Constant Contact vs Mailchimp (2026): The Legacy Matchup

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are the matchup people search when they want a safe pair of hands rather than a bargain — two decades-old platforms with phone support, event tools and enormous template libraries. Priced on their own pages on September 23, 2026, they differ most in the fine print: Constant Contact publishes the friendlier send caps and a transparent overage fee, Mailchimp publishes the clearer per-band price ladder, and each page makes its numbers slightly awkward to compare — in ways worth spelling out before you trust anyone's table, including ours.

Neither platform pays this site anything: Mailchimp is never an affiliate here by policy, and we have no Constant Contact relationship either. That makes this the rare comparison where we genuinely don't care which one you pick.

The prices, with their asterisks attached

Constant Contact's page led with per-month figures marked "billed annually" (its toggle offers monthly billing too, labelled "Save 15%" on the annual side — the monthly figures didn't render for our reader, so we quote only what we read): Lite starting at $10.20, Standard at $29.75, Premium at $68 — "starting at" because the price climbs with your contact count, per the page's own footnote. Mailchimp shows monthly billing with a 50%-off first year: after the offer, Essentials starts at $13, Standard at $20, Premium at $350 for 0–500 contacts, rising by band — $100 for Standard at 2,501–5,000, the full ladder on our Mailchimp pricing page.

So the honest entry-level statement is: on annual billing, Constant Contact's tiers open a little below Mailchimp's post-offer monthly figures, and neither page lets you compare identical terms at a glance. For a like-for-like at your size, you'll need Constant Contact's contact-tier selector at your count — its "see pricing tiers" ladder wouldn't open for our headless reader, so we don't reproduce it.

Send caps and the $2-per-thousand overage

Here Constant Contact's page is the more forthcoming of the two. Its FAQ states each plan's monthly send allowance as a multiple of contacts — 10× on Lite, 12× on Standard, 24× on Premium — and prices the overage exactly: $0.002 per extra send, "for every 1,000 sends over the monthly allowance, there will be a $2 fee", with sending never paused. Mailchimp's multipliers run 10× (Essentials), 12× (Standard), 15× (Premium); Standard and Premium incur overages while Essentials pauses sending at the cap. Two things follow. Premium-tier heavy senders get 60% more headroom at Constant Contact (24× vs 15× at Mailchimp's top tier). And Constant Contact's flat $2-per-thousand overage is a number you can budget, which is more than most of this category offers.

Features, events and the SMS line

At the feature level the pages describe similar mid-market kits: automation templates (1 on Lite, 3 on Standard, unlimited plus custom on Premium), segmentation that deepens by tier, and social-posting tools. Constant Contact's genuine specialty is events — hosting, ticketing and payments are listed on every tier — which is why associations and community organisations keep choosing it. Premium includes 500 SMS messages; SMS is otherwise an add-on from $10 a month. Mailchimp's counterweights are its integration catalogue and reporting depth. If neither specialty applies to you, you are probably overpaying for legacy either way — the alternatives table prices eight exits at your size, most of them cheaper.

Guarantees and discounts

Constant Contact publishes a 30-day money-back guarantee and a nonprofit prepay discount of up to 30%; Mailchimp's nonprofit discount is 15%, requested through billing. Mailchimp's page shows no annual-billing option at all, while Constant Contact's annual billing is its default display — worth remembering when any comparison (ours included) quotes the two side by side.

The verdict

Choose Constant Contact over Mailchimp if events are a real part of your program, if you want the 24× Premium send headroom, or if a predictable overage fee matters to how you budget. Choose Mailchimp if its integrations carry your stack or you'll genuinely use the 50%-off year — and if free tiers are what you're actually weighing, the free-plan field is a different race with different winners. And if you arrived at this matchup only because both names were familiar, widen the shortlist: at 5,000 contacts, the platforms on our comparison do the same core job from $31.50 a month.

A worked example of the billing-term trap

To see why we keep flagging billing terms, put one imaginary sender through both pages: a community organisation, about 500 contacts, one newsletter and an event blast a month. On Constant Contact's default display it reads "Lite, $10.20 a month" — but that's the annually-billed rate, so the real year-one commitment is roughly twelve times that, paid on annual terms, and the monthly-billing price (which the page offers but wouldn't render for our reader) is the number you'd actually compare against Mailchimp's monthly display. On Mailchimp's page the same organisation reads "$10 a month" — but that's the 50%-off intro figure for Standard's smallest band, and the durable price is the $20 shown smaller beside it. Both pages are technically accurate; both lead with their most flattering term; and a side-by-side of the two headline numbers would compare an annual discount against a temporary promotion, which is to say: nothing.

The defence is mechanical, not clever. Reduce every option to the same sentence — "per month, on monthly billing, at my contact count, after any intro period" — and refuse to compare until each vendor's page has filled that sentence in. Where a page won't fill it in (Constant Contact's unrendered monthly figures, its tier ladder behind a modal), treat the gap as information: a platform that makes your durable price hard to read before signup is telling you how renewal will feel. That's not an accusation aimed at either name here — it is the category's standard behaviour, which is exactly why this site prints reading dates on everything and why our comparison table quotes one billing term per column and says so.

As everywhere on this site, the figures above are a dated reading of two moving pages, not a permanent record — if either vendor's page now shows something different at your contact count, believe the page, and tell us so we can correct ours.