Mailchimp vs Constant Contact in 2026: the tier math

Contact number 501 costs you an extra $13.50 a month at Mailchimp and an extra $18 at Constant Contact, both on monthly billing, verified August 2026. That single step is the honest summary of this matchup. Two legacy ESPs, two staircases of contact tiers, two send meters chained to list size, and growth that arrives as an invoice on both sides. The real differences sit in four places: who counts as billable, what the cheap plan withholds, what comes bundled beyond email, and who picks up the phone.

What each one is

Constant Contact has been selling email since 1995, which makes it the older company in almost any matchup you can construct. The product is a small-business marketing kit rather than a pure sending tool: campaigns, plus event management with registration, plus surveys, plus social posting and ads, plus SMS as a paid add-on. The lineup is three plans, Lite, Standard, and Premium, each climbing its own ladder of contact tiers, and it has held that shape since February 2023. Live phone and chat support come with every plan, including the $12 one, which nobody else in this price bracket offers. There is no permanent free tier, only a 14-day trial.

Mailchimp is the category's default answer and prices like it. The product is a marketing platform first: customer journeys that branch up to 200 steps on Standard, multivariate testing and predictive segmentation higher up, send-time optimization, a template library with generative AI drafting, and connections into more than 300 apps and store platforms. It bills by contact count, it sends only outbound, and its free plan was cut in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, effective February 17.

What each costs

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Mailchimp: Essentials on monthly billing, the cheapest paid tier. Standard runs $20 to $135 across the same contact counts. First-year promotional discounts are excluded. Constant Contact: Lite plan at the 12-month prepay price, 15 percent below list. Monthly list prices are $12, $30, $80 and $120. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Read the billing basis before you read the numbers. The Constant Contact column is the twelve-month prepay effective price, because that is the only discount the company publishes (15% for a year, 10% for six months). The Mailchimp column is plain monthly billing, because Mailchimp publishes no per-tier annual rate; its pricing page says annual plans exist "for qualified customers" and stops there. Comparing a prepaid year against a monthly bill flatters Constant Contact, so here is the same fight on the same terms, monthly billing on both sides, plus the mid tiers most buyers actually land on:

Monthly against monthly, Constant Contact is a dollar cheaper at 500 contacts and more expensive at every size above it. Commit a year of cash and the 15% prepay discount flips the result back: Lite lands at $10.20, $25.50, $68, and $102 across the same four sizes, and Mailchimp has no equivalent lever to pull at any tier. The price question is therefore not really "which is cheaper." It is whether you will prepay twelve months on a plan whose price steps up every time your list outgrows a tier.

Then there is the pairing everyone gets wrong. Lite is one user, 1 GB of storage, and basic single-step automation, with no segmentation and no A/B testing. Mailchimp's $13 Essentials includes three seats, A/B testing, and four-step automation flows. Feature for feature, the Constant Contact plan that matches $13 Essentials is Standard at $35, which is a 169% premium, not a one-dollar saving. Anyone quoting "$12 versus $13" is comparing a sticker to a sticker.

The unsubscribed-contact question, which most reviews get backwards

Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts toward your billable total, and it never archives anyone for you. Constant Contact does not bill unsubscribed contacts, confirmed in official community answers from April 2025 and again in June 2026. A large number of third-party comparisons claim both companies charge for opt-outs; on current behavior that is wrong, and it is the most expensive error in the genre.

Work it with a real list shape. Say you hold 6,000 contacts and 1,200 of them unsubscribed over the years. Mailchimp bills all 6,000, which sits in the 5,001 to 10,000 band: $110 a month on Essentials. Constant Contact bills the 4,800 you can still email, which sits in its 5,000 tier: $80 monthly, or $68 prepaid. The product with the higher sticker price is $30 to $42 a month cheaper on the same real list, and it stays cheaper until you remember to archive. Our full Constant Contact pricing and Mailchimp pricing teardowns carry the rest of each ladder.

The send meter, and two ways to get caught

Both companies chain volume to list size. Mailchimp allows 10 times your contact count per month on Essentials and 12 times on Standard. Constant Contact allows the same 10 times on Lite and 12 times on Standard, then 24 times on Premium. What differs is the ceiling behavior. Constant Contact bills overage at $0.002 per email and counts resends to non-openers against the allowance, while exempting automated sends like a welcome series. Mailchimp bills overage as add-on contact blocks or pauses your sending until you upgrade. One meters you quietly, the other stops the campaign. Decide now which failure you would rather explain.

Feature by feature

Choose Constant Contact if

• Your organization runs things in the physical world: events with registration, surveys after, SMS reminders before. That bundle is the actual product, and no flat-rate sender assembles it.
• You want a human on the phone at the cheapest tier. Phone and chat support ship with the $12 plan; Mailchimp reserves phone support for Premium at $350 a month.
• You are a nonprofit. Up to 30% off a twelve-month prepay is the largest discount in this comparison, and it stacks on top of the 15% prepay saving everyone gets.
• Your list carries years of accumulated opt-outs and you are tired of paying rent on them.
• You need unlimited users without a $350 plan: Premium starts at $80 a month at 500 contacts with unlimited seats.

Choose Mailchimp if

• Revenue arrives through automation. Branching journeys, store triggers, and post-purchase sequences are Mailchimp's home ground, and Constant Contact's automation stops well short of it.
• Your stack lives on integrations. More than 300 apps against a catalog built for small-business tooling is not a close call.
• You want to start at zero. Mailchimp's free plan is thin at 250 contacts and 500 sends, but it exists; Constant Contact gives you 14 days and then a card.
• You want testing beyond subject lines: multivariate testing, predictive segmentation, and send-time optimization all live on Mailchimp's upper tiers.
• Three seats matter at the entry price. Lite is single-user, so a two-person team is already on Standard at $35.

Migration friction, in both directions

The list moves in an afternoon. Export CSV, import CSV, done. Four things take longer than people plan for.

Opt-outs are the legal step, not the housekeeping step. Export unsubscribed and cleaned contacts and import them as unsubscribed on the other side before the first send. Moving toward Constant Contact this costs nothing, since it does not bill them; moving toward Mailchimp it does cost, which is exactly why people skip it, and skipping it is how you mail someone who told you to stop.

Automations do not port. No importer turns a Mailchimp journey into a Constant Contact automation or the reverse, so every flow is rebuilt by hand. If your account holds a deep journey library, that library is the switching cost, and it is usually larger than the annual price difference on this page.

Authentication decides whether the first campaign lands at all. Each provider signs with its own DKIM selector, so publish the new records before the first send and pull the old ones after the last one. The domain reputation stays where it always lived, on your domain, but the machine behind it changes and mailbox providers notice. We learned how quiet that failure can be in June 2026, in a different context: Gmail was rejecting about 73% of the mail we mirrored through Cloudflare's forwarding, because forwarding broke DMARC alignment, and nothing in our own logs said so. Send a test to a Gmail address and read the headers before you trust the list send.

Timing is money if you prepaid. A twelve-month Constant Contact prepay is cash spent on a year you may not finish. Moving in month three throws away the discount you bought, so line the switch up with the renewal date.

The third option

Neither product on this page will ever show you a reply. Both send campaigns and count what happened; the answers come back to a mailbox you rent from somebody else, usually per seat, usually in one person's account. LetterDuck exists for the business where those two halves are the same job. It is $50 per domain, flat, at any list size: every address on the domain feeds one threaded team inbox, anyone can reply as any address, and the newsletter composer sends from the domain you own with deliverability run for you, meaning SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a warm-up throttle, automatic suppression, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe stamped on every campaign. The fit is a small team on its own domain; the full head-to-head is LetterDuck vs Mailchimp. It is the wrong pick if you sell through automated flows, run events, or need SMS and surveys in the same tool, and it is in waitlist mode, so seats open in waves. If you are simply pricing an exit, the Mailchimp alternatives list ranks the wider field on this same dataset, and what email actually costs covers every provider we track.

Common questions

Every price on this page was verified August 7, 2026: Mailchimp against its live pricing page cross-checked with three independent 2026 teardowns, Constant Contact against three sources updated in June 2026, because its own pricing page returns HTTP 403 to automated checks. The price table above re-renders from that dataset on every build, so when either ladder moves, this page moves with it.