Originally called Roving Software, Constant Contact was created in 1995 by Randy Parker to level the playing field between small businesses and their larger competitors. Since then, it helped make digital marketing more accessible and affordable to small businesses.

Constant Contact provides over 200 customizable templates and a drag-and-drop editor to design visually appealing email campaigns without any coding knowledge. Users can add images, videos, tables, and even product catalogs from online stores. Not only does it offer contact list management, but it also provides contact generation tools like forms, landing pages, and surveys. It features powerful segmentation tools to create targeted campaigns and automations and detailed analytics to track the performance of email campaigns. Users can monitor metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to measure engagement and make data-driven decisions.

Constant Contact is best for DIY marketers wearing many hats, nonprofits, and organizations that need an all-in-one digital marketing platform.

Mailchimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chesnut and Dan Kurzius as an alternative to the bloated, expensive email software of that era. It offered small businesses access to the same digital marketing tools their larger competitors enjoyed.

Mailchimp provides customizable email templates and a drag-and-drop editor to create and send personalized email campaigns to subscribers. It also offers audience segmentation using subscriber lists, tags, and complex rules, allowing users to create targeted campaigns and automated workflows. Additionally, users can design and publish custom landing pages, forms, and even a full website without any coding knowledge, allowing them to capture leads, promote products or events, and drive traffic to their online stores. Mailchimp provides detailed reports and analytics on email performance, audience engagement, and campaign effectiveness to optimize marketing strategies. Furthermore, it integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento — enabling users to sync customer data, track purchases, and send targeted product recommendations and promotional emails.

Mailchimp is best for large marketing teams with heavy marketing automation needs and intricate omnichannel strategies. That’s why it’s the go-to tool for marketers in eCommerce.

Benchmark Email was created by Curt and Denise Keller in 2004 to help marketers simplify their marketing journey. It is a powerful, yet extremely easy-to-use email marketing automation platform.

Benchmark Email provides an intuitive drag-and-drop email editor and customizable templates to design eye-catching emails without coding knowledge. The email builder is enhanced by the AI-powered Smart Design, which generates branded emails from your website colors and logos. Benchmark Email also lets users set up automated email workflows triggered by specific events such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and follow-up emails. It allows contact list segmentation based on subscriber behavior, demographics, and preferences to send out personalized content. And, it provides detailed analytics tools that track email performance metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to optimize campaigns.

Benchmark Email is ideal for B2C businesses from various industries, marketing generalists, and other high-volume senders that need a simple but powerful platform for handling large contact lists.

You can try Constant Contact for 30 days after which you’ll have to opt for a paid subscription.

It’s most basic plan — the Lite plan starts at $12/month for 500 contacts and caps out at $430/month for 50,000 contacts and 10x that monthly email sends (so 500,000) but is available only for 1 user. It offers basic email & SMS marketing, welcome email automation, and social media marketing.

The Standard plan starts at $35/month for 500 contacts and 12x the monthly sends and is available for 3 users. It includes all marketing and audience engagement tools. However, you can’t create custom automation paths or use advanced Ads features.

Mailchimp’s free plan lets you send up to 1000 monthly emails to 500 contacts. It includes all core email and SMS marketing tools with limited analytics, pre-built email templates, and segmentation.

The paid plans start at $13/month for 5000 monthly emails to 500 contacts. The Premium plan offers 300 times more monthly sends and unlimited users. Like Constant Contact, the total cost for each plan depends on the number of contacts. Like Constant Contact, the total cost for each plan depends on the number of contacts. However, all pricing plans allow you to create a website with free hosting and a Mailchimp-branded domain.

In addition, Mailchimp offers more team seats than Constant Contact for each equivalent plan.
Mailchimp only offers send-based pricing for transactional emails.
The price starts at $20/block for up to 20 blocks. Each block is a credit for 25,000 emails, and its cost reduces as the number of purchased blocks increases. You can also opt for a dedicated sender IP address at $29.95/month to improve deliverability and pass spam detection tests.

Benchmark Email offers three pricing models depending on your business needs.
The standard subscription-based pricing model starts with a Free plan that offers 3,500 emails/mo and up to 500 contacts. The Pro plan starts at $15/mo for 500 contacts and goes up to $499/mo for 100,000 contacts. The number of included monthly sends on the Pro plan is 15x the number of contacts.

Large-volume senders get the most value from the send-based plan, which starts at $39/mo for 10,000 emails. With this model, Benchmark Email’s credits progressively become more affordable as your email volume increases.

Finally, the Pay As You Go pricing,which is coming soon, only charges you when you’re actively sending out emails. It keeps your email list intact when you’re inactive and saves your campaign performance history. This way, you can pick up right where you left off.
Benchmark Email also lets you enhance your experience with add-ons. For example, the List Verification add-on ensures that you have high-quality contacts for just $3 per 1000 contacts. Also, you can host unlimited images, logos, and graphics for only $5/mo or for free with any Pro and Enterprise plan.

Constant Contact offers a simple and intuitive email builder with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it very approachable for beginners. It also offers 200+ templates to get you started quickly. However, it doesn’t offer many styling options when compared to Mailchimp.

In addition to text content, it lets you add images, videos, and even a Read More block that stores collapsed content in your email.

To ensure your email design looks good on all devices, Constant Contact provides a Cross-Device email editor, which uses a click-and-stick method of adding content to your emails. Simply click on the content block and select the section you want to place it within the email.

Mailchimp offers two types of email builders.
The Classic Builder is no longer the default builder but is available for emails created before the New Builder was introduced. You can also set it as the default builder in your account settings.

The proprietary New Builder is much more powerful than Constant Contact’s, offering many more customizations and content options. It offers the same content blocks as the Classic builder, with the exception of the RSS and Share blocks.

However, it includes a survey block that links to any survey you’ve created in your account.
In addition, it provides an Apps block that lets you connect third-party apps and services to your email. For example, you can link to an Instagram account or even preview content from any web page directly in your email.

Unlike Constant Contact, you can add product recommendations or even sell products directly from any email.
When creating an email using the New Builder, you can choose from one of five

• Mailchimp templates — use a pre-built template or use the Creative Assistant to work with your brand assets,
• Saved templates — use an email design that you previously saved as a template,
• Recently sent emails — use one of your recently sent emails as inspiration for a new design,
• Draft emails — use a design you’ve started work on, but haven’t sent,
• Code Your Own — use the classic builder to import a custom HTML template.

Mailchimp lets you style your email differently for desktop and mobile devices. Plus, it offers optimization tips to make your email more engaging and improve click rates.

Compared to the other two, Benchmark’s email builder offers the most intuitive user experience.
That’s because Benchmark Email uses a proprietary email editor which was designed based on user feedback and recommendations. One feature that this tool offers and the others don’t, is the ability to embed previews of websites like Facebook and LinkedIn directly in your email.

Benchmark Email provides several ways to create emails:

• Templates — create emails using one of several customizable pre-built templates,
• Saved campaigns — repurpose previous emails in your new campaign,
• Drag-and-drop builder — create a new email from scratch using the builder,
• HTML code editor — code your email from scratch using HTML,
• Smart Design feature — use Al to create a branded email in seconds,
• RSS email — create an email that automatically sends when a blog is updated.

Like Mailchimp, you can add product purchase blocks to your email, but it also lets you connect to a Shopify store. This way, you can send product recommendations, promotional offers, and even purchase options through your emails.

Benchmark Email uses sections to organize your email content — all sections except the Header and Footer can be reorganized using intuitive Up/Down arrows. It lets you apply a global style to all sections or you can customize each section individually.

When styling your email, you can choose from 27 designed curated color schemes, or set a custom background color. As an alternative, Benchmark Email lets you set up a ‘Brand Kit’ to add logos and color schemes from your own website to the email builder in just a few clicks.

It also includes a built-in image editor that lets you enhance images with effects, stickers, text, and more.

To ensure that your designs match your expectations throughout all devices, Benchmark Email provides desktop and mobile previews. It also includes the Test Email feature, which sends your email campaign to five different email addresses to help you review how emails will look in different mailboxes.

There are around 100 email templates that can serve as starting points for your designs, and you can even cut down email building time with saved content blocks that you can reuse across multiple emails.
The email builder’s highlight feature is the AI-powered Smart Content generator. This tool creates new content or modifies existing content to match your prompt. All you need to do is simply describe what you’d like to see in your email.
Benchmark Email's Smart Design feature works on a larger scale to generate entire emails from scratch.

Constant Contact Contact offers five types of sign-up forms that you can embed in your website:

• inline,
• pop-up,
• banner,
• flyout,
• and WordPress form plugin.

It also offers Facebook and Instagram Lead Ads, allowing you to create forms that target audiences based on their interests, age, location, and more. With this, you simply set a budget and Facebook does the work to get it to the right audience.

Constant Contact forms are fully customizable. You can set the form title and description, and add as many custom fields as you want. In addition, it lets you display the form on a timer or when the visitor moves to exit the tab.

To improve accessibility, you can choose whether to display the form on desktop or mobile devices only or on both.
Forms require you to modify the HTML code for your webpage, but some users are unable to do so. That's why Constant Contact offers sign-up landing pages with URLs you can embed in buttons and hyperlinks.

It offers free hosting for your standalone landing pages and provides a drag-and-drop editor for designing them. Unlike regular sign-up forms, landing pages support images, videos, tables, and other web page content.

Mailchimp’sform builder offers many more customization options than Constant Contact’s. It also includes more form types and web pages, such as:

• signup form,
• confirmation page
• unsubscribe form,
• goodbye email,
• update profile form,
• and forward to a friend form.

You can add custom fields and customize the background color, header image, dimensions, and other style properties. Forms also feature auto-translation, allowing you to set a default language, form text, and even text direction.
Mailchimp also lets you create standalone landing pages that present promotional offers, surveys, sign-up forms, or any other information you choose for your audience.
The landing page builder has similar controls, content blocks, and customizations to its email designer. And, it offers pre-built templates that serve as a starting point for your designs.

Mailchimp allows you to customize the landing page's URL and content preview when you embed the URL in social media. You can also set the audience associated with the landing page and filter them based on custom tags.
In addition to standalone landing pages, Mailchimp offers a full website with a drag-and-drop builder. There's no limit to the number of pages on your website and you can customize how each page animates when a visitor scrolls through it.

The website builder also includes a built-in image editor, which allows you to resize images, add alt-text, embed links, and round corners.
Similar to Mailchimp and Constant Contact, Benchmark Email lets you create embed, flyout, and pop-up forms . And, it includes a Small Embed Form type, which fits into page headers and footers.
In addition to forms, it also lets you create dedicated landing pages.
Landing pages use the same drag-and-drop builder as the email designer but include context-specific content blocks that let you create custom layouts. You can also choose which content to hide or show on mobile and desktop devices.

Unlike other platforms, Benchmark Email offers primary support for polls and surveys. A poll is a single multiple-choice question about a specific topic that shows the answer ratios upon submission.

Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs Benchmark Email: Email Marketing Optimization

Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs Benchmark Email: Marketing Automation

Constant Contact vs Mailchimp vs Benchmark Email: Pros & Cons

Final Verdict: Mailchimp vs Constant Contact vs Benchmark Email

Use Benchmark Email if:

• You need easy-to-use but powerful email marketing software
• You’re a business owner or marketer with a large email list size.
• You want to save time creating emails with AI-generated content.

Click here to get started with Benchmark Email!