Email marketing software is a valuable tool for every business with an online presence. They enable you to send promotional or transactional emails to thousands of email addresses at the click of a button. Without an email marketing tool, you’ll find it difficult and time-consuming to create and send even the simplest marketing emails.
There are endless examples of email marketing tools, such as MailChimp and Flodesk. MailChimp is the most popular email marketing platform, with 13 million users globally, and the first name most people will remember when you talk about email marketing. Flodesk is a less popular tool with just over 30,000 users.
We want to see how Flodesk, the underdog, stacks against MailChimp, the giant. We’ll compare them based on critical factors like features, pricing, customer support, and performance. After reading this review, you can see our previous MailChimp review for more information.
Features
MailChimp is a web-based, software-as-a-service platform. It enables you to craft and send emails to as many subscribers as you have. MailChimp offers various templates designed by professionals to help users create visually-appealing emails– you can choose a template and edit it to fit your tastes, and you’re good to go. If you want to create your email from scratch, MailChimp offers a drag-and-drop builder that lets you do that with ease.
You can build a new email list with MailChimp or import an existing list. To import, download the email list as a CSV file, upload the file to MailChimp, and the platform will extract the email addresses automatically. To build a new list, you can create and embed forms on your website – any email address inputted on the web form will be automatically added to your email list.
Flodesk offers templates designed by professionals to help users create visually-appealing emails, just like MailChimp. Yet, we observed that Flodesk offers a wider variety of templates, and they seem to be more appealing in general than MailChimp’s. Flodesk really focused on offering creative templates to differentiate itself from bigger competitors like MailChimp.
Likewise, Flodesk lets you create and embed forms on your website to gather email addresses. It provides templates to help users create the type of forms that’ll likely draw people’s attention.
Performance
MailChimp is primarily a web-based tool, but it offers mobile apps (iOS and Android) that enable users to manage their email campaigns on the go. These apps are convenient for use, but they don’t offer the full set of features you’ll find on MailChimp’s web-based interface.
Flodesk is exclusively a web-based tool. It doesn’t offer a mobile app of any kind, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to MailChimp.
MailChimp fits a lot of features into a user-friendly interface that you'll likely find easy to navigate. We enjoyed using its drag-and-drop email builder because it lets you create emails similar to how you'll build a website. User-friendliness is one of the main appeals of choosing MailChimp.
Yet, Flodesk offers a better user experience than MailChimp. The interface is less cluttered and feels more interactive. The platform was obviously built with the user experience as a critical consideration. Because Flodesk was founded in 2019, it gained a competitive edge by taking advantage of new web technologies that improve the user experience. In contrast, MailChimp was founded in 2001 and has to deal with a lot of technical debt when trying to improve its user experience– it still offers a good interface, but not as good as Flodesk.
Support
MailChimp provides direct customer support through email, live chat, and telephone. However, the support channels available to you depend on the plan you choose. Only the most expensive premium plan comes with telephone support, but all others include email and live chat support. MailChimp offers email support for free users for the first 30 days of their use, which we consider a good gesture.
You can access the MailChimp help center, which contains an extensive collection of user guides and tutorials to help users navigate the platform. There’s also an official marketplace where you can hire vetted MailChimp experts to aid your marketing efforts.
Flodesk offers direct support for customers via email. The company says its support team is available from 8 am to 8 pm eastern time (US) and typically responds to queries within two business days. There's also a support group hosted on Facebook (Flodesk Insiders) where customers can interact and exchange solutions to their problems.
Flodesk doesn’t offer live chat or telephone support, which puts it at a significant disadvantage compared to its rival. MailChimp is the clear winner in this category.
Pricing
MailChimp offers a free version that anyone can use, but Flodesk doesn’t. The free version of MailChimp supports a maximum of 500 subscribers, so you’ll have to pay for anything above that.
MailChimp offers three premium plans; Essentials for $11 / £11 / AUD$16 per month, Standard for $17 / £17 / AUD$25 per month; and Premium for a high $299 / £299 / AUD$499 per month. Essentials supports 5,000 monthly emails to 50,000 subscribers, Standard supports 6,000 monthly emails to 100,000 subscribers, and Premium has no limits on emails or subscribers.
Flodesk charges a fixed fee of $38 / £38 / AUD$58 per month to use its email features. Using its checkout features (sales pages, payments, transactions) costs a separate $38 per month, but you can combine email and checkout for a discounted price of $64 / £64 / AUD$98 per month.
The fixed fee of $38 per month gives you unlimited access to all of Flodesk’s features, unlike MailChimp where that’ll cost a high $299 / £299 / AUD$499 per month. Hence we think Flodesk offers a better bang for your buck.
Verdict
Both MailChimp and Flodesk are effective email marketing tools with their pros and cons. MailChimp offers a much broader feature set and better customer support than Flodesk. Flodesk offers a better user experience and is more economical.
We think big enterprises with significant marketing budgets will be best served by MailChimp and the platform’s extensive feature set. Flodesk is best suited for small enterprises with limited marketing budgets and needs.
