Tilly vs Mailchimp

Mailchimp and Tilly overlap less than the search suggests. Mailchimp is a sender with an editor, templates and a contact database, used by Shopify stores for newsletters and a set of automated emails. Tilly writes marketing for Shopify stores and publishes it into Klaviyo; it has no Mailchimp connection and sends nothing itself.

Choose Mailchimp if you want a familiar, broad email tool and your store runs on a regular newsletter plus a few automations. Tilly is the better fit when you want the flows planned and written around who actually buys from you, and you are willing to send through Klaviyo to get them published without copying.

Mailchimp's figures are taken from its marketing pricing page and its Shopify App Store listing, with a source link on every cell. Where Mailchimp prices by a contact slider we show the published starting prices only. The rating rows show Mailchimp's figures alone: we do not quote a rating for Tilly on a page Tilly wrote.

Mailchimp is free under 250 contacts. Its Shopify listing gives starting prices of $13 a month for Essentials, $20 for Standard and $350 for Premium, each rising with contacts, and a 14-day free trial of Standard. The plans differ in more than price: Essentials allows up to 4 marketing automations and Standard up to 200, and monthly sends are capped at a multiple of your contacts, from 10X on Essentials to 15X on Premium.

Tilly starts with 100 free credits and no card, then $49 a month for 500 credits on the Store plan. Credits are used when an agent builds something: 30 for a flow, 10 for a campaign, 15 for a blog post. Looking costs nothing, including the audit, previews and reports.

Because Tilly does not send, a store using it still pays a sender. Today that sender needs to be Klaviyo for Tilly to publish directly.

Tilly wrote this comparison, so the case for Mailchimp comes first. These are things it does that Tilly does not. source, checked 25 September 2026

• Mailchimp sends email itself and offers SMS as an add-on. Tilly sends neither and depends on a separate sender.
• It connects to a very wide range of tools, with 300+ integrations included on every plan.
• Its Shopify app is well reviewed: a 4.8 rating from 1,486 reviews when we checked.
• You can start for nothing and stay free while your list is under 250 contacts, with a real sender and editor, which Tilly's free credits cannot give you on their own.

Mailchimp gives you the tools to build the emails; Tilly builds them. It audits the storefront, reads reviews for the worries customers actually mention, and turns those into personas you confirm. Each flow is then written for one persona, one email per pain point, instead of one generic sequence for everyone.

It is not limited to email. The same profile drives blog posts published to your Shopify blog, ad creative sent to Meta paused, and product page fixes on a preview copy of your theme. A store that finds Mailchimp's automation limits tight on Essentials usually has the same gap in every other channel, and that is the gap Tilly is built for.

It reports on the work, not just the sends. Revenue from a flow is shown against the persona and angle it was written for, so what worked shapes the next thing Tilly suggests.

And it plans the month for you. The email calendar agent proposes next month's campaigns around the holidays in the countries you sell to and your own launches and restocks, each slot with a one-line reason, and the plan itself costs nothing. In Mailchimp that calendar lives in someone's head or a spreadsheet.

Moving from Mailchimp to a Tilly setup means moving your sending to Klaviyo, because that is where Tilly publishes today. Export your audience from Mailchimp with each contact's subscription status, import it into Klaviyo, and keep unsubscribed and cleaned addresses out of the send.

Automations do not transfer between tools. Tilly writes the core flows fresh from your audit, so list the Mailchimp automations you rely on and check each one has a replacement before switching Mailchimp off.

Plan a few weeks of overlap. Warm up the new sending domain on your most engaged contacts first, leave Mailchimp's automations running until Klaviyo's are live, then turn them off one at a time so no customer gets both.