Mailchimp and HubSpot are two behemoths of the email marketing industry. Naturally, marketers might find it difficult to choose between the two. To prevent you from going through the exhaustive process of experimenting with both platforms, we have prepared a comparison of the top 10 features. By the end of the blog, you should have the much needed clarity about Mailchimp vs HubSpot to choose for scaling your company.
Mailchimp Vs HubSpot : Tabular Comparison
Factors | Mailchimp | HubSpot |
| Pricing | Starts at $0 per month for free plans and goes up to $279 per month for the Professional plan | Starts at $0 per month for the Free plan and goes up to $3600 per month for the enterprise plan. |
| Ease of Use |
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| Integrations |
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| Contact Management |
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| Email Template Designing |
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| Analytics and Reporting |
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| Email Automation Tool |
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| Social Media Integration | Compatible with Facebook and Instagram | Compatible with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn |
| Landing Pages |
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| Customer support |
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Mailchimp vs HubSpot: In-Depth Comparison
Pricing
Mailchimps Pricing plans-
Free | Essentials | Standard | Premium | |
| Starting Price | $0 per month | $9 per month | $14 per month | $279 per month |
| Contacts limit | 500 contacts | 50000 contacts | 100000 contacts | 200000 Contacts Beyond this, you have to get custom quotes from Mailchimp Customer Support. |
| Onboarding process | No onboarding process | Assisted onboarding process | Assisted onboarding process | Users get access to dedicated customer support that guides them through the entire process. |
| Customer journeys | NA | NA | Available | Available |
| Predictive Segmentation | NA | NA | Available | Available |
| Content Optimizer | NA | NA | Available | Available |
HubSpot Pricing Plans-
Free | Starter | Professional | Enterprise | |
| Starting Price | $0 | $20 per month | $890 per month | $3600 per month |
| Contacts limit | 1000 | 1000 | 10000 | More than 10000 |
| Email sends limit | 2000 per month | 5 times the upper limit of your contacts tier | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Segmentation | Limited | Limited | Advanced | Advanced |
| Automation | NA | Available | Available | Available |
| Lead Nurturing | NA | Available | Available | Available |
Winner- Mailchimp
Mailchimp pricing plans are the most aggressive ones. Therefore, if you are working on a budget, Mailchimp is the best option for you. However, if money is not an issue, opting for HubSpot will give your better results.
Ease Of Use
Email marketing platforms should be designed to cater to the needs of both experienced and novice email marketers. Thankfully, Mailchimp and HubSpot have extremely versatile user interfaces.
Mailchimp is often praised for its highly user-friendly dashboard. The simplicity of Mailchimp’s user interface helps the beginner set up elaborate email marketing campaigns with ease. The dashboard design is clean and organized. And, seasoned email marketers can customize the dashboard to monitor all the important campaign metrics.
On the other hand, HubSpot is designed for marketers who are searching for functions beyond email marketing. Consequently, the learning curve for HubSpot is comparatively steeper. After all, it is an all-in-one marketing tool.
HubSpot’s dashboard has a modern layout and sports highly advanced marketing tools. Like Mailchimp, the dashboard is customizable and the user interface is highly intuitive. Of course, email marketers can easily create custom reports and live performance trackers.
Mailchimp also has a sidebar menu that offers quick access to essential features, like email personalization, segmentations, email marketing automations, subscriber lists, and reports. HubSpot also has a similar sidebar menu that carries all the important marketing tools.
Lastly, both the platforms support cooperative communities that guide new email marketers to set up their profiles.
Winner: Tie
Mailchimp’s user-friendliness keeps it ahead of HubSpot in terms of ease of use. However, the steeper learning curve of HubSpot helps the beginner learn more than just email marketing. Therefore, it is a tie between both platforms.
Integrations
HubSpot and Mailchimp offer a wide range of integrations and APIs to enhance their overall functionality. While HubSpot has better social platform integrations, Mailchimp makes up for this deficiency by offering over 800 native integrations. For comparison, HubSpot only offers 200+ native integrations.
In 2019, Mailchimp and Shopify, one of the leading eCommerce brands, parted ways after a public dispute. This caused several loyal Shopify users to jump ship and opt for other compatible platforms, like HubSpot. Since then, Shopify and Mailchimp have resolved their differences and agreed to a new set of terms and conditions.
The renewal of the Shopify partnership fortifies Mailchimp’s position as the market leader. Apart from Shopify, Mailchimp is highly compatible with WooCommerce, WordPress, Google Analytics, and Salesforce. User can easily streamline their workflows across the platforms with great ease.
In the same manner, HubSpot offers native integration with Zapier, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics. Additionally, it offers its own marketing suite that encompasses all the various aspects of sales and marketing.
Winner- Mailchimp
Mailchimp easily moves ahead of HubSpot with the sheer number of native integration it offers.
Contact Management
It is only natural for your contact list to grow. As a result, it becomes imperative for the brand to keep its list organized. Maintaining the hygiene of your email list also helps avoid unnecessary expenditures. Mailchimp and HubSpot are both well-equipped to efficiently manage thousands of customer profiles.
Mailchimp contact management tool uses tags and segments to manage all the customer profiles and outreach. The marketers can create custom and manual groups using the tags feature. Tags are mostly used when marketers notice a new customer activity or an upcoming behavioral trend.
In segments, the email marketer can set multiple parameters and conditions. Whenever a customer fulfills any of the criteria, they are automatically sorted into the pre-defined segment. Free plan users can add only 5 conditions to create a segment. For unlimited segmentation parameters and advanced tools, you need to subscribe to the Professional plan.
HubSpot offers a holistic view of your contact’s journey from lead generation to the end of the sales funnel. The contact management tab offers granular control over your customer profiles. This means that you can track how a contact is interacting with your website and also maintain a record of their previous customer support interactions.
Like conditions in Mailchimp, HubSpot allows marketers to set properties for their customer profiles. Conforming to any of the properties will automatically segregate them into different segments. Unlike Mailchimp, marketers can set as many properties as they want right from the free one.
Winner- Tie
Even though the features of HubSpot’s free plan are slightly better than Mailchimp’s plan, they are still neck and neck in the contact management category.
Email Template Designing
Email template designing is a crucial aspect of the whole process. However, designing attractive emails from scratch might not be your email marketer’s forte. Apart from that, crafting truly interactive emails using HTML coding can be even more challenging for the organization.
To tackle this problem, email automation platforms are outfitted with some easy-to-use email editors and designing tools.
Mailchimp offers a vast library of pre-built email templates. It also provides a search function for you to use and find suitable templates for your upcoming campaigns. The template library hosts more than 100 variations for different kinds of email campaigns.
On the downside, Mailchimp becomes restrictive with customizability. Although, these harsh constraints are put in place to prevent the users from ruining the template’s layout and optimization.
HubSpot also hosts a massive library of optimized and pre-designed email templates, Even though the number of variations of templates is half of what Mailchimp offers, the high degree of customizability makes up for it. If you are facing challenges coming up with innovative email designs, you can always outsource it to HubSpot email marketing experts.
Both, Mailchimp vs HubSpot, offer drag-and-drop email editors to make it easier for beginner marketers to effortlessly create highly engaging emails.
Winner- Tie
HubSpot cannot match the variety and quantity of email templates offered by Mailchimp. But, it excels when it comes to the customizability of these templates. Mailchimp is known to restrict email marketers from making too many changes to its templates. Hence, it is a tie between the two.
Analytics and Reporting
Data analytics and insightful campaign reports have become an indispensable part of all campaigns. Mailchimp and HubSpot offer basic reporting tools in their free and basic plans. These tools allow you to track email click-through rates, CTA button clicks, email open rates, and all the other necessary metrics.
With Mailchimp’s paid plans, you get access to advanced features, like comparison reports. These reports compare your current email campaign’s performance to past performances. The report also highlights the performance of similar companies in your niche.
Mailchimp also tracks the financial performance and efficiency of different email automations and landing pages. Lastly, it analyzes your current campaign and offers recommendations and tips for optimizing your content.
HubSpot also offers similar features to its users, but its reports are much more detailed. The email automation platforms aim to help email marketers easily understand the performance data to make important changes to their ongoing promotional campaigns.
HubSpot’s seamless integration with different social platforms and software is the leading reason for offering such exhaustive reports. It essentially compiles all the available customer data to generate highly insightful reports.
Winner- Tie
It is a tie between Mailchimp and HubSpot. They both generate informative reports for the users. However, HubSpot becomes the go-to platform for all-round marketers searching for compilation of all available customer data from all the different marketing channels.
Email Automation Tools
Despite being the most popular platform, Mailchimp visibly lacks some of the essential automation tools. Mailchimp offers the basic autoresponder functions in its base plan. As a result, the base plan becomes a very appealing proposition for small business owners who are just starting out.
At higher-priced plans, Mailchimp offers a customer journey tracker that helps email marketers track the customer’s actions throughout the sales funnel. Then, these actions are used to trigger highly personalized and relevant email campaigns.
Again, the customer journey tracker is also utilized to make updates to the various segments and subscriber lists based on the actions of the customers. Veteran Mailchimp users can leverage the customer journey builders to get higher conversion and click-through rates.
For HubSpot, these features are only the tip of the iceberg. Owing to its incredible integration capability, HubSpot goes beyond just email campaign automation. The pre-defined workflows enable marketers to send leads to their sales team, manage their contact bases, and automatically generate customer support tickets. The built-in customer relationship manager also helps address customer queries.
The marketers gain the ability to add extra triggers and delays between the various action items. Apart from this , HubSpot also empowers marketers to set up corresponding social media ad campaigns to complement their email campaigns.
However, you should know, HubSpot’s advanced features are only available in its premium marketing plans. And, some of the plans can be expensive for small business owners.
Winner- HubSpot
Albeit being the pricier of the two, HubSpot’s advanced features and tools make the investment worthwhile. As mentioned above, Mailchimp is better suited for small business owners exploring the email marketing space.
Social Media Integration
Regardless of the fact that Mailchimp is a pure email marketing platform, it does offer tools to help the business to expand its marketing efforts to other channels. However, HubSpot is a multi-purpose platform with built-in social media managements & integrations.
To begin with, Mailchimp empowers the user to organically post on Instagram and Facebook with a single click. Marketers can also monitor the ads on these social media channels through the Mailchimp dashboard.
It is also possible to promote Google ads through Mailchimp’s third-party integrations. But, Google Ads API is unable to use the customer profile data to create more targets campaigns. Consequently, Google ads become more expensive as they are displayed to all visitors. This restricts Mailchimp users from achieving their full potential.
In stark contrast, HubSpot offers features are that significantly better. Marketers can link all the social media platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn. HubSpot also allows its users to schedule posts on all these platforms. It becomes easier to track the success rate of all the campaigns running on different platforms.
All the leads generated from the various channels are channeled through HubSpot’s dashboard. Marketers can continuously track customer behavior and make changes to their marketing strategy accordingly. Finally, HubSpot also helps the marketing department tracks recent trends and keyword searches.
Winner: HubSpot
HubSpot clearly takes the win here. But then again, these features are only available to the Professional plan user.
Landing Pages
The goal of most email campaigns is to get the readers to click on the CTA buttons that lead them to a landing page. Now, the onus is on the interactivity of the landing page to convert the readers from idle browsers to active customers.
But, not all email marketers are equipped with the HTML knowledge to create amazing landing pages. And, hiring developers to do the same can be an expensive affair.
Email marketing automation platforms, like Mailchimp and HubSpot, offer marketers the tool to quickly create informative landing pages.
The landing pages are highly customizable and can be designed to align with your brand aesthetics. These landing pages are designed in a way to encourage the customers to take actions that are beneficial to the brand.
Mailchimp’s landing page editor is extremely simple to use. The moment the marketer opens the tool, they are presented with two options to choose from- basic and themed templates.
The basic templates are used to create sign-up forms, promotional content blocks, or payment gateways. The themed templates come with images and texts that can be easily replaced with your brand’s content.
HubSpot has a larger variety of landing page templates. Since HubSpot is closely connected with various other marketing channels, it helps marketers create hyper-personalized landing pages for visitors. The built-in CRM also offers valuable insights into the performance of the landing pages.
Winner- Tie
Both offer highly effective tools and creative templates to help marketers stay ahead of their competitors. Yes, the landing pages are only available in the paid plans. However, the price paid for the landing page editor is significantly lower than what the organization would have paid to a developer.
Customer Support
when it comes to Mailchimp vs HubSpot they both operate communities that allow email marketers to interact with each other. Beginners can easily reach out to veteran marketers to get advice regarding their strategies. Both platforms also offer extensive knowledge resources in the form of how-to videos and blogs.
The customer support team of HubSpot is available 24/7 to support teams that are always looking out for their users. Mailchimp also offers email support. However, Mailchimp’s live chat support is only available for limited hours during workdays.
Again, HubSpot and Mailchimp’s customer support varies depending on the plan you are on. For example, HubSpot users can only get phone support only if they are on the Professional or Enterprise plan. Similarly, phone support is only reserved for Mailchimp’s Premium plan users. The free plan users get limited support for only the first 30 days in both cases.
The only differentiating factor is that HubSpot offers customer support in 11 different languages while Mailchimp is only limited to 5 support languages.
Winner- Tie
HubSpot and Mailchimp offer very similar support to their users. Therefore, it is difficult to choose one over the other solely based on these criteria.
Which One is Better HubSpot or Mailchimp?
Since HubSpot is an all-in-one platform, it is best suited for medium to large-sized businesses. Using HubSpot, businesses can attract more visitors through SEO blogs.
Once these visitors turn into subscribers, HubSpot can target them with highly personalized automated email workflows. Regularly engaging with the subscribers enables marketers to generate leads rapidly and increase their conversion rates.
Mailchimp is best suited for small and medium-sized business owners. Mailchimp helps them build effective sign-up forms and landing pages to increase email subscribers.
Then, marketers can easily create a dynamic email using the template library. Finally, they can use the automation features to target customers with highly relevant and targeted promotional emails.
Conclusion
As you might have noticed, Mailchimp and HubSpot have very similar offerings for their users. However, Mailchimp’s entry pricing makes it the more attractive option for small businesses that want to expand their brand identity through email marketing. On the other hand, HubSpot is quite expensive but offers valuable tools to businesses to improve their email marketing efforts. HubSpot users can use the platform to consolidate their social media and marketing campaigns in a single place.
So, which one should you choose?
HubSpot should be the preferred one if you are not constricted by budget and want to capitalize on the expansive reach of email campaigns. In the same vein, Mailchimp is best for companies that want to run simple email marketing campaigns without any fuss. As always, email experts at InboxArmy will be more than happy to guide you through the selection and onboarding process for your preferred email marketing platform.
