Mailchimp features: what you get on each plan

This page answers one question per row: does the feature exist, and which plan turns it on. Plan gating was read from Mailchimp’s own plan comparison table and help centre on 26 August 2026. Where an independent tester disagrees with Mailchimp about a threshold, we say so in the section and we follow Mailchimp, because the vendor defines the gate.

Feature matrix

Feature by feature

Mailchimp templates

Templates exist on every plan, including Free, and this is one of the places where Mailchimp is still genuinely ahead of the cheaper newsletter tools. What changes across plans is not the editor but the catalogue: Mailchimp’s own comparison table marks the Free tier’s template access as limited and gives the full set from Essentials upward.

The gate that catches people is a different one. A custom-coded HTML template can be created on Free and on Essentials, but it can only be sent from Standard. Mailchimp states this in the comparison table as “Create — upgrade to send”. If you have a designer handing you finished HTML, or you are migrating templates out of another tool, the plan you need is Standard, not Essentials, and nothing in the editor warns you until you try to send.

Against a specialist, the drag-and-drop editor is the weak point rather than the library. Tools built around design, Flodesk in particular, produce better-looking mail out of the box with no template surgery. Mailchimp’s advantage is breadth and the fact that the templates are wired into the rest of the account.

Mailchimp SMS

SMS is real, it is not included in any plan, and it is the feature most often described incorrectly elsewhere. It is an add-on that requires the Essentials plan or higher, bought as credits on a subscription that renews alongside the marketing plan. MMS is not available at Essentials at all — Mailchimp’s comparison table lists “SMS add-on” for Essentials and “SMS and MMS add-on” only from Standard.

Before a single message goes out you must be an account Owner, Admin or Manager, submit an application and be approved, and register separately for each audience, sending number and sending country you enable. Consent from the contact is required. This is not a switch you flip the afternoon before a campaign.

Geography is where most comparison articles are simply wrong, including one major independent tester that still describes Mailchimp SMS as US-only. Mailchimp’s help centre lists three regions: the Americas (United States and Canada), Europe (the United Kingdom, Belgium and 27 further countries) and APAC (Australia). It is restricted, but it is not a US-only product.

Mailchimp landing pages

Landing pages are on every plan including Free, with no cap on how many you build. Mailchimp’s help centre puts it plainly: they are free to all users, build as many as you need. For a feature that competitors routinely put behind a paid tier, that is a straightforwardly good answer, and it is the strongest argument for running a small list on the Free plan.

The limits are the ones that apply to the account as a whole rather than to the pages. On Free you get one audience, so every page feeds the same list, and Mailchimp branding stays on your outbound email until you reach Essentials. Connecting your own domain to a landing page is possible but Mailchimp documents it in a separate article rather than on the landing pages page, and it does not state a plan requirement there, so we do not claim one.

Compared with a dedicated builder the pages are plain. There is no A/B testing of page variants and no behavioural targeting on the page itself. What you get is a page that shares the audience, the tags and the automation triggers with everything else in the account, which for most senders matters more than layout control.

Mailchimp CRM

Mailchimp’s CRM is contact-centred rather than deal-centred, and the whole of it ships on the Free plan: contact profiles, tags, the audience dashboard, the shared inbox and surveys all appear across every tier in the comparison table. If you are looking for a place to keep who someone is, what they clicked and which tags they carry, the free tier already does it.

The gating is the audience count, and it is steep. Free gives one audience, Essentials three, Standard five, Premium unlimited. Seats follow the same ladder: one, three, five, unlimited. For an agency or a business with genuinely separate lists — a B2B list and a consumer list that must not mix — the audience number, not any feature, is what forces the upgrade.

Set against a real CRM this is not close. There is no pipeline, no deal stage, no forecast. Mailchimp holds contact context for email; HubSpot and ActiveCampaign hold a sales process. Choosing Mailchimp for CRM is a decision to not have a sales pipeline in the same tool.

Mailchimp automation

The product formerly sold as Customer Journey Builder is now called Marketing Automation Flows, and the rename matters because the plan limits are quoted in different units depending on where you read them. Mailchimp’s comparison table gives the Free plan a preview only, Essentials up to 4 flow steps, and Standard and Premium up to 200 flows. Independent write-ups still describe the same limits as “journey points”, and older ones frame it as single-step on Free and multi-step from Standard.

Four flow steps is less generous than it reads. A trigger, a wait, a condition and a send is four, so an Essentials automation is roughly one welcome email with a delay and a single branch. Anything shaped like a real nurture sequence — several sends, re-entry rules, more than one condition — needs Standard at $20/mo.

The comparison against specialists is unflattering at the low tiers and reasonable at Standard. Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign let you build multi-branch logic at their entry price. Mailchimp’s automation is competent once you are on Standard; below it, it is a welcome email with extra steps.

Mailchimp A/B testing

A/B testing is available from Essentials, and this is the one threshold on this page where sources disagree. Mailchimp’s plan comparison table lists A/B testing as included from Essentials. One independent tester agrees; another files it under Standard. Mailchimp’s own help article on A/B tests says only “Depending on your plan, you may not have access to A/B tests” without naming a plan, so it settles nothing.

The disagreement is worth understanding rather than resolving by vote, because it points at a real limit. An A/B test on Mailchimp allows up to 3 variations and tests one variable: subject line, From name, content, or send time. Testing how variables interact is a different product — multivariate testing — and that is explicitly “included with the Standard plan or higher”, where you can test up to 3 of the 4 variables and produce up to 8 combinations. A reviewer who considers only interaction testing to be real testing would reasonably file the whole capability under Standard. That is almost certainly what happened.

Winner selection is automatic on open rate, click rate or total revenue after a set period, or manual. For SMS, content is the only variable that can be tested.

Mailchimp forms

Pop-up forms are listed on every plan in Mailchimp’s comparison table, Free included, alongside the rest of the audience toolkit. Embedded forms and hosted signup pages are part of the same free set. As with landing pages, this is a feature that a good number of competitors gate, and Mailchimp does not.

What the forms feed is the constraint rather than what they capture. On the Free plan there is one audience, so every form on every property writes into the same list, and separating audiences later is manual work. Tags are the usual workaround and they do work, but tags are not audiences and some Mailchimp features key off the audience rather than the tag.

Against dedicated capture tools the targeting is thin. There is no exit-intent rule set, no scroll-depth trigger and no per-page behavioural targeting of the kind an OptinMonster or a Sumo sells. The forms are adequate and free; they are not a conversion optimisation product.

Mailchimp segmentation

Segmentation is the clearest paywall on the platform. Mailchimp’s comparison table marks segmentation as basic on Free and on Essentials, and gives the advanced builder from Standard. Predictive segmentation — likelihood to purchase, predicted demographics, customer lifetime value — is Standard and above, with no partial version below. Both independent testers agree on both lines, which makes this the best-sourced row on the page.

In practice the basic builder handles single conditions on subscriber data: a tag, a signup source, a location. The advanced builder is where you combine conditions, nest them, and segment on behaviour such as what someone opened, clicked or bought. If your reason for choosing an ESP is behavioural targeting, Essentials will not do it at any list size.

The predictive features carry a further condition that is easy to miss: they need e-commerce data to produce anything. Connected store, purchase history, enough of it to model. A Standard subscriber with a pure newsletter list pays for predictive segmentation and gets empty fields.

Mailchimp analytics

This is the one row on this page we leave blank, deliberately. Mailchimp’s comparison table describes analytics as “limited” on Free and on Essentials and as included from Standard, and it never states what limited means — which reports are withheld, which metrics are truncated, over what retention window. Neither independent tester covers the difference either.

Our sourcing rule is that a vague vendor qualifier with no number and no non-vendor corroboration does not earn a threshold in the matrix, because a word like “limited” is exactly where a vendor has an interest in staying imprecise. So the From plan cell reads — rather than a plan name we cannot defend.

What is safe to say: open, click and unsubscribe reporting exists on every plan including Free, and the reporting that is unambiguously gated is comparative and predictive, covered in the next section. If analytics depth is your deciding factor, the honest advice is to trial the tier you are considering rather than trust any published matrix, this one included.

Mailchimp reports

Two reporting features are gated and both land on Standard. Send time optimization, which picks a per-contact send hour from past engagement, is listed as Standard and above in Mailchimp’s comparison table and both independent testers agree. Comparative reporting, which puts several campaigns side by side over time, is the interesting case: both independent testers place it at Standard, and Mailchimp’s own comparison table does not list it at all.

We publish it at Standard on the strength of the two independent sources, and we flag the vendor’s silence because that silence is itself informative. A feature a vendor does not put in its comparison table is usually one it is not using to sell upgrades, which in practice means it is either being reworked or it is not considered a headline differentiator.

Send time optimization deserves one caveat that no plan page gives you: it needs engagement history to have anything to optimise against. On a young list or a low-volume sender it will fall back to something close to your default send hour, and paying for Standard to get it is a poor reason on its own.

Continue reading

• Mailchimp pricing — what each plan actually costs as your list grows
• Mailchimp review — our full verdict after hands-on testing
• Mailchimp alternatives — who to look at if the plan gates above are dealbreakers