Choosing between two evenly matched marketing automation tools can feel as precarious as picking your fantasy football team’s captain. Each option is quality, but there are plenty of what-ifs and outlying factors that could impact their performance (or non-performance). Like sizing up quarterbacks on DraftKings, our analysts have done a data drive into Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact.

We put these titans through an extensive head-to-head feature analysis, with Mailchimp narrowly claiming the grand prize! Buckle up as we dive into the details of how each tool performed.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Article Roadmap

• Features Comparison
  • AI Capabilities
  • Campaign Management
  • Compliance and Data Security
  • Dashboard and Reporting
  • Email Campaign Management
  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Management
  • Lead Nurturing
  • Mobile Capabilities
  • Social Media Campaign Management
  • Text Campaign Management
• Other Considerations
  • Price
  • Customer Support
  • Deliverability
• Next Steps

Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact Overview

Product	Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Rating	91	87
User Sentiment Score	88%	81%
Free Trial	Yes	Yes
Deployment	Cloud	Cloud
Company Size	S M L	S M L
Starting Price	$0-299 per month	$9.90 per user

Head-To-Head Feature Comparison

You can’t beat out your fellow fantasy league players without making some tough decisions. Luckily, our analysts have made life easier with an in-depth feature comparison and ranking. Let the (marketing automation) Hunger Games begin!

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

AI Capabilities

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 86/100	Analyst Score: 21/100
Winner: Although neither solution supports AI-powered lead scoring, Mailchimp’s fairly extensive AI-assistive tools give it a landslide victory.

AI-powered audience segmentation, smart content recommendations and target audience predictions put the AI in Mailchimp. Improve engagement and conversion metrics using AI-assisted tools to monitor trends, track performance and optimize campaign creation. Communicate effectively across multiple platforms using integrated chatbots and optimal times to send emails.

Constant Contact offers basic AI-based contextual recommendations for emails, texts and blogs. Integrate with Zapier for access to AI chatbots.

Campaign Management

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 90/100	Analyst Score: 86/100
Winner: Mailchimp narrowly takes the win thanks to its geolocation tracking and team collaboration capabilities.

Mailchimp allows users to optimize campaigns with dynamic, tailored content, a drag-and-drop landing page builder and templates, geolocation tracking and search engine optimization. Track contacts using clicks and purchases on your website with Google Analytics (note: Bing ad tracking isn’t supported).

Collaborate with team members by viewing other collaborators’ work, sending requests for feedback and leaving comments. Create pay-per-click campaigns and pay only when customers click on the page, embed CTA buttons and video campaigns and add snippet codes to emails.

Improve campaigns with Constant Contact’s dynamic content, generate landing pages with a drag-and-drop builder and templates and optimize page ranking with keyword assignment. Access tracking analytics for Bing and Google ads. Activate PPC ads, add custom CTA buttons to emails and web pages and embed snippet codes and videos in campaigns. Geotracking and team collaboration are two misses here.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Compliance and Data Security

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 83/100	Analyst Score: 98/100
Winner: A combination of AES encryption and an audit trail helps Constant Contact land the knockout punch.

Ensure you’ve got your i’s dotted and t’s crossed with Mailchimp. Comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPA). Improve data security with encryption, single-sign-on and two-factor authentication.

Adopt a safety-first approach with Constant Contact’s audit trail of changes made to contact data, like imports, exports and customer activity. Ensure CCPA and GDPA compliance and manage user security with single-sign-on and multi-factor authentication. Protect customer data with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256 and Transport Layer Security.

Dashboard and Reporting

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 83/100	Analyst Score: 99/100
Winner: Constant Contact takes the top spot with an almost perfect score thanks to its web analytics dashboard and searchable saved reports.

Stay on top of important insights and KPIs with Mailchimp’s pre-built reports for campaigns, landing pages and social media. Generate custom comparative reports, but not reports from scratch, by adding date ranges and filters. Use the dashboard to view insights, recent growth, tags, top-performing locations, lifetime values, predicted demographics and targeted campaigns.

Track customer progress through the sales lifecycle, schedule reports and visualize data into graphs.

Access insights into campaign performance over time using Constant Contact’s in-depth reporting. Apply filters to create custom reports, although you can’t build new custom reports. Get real-time metrics on subscribers, engagement and other KPIs using the branded, custom dashboard.

Measure the performance of customer journeys, set times for scheduled reports and visualize data with charts. Track your website’s performance with a web analytics dashboard for traffic domain authority, search ranking, bounce rate, traffic sources and conversion rates. Bookmark key reports you can access and search for at a later date.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Email Campaign Management

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 93/100	Analyst Score: 94/100
Winner: Constant Contact pips Mailchimp at the post with custom transactional emails and email campaign timeline.

Create customizable emails with Mailchimp’s pre-designed email templates with editable layouts, themes and campaigns and a drag-and-drop editor. Automate autoresponders and create drip campaigns using triggers. Improve campaign performance with A/B and multivariate testing for different versions, email deliverability through built-in domain authentication and mobile-optimized emails.

Set up campaign schedules, personalize emails and send bulk emails. Analyze trends and track performance and KPIs with an email analytics tool.

Use Constant Contact’s library of email templates and its drag-and-drop tool to create custom emails. Send autoresponders for pre-set events and trigger drip campaigns based on user actions for contacts with common interests. Optimize email campaigns with A/B testing for a portion of contacts, removing invalid addresses for email deliverability and mobile-responsive emails.

Schedule and send email campaigns at specified dates, add personalized details like name, city and greeting tags, send custom transactional emails and email multiple recipients. View the send history of email campaigns and filter the timeline by open rate.

Lead Generation

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 82/100	Analyst Score: 75/100
Winner: Mailchimp puts the lead in leaderboard with in-depth insights on web analytics and a native custom form builder.

Mailchimp helps users “take the lead” by creating and sharing blog posts, events, webinars and custom, branded surveys. Create multiple types of customizable, auto-populating forms using a drag-and-drop builder.

Keep an eye on website traffic by tracking and monitoring unique visits and new sign-ups for landing pages and add tracked behavior to customer profiles to create audience segments. Track anonymous visitors with integration with tools like RightMessage.

Constant Contact allows users to generate and publish blog articles and landing pages, create and track surveys and manage events. Create forms using custom fields and integration with form builder software. Track the web activity of new and repeat visitors and track anonymous visitor activity using their IP address.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Lead Management

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 100/100	Analyst Score: 100/100
Winner: Two can play the game in this section! Both tools put in a stellar shift for a perfect score in every feature, so we’ll call this one a tie.

Store contact data in one place and search for contacts through names, emails, statuses and types with Mailchimp’s contact database. Assign leads to sales teams using lead routing rules, track sources and lead progress through the pipeline, delete duplicate leads and add custom tags to leads.

Improve lead quality with segmentation based on interests, behavior and activity, lead scoring and lead qualification using information from multiple channels.

Constant Contact’s database allows users to create and manage contact data with multiple lists and advanced search capabilities. Use specific lists to allocate leads to sales reps, merge data to avoid duplicate records, track an opportunity through the sales cycle and track lead sources.

Set lead scoring rules to qualify leads and automate workflows for organization and prioritization and segment leads using contact activity.

Lead Nurturing

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 83/100	Analyst Score: 100/100
Winner: Constant Contact’s timeline view of lead communication wins the gold in this category.

Mailchimp helps users build custom customer journeys with a drag-and-drop builder for automated marketing workflows, pre-built templates and buyer personas. Follow up with leads using automated emails triggered by products or categories and communication plan templates.

You may have 99 problems, but lead nurturing won’t be one with Constant Contact’s visual workflow editor and branded templates for customer journey building. Optimize communication with a timeline view of customer interactions, pre-built email templates and automated email follow-ups.

Mobile Capabilities

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 93/100	Analyst Score: 81/100
Winner: Mailchimp’s mobile collaboration and business card scanner give it the edge in this Royal Rumble.

Mailchimp is no slouch in the mobile department. Scan all details from business cards, create marketing campaigns, build landing pages and view contact details from a mobile device. Collaborate with contacts by texts, calls and emails, track campaign performance and access a native mobile app.

Constant Contact allows users to scan business cards for emails, build landing pages, create social media campaigns and manage contacts and contact lists from the app. Track campaign metrics like opens, clicks, bounces and social impressions from a mobile device.

Note: Neither tool supports offline contact access.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Social Media Campaign Management

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 100/100	Analyst Score: 100/100
Winner: It’s another match-up for the ages with a 100 rating a piece – another tie!

Mailchimp helps social media work for you, and not the other way around, with ad creation, ad click tracking and journey-based targeted email advertisements. Pair contact data with real-time information on contact action to target customer behavior by sending personalized content and marketing.

Schedule and create social media posts, analyze social media presence with social listening and monitor campaign performance with metrics.

Tap into the wonderful world of social media advertising with Constant Contact’s ad creation using custom content and imagery, as well as ad tracking. Use data collected from past searches and online behavior for behavior retargeting. Create ads that interact with audiences through the lead’s journey.

Publish and schedule posts on social media platforms, create social listening feeds to track activity and measure the effectiveness of views and clicks on conversions.

Text Campaign Management

Mailchimp	Constant Contact
Analyst Score: 55/100	Analyst Score: 93/100
Winner: Constant Contact’s native text campaign capabilities give it the win.

Mailchimp allows users to create and send automated text message campaigns to customers for appointments, confirmations and order notifications. However, it does not support bulk text campaigns. Integrate with SimpleTexting to automate follow-up text campaigns, personalize texts, schedule texts and enable deliverability.

Constant Contact users can create text campaigns with a built-in link shortener and live preview. Optimize text campaigns with fully-supported automated email follow-ups, personalized messages, text campaign tracking and scheduling.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Other Considerations

Now that we’ve talked about key features, let’s take a look at some secondary aspects. After all, software is much more than the sum of its capabilities.

Price

Winner: It’s a tie! Mailchimp is a better option for businesses with less than 2000 subscribers because of the free option, but Constant Contact offers better pricing tiers. Pricing primarily depends on the features your business requires. Download our free pricing guide for more in-depth information.

If you’re in the market for a free solution, Mailchimp is your go-to choice. Signing up for the free version of the software will get you things like free reports, basic templates, signup forms and basic one-click automation.

The free plan offers one seat and lets users send a max of 10,000 emails per month, with a daily limit of 2000 emails, and send emails to 2,000 contacts – not too shabby if you have a smaller operation. Furthermore, you can enjoy 30 days of email support from the vendor.

Constant Contact, by contrast, doesn’t have a freemium option. Your best bet is to take advantage of their 60-day free trial. Sure, it’s not the same as free software, but on the plus side, you get to test drive for 2-4x longer than trial periods typically last. On top of that, you have access to all features, so you can really put the system through the ropes to see if it can handle what you throw at it.

 

No. of Contacts	Constant Contact Pricing	Mailchimp Pricing
0-500	$9.99/mo	$0-299/mo
501-2000	$35/mo	$0-299/mo
2001-2500	$35/mo	$34-299/mo
2501-5000	$55/mo	$59-299/mo
5001-10000	$80/mo	$87-299/mo
10001-15000	$105/mo	$150-399/mo
15001-20000	$130/mo	$189-460/mo
20001-25000	$155/mo	$225-530/mo
25001-30000	$180/mo	$255-590/mo
30001-35000	$210/mo	$285-640/mo
35001-40000	$240/mo	$285-640/mo
40001-45000	$270/mo	$299-700/mo
45001-50000	$300/mo	$299-700/mo

Customer Support

Winner: Given its affordability, Constant Contact is the better option when it comes to customer support.

It’s easy to overlook vendor support, but that can make or break your experience. When something happens – because you know it will – you need to rely on the vendor to make it right.

On the Mailchimp side, you have access to 24/7 email and chat support. However, if you want phone support, you need to have a premium subscription and shell out $299 per month on top of your regular fees.

Constant Contact also delivers 24/7 chat and email support, and you can add phone support even with the cheapest plan. It’s a reasonable $9.99 per month for the Core plan and only $45 per month if you have the Plus plan. You also have access to their community help portal.

Deliverability

Winner: Due to nearly identical deliverability and equal compliance assurances, this is a tie.

When you send emails and texts, you want to know they’ll get to the intended recipients and not die a painful death in the spam folder. Both systems are compliant with CASL and CAN-SPAM regulations, enabling them to achieve the following delivery rates:

• Constant Contact: 97%
• Mailchimp: 96–99%

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Next Steps

Congratulations! You’re now equipped with the insights you need to select a winning fantasy team. Armed with our in-depth comparison of Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact, it’s time to make a decision to help you take out the competition. Looking for a bit of a cheat code to extend your lead? Check out our free comparison guide for a handy peek into how these solutions match up to other top contenders.

What features stood out most in our Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp comparison? Which solution sounds like a better fit for your company? Let us know in the comments!

Top Competitors