AWeber vs Mailchimp: which one is worth your money?

Mailchimp used to be the default answer for "what should I use to send emails." Friendly mascot, generous free tier, everyone's cousin had used it. Since the Intuit acquisition it has turned into something closer to a full marketing cloud, with ad management, social posting and a CRM layer most small senders never open, and the free plan has shrunk to 250 contacts along the way.

AWeber didn't chase that trend. It has stayed narrower: send emails, land them in the inbox, keep a support desk staffed around the clock. The short answer is that AWeber is the better pick for a small business or creator that mostly sends newsletters and sequences, and Mailchimp is the better pick for a store that wants email, ads and social posts run from one dashboard. The rest of this piece is the detail behind that call: support, how each one counts your contacts, what you pay at 500 and 10,000 subscribers, and the policies that can end an account.

Getting help is a completely different experience

This is the part people underestimate until they need it. Mailchimp's support depends on the plan you pay for. The free plan gets email support for the first 30 days and then nothing. Essentials and Standard get 24/7 email and chat. Phone support only comes with Premium, which starts at $350 a month and is priced for agencies and marketing teams, not a solo business owner.

AWeber doesn't tier its support at all. Live chat and email are open 24/7 on every plan, and the US phone line is staffed from 8am to 8pm Eastern. That isn't a round-the-clock phone desk, but it is a phone number a $15-a-month customer can dial, which Mailchimp doesn't offer below $350. When a broadcast goes out with a broken merge tag, the difference between a chat reply in minutes and a ticket that waits for a queue is the difference between a correction email and an apology a day later.

The way they bill for contacts is night and day

Mailchimp bills on every contact in your audience, and that includes people who have unsubscribed and contacts marked non-subscribed, unless you go in and archive them yourself. Someone unsubscribes, or a contact you imported for a one-off receipt sits in the audience, and you keep paying for them until you remember to clean house. It has been a running complaint in reviews for years, and it is the main reason a Mailchimp bill creeps up faster than the list of people actually reading.

AWeber doesn't count unsubscribed contacts toward your bill. An unsubscribe drops off your count the moment it happens. Its tagging also lets you split one list into as many segments as you like without duplicating the contact record, whereas Mailchimp counts the same email address twice if it sits in two separate audiences.

The free plans differ in the same direction. Mailchimp's free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month. AWeber's covers up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 sends a month, with one landing page and one automation. Neither is enough to run a business on, but AWeber's lets you send a weekly newsletter to a small list for months before you pay anything.

What each one costs at 500 and 10,000 subscribers

Both companies price by list size and both cap monthly sends as a multiple of that size, so the honest comparison is at real list sizes rather than the headline "from" price. These are monthly-billing prices taken from each company's pricing page; AWeber knocks roughly 17 to 33 percent off for paying yearly, and Mailchimp runs its own annual and promotional discounts.

On paper the two sit within a few dollars of each other. In practice the gap opens through the billing rule above: a Mailchimp audience of 10,000 that includes 1,500 unsubscribes is billed as 10,000, while the same list on AWeber is billed as 8,500. AWeber Plus also includes unlimited lists, automations and landing pages, where Mailchimp reserves its branching customer journeys and send-time optimisation for Standard and up.

Where Mailchimp is genuinely better

Mailchimp's breadth is real, not just marketing. It runs Facebook, Instagram and Google ads from inside the account and uses your email audience to target them, posts to social channels, and offers SMS in some countries. Its Standard plan has a branching customer journey builder that can split a contact down several paths, which is more flexible than AWeber's mostly straight-line automations. Its email editor and template library also look more current than AWeber's, where a fair share of the 700-plus templates still carry a dated, stock-photo look.

But that breadth is also the catch. If you only send email, you are paying for a platform built around features you won't open, and the interface is busier because of them. AWeber is quicker to learn precisely because it does less, and it adds things a newsletter sender actually uses, like RSS-to-email for a blog or podcast feed and built-in browser push notifications.

Feature comparison, head to head

Put side by side, the two agree on the basics, a newsletter that reaches the inbox, and disagree on almost everything around the edges.

The affiliate rule that ends accounts

One row in that table deserves its own paragraph. Mailchimp's acceptable use policy lists affiliate marketing as prohibited content, alongside other industries it says draw higher-than-average abuse complaints. If your newsletter earns money by recommending products through affiliate links, Mailchimp can close the account, and people have lost lists that way with little warning.

AWeber permits affiliate links as long as the list was built with permission and the mail isn't purely a stream of offers, which we cover in our piece on AWeber and affiliate marketing. For bloggers, reviewers and course creators who recommend tools, that policy difference alone settles the comparison.

Switching from Mailchimp to AWeber

AWeber's migration team will move subscribers, tags, sign-up forms and templates across for free, or you can export a CSV from Mailchimp and import it yourself in an afternoon. Our step-by-step guide to moving from Mailchimp to AWeber covers both routes, plus the domain authentication records that need updating so your mail keeps landing in the inbox after the move. The one thing that doesn't transfer cleanly is a complex Mailchimp customer journey; expect to rebuild that as a simpler AWeber campaign.

The verdict

Mailchimp still wins if you will actually use its ad and social tools alongside email, or if you need a branching journey with several paths. For a business that mostly wants a newsletter that lands in the inbox, a bill that doesn't count people who left, and a person to talk to when something breaks, AWeber is the one we'd set up first, and it is the only one of the two that will let you keep affiliate links in your emails.