Free Mailchimp Alternatives 2026: 4 Tools With Genuinely Free Plans

Mailchimp's free plan has been cut down to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month — tight enough that many freelancers and small businesses hit the paywall in their first quarter. The good news: several serious competitors offer dramatically more generous free plans, permanently and without a credit card. Here are the four best free Mailchimp alternatives in 2026, with every limit verified directly against the vendors' pricing pages in August 2026.

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Free plans compared: the actual limits

All limits verified on the official pricing pages, August 2026. Free plans include vendor branding in emails; paid entry plans start at $7–12/month.

1. Brevo — unlimited contacts, pay only when you send more

Brevo inverts Mailchimp's pricing logic: contacts are free and unlimited, the meter runs on sending — 300 emails per day on the free plan, roughly 9,000 a month, forever. A consultant with a 4,000-address list who sends one newsletter a week never pays a cent (split the send across two days and even a 5,000-recipient issue fits). On Mailchimp, that same list costs real money every month whether you send or not.

The free plan includes the drag-and-drop editor, signup forms, transactional email and automations (capped at 2,000 contacts in automation workflows). Upgrading to Starter at $9/month removes the daily cap and the Brevo logo. Template variety and reporting are simpler than Mailchimp's — a trade most freelancers won't notice.

Best for: anyone whose list outgrew Mailchimp's 250-contact cap but whose send volume is still modest.

2. Kit — free up to 10,000 subscribers, built for creators

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) offers the single most generous contact limit in serious email marketing: the newsletter plan is free up to 10,000 subscribers — forty times Mailchimp's free cap. It's built for people who treat their newsletter as a product: paid subscriptions, digital product sales and a creator recommendation network are part of the platform, not add-ons.

The trade-offs are deliberate: Kit's emails are text-first (pixel-perfect promotional layouts aren't the point), visual automation workflows are reserved for paid plans, and data is hosted in the US — the weakest privacy answer in this list if your audience is EU-based. But if your list is growing faster than your budget, nothing else comes close at $0.

Best for: creators and newsletter publishers scaling an audience before monetizing it.

3. MailerLite — the cleanest editor, landing pages included

MailerLite's free plan matches Mailchimp's 250-contact cap but is more useful in every other dimension: 2,500 sends per month (five times Mailchimp's 500), two user seats, automations, the website and landing-page builder, and all three email editors. EU data hosting is standard — relevant if your subscribers are European.

Honesty required: MailerLite trimmed this plan down from its formerly famous 1,000-subscriber tier, so older recommendations you'll find elsewhere overstate today's free plan. It remains the nicest tool in this list to actually work in — the editor is genuinely the least cluttered on the market — and paid plans from around $12/month stay cheap as you grow.

Best for: beginners who want the friendliest editor plus landing pages without paying, and EU hosting by default.

4. Mailjet — marketing and transactional email in one free plan

Mailjet's free plan carries 1,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month (capped at 200 per day) — four times Mailchimp's contacts and twelve times its send volume. The distinctive part: Mailjet is equally a developer product, so SMTP relay, APIs and webhooks are included on the free tier. If your website sends receipts or password resets anyway, one free account covers both your newsletter and your transactional mail.

The marketing feature set is shallower than Brevo's or MailerLite's (basic statistics, simpler automation), and the daily cap means a single 1,000-recipient newsletter needs to be split across days. Paid plans start at $9/month, which removes the daily limit. EU data hosting is standard.

Best for: freelancers with a website that already sends transactional email, who want newsletters from the same free account.

Verdict: match the free plan to what grows

The right free Mailchimp alternative depends on which limit you'll hit first. List growing? Kit (10,000 subscribers free). Send volume growing? Brevo (unlimited contacts, 300/day). Want the nicest tool and EU hosting? MailerLite. Already sending transactional email? Mailjet. All four import your Mailchimp list in minutes — just never re-import unsubscribed contacts, and clean the list first so dead addresses don't eat your new limits.

Keep reading: compare every email tool we list in the email marketing category, see the head-to-head in Brevo vs Mailchimp, or zoom out with the best freelancer tools 2026.