The biggest difference between Mailchimp and Omnisend is what they optimize around: Mailchimp is built as a broad, all-in-one marketing platform that starts with audience management and a marketing CRM mindset, while Omnisend prioritizes ecommerce marketing automation where messaging is tightly connected to shopping behavior and can run across channels like email, SMS, and web push. If you need one centralized hub for campaigns and contact data across many marketing motions, the orientation is different than if your primary goal is revenue-driving lifecycle messaging from store activity.
That tradeoff exists because Mailchimp’s product bets emphasize keeping audience data in one place and turning those insights into campaigns through segmentation, contact profiles, and journey building, whereas Omnisend evolved from an ecommerce-focused email tool (founded in 2014 as Soundest, rebranded in 2017) into an omnichannel automation suite with deep integrations into ecommerce platforms and real-time syncing. In practice, Mailchimp’s “audience-first” model pushes breadth and centralized marketing workflows, while Omnisend’s “store-data-first” model pushes tighter commerce context and channel orchestration.
What hinges on this difference is how your lifecycle engine is designed: whether you treat email as one part of a broader marketing hub, or as an extension of your commerce stack where automation depth, behavioral segmentation, and omnichannel reach are core. The rest of this comparison unpacks the stakes in automation logic, cross-channel coordination, how much operational overhead comes from integrations, and how directly each platform turns customer and purchase signals into messaging decisions.