Flodesk vs. Mailchimp: Which email marketing tool is better?

Discover the key differences between Flodesk and Mailchimp, two powerful email marketing platforms. Compare features, pricing, and ease of use to find the best fit.

When it comes to email marketing, choosing the right platform can make all the difference in building meaningful connections with your audience. 

Two of the most popular options on the market today are Flodesk and Mailchimp. 

While both platforms offer a range of features to help you design stunning emails and grow your business, they cater to different needs. 

In this comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between Flodesk and Mailchimp, exploring their strengths and weaknesses so you can determine which platform is the best fit for your email marketing goals. 

Whether you’re prioritizing design, automation, or ease of use, we’ve got you covered!

Flodesk vs. Mailchimp: At a Glance

Here’s a comparison of how Flodesk and Mailchimp measure up against one another.

Criteria	Flodesk	Mailchimp	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	7.35/10	8/10	Mailchimp
Marketing Automation Capabilities	None	Basic automation	Mailchimp
Email Builder	Limited	Intuitive, easy-to-use	Tie
Personalization & Customization	Very limited	Basic personalization	Mailchimp
Campaign Performance Tracking	Basic	Standard metrics	Mailchimp
Email Deliverability	✅	✅	Mailchimp
List Management	Relies solely on segmentation	Simple lists	Mailchimp
A/B Testing	❌	✅	Mailchimp
Advanced Reporting & Insights	Basic reports	Basic reports	Tie
Compliance & Security	✅	✅	Tie
User Experience and User Interface	User-friendly interface	User-friendly interface	Mailchimp
Integrations and Compatibility	Integrations via Zapier	300+ integrations	Tie
Customer Support	Email support; knowledge base	Limited support	Mailchimp
Pricing	Free – $38/mo	Free – $1,600/mo	Mailchimp
Scalability	✅	✅	Mailchimp

Flodesk: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Flodesk is a straightforward and intuitive email marketing platform, perfect for small businesses, creatives, and entrepreneurs.

It comes with a drag-and-drop email builder and visually stunning templates, making it easy for anyone to design professional, branded emails without needing any technical know-how.

Flodesk also includes basic automation features like welcome sequences and follow-up emails triggered by user actions, allowing you to engage leads and keep subscribers involved, all without complicated setups.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Flodesk offers a simple pricing model with one flat-rate plan, providing unlimited access to all features with no subscriber or email send restrictions. A 30-day free trial is available.

Unlike many competitors, Flodesk does not use a tiered pricing system or freemium option.

Instead, it offers the same service to all users for one fixed price, making it perfect for businesses that want predictable costs and access to all features without worrying about extra fees or subscriber limits.

Mailchimp: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing automation platform renowned for its sophisticated features and user-friendly design.

It empowers users, including beginners, to craft engaging emails that effectively attract and convert their audiences.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Mailchimp offers multiple plans to accommodate changing business needs as you scale. Pricing is as follows:

• Free Plan: Limited to 500 contacts and basic email templates.
• Essentials Plan: Starts at $13/month/500 contacts. 
• Standard Plan: Starts at $20/month/500 contacts, up to $800/month/100,000 contacts
• Premium Plan: Starts at $350/month/10,000 contacts, $1,600/month/200,000 contacts, custom pricing for additional contacts.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Flodesk simplifies marketing automation with its easy-to-use interface, allowing users to quickly set up workflows for tasks like welcome emails, lead nurturing, and follow-up sequences.

These automations are triggered by user activities, such as subscribing or filling out a form.

However, Flodesk’s automation features are fairly simple, lacking advanced options like branching logic or multi-channel capabilities (e.g., SMS or social media).

While it does allow for basic dynamic content personalization, its segmentation and behavioral targeting tools are quite limited. 

This makes Flodesk a great choice for users who prefer a no-fuss automation setup without the need for complex features.

Mailchimp’s automation tools allow you to send emails triggered by specific subscriber behaviors, such as abandoning a cart or signing up for a newsletter.

This feature helps streamline your workflow and ensures that subscribers receive relevant, timely communication.

You can create automated email journeys that guide subscribers based on their interactions with past messages.

Mailchimp offers ready-made templates for different scenarios like order notifications, loyalty rewards, follow-up messages after purchases, and reminders for cart abandonment.

These workflows run on preset schedules, requiring little manual effort. Whether it’s a single email or a full sequence, Mailchimp provides flexibility in designing the right automation for your needs.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Email Builder

Flodesk’s email builder is incredibly easy to use, thanks to its drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding skills.

It provides a variety of visually appealing, mobile-friendly templates for different purposes like newsletters and promotions. Users can easily customize their emails by tweaking layouts, fonts, and images.

On the downside, Flodesk doesn’t offer HTML editing, which might be a drawback for users who prefer to code their own templates.

Additionally, it lacks tools for previewing emails across different clients or conducting spam tests, which may impact email deliverability. 

Despite these limitations, Flodesk’s design-centric approach makes it a great choice for creatives and small businesses focused on aesthetics.

Mailchimp simplifies the process of creating email campaigns with a user-friendly guide. It provides a range of templates or allows you to craft your own designs, giving you the freedom to tailor your emails.

Using Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor, you can effortlessly build your email, whether starting from a blank slate or a pre-designed template, without needing any technical expertise.

Every component of your email—from images and videos to social media buttons and text blocks—can be customized to reflect your brand’s identity.

You can tweak fonts, colors, and other design elements to ensure everything aligns with your desired aesthetic.

✅ Winner: Tie

Personalization & Customization

Flodesk provides basic personalization options, allowing users to insert dynamic content like names or locations using merge tags, giving emails a more personalized feel.

However, compared to more advanced platforms, its personalization features are somewhat limited.

Segmentation is easy to manage, enabling targeting based on simple criteria like how a subscriber signed up or their level of engagement.

That said, it doesn’t support more complex features like combining multiple conditions or triggering actions based on detailed behavioral patterns.

While Flodesk’s customization tools are functional and easy to use, they lack the depth and sophistication of more feature-rich platforms.

Mailchimp takes email marketing to the next level with its sophisticated personalization features, allowing you to tailor content according to subscribers’ preferences and previous interactions for a more engaging experience.

The platform’s segmentation capabilities enable you to form specific audience groups based on various criteria, such as behaviors, demographics, or other characteristics.

With Mailchimp’s Segment Builder, you can use predefined templates for common segments like new subscribers or customers, as well as create your own custom segments.

This focused method ensures that your content is delivered to the appropriate customer groups, boosting engagement and enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by targeting the right audience with relevant messages.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Campaign Performance Tracking

Flodesk offers essential email tracking features, such as monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. The reporting dashboard is simple and easy to navigate, delivering real-time data for quick insights.

However, the platform’s analytics are fairly basic, lacking more advanced tracking or detailed analysis options.

One drawback is the absence of A/B testing, making it difficult for users to experiment with different campaign elements.

Additionally, Flodesk doesn’t integrate with third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics, which limits the ability to track conversions and measure ROI.

Although Flodesk’s analytics might not satisfy users looking for in-depth data, it’s a solid option for beginners and small businesses that only need fundamental performance metrics.

Mailchimp offers powerful analytics tools that are perfect for evaluating the success of your email campaigns. It provides comprehensive reports on key metrics like clicks, opens, and conversions, giving you a clear view of what’s effective.

Additionally, the platform compares your results to industry benchmarks, which helps you better understand your audience and fine-tune your targeting for future campaigns.

By reviewing comparative reports, you can enhance your strategies for improved results.

With Mailchimp’s Marketing Platform, you can monitor ROI through metrics such as total revenue, average order value, and order volume.

This analysis helps you identify successful campaigns, detect emerging trends, and spot areas needing improvement, ensuring your data drives impactful decisions.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Email Deliverability

Feedback on Flodesk’s email deliverability has been varied—some users have experienced great success, while others note that platforms like Mailchimp deliver stronger results.

Mailchimp’s performance in email deliverability shows some variability. The 2022 Email Deliverability Report reveals that the platform has a 14% rate of emails landing in spam and an 81% inbox placement rate.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

List Management

Flodesk offers strong subscriber management tools, making it simple to handle contacts either one at a time or in bulk.

You can effortlessly select your entire list or target specific segments, giving you the ability to unsubscribe, delete, or reassign subscribers to new segments in bulk with ease.

Mailchimp’s system provides detailed views of your list, showing insights into subscribers who have yet to confirm their subscriptions, those who have opted out, or contacts marked as “cleaned.”

Deleting a list will remove all associated data, including subscriber history, activity, and email addresses, unless you’ve previously backed up the information.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

A/B Testing

Flodesk’s A/B testing capabilities are quite limited, as they only permit testing of subject lines. Unlike many other platforms, it does not offer the ability to experiment with different email content or sender information.

This limitation could be a drawback for businesses that rely on comprehensive A/B testing to refine and optimize their campaigns.

Mailchimp’s A/B testing feature enables you to experiment with up to 3 variations of your campaign, allowing you to refine your strategy effectively.

You can test elements such as subject lines, content, sender names, and send times, as well as the number of recipients for your test emails.

After setting up your test, you select the metric that defines success, whether it’s based on clicks, opens, or revenue.

For those on the Premium plan, Mailchimp offers multivariate testing, which lets you test up to 8 different campaign variations simultaneously to create highly optimized emails.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Advanced Reporting & Insights

While Flodesk’s reporting capabilities might be less advanced compared to some other platforms, the service is actively evolving.

Recently, Flodesk launched an updated analytics dashboard that provides in-depth insights into email campaigns, forms, workflows, and checkout processes.

This new feature includes visualized data such as charts, graphs, and tables, which assist users in tracking performance, understanding effective strategies, and making necessary adjustments.

Users can also compare metrics across various elements and download reports for more detailed analysis, reflecting Flodesk’s dedication to improving based on user input.

Mailchimp’s marketing analytics tools deliver real-time insights for both email and SMS campaigns, empowering you to make data-driven decisions based on current performance metrics.

The platform’s Content Optimizer offers tailored, AI-powered recommendations to improve your email campaigns by pinpointing effective strategies and areas for improvement, ensuring continued audience engagement.

Additionally, you can create customized reports and visualizations to concentrate on particular revenue and engagement indicators, providing a comprehensive overview of your marketing effectiveness over time.

✅ Winner: Tie

Compliance and Security

Both Mailchimp and Flodesk adhere to GDPR regulations, ensuring that users’ personal data is handled with the highest security standards.

They implement best practices for data privacy and protection, offering tools for obtaining consent, managing data requests, and ensuring transparency in email marketing campaigns.

✅ Winner: Tie

User Interface and User Experience

Flodesk is designed to be user-friendly and accessible, making it an excellent choice for those with limited technical skills.

Its clean and minimalist interface streamlines the process of creating emails. The intuitive layout and user-friendly menus enhance the overall experience, while the drag-and-drop editor and customizable templates simplify the task of maintaining consistent branding.

While Flodesk excels in design and ease of use, it falls short in areas like keyboard shortcuts and customizable dashboards.

Its testing capabilities are also somewhat limited, and the platform does not provide extensive email previews across various devices and clients.

Mailchimp boasts a user-friendly interface that simplifies everyday tasks such as crafting emails and handling contact lists. While basic operations are straightforward, more complex features like automation and segmentation might need a bit of a learning curve.

For easy access, essential tools are organized in the left sidebar, allowing you to manage subscribers, view reports, and start new campaigns with ease.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Integrations and Compatibility

Flodesk supports a wide range of integrations through platforms like Zapier and Pabbly Connect, enabling connections with applications such as Shopify, Facebook, Instagram, Typeform, WordPress, Google Sheets, and Slack.

This facilitates seamless data synchronization and workflow automation.

Mailchimp stands out for its extensive range of integration possibilities, seamlessly connecting with leading platforms across eCommerce, social media, and CRM systems.

Highlighted integrations encompass:

• Analytics: Google Analytics, Facebook, Supermetrics
• Scheduling: Calendly, Jane, Formbuilder
• Contact Management: Shopify, Outfunnel, QuickBooks Online
• Content: Instagram, Twitter
• Payments: Stripe, SamCart
• Marketing: LinkedIn, Mailmunch, Wix

These integrations facilitate smoother workflows and boost email marketing effectiveness by synchronizing data, which in turn enhances engagement and drives conversions.

✅ Winner: Tie

Customer Support

Currently, Flodesk provides support exclusively through email and a comprehensive knowledge base, with no options for live chat or phone assistance. This could be a drawback for users seeking immediate help.

Mailchimp’s support system has its advantages and limitations. For those on the free plan, technical support is restricted to the first 30 days, which can be a challenge for new users who need more comprehensive help.

Once this initial period ends, users only have access to the knowledge base without options for live chat or phone assistance.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Pricing

Flodesk offers a simple pricing structure, where all users receive the same service level and features for a single flat fee. This straightforward approach means there are no tiered plans or additional costs for different functionalities.

Free	Email Marketing		Email Marketing & Checkout
$0	Billed monthly	Billed annually	Billed monthly	Billed annually
	$38	$35	$26	$24

For a contact list ranging from 1,500 to 2,000, Mailchimp offers the following plans:

Free	Essentials		Standard		Premium
$0	Billed monthly	Billed annually	Billed monthly	Billed annually	Billed monthly
	$38	$11	$51	$17	$298

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Scalability

When it comes to scalability, Mailchimp takes the lead over Flodesk due to its flexible, tiered pricing structure.

While Flodesk offers a simple flat-rate plan that grants access to all features regardless of subscriber count, Mailchimp’s pricing adjusts based on the number of contacts and the features needed.

This tiered approach allows Mailchimp to cater to growing businesses with expanding subscriber lists, offering advanced features as they scale.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Standout Features of Flodesk

Flodesk’s stand-out features include: 

• Efficient Sales Funnels: Flodesk enables users to build sales funnels designed to turn visitors into paying customers. The platform provides tools for creating sales pages, handling payments, and delivering products effortlessly. Features such as custom discount codes and strikethrough pricing add a sense of urgency and can increase conversion rates.
• Tailored Sign-Up Forms: Flodesk offers a range of customizable and visually appealing forms to help grow email lists. Users can create on-brand sign-up forms, including pop-ups, landing pages, and inline forms, to effectively capture leads and broaden their audience.

Standout Features of Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers the following notable features:

• Landing Page Builder: The Landing Page Builder in Mailchimp allows you to design landing pages that drive conversions. You can either use pre-designed templates or create custom layouts, easily placing and organizing text, images, and buttons to appeal to specific audiences and boost campaign effectiveness.
• CRM and Contact Management: Mailchimp’s CRM system integrates smoothly with its email marketing features, enabling you to categorize and manage your contacts based on various criteria such as demographics or interaction history. This intuitive CRM facilitates relationship building and provides robust tracking capabilities in an easy-to-use interface.

Flodesk vs. Mailchimp: SMB Guide’s Verdict

In conclusion, Mailchimp takes the win for businesses seeking scalability and advanced features as their subscriber list grows. Its tiered pricing model offers flexibility and customization, making it ideal for companies looking to expand over time. 

On the other hand, Flodesk is perfect for beginners or those who prefer the simplicity of flat-rate pricing without the complexity of additional costs or advanced automation features. 

If you’re after a platform with growth potential, Mailchimp is the better choice, while Flodesk shines for those who value straightforward, affordable email marketing.