Mailchimp vs AWeber (2026) — Which is Better?

We have an honest review policy, but this page contains affiliate links. If you buy through these, we may earn a commission. This helps fund our research at no cost to you.

In this in-depth Mailchimp vs AWeber comparison, I’m going to look at two of the best-known email marketing solutions currently available — and help you work out which one is the better fit for your business.

Read on to get a full overview of both Mailchimp and AWeber’s feature set and exactly why — and when — you might decide to use one of these tools over the other.

Let’s start off with an important question…

What do AWeber and Mailchimp do?

AWeber and Mailchimp are email marketing tools that allow you to:

…and much else besides.

But how much does this functionality cost?

Pricing

AWeber pricing

There are four plans available for AWeber. In order of expense, these are:

The free plan gives you basic access to most of AWeber’s key features, so long as your list is 500 or fewer subscribers in size. You can access this here.

The key differences between AWeber’s pricing plans are:

Mailchimp pricing

There are four Mailchimp email marketing plans, and the cost of using each depends on the size of your mailing list.

The plans are as follows:

The key differences between the Mailchimp tiers involve:

An interesting option for users who mail their databases relatively infrequently is Mailchimp’s ‘Pay as You Go’ plan, where you pay a set fee per email sent.

Exact pricing varies by territory, and the functionality you get is the same as that provided on the ‘Essentials’ plan.

The pay-as-you-go model won’t be for everyone, but it’s potentially useful for users who are not interested in making use of autoresponders and only wish to send ad hoc, one-off blasts.

A similar pay-as-you-go option is not currently available in AWeber.

So which works out cheaper?

If your only purpose of using an email marketing tool is to send occasional newsletters to a reasonably small database, then Mailchimp lets you do this a bit cheaper than AWeber, via its ‘Essentials’ plan (which involves a $13 monthly fee to AWeber’s $15 ‘Lite’ plan).

You won’t be able to use advanced email automation on it, or code your own templates, but it will let you carry out basic email marketing perfectly well.

However, in order to compare like with like, you really need to look at how Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ plans stack up against AWeber’s ‘Plus’ plans.

On these plans, Mailchimp works out $10 cheaper than AWeber for a list of 500 subscribers, but for larger lists, AWeber usually offers better value.

As the table below shows, AWeber is generally more affordable for lists between 2,500 and 50,000 subscribers, with savings ranging from $5 to $60 per month.

Of course, you could theoretically use either product for free — so let’s take a quick look at the free plans on offer from AWeber and Mailchimp.

Free plans

Mailchimp offers a free plan that lets you send e-newsletters to a mailing list containing 250 contacts entirely for free.

However, there are some important things to be aware of with regard to this plan:

AWeber free plan

AWeber offers a free plan too — and in several respects, it’s more generous than Mailchimp’s.

For starters, AWeber’s free plan lets you send newsletters to a list of up to 500 subscribers, twice Mailchimp’s 250-contact limit. Its sending allowance is considerably higher too: you can send up to 3,000 emails per month with AWeber, compared with 500 per month on Mailchimp.

AWeber’s free plan does come with restrictions. You’re limited to one email list, one landing page and one automation workflow, and some more advanced functionality is reserved for paid plans. Even so, you get access to a useful range of email marketing features, including email design tools, signup forms, landing pages, integrations and basic automation.

As with Mailchimp’s free plan, emails sent using AWeber’s free offering contain platform branding.

So, of the two free plans, AWeber’s is the more generous option overall — particularly when it comes to contact and email send limits.

You can try the free AWeber plan out here.

Autoresponders and marketing automation in Mailchimp and AWeber

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your mailing list subscribers automatically.

At their simplest, they involve sending emails at pre-defined time intervals. For example, you can set things up so that straight after somebody signs up to your list, they receive a welcome or ‘onboarding’ message from your business; a week later they could receive a promo code for specific products; two weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on social media.

And so on!

The idea behind autoresponders is that much of your email marketing gets automated — it’s a sort of ‘set and forget’ scenario that saves you the bother of sending out e-newsletters manually (although you can still of course do this as and when required).

Both Mailchimp and AWeber let you create these sorts of simple, time-based email sequences.

But both platforms also let you go considerably further than this, by creating marketing automations that determine what happens next based on subscriber behavior.

So rather than everybody receiving the same sequence of emails at the same intervals, you can create different paths for subscribers depending on how they interact with your messages.

Mailchimp handles this through its Automation Flows feature. This lets you create branching automated journeys using a wide range of rules and triggers, with subscriber activity determining which path somebody takes.

AWeber provides a visual workflow builder too, through its Automation Campaigns tool. You can build workflows from scratch or choose from 13 ready-made ones covering tasks such as welcoming subscribers, generating leads, re-engaging inactive subscribers, teaching a course and selling products.

You can add delays, messages, tags and conditions to these workflows, while AWeber’s ‘Split Path’ feature lets you send subscribers down different routes based on actions such as email opens and link clicks.

Tags provide further automation options. For example, AWeber can apply a tag when a subscriber visits a particular page on your website, and this can then be used to trigger an automation.

Of the two platforms, however, Mailchimp ultimately gives you more sophisticated automation tools. Its Automation Flows tool provides a broader range of triggers, conditions and branching options directly within the automation editor, making it the stronger choice for creating particularly complex customer journeys.

That said, the gap between the two platforms in this area is considerably smaller than it used to be. AWeber’s automation functionality has improved substantially, and should comfortably cover the requirements of many users.

It’s also important to consider which plans give you access to these features.

With Mailchimp, the ‘Free’ plan doesn’t include marketing automation flows at all, while the ‘Essentials’ plan lets you create relatively simple flows containing up to four steps. To access Mailchimp’s more sophisticated automation functionality — including flows with up to 200 steps and multiple branching points — you’ll need to be on its ‘Standard’ plan or higher.

AWeber takes a somewhat different approach. Its ‘Lite’ plan lets you create up to three email automations, while the ‘Plus’ and ‘Done For You’ plans let you create an unlimited number.

So, if advanced marketing automation is your main priority, Mailchimp is the stronger of the two products — although you’ll need to pay for one of its more expensive plans to get the most from it.

If your automation requirements are more straightforward, however — for example, if you simply want to create welcome sequences, drip campaigns or relatively simple behavior-based journeys — AWeber gives you plenty of functionality and, at many list sizes, does so for less than Mailchimp.

Next, let’s look at email design and templates.

Templates

Both AWeber and Mailchimp offer a wide range of e-newsletter templates, which are designed to suit many different applications and organization types — ecommerce, events, sports, education and so on.

Mailchimp offers far more templates than AWeber, however — around 350 to 169 respectively.

(AWeber claims that it comes with 600+ templates. However, these include variants and RSS feed templates; so by our reckoning, the ‘real’ number is more like 169).

With both systems you can tweak the templates extensively, and indeed code your own, so users of both platforms should be able to settle on a template which works for their business without too much difficulty.

However, and as mentioned above, you’ll pay a premium to do so with Mailchimp.

All the email templates provided by both products are responsive, meaning that they will automatically resize themselves to suit the device your e-newsletter is being viewed on.

A ‘preview’ mode is also available for both Mailchimp and AWeber that lets you see how your e-newsletter will look on a mobile device.

In terms of quality, I’d argue that some of Mailchimp’s templates look a bit more contemporary than AWeber’s. But there’s not a huge amount in it.

Web fonts in Mailchimp and AWeber

Both Mailchimp and AWeber let you use web fonts in your newsletters — something that not all email marketing platforms offer.

Web fonts can make newsletters look more polished and, if you use the same typefaces on your website, help you maintain greater brand consistency across your site and email campaigns.

Of the two platforms, Mailchimp now gives you the wider selection of web fonts. Its new email builder provides a broad range of typefaces, including popular options such as Lato, Lora, Merriweather, Open Sans, Playfair Display, Roboto, Source Sans 3 and Work Sans, along with more distinctive fonts like Anton, Comic Neue and Syncopate.

This represents a considerable improvement on Mailchimp’s older email builder, which offered a much smaller selection of web fonts. The new builder is now Mailchimp’s default email designer for most users, although its legacy builder remains available to some existing customers.

AWeber gives you a good selection of web fonts too, including several that are also available in Mailchimp. It also provides some more unconventional options, such as ‘Permanent Marker,’ which can add personality to an email when used appropriately.

So, while both platforms give you a decent amount of flexibility when it comes to typography, Mailchimp has the edge here thanks to the larger range of web fonts available in its new email builder.

One thing to bear in mind, however, is that web fonts aren’t supported by every email client. When this is the case, recipients will typically see a standard fallback font instead.

AMP for email in Mailchimp and AWeber

An area where AWeber has an edge over Mailchimp — and indeed most other email marketing platforms — involves something called AMP for email.

In the past, e-newsletters have been very static affairs — a simple combination of text and images.

AMP for Email changes all that by making it possible for recipients to take actions — like booking an appointment, adding something to a cart, or RSVP-ing to an event — directly within the email (i.e., without leaving their email program and without visiting an external website).

It also allows the senders of an email to insert live, dynamic content into it — think survey results, weather updates, football scores etc.

This ‘dynamic’ nature of AMP e-newsletters gives recipients a reason to return to them from time to time — turning emails into much more powerful and engaging pieces of content.

The below video from Google about AMP for email is worth checking out.

(Mailchimp does offer dynamic emails of sorts too — you can create one email and populate its content based on segments within your mailing list. This isn’t the same as fully dynamic AMP-based emails, however).

The AWeber and Mailchimp interfaces

When it comes to their interfaces, there isn’t a huge amount to separate AWeber and Mailchimp. Both use the sort of dashboard-and-sidebar layout that’s standard in modern SaaS applications, with a main navigation menu providing access to their key email marketing tools.

AWeber’s interface is straightforward and functional. Its main menu gives you quick access to messages, subscribers, signup forms, automations, reports and other key features, with additional options appearing as you move deeper into each section.

Mailchimp takes a similar approach. Its main navigation combines icons and text labels, making it reasonably easy to move between campaigns, automations, audiences, analytics and its other tools.

Of the two, Mailchimp’s interface feels a little more polished and contemporary, with generous use of white space and large typefaces. AWeber’s is slightly more utilitarian by comparison, but this isn’t necessarily a disadvantage — I generally find its key features easy to locate.

One useful feature in Mailchimp is its content studio. This gives you a central place to store images, files and other assets, which can then be easily reused when creating campaigns.

Ultimately, though, both interfaces are easy enough to get to grips with, and I wouldn’t consider usability a major reason to choose one platform over the other. Mailchimp arguably wins on visual polish, while AWeber’s slightly simpler approach can make it quicker to find certain features.

Opt-in processes in AWeber and Mailchimp

There are two ways you can add subscribers to a mailing list: using a ‘single opt-in’ or a ‘double opt-in’ process.

When you use a single opt-in process, the person completing your sign-up form is added to your mailing list immediately.

With a double-opt-in process, the person signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that he or she must click before they are subscribed.

The main benefits of a single opt-in process are that

 A double opt-in process is better for

For quite some time, AWeber had a big edge over Mailchimp in this area, because it allowed users to make use of either a single or a double opt-in approach.

Mailchimp eventually changed its tune however, allowing its customers to use a single opt-in approach, because the company found that 61% of users completing double opt in data capture forms were not completing their sign-up process.

So a thumbs up to both products for the flexibility in this area. Not all competing products provide single opt-in functionality, so it’s great to see both AWeber and Mailchimp doing so.

Data segmentation

A key part of managing a mailing list involves creating segments and sending e-newsletters to them.

Both Mailchimp and AWeber allow you to create segments based on your preferred criteria — but what they don’t do is let you send to multiple segments at once.

Let’s say you’re a Volkswagen dealer with a mailing list containing a field called ‘car model.’

You’ve used this field to segment your mailing list neatly into the owners of VW Polos, Golfs, Passats, Tiguans etc. You have a special offer which is relevant to Polo and Golf owners, and you want to send one message about it to those two segments.

But with AWeber — and with Mailchimp unless you’re on a ‘Standard’ or ‘Premium’ plan — you can’t do this. Instead, you’ll need to create a new segment containing people who own either Polos or Golfs.

Now, this might not seem like a serious problem, but if you regularly need to send mailouts to multiple (and varying) segments of subscribers then you will potentially have more work to do than you might like.

If segmentation is a very important aspect of how you manage your mailouts, then I’d probably look elsewhere for an email marketing solution. The two products I’ve come across which cater best for emailing multiple segments (and indeed lists) are GetResponse and Campaign Monitor.

To be fair, you can get some advanced segmentation functionality with Mailchimp — but you’ll need to be on the ‘Standard’ plan or higher to access this.

You can find out more about advanced segmentation in Mailchimp here. 

Finally, AWeber allows you to send e-newsletters across multiple lists — Mailchimp doesn’t. Although it’s usually better to use one list and segment it properly, there are occasions where you might need to broadcast e-newsletters across a variety of individual lists.

So overall, it’s a bit of a win here for AWeber, due to the fact that the product allows you to send emails to multiple lists. But both products could do rather better in the segmentation department.

Stock images / Canva integration

AWeber includes a built-in stock image library that gives you access to tens of thousands of royalty-free photos. These can be added directly to your e-newsletters, making it easy to enhance your content with polished visuals — whether you need a stylish background or a generic photo of a keyboard.

Mailchimp also provides a stock image library, but it’s more limited in scope. It gives users access to around 500 free images sourced from Shutterstock.

While this is still a useful inclusion, anyone needing a wider selection will likely need to supplement it with images from external royalty-free sites like Unsplash or Pexels.

A related AWeber feature which is worth flagging up is its new integration with the popular graphic design tool Canva. This lets you create Canva designs without ever leaving the AWeber interface — and insert the results into the e-newsletters you create with AWeber.

The below video gives an overview of how this integration works (for more information about the tool itself, check out our Canva review).

Mailchimp can also be used in conjunction with Canva — but the integration works the other way round, i.e., you create your designs in Canva and click a button to insert them into Mailchimp. Which approach works for you probably boils down to personal preference.

Split testing

An important feature of email marketing tools like AWeber and Mailchimp is split testing.

This allows you to try out different subject headers or content on sample data to see which works best.

For example, you could send two versions of your e-newsletter to 10% of your subscribers, analyze the results (i.e., open / clickthrough rates) and send out the best-performing version to the remainder of people on your list.

If you have a large email list, use of split testing can lead to significant improvements to your open and clickthrough rates. So, many email marketing tools automate the process for you.

On the ‘Essentials’ Mailchimp plan, you can test 3 different versions of your emails against each other. You can involve one variable in these tests: subject line, name, content or send time.

More sophisticated split testing options are available in Mailchimp on Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ and ‘Premium’ plans in the way of ‘multivariate’ testing — this lets you test 8 variants of e-newsletters against each other (and using multiple variables at once — sender, subject header, content etc.).

This was previously only available to Mailchimp ‘Premium’ plan subscribers, but has recently been added as a feature of the ‘Standard’ Mailchimp plan too.

AWeber also lets you test 3 versions of your newsletters against each other on all paid plans — but importantly, there are no restrictions on what you can test. You can simply put 3 e-newsletters head to head — testing content, subject headers, sender names etc. against each other all at once.

So on balance, when it comes to split testing, it’s a win for AWeber.

RSS to e-newsletter

Mailchimp and AWeber both allow you to send out e-newsletters automatically based on an RSS feed (i.e., every time it gets updated, it will trigger a newsletter).

Both platforms allow you to use all of the available templates to send RSS emails — and editing is done in the standard drag and drop editors.

Several competing email marketing tools require you to use separate templates for RSS emails, so I give a thumbs up to both Mailchimp and AWeber for making life simple here.

(AWeber recently introduced a new feature called ‘Autonewsletter’. This includes the RSS emails described above, but it also allows you to use URLs to automatically populate e-newsletters with new content from a YouTube channel, a podcast or an Etsy store).

Landing pages

Landing pages — also known as ‘squeeze pages’ — are web pages that are designed with just one goal in mind: data capture.

They typically consist of a form, some attractive images and a small amount of text spelling out the benefit of submitting your email address.

Landing pages capture data more effectively than forms placed on regular websites, simply because there are fewer elements on view to distract users from entering their data — no navigation, offers or content to take attention away from a sign-up form are usually present.

Both Mailchimp and AWeber recently introduced landing pages as a new feature — you can now use both platforms to design simple landing pages which can be used in conjunction with advertising campaigns. There are 162 templates available from AWeber compared with a much smaller range of just 9 templates from Mailchimp.

It should be noted, however, that AWeber and Mailchimp’s offering in this regard is a bit limited by comparison to the likes of dedicated landing page products Instapage or Unbounce.

This is because they don’t facilitate A/B testing, where variants of the landing pages are shown to a sample of users, with the highest-converting ones being automatically rolled out.

Mailchimp’s landing pages do let you view analytics on the performance of your landing pages, however, allowing you to perform manual tests and make your own decisions regarding which landing pages are performing best. This does add value to proceedings.

AWeber doesn’t seem to offer a similar set of statistics for landing pages (you’ll have to manually track hits and conversions using a Facebook / Meta Pixel or Google Analytics), which means Mailchimp’s landing pages have the edge when it comes to reporting.

Website building tools and ecommerce

In recent years, many email marketing products have started to add website building and ecommerce features to their feature sets — and AWeber and Mailchimp are no exception here.

In the case of AWeber, you can now use the platform to take payments, accept donations or sell subscriptions. This is done through its landing pages feature (discussed above).

Mailchimp provides a decent website building tool that lets you create a site with unlimited pages and includes some basic SEO tools (even the free Mailchimp plan includes this).

Until recently, Mailchimp had also provided ecommerce functionality for running an online store on the platform — but this feature has now been discontinued (along with Mailchimp’s appointment scheduling offering).

Now, it has to be said that the website building features in AWeber and Mailchimp are not yet going to rival dedicated website building platforms like Shopify or Squarespace in the functionality stakes — but they may come in handy for some users, particularly those who like having everything in one place, or those on a low budget.

Between the two products under discussion here, Mailchimp currently offers the better features for website building, but AWeber takes the win when it comes to ecommerce.

Reporting

Both AWeber and Mailchimp provide you with detailed statistics on the performance of your mailouts with — in my view — Mailchimp having the better reporting interface and one that is more feature packed.

It’s laid out in a way that makes drilling down into particular bits of data very straightforward — you can view e-newsletter results by activity (opens and clicks etc.), URLs clicked, social activity, ecommerce, conversations and Google Analytics.

There are two particularly nifty features in Mailchimp that are worth singling out for attention:

AWeber is not without its strengths when it comes to reporting either, and I particularly like the way that you can create segments directly from reports. For example, you can open the report for a particular newsletter, view the subscribers who opened it and save these contacts as a segment for use in a new campaign.

Mailchimp lets you see which contacts opened or clicked a particular email too, but turning these contacts into a reusable segment is a little less immediate. Rather than creating the segment directly from the report, you generally do this using Mailchimp’s segmentation tools, specifying the relevant campaign interaction — an open or click, for example — as a condition.

So, AWeber has a slight usability edge here, although Mailchimp provides plenty of other ways to identify and target engaged subscribers — including its contact ratings and segmentation tools.

Both products also provide ecommerce reporting that can help you establish which emails are generating sales and conversions.

Integrations

AWeber and Mailchimp both integrate with important website building platforms — key examples include BigCommerce, Shopify and WordPress. Popular ecommerce tools like PayPal and social media giants like Facebook are also catered for.

AWeber offers more integrations, however: around 765 to Mailchimp’s 330 or so.

Mailchimp is more of an industry standard tool than AWeber, however, so some important services — key examples being Squarespace and Facebook — will offer Mailchimp as a built-in, ‘works out of the box’ email marketing integration.

When it comes to Facebook ads, Mailchimp is more tightly integrated with the platform. You can actually run Facebook ad campaigns from within your Mailchimp account, so if you’re the kind of user who wants to manage everything in one place, you may find this useful.

A similar feature exists in Mailchimp for running Google Ads too.

Send time optimization

A good feature that is included in Mailchimp which is unfortunately not present in AWeber is ‘Send Time Optimization’.

Send time optimization is a sophisticated tool which automatically sends your e-newsletter at the time at which it is most likely to be opened.

This time is calculated by Mailchimp based on looking at when the subscribers on your list have previously opened mail — it can work this out based on looking at the campaigns you’ve previously sent and also by using data from campaigns sent by other Mailchimp users involving email addresses that are also present on your list.

As Mailchimp explains:

It would be great if AWeber could consider adding this functionality, as it has the potential to significantly increase open rates.

Using different languages in Mailchimp and AWeber

For users wishing to provide versions of their confirmation emails and thank-you pages in different languages, Mailchimp is a better choice than AWeber, as it provides this functionality out of the box. 

Setting this up is a bit fiddly, however, and involves creating different merge tags for each language.

Customer support

Finally, let’s take a look at customer support.

When it comes to support for free plans, AWeber has an edge, providing live chat and email support for its free offering; Mailchimp only provides email support for the first 30 days of using its free plan.

As for paid plans, AWeber provides live chat, email and phone support on all of them. Its live chat and email support is available 24/7, while phone support is available from 8am to 8pm ET, Monday to Friday.

By contrast, Mailchimp provides 24/7 live chat and email support on its paid plans, but phone support is reserved for customers on its considerably more expensive ‘Premium’ plan.

So if you are a complete novice to email marketing, but don’t have the resources to hire somebody to set your e-newsletter campaigns up, the availability of phone support at an affordable price for AWeber is something to bear in mind as an important advantage of using the platform.

And accessing contact details for customer support in AWeber is easy too. You simply click on a support link at the bottom of the interface, and this brings you to the contact details page.

Mailchimp makes accessing support a little more complicated — you can only do so after you’ve been forced to search its website for an answer to your query.

Mailchimp has an advantage when it comes to languages, however. Its live chat and email support is available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Italian, while AWeber’s support is provided in English. Mailchimp’s Help Center is available in these six languages too.

Overall, AWeber provides the more comprehensive support offering, particularly because phone support is available without requiring an expensive top-tier plan. However, Mailchimp is the better option if receiving support in a language other than English is important to you.

User reviews

To give a sense of how users rate both platforms across leading software review sites — including TrustRadius, Capterra, G2, and SourceForge — the table below summarizes the latest available scores for Mailchimp and AWeber.

Overall, AWeber holds a very slight edge, averaging 4.41 out of 5 compared to Mailchimp’s 4.38, although user sentiment is broadly positive for both platforms across review sites.

Alternatives to Mailchimp and AWeber

Before deciding conclusively on Mailchimp and AWeber, it’s worth taking a quick look at some alternatives:

Additionally, many ecommerce platforms — for example, tools like Wix and Shopify — are now bundling email marketing features with their services. So you may find that your website builder has some fairly generous email marketing tools built in.

AWeber vs Mailchimp conclusion

Overall, AWeber and Mailchimp are both solid, well-established email marketing platforms that give you the core tools you need to create campaigns, build mailing lists and automate communications.

Of the two, AWeber is generally the better choice if ease of use, value for money and customer support are your main priorities. Its free plan is more generous than Mailchimp’s, its automation tools are now considerably more capable than they used to be, and phone support is available on its paid plans.

Mailchimp is the more sophisticated platform overall, however. It gives you more advanced marketing automation and segmentation functionality, and its email builder also gives you a larger selection of web fonts.

So, if your email marketing requirements are relatively straightforward, I’d lean toward AWeber; if you need more advanced marketing and audience-management functionality, Mailchimp is likely to be the better fit.

If you’ve got any queries on Mailchimp vs AWeber, I’d love to hear them — just leave them in the comments section below (I do my best to answer each one!).

I’ll leave you with the key reasons you might want to use one of these platforms over the other: