HubSpot vs. Mailchimp: Which is right for you? [2026]

Mailchimp is an SMB-focused email marketing tool. HubSpot is an all-in-one enterprise marketing platform. Simple enough to choose between them, right? Not so fast: Mailchimp also has an enterprise tier, and HubSpot also has a $15/month starter plan—and a free plan.

If you’re a local business owner wearing a ton of hats, Mailchimp is an easy pick. And HubSpot is definitely for you if you’re a large org with hundreds of employees. But there are lots of businesses caught in the middle. If that’s you, it’s worth exploring the nuances of each platform so you can figure out which makes sense.

For this article, I spent time in both apps to dig into the differences between HubSpot and Mailchimp and see how they stack up. Here’s what I found.

Table of contents:

HubSpot vs. Mailchimp at a glance

Here’s a quick summary, but keep reading for more details.

HubSpot’s sophisticated marketing automation caters better to longer buyer lifecycles

HubSpot is an enterprise-focused inbound marketing tool that uses sophisticated workflows to nurture contacts through longer buyer lifecycles (check out a few example HubSpot workflows). You can systematically guide contacts through your marketing funnel and segment your audience based on their behavior, lead scoring, and what stage they are in the buyer lifecycle. 

Here’s an example of what a HubSpot workflow looks like:

Mailchimp’s automation capabilities aren’t as advanced as HubSpot’s, and it isn’t optimized for nurturing customers through long buying cycles. Mailchimp targets a different demographic: small and medium-sized businesses that need simpler automations for shorter buying cycles. On Mailchimp’s Essentials and Standard plans, you get access to an easy-to-use flow builder that allows you to create custom workflows based on customer behaviors. (For example, when customers make a purchase, you can tag them as a “New customer” and send a welcome sequence.)

Here’s an example of what an automation workflow looks like in Mailchimp:

If your business has a short buyer cycle (e.g., a customer can land on your website for the first time and might make a purchase on the same day), this is all the automation you’re likely to need. But if your customers tend to take longer to make a purchase because multiple stakeholders, sales reps, and larger budgets are involved, then a tool like HubSpot will better support your needs.

Building and sending an email in Mailchimp is simpler

Both Mailchimp and HubSpot offer excellent email builders that are easy to use and intuitive, even for someone with no design or marketing experience. You can easily add elements like text boxes, images, videos, and social buttons just by dragging them into your email from the sidebar menu. It’s also easy to drag and drop your different elements around the page, select the colors you want, and add images and logos to get your emails looking on-brand. 

To show you how similar they are, here’s Mailchimp’s editor:

And here’s HubSpot’s:

Both tools have a selection of out-of-the-box templates that make it easy to launch email campaigns quickly. If you’re looking for the widest possible range of designs, it’s worth pointing out that Mailchimp has 350+ templates while HubSpot has just 45. For highly specific designs—like a welcome email for a yoga studio—Mailchimp is more likely to have what you need.

When it comes to actually sending your emails, you don’t have to think too hard with Mailchimp. Because HubSpot’s email tool is deeply integrated with a CRM, there are a lot more fields to check through before you hit the Send button, which leaves a bit more room for human error.

HubSpot offers more advanced analytics 

HubSpot’s analytics help users visualize the impact of a huge variety of marketing activities. Rather than getting bogged down in email open rates and bounce rates, you can use HubSpot to design marketing dashboards that give a zoomed-out look at your overall performance.

For example, you can create dashboards that show:

• How much you’re paying for each contact from paid ads

• Which blog posts are bringing in the most new contacts

• Which campaigns influenced the most contacts

• How quickly leads from different sources convert into customers

You get 10 reporting dashboards on HubSpot’s free plan, and it goes up to 100 dashboards on the Enterprise package. HubSpot dashboards let you pull in precisely the data you need and then customize how it’s displayed by adjusting visibility, adding descriptive text, filtering by date or other factors, and embedding external content.

Mailchimp’s analytics offering is more basic in comparison, but if you’re only using reporting to understand how people are engaging with your email marketing, it offers plenty of options. You can review the stats of individual email campaigns (for example, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes), and if you upgrade to Standard or higher, you get a wider overview that allows you to review performance across all your campaigns.

You can also create quick custom reports with Mailchimp that visually compare two different metrics over time, like email opens versus email delivery rate. One feature that’s particularly useful for small businesses is Mailchimp’s email benchmarking report, which shows how your campaign performance compares against other Mailchimp users with similar audiences.

Mailchimp is easier to set up

Considering everything I’ve covered so far about these two tools, it won’t surprise you that Mailchimp is easier to set up than HubSpot. Since HubSpot is a more complex tool with a whole load of different features, it takes time to embed it properly into your business.

When you opt for the higher tier HubSpot plans, you need to pay a one-off onboarding cost to cover training and initial setup (e.g., data migration from a previous system and anything else needed). This is charged per organization, at $3,000 for Professional and $7,000 for Enterprise, regardless of how many users you have—so this adds a good chunk to the initial cost of HubSpot.

Mailchimp doesn’t charge any onboarding costs because it isn’t complex enough to require heavy support; you can even do much of the initial setup (like importing contacts) on your phone through Mailchimp’s iOS or Android app. While you can schedule a free personalized onboarding call if you want, for most people, that’s probably not necessary. After spinning up a new test account, I was able to import contacts, find my way around the platform, and send an email campaign in less than an hour.

With HubSpot, by contrast, something as simple as importing contacts takes time. Because HubSpot is also a CRM, every contact you upload is stored with its own contact record. These contact records have tons of fields to help growth teams build a picture of who the contact is and how warm they are as a lead, including Deal name, Pipeline, and Deal stage, along with essential fields like Company name and First name. As a result, you need to prepare your CSV file carefully—particularly if you’re importing contacts that are also deals—to make sure everything consolidates under the same record. HubSpot oversees this part of the process on Professional and Enterprise plans to make sure you get it right, which is one of the reasons they charge for Marketing Hub onboarding.

HubSpot’s landing pages can be personalized for each visitor

Both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer functional, well-designed landing pages for capturing leads, but you can do more with HubSpot’s landing pages.

While Mailchimp lets you publish an unlimited number of landing pages, you only have nine template designs to choose from, and they don’t offer much wiggle room for customization. On the positive side, the landing page builder is incredibly straightforward—if you can design a Mailchimp email, you can design a Mailchimp landing page.

HubSpot offers close to 20 landing page template designs and they’re more personalizable: you can add smart rules that show visitors a slightly different version of your landing page based on criteria like their country, language, or stage in the buyer lifecycle. None of these extra options is accessible with Mailchimp’s landing page builder.

Just be aware that landing pages are technically part of HubSpot’s Content Hub (a separate product) rather than its Marketing Hub. If you’re going all-in on the HubSpot ecosystem anyway, then you’ll have full access, but if you’re only planning to subscribe to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, then you may need to talk to a sales rep to negotiate access.

Mailchimp is far more affordable than HubSpot

HubSpot is made for larger organizations, so it’s not surprising that it has premium pricing. For many mid-sized companies, the investment is easy to justify. But it also offers a free plan and an affordable entry-level plan, so it’s worth digging into the numbers to see what you actually get and how Mailchimp’s pricing compares.

• If you want a free email marketing plan, Mailchimp is the only real option. You get 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and decent (though not comprehensive) access to the platform. HubSpot’s free plan is ok for exploring its Marketing Hub and uploading contacts, but in a truly odd twist, you can’t actually use it for traditional email marketing. Instead, you can only send one-to-one emails. (HubSpot only allows you to send email campaigns to “marketing contacts,” and the free plan doesn’t give you any marketing contacts.)

• Mailchimp is roughly 2-4x cheaper than HubSpot’s entry-level paid plans, depending on how many marketing contacts you have. 

HubSpot’s $15/month per user Starter plan is essentially a version of its free plan with increased limits and no HubSpot branding. You get 1,000 marketing contacts included, and beyond that, you pay $40-$50/month more for every 1,000 additional contacts you need. For example, to get 10,000 marketing contacts and 50,000 email sends on HubSpot’s Starter plan, you’d pay around $390/month.

With Mailchimp, you can get started for $13/month for 500 contacts on its Essentials plan. Scaling up to 10,000 contacts costs just $100/month, and you get twice as many email sends as HubSpot (100,000 per month), plus the ability to share your account with three other users.

Want the full-featured version of HubSpot Marketing Hub? Prepare to spend $890/month for the Professional plan (includes three seats) or $3,600/month for the Enterprise plan (includes five seats). HubSpot does offer customizable bundles in an attempt to make the tool more affordable, but it still gets very expensive pretty quickly.

You can do more with HubSpot’s social media features

Both Mailchimp and HubSpot allow you to post to your linked social media accounts without ever having to leave the platform. Mailchimp’s social media offering is basic but can be used for free; HubSpot’s is a lot more advanced, but it comes at a cost. 

On Mailchimp’s free plan, you can create social messages and post them across Facebook, Instagram, and X. Scheduling is available too but only on paid plans.

And that’s just about all you can do. It’s a nice bonus for businesses trying to manage all their marketing in one place, but there’s nothing particularly innovative.

HubSpot, on the other hand, only gives Professional-tier users and higher access to its social media management tools, which means you need to fork out at least $890/month to use it. But it’s easy to see why it’s limited to premium plans—you can do so much with it. 

As a HubSpot Professional user, you can publish 10,000 posts per month from within the platform, and you can schedule posts out up to three years in advance. HubSpot connects to LinkedIn and YouTube—neither of which Mailchimp supports—and offers in-depth social media performance analytics, even on posts you didn’t publish through HubSpot.

Even better, HubSpot has genuinely useful tools for creating social media content. For example, you can use its AI assistant to brainstorm ideas and create entire posts; in my tests, the outcome was notably better than what I usually get with vanilla ChatGPT prompts.

You can also manage conversations and interactions on any of your linked social accounts—up to 50 on the Professional plan or 300 on the Enterprise plan, including employee accounts—directly from within HubSpot. In this sense, HubSpot’s social media dashboard is a bit like a social media management tool similar to Buffer. If you’re replacing a social media management tool with HubSpot, that might strengthen the argument for moving to a higher-tier package.

HubSpot is working on a new Social Post Agent feature (currently in private beta) that will queue posts for your approval, though it’s limited to covering things like holidays and events.

HubSpot’s AI features are more comprehensive

Most software companies start their AI journeys by adding basic generative content features like AI writing assistants and subject line generators. That’s where both HubSpot and Mailchimp started, but while HubSpot has moved on to a more ambitious platform-wide AI integration, Mailchimp’s progress has been less impressive.

Mailchimp does have some neat AI features, like its AI-generated columns, which automatically pull content from external links and convert it into email-friendly layouts.

You can also generate entire automations with AI using Mailchimp’s AI-powered flows, including the design and copy of the emails in addition to the workflow. That said, there are only three AI-powered flows available, so it’s not especially practical.

The rest of Mailchimp’s AI features are pretty standard: subject line generators, AI content generation, send time optimization, a content optimizer, and smart campaign recommendations.

HubSpot’s AI—known as Breeze—is embedded throughout the platform as an all-purpose AI assistant. In addition to using Breeze to generate social media posts, I also got it to successfully help me with basic queries (“how many contacts do I have?”) as well as more strategic questions (“based on everything you know about my business, what’s a good email marketing strategy for me?”). Once you connect your CRM and upload information about your company to Breeze’s knowledge vault, you end up with a highly specialized collaborator.

You can also use Breeze to create automations, personalize campaigns, design reports, and generate segments.

Then there’s Breeze Studio, which lets you choose from prebuilt agents or create your own to do work on your behalf. This feature is still in beta, and most of the prebuilt agents are currently related to sales or customer success. Still, given that HubSpot has access to so much of your company’s data, there’s huge potential for automating repetitive tasks with agents.

You can automate both tools with Zapier

HubSpot’s app marketplace features 2,000+ integrations. Mailchimp has a more modest 330+ app connections, though you won’t have trouble finding integrations with most small business apps.

Because both HubSpot and Mailchimp integrate with Zapier, you can connect either one with 8,000+ other apps to automate your mission-critical workflows. Automatically add new leads to your marketing list, surface ads to new subscribers, and follow up with event attendees. You can build fully automated systems that connect your marketing software to the rest of your tech stack.

Learn more about how to automate business processes in HubSpot and how to automate your email marketing with Mailchimp, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Mailchimp vs. HubSpot: Which should you choose?

With all this in mind, choosing between Mailchimp and HubSpot should be pretty straightforward once you understand your needs:

Choose Mailchimp if: 

• You’re looking for an affordable all-in-one small business marketing tool

• You need a platform that’s simple and easy to use (even for beginners)

• Your main focus is email marketing

• Your business model relies on shorter buyer lifecycles

Choose HubSpot if:

• You have more marketing budget to play with

• You have experienced marketers running your campaigns

• You have a longer and slower buyer lifecycle that involves a sales team

• You’re taking AI seriously and want to incorporate it into your marketing

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This article was originally published in December 2022 by Katie Paterson. The most recent update was in February 2026.