsletter tool with event registration serves a local business well; an online store’s lifecycle work, which is deciding per shopper what to send and when, is a different job, and neither Constant Contact nor Mailchimp is built around it.

What are the downsides of Mailchimp?

From its own pricing page: monthly email sends are capped at 10, 12 or 15 times the contact count depending on plan, and overages apply if either the contact or the send limit is exceeded; the Free plan includes no automation flows and Essentials allows up to 4 flow steps; SMS is an add-on on every plan; the Free plan gets email support for the first 30 days only. Constant Contact’s comparison page adds a view of its own, that Mailchimp’s connected systems will require maintenance and oversight, which is a rival’s claim and ships here as one.

Who are Constant Contact’s main competitors?

Mailchimp first, by both vendors’ own account, since each publishes a comparison page about the other. The related searches add HubSpot, MailerLite and Brevo. For an online store the list is different: Klaviyo, Omnisend and Shopify Email are the tools a Shopify brand actually meets, and this site compares each of them, including Klaviyo vs Constant Contact directly.

Which is cheaper, Mailchimp or Constant Contact?

Both price by contact count with a monthly send allowance tied to it, so the answer depends on the list size and on how often the brand emails each contact. The cheapest plan on either side is the one whose send cap the brand will not hit: Mailchimp’s caps run 10, 12 and 15 times the contact count by plan, Constant Contact’s run 10, 12 and 24 times, and Constant Contact bills $0.002 per send over the allowance while Mailchimp applies overages. The only honest comparison is at the brand’s own contact count on each pricing page, read on the same day.

How long does it take to migrate from Mailchimp or Constant Contact to Relvino?

About 30 minutes for the technical cutover: connect the Shopify store, point the sending domain, connect SMS, and order and browse history ingest automatically. No automations or templates are rebuilt, because there are no flows to build; each shopper is handled by a decision made in under 80ms inside guardrails the brand sets once. There is no send cap to buy up to, because declining to send is a decision the system makes per shopper. Revenue is then proven in a 14-day pilot run beside the current setup.