Free Mailchimp Alternatives (2026), by Published Ceiling

The best free Mailchimp alternatives, by the ceilings printed on their own pricing pages on September 23, 2026, are Sender and EmailOctopus — each free to 2,500 subscribers, with 15,000 and 10,000 monthly emails respectively. Mailchimp's own free plan can't enter this ranking on its own terms: its pricing page states the cap as 250 contacts in one section and 500 in another, a discrepancy we document separately and won't resolve by picking a number.

"Free plan" is doing different work at each platform, though — a permanent home at one, a teaser at another, a daily drip at a third. So this guide ranks the published numbers first, then reads each plan's strings.

The ceilings, side by side

Sender — the biggest allowance, with a badge on it

Sender's free plan is the largest by both numbers: 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails a month. The visible string is branding — free emails carry Sender's badge — plus a single seat. Whether the badge matters is a question about your audience, not the platform: a hobby newsletter shrugs; a consultancy pitching polish may not. Its paid Standard starts at $9 a month at 500 subscribers if the badge has to go, and the platform's whole ladder stays cheap (the comparison has it at every size).

EmailOctopus — nearly as big, nothing on the box

EmailOctopus matches the 2,500-subscriber cap with 10,000 monthly sends, on a plainer product — simple automation, light segmentation, unlimited forms and landing pages on the paid tier. As a permanent free home for a monthly or fortnightly newsletter under 2,500 readers, it's arguably the cleanest answer on this page; our full review prices the paid ladder it graduates onto ($10 a month at 500 subscribers, $31.50 at 5,000).

MailerLite — small cap, most product

MailerLite's free tier holds 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails, with 2 seats, 3 automations, a landing page and signup forms — the most product per free subscriber here, on the platform most Mailchimp leavers end up shortlisting anyway (the head-to-head). As a permanent home it's tight; as a working trial of the platform you'll likely pay for at $12 a month, it's exactly the right size.

Brevo — free by the day, not the month

Brevo's free plan sends up to 300 emails a day once your account is approved. Notice the unit: a steady drip suits transactional-ish senders and tiny dailies, while a monthly blast to 3,000 contacts can't fit through a 300-a-day pipe in one morning. Brevo also publishes no contact cap for the free tier — consistent with its whole model of charging for volume rather than storage, which is why quiet big lists should read the Brevo comparison regardless of budget. Its free plan is at brevo.com, linked plainly because Brevo pays us nothing.

HubSpot — free email as a CRM's foyer

HubSpot's free tools include email marketing at $0 for up to 2 users. The email is real; the plan's purpose is to walk you into the CRM, and the marketing features Mailchimp leavers usually miss sit on paid tiers whose logic — seats plus marketing contacts, onboarding fees upstream — belongs to a different product category (explained here). Pick it for free email plus a genuine contacts database; skip it if you just want campaigns out the door.

The honest closing note

Free plans are marketing spend: every ceiling here exists to be outgrown, and every one can be lowered by a pricing-page edit — MailerLite's current 250 and the two figures on Mailchimp's own page are both reminders that free tiers move. Build on one happily, but keep two habits: export your list on a schedule, and know your next rung — the paid rows these plans graduate onto start at $9 to $12 a month at 500 subscribers, all priced with dates in the full comparison.

Stress-testing a free plan in one afternoon

Free plans remove the price signal, which means the usual research shortcut — trusting the number — doesn't apply. What works instead is a structured afternoon, and because these tiers cost nothing you can run it on two platforms in parallel. Import a slice of your real list (a few hundred rows, suppressions included) rather than a toy CSV, because import friction and field mapping are where budget platforms differ most. Rebuild your actual template, not a demo — the editor's real shape appears the moment you need your logo, your footer and your two-column section, not before. Send yourself the result on desktop webmail and a phone, since rendering differences are a per-platform fact no comparison table captures. Then build the simplest automation you actually run, usually a welcome email, and check the free tier lets you publish it — several tiers in our table meter automations, and "3 automations" reads differently once you know which three you need.

While you're in each product, read the two documents nobody reads: the plan-limits page (what exactly counts against the cap — subscribers, contacts, or something defined in the docs) and the acceptable-use policy (list-quality rules that can suspend a free account faster than any cap). An afternoon of this produces something no roundup can: your list, your template and your flow, living on the two candidate platforms, with the annoyances already discovered. At that point the published ceilings in our table stop being abstractions — they're the growth headroom on a setup you've already proven, and picking between them takes five minutes.

And a scope reminder while you test: this page ranks marketing-email free tiers only. Free plans for transactional email, for CRM-first suites beyond HubSpot's, and for the ecommerce-specific platforms answer different questions with different units, and mixing them into one table is how "free" comparisons mislead. If what you actually need is the paid conversation, the ladder rows above graduate onto start cheap enough that free may be the wrong fight to win.