by Albright Labs
Mailchimp is the name most small organizations know when they need to send a newsletter. Sendly is a smaller tool built around one different idea: you send through an email account you already own, and Sendly handles the lists, the campaigns and the tracking.
That one difference drives most of the others. This post walks through where each tool fits, including the places where Mailchimp is the better choice.
The short version
- Pick Mailchimp if you want one tool that does everything, you have no email provider of your own, and you want a drag-and-drop editor.
- Pick Sendly if you already send email through Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark or Brevo, and you want your campaigns to go out from that account at a flat monthly price.
Where your email is actually sent from
Mailchimp sends your campaigns from its own sending infrastructure. You connect your domain, but the mail servers are Mailchimp’s, and so is most of the sending setup.
Sendly never sends campaigns through its own servers. On every plan, including Free, you add your own SMTP server, and on Pro and up you can connect a provider’s API instead (Brevo, SendGrid, Mailgun or Postmark). Campaigns go out from an address at your own domain, through your own account.
That has three practical effects:
- Your sender reputation stays yours. It is built on your domain and your provider, not shared with other senders on the same platform.
- Your authentication lines up. Because the mail comes from your provider and your domain, SPF and DKIM match what receiving mail servers expect. Sendly will not substitute an address of its own. If no From address is set, it holds the campaign and tells you, rather than sending mail that lands in spam.
- You do need a provider. If you have no email account that can send bulk mail, Sendly will not work until you set one up. That is a real cost in setup time, and it is the main reason some organizations should stay with an all-in-one tool.
What you pay for
Sendly’s plans are flat. Sendly has no monthly email cap on any plan and no per-email charges; how much you can send is set by your own provider.
| Plan | Price | Subscribers | Active campaigns | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 500 | 3 | 1 |
| Basic | $29/mo | 2,500 | 15 | 3 |
| Pro | $79/mo | 15,000 | Unlimited | 10 |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | 50,000+ | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Free-plan emails carry a small “Sent via Sendly” footer, and scheduling starts on Basic. Your provider may charge for sending volume, so add that to the comparison. Many small organizations already pay for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and can start there.
Mailchimp’s pricing works differently. As of October 2026, its free plan allows up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with no more than 250 in a day. Paid plans start at $13 a month for Essentials, $20 for Standard and $350 for Premium, at the lowest contact tier, and the price rises as your audience grows. Each paid plan also has a monthly send limit tied to your contact count, and Mailchimp charges overages if you go past your contact or send limit. The right comparison depends on your list size and how often you send, so price both at your real numbers before deciding.
Building the email
This is where Mailchimp is ahead. It has a drag-and-drop builder, which matters if nobody on your team is comfortable with HTML, and A/B testing on its paid plans.
Sendly uses a rich-content editor with HTML support, merge tags for personalization (with fallbacks, such as a first name that falls back to “there”), an optional header image, and a full-width or boxed layout. You can send yourself a test before launching. It does not have a drag-and-drop builder, and it does not have A/B testing.
When your sending account has a bad day
Email providers have outages. With a single sending account, an outage in the middle of a campaign means some of your list got the email and the rest did not.
On Pro and up, Sendly lets you add a backup server. If your primary server stops accepting mail partway through a send, Sendly sends that same email through the next server and carries on, so nobody gets it twice, and your admins get a notice. If every server is down, nothing is marked as sent: campaigns wait, admins are alerted, and sending resumes on its own once a server works again.
Lists, tracking and reporting
Both tools cover the basics a small organization needs.
In Sendly:
- Import subscribers by CSV on every plan. Export needs Basic or higher.
- Opens and clicks are tracked automatically on every plan, with no setup.
- Bounces and spam complaints come in through your provider’s webhooks.
- Double opt-in and an automatic unsubscribe link are built in.
- Email validation flags bad syntax, domains with no mail server, disposable and role-based addresses, and duplicates, so you can clean a list before you send to it.
Sendly’s reporting is deliberately simple: sent, delivered, opened, clicked, unsubscribed and bounced for each campaign, plus overall delivery, open and click rates. It does not have geographic, device or heatmap reports. If you rely on those, Mailchimp’s reporting goes further.
Integrations and automation
Mailchimp lists more than 300 integrations and has automation flows built in. If your email program depends on those connections, that is a strong reason to stay.
Sendly has no third-party app integrations such as Zapier, WordPress or Shopify. It does have a REST API on Pro and up for adding and updating subscribers and managing lists. Automated follow-ups are available on Pro when you send through Brevo, and a follow-up sequence stops for anyone who replies.
Which one fits
Mailchimp fits an organization that wants one tool to handle everything, including the sending, and values a visual editor and a large integration catalog over control of its own sending.
Sendly fits an organization that already has an email provider, cares about sending from its own domain and reputation, wants a flat price that does not change with every send, and would rather keep going through a provider outage than find out afterward that half the list never got the email.
You can try Sendly free with up to 500 subscribers and your own SMTP server. No credit card is required.