Sendly vs Mailchimp

The short version

Mailchimp is a marketing suite. Its centre of gravity is the dashboard: someone in the business writes a campaign, picks an audience, and sends it, and the developer is rarely in the loop.

Sendly's centre of gravity is the API. Campaigns, segments, templates and workflows exist as first-class objects with a published REST contract behind them, so the same things can be driven from a script, from CI, from your product's own admin screen, or from an AI agent — as well as from the dashboard.

That difference cuts both ways, and it is the honest thing to lead with. If the people who send your marketing email do not write code and never want to, a suite built around them is a reasonable answer. If your marketing email is increasingly triggered by product events — an account went inactive, a plan changed, a trial is ending — then it belongs next to your transactional sends, on the same contact record, and that is the case for Sendly.

What Sendly does not do

Stated plainly, because finding this out three weeks into a migration is the worst way to find it out. Sendly is an email platform, not a marketing suite. It has no equivalent for:

• Landing pages, signup form builders, or hosted microsites.
• Social posting, digital ads, or postcards.
• An e-commerce storefront integration that syncs products and orders on its own.
• A CRM with deals, pipelines or sales tasks.
• SMS, push, or any channel other than email.

What it does instead is the email part, properly, with an API around all of it: contacts with custom fields, dynamic segments that re-evaluate themselves, reusable templates, one-off campaigns, automated workflows with branching, and transactional sends from your application — all on one contact database and one bill.

Moving is an import, not a proxy

Sendly speaks the transactional-send dialect of five providers, so moving from those is a base URL and a key. Mailchimp is not one of them, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon: there is no compat endpoint that accepts Mailchimp's campaign or audience API shape.

A move looks like this instead, and the first three steps are the ones that carry risk:

1. Export your audience from Mailchimp as CSV and import it into Sendly, mapping merge fields onto Sendly custom fields. Contact counts in the millions are a normal size here, not an enterprise conversation.
2. Export your unsubscribes and cleaned addresses, and load them into Sendly's suppression list BEFORE you send anything. This is the step that protects your sending reputation, and it is the one people skip.
3. Verify your sending domain. Guided DNS setup can publish the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for you and then keep watching them for drift, so this is usually minutes rather than a ticket.
4. Rebuild the templates you actually still use. In practice this is far fewer than the number in the account, and it is a good moment to delete the rest.
5. Recreate the automations you actually still run, as Sendly workflows. Branching on contact fields and on tracked events is the same idea under a different builder.
6. Send to a small internal segment first, read the delivery and engagement data back, and only then point the real audience at it.

Every step above is an API call as well as a screen, so the whole thing can be scripted if your audience is large or your merge-field mapping is fiddly. The API reference is the complete list.

What Sendly does

Sendly is one workspace for transactional email, marketing campaigns and automation, against one contact database. Everything below is in the product today, not on a roadmap.

What Sendly costs

There is no monthly platform fee and there is no plan to outgrow. A free tier, metered usage that gets cheaper as volume rises, and a conversation for anything past that.

The free tier is a real tier, not a trial: it does not expire, and nothing about it is time-limited. Its allowance is shared across transactional sends, campaigns, workflows and inbound mail, because Sendly meters emails rather than products.

What to check on Mailchimp's side

We do not publish Mailchimp's prices or limits here. They change without telling us, and a stale number on this page would be the one thing on it you could catch us being wrong about. These are the questions worth answering from their own documentation before you move anything.

• What does the bill look like at your actual monthly volume, and at ten times it? Flat plans and metered curves cross over somewhere; find where.
• Are transactional sends and marketing sends billed and rate-limited from the same allowance, or two?
• Is there a contact-count charge on top of the send charge, and does an unsubscribed contact still count?
• What happens on the day you exceed the plan — a hard stop, an overage rate, or an upgrade prompt?
• Can you export your contacts, templates and suppression list in full, without asking support?
• Is there an API for everything the dashboard can do, and is the contract published?

Questions people ask

Does Sendly charge per contact?

No. Sendly meters emails sent, not contacts stored. A large list that you mail rarely costs what you send to it, and an unsubscribed contact sitting in your database costs nothing at all.

Can I import my Mailchimp audience?

Yes, by CSV or through the API, with merge fields mapped onto Sendly custom fields. Import your unsubscribes and cleaned addresses into the suppression list in the same pass — that is the step that protects your sending reputation, and it is the one most often left until after the first send.

Do Mailchimp automations transfer?

Not automatically. Sendly workflows are a different builder, so an automation is recreated rather than imported. The concepts line up — a trigger, branching on contact data or a tracked event, a wait, a send — so the translation is usually mechanical, but somebody has to do it.

Can a non-developer send a campaign in Sendly?

Yes. Campaigns, templates and segments all have dashboard screens, and sending a campaign does not require touching an API. The difference from Mailchimp is that everything those screens do is also in the REST contract, so it can be automated later without a workaround.

Is transactional email included, or is that a separate product?

Included, on the same allowance. Sendly meters emails rather than products, so transactional sends, campaign sends, workflow sends and inbound mail all draw on one free allowance and, past it, one per-thousand curve. The plan table on this page has the current figures.