Brevo
Email, SMS, automation, and CRM priced by sends, with unlimited contacts.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is a marketing and CRM platform for email, SMS, automation, and customer messaging. It targets small and midsize businesses with an affordable all-in-one toolset.
Best known for: Affordable email/SMS marketing with CRM
Key features
- Email marketing
- SMS marketing
- Marketing automation
- CRM and contact management
- Transactional email and API
- Landing pages and forms
Who Brevo is best for
- Teams with large contact lists that want to pay by email volume, not contacts
- SMBs that need email, SMS, and a light CRM in one affordable platform
- Businesses sending transactional and marketing email through one provider
Ideal team: Cost-conscious SMBs and startups (1–50) with big lists but modest send volume who want unlimited contacts and multichannel messaging.
Brevo pricing
Free
$0
- Unlimited contacts
- ~300 emails/day
- Drag-and-drop editor
Starter
$9/per send volume
- No daily send cap
- 5,000 emails/mo
- Basic reporting
Business
$18/per send volume
- Marketing automation
- A/B testing
- Advanced statistics
Costs to watch before you commit
- Paid plans are priced by monthly email volume, exceeding your send allotment forces an upgrade or overage.
- Removing the Brevo logo is a paid add-on (~$11/mo).
- A dedicated IP costs extra, and SAML SSO sits in a pricey enterprise add-on.
- The Sales/CRM platform is billed separately per user on top of the marketing plan.
Brevo pros and cons
Pros
- Priced by emails sent rather than contacts stored, which is the opposite of almost every competitor and much cheaper for large lists
- Free forever with 300 emails a day and no credit card, and it allows unlimited contacts
- Starter at $9 undercuts nearly every comparable platform on entry price
- Transactional email and SMS run through the same account as marketing campaigns
- 4.6 from 3,495 reviews, a large and genuinely reassuring sample
- Includes a CRM, landing pages, and automation rather than selling each separately
Cons
- Removing the Brevo logo from emails is a paid add-on at roughly $11 a month
- SMS credits are sold separately from the plan, so the subscription is not the whole bill
- A dedicated IP costs extra, and SAML SSO sits inside a pricey enterprise add-on
- Exceeding your monthly send allotment forces an upgrade or overage charges
- The interface is functional rather than polished next to Mailchimp or Kit
- The separate Sales and CRM platform pricing adds confusion to what looks like a simple lineup
Brevo review: a closer look
What Brevo is
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is an all-in-one marketing platform covering email campaigns, transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp, automation, landing pages, and a CRM. It came out of the transactional email world rather than the newsletter world, which explains both its pricing model and the fact that developers and marketers often end up using the same account for different jobs. It carries 4.6 from nearly 3,500 reviews, which is a substantial evidence base by any standard.
Send-based pricing is the reason to look at it
This is the single most important thing about Brevo and it inverts how the rest of the category works. Mailchimp, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign and most others charge by how many contacts you store, so your bill rises as your list grows whether you email those people or not. Brevo charges by how many emails you send, and lets you store unlimited contacts for free. For a business with a large but infrequently mailed list, that difference is enormous: a 50,000-contact list that receives one campaign a month costs a fortune on contact-based pricing and very little here. The corollary is that a small list mailed daily may cost more on Brevo than elsewhere. Work out your monthly send volume, not your list size, and compare on that.
The free plan is a real plan
Free forever, no credit card, unlimited contacts, and 300 emails a day. That daily cap works out around 9,000 emails a month, which is more than many small businesses send, and the unlimited contact storage means you can build a list for months before paying anything. It is genuinely one of the more generous free tiers in this category rather than a trial with a countdown. The catch is that free and lower-tier sends carry Brevo branding, and removing it costs about $11 a month as an add-on, which is worth adding to your comparison because most competitors include unbranded sending on any paid plan.
What is not in the subscription
Three things sit outside the plan price and each catches people. SMS credits are bought separately, so a plan that advertises SMS does not include the messages. Removing the Brevo logo is roughly $11 a month on top. A dedicated IP, which matters once you send at real volume and want to control your own sender reputation, costs extra again. None of this is hidden, but the advertised $9 is genuinely $9 only for a business sending branded email with no SMS. Add the pieces you actually need before comparing against a competitor whose sticker price includes them.
How it compares
Against Mailchimp, Mailchimp has the stronger brand and ecosystem and charges by contacts, which makes it much more expensive for large lists. Against ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign is far deeper on automation logic and costs more. Against GetResponse, GetResponse bundles webinars and courses that Brevo does not, and gates automation at $59 where Brevo includes it lower down. Against Omnisend, Omnisend is ecommerce-specific with better store integrations. Against Mailgun or Postmark for transactional email alone, those are more developer-focused. The honest summary: Brevo wins decisively on price for large, infrequently mailed lists, and on having marketing and transactional email in one account.
Who should use Brevo?
A good fit
Brevo fits small and mid-sized businesses of roughly 1 to 100 with substantial contact lists they do not mail constantly, where contact-based pricing elsewhere becomes punishing. It suits businesses that need transactional email alongside marketing, teams wanting SMS and WhatsApp in the same tool, and anyone starting from nothing who wants a free plan that can carry real use rather than expiring.
Look elsewhere if…
Teams whose automation needs are genuinely complex should price ActiveCampaign, which is a different class for branching logic. Ecommerce stores wanting deep Shopify or WooCommerce integration will get more from Omnisend or Klaviyo. Businesses sending high volume to a small list may find contact-based pricing cheaper, so run both models. And anyone comparing on the $9 entry price should add the logo-removal and SMS costs first, since those are separate.
The verdict
Brevo is the value choice in email marketing and the reason is structural rather than promotional: charging by sends instead of contacts means a large list costs nothing to hold, which is exactly backwards from how the rest of the category prices and hugely favorable for the right business. The free plan is real, with unlimited contacts and 300 emails a day. Two adjustments before you compare it against anything else. Calculate your monthly send volume rather than your list size, because that is the number that decides whether Brevo is cheap or expensive for you. And add roughly $11 for logo removal plus whatever SMS you intend to use, since neither is in the subscription.
Top Brevo alternatives
Popular Marketing & Email tools teams evaluate alongside Brevo.
UniqodeDynamic QR codes and digital business cards to connect physical touchpoints to digital experiences
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Systeme.ioAll-in-one platform for funnels, email, courses, and affiliates with a free plan.
RecaptureAbandoned cart recovery via email and SMS for e-commerce stores.
MoosendLow-cost email marketing and automation known for value.