Sendinblue vs Mailchimp: Which Is Better In 2022?

Sendinblue and Mailchimp are both great email marketing services that help small and mid-sized businesses really take advantage of email marketing. Mailchimp has long been a household name for many people in the business world, but a lot of people are as yet unfamiliar with newcomer Sendinblue.

Both offer similar services but are priced very differently. Mailchimp operates with a price per contact structure that essentially means you pay based on how many contacts are on your mailing list. Sendinblue, on the other hand, is structured differently, having its users pay based on the number of emails they send rather than the number of contacts.

In this article we stack Sendinblue vs Mailchimp to help you determine which service is right for you and your business.

Sendinblue vs Mailchimp: Editor and Ease of Use

Whether or not a software is intuitive to use is a big deciding factor for many people considering signing up. Mailchimp has been praised in the past for its easy to navigate software, but it still has a few areas where it could improve (we have found that some features are difficult to find easily).

That being said, we do like a lot of the design choices and navigation ease offered by Mailchimp. This service does a great job at making sure you’ve ticked all the boxes for each new marketing campaign, ensuring that you aren’t forgetting any crucial information. In terms of appearance, their interface reminds us of a standard and very simple Gmail-esque setup. It has basic text-based icons and list items, and isn’t too focused on aesthetics.

Comparatively, the Sendinblue iterface is a lot more “millennial.” They feature icons more heavily and designed it in a way that reminds us a bit of the Dropbox website.

Both interfaces are intuitive enough and easy to navigate, however, which means that this round is a tie.

Email Design

Not everyone has an eye for creating well-designed email campaigns from scratch— and that’s ok! One of the best things about email marketing services like Mailchimp and Sendinblue is that they have a lot of pre-made templates that you can choose for your own email campaigns.

Mailchimp has over 100 templates to choose from for emails, and all of them are mobile responsive and attractive enough. If you don’t absolutely love a template but it’s pretty close to your ideal email, you can even edit some design features to make it more to your liking. Additionally you can make your own HTML templates for Mailchimp.

Sendinblue also offers pre-made templates, but it doesn’t have nearly as many as Mailchimp does. In our opinion, however, their templates are stylistically a bit more youthful looking than Mailchimp’s. You can also create your own template from scratch with HTML using Sendinblue.

Again, these two services are very similar in this regard, but Mailchimp does offer more templates to choose from, which helped it win this category.

List Management

For a long time, people have been complaining about Mailchimp’s lack of list management features. One of the biggest problems users have is the fact that with Mailchimp, your email lists are mutually exclusive. In other words, if you have multiple lists in the same email marketing campaign you can only have each contact on one list within that campaign. In addition to this issue, there is also no easy or automatic way to move contacts from one list to another, which many people find quite frustrating.

Another flaw with Mailchimp’s list management system is that if you have multiple campaigns and have a contact listed more than once then you will pay for them as many times as they are listed. This is because Mailchimp has a pay structure that has users pay per contact, even if those contacts are repeated.

Sendinblue, on the other hand, is much simpler when it comes to setting up your contact lists. You can filter with behaviors (link clicks, opening emails) and create a new list of users who engage with your email content frequently. Additionally they have a nice feature that let’s you auto assign a new subscriber to a specific list based on a preset condition of your choice.

Given the confusing nature of Mailchimp’s list management and the ease of use for Sendinblue, it comes as no surprise that Sendinblue won this round.

Automations

Mailchimp definitely has a lot of email automations available— and even claim loudly and proudly that they have “all of the automation triggers.” While this is technically true, their pricing structure almost makes it not worth it in our opinion.

Sendinblue has a lot of automations as well, and many of the triggered campaigns are incredibly advanced for the price you pay. You can trigger based on email engagement, browsing behavior, contact data, and e-commerce activity.

Given how affordable Sendinblue is, they win another round!

Registration Forms

Most email marketing services offer some kind of registration form template, which is one of the reasons we’re choosing to include it in our comparison.

Mailchimp is a bit confusing in this regard. It can be tricky for new users to even find the form section when navigating their site. If you’re looking for it and can’t seem to locate it, it can be found under the Audience tab on the navigation menu. Once you find it, you will see that you can create three types of forms: a landing page, a pop-up, or an embedded forms. One of the biggest downsides with Mailchimp’s service is that these forms aren’t very straightforward to edit and a few of them don’t scale for mobile use.

Sendinblue is much easier and more straightforward to both find and edit. You can even toggle a feature that lets subscribers select if they want to be opted into various lists based on criteria that you dictate.

The ease of use from Sendinblue helped them secure yet another category win.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (or CRM for short) is a technology that you can use to keep track of all of the interactions and relationships that your company was with existing and potential customers.

Mailchimp often claims that you can use their services as a CRM service, but the reality is that this isn’t really the case. They really don’t offer enough features that would enable you to truly use only their service as your CRM software, especially if you were depending on it for marketing decisions. If you really want to you can use Mailchimp’s Social Profiles feature to get some further degree of CRM features, but this requires you to pay an additional fee.

All that being said, Mailchimp does shine with the tracking and presentation of e-commerce data. If you feel so inclined, you can connect Mailchimp with your online marketplace to track the amount of revenue generated by each individual contact, which is a useful service.

Sendinblue, on the other hand, has a more flushed out CRM that lets you manage your contacts easily. It shows you the sites they visit and things like that, but it, too, is flawed. Unfortunately you aren’t able to view this information by going into the CRM profile directly and the CRM isn’t that advanced.

For this reason, we decided that this round is a tie.

Design Testing

Each of these two services actually have some pretty great features for design testing. You can test your design on both desktop and mobile for both and you can even see what the email will look like when displayed on different email clients (like Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, etc).

This is a great feature, and if you’re really keen on checking the display across clients please note that Mailchimp allows you to look at more clients than Sendinblue, although it isn’t technically “free” to do so. Mailchimp’s paid plans offer users 25 Inbox Preview Tokens per month, and these don’t carry over from month to month.

Sendinblue does not charge for the email preview feature, but they don’t offer quite as many email clients to test your email on.

Given that it’s free to use the design testing feature on Sendinblue, they secured the top spot for this category.

Support

In our opinion this category is truly the kicker. Anyone who has tried to create an email marketing campaign with no experience will tell you that it can be incredibly confusing— as is using any software you’re unfamiliar with. Therefore, customer support from the software in question can go a long way in making the process run smoothly.

For Mailchimp you can get support through three channels: knowledge base, live chat, and email. The annoying thing is that you need to upgrade to a paid account to receive any help from them.

Sendinblue has a strange support setup as well. They have a Help button that, when clicked, will show you different support options depending on what time of day you click it. This can be a bit frustrating if you want live support, but at least you don’t have to pay extra for the help.

Yet again, Sendinblue came out on top here.

Pricing

As we’ve talked about a few times, Mailchimp has a pay per contact pricing structure, which isn’t our favorite. They do offer a freemium service, though, as well as a pay as you go play which can be nice.

Sendinblue has you pay per email and has no limit one the number of contacts you can have. They also offer a free plan and even when you compare the plans that cost money they are still the most affordable option.

It comes as no surprise, then that Sendinblue also wins the pricing round.

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Related FAQs

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions that people like you have about Sendinblue and Mailchimp.

Is Sendinblue the same as Mailchimp?

Sendinblue is a great email marketing solution for small and mid-sized businesses looking to automate their email marketing campaigns on a budget. Mailchimp is similar, but it has fewer automations and list managements than Sendinblue. Sendinblue is also priced differently in the sense that you pay per email rather than per contact on your mailing list.

Is Sendinblue any good?

Yes, as far as value and service go Sendinblue is a great option for email marketing campaigns. It’s especially beneficial if you have a smaller or medium sized company because the pricing structure makes a lot of sense for companies of that size. If you’re new to email marketing and are trying to embrace that side of marketing Sendinblue is a great and affordable option for you.

Who is using Sendinblue?

A lot of people use Sendinblue! From super small businesses to medium sized startups, Sendinblue seems to be the product of choice for email marketing campaigns for many professionals out there. As of this year, it looks like at least 21,000 companies are using Sendinblue for their email marketing campaigns.

Why is Sendinblue so cheap?

One of the reasons that Sendinblue is so affordable is that their pricing is based on how many emails are sent out instead of the number of contacts stored in your contact list. This let’s you pay based on how many emails you plan to send, rather than how many people you want to send them to. Another benefit to this service is that it scales well, allowing you to grow your list as large as you’d like to.

In Conclusion

While it’s true that Mailchimp has been around a lot longer, their services aren’t necessarily the best on the market. All in all we found that Sendinblue offered better features for the price, and we also like the pricing structure of paying per email better than Mailchimp’s pricing structure. We hope you found this comparison helpful!