For a UK list under ten thousand subscribers, Kit is the clear pick on price: its free plan carries the whole list with no send cap, where the same list is a paid Mailchimp plan. Choose Mailchimp only if you sell online or need real templates, deeper segmentation and broad integrations, which Kit deliberately does not have.
Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is the platform newsletter writers and course sellers choose. Mailchimp is the platform businesses default to. Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure below is read live from our pricing database.
The free plans are not the same product
Every comparison says "both have a free plan". That sentence hides the entire decision, so here are the actual caps.
- Kit free plan: Yes (10K subscribers, 1 automation, no A/B)
- Mailchimp free plan: Yes (250 contacts, 500 sends /mo)
Kit's is capped on one axis, subscribers, and sending is unlimited. You could mail ten thousand people every week and pay nothing. Mailchimp's is capped on two axes at once, contacts and monthly sends, and the send cap is the binding one: a few hundred subscribers emailed twice a month is already over it.
So for a list of any real size, Mailchimp's free plan is a trial and Kit's is a business. Kit's entry position is £0 (free to 10K), while Mailchimp's is £9.76/mo (Essentials), and that is before the list grows. This is the single most useful fact on this page, and it is why we are willing to say Mailchimp simply loses on price up to ten thousand subscribers.
Pricing and plans compared
Above ten thousand subscribers the two converge and the comparison becomes ordinary. Kit's paid plan is Creator, priced on Per subscriber, and it bills Active subscribers. Mailchimp is priced on Per contact and bills All contacts including unsubscribed.
That last difference is worth money over time. A list that has run for a few years accumulates unsubscribes, and Mailchimp keeps charging for them until you delete them. Kit does not. The calculator above prices both platforms against your actual subscriber count, which is the only comparison that matters.
Both bill UK customers in pounds, so there is no exchange rate risk on either side.
Who each one is built for
Kit is for people whose product is what they write: newsletter operators, course creators, coaches, authors, consultants building an audience before they build a funnel. Its emails default to looking like a personal message rather than a marketing artefact, and that is a design decision, not a limitation, because plain email from a person outperforms a designed template in that context.
Mailchimp is for businesses that market to customers: a shop, a clinic, a gym, an agency, a charity. It gives you 100+ templates, 300+ integrations and e-commerce reporting, and it is the tool a marketing hire will already know.
Where Kit is genuinely weaker
We are not going to pretend Kit's free plan makes it the better tool. It is thinner in four places that matter.
Segmentation is Basic (tags, segments), against Mailchimp's Moderate (tags, predicted demographics). Tags and segments will carry a content business a long way, but they cannot slice a list by purchase history or predicted value.
A/B testing on Kit is Yes (Creator Pro only), so on the free plan and the entry paid plan you cannot split-test subject lines at all. Mailchimp's is Yes (Standard+).
Design is deliberately minimal: 50+ templates against Mailchimp's 100+. If your emails need to look like a catalogue, Kit will frustrate you.
E-commerce is shallow. Kit covers Shopify, WooCommerce, where Mailchimp covers Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento.
Automation compared
Kit's automation is Basic (Free), Advanced (Creator+), and its visual sequence builder is genuinely good at the thing creators need: someone joins from a form, gets tagged, receives a sequence, and branches on what they click. Mailchimp's is Basic (Essentials), Advanced (Standard+), which means the plan you would compare on price is not the plan that runs proper workflows.
The honest summary is that Kit's automation is better value and Mailchimp's ceiling is higher. A creator will hit Kit's limits late or never. A business wiring email into a CRM, a store and a support desk will hit them quickly.
UK considerations
Both bill in pounds and both handle the mechanics of UK GDPR and PECR compliance: Kit is Yes (consent tools, unsubscribe, sender ID) and Mailchimp is Yes (consent tools, unsubscribe, sender ID). PECR requires opt-in consent before you email a UK individual, and both give you the signup forms, consent capture and one-click unsubscribe to evidence it. Neither tool relieves you of holding the consent in the first place.
SMS is a hard split. Kit's UK SMS is No, so if text messaging is part of your marketing, Kit is not a candidate at all. Mailchimp's is Yes (UK SMS, paid add-on).
Pros and cons for this matchup
Kit wins on a free plan that carries a real list with no send cap, sequence automation that suits content businesses, active-subscriber billing that ignores dead weight, and an editor that gets out of the way. It loses on design, on segmentation depth, on A/B testing being locked to its top plan, and on having no SMS at all in the United Kingdom.
Mailchimp wins on templates, integrations, e-commerce depth, reporting and familiarity. It loses on a free plan that cannot run a real list, on charging for unsubscribed contacts, and on holding advanced automation back for a higher tier.
The verdict
If you write to an audience and your list is under ten thousand people, choose Kit. You will pay nothing, you will send as much as you like, and its automation is built for exactly the sequences you need. Mailchimp cannot compete with free, and its extra features are features a newsletter does not use.
If you sell products, especially online, choose Mailchimp and pay for it. Kit's segmentation cannot follow a customer through a purchase, and its e-commerce integrations stop early. The free plan is not worth the ceiling you would be buying into.
If you are somewhere in between, a service business with a growing list and no shop, start on Kit's free plan while you build the list, and move only when a specific missing feature costs you more than the subscription would. Put your real subscriber count into the calculator above, and see the wider field in our UK email marketing comparison or our Mailchimp alternatives guide.