Mailchimp or HubSpot? For many small teams, that may provide enough automation.
Mostly because they do overlap. A lot. Both help you send emails. Both help you organize contacts. Both have automation. Both can grow with you.
But they are not really built from the same starting point.
Mailchimp starts with email marketing. Then adds audience tools, automation, and a lighter marketing CRM layer.
HubSpot starts with CRM and extends to other workflows like building email, automation, sales, service, and reporting around that core.
That difference between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp affects setup processes, costs, and workflow complexity. Even though your team works day to day.
Maybe you want a simpler email tool or something that can be used as a CRM as well as an email tool. Maybe you are worried about cost now, but also worried about outgrowing the cheap option six months from now.
That’s what this guide comparing Mailchimp vs. HubSpot is for.
TL;DR
- Mailchimp offers faster setup, strong email features, useful segmentation, and a lower-cost way to run campaigns.
- Mailchimp’s paid marketing plans start lower, and the product still leans hard into email, testing, and automation flows.
- HubSpot’s free CRM includes contact, deal, and task management, and its marketing tools are built around that shared customer record.
- If sales and marketing need to work from the same system, HubSpot usually makes more sense.
- Often, the bigger problem is getting leads and data to move between platforms cleanly.
- LeadsBridge can help with either one, listing 390+ integrations for both Mailchimp and HubSpot.
An overview of Mailchimp vs. HubSpot
HubSpot vs. Mailchimp at a glance
| Area | Mailchimp | HubSpot |
| Best for | Email-first marketing teams | Teams that want CRM + marketing in one place |
| Core strength | Campaigns, segmentation, testing, automations | CRM, lifecycle data, cross-team visibility |
| Email builder | Strong and easy to use | Strong, with CRM-based personalization |
| CRM depth | Lighter marketing CRM | Much deeper CRM foundation |
| Automation | Strong for email and customer journeys | Stronger for multi-step, CRM-driven workflows |
| Entry pricing | Lower starting point for many teams | Free CRM, but paid growth can get pricier |
| Scalability | Good for growing email programs | Better for complex funnels and team handoffs |
| Integrations | 390+ via LeadsBridge | 390+ via LeadsBridge |
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email-first marketing platform. It gives you:
- Campaign creation
- Templates
- A/B testing
- Segmentation
- Marketing automation flows
Can Mailchimp be counted as a CRM?
It does offer what it calls marketing CRM tools, mainly around audience management, contact data, tags, and segmentation. So yes, it has CRM features, but they are mostly there to support marketing activity.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM-first customer platform. Its free CRM includes:
- Contact
- Deal
- Task management
- Email tracking
- Meeting scheduling
- Live chat
- Sales quotes
HubSpot also layers email marketing, workflows, reporting, and other hubs for sales, service, and content.
HubSpot email vs. Mailchimp
For pure email marketing, Mailchimp is the more natural fit for a lot of teams. You’ll get:
- Templates
- A/B and multivariate testing
- Predictive segmentation
- Behavioral targeting
- Marketing automation flows built around email and audience actions.
Mailchimp also says you can trigger flows from customer behaviors and use pre-built flows or build from scratch.
So if your main focus is newsletters, promos, nurture emails, and basic lifecycle automation, Mailchimp covers those really well.
HubSpot’s email tools include:
- A drag-and-drop editor
- Templates
- A/B testing
- AI writing help
- Personalization using CRM data
The bigger advantage is that in HubSpot, your email campaigns live next to your CRM, forms, contact history, and workflows. That means your emails can react to what people actually do across the funnel.
So what should you pick?
If you care most about ease, speed, and email-first execution, go for Mailchimp. If you care about email as one part of a larger CRM-driven journey, HubSpot is probably a better pick.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of HubSpot email vs. Mailchimp:
| Feature | Mailchimp | HubSpot |
| Templates | ✅ | ✅ |
| Drag-and-drop editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| A/B testing | ✅ | ✅ |
| Build-from-scratch automations | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multivariate testing | ✅ | ❌ |
| Predictive segmentation | ✅ | ❌ |
| Behavioral targeting | ✅ | ❌ |
| Pre-built automation flows | ✅ | ❌ |
| AI writing help | ❌ | ✅ |
| CRM-based personalization | ❌ | ✅ |
| Email tied closely to CRM and sales data | ❌ | ✅ |
| Best for fast, email-first execution | ✅ | ❌ |
| Best for CRM-driven journeys | ❌ | ✅ |
HubSpot CRM vs. Mailchimp
This is where the gap in HubSpot vs. Mailchimp gets wider.
Mailchimp has CRM features and offers them to its users as marketing CRM tools. You can use them to:
- Store contact data
- Build audiences
- Tag contacts
- Segment people based on behavior and preferences.
That works fine for campaign planning and audience management. For many small teams, that may provide enough automation.
But HubSpot’s free CRM goes much further by offering:
- Contact, deal, and task management
- Email tracking, meeting scheduling, live chat
- Sales workflows and sales quotes
You can always upgrade to get more of what you need. For example, HubSpot’s Smart CRM serves as the shared layer across marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.
The tool you choose can change how you work.
With HubSpot, marketing and sales can look at the same contact record with the same lifecycle context. And HubSpot’s automation supports branching logic and segment-based workflows tied to CRM data.
HubSpot mentions these stats about their users:
But if you just need enough contact management to run smarter email marketing, Mailchimp may be all you need. Learn more about how to automate your email marketing here.
And this is what Mailchimp had to say about their superior features:
For a quick overview, take a look at how HubSpot CRM vs. Mailchimp compare below:
| CRM feature | Mailchimp | HubSpot |
| Store contact data | ✅ | ✅ |
| Audience building | ✅ | ✅ |
| Tags and segmentation | ✅ | ✅ |
| Behavioral segmentation | ✅ | ✅ |
| Contact management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Deal management | ❌ | ✅ |
| Task management | ❌ | ✅ |
| Email tracking | ❌ | ✅ |
| Meeting scheduling | ❌ | ✅ |
| Live chat | ❌ | ✅ |
| Sales quotes | ❌ | ✅ |
| Shared CRM for marketing and sales | ❌ | ✅ |
| Best for lightweight marketing CRM | ✅ | ❌ |
| Best for full-funnel CRM operations | ❌ | ✅ |
Mailchimp vs. HubSpot pricing
Pricing is where a lot of teams start filtering out their options.
Mailchimp’s more economical tiers are easier to step into.
For the selected lower contact tier, Mailchimp lists:
- Essentials starting at $13/month
- Standard starting at $20/month
Pricing then scales based on contacts and sends. Mailchimp also has a free plan, though the limits are tighter.
HubSpot also has a free option. Its free CRM is listed as 100% free with no expiration date, including up to two users and 1,000 contacts.
For paid tiers, HubSpot lists:
- Marketing Hub Starter at $15/month per seat on its product page
- Smart CRM Professional starts at $50/month per seat.
But consider the total cost before you make a decision. If you use Mailchimp plus a separate CRM plus extra handoff tools, the stack could need another tool, which also means an added expense and several other workflows.
HubSpot can cost more as you add seats and advanced features, but some teams accept that because it replaces other tools and keeps data in one place.
| Pricing point | Mailchimp | HubSpot |
| Free plan | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pricing scales with contacts | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pricing scales with seats | ❌ | ✅ |
| Easier to start cheap | ✅ | ❌ |
| Better if you want more tools in one platform | ❌ | ✅ |
| Lowest paid entry point | $13/mo | $15/mo per seat |
| Mid-tier starting point | $20/mo | $50/mo per seat |
Mailchimp vs. HubSpot: Which one scales better?
Mailchimp scales well for growing email programs. Especially if you want stronger segmentation, better testing, and more advanced flows without buying into a huge system right away. It is a good fit for lean teams that mostly live in campaign mode.
HubSpot scales better when your funnel has more lifecycle stages, and you want to automate more of it. Because the CRM sits underneath everything, HubSpot is better built for that kind of growth.
So ask yourself, do you need a better email engine, or a broader customer system?
How LeadsBridge can streamline Mailchimp and HubSpot workflows
How do you get lead data into the platform fast enough to actually use it?
How do you keep audiences updated across email, CRM, and paid media?
And how do you prove which campaigns are driving real conversions?
You need automation for all these.
LeadsBridge positions its platform around four things: Lead Sync, Audience Targeting, conversion tracking, and Custom Integration.
Using these data bridges, you’ll get to fix the handoff between ad platforms, lead sources, and the system you picked.
LeadsBridge leans hard into solving exactly that. Its Lead Sync pages focus on moving lead data automatically from sources like Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, Google lead forms, and TikTok Lead Generation into CRM or marketing tools in real time.
Mailchimp integrations
If you choose Mailchimp, LeadsBridge helps close the follow-up gap.
Mailchimp works well when email is the center of your marketing machine. But that setup gets weaker when lead capture happens somewhere else. With LeadsBridge, you get to:
Sync new leads into Mailchimp automatically
Once connected, you can create new Mailchimp subscribers from Facebook lead ads and add subscribers to specific Mailchimp groups or lists.
That turns Mailchimp into a faster response system for your paid lead generation strategy.
Segmenting earlier
LeadsBridge says its Lead Sync feature lets you segment leads as soon as they come in and send them into the next step of the funnel that fits them best.
That is a useful angle for Mailchimp because segmentation is already one of Mailchimp’s stronger points.
The integration then helps you capture leads from ad platforms, send them into the right Mailchimp audience or group, and then trigger the right nurture path faster.
Use Mailchimp audiences beyond email
LeadsBridge’s Audience Targeting product is built around syncing CRM segments, email contacts, or customer lists to ad platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google for retargeting, exclusion, and lookalike audience creation.
So, as a Mailchimp user, you can turn your email audience into a more useful paid media audience too.
That’s how LeadsBridge integrations help Mailchimp act more like a connected growth system.
HubSpot integrations
HubSpot integrations allow you to make HubSpot easier to feed, easier to activate, and easier to measure. With these integrations, you can:
Push lead ad data into HubSpot in real time
HubSpot offers native integrations, but it has partnered with LeadsBridge to offer better integrations.
First of all, LeadsBridge lets you manage your data in real time. Also, if you run ads and use different platforms like invoicing tools or SMS apps, you want to have your integrations in one place instead of different apps.
Automated data bridges let you create new HubSpot records from lead ads, segment them, and more.
That gives you a clean use case for HubSpot. Your generated leads go straight into the CRM, sales or automation can act on them quickly, and your team doesn’t lose time on manual imports.
Turn CRM segments into ad audiences
LeadsBridge has dedicated HubSpot-to-Facebook custom audiences integrations that sync contacts based on HubSpot lists, forms, deals, lead status, and deal-stage history.
That means teams can build retargeting and exclusion audiences from actual CRM data instead of static uploads.
You can also connect other audience targeting tools, such as Facebook custom audiences, Google Customer Match, and LinkedIn Matched Audiences, for much better lifecycle marketing.
Connect campaign performance back to revenue signals
LeadsBridge also positions conversion tracking tools like Facebook Conversions API, TikTok Conversions API, and LinkedIn Conversions API.
These integrations are ways to pass conversion data from CRM, email software, or ecommerce platforms back into ad platforms for attribution.
HubSpot already stores richer lifecycle and sales data. So you don’t just capture leads in HubSpot, but use CRM data to improve reporting and campaign optimization too.
Still not convinced? Here are the top HubSpot alternatives.
Mailchimp vs. HubSpot: FAQs
1. What is the main difference between Mailchimp and HubSpot?
Mailchimp is mainly an email-first marketing platform with audience and marketing CRM tools. HubSpot is a CRM-first customer platform with email, automation, and broader cross-team features built around the CRM.
2. Which platform is better for small businesses?
It depends on what the business needs. Mailchimp offers better email marketing automation for small businesses that mainly want email campaigns and simpler setup. HubSpot is better for small businesses that need a real CRM and want sales and marketing working from the same system.
Takeaways
Choose Mailchimp if:
- Your team is mostly focused on email marketing
- You want faster setup
- You want lower starting costs
- You do not need deep sales pipeline management
Choose HubSpot if:
- CRM is a major part of the decision
- Sales and marketing need shared visibility
- You want more workflow logic tied to customer records
- You are planning for a more complex funnel
And know that a disconnected stack cannot really give you the results you are looking for. A platform is only as useful as the data getting into it.
Ready to build cleaner, faster workflows around the platform you choose?
Discover LeadsBridge integrations for Mailchimp.
Discover LeadsBridge integrations for HubSpot.
