AWeber Email Platform
Best for: If you just want to send a newsletter and a few automated follow-ups, AWeber is the less annoying tool to run day to day, and its support desk will actually pick up. Mailchimp still makes sense for one narrow group: people who genuinely use its ad retargeting and social scheduling features and don't mind paying for the rest.
- •Phone and chat support is included on every paid AWeber plan, not locked to a top tier
- •Unsubscribed contacts stop counting against your bill immediately
- •AWeber will migrate your subscribers, tags, and forms for you at no charge
- •Autoresponder setup is predictable and doesn't fight you
- •Mailchimp's ad management for Google and Facebook is genuinely more capable
- •The default Mailchimp templates just look a bit more polished out of the box
- •AWeber's Lite tier locks you to a single list, which is annoying if you segment customers from subscribers
AWeber vs Mailchimp: which one is worth your money?
Mailchimp became a full marketing cloud with a price tag to match. AWeber stayed narrower and easier to deal with — here's how they compare.
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Mailchimp used to be the default answer for "what should I use to send emails." Friendly mascot, generous free tier, everyone's cousin had used it. Since the Intuit acquisition, though, it's turned into something closer to a full marketing cloud, bundling in ad management, social scheduling, and a CRM layer most small senders never open — and the free plan and entry pricing have gotten noticeably worse in the process of building all that.
AWeber didn't chase that trend. It's stayed narrower: send emails, land them in the inbox, keep the support desk staffed. That narrower focus is either exactly what you want or a dealbreaker, depending on what you're trying to do, so we put the two through the same tests — a cold send, a support call, and a look at what each one actually charges once a list stops being tiny.
Getting help is a completely different experience
This is the part people underestimate until they need it. On Mailchimp's cheaper plans, reaching an actual human is close to impossible — you get routed to a chatbot or a community forum first, and live phone support sits behind the Premium tier, which starts around $350/mo and is priced for agencies, not a solo business owner. Email support exists lower down the ladder, but response times on the free and Essentials tiers have been reported at a day or more during busy periods, which is a long wait when a broadcast just went out with a broken merge tag.
AWeber puts phone, chat, and email support on every paid plan, 24/7, with no tier gate. When we called in with a fake DNS authentication question during testing, we had a real person walking through the fix inside a few minutes, and a separate late-night chat session got a specialist instead of a bot within the same couple of minutes. No queue, no bot pretending to understand the problem, no "upgrade to talk to a person" wall in the way.
The way they bill for contacts is night and day
Mailchimp counts unsubscribed contacts against your plan limit unless you go in and manually archive or delete them — a policy that's annoyed enough users to become a running complaint in reviews and forum threads. Someone unsubscribes, or bounces permanently, and you're still paying for the privilege of having ignored them until you remember to clean the list yourself. Mailchimp also merges "contacts" across marketing and transactional use in a way that can inflate your count if you're using it for anything beyond a newsletter.
AWeber only bills for active, subscribed contacts — an unsubscribe drops off your count the moment it happens, no manual archiving required. Its tagging system also lets you split one list into as many behavioral segments as you want without duplicating the contact record, which matters because some platforms (Mailchimp included, if you're not careful with multiple audiences) will count the same person twice if they exist in two segments and bill you accordingly.
Feature Comparison: Head-to-Head
Put side by side, the two tools agree on the basics — both send a newsletter and land it reasonably well — and disagree on almost everything around the edges. The table below covers the differences that actually change which one you'd want to run day to day.
| Dimension | AWeber | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Live Phone Support | Included 24/7 on paid tiers | Only on Premium tier ($350+/mo) |
| Unsubscribed Contacts | Never billed | Billed unless manually archived |
| Free Migration Service | Yes (forms, tags, subscribers) | No (DIY or hire certified partner) |
| Web Push Notifications | Built-in | Not available natively |
| Affiliate Marketing Policy | Permitted with proper disclosures | Strictly restricted / high ban risk |
The Verdict
Mailchimp still wins if you actually use its Facebook and Google retargeting tools alongside email — that's a real feature AWeber doesn't try to compete with. But for a business that mostly wants a newsletter that lands in the inbox and a person to call when it doesn't, AWeber is the one we'd set up first.
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