HubSpot and Mailchimp get compared as if they were competitors. They only half are. Mailchimp is email marketing with a contact list underneath. HubSpot is a CRM with email inside it. If all you want is to send email, HubSpot charges you heavily for things you will not use.
That is an awkward opening for a HubSpot partner, but it is the honest answer. Updated October 2026.
Short answer
Choose Mailchimp if email is your main channel, your list is manageable and your sales process does not live in a CRM. At a few thousand contacts you are talking tens of euros a month.
Choose HubSpot if email is one of several channels, sales needs to see what marketing did, and you want reporting from first visit through to signed deal. Then you are buying a system, not a sending tool.
The price gap is not a detail. HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional starts around $890 a month. Mailchimp Standard at a comparable list size costs a fraction of that. If you only send newsletters, that sum is quick.
What they both do, and where it stops
Building emails, segmenting lists, running automations, measuring results: both do this, and for most users well enough.
The difference starts with what happens to a contact after they click your link.
In Mailchimp a contact is a subscriber with a status and some tags. Mailchimp has added CRM-like features over the years, but it remains an audience model: the list is the core.
In HubSpot that same contact is a record with a company, a deal, an owner, tickets and a full timeline. Your sales colleague opens it and sees that marketing sent a case study last week, that they visited the pricing page three times and that a quote is outstanding.
If none of that matters because you sell through a webshop or without personal contact, you are buying that difference for nothing.
Pricing models: where the surprise lives
Both bill on contacts, but not in the same way. This is the most practical lesson on this page.
Mailchimp bills on your total audience. Free up to 250 contacts, with a maximum of 500 sends a month or 250 a day, and one seat. Above that, Essentials, Standard and Premium scale with your list size. Checked on Mailchimp's pricing page on 22 October 2026.
HubSpot has billed in two different ways since 1 October 2026, and which one applies to you depends on when you start.
New in EMEA, since 1 October 2026. Marketing contacts no longer exist as a separate line item. Your subscription has one record capacity across all objects: 25,000 on Starter, 250,000 on Professional and 15,000,000 on Enterprise. A contact weighs the same whether you email it or not. You pay per seat: €20, €100 or €175 a month. Source: the Flexible Seats-and-Credits Pricing Supplement, checked on 22 October 2026.
Already a customer on the old per-hub model. Then HubSpot does bill on marketing contacts, and that distinction is worth money. A contact you want in your CRM but never email can be set to non-marketing and does not count. Professional includes 2,000 marketing contacts, Enterprise 10,000.
The most expensive mistake we saw with new HubSpot customers under that old model: importing the entire database and flagging everything as a marketing contact. Then you pay for tens of thousands of records you never email. On the new model that mistake costs less, but it does not disappear. The question simply moves, from "who do I flag as marketing" to "how many records do I bring across at all".
Against Mailchimp the core does not change. Mailchimp bills on your full audience, so every address you keep costs money. With HubSpot the brake sits elsewhere: on the old model at who you email, on the new one at how many records you store and how many people work in it.
When switching makes sense, and when it does not
Stay on Mailchimp if
- email is your only or by far your largest channel
- you have no sales team working in a CRM
- you sell without personal contact, for instance through a webshop
- your budget does not justify the jump to a CRM platform
Switch if
- your list and your CRM have drifted apart and nobody knows which is right
- sales asks what marketing sent and cannot see it themselves
- you want to know which campaign led to revenue, not just to a click
- you are stitching together several tools that each keep their own contact list
That last point is usually the decider. Not the comparison between two tools, but the sum of five separate tools with five separate lists that each say something slightly different.
Migrating in practice
Moving from Mailchimp to HubSpot is not technically heavy. Contacts, tags and signup dates come across; campaign history only partly.
Three things come up in every migration:
Your tags are not segmentation. In Mailchimp tag counts grow by themselves. The move makes it visible that half of them were used once. Do not carry them all over as properties.
Decide up front who becomes a marketing contact. See the point above. Do this before the import, not after.
Your opt-ins must stay provable. Bring signup date and source across as fields. Under GDPR you need to be able to show why someone is on your list, and that evidence is not automatically in the Mailchimp export.
Frequently asked questions
Is HubSpot better than Mailchimp?
Not for email alone. HubSpot is a CRM with marketing in it, Mailchimp an email tool with a list in it. For sending newsletters, Mailchimp is cheaper and simpler.
Does HubSpot have a free tier like Mailchimp?
Yes. The HubSpot CRM is free, including forms and email with HubSpot branding. The free tier allows more contacts than Mailchimp but is more limited in send volume and design.
Can I connect Mailchimp to HubSpot?
Yes, an integration syncs lists. Useful if you want to keep Mailchimp for sending but run everything else in HubSpot. You do then keep two systems holding contact data.
Who owns Mailchimp?
Intuit, which acquired Mailchimp in 2021 for around $12 billion.
What exactly are marketing contacts?
Contacts you are allowed to and want to email. Only those count towards your HubSpot subscription. The rest can sit in your CRM for free.
Other comparisons
Not sure?
The question is rarely "which email tool". It is usually "how many separate systems do we have and what is that costing us". In half an hour we look at your current stack and tell you honestly whether a move pays for itself. Sometimes the answer is no.
Carel Schrier
