A working comparison of the MailerLite + MailerSend combo against Mailchimp for an agency juggling clients who need marketing, transactional, or both. Scroll for the deep dive — then build your own client roster in the simulator and watch the two bills fight.
Three facts decide most of this before you touch a feature list. They're the levers the simulator below pulls on.
MailerLite bills only active subscribers — people emailed in the last 30 days. Mailchimp bills every contact in the audience, including unsubscribed and dormant ones.
MailerSend sends transactional email by itself from free / $7. Mailchimp's transactional (Mandrill) is an add-on that requires a paid Standard plan underneath it — so you buy two things to send one.
Two dashboards, two logins, two invoices, two support queues. The combo is cheaper, not simpler. That tax is real for a small team.
MailerLite and MailerSend are sibling products from the same company. They are not one platform — they're a marketing tool and a transactional tool that happen to share a parent, a design language, and a support team.
The Mailchimp-shaped half. Drag-and-drop builder, signup forms and pop-ups, landing pages, a website builder, segmentation, and automation workflows. Genuinely easy to use and consistently strong on deliverability. The automation is functional but shallower than Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign, and template design is more limited.
The developer half. REST API and SMTP relay for password resets, order confirmations, alerts — the action-triggered mail. High deliverability, metered overage instead of hard cutoffs, multi-domain support that suits agencies. Note: it polices spam complaints hard and will auto-pause an account whose complaint rate spikes.
The all-in-one most clients already recognize. Deeper automation, a bigger template and integration ecosystem, and everything under a single login — which is its real advantage. The costs: contact-based pricing that counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts, prices that have climbed 30%+ since 2022, auto-upgrades when you cross a tier with no grace period, and a transactional product (Mandrill) sold separately at $20 per 25,000-email block, available only on Standard and Premium. Extra seats, a custom domain, and a dedicated IP all cost more on top.
Monthly, USD, publicly listed rates as of May 2026. Marketing tiers are billed by contacts; transactional by emails sent. Annual billing knocks ~10% (MailerLite/MailerSend) to 15% (Mailchimp, 10k+ contacts) off — not shown below.
| Contacts | MailerLite (GB) | Mailchimp (Std) |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $10 | $20 |
| 2,500 | $25 | $60 |
| 5,000 | $39 | $100 |
| 10,000 | $73 | $135 |
| 25,000 | $169 | $270 |
| 50,000 | $289 | ~$385 |
| Emails/mo | MailerSend | Mailchimp (Mandrill)* |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | Free | $20 + plan |
| 5,000 | $7 | $20 + plan |
| 25,000 | ~$19 | $20 + plan |
| 50,000 | $35 | $40 + plan |
| 75,000 | ~$59 | $60 + plan |
* Mailchimp Transactional (Mandrill) is sold in $20 blocks of 25,000 emails and only works on a paid Standard/Premium plan — so a transactional-only client still drags a $20+ marketing plan along for the ride. The simulator accounts for this.
Add a client, drag its marketing and transactional needs, and the stack costs recompute live across your whole book. Rename clients, try the presets, stack a dozen. All in-memory — nothing is saved.
Marketing slider = active contacts (0–50k). Transactional slider = emails/month (0–75k). Combo = MailerLite (Growing Business) + MailerSend, cheapest covering plan. Mailchimp = Standard marketing + Mandrill blocks, with the forced-plan rule applied. Mid-tier numbers are interpolated from listed rates and meant for directional planning, not a quote.