“Can Mailchimp do everything we need or should we just move it all to HubSpot?”
Man, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked a version of that question over my years as a marketer. It makes sense...if it ain’t broke don’t fix it right?
For a while, Mailchimp and HubSpot weren’t entirely comparable. Mailchimp began as an email marketing platform that had one of the few drag-and-drop editors out there, which made creating beautiful emails a breeze. Their bread and butter was sending large scale email campaigns and helping you evaluate and engage with subscribers.
Then they shifted into an all-in-one marketing platform with new features like landing pages, social posting and a marketing CRM. Their goal was to fully empower small businesses with all the tools they needed for digital marketing on an easy-to-use platform. This shift put them in a similar category to HubSpot, where one of the big draws was being able to centralize your marketing functions on a single platform.
Having used both of these platforms myself — and recently delved pretty deep into using Mailchimp to augment some HubSpot efforts — I have a lot of thoughts on these two platforms that I’ll share below.
But hey, if you want to spoil the surprise here’s the TL;DR:
While their features are similar, these platforms are meant for different business sizes. If you’re a small business, you likely aren’t ready to make the investment in HubSpot and honestly, you probably don’t have time for it. However, if you’re any bigger than small, HubSpot is the way to go.
As one of the largest names in email marketing software, almost everyone is familiar with Mailchimp. At the start of my marketing career, Mailchimp was my go-to platform for email marketing. It’s relatively easy to build things on the platform and they’re geared toward users who aren’t living and breathing marketing every day.
HubSpot emerged in 2006 in response to the changing ways in which customers interact with ads online. They made “inbound marketing” a staple in every marketer’s vocabulary and built their entire ecosystem around enabling this type of marketing.
HubSpot has email tools but the platform is so much more. Their Marketing Hub provides robust automation and segmentation capability and you can easily expand into other Hubs (Sales, Ops and Service) as your business scales. Although many small businesses use HubSpot, the platform is geared more toward businesses that are medium-sized and larger.
Mailchimp is geared toward small businesses, and they have built a tool set that does a good job of enabling that target audience. The reporting isn’t super in-depth, but it does what a busy owner or a beginner would need without getting caught up in all the details.
It also has a relatively small learning curve. The way Mailchimp structures their reporting and tools is super simplified, which is a plus for a small business who likely don’t have a full-time marketer delving into reporting every day. They make enough data available that you have something to take action on and don’t burden you with much beyond that.
Another pro is that their email builder is intuitive for users, which is great for someone who doesn’t spend all day in an email editor.
The number one reason someone would choose Mailchimp over HubSpot, however, is price. The two platforms simply cater to two different groups of businesses. If you’re a small business, the high price tag of HubSpot won’t be worth it, no matter the features it has. Mailchimp is competitively priced against other email providers and you can get a lot of tools for about $60 per month.
Like I said before, Mailchimp and HubSpot cater to two different audiences with very different budgets. This leaves some people wondering if they should use (or continue to use) Mailchimp just because it’s cheaper.
Given that Mailchimp and HubSpot are at two totally different price points, I want to focus on some of the hidden costs of Mailchimp, regardless of your pricing tier, and where HubSpot makes up for those.
The truth is, these platforms are not geared toward the same people. If you’re a small business without a full-time marketer, maybe Mailchimp or another similarly priced platform is the right choice. I probably wouldn’t recommend HubSpot.
But if you’re looking to go hardcore on your marketing, don’t even consider Mailchimp. Please. HubSpot not only provides better, faster tools, it also sets you up to easily expand those tools as your needs grow.
Want to chat more about HubSpot? Feel free to reach out.