Brevo is the platform that used to be Sendinblue. It was founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, took the Brevo name in 2023, and reports 600,000 customers, more than 1,000 staff and 150-plus integrations on its about page.
The pitch has not changed since the rename. You pay for the emails you send, not the people you store, so a 40,000-contact list that gets one newsletter a month costs less than it would at any contact-billed rival. Brevo’s own comparison table puts that list at $46 a month against $289 at Mailchimp.
The product is wider than email: every account gets SMS, a sales CRM with deals and pipelines, transactional email over SMTP and API, and a live chat inbox, with WhatsApp and push held back for the Professional tier.
Who it is for: a small business with a real list and a small budget, or a developer who wants marketing and transactional mail from one login. Who it is not for: a marketing team of five, or anyone who needs to phone a human before spending $499 a month.
How this Brevo review was built
- No Brevo plan purchased, no deliverability check run, no campaign sent. This is a research-based review, not a hands-on test
- Every figure is from brevo.com, help.brevo.com, Brevo’s terms of service or a named public source, all checked on 7 September 2026
- Where Brevo’s own documents disagree, both figures are given and the choice is explained
- We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Commissions never touch scores or rank order
Where Brevo’s own documents disagree with each other, both figures are given. That happens twice, on the price of an extra Standard seat and on whether prepaid credits expire. The Brevo review uses the more specific document each time and says so in the section where it matters.
The score weighs price per contact at three list sizes, the free tier’s ceiling, the cost of the first forced upgrade, and the terms you sign, and it gives feature counts less weight than most reviews do because a feature you cannot afford is a brochure.
300 emails a day: the free plan and its ceiling
The free plan number is 300. That is the daily send limit, it resets every day, and unused sends do not roll over. Send every day and you reach roughly 9,000 emails a month; send once and you reach 300.
The contact number is 100,000. Brevo lets a free account store that many contacts, which is 400 times Mailchimp’s free cap of 250, but storing is not sending, and a 5,000-contact newsletter takes 17 days to leave the building at 300 a day.
Two other caps bite. Automation on the free plan accepts up to 2,000 unique contacts. The sales CRM is limited to 50 open deals, 1 pipeline, 1 connected inbox and 1 calendar. Every email carries a “Sent with Brevo” sticker that cannot be removed.
What is not on the free plan at all: A/B testing, landing pages, popups, push notifications, WhatsApp and phone support. In a small shop that makes the free tier a working newsletter tool for a list under 300 and a holding pen for anything bigger.
$9 a month: what Starter buys and what it leaves out
Starter starts at $9 a month for 5,000 emails a month and removes the daily limit. Brevo’s pricing help page sets the contact tiers at 500, 1,500, 2,500 and upward to 500,000, with email volumes from 5,000 to 100,000 a month.
Read that twice. Starter is priced on contacts and on emails at the same time, and the account auto-upgrades when you reach 85% of the contact limit for your tier. A 2,500-contact list sending one email a month uses 2,500 of its 5,000 sends and sits inside the tier; the same list sending three emails a month needs the next volume band.
The logo stays on Starter unless you pay $9 a month more to remove it, which turns a $9 plan into an $18 plan, the same price as Standard. Both of Brevo’s help pages agree on that $9 add-on figure.
The 2,000-contact automation cap
Starter carries the same automation ceiling as Free: 2,000 unique contacts can enter your active workflows. A welcome sequence for a 2,500-contact list stops enrolling people at 2,000, and there is no add-on for more.
That cap is the real reason to skip Starter once your list passes 2,000. The price gap to Standard is $9 a month, or $108 a year. Standard removes the cap entirely.
Plan 03 · Standard$18 a month: Standard is where automation opens
Standard begins at $18 a month and its email volume runs from 5,000 to 500,000 a month across the tiers. Marketing automation accepts unlimited contacts, the Brevo logo is gone, and you get A/B testing, AI send time optimisation, web and event tracking and 1 landing page.
The pricing plans article prices an extra marketing seat at $9 a month; the add-ons article prices it at $12 a month, up to 3 seats in total on Standard. This Brevo review uses $12 because the add-ons article is the specific document, and it treats the $9 figure as stale.
For a 2,500-contact shop sending four campaigns a month, that is 10,000 sends and the second volume tier. Brevo does not publish the price of that tier as static text on its site, so the honest statement is “above $18 and below $499”.
The weakness is support. Standard gets email support only. Phone support and a deliverability specialist wait on the next plan, and the next plan is not cheap.
$499 a month: the Professional cliff
Professional starts at $499 a month. The volume band is 150,000 to 10 million emails a month, contact storage rises to 2 million, and you get 10 seats, 10 landing pages, phone support, 3 hours a year with a deliverability specialist, WhatsApp, popups, mobile and web push, contact scoring and AI segmentation.
The problem is the gap. Standard tops out at 3 seats and 500,000 emails; Professional begins at $499, so a four-person team with a 6,000-contact list pays $481 a month more for the fourth login. Mailchimp gives 5 seats on its $20 Standard plan.
Dedicated IPs cost $251 a year and are available only on Professional and Enterprise. SAML single sign-on is $324 a month. Enterprise adds multi-account management, custom objects, unlimited seats and a dedicated IP included, at a custom price. Brevo’s pricing page pitches Enterprise at companies with a million-plus contacts, which tells you who the $499 plan is really for.
100,000 contacts stored free: how the pricing model works
Brevo’s pricing model has one idea and one footnote. The idea is that you pay for sends, so a big quiet list is cheap. The footnote is that contact tiers also exist on Starter and Standard, and crossing 85% of your tier triggers an automatic upgrade.
Brevo’s own comparison page shows the effect at one email a month, against Mailchimp prices taken from Mailchimp’s pricing page on 7 August 2026:
What the number means in your shop
Take a 5,000-contact list that sends one newsletter a month. Brevo’s table prices it at $32; Mailchimp Essentials prices it at $75, and Mailchimp’s price does not move until you pass 50,000 sends a month, ten times the contact count. Brevo’s price does move: every extra campaign a month is another 5,000 sends, and the volume band climbs with it.
Over 12 months the gap at one email a month is $516. That covers a year of an extra Standard seat and a dedicated IP with $121 to spare.
The reverse case exists. A 500-contact list sending daily runs 15,000 emails a month, which is the third Starter volume band on Brevo and 10,000 sends over the cap on Mailchimp Essentials. Neither vendor is cheap for that pattern.
SMS, WhatsApp and transactional email on the same bill
SMS is prepaid on every plan, and Brevo’s SMS page states prices start at $0.0109 per message credit in the US and vary by country, with no monthly minimum and no contract. Transactional SMS is rate-limited to 250 messages a day and 10 a minute.
WhatsApp is a Professional and Enterprise feature. Credits are priced by country and template type with a 100-credit minimum purchase. On an $18 Standard plan you do not get it at any price.
Transactional email is the quiet advantage. Brevo’s pricing page says every plan, Free included, gets transactional features, so an app can send password resets over SMTP or the API from the same account that runs the newsletter, and the 300-a-day Free cap covers those sends too.
Brevo’s terms give prepaid credits 12 months of validity from purchase. Its sending-limits FAQ says prepaid credits never expire. The terms are the contract. Budget on 12 months.
Deliverability and the Gmail rules
Gmail defines a bulk sender as anyone sending close to 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts. It asks for a spam rate under 0.1% and treats 0.3% as the line beyond which mitigation support is withdrawn. Marketing mail must carry one-click unsubscribe under RFC 8058, and Google recommends honouring an unsubscribe within 48 hours.
Brevo’s compliance article says the list-unsubscribe header and the visible link are handled with “no action needed on your side”. DKIM and DMARC are not automatic: you add the records at your domain host and verify them in Brevo’s Senders page, and Brevo repeats the 0.3% complaint threshold as its own requirement.
Under CAN-SPAM in the US, opt-outs must be honoured within 10 business days. Every message needs a valid postal address. Each violating email carries a penalty of up to $53,088. Brevo’s templates carry an address block; the accuracy of the address is on you.
Shoptera has not measured Brevo’s inbox placement, so no number in this section is a test result.
Cancellation, renewal and refunds
Subscriptions renew automatically unless you close the account or give notice. For the Professional plan the minimum notice of non-renewal is 15 calendar days; other plans can be cancelled during the term, but the term is not refunded.
Brevo’s terms are blunt on refunds. The agreement is non-cancellable before the end of the current subscription, prepaid fees are not returned, and unused quotas remain due. Price rises come with at least 30 days’ notice and a right to terminate.
Monthly plans expire unused sends at renewal. Yearly billing is charged up front for 10% off, so an $18 Standard plan is $194.40 a year, and that discount is the one meaningful lever a small account has.
Compare Mailchimp, which lets you pause a plan for 3 or 6 months, twice in any 12, with billing stopped. Brevo has no pause. A seasonal shop that sends nothing from January to March keeps paying Brevo for those months.
What the competition does better
Mailchimp’s $20 Standard plan includes 5 seats and up to 200 automation flows, where Brevo Standard stops at 3 seats. Mailchimp also lists 300-plus integrations against Brevo’s 150-plus.
MailerLite gives a free account 2 seats and 3 automations, and its Power plan starts at $25 a month with unlimited sends under a fair-use policy. Kit’s free plan holds 10,000 subscribers with unlimited landing pages and forms. That beats Brevo’s free tier for a creator who never sends daily.
Constant Contact publishes a 30-day money-back guarantee. Brevo’s terms offer no refund at all, which is the single clause most likely to sting a first-time buyer.
Omnisend’s Pro plan bundles SMS from $0.007 a message with unlimited emails from $41.30 a month at 2,500 contacts, a bundle Brevo only matches on Professional.
Public review data
Brevo’s Trustpilot profile shows a TrustScore of 4.0 out of 5 from 7,196 reviews on 7 September 2026, with 76% five-star and 13% one-star. Mailchimp’s profile on the same day shows 2.6 from 1,506 reviews, with 66% one-star.
Those are public review counts, not Shoptera findings. Brevo has replied to 97% of its negative reviews and Mailchimp to 91%. The one-star share on Brevo clusters around account suspensions, which stop sending outright.
Compared to and where Brevo appears
The head-to-head with Mailchimp prices both platforms over 12 months at 500, 5,000 and 20,000 contacts, using Brevo’s published comparison table and Mailchimp’s own plan pages. It is the article to read if the $32 against $75 figure is the only thing you remember from this Brevo review.
The Manychat review covers the Instagram side of the same small-business stack. The Brevo brand page collects every Shoptera article that mentions the platform.