Mailchimp is usually the first email tool a church tries. Someone on staff or a volunteer used it at work, the free plan gets you started, and the editor is polished. Plenty of churches run on it happily.
But a lot of church admins end up searching for “Mailchimp alternatives” after a few months, and it’s usually not because Mailchimp is bad. It’s because most church email isn’t marketing. It’s the same handful of announcements, sent again every week, to the same people.
Full disclosure: we make Hey Church, one of the tools below. We’ll be straight about where it fits and where something else, including Mailchimp, is the better call.
Where Mailchimp Fits Churches Well
Mailchimp earns its reputation. It’s a strong choice if:
- You have a comms person who enjoys design. The template editor is flexible, and you can build a newsletter that looks exactly the way you want.
- You send real campaigns. A capital campaign, a conference with ticket sales, or a donor appeal with landing pages and forms are the kind of thing Mailchimp is built for.
- You’re a registered nonprofit on a paid plan. Mailchimp offers a 15% discount for verified nonprofits on paid marketing plans. You have to request it before you buy, and U.S. organizations need to add their EIN.
If that’s your church, you may not need an alternative at all.
Where Churches Start Looking Elsewhere
The friction usually shows up in three places.
1. Church announcements repeat. Campaigns don’t. The fall retreat gets announced for five weeks. The volunteer sign-up runs all month. In a campaign tool, each of those is a new email you build and send again. That’s fine once. By week four, it’s the part of Monday nobody wants.
2. The free plan is small, and scheduling is a paid feature. Mailchimp’s Free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a daily cap of 250. According to Mailchimp’s pricing page, email scheduling isn’t included on Free, so every send happens when someone clicks the button.
3. The vocabulary is business vocabulary. Audiences, journeys, conversions, e-commerce. None of it is wrong, but a part-time church secretary has to translate all of it into “tell the church about the potluck.”
Mailchimp Alternatives Worth Considering
There’s no single best replacement. It depends on how your church communicates.
| Tool | Built for churches? | Strongest at | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hey Church | Yes | Announcements that repeat on a schedule | Churches re-announcing the same things week to week |
| Flocknote | Yes | Email and text together, members choosing their groups | Larger churches with many ministries |
| Text In Church | Yes | Text messaging and visitor follow-up | Churches whose people answer texts, not email |
| Constant Contact | No | Events and RSVPs, long nonprofit history | Churches already using it for events |
| Planning Center email | Yes (part of your ChMS) | Emailing people already in Planning Center | Quick one-off notes to lists you already keep there |
Hey Church
Hey Church is built around one idea: you write an announcement once and it goes out on a rhythm you choose, weekly, every 2 weeks, or monthly, for as long as it needs to run. You can also set a single send for later. Weekly, every-2-weeks, or monthly announcements and Send later are included on every plan, including Free. You add people by hand, by CSV upload, with a QR join link people scan on Sunday, or with a one-time import from Planning Center (first name, last name and primary email).
Honest limitations: It’s deliberately not a marketing suite. No landing pages, no e-commerce, no open-rate dashboard yet. Planning Center import is one-time, not a live sync, so you re-import when your list changes. If you want a heavily designed newsletter, Mailchimp’s editor does more.
Flocknote
Flocknote combines email and text, and its standout feature is letting members subscribe themselves to the ministry groups they care about. That self-service model is genuinely useful for big churches and parishes with lots of groups.
Honest limitations: Pricing scales with congregation size.
Text In Church
If your people read texts and ignore email, Text In Church leans into that, and its visitor follow-up workflows are a real strength.
Honest limitations: Email is the secondary channel. Detail-heavy announcements with dates, links and sign-ups get cramped over text, so many churches pair it with an email tool.
Constant Contact
A long-running email platform with solid event and RSVP tools and a long track record with nonprofits. Many churches inherit an account that’s already set up.
Honest limitations: It shares Mailchimp’s core mismatch: it’s built around campaigns rather than recurring announcements.
Planning Center’s built-in email
If you already use Planning Center, its email tools can reach people you already keep there, without adding another system.
Honest limitations: It’s a feature inside a church management system, not a dedicated announcement tool. Many admins use it for quick notes and something else for the weekly announcement. (We wrote more about that in Planning Center Has Your People.)
How to Decide in Ten Minutes
Open your sent folder from the last month and count two things.
- How many emails were re-announcements of something you’d already announced? If it’s most of them, pick a tool that handles repetition for you. If almost every email is a one-time campaign, Mailchimp or Constant Contact may suit you fine.
- Who actually sends them? A volunteer with 30 minutes a week needs fewer steps more than more design options. A dedicated comms person might want the design control.
Then test with your real announcements, not a demo. Import your list, set up the two or three things you announce every week, and see what Monday morning looks like after a couple of weeks.