Nectazo vs Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the default. It has been around since 2001, nearly everyone has used it, and for a lot of businesses it is genuinely the right answer. This page is not an attempt to talk you out of it — it is an attempt to be specific about where the two differ, so you can tell quickly whether Nectazo is worth your time.

The short version: Nectazo is built for people who sell things and want their catalogue inside their email, run more than one brand, and would rather hit a wall than get a surprise invoice. Mailchimp is broader, older and connects to far more other software.

What each costs

Mailchimp bills by contact count, and every plan's headline price is for its smallest tier. The prices below are the starting price on each plan.

Those headline prices are for 500 contacts, and Mailchimp's climbs steeply with your list. The useful question is what the same list costs on each — and because Mailchimp's Essentials plan allows ten sends per contact, its send allowance lands on almost exactly the same number as ours at two of our tiers. That makes a genuine like-for-like possible.

At 2,500 contacts, Nectazo Starter and Mailchimp Essentials give you the same list size and the same 25,000 sends a month, for $19 against $45. At 10,000 contacts it is $49 against $110, again for the same sends. Standard costs more and allows a slightly larger send multiple.

Both of us discount for paying yearly, and it is worth comparing those too rather than the monthly figures alone. Mailchimp takes 15% off on lists of 10,000 or more, bringing Essentials to $93.50 a month; Growth paid annually works out at $40.83 a month.

One difference the price alone hides: on Essentials, automations are capped at four steps. Every paid Nectazo plan has unlimited automations, and Growth adds branching ones.

What counts as a contact

This is where email pricing surprises people, and it is worth being exact. On Mailchimp, subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your monthly limit; cleaned, pending, archived and deleted contacts do not.

Nectazo counts the contacts you can actually email: subscribed, plus anyone awaiting double opt-in confirmation. Unsubscribed, bounced, complained and cleaned contacts are kept in full and cost nothing.

That is deliberate rather than generous. Keeping your unsubscribes is the thing that stops somebody being mailed after they opted out, so it is what we tell you to do — and charging for those records would push anyone near their limit to delete exactly the ones worth keeping. A limit you cannot use is not a limit, it is a bill.

What happens when you go over

Here the two genuinely differ, and it is the difference worth understanding before you pick either.

Mailchimp charges you. In their words, if you go over the contact or send limit for your tier they charge for “an extra, smaller set of contacts and email sends called an add-on contact block”, and going further incurs charges for multiple blocks.

Nectazo stops you. Limits are hard caps, not metered overage — there is no way to spend more than your plan's price by accident, because there is no mechanism to bill you for it. A campaign is counted against your remaining allowance before it leaves draft, so if the list is too big for what is left you find out then, with nothing sent, rather than halfway through a send.

What Nectazo does that Mailchimp does not

• Your product catalogue inside your email. Connect WooCommerce or Shopify and drop real products into a campaign. Prices are read from the catalogue when the email is sent, not copied in when you build it, so a price change upstream fixes every unsent email at once. Images are cached to our own storage rather than hot-linked, so a big send does not fire thousands of requests at your web host.
• Several brands on one account. Growth carries 3 brands and Pro is unlimited, each with its own sending identity, contacts, templates and catalogue. If you run more than one shop, that is one bill instead of several.
• Landing pages on your own domain, included. From Starter up, with your forms on them, live product prices, and a report showing which traffic converted. Connect a subdomain you own and they are served from it — see landing pages.
• AI that is included rather than an add-on. Subject lines, rewriting, image generation, and a whole landing page from a brief. Every plan carries a token allowance, shown in the sidebar as you spend it.

Where Mailchimp is the better choice

Plenty of cases, and it would be a waste of your time to pretend otherwise.

• You need it to talk to something specific. Mailchimp's integration directory is enormous and two decades deep. Nectazo has WooCommerce, Shopify, a WordPress plugin and a REST API. If the thing you need is not one of those, Mailchimp probably already has it and we probably do not.
• You need a team in the tool. Mailchimp sells seats — 3 on Essentials, 5 on Standard, unlimited on Premium — with roles to match. Nectazo is built for one operator or a very small team.
• You want everything under one roof. Mailchimp also does SMS, ads, social posting and websites. Nectazo does email, automations, forms and landing pages, and nothing else.
• Somebody else has to approve the choice. Nobody has ever had to justify picking Mailchimp. We are new, and that is a real cost to you, not just to us.

Moving across

Export your audience from Mailchimp as a CSV and import it — see contacts. Bring the unsubscribes with you: they import as unsubscribed and are excluded from every send, which is the whole point of carrying them over rather than starting clean. Nectazo also reads a status column, so a Mailchimp export maps across without editing.

Verify your sending domain before the first campaign — sending domain walks through the three DNS records. Sending from a verified domain you own is what keeps a list warm through a move; sending the first campaign from an unverified one is the usual way a migration goes badly.