Alternatives to Mailchimp

Mailchimp was acquired in 2021 by Intuit Inc., a US company headquartered in Mountain View, California. This subjects Mailchimp to the CLOUD Act (2018) and the Stored Communications Act. Newsletter recipient lists, open rates and click data are personal data under the GDPR. When this data is processed in the United States, an additional legal review is required. Mailchimp operates data centers in the US; EU data residency is not the default.

Mailchimp stores recipient IP addresses, device and browser data, and uses click and open tracking delivered through external pixels. The Bavarian data protection supervisory authority (BayLDA) found in a 2021 case that the use of Mailchimp without sufficient supplementary measures was not GDPR compliant, since personal data was transferred to the United States. The Schrems II ruling (2020) is the legal basis for this assessment. European providers process this data within the EU.

Mailchimp has changed its pricing model several times since 2022. The free tier is limited to 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly sends; Essentials starts at around $13 per month, Premium from $350 per month. For larger lists costs scale more than proportionally. European alternatives such as rapidmail charge per sent email, Brevo offers a free plan with 300 sends per day, CleverReach has a 250-recipient free tier, and Keila is open source and self-hostable without license fees.

European providers specialise in the German and French market and offer features important for local compliance: rapidmail and CleverReach provide standardised data processing agreements under Art. 28 GDPR without a Schrems II risk analysis. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a French company that integrates CRM, newsletters and transactional email. Keila is an open-source newsletter platform from Germany that can be operated entirely on your own servers.