Quick Verdict: Brevo scores 7.8/10. It is the most affordable multi-channel marketing platform available in 2026 — email, SMS, CRM, and live chat starting at $9/month. The email-volume pricing model means you pay for sends, not contacts, which saves serious money if your list is large. Automation and templates lag behind specialists like ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp, but the sheer breadth of built-in channels at this price is unmatched.
| Your situation | Our recommendation |
|---|---|
| Need email + SMS + CRM on a budget | Brevo — no other platform bundles all three this cheaply |
| Large contact list, moderate send volume | Brevo — email-volume pricing saves you money |
| Advanced automation is critical | Consider ActiveCampaign instead |
| Need 200+ templates and plug-and-play design | Consider Mailchimp or AWeber instead |
| Want the simplest email tool possible | Consider MailerLite instead |
| Multi-channel: email + SMS + WhatsApp + chat | Brevo — only platform with all four built-in |
How We Researched This
What we verified directly:
- Pricing and plan details from brevo.com/pricing, cross-checked March 2026
- Feature availability per plan: email limits, automation capabilities, CRM, SMS, chat, and WhatsApp confirmed against official documentation
- Free plan limitations verified: 300 emails/day cap, 100,000 contact storage, Brevo branding inclusion
What comes from third-party reviews:
- G2: 4.5/5 from 2,315 reviews — sub-ratings for ease of use, customer support, and feature depth collected from G2’s product page, March 2026
- Community sentiment: we reviewed common praise and complaint patterns across review platforms to identify recurring themes
- Competitor comparisons: Mailchimp, MailerLite, and ActiveCampaign pricing and features verified against their respective pricing pages in March 2026
Brevo has an affiliate program. This review was written independently. We did not receive product access, payment, or promotional consideration from Brevo. All pricing and feature claims are sourced from publicly available information.
Pricing
Brevo uses a volume-based pricing model — you pay based on the number of emails you send per month, not the number of contacts you store. This is a fundamental difference from Mailchimp, MailerLite, and most competitors that charge per subscriber.
Why this matters: if you have 50,000 contacts but only send 20,000 emails per month, Brevo charges you for 20,000 emails. Mailchimp would charge you for 50,000 contacts regardless of how often you email them.
Brevo Pricing Table (March 2026)
| Emails/month | Contact limit | Starter | Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 500 | $9/mo | $18/mo |
| 10,000 | 1,500 | $17/mo | $35/mo |
| 20,000 | Unlimited | $29/mo | $65/mo |
| 40,000 | Unlimited | $39/mo | $75/mo |
| 60,000 | Unlimited | $55/mo | $89/mo |
| 100,000 | Unlimited | $69/mo | $129/mo |
Source: brevo.com/pricing, verified March 2026.
Key pricing details:
- Free plan: 300 emails/day (~9,000/month), 100,000 contacts, basic automation, CRM, live chat. Brevo branding on all emails.
- Starter ($9/mo+): removes daily sending limit, adds basic reporting and email support. Brevo branding removal is an add-on at ~$10/month.
- Standard ($18/mo+): full visual automation builder, A/B testing, advanced reporting, no Brevo branding.
- Professional ($499/mo+): WhatsApp campaigns, push notifications, advanced reporting. This is a significant jump — most small businesses will not need this tier.
- Enterprise: custom pricing for high-volume senders.
How Brevo Compares on Price
At 20,000 emails/month, Brevo’s Starter plan costs $29/month. Mailchimp’s Standard plan for 20,000 contacts (their comparable tier) costs significantly more — and Mailchimp charges you even for unsubscribed contacts that remain on your list. MailerLite’s Growing Business plan for 20,000 subscribers costs $139/month but includes unlimited emails.
The pricing model you prefer depends on your sending pattern. If you email your entire list multiple times per month, MailerLite’s unlimited-email model may be cheaper (see our Brevo vs MailerLite comparison for specifics). If you have a large list but send infrequently, Brevo’s volume pricing wins by a wide margin.
Multi-Channel Marketing: Brevo’s Biggest Differentiator
This is where Brevo separates itself from every competitor at this price point. Most email marketing platforms do one thing: email. Brevo bundles seven communication channels into a single platform:
- Email marketing — available on all plans including free
- SMS marketing — available on all plans, charged per message (pay-as-you-go)
- WhatsApp campaigns — Professional plan only ($499/month and above)
- Live chat widget — available on all plans including free
- Chatbot — available on all plans
- Meeting scheduling — available on all plans
- VoIP phone — available on all plans
To get email + SMS + live chat + CRM from competing platforms, you would typically need to subscribe to three or four separate tools. With Brevo, it is all included from the free plan upward (except WhatsApp, which requires the Professional tier).
Important distinction on WhatsApp: SMS is available on all plans. WhatsApp campaigns are only available on the Professional plan at $499/month and above. These are not the same thing — do not assume WhatsApp access comes with lower-tier plans.
The practical value here is consolidation. One dashboard, one contact database, one reporting interface for email, SMS, chat, and phone. For a small business managing marketing across multiple channels, this reduces tool sprawl and keeps customer interaction history in one place.
Email Editor and Templates
Brevo provides a drag-and-drop email editor that handles standard newsletter and promotional email layouts. You can build emails from scratch or start with one of 40+ pre-designed templates.
The template library is small. Mailchimp offers 260+ templates and AWeber provides 600+. If you rely heavily on pre-built designs and want variety without hiring a designer, Brevo’s library will feel limited. The templates that do exist cover common use cases — welcome emails, product announcements, newsletters, promotions — but the selection is noticeably thinner than what larger competitors offer.
AI content generator is available on Starter plans and above. It can generate subject lines, email body copy, and suggest improvements. This is a useful feature for small teams without dedicated copywriters, though the output typically requires editing before sending.
A/B testing is available only on the Standard plan ($18/month and above). On the Starter plan, you cannot split-test subject lines or content variations. This is a meaningful limitation — A/B testing is essential for optimizing email performance over time, and locking it behind the Standard tier pushes serious email marketers to the higher plan.
The editor itself is competent. Drag-and-drop blocks, mobile-responsive layouts, and custom HTML editing for advanced users. It will not win design awards, but it gets the job done without a steep learning curve.
Marketing Automation
Brevo’s automation capabilities depend heavily on which plan you choose.
Free and Starter plans include basic automation — simple triggers like welcome emails, birthday messages, and basic if/then workflows. You can set up autoresponders and simple sequences, but you will not get the full visual workflow builder.
Standard plan ($18/month and above) unlocks the full visual automation builder with branching logic, A/B testing within workflows, and more advanced trigger conditions. This is where Brevo’s automation becomes genuinely useful for marketing sequences, lead nurturing, and behavioral targeting.
How does Brevo automation compare?
Honestly, it is basic compared to automation specialists. ActiveCampaign offers 750+ automation templates and 135+ trigger types (see our Brevo vs ActiveCampaign comparison for the full breakdown). Brevo’s automation is functional but simpler — fewer pre-built templates, fewer trigger options, and less granular conditional logic.
For businesses that need “send welcome email, then wait 3 days, then send follow-up” types of workflows, Brevo handles it fine. For businesses that need complex multi-branch automations with lead scoring, predictive sending, and deep behavioral triggers, ActiveCampaign or HubSpot are better choices — at a significantly higher price.
The trade-off is clear: Brevo gives you basic-to-moderate automation bundled with SMS, CRM, and chat for $18/month. ActiveCampaign gives you best-in-class automation for $49/month and above, but without SMS, chat, or a built-in CRM.
Built-in CRM
Brevo includes a CRM on every plan, including the free tier. This is unusual — most email marketing platforms either do not have a CRM or charge extra for it.
What the CRM includes:
- Contact management — store and segment contacts with custom fields and tags
- Deal tracking — create deals, assign values, and move them through pipeline stages
- Pipeline management — visual pipeline view with drag-and-drop deal management
- Task management — assign tasks and reminders linked to contacts and deals
- Activity tracking — see email opens, clicks, and interaction history per contact
What it does not do:
The CRM is not a replacement for HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive. It lacks advanced features like custom reporting dashboards, territory management, forecasting, and deep third-party integrations that dedicated CRM platforms provide. There is no lead scoring built into the CRM itself (lead scoring is part of the marketing automation, available on Standard and above).
Who benefits most: Small businesses and freelancers who currently track deals in spreadsheets. Moving from a spreadsheet to Brevo’s CRM is a genuine upgrade — you get pipeline visibility, task reminders, and a direct connection to your email marketing data. If you already use a dedicated CRM, Brevo’s version is unlikely to replace it.
The value proposition is not “Brevo has a great CRM.” It is “Brevo gives you a functional CRM for free, bundled with your email marketing, so you do not need to pay for a separate tool.”
Free Plan: Generous with Clear Limits
Brevo’s free plan is one of the more generous in the email marketing category, with one notable restriction.
What you get for free:
- 300 emails per day (approximately 9,000 per month)
- 100,000 stored contacts — this is exceptionally generous. Mailchimp’s free plan caps at 250 contacts with 500 emails/month. MailerLite caps at 500 subscribers with 12,000 emails/month.
- Basic automation workflows
- Built-in CRM with deal tracking
- Live chat widget
- Chatbot
- Meeting scheduling
- SMS marketing (pay per message)
The catch: 300 emails per day. This daily cap is the main limitation. If you have a list of 10,000 contacts and want to send a newsletter to all of them, you cannot do it in one send — it would take over 33 days to reach everyone at 300/day. For businesses with lists under 300 contacts, this is not an issue. For growing businesses, you will hit this wall quickly.
Brevo branding appears on all emails sent from the free plan. You cannot remove it without upgrading.
The 100,000 contact storage is the standout. Most competitors limit free plans to a few hundred or a few thousand contacts. Brevo lets you store up to 100,000 contacts for free, which means you can build your list over time without being pressured to upgrade just for storage. You only pay when you need to send more than 300 emails/day.
Integrations
Brevo offers 150+ integrations including connections to Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, Zapier, Salesforce, and Google Analytics.
This is below average for the category. Mailchimp offers 300+ integrations, ActiveCampaign provides 950+, and AWeber has 750+. If your tech stack relies on niche tools or you need deep native integrations without Zapier as a middleman, Brevo’s integration library may fall short.
Zapier support partially compensates for the smaller native integration library. Through Zapier, Brevo connects to thousands of additional apps, though this adds an extra subscription cost and introduces a dependency on a third-party connector.
For standard stacks — WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, common CRMs — Brevo’s integrations cover the essentials. The gap becomes noticeable when you need integrations with specialized tools, industry-specific software, or when you want to avoid Zapier entirely.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Email-volume pricing saves money for large lists with moderate send frequency
- Multi-channel suite (email + SMS + chat + CRM) included from the free plan
- 100,000 free contact storage — the most generous in the category
- Built-in CRM on all plans, including free
- SMS marketing on all plans with pay-per-message simplicity
- Low starting price at $9/month for the Starter plan
- G2 rating of 4.5/5 from 2,315 reviews shows consistent user satisfaction
Cons
- 300 emails/day cap on the free plan limits real-world usefulness for growing lists
- Only 40+ email templates — significantly fewer than Mailchimp (260+) or AWeber (600+)
- Brevo branding removal costs ~$10/month extra on the Starter plan
- Automation is basic on Free and Starter — full workflows require Standard ($18/month)
- Only 150+ integrations — below average for the category
- A/B testing locked to Standard plan — not available on Starter
- WhatsApp campaigns require Professional plan at $499/month — a steep jump from Standard
- No unlimited email sending on any plan — every tier has a monthly email cap
Who Should Choose Brevo
Budget-conscious small businesses that want email marketing, SMS, and a CRM without subscribing to three separate tools. Brevo’s bundled approach saves both money and complexity.
Businesses with large contact lists but moderate sending needs. If you have 50,000 contacts but only send 20,000 emails per month, Brevo’s volume pricing is significantly cheaper than contact-based competitors like Mailchimp.
Teams that want to consolidate marketing channels. Email, SMS, live chat, chatbot, meeting scheduling, and CRM in one dashboard — no other platform at this price point offers this breadth.
Solopreneurs and freelancers who need a free plan with real functionality. The free tier’s 100,000 contact storage, CRM, and live chat widget give you a legitimate marketing stack at zero cost. Brevo also ranks as a top budget pick in our best email marketing for creators guide.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
Teams that need advanced automation. If complex multi-branch workflows, lead scoring, predictive sending, and 750+ automation templates are essential, ActiveCampaign is the better choice — expect to pay $49/month and above.
Design-focused email marketers. If you need a large template library and polished design options out of the box, Mailchimp (260+ templates) or AWeber (600+ templates) offer more variety. Brevo’s 40+ templates will feel limiting.
Integration-heavy tech stacks. If your workflow depends on native integrations with dozens of tools, Brevo’s 150+ library is smaller than ActiveCampaign’s 950+ or Mailchimp’s 300+. You will likely need Zapier to fill the gaps.
High-volume senders who email their entire list frequently. If you send to your full list multiple times per week, MailerLite’s unlimited-email paid plans may be more cost-effective than Brevo’s volume-based pricing, where costs scale with every additional email sent.
Businesses that need WhatsApp marketing on a budget. Brevo’s WhatsApp campaigns are locked behind the Professional plan at $499/month — a price point that excludes most small businesses. If WhatsApp is a critical channel, evaluate dedicated WhatsApp marketing tools instead.
For a broader look at what else is available, see our Brevo alternatives roundup.
Related Content
- Brevo vs MailerLite: Full Comparison — head-to-head with the simplicity champion
- Brevo vs ActiveCampaign: Full Comparison — budget power vs automation king
- Brevo vs Kit: Full Comparison — multi-channel suite vs creator-first platform
- AWeber vs GetResponse: Full Comparison — simplicity vs marketing depth
- GetResponse vs Mailchimp: Full Comparison — automation and webinar differences
- Kit vs Mailchimp: Full Comparison — creator tools vs all-purpose marketing hub
- Best Email Marketing for Creators 2026 — full field comparison
- MailerLite Review 2026 — in-depth review of the simplicity champion
- Explore alternatives: Brevo Alternatives | GetResponse Alternatives | AWeber Alternatives
Last updated: March 2026. We regularly update this content — if something has changed, let us know.