Constant Contact vs Mailchimp 2026: Which Is Better?

Email marketing continues to be one of the highest-ROI channels for businesses of all sizes. According to the latest email marketing insights, many small businesses report noticeable improvements in response rates and conversions after adopting dedicated tracking and analytics tools. Knowing when a lead opens an email or clicks a link can be the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed sale.

Choosing the right email marketing platform can feel like ordering at your favorite restaurant. Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp have earned their place as industry leaders, but which one truly deserves a spot in your marketing toolkit? In this comparison, we break down everything you need to know about these two major platforms, including features, pricing, deliverability, and customer support.

The Quick Overview

At a glance, here's what you need to know before diving deep:

With Constant Contact, it positions itself as an easy system for email marketing, guiding small businesses and nonprofits through strategies that are very simple to implement with great customer support.

Mailchimp offers a more fully featured all-in-one marketing solution, featuring advanced automation, detailed analytics, and multichannel capabilities-ideal for growing businesses and marketers looking for more complex tools.

Key Differences at a Glance

Email Marketing Features: Head-to-Head Comparison

Email Builder and Design

Both platforms offer drag-and-drop email builders, although their respective philosophies on this matter are considerably different.

Constant Contact's Email Builder

The editor of Constant Contact greets you with simplicity. It's a clean and intuitive interface, great for those who are just starting or want to crank out professional emails fast. You can drag elements directly into your design and edit text, images, and formatting in place. While this straightforward approach is excellent for getting campaigns out the door fast, it might feel a little too limiting for users who want to create more complex or visually sophisticated layouts.

Mailchimp's Email Builder

Mailchimp recently upgraded its email builder, and it shows. In the new version, you can click directly on your design to add elements and edit content blocks immediately, whereas in the older version, edits needed to be made via sidebar editing. The modern interface feels more efficient and offers more flexibility for creating custom designs. Meanwhile, for those fond of the classic feel, Mailchimp still supports its older builder.

Winner: Mailchimp wins with its modern builder, which balances efficiency with ease of use.

Email Templates: Quantity vs Quality

With an impressive library of more than 200 ready-to-send templates, Constant Contact spans just about any occasion and industry: from seasonal campaigns and promotional emails to nonprofit communications and invitations. Even better, its "branded template" feature automatically pulls colors and imagery from your website to create on-brand emails. Some users say that a few of the templates feel a bit dated, and some of the really good templates are only available if you get one of the higher-tier plans.

Mailchimp does things a bit differently, offering roughly 100 templates, which are grouped into "layouts"-basically, 14 basic structures-and "themes", or styled designs. Though the pickings are slimmer, to many users, Mailchimp's templates feel more modern and polished. It also has a "Code your own" option for developers who want full control. The catch: A number of the best templates are reserved for subscribers to the Premium plan.

Winner: It's a draw. Constant Contact has more quantity and types, but Mailchimp has more advanced and modern designs.

Marketing Automation: Where the Gap Widens

This is the main area of huge difference between the two platforms.

Constant Contact Automation

It provides some basic automation features, but here is the catch-you will need to upgrade to the Email Plus plan, which starts at $45/month, to get access to them. Once you are there, you can send in automated workflows because of subscriber actions, set autoresponders, and even build campaigns on ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify and WooCommerce. The automation builder is simple and clear, but it doesn't provide the level of flexibility or, really, visual feedback that more advanced users might want. You can't really nest multiple triggers, for instance, or create complex branching workflows.

Mailchimp Automation

Automation capabilities in Mailchimp are much stronger and more available at a lower price: it's available on the Standard plan. It allows you to work with pre-built automation workflows, including welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, birthday emails, product recommendations, and behavior-based triggers. You can create custom automation sequences with multiple steps, conditional logic, and branching paths based on subscriber actions. The only negative point is that Mailchimp lacks a visual workflow builder: complicated automation is harder to visualize and troubleshoot.

Winner: Mailchimp leads this category with much stronger automation features at more affordable price points.

List Management and Segmentation

With Constant Contact, simplicity rules through basic list management systems. You can apply tags, behavioral data, and even segment contacts based on engagement. The options include lists from Excel, Outlook, Gmail, and CRM systems, such as Salesforce. The result is that the interface is clean and intuitive for insights at a glance of your audience organization.

Mailchimp treats list management with a full-fledged built-in CRM, offering you advanced segmentation options, predictive analytics, and detailed audience insights. The platform also allows for a more refined segmenting of customers, using purchase history, website behaviors, and a customer's engagement pattern. However, that increased power comes with complexity: creating advanced segments requires more steps and some familiarity with the platform.

Winner: This round goes to Constant Contact because it's better for those people who like simple over complex. If your business requires higher functions of CRM, then Mailchimp is the best choice.

Customization Options

Both are relatively well-rounded on that point, even though they implement personalization in somewhat different ways.

You will be able to personalize subject lines with contact names, details, and custom fields by easily toggling them in Constant Contact. You can insert dynamic content blocks that can display different products or messages depending on the characteristics of subscribers, such as age, gender, or location.

Mailchimp offers the same subject line personalization, plus dynamic content blocks integrated directly into the email builder. Personalization is easy to set up, using the same logic found in segment creation and pulling from your contact data.

Winner: It's a tie. Both platforms deliver strong personalization capabilities that meet most business needs.

A/B Testing Capabilities

Testing is essential for optimization, and on this point, the platforms vary in terms of the degree of sophistication.

Constant Contact does offer A/B testing of subject lines, so you can try out two different versions to see which yields better open rates. Beyond that, though, you won't have any other options for split testing-email content, send time, and other variables won't be testable.

With Mailchimp, the testing options are a bit more comprehensive: you can run A/B tests on subject lines, content, sender names, and send times with up to three variations. On the Premium plan, this extends to multivariate testing, allowing the testing of up to eight combinations of different elements simultaneously.

Winner: Mailchimp definitely wins out here with more flexible and powerful testing.

Forms and Landing Pages

Meanwhile, both services have features to help one build their lists beyond conventional sign-up forms.

It offers pop-ups, in-line forms, landing pages, and Facebook Lead Ads through Constant Contact. The form builder provides basic customization-you can edit text, backgrounds, CTA colors, and add custom fields for information like name, location, and contact details. This builder is pretty straightforward but with somewhat limited design flexibility.

In addition, Mailchimp has the same form types available, but with more advanced customization and field addition. Unique among them is the "Translate it" option, which helps in creating multilingual forms targeting different geographies. The forms from here also perfectly integrate with Mailchimp CRM, automatically segmenting new subscribers.

Winner: This one goes to Constant Contact, for having an overall easier and quicker way to create forms, although Mailchimp does indeed allow for more customization, if that is what you need.

Email Deliverability: Getting to the Inbox

After all, email deliverability-ensuring your messages actually reach the recipients' inboxes rather than spam folders-is arguably the most critical factor in email marketing success.

According to recent test results:

• Constant Contact has about 92-97% deliverability

• Mailchimp: 92.6% deliverability

Both platforms continue to work hard in maintaining good deliverability rates via:

• Dedicated IP addresses for larger senders

• Authentication protocols: SPF, DKIM, DMARC

• Hygiene tools

• Strict anti-spam policy

Winner: Constant Contact has had a slight edge in more recent tests, although both send fantastic inbox placement rates.

Reporting and Analytics

Understanding campaign performance is key to improvement.

Reporting in Constant Contact is very straightforward and based on key metrics such as opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and social shares. The reports themselves come out nicely, and their underlying visualizations are second to none. You can compare campaigns side by side, but the tool does not offer in-interface comparative charts, as well as some other advanced analytics. For many users, the simplicity is actually a strength-reports explain what each metric means and offer actionable tips for improvement.

Mailchimp provides more in-depth analytics, including benchmark comparisons across industries, revenue tracking for e-commerce stores, geographic data, click maps, and subscriber engagement scores. One can create custom reports based on preferred data points, export to PDF or CSV file types, and share links to live dashboards with colleagues or clients. The depth of reporting comes with an inherent integration with Google Analytics through automatic tagging of UTM parameters.

Winner: For businesses needing granular analytics and data insights, Mailchimp is the winner; for those who want it a bit simpler and in smaller bites, Constant Contact takes the prize.

Third-Party Apps and Integrations

Constant Contact provides over 540 integrations with popular platforms such as:

• Ecommerce: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce

• CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot

• Social Media: Facebook, Instagram

• Events Management: Eventbrite, Canva

• Zapier for integrating thousands of other apps

Mailchimp boasts around 284 native integrations but makes up for it with deeper, more advanced connections- especially when it comes to:

• E-commerce sites, for product recommendations and abandoned cart automation

• Social media advertising platforms

• Content management systems

• Analytics and reporting tools

Winner: Constant Contact for sheer number of integrations. Mailchimp for the depth and sophistication of key integrations.

Pricing Comparison by List Size (2026)

Unique Features and Strengths

What makes Constant Contact stand out?

• Events Creation and Promotion Tools

• Surveys and polls to enable the collection of customer feedback

• Donation tools ideal for nonprofits

• In-platform posting on social media

• Extremely easy-to-use interface for beginners

Unique Selling Points of Mailchimp

• Native CRM with sophisticated audience management

• Website builder with free hosting & domain

• Postcards for direct mail campaigns

• Advanced product recommendations for e-commerce

• Robust API to allow custom integrations and automation

• SMS marketing with integrated email and SMS automation

Which Platform is Right for You?

Constant Contact is a better choice if you:

• Are new to email marketing and are looking for an easy-to-use platform

• Value responsive customer support with phone availability

• Need extended templates for faster campaign creation

• Operating events: integrated management of events

• Have a non-profit and be eligible for the discount rate

• Prefer predictable pricing, with generous sending limits

• Be listed over 2,500 contacts

• Seek simplicity in features, without making things complicated

Choose Mailchimp if you:

• Advanced marketing automation is required with complicated workflows

• Operating an ecommerce business that needs product recommendations

• Looking for in-depth Analytics and Industry Benchmarking

• Those who do not mind a steeper learning curve

• With fewer than 500 contacts, one can make use of their totally free plan

• Multi-channel marketing needs: email, social ads, SMS, website

• Appreciate the latest, sleek template designs

• Need for an in-built CRM system

• Require advanced segmentation and testing capabilities

Final Thoughts

Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp earned their reputations as leading email marketing platforms, serving different audiences and business needs.

Constant Contact shines at making email marketing pretty accessible to non-technically inclined users; its combination of user-friendliness, excellent support, and simplicity of features makes it ideal for small businesses, nonprofits, and organizations seeking results without complexity.

Mailchimp is an all-inclusive online marketing platform for companies that need more advanced functionality and multichannel capability, detailed analytics, and sophisticated automation to help scale.

The best email marketing platform is, after all, the one that you will use and do so consistently and effectively.