Email marketing is still a great way to engage with your audience and generate sales from important pages on your site.

It’s the only marketing funnel that’s completely yours ’cause let’s face it, you can get banned on social media, a Google algorithm update may penalize your site but those email subscribers, they’re yours to keep forever!

Like most things in marketing, the only way to scale is by automating repetitive tasks and email marketing tools like MailChimp and GetResponse help with that.

It’s difficult to choose between both pieces of software so let’s take a look at their features to see what separates one from the other:

1. Pricing

MailChimp is the tool for the beginner site owner and that’s because their lowest plan is a free for life plan that accommodates people with up to 2,000 subscribers, allowing you to send as much as 10,000 emails per month.

GetResponse’s basic plan costs $15 per month for 1,000 subscribers and this price increases if you’d like to accommodate more subscribers.

There’s no free plan but a free trial is available for the basic, plus, and professional plans which are the three tiers on offer.

A key difference between both tools on pricing is that MailChimp offers no automation on its free plan and as the price increases, GetResponse offers more features including extra automation features.

Send limits are things you should also consider, the limits are 10k, 500k, 1.2 million, and 3 million for the four MailChimp plans. Those numbers represent the number of emails you can send.

If you run something like a hobby blog and only send out newsletters once a week, you probably don’t need to worry about these limits.

Everything changes if you run an autoresponder on a business site where you need to engage with your audience multiple times weekly because you could exhaust those limits quickly.

Finally, list size is a term that’s used differently by both tools. Simply put, if you have 1900 subscribers on a list and 400 unsubscribe, MailChimp still maintains that you have a 1900-subscriber list while GetResponse puts your list at 1500 subscribers.

So while MailChimp wins by offering a free plan, GetResponse wins on paid plans by offering more features than the former at higher tiers.

2. Integrations

Most successful email marketing campaigns today run with a lot of backend integrations.

If you’re sending Facebook ad traffic to your landing page, you’d need Facebook ad pixel integration to produce responsive landing pages. Integration with analytics software helps you reduce bounce rate and improve conversions.

So who’s the king of the integration battle? Let’s start with GetResponse this time.

GetResponse Integrations

The tool integrates perfectly with 122 third party tools including e-commerce, CRM, social, analytics, and CMS software.

MailChimp Integrations

MailChimp has more than double that number with 256 integrations for everything from e-commerce to analytics.

One thing you should note is that a tool having more integrations doesn’t necessarily make it the better tool, you should look at both tools and only concentrate on the integrations needed on your website.

If you run an e-commerce store, integrations with WooCommerce and Stripe or PayPal are things you’d want to look for, Calendly, maybe not so much.

MailChimp is the popular software so it’s usually offered as the default option on third-party platforms like Facebook while GetResponse seems it owes a lot of its integrations to Zapier.

Bottom line: most basic third party platforms integrate perfectly with both email tools but if you’re on the market for a wider range of integrations, MailChimp wins this.

3. Templates

Good email templates are usually simple, flexible, and responsive. Let’s start with MailChimp.

MailChimp Templates

The tool offers two types of email templates, featured and basic. If you know nothing about designing email templates, the featured templates are what you need.

MailChimp helps you with designing by recommending changes you can make and it does this with its drag-and-drop editor.

Basic templates are five simple templates you can use to sell products, make an announcement, tell a story, follow up, and educate.

Those are the five templates provided and they should cover most of what you’d need on your site.

If both don’t work for you, there’s an option to code your custom template externally and import into MailChimp.

GetResponse Templates

GetResponse is the tool with the larger template library, it’s drag-and-drop also, providing a responsive interface even on mobile.

You can also import your custom templates into the platform and GetResponse wins here cause MailChimp doesn’t allow custom imports on its free plan.

The GetResponse templates are also separated into categories so if you have a food blog, you can simply choose from the tested templates used by other food bloggers.

There’s not much to separate both tools in terms of template design as both tools keep releasing new sets of modern templates to their library but if you’re looking for industry-specific templates, GetResponse is the way to go.

4. Extras

There are a lot of other features on both tools you can explore, many of which you’d never need in all your email marketing campaigns but let’s look at a few worth paying attention to:

#1. Responsiveness

More than 60% of people today read their emails on a mobile phone so you need a tool that’s responsive on mobile.

GetResponse handles this with its inbuilt tool that displays a preview of how your email looks on a mobile device so you can edit if needed before hitting send so it’s the more responsive tool.

#2. Automation

Both tools offer automation to an extent but GetResponse has the larger library of automation tools.

One important automation tool GetResponse provides is its visual flowchart feature so you can view your campaign emails displayed in a sequence and how each step interacts with the next.

#3. Webinars

GetResponse is the clear winner here as it allows you to integrate your email marketing funnel with a webinar software.

#4. Support

The free version of MailChimp offers support for the first 30 days but none after that so you’d rely on online tutorials and MailChimp’s FAQ system which is just not comprehensive.

You’d do fine if you’re a bit tech-savvy and can navigate your way around the tool but if you need some form of support, you’d need to stick to paid versions of both tools.

Final Words

There’s not much separating both email marketing tools as they share a lot of similar features but if you focus on the specific features that apply to you and your business, you’d find it easier making a decision on the tool that’s a better fit.