Mailchimp vs AWeber — Which is Better?

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In this in-depth Mailchimp vs AWeber comparison, I’m going to look at two of the best-known email marketing solutions currently available — and help you work out which one is the better fit for your business.

Read on to get a full overview of both Mailchimp and AWeber’s feature set and exactly why — and when — you might decide to use one of these tools over the other.

Let’s start off with an important question…

What do AWeber and Mailchimp do?

AWeber and Mailchimp are email marketing tools that allow you to:

…and much else besides.

But how much does this functionality cost?

Pricing

AWeber pricing

There are four plans available for AWeber. In order of expense, there are:

The free plan gives you basic access to most of AWeber’s key features, so long as your list is 500 or less subscribers in size. You can access this here.

The key differences between Aweber’s pricing plans are:

Mailchimp pricing

There are four Mailchimp plans, and the cost of using each depends on the size of your mailing list.

The plans are as follows:

The key differences between the Mailchimp tiers involve:

An interesting option for users who mail their databases relatively infrequently is Mailchimp’s ‘Pay as You Go’ plan, where you pay a set fee per email sent.

Exact pricing varies by territory, and the functionality you get is the same as that provided on the ‘Essentials’ plan.

The pay-as-you-go model won’t be for everyone, but it’s potentially useful for users who are not interested in making use of autoresponders and only wish to send ad hoc, one-off blasts.

A similar pay-as-you-go option is not currently available in AWeber.

So which works out cheaper?

If your only purpose of using an email marketing tool is to send occasional newsletters to a reasonably small database, then Mailchimp lets you do this a bit cheaper than AWeber, via its ‘Essentials’ plan (which involves a $13 monthly fee to AWeber’s $14.99 ‘Lite’ plan).

You won’t be able to use advanced email automation on it, or code your own templates, but it will let you carry out basic email marketing perfectly well.

However, in order to compare like with like, you really need to look at how Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ plans stack up against AWeber’s ‘Plus’ plans. As the table below shows, if you have between 500 and 50,000 subscribers on your list, AWeber plans work out quite a bit cheaper ($20-$150 per month cheaper!). And if your list size is over 100,000, then both platforms are priced around the same.

Of course, you could theoretically use either product for free — so let’s take a quick look at the free plans on offer from AWeber and Mailchimp.

Free plans

The Mailchimp ‘Free’ plan is one of the strongest reasons why you might want to choose Mailchimp as an email marketing solution: it lets you send e-newsletters to a mailing list containing 500 contacts entirely for free.

However, there are some important things to be aware of with regard to this plan:

AWeber free plan

Perhaps in a bid to compete with Mailchimp, AWeber recently introduced an entirely free plan too.

Like Mailchimp’s free plan, AWeber’s lets you send newsletters to a list of up to 500 subscribers.

However, AWeber’s free plan is more generous than Mailchimp’s. This is because — with the exception of a couple of key features (notably split testing and abandoned cart emails) — you get access to the bulk of AWeber’s functionality entirely free. Mailchimp’s free plan, as discussed above, restricts functionality to a few core features.

Additionally, AWeber’s free plan allows you to send 3,000 emails per month, while Mailchimp allows you to send 1,000.

As is the case with Mailchimp’s newsletters, emails sent with Aweber feature advertising — but the branding on show is more subtle.

You can try the free AWeber plan out here.

Autoresponders and marketing automation in Mailchimp and AWeber

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your mailing list subscribers at pre-defined time intervals.

For example, you can set them up so that straight after somebody signs up to your list, they receive a welcome or ‘onboarding’ message from your business; a week later they could receive a promo code for specific products; two weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on social media.

And so on!

The idea behind autoresponders is that much of your email marketing gets automated – it’s a sort of ‘set and forget’ scenario that saves you the bother sending out e-newsletters manually (although you can still of course do this as and when required).

Both Mailchimp and AWeber allow you to create simple ‘time-based’ autoresponders — a series of emails based on time intervals (as discussed above).

I’d argue that for this kind of autoresponder, AWeber makes things a bit easier — setting up an automation in Mailchimp can be slightly fiddly (as there are more options to wade through) whereas AWeber’s ‘Campaigns’ tool, which is used to create your autoresponder workflow, is very easy to use.

However, to properly compare Mailchimp and AWeber’s autoresponder functionality, we need to look beyond traditional ‘drip’ style autoresponders and look more closely at the idea of marketing automation — something that has been introduced into many email marketing solutions over the past couple of years.

Marketing automation works in a similar way to autoresponders, in that emails are automatically sent to a mailing list according to a predefined sequence.

But instead of time intervals, user behaviour is used to determine what emails should be sent next — opens, clicks, goal completions, purchases, abandoned carts and more can all be used to trigger the next e-newsletter.

As things stand, Mailchimp offers significantly more functionality when it comes to marketing automation: you can use its sophisticated ‘customer journey’ tool to create a series of messages that are sent on an ‘if this then that’ basis.

AWeber’s marketing automation feature, ‘AWeber Campaigns,’ is currently far more basic in nature — you can only use tags and clicks to create automated user journeys with it.

As an aside, I would argue that both products are a bit behind their rival GetResponse in the marketing automation stakes (especially AWeber).

This is because GetResponse now bundles ‘conversion funnels’ and webinar hosting into its plans, and you can integrate marketing automation with both. You can find out more about all this here.

As discussed above, a key thing to be aware of if you are hoping to create autoresponders with either Mailchimp or AWeber is that the customer journey feature is only fully available on the more expensive plans — Mailchimp ‘Standard’ and AWeber ‘Plus’ or higher.

(You can access basic automation features in the cheaper Mailchimp and AWeber plans, but these don’t facilitate the ‘if this, then that’ rules that differentiate marketing automation from autoresponders).

And using Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ plan typically works out $20 to $150 more expensive per month than the AWeber equivalent.

To be fair, you’ll get more advanced autoresponder functionality for this, but if all you’re looking for is a tool to send simple e-newsletters or create a basic drip campaign, AWeber works out considerably cheaper.

Now, let’s take a look at the visual side of things.

Templates

Both AWeber and Mailchimp offer a wide range of e-newsletter templates, which are designed to suit many different applications and organisation types — ecommerce, events, sports, education and so on.

AWeber offers far more templates than Mailchimp, however — around 169 to 137 respectively.

(AWeber claims that it comes with 600+ templates. However, these include variants and RSS feed templates; so by our reckoning, the ‘real’ number is more like 169).

With both systems you can tweak the templates extensively, and indeed code your own, so users of both platforms should be able to settle on a template which works for their business without too much difficulty.

However, and as mentioned above, you’ll pay a premium to do so with Mailchimp.

All the email templates provided by both products are responsive, meaning that they will automatically resize themselves to suit the device your e-newsletter is being viewed on.

A ‘preview’ mode is also available for both Mailchimp and AWeber that lets you see how your e-newsletter will look on a mobile device.

In terms of quality, I’d argue that some of Mailchimp’s templates look a bit more contemporary than AWeber’s. But there’s not a huge amount in it.

Web fonts in Mailchimp and AWeber

Both Mailchimp and AWeber now allow you to make use of web fonts — something which not all other leading email marketing apps let you do (many tend to restrict you to more boring fonts like Times New Roman, Arial and so on).

Web fonts are useful because they can improve the look and feel of e-newsletter considerably; and depending on the typefaces you use on your website, may help you achieve a greater brand consistency between your site and your e-newsletters.

By default, Mailchimp and AWeber allow you to make use of the following web fonts in their e-newsletter templates.

So if you use any of the above on your website, you’re in luck — you can add them to your e-newsletters too and keep the branding consistency tight.

AWeber gives you one additional typeface, ‘Permanent Marker,’ a brash font which is something of an acquired taste — but potentially handy to have in your design arsenal nonetheless.

AMP for email in Mailchimp and AWeber

An area where AWeber has an edge over Mailchimp — and indeed most other email marketing platforms —involves something called AMP for email.

In the past, e-newsletters have been very static affairs — a simple combination of text and images.

AMP for Email changes all that by making it possible for recipients to take actions — like booking an appointment, adding something to a cart, or RSVP-ing to an event — directly within the email (i.e., without leaving their email program and without visiting an external website).

It also allows the senders of an email to insert live, dynamic content into it — think survey results, weather updates, football scores etc.

This ‘dynamic’ nature of AMP e-newsletters gives recipients a reason to return to them from time to time — turning emails into much more powerful and engaging pieces of content.

The below video from Google about AMP for email is worth checking out.

(Mailchimp does offer dynamic emails of sorts too — you can create one email and populate its content based on segments within your mailing list. This isn’t the same as fully dynamic AMP-based emails, however).

The AWeber and Mailchimp interfaces

AWeber takes quite a traditional approach to its user interface — when you log in, you encounter a primary navigation bar on the left hand side of the screen containing all the key options.

Hovering over these menu items then reveals sub-menus that let you access important secondary options (for example, email templates, import options and statistics).

As for Mailchimp, until recently it took a rather ‘funky’ approach to navigation, presenting menu items in the form of icons that weren’t very easy to decipher.

This didn’t make for the best user experience, and following customer feedback Mailchimp added labels to them, getting rid of the guesswork and making key features much easier to access.

The two interfaces differ when it comes to font size and use of white space: Mailchimp uses really big typefaces and lots of white space.

Whilst aesthetically this makes for a ‘cleaner’ and more attractive user interface, in my experience it also means a bit more clicking and scrolling about the place to find what you’re looking for.

With AWeber, by contrast, all the important options are easily identifiable the moment you log in.

So despite the fact that the Mailchimp interface is undoubtedly easier on the eye, actually locating key functionality can sometimes be a bit harder to do.

One aspect of Mailchimp’s interface that I do really like however is its content studio — a place where you can upload assets (images, files and so on) to the platform which can then be incorporated into emails really easily as you create campaign.

The bottom line on these interfaces is that you’ll probably be fine with either. If working in a contemporary online environment is important to you, you’ll probably prefer Mailchimp’s; if you’re a fan of traditional menus, you’ll probably prefer AWeber’s.

Opt-in processes in AWeber and Mailchimp

There are two ways you can add subscribers to a mailing list: using a ‘single opt-in’ or a ‘double opt-in’ process.

When you use a single opt-in process, the person completing your sign-up form is added to your mailing list immediately.

With a double opt-in process, the person signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that he or she must click before they are subscribed.

The main benefits of a single opt-in process are that

 A double opt-in process is better for

For quite some time, AWeber had a big edge over Mailchimp in this area, because it allowed users to make use of either a single or a double opt-in approach.

Mailchimp eventually changed its tune however, allowing its customers to use a single opt-in approach, because the company found that 61% of users completing double opt in data capture forms were not completing their sign up process.

So a thumbs up to both products for the flexibility in this area. Not all competing products provide single opt-in functionality, so it’s great to see both AWeber and Mailchimp doing so.

Data segmentation

A key part of managing a mailing list involves creating segments and sending e-newsletters to them.

Both Mailchimp and AWeber allow you to create segments based on your preferred criteria — but what they don’t do is let you send to multiple segments at once.

Let’s say you’re a Volkswagen dealer with a mailing list containing a field called ‘car model.’

You’ve used this field to segment your mailing list neatly into the owners of VW Polos, Golfs, Passats, Tiguans etc. You have a special offer which is relevant to Polo and Golf owners, and you want to send one message about it to those two segments.

But with AWeber and Mailchimp (unless you’re on a ‘Standard’ or ‘Premium’ plan)…you can’t. You’ll have to go and create a brand new segment for people who own Polos OR Golfs.

Now, this might not seem like a serious problem, but if you regularly need to send mailouts to multiple (and varying) segments of subscribers then you will potentially have more work to do than you might like.

If segmentation is a very important aspect of how you manage your mailouts, then I’d probably look elsewhere for an email marketing solution. The two products I’ve come across which cater best for emailing multiple segments (and indeed lists) are GetResponse and Campaign Monitor.

To be fair, you can get some advanced segmentation functionality with Mailchimp — but you’ll need to be on the ‘Standard’ plan or higher to access this).

You can find out more about advanced segmentation in Mailchimp here. 

Finally, AWeber allows you to send e-newsletters across multiple lists — Mailchimp doesn’t. Although it’s usually better to use one list and segment it properly, there are occasions where you might need to broadcast e-newsletters across a variety of individual lists.

So overall, it’s a bit of a win here for AWeber, due to the fact that the product allows you to send emails to multiple lists. But both products could do rather better in the segmentation department.

Stock images / Canva integration

A nice feature in AWeber which isn’t currently available in Mailchimp is a free stock images library.

(Although there’s a reference to a Mailchimp integration with the free stock photography site Unsplash in the product’s help materials, we couldn’t find an obvious way to get this working!).

You can use this to insert royalty-free photography into your e-newsletters — this is handy for all those times you need a generic looking picture of a computer keyboard to use as a thumbnail!

Mailchimp users can still avail of free stock photography for their e-newsletters of course; they’ll just have to source it separately from a royalty free photo site like Unsplash or Pexels.

A related AWeber feature which is worth flagging up is its new integration with the popular graphic design tool Canva. This lets you create Canva designs without ever leaving the AWeber interface — and insert the results into the e-newsletters you create with AWeber.

The below video gives an overview of how this integration works (for more information about the tool itself, check out our Canva review).

Mailchimp can also be used in conjunction with Canva — but the integration works the other way round, i.e., you create your designs in Canva and click a button to insert them into Mailchimp. Which approach works for you probably boils down to personal preference.

Split testing

An important feature of email marketing tools like AWeber and Mailchimp is split testing.

This allows you to try out different subject headers or content on sample data to see which works best.

For example, you could send two versions of your e-newsletter to 10% of your subscribers, analyse the results (i.e., open / clickthrough rates) and send out the best-performing version to the remainder of people on your list.

If you have a large email list, use of split testing can lead to significant improvements to your open and clickthrough rates. So, many email marketing tools automate the process for you.

On the ‘Essentials’ Mailchimp plan, you can test 3 different versions of your emails against each other. You can involve one variable in these tests: subject line, name, content or send time.

More sophisticated split testing options are available in Mailchimp on Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ and ‘Premium’ plans in the way of ‘multivariate’ testing — this lets you test 8 variants of e-newsletters against each other (and using multiple variables at once — sender, subject header, content etc.).

This was previously only available to Mailchimp ‘Premium’ plan subscribers, but has recently been added as a feature of the ‘Standard’ Mailchimp plan too.

AWeber also lets you test 3 versions of your newsletters against each other on all paid plans— but importantly, there are no restrictions on what you can test. You can simply put 3 e-newsletters head to head — testing content, subject headers, sender names etc. against each other all at once.

So on balance, when it comes to split testing, it’s a win for AWeber.

RSS to e-newsletter

Mailchimp and AWeber both allow you to send out e-newsletters automatically based on an RSS feed (i.e., every time it gets updated, it will trigger a newsletter).

Both platforms allow you to use all of the available templates to send RSS emails — and editing is done in the standard drag and drop editors.

Several competing email marketing tools require you to use separate templates for RSS emails, so I give a thumbs up to both Mailchimp and Aweber for making life simple here.

(Aweber recently introduced a new feature called ‘Autonewsletter’. This includes the RSS emails described above, but it also allows you to use URLs to automatically populate e-newsletters with new content from a YouTube channel, a podcast or an Etsy store).

Landing pages

Landing pages — also known as ‘squeeze pages’ — are web pages that are designed with just one goal in mind: data capture.

They typically consist of a form, some attractive images and a small amount of text spelling out the benefit of submitting your email address.

Landing pages capture data more effectively than forms placed on regular websites, simply because there’s less elements on view to distract users from entering their data — no navigation, offers or content to take attention away from a sign-up form are usually present.

Both Mailchimp and AWeber recently introduced landing pages as a new feature — you can now use both platforms to design simple landing pages which can be used in conjunction with advertising campaigns. There are 162 templates available from AWeber compared with a much smaller range of just 7 templates from Mailchimp.

It should be noted however that AWeber and Mailchimp’s offering in this regard is a bit limited by comparsion to the likes of dedicated landing page products Instapage or Unbounce.

This is because they don’t facilitate A/B testing, where variants of the landing pages are shown to a sample of users, with the highest-converting ones being automatically rolled out.

Mailchimp’s landing pages do let you view analytics on the performance of your landing pages however, allowing you to perform manual tests and make your own decisions regarding which landing pages are performing best. This does add value to proceedings.

AWeber doesn’t seem to offer a similar set of statistics for landing pages (you’ll have to manually track hits and conversions using a Facebook / Meta Pixel or Google Analytics), which means Mailchimp’s landing pages have the edge when it comes to reporting.

Website building tools and ecommerce

In recent years, many email marketing products have started to add website building and ecommerce features to their feature sets — and AWeber and Mailchimp are no exception here.

In the case of AWeber, you can now use the platform to take payments, accept donations or sell subscriptions. This is done through its landing pages feature (discussed above).

Mailchimp provides a decent website building tool that lets you create a site with unlimited pages and includes some basic SEO tools (even the free Mailchimp plan includes this).

Until recently, Mailchimp had also provided ecommerce functionality for running an online store on the platform — but this feature has now been discontinued (along with Mailchimp’s appointment scheduling offering).

Now, it has to be said that the website building features in AWeber and Mailchimp are not yet going to rival dedicated website building platforms like Shopify or Squarespace in the functionality stakes — but they may come in handy for some users, particularly those who like having everything in one place, or those on a low budget.

Between the two products under discussion here, Mailchimp currently offers the better features for website building, but AWeber takes the win when it comes to ecommerce.

Reporting

Both AWeber and Mailchimp provide you with detailed statistics on the performance of your mailouts with — in my view — Mailchimp having the better reporting interface and one that is more feature packed.

It’s laid out in a way that makes drilling down into particular bits of data very straightforward — you can view e-newsletter results by activity (opens and clicks etc.), URLs clicked, social activity, ecommerce, conversations and Google Analytics.

There are two particularly nifty features in Mailchimp that are worth singling out for attention:

AWeber is not without its strong features when it comes to reporting either however, and I particularly like the way that you can create segments directly from reports (i.e., you can look at a report for a particular e-newsletter broadcast, go to a list of people who’ve opened that email, and target them with a new communication on the spot).

This is not easily doable in Mailchimp: to create a segment of subscribers based on clickthroughs or open rates, you need to open your report, export a list of the relevant subscribers, and then re-import it (making sure that there is a field which flags the fact that these subscribers have engaged with the mailout). Messy!

However, Mailchimp does surface contacts (on its ‘Audience’ dashboard) who generally engage often, occasionally and seldom with your emails, and provides an easy way to retarget them.

Both products also let you track sales and goals easily (by adding tracking code to your ecommerce platform or website builder). This lets you monitor which emails were most effective in terms of conversions.

Integrations

AWeber and Mailchimp both integrate with important website building platforms — key examples include BigCommerce, Shopify and WordPress. Popular ecommerce tools like Paypal and social media giants like Facebook are also catered for.

AWeber offers more integrations however: around 759 to Mailchimp’s 327 or so.

Mailchimp is more of an industry standard tool than AWeber, however, so some important services — key examples being Squarespace and Facebook— will offer Mailchimp as a built-in, ‘works out of the box’ email marketing integration.

When it comes to Facebook ads, Mailchimp is more tightly integrated with the platform. You can actually run Facebook ad campaigns from within your Mailchimp account, so if you’re the kind of user who wants to manage everything in one place, you may find this useful.

A similar feature exists in Mailchimp for running Google Ads too.

Send time optimization

A good feature that is included in Mailchimp which is unfortunately not present in AWeber is ‘Send Time Optimization’.

Send time optimization is a sophisticated tool which automatically sends your e-newsletter at the time at which it is most likely to be opened.

This time is calculated by Mailchimp based on looking at when the subscribers on your list have previously opened mail — it can work this out based on looking at the campaigns you’ve previously sent and also by using data from campaigns sent by other Mailchimp users involving email addresses that are also present on your list.

As Mailchimp explains:

It would be great if AWeber could consider adding this functionality, as it has the potential to significantly increase open rates.

Using different languages in Mailchimp and AWeber

For users wishing to provide versions of their confirmation emails and thank-you pages in different languages, Mailchimp is a better choice than AWeber, as it provides this functionality out of the box. 

Setting this up is a bit fiddly however, and involves creating different merge tags for each language.

Customer support

Finally, let’s take a look at customer support.

When it comes to support for free plans, AWeber has an edge, providing live chat and email support for its free offering; Mailchimp’s support for its free plan is email only.

As for the paid-for plans, AWeber provides live chat, email and phone support on all of them.

By contrast, Mailchimp’s support is restricted to live chat and email on all its paid-for plans except its (very expensive!) $350+ ‘Premium’ plan.

So if you are a complete novice to email marketing, but don’t have the resources to hire somebody to set your e-newsletter campaigns up, the availability of phone support at an affordable price for AWeber is something to bear in mind as an important advantage of using the platform.

Indeed, phone support is something of a unique selling point for AWeber, given that many of its leading competitors simply don’t offer it.

And accessing contact details for customer support in AWeber is easy too. You simply click on a support link at the bottom of the interface, and this brings you to the contact details page.

Mailchimp makes accessing support a little more complicated — you can only do so after you’ve been forced to search its website for an answer to your query.

As for availability, AWeber’s live chat / email support is available 24/7, and its phone support is available 7am-10pm ET Monday to Friday and 8am-5pm ET on weekends. The company has won several Stevie awards for its customer service over the past few years too, which speaks well for its quality.

Mailchimp’s live chat and email support is available 24/7, and its phone support for ‘Premium’ plan customers is available from 6.30am-6pm ET on weekdays.

So in general, AWeber’s support offering is the more comprehensive than Mailchimp’s. However, Mailchimp does have a linguistic advantage over AWeber when it comes to customer service — its phone and live chat support is available in English, Spanish and French, while AWeber’s is only provided in English.

Additionally, Mailchimp’s Help Center articles are available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese.

The bottom line: so long as you’re happy to access customer support in English, it’s a win in the support department for AWeber.

Alternatives to Mailchimp and AWeber

Before deciding conclusively on Mailchimp and AWeber, it’s worth taking a quick look at some alternatives:

Additionally, many ecommerce platforms — for example, tools like Wix and Shopify — are now bundling email marketing features with their services. So you may find that your website builder has some fairly generous email marketing tools built in.

AWeber vs Mailchimp conclusion

Overall, both AWeber and Mailchimp are both solid, well-established tools that you can use to create and send professional e-newsletters with. Either, used correctly, can help you grow your email database and contribute the success of your business. AWeber outshines Mailchimp when it comes to ease of use, bang-for-buck, and support. Mailchimp is, however, the more fully-featured tool, providing automation functionality that is far more sophisticated than what’s on offer from AWeber, and website building features too.

If you’ve got any queries on Mailchimp vs AWeber, I’d love to hear them — just leave them in the comments section below (I do my best to answer each one!).

I’ll leave you with the key reasons you might want to use one of these platforms over the other: