Mailchimp vs Omnisend: Read Each From Its Own Pages

Mailchimp and Omnisend are email and SMS platforms; Mailchimp sells to any business, Omnisend only to ecommerce. A page-one comparison of the two is written by Omnisend, and one of its claims about Mailchimp is at odds with what Mailchimp says about itself. A rival is an argument, not a source.

Relvino is a third option in this comparison, so read this as informed but interested, and apply the same rule to it. Every plan, price and product description below is quoted from Mailchimp’s or Omnisend’s own pages about itself; Omnisend’s statements about Mailchimp are labeled as Omnisend’s; the reading of what the two have in common, and the section on Relvino, are ours.

What each says it is

Mailchimp’s homepage headline is “Email & SMS marketing minus the learning curve,” and its customer list runs from restaurants and nonprofits to e-commerce and mid-market companies. Omnisend’s is “Email & SMS marketing so good, it’s boring,” and it calls itself “Official Email Marketing Software for Ecommerce,” naming Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, WordPress and Wix. One is a generalist with a Shopify integration; the other is built for the store from the first screen.

Pricing, from the two pricing pages

• Mailchimp: four plans, Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium, priced by contact tier. Free is “$0/month” with a “Limit of 250 contacts,” for those “Under 250 contacts” who want to “Use core features to manage early growth.” Essentials “starts at $13.00/mo for 12 months.” Standard, “Send up to 6,000 emails each month,” “starts at $20.00/mo for 12 months” and is pitched to “Sell even more with automations, personalization, and optimization tools.” Premium, “Send up to 150,000 emails each month,” “starts at $350.00/mo for 12 months” with “unlimited contacts.” Sending is paused “if contact or email send limit is exceeded.”
• Omnisend: Free, Standard, Pro and Custom. Free is “500 monthly emails,” “250 contacts” and “500 Web Push notifications.” Standard is “$11.20/mo” for “6,000 emails/mo” and “500 contacts,” “Best for growing and medium-sized businesses focused on email marketing.” Pro is “$41.30/mo” for “Unlimited monthly emails” and “2,500 contacts,” with “SMS starting at $0.007,” “Best for high-volume senders aimed at adding extra power with SMS.” SMS is metered from “$0.009” at low monthly volume down to “$0.007” at $10,000 and above.

Read side by side, the meters are the same shape: a contact count sets the tier and an email cap sits inside it. The Omnisend free plan guide works through which of those two caps binds first, and the arithmetic applies to Mailchimp’s free tier as well. On listed price at the small end, Omnisend’s Standard ($11.20) is below Mailchimp’s Essentials ($13.00) and Standard ($20.00), and the two Free tiers share the 250-contact line.

Automation, in each vendor’s words

Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder lets a team “Visually create automated experiences that you can customize to fit your business goals and adapt to your customer’s behaviors,” and “Trigger automations based on any of your data points to deliver more personalized emails and SMS to customers across your audience.” There is a “library of fully customizable flow templates.” With a Shopify store connected, Mailchimp names the standard set: “Trigger automations, like welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and back-in-stock alerts to keep contacts engaged,” using “customer events passed through Shopify pixels.”

Omnisend’s version is one sentence on its homepage: “Build workflows for welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and more. Let them bring in revenue on autopilot.” Its AI is described the same way: “Let AI write copy, pick send times, and segment your audience.”

What Omnisend says about Mailchimp, and what Mailchimp says about itself

Omnisend’s own comparison page ranks on the first page for this query, and it makes claims about Mailchimp that a reader would naturally take as facts. Among them: that “Mailchimp restricts core tools like automation and A/B testing behind higher-tier plans,” that on Mailchimp “SMS requires a separate add-on and Standard plan or higher,” that “Mailchimp bills based on your total contact count,” and that Mailchimp’s “Free plans have no automation.” About itself it says “Every Omnisend plan includes automation, A/B testing, detailed reporting, SMS, and popup forms” and “You get 24/7 live chat and email support on every Omnisend plan, including Free.”

Take the last claim about Mailchimp to Mailchimp’s own pages. The Customer Journey Builder page carries two statements: “Marketing Automation Flows only available on paid plans. Features and functionality of CJB vary by plan,” and, in the same plan comparison, that the Free plan includes “Basic marketing automation flows” while higher tiers offer “Enhanced marketing automation flows.” Mailchimp’s own page says both things; Omnisend’s page repeats the half that helps Omnisend. That is not deceit, it is what a comparison written by one of the parties is for, and Mailchimp’s own Shopify page does the same in the other direction with a return-on-investment figure whose basis is its internal user data.

The rule this suggests for any vendor comparison, including the ones on this site: a vendor is a source about itself and a party about its rivals. Use Omnisend’s page to learn what Omnisend includes, Mailchimp’s to learn what Mailchimp includes, and treat each one’s sentences about the other as the opening of an argument. The Klaviyo vs Mailchimp and Klaviyo vs Omnisend comparisons on this site are built on the same rule, and say where a cell is our reading rather than the vendor’s words.

Built for ecommerce is a vocabulary

What “built for ecommerce” means, read off the two automation descriptions, is that Omnisend’s events and templates arrive already named after the store: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and more. Mailchimp gets the same nouns once Shopify is connected, by its own description through “customer events passed through Shopify pixels.” A Shopify marketer on Omnisend never has to translate; the trigger is called what the marketer calls it and the template is shaped like the message they were going to write. That is a real advantage, and it is a vocabulary advantage: on what happens after the trigger fires, both pages describe the same job, a person building and maintaining the workflow. Omnisend’s AI picks send times and writes copy inside that workflow; Mailchimp’s Intuit Intelligence beta sits on paid tiers the same way.

A third option, described the same way

Relvino keeps the store’s vocabulary and does not sell a flow builder. For each shopper the agent decides whether to act, on which channel (email, SMS/MMS or a pop-up), with what offer and when, from that shopper’s live behavior, in under 80 milliseconds, inside guardrails the brand sets once (margin floor, quiet hours, frequency, consent, voice). A Large Retail Model trained across 10K+ retailers and 7M+ data points, on 1.78M real shoppers, supplies the prior for a shopper the store has never seen. There is no free tier; the proof is a 14-day pilot beside the current setup, and the technical cutover takes about 30 minutes because there are no workflows to rebuild. By the rule above, that paragraph is a vendor describing itself, and the Klaviyo vs Relvino page and pricing are where to check it. The Omnisend alternatives and cheaper alternatives to Mailchimp guides cover the wider field for brands leaving either tool.

The two tools and the third option, side by side

In the list below, every quoted phrase is from the vendor’s own pricing or product page about itself; the “Source for this column” row says where each column came from. The Relvino column describes Relvino.

• Sells to · Mailchimp: Any business: restaurants, nonprofits, e-commerce, mid-market · Omnisend: “Official Email Marketing Software for Ecommerce” · Relvino: Direct-to-consumer stores on Shopify
• Free tier · Mailchimp: “$0/month”, “Limit of 250 contacts” · Omnisend: “250 contacts”, “500 monthly emails” · Relvino: No free tier; a 14-day pilot beside the current setup
• First paid tier · Mailchimp: Essentials “starts at $13.00/mo for 12 months” · Omnisend: Standard “$11.20/mo”, 500 contacts, 6,000 emails · Relvino: See /pricing
• Meter · Mailchimp: Contact tier plus a monthly email cap · Omnisend: Contact tier plus a monthly email cap; SMS from $0.007 · Relvino: See /pricing
• Automation · Mailchimp: Customer Journey Builder: “automated experiences that you can customize”; flows vary by plan · Omnisend: “Build workflows for welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and more” · Relvino: No workflows; a decision per shopper
• AI · Mailchimp: “Generative AI features” and “AI marketing tools”; Intuit Intelligence beta on paid tiers · Omnisend: “Let AI write copy, pick send times, and segment your audience” · Relvino: The agent decides offer, channel, timing and message
• Cutover · Mailchimp: Rebuild workflows in the new tool · Omnisend: Rebuild workflows in the new tool · Relvino: About 30 minutes; nothing to rebuild
• Source for this column · Mailchimp: mailchimp.com pricing, homepage, Customer Journey Builder and Shopify integration pages · Omnisend: omnisend.com pricing and homepage · Relvino: relvino.com, a vendor describing itself

A brand choosing between Mailchimp and Omnisend on a Shopify store will usually be happier with the tool whose nouns match its own, and Omnisend was built with that in mind; a brand that runs more than one kind of business may prefer the generalist. Either way, decide from each vendor’s own pages and treat the comparison pages, this one included, as arguments to check. For the free tool at the very small end, Shopify Email pricing covers the meter Shopify itself sells; for the one timing feature both tools advertise, send time optimization explains which clock it reads.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a better option than Mailchimp?

For a Shopify store, Omnisend is the usual answer: its triggers, templates and reporting are named after store events, and its listed Standard plan ($11.20 a month) is priced below Mailchimp’s Essentials ($13.00) and Standard ($20.00). Klaviyo is the other common answer. Whether either is better for a given store depends on what the store sends; the honest way to decide is from each vendor’s own pricing and product pages rather than from either vendor’s page about the other.

Is Omnisend any good?

By its own description Omnisend is email, SMS and push in one platform built only for ecommerce, with workflows for welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase, AI that writes copy, picks send times and segments the audience, and a free tier of 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Its Standard plan lists at $11.20 a month and its Pro at $41.30 a month with SMS from $0.007. For a small Shopify store that wants the standard workflows without translating a generalist tool, it does the job it describes.

What are the top 3 email marketing tools?

For Shopify brands the three most compared are Klaviyo, Omnisend and Mailchimp, and the search results for this comparison reflect that: the related searches are Omnisend vs Klaviyo and Omnisend free plan. All three sell a flow builder with a contact-based meter and a free tier. A fourth kind of tool, an agent that decides per shopper inside guardrails instead of running a designed workflow, is what Relvino is, and it is compared with each of the three elsewhere on this site.

What are the downsides of Mailchimp?

From Mailchimp’s own pages: the Free tier is capped at 250 contacts and pauses sending when a contact or email limit is exceeded, the Standard plan caps sends at 6,000 emails a month, and marketing automation flows vary by plan, with Mailchimp’s own page saying both that flows are only available on paid plans and that Free includes basic flows. Omnisend’s comparison page adds claims of its own about Mailchimp’s SMS add-on and higher-tier gating; those are Omnisend’s statements, and the place to check them is Mailchimp’s pricing page.

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

About 30 minutes for the technical cutover: connect the Shopify store, point the sending domain, connect SMS, and shopper data ingests automatically. The welcome, cart and post-purchase workflows are not rebuilt, because there are no workflows on the other side; the brand sets guardrails once and the agent decides per shopper inside them. Revenue is proven in a 14-day pilot run beside the current setup.