Choosing the wrong email marketing tool for your business is a real cost, not just an inconvenience. If you are running your website on Squarespace, you have likely weighed the two most obvious options: Squarespace Email Campaigns, the built-in tool, or Mailchimp, the dedicated platform most marketers already know. This comparison cuts through the feature lists and pricing tables to show you exactly where each tool wins, where each falls short, and which one fits your actual needs.
Key Takeaways
- Squarespace Email Campaigns is a strong fit for Squarespace website owners who want simplicity, brand consistency, and an all-in-one setup without a steep learning curve.
- Mailchimp offers far more advanced automation, segmentation, A/B testing, and analytics, making it the better choice for growth-focused marketers.
- Squarespace plans cap sends at 500 to 250,000 emails per month; Mailchimp scales based on contact count with no fixed monthly cap on higher tiers.
- Mailchimp's deliverability infrastructure is more mature and includes dedicated IP options; Squarespace relies on standard best practices.
- For most businesses with ambitions beyond basic newsletters, Mailchimp provides more headroom. For Squarespace-only operations that prioritize speed and simplicity, Squarespace Email Campaigns is a reasonable starting point.
What Squarespace Email Campaigns Actually Is
Squarespace Email Campaigns is Squarespace's own email marketing system, integrated directly into the Squarespace platform. You can use it to capture user data and send email blasts to multiple customers, as well as more individual, personalized emails.
With Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can design, write, and send marketing emails without leaving your Squarespace dashboard. Create newsletters, announcements, launch promos, or nurture sequences using a drag-and-drop editor that works just like building a Squarespace page.
It is only available if you already have a Squarespace subscription. It is an extension of your existing plan, and the cost is added on top of whatever you are already paying for your website.
One important limitation to flag early: one aspect of this platform that is limiting is that Squarespace pushes emails out, but does not bring emails in. Squarespace does not import emails, which is a significant constraint for businesses migrating from another platform.
What Mailchimp Actually Is
Mailchimp's key features include a drag-and-drop email builder with 260+ mobile-responsive templates, AI-powered Creative Assistant for template generation and content optimization, visual automation flows for multi-step email sequences, comprehensive audience segmentation with behavioral tracking, and deep integrations with 300+ platforms including Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, and QuickBooks.
Mailchimp, founded in 2001, is one of the oldest and most popular email marketing platforms, offering a comprehensive set of features for creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns. It is a standalone tool, which means it works with any website platform, not just one ecosystem.
Pricing: What You Actually Pay
Squarespace Email Campaigns Pricing
You can sign up for the cheapest Squarespace Email Campaigns plan for only $5 a month billed annually, though that plan is limited to 500 email sends per month and lacks advanced features such as email automation. The most expensive plan is $48 a month, offering unlimited subscribers and up to 250,000 email sends.
A critical point: there is no limit to the number of contacts you can have on an individual mailing list, but mailing list size cannot override other plan limits. For example, if you have a mailing list with 510 contacts on the Starter plan, that exceeds your monthly send limit and you will not be able to send your campaign to that list.
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp pricing ranges from $0 per month to over $350 per month, depending on your plan and contact count. The Free plan costs $0, Essentials starts at $13 per month, Standard starts at $20 per month, and Premium begins at $350 per month for 10,000 contacts.
One thing to watch: the starting prices are low, but once you factor in how Mailchimp counts contacts, gates features behind higher tiers, and charges separately for SMS and transactional email, the actual cost can run 20 to 40% higher than what the pricing page suggests.
Also note that Mailchimp's free plan contact limit was cut from 2,000 to 250, and automations were restricted in December 2025, with the monthly email cap reduced to 500 emails.
Quick pricing comparison:
| Plan Level | Squarespace Email Campaigns | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid | ~$5/month (500 sends) | $13/month (500 contacts) |
| Mid-tier | ~$14/month (50,000 sends) | $20/month (Standard) |
| Top tier | ~$48/month (250,000 sends) | $350+/month (Premium) |
| Free option | Trial (3 campaigns only) | Yes (250 contacts, 500 sends) |
Automation: Where the Gap Is Most Clear
This is where the Squarespace email marketing vs Mailchimp comparison becomes most consequential for growth-focused teams.
Squarespace Email Campaigns provides a simplified approach, offering basic automation on its Core plan and above. However, these automations are limited to single-step workflows and only three triggers for sending coupons or welcoming new subscribers. This makes Squarespace ideal for users seeking straightforward, no-frills email marketing solutions integrated with their Squarespace website.
Mailchimp delivers a more robust suite of automation features, including multi-step workflows, about 45 automation triggers, and advanced segmentation options. These features empower users to create complex, behavior-based campaigns and personalized communications.
Common Mailchimp automation templates include welcome series for new subscribers, abandoned cart recovery for ecommerce, post-purchase follow-ups, birthday and anniversary campaigns, and re-engagement sequences for inactive subscribers.
If your strategy involves a proper welcome email sequence or behavioral drip campaigns, Squarespace's automation depth will hit a ceiling fast. Mailchimp's multi-step flows give you far more room to work.
Segmentation and Personalization
Mailchimp offers audience segmentation with about a dozen conditions, such as campaign activity, automation activity, or signup source, allowing you to set up new segments in just a few clicks and send targeted emails to select subscribers.
Advanced Mailchimp segments combine different conditions to sort contacts in nested groups, with a top-level condition required that shares its logic with the groups that follow it. On Premium, there is no limit to the number of conditions you can apply.
Squarespace, by contrast, offers only basic list-level targeting. Squarespace is somewhat limited in advanced email marketing functionalities like segmentation, A/B testing, and lacks the depth of automation features that more seasoned marketers may require.
For anyone implementing serious email list segmentation strategies, Mailchimp is the clear tool of choice here. Segmented campaigns consistently outperform unsegmented ones, and Squarespace simply does not provide the segmentation granularity to execute them properly.
Analytics and Reporting
Mailchimp wins the analytics comparison decisively. The reports you get with Squarespace Email Campaigns are so simple they tell you next to nothing. You cannot see which links people clicked, and you certainly cannot compare campaign results. All you can see are basic stats such as how many people received, opened, or clicked a link in your emails.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, includes:
- A/B and multivariate testing
- Click map reporting
- Revenue attribution for connected stores
- Behavioral data and contact ratings
- Comparative campaign analysis
With Mailchimp, businesses can use detailed analytics, A/B testing, and many integrations, enabling a deeper understanding and engagement with their audience.
If you take email marketing analytics seriously and want to optimize based on real data, Squarespace's reporting will frustrate you quickly.
Design and Ease of Use
This is where Squarespace earns genuine points.
Squarespace emails can automatically match the look and feel of your website. Squarespace pulls in your logo and color palette, so your campaigns feel like a true extension of your brand without the extra design work.
Squarespace offers a solid selection of sleek email templates. Squarespace Email Campaigns also provides complete brand consistency between your email newsletters and your site.
Mailchimp has 260+ templates and a more flexible drag-and-drop editor, but the brand-sync experience is not as seamless unless you have a Mailchimp-hosted website.
Squarespace extends its intuitive interface from website building to email marketing, offering a simple, easy-to-navigate environment that lets you craft and launch campaigns quickly. Mailchimp is more feature-dense, which means there is more to learn before you can use it efficiently.
Deliverability
Mailchimp wins for superior email deliverability, with advanced algorithms and monitoring capabilities giving it an edge, especially for commercial senders. Squarespace follows email best practices but cannot match Mailchimp's optimized deliverability infrastructure.
Mailchimp offers a private IP for just $29.95 per month, which is exceptional value compared to other email service providers, most of which charge hundreds of dollars for this feature.
Squarespace's use of shared IPs rather than dedicated IPs can also limit deliverability for high-volume senders.
That said, deliverability is not purely a platform issue. List hygiene, authentication setup, and email subject line best practices all carry significant weight regardless of which platform you use.
Who Should Use Which Platform
Choose Squarespace Email Campaigns if:
- Your website is on Squarespace and you want everything managed in one place
- You send occasional newsletters to a relatively small list
- Design simplicity and brand consistency matter more than advanced features
- You are just getting started with email marketing and want minimal setup friction
Choose Mailchimp if:
- You need multi-step automation flows and behavioral triggers
- You run an ecommerce store and need abandoned cart, post-purchase, or product recommendation sequences
- You want granular segmentation and A/B testing
- You manage a large or growing list and need detailed analytics to improve performance
- You use multiple platforms and need broad integrations
Squarespace Email Campaigns is an excellent choice for businesses that want a simple, unified solution for their website and email marketing needs, while Mailchimp stands out for its advanced features, vast integrations, and flexibility, making it a potent tool for businesses focused heavily on email marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you use Mailchimp with a Squarespace website?
Yes. There are various email platforms available that can integrate with your Squarespace site, and you can easily integrate Mailchimp into your Squarespace site. The integration takes only a few minutes and lets you collect subscribers from your Squarespace forms while managing all email marketing inside Mailchimp.
Is Squarespace Email Campaigns free?
There is no official freemium plan, but you can try Squarespace Email Campaigns as part of their free trial with no time limit. During this unlimited trial period, you can only send a total of three blast emails, with a maximum of 50,000 sends per campaign. Paid plans start at approximately $5 per month billed annually.
Does Squarespace Email Campaigns have A/B testing?
No. Squarespace lacks A/B testing and advanced email marketing functionalities like in-depth segmentation. If A/B testing is part of your strategy, Mailchimp's Essentials plan and above include it, and the Standard plan adds multivariate testing.
How does Mailchimp's free plan compare to Squarespace's trial in 2025?
Mailchimp's free plan contact limit was cut to 250 contacts and automations were restricted, with the monthly email cap reduced to 500 emails. Squarespace's free trial allows three campaign sends but no subscriber limit per campaign. Neither free option is suitable for an active list, so both effectively require a paid plan for real business use.
