In this post we will be comparing these two popular email marketing solutions in depth, to see which of them best meets your business’ needs. 🙂

We will look at…

• Pricing and value for money
• Quality of templates
• Key features
• Ease-of-use
• The main pros and cons of both products   and more.

And by the end of the comparison, you’ll have a much clearer idea of which product is for you.

Let’s dive in with a basic question: what do GetResponse and Mailchimp actually do

Please Note: this is a lengthy content you can use this navigations to scroll straight to the topic that interest you most 

What do they do?

GetResponse and Mailchimp are email marketing tools that allow you to:

• Create (or import) a mailing list and capture email addresses onto it
• Design HTML e-newsletters (emails containing graphics, photos and brand elements) that can be sent to your subscribers
• Automate your emails to subscribers via ‘autoresponders’
• Monitor statistics related to your email marketing — open rates, clickthroughs, forwards and more

Over the past couple of years, GetResponse has evolved into more of an ‘all-in-one’ marketing solution, offering website building and e-commerce tools. It also provides some features which are not to be found in Mailchimp, namely:

• Webinars
• Conversion funnels
• Chat functionality
• Push notifications

But Mailchimp is also increasingly aiming to be an all-in-one ‘marketing platform’ that offers e-commerce and website building functionality in addition to email marketing features — and has changed its pricing model accordingly.

I’ll discuss both products’ new ‘all-in-one’ approach in more depth later in the comparison.

Before that however, let’s discuss something that’s really integral to both Mailchimp and Getresponse, and a feature that historically they’ve been best-known for: autoresponders.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at pre-defined intervals – for example, you can set them up so that:

• Immediately after somebody signs up to your mailing list, they receive a welcome message from your business
• A week later they receive a discount code for some of your products
• Three weeks later they receive an encouragement to follow you on Twitter and Facebook.

And so on.

The idea is that a huge chunk of your email marketing gets automated – so that once you’ve set things up correctly, subscribers will automatically receive key messages from your business without you having to bother sending out e-newsletters manually (although you can still do this as and when required).

The above example of an autoresponder cycle is typically called a ‘drip’ campaign, where e-newsletters are triggered by time intervals.

However, autoresponders are increasingly being used in more sophisticated ways by businesses, with messages being triggered by opens, clicks, purchases, web page visits, abandoned orders and more.

And when set up correctly, they save a huge amount of time and have the potential to generate significant income.

So what’s the autoresponder functionality in GetResponse and Mailchimp like?

Let’s find out.

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Autoresponders – M vs G

Getresponse and Mailchimp both provide extensive autoresponder functionality — some of the best in the business.

Both products offer a similar set of autoresponder triggers to choose from — subscription to a list, opens, clicks, purchase mades, URLs visited and user data changes all can be used to kickstart an autoresponder cycle.

For example, with both tools, you can trigger autoresponders by:

• E-newsletter action — for example, when somebody opens or clicks a link on an email you send, they can be automatically added to a particular autoresponder cycle.
• Purchases — if somebody buys a product from your website, you can use this information to trigger an email broadcast in GetResponse or Mailchimp.
• Page visits – if a subscriber visits a particular page on your site, you can send them an email a few seconds later.

• Data changes — i.e., when somebody changes their details on your list.

• Date and time — for example, you can send automatically send messages x minutes or days after sign up, or on birthdays.

In short, both products are really strong when it comes to autoresponder functionality — the range of triggers available to you is very extensive.

For a while now, GetResponse has been letting you manage email automation via a ‘flowchart’-style journey creator — it’s very sophisticated stuff, which you can get a sense of from the screenshot below — and it’s not too hard to set up.

You basically map out a set of rules for GetResponse to follow — these are based on user action. So, for example, if a user clicks a link on a particular email, they are taken down one path; if they don’t, they go down another.

Not to be outdone, Mailchimp recently added a similar ‘journey builder’ tool that also lets you create similar subscriber journeys.

This is broadly comparable in terms of features with the GetResponse automation builder — but I’d argue that GetResponse’s feature offers slightly more in the functionality department.

This is because unlike Mailchimp’s, you can use it to create ‘loops’ — so if a subscriber gets to a particular point in the journey without taking an action, you can send them back to the beginning of the journey — or somewhere else on it.

You can also use GetResponse’s journey builder to trigger ‘push notifications’ — where users see a message from you in their browser after taking a particular action.

The Mailchimp journey builder interface is ‘cleaner’ than the GetResponse one, however — and a bit easier to use.

Overall, both tools offer really strong autoresponder functionality; Mailchimp wins on usability, but when it comes to features, the winner is GetResponse.

Pricing

Mailchimp pricing

There are 4 plans available for Mailchimp. In order of expense, these are:

• Free — a cut-down version of the product that works with a list of up to 2,000 subscribers

• Essential — starting at $11 per month to send emails to a list up to 500 subscribers in size

• Standard — starting at $17 per month for a list up to 500 subscribers in size

• Premium — starting at $299 per month for a list up to 10,000 subscribers in size.

GetResponse pricing

With GetResponse, there are five plans available — again, in order of expense, these are:

A free trial, lasting 30 days, is also available — you can access it via this link.

What about discounts?

If you are prepared to pay upfront for your GetResponse account, there are some sizeable discounts available that can make the platform a substantially cheaper option for you than Mailchimp. Paying upfront for a year entitles you to an 18% discount; paying upfront for two years results in a 30% discount.

No yearly discounts are available for Mailchimp, although you can get a 10% discount for 3 months if you enable its two-factor authentication security setting (a 15% percent discount is also available to verified charities and non-profit organisations too).

You can read more about the GetResponse discounts on its pricing page.

Users / seats

Mailchimp is slightly more generous than GetResponse when it comes to the number of users (or ‘seats’) that you can associate with its cheaper accounts.

Its entry-level ‘Essentials’ plan gives you 3 seats; its ‘Standard’ plan gives you 5.

This contrasts positively with the equivalent GetResponse limits, which are 1 seat on the ‘Basic’ plan, 3 on ‘Plus’.

As for the more expensive plans, GetResponse gives you 10 seats on the ‘Professional’ plan and up to 500 on ‘Max.’ With the Mailchimp ‘Premium’ plan, an unlimited number of seats is available.

Free plans

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp offer entirely free plans.

In the case of GetResponse, you can use its free plan to send an an unlimited number of emails to a list of up to 500 subscribers in size.

Mailchimp lets you host a larger list for free — one up to 2,000 subscribers in size — but limits you to sending 10,000 emails per month to it (i.e, if you had 2,000 subscribers on your list, you could send 5 newsletters to it per month).

Both plans are generous and very useful for users who wish to send occasional emails to a small list.

However, emails sent using either free plan feature advertising on them, which, whilst reasonably subtle, does makes them look slightly less professional in appearance.

And, as you might expect, the free plans don’t provide all the functionality that you’d find on a paid one. The most significant omission with regard to both products is autoresponder functionality — you can only really use the GetResponse and Mailchimp free plans to send ‘one-off’ emails.

GetResponse’s free plan is a bit more functional than Mailchimp’s, however.

Significantly, it lets you use all the professionally designed e-newsletter templates — Mailchimp restricts you to using a couple of basic designs only.

GetResponse’s free plan also lets you use custom HTML in your emails, meaning that you can code your own templates; Mailchimp’s free plan doesn’t facilitate this.

Ultimately, both free plans are pretty generous for what they are — a way to build an audience and send basic newsletters free of charge. Mailchimp’s has the edge on list size, and GetResponse’s wins on features and send limits.

You can learn more about the Mailchimp free plan here, or access the GetResponse free plan here.

Key differences between the paid-for plans

The key differences between Mailchimp plans to watch out for are the ability to code your own templates and access to all the key features of the new journey builder (notably branching points, pictured below) — these are only available on the more expensive ‘Standard’ plan or higher.

If you plan to use your Mailchimp account in conjunction with Facebook or Google to create retargeted advertising aimed at your subscribers, you should note that this feature is also only available on the ‘Standard’ plan or higher too.

And, if professional segmentation options, comparative reporting and multivariate testing are important to you, you should note that these features are only available on the expensive $299 ‘Premium’ Mailchimp plan. (I’ll go into more depth on segmentation in a moment).

The key differences between the GetResponse tiers involve access to webinar functionality and the marketing automation builder — arguably the two standout features of the platform.

You only get comprehensive access to these on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher. And the limits that apply to how many participants can attend a webinar, or how many automation ‘workflows’ you can create vary by plan (the more you pay, the more you get, basically).

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Templates

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp offer a good range of email templates that you can use as a starting point when designing your e-newsletters.

In terms of quantity, GetResponse offers a few more: there are around 135 GetResponse templates to Mailchimp’s 85 or so.

As for quality, I slightly prefer the GetResponse templates — they are more contemporary in nature.

It’s important to note that with both products, you don’t need to use one of the supplied templates — you can use your own HTML code in both GetResponse and Mailchimp to design your own (note however that you will have to be on a more expensive ‘Standard’ plan if you intend to do this in Mailchimp).

Mailchimp also offers some ‘premium’ templates that you can buy — there are around 45 to choose from, and they range from $6.99 to $14.99 in price (to be honest though, I don’t think the quality of these is sufficiently high to justify using them over the standard Mailchimp ones).

You can also buy additional templates for both platforms from a third-party supplier like Theme Forest.

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Interface

The user interfaces offered by GetResponse and Mailchimp are quite different – Mailchimp opts for a very minimalistic sort of approach, with lots of big fonts (on big spaces) being employed to present menus, stats and data. And icons, rather than text, are used in menus.

It’s quite distinctive and some users will probably appreciate the ‘big and bold’ approach.

GetResponse, by contrast, provides a user interface that is based more around traditional drop-down menus.

Neither system is particularly hard to use — personally I marginally prefer the GetResponse interface because you don’t seem to have to scroll or click quite so much to get at particular features or data.

In Mailchimp, all the big fonts employed mean a lot of stuff is ‘below the fold’, particularly on laptops – it makes for a clean interface but one where screen ‘real estate’ is not always efficiently used.

That said, I have found Mailchimp’s interface to be more robust — I’ve occasionally come across the odd glitch on GetResponse; nothing serious, but Mailchimp’s back end seems just a little bit more reliable and less buggy.

Both back ends are in general fine though really – it’s mainly a case of personal taste here.

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Editing email designs

Drag-and-drop

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp allow you to edit your templates using ‘drag-and-drop’ style editors.

These editors are fairly similar in concept, in that they allow you to lay images and text out in a manner that suits you without resorting to any HTML coding.

However, I’d argue that as things stand, Mailchimp’s email editor is slightly better than the GetResponse one.

It’s just a little bit more ‘solid’ and unlike Getresponse’s editor, it lets you define ‘global styles’ for your templates. This means that with Mailchimp you can set things up so that every time you add an image, it has curved borders; every time you add a text block, it’s always in a particular font etc.

With GetResponse, you have to tweak the settings for each component every time you add one.

Web fonts

Both Mailchimp and GetResponse let you make use of web fonts in your e-newsletters.

However, the selection of web fonts provided in Mailchimp is extremely limited — only a very small number of Google Fonts can be used, and really boring ones at that (they look so similar to web safe fonts that you might as well use the web safe ones!).

With GetResponse, the options are much more extensive — you can use tons of Google fonts in your emails.

Given that Google fonts are widely used in web design, this will help a lot of users keep a greater degree of brand consistency between their sites and their email newsletters.

So when it comes to web fonts, it’s currently a win for GetResponse.

Mobile-friendly emails with GetResponse and Mailchimp

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp let you create mobile-friendly versions of your e-newsletters, and preview the mobile version as you do so.

Responsive design is used by both products to do this, which follows best practice and ensures that your messages will look great on any device. A thumbs up to both products here.

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Split testing

An important feature of email marketing solutions is split testing. This allows you to try out a variety of subject headers and/or content on some sample data (for example, 10% of your list) before automatically sending the best-performing version to the remainder of your list.

If you are using very small lists, this feature is not particularly essential, because for statistical reasons split testing is only worth doing on relatively large lists — but anybody intending to do big mailouts will find that split testing functionality can improve open rates significantly.

GetResponse lets you use either subject headers or newsletter content in split tests.

Mailchimp lets you use newsletter content variants, subject headers, different sender names and send times in its split tests — so long as you are on a paid-for plan.

On its ‘Essentials’ and ‘Standard’ plans, Mailchimp allows you to split-test 3 different versions of your email; GetResponse’s limit on all plans is 5.

It’s important to note that with both products, you can only use one variable at a time during a split test. For example, you can test two emails with different subject headers against each other — but both versions of the email must have the same content.

If this sort of split testing doesn’t meet your requirements, then you might consider Mailchimp’s ‘Premium’ plan, which lets you test 8 variants of your e-newsletters against each other — and mix and match variables. However, the costs for this are significant — a minimum of $299 per month.

Because of the more generous limit on variants that can be used in split tests, it’s a win here for GetResponse.

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Creating data segments in GetResponse and Mailchimp

GetResponse and Mailchimp both allow you to create data segments easily enough — you can use a variety of filters to identify subscribers based on particular criteria and save them.

However, GetResponse beats Mailchimp hands down when it comes to sending e-newsletters to your segments.

This is because the basic version of Mailchimp only allows you to send e-newsletters to one segment at a time, whereas GetResponse lets you send them to as many as you like.

For example, if you had a mailing list about guitars with three pre-existing segments in it, ‘red guitar owners’, ‘blue guitar owners’ and ‘green guitar owners’, and you wanted to send an e-newsletter to the red guitar AND blue guitar owners in one go, you could do this in GetResponse really easily — you’d just tick the relevant red and green segments and hit send.

By contrast, in Mailchimp, to achieve the same thing you’d have to create a brand new segment containing red guitar owners OR blue owners.

More work, and more segments cluttering up the place!

Similarly, Mailchimp only allows you to send e-newsletters to one list at a time. Although it IS usually best practice to consolidate your data into one list and populate fields to flag data types, there are nonetheless occasions where you may end up working with subscribers which are stored in multiple lists.

In GetResponse, this isn’t a problem — you can send e-newsletters to multiple lists at once.

And finally, excluding segments is much easier in GetResponse — once you’ve picked your list of recipients, you can simply tick the segments or lists that you want to exclude from the mailout.

If you want more advanced segmentation options, you can get these in Mailchimp but you’ll need to be on a very expensive ‘Premium’ plan.

GetResponse’s more flexible approach to both segmentation and list management is, in my view, one of the strongest reasons for using it over Mailchimp — possibly the strongest.

So, if segmentation is important to your business, the obvious choice here is GetResponse.

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Reporting

Reporting on both Mailchimp and GetResponse is very comprehensive: you can track all the usual things like delivery rates, open rates, clickthroughs and unsubscribes, but you can also drill down into the data much further.

For example, you can look up somebody on your mailing list and get an overview of what lists they are on; their location; IP address; and what emails they’ve previously opened.

This is all very useful data for understanding your audience and informing your future marketing strategy — if rather Orwellian!

One reporting feature in Mailchimp that I really like is its ‘engagement stats’ panel. As the name suggests, this shows you the percentages of your subscribers who engage often, occasionally or rarely with your e-newsletters.

Furthermore, it allows you to email them really easily — you just click a little paper plane icon and you can send them a message immediately.

You can identify and mail your most engaged subscribers in GetResponse too; however, it’s a slightly more manual process involving creating a segment of people with a high engagement score.

GetResponse’s reporting system has an excellent feature which is not present in Mailchimp however: its automatic creation of emailable ‘groups’ — based on more precise user action — after a mailout is sent.

After an email broadcast, GetResponse will show you several segments of contacts who took specific actions — you’ll see groups of people who opened your email, did not open your email, clicked your email but did not meet a goal etc. — and you can mail them all again really easily. This is extremely useful for sending quick reminders or follow-up offers to relevant contacts.

Mailchimp does let you see this information too — but in order to create segments from it you’d need to export and reimport the data, using new ‘flag’ fields to manually create your segments.

This is unnecessarily fiddly — and, as discussed earlier, you’ll quite possibly run into some headaches with emailing these segments, because Mailchimp is so restrictive in this area.

All in all though, the reporting functionality in both Mailchimp and GetResponse is very comprehensive — either tool will let you get a very complete overview of how your e-newsletters are performing.

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Integrations

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp integrate with a wide range of other services – you will need to check their websites for an exhaustive list, but services like Paypal, BigCommerce, Facebook and Shopify are examples of the kind of services catered for.

I have found that, in general, Mailchimp tends to be more of a ‘default’ option than GetResponse for many services (Squarespace and Facebook being prime examples), and GetResponse seems to rely quite a lot on a third party syncing tool, Zapier, for many of its integrations (which makes them a bit longer to set up and involves more configuration).

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Facebook ads in Mailchimp and GetResponse

Both Mailchimp and GetResponse differentiate themselves from many of their competitors by allowing you to manage Facebook ad campaigns directly from their platforms.

So, if you’re somebody who likes to work on all aspects of a marketing campaign in one place, you may find this functionality handy.

You can set up basic ad campaigns using the standard set of Facebook demographics (i.e., create simple ads that target users who are aged X and interested in activity Y).

More useful perhaps is the option to connect your Mailchimp or GetResponse account to Facebook, which will then — in its trademark big-brother way — examine the email addresses on your list and show ads to anybody on your database with a Facebook account (this is called a ‘custom audience’).

When you’ve connected your accounts, your lists can also be synced with your Facebook account, meaning that Facebook will automatically start showing the ads to any new subscribers (i.e., in addition to the people who were on your list when you connected your accounts).

Be careful though — GDPR rules mean that using custom audiences — which effectively means sharing user data with Facebook — can be risky from a legal point of view (at least where EU users are concerned).

So do your due diligence and obtain relevant subscriber permission first before using these features!

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Adding a sign-up form to your website

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp allow you to design sign-up forms and grab a snippet of code which you can add to embed a form on your website.

With GetResponse, the design options are a bit more extensive — you can make use of a wider range of typefaces on your form and you can choose from a range of pre-designed form templates (some good, some cheesy).

Neither platform is great when it comes to giving you fine grain control over your forms, however — you can’t specify for example whether or not a pop-up form should appear on mobile devices (some site owners prefer not to use pop up forms on mobile devices, as doing so can have a negative impact on a site’s performance in search results).

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Landing page creation

A landing page creator allows you to make use of various templates and a drag and drop editor to create a landing or ‘squeeze’ page which improves the sign-up rate to your list.

These are distraction-free sign-up pages that are designed to improve sign-up rates. A/B testing is often used to test different versions of landing pages against each other, in order to identify the best-performing ones and use these to maximize the number of sign-ups.

Landing pages in Mailchimp

Mailchimp lets you use landing pages on all its plans — even the free ones.

However, as things stand, this functionality is a bit limited: no A/B testing is included, and only a few templates are available.

Landing pages in GetResponse

In GetResponse you get comprehensive landing page functionality: hundreds of responsive templates, automatic A/B split testing, countdown timers and free stock photography are all included with this feature.

The landing page designer could be better from a usability point of view — it’s a bit clunky and fiddly to use — but it is ultimately a powerful tool that allows you to do considerably more with landing pages than Mailchimp.

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Two-factor authentication

Both Mailchimp and GetResponse facilitate two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication requires you to not only enter a password at login, but also to verify your identity as an account owner by entering in a second piece of information — for example, a code sent by SMS to your phone.

Given the emphasis placed by GDPR on the importance of data security, it’s good that both products cater for this.

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The biggest differences between GetResponse and Mailchimp: webinars, conversion funnels, chats and push notifications

So far, I’ve compared features that are common to both GetResponse and Mailchimp. However, there are 4 tools in GetResponse which you won’t find an equivalent for in Mailchimp.

These are:

• webinars
• conversion funnels
• live chat
• push notifications.

Let’s take a quick look at them.

Webinars

With GetResponse ‘Plus’ plans and up, you get something that is not included in Mailchimp’s feature set at all: the ability to host webinars.

Webinars are commonly used as a way to generate business leads, with businesses offering access to webinar content in exchange for an email address.

Now normally, this involves using two apps — one for hosting the webinars, and one for managing your email marketing.

But GetResponse has been very clever here by offering a webinar feature as part of its email marketing offering. And it’s an extremely good feature, comparing positively with dedicated webinar products that cost significantly more than GetResponse.

A few GetResponse webinar features worth flagging up as being particularly useful are:

One thing to watch out for is the attendee cap: GetResponse limits this to 100 people on its ‘Plus’ plan, 300 on its ‘Professional’ plan and 1000 on its ‘Enterprise’ plan. And you can’t run ‘paid webinars’ (i.e., where people pay to attend) unless you’re on the ‘Professional’ plan, which is a bit disappointing.

Webinars are not available at all on the cheapest GetResponse offering (its ‘Basic’ plan), but you can pay another $40 or $99 per month to enable this functionality and allow 100 or 500 attendees respectively to tune in.

‘Conversion funnels’

It’s now possible to manage an e-commerce inventory within and sell products directly from GetResponse and to make use of GetResponse’s dedicated conversion funnel feature to automate ad campaigns, data capture, transactions, abandoned cart recovery and more.

You can do similar things with Mailchimp, by using its new ‘online store’ feature, building landing pages and creating customer journeys — but there’s arguably more separate processes involved and slightly more ‘joining the dots’ to do than in GetResponse.

My feeling is that for now, serious e-commerce operators will continue to make use of established platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify to sell products online rather than using a email marketing platform like GetResponse or Mailchimp.

That said, GetResponse’s all-in-one approach has the potential to be useful to some merchants, particularly those starting out, those hosting paid webinars, or those who want to manage as many aspects of a sales process as possible using only one tool.

GetResponse Chats

GetResponse has now added a ‘chat’ feature that, as the name suggests, adds live chat functionality to your website (either one you’ve created via GetResponse’s new website builder feature, or your own existing site). This is available on the ‘Plus’ plan or higher.

To enable GetResponse Chats, you add a snippet of code to your site, which then displays a live chat option to your visitors.

There are lots of contexts where this sort of functionality will come in very useful — so it’s definitely a nice addition to GetResponse’s feature set.

Push notifications

The final GetResponse feature for which there’s not a direct Mailchimp equivalent is its ‘push notifications’ tool.

By adding a snippet of GetResponse code to your site, you can allow visitors to your site to opt in to browser-based notifications (which will you can display to your site visitors in future regardless of what website they’re currently browsing).

You can use these notifications as part of an automated subscriber journey too — for example, 15 minutes after a subscriber clicks on a link in an email about a promotion you’re running, you could display a push notification in their web browser about that particular offer.

This feature is only available on the more expensive ‘Professional’ or ‘Max’ plans, however.

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Customer support

Finally, there’s customer support to consider.

GetResponse used to be a clear winner in this area, because phone, live chat and email support were offered, whereas Mailchimp only offered email or live chat support.

The company recently axed its phone support however — on all plans but their enterprise-level “Max” offering — so now both Mailchimp and GetResponse offer a similar level of support.

Mailchimp provides phone support on its most expensive offering too (the $299+ ‘Premium’ plan).

If phone support is an absolute deal-breaker for you, you might want to take a look at AWeber — one of the few email marketing products that still includes it at an affordable rate.

In terms of the languages that support is offered in, Mailchimp provides its help center articles in English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazilian). Email and live chat support are offered in English, French and Spanish.

The email support provided by GetResponse is available in English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese; live chat is in English only.

I have had more personal experience of GetResponse’s support than Mailchimp’s; and what I’d say on this front is that the live chat support is excellent — and of a significantly higher quality than the email support.

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The pros and cons of GetResponse and Mailchimp

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Reasons to use GetResponse over Mailchimp

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Alternatives to Mailchimp and GetResponse

There are many alternatives to GetResponse and Mailchimp available.

AWeber is a solid if slightly less functional option than these two products, but it features phone support, which some users will find appealing.

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