The real cost of an emailing tool is not its subscription: it is the contact list you must keep in step from somewhere else.
A dedicated emailing platform does its job on sending very well. The friction sits elsewhere, and it is structural: the contact list lives in one tool, the clients in another, the signups in a third. So you install a sync, which works until the day it fails silently — and three months later you find that some subscribers never received anything. When forms, client records and mailings live in the same account, that class of problem disappears, not because it is handled better but because there is nothing left to sync.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
From the forms and client records in the same account. A signup therefore reaches the list the moment it happens, with no connector and no periodic import, removing the gap between signing up and receiving a first message.
A form submission, an appointment booking, a stage reached in the CRM. Automations start from real business events rather than a date picked in advance, which produces messages arriving when they mean something to the person.
From the data already in the account, including form answers. So you segment on what people actually stated rather than a hand-applied tag, and the list updates itself as the data changes.
On servers located in the European Union, with a GDPR module recording consents and handling erasure requests. On an address file built in Europe, consent traceability is the point you regret not settling at the start.
ThingsMail is included from the Essential plan. Dynamic segments belong to the Pro plan: we say so here rather than at signup, because it is often the very feature that motivates the switch and is better known beforehand.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes, by importing your current export file. Take the opportunity to bring across only still-active contacts: a trimmed list improves deliverability more than any technical setting, and this is the one moment when that cleanup is easy.
No. Start with messages triggered by a form or an appointment, where the gain is immediate, and keep your regular campaigns where they are while you compare. A single full switch exposes deliverability with no need.
They are handled by the GDPR module, with consent tracking and erasure requests in the same place as the mailings. That avoids the classic case: someone unsubscribes in one tool and still receives messages sent from another.
We describe neither the features nor the pricing of another vendor, which change without notice to us. This page sets out the criteria to examine and Thingsform's answers. For the other tool, its current terms are authoritative.
Mailchimp is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.