Mailchimp vs Kit: Which Should You Choose?

Mailchimp

The best-known email marketing platform — campaigns, automations, and a marketing CRM for small business.

Mailchimp (an Intuit company) is the household name of email marketing, used by millions of small businesses to send newsletters, build automations, and manage customer data in one marketing CRM. The platform spans drag-and-drop email design with a large template library, customer journeys with branching automation, segmentation and predictive analytics, plus landing pages, forms, SMS (in supported regions), and light social/ads tooling. Its integration catalog — Shopify, WooCommerce, Canva, and hundreds more — keeps it at the center of small-business stacks. AI features generate copy, subject lines, and design variants. Pricing starts free for very small lists and scales by contact count; costs rise noticeably as lists grow, which is the most common reason users eventually shop for alternatives — but for getting a business onto professional email marketing quickly, Mailchimp remains the default on-ramp.

Kit

The creator marketing platform (formerly ConvertKit) — email, automations, and monetization built for creators.

Kit, the platform formerly known as ConvertKit, is an email marketing hub built around creators — writers, podcasters, course sellers, and YouTubers. Beyond sending newsletters, Kit's strength is its visual automation builder: tag subscribers by behavior, branch sequences by interest, and run evergreen funnels that sell products while you sleep. Landing pages, forms, and a Creator Network for cross-promotion handle audience growth, while Commerce features let you sell digital products and paid newsletters with no separate storefront. The free plan now supports up to 10,000 subscribers, making Kit unusually generous for starting out. Compared to newer publications-focused tools like beehiiv, Kit leans toward marketing automation depth: it's less about publishing a media brand and more about running a creator business on email.