Almost every email platform charges you for how many contacts you store — which means you pay rent on subscribers you might email once a quarter. Brevo, the Paris-based platform formerly known as Sendinblue, inverts the model: unlimited contacts on every plan, with pricing based on how many emails you actually send. Around that pricing quirk the company has built something unusually broad — marketing campaigns, transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, a genuinely free CRM and a meetings tool — all under one roof, with a free tier that lets you send 300 emails a day forever. We built campaigns and automations on the platform, priced real-world scenarios against the contact-based incumbents, and compared it against the email tools we have already reviewed to see who the pay-per-send model actually favors.
AnalyzeBench Score: 8.4/10
Best for: Businesses with large contact lists and modest sending frequency — and anyone who wants marketing, transactional email, SMS and a CRM in one bill instead of four.
What we loved:
- Unlimited contacts on every plan, including the free one — you pay for emails sent, not names stored.
- Marketing campaigns, transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp and chat in a single platform with one contact database.
- A genuinely useful free tier: 300 emails/day, automation for a limited audience, forms, and the CRM included.
- Built-in sales CRM and a meetings/booking tool at no extra cost — a small-business stack in one login.
- EU company with GDPR compliance built into its bones, including EU data hosting — a real differentiator for European businesses.
What could be better:
- The automation builder is capable but less elegant than specialist tools — complex journeys take more clicks and more squinting.
- The email template gallery is noticeably smaller than Mailchimp’s or GetResponse’s.
- Several advanced features — landing pages, A/B testing, send-time optimization — sit on higher tiers or cost extra.
- The free and Starter tiers put Brevo branding on your emails unless you pay to remove it.
What makes Brevo different
The pricing model is the headline, and it changes real budgets. A contact-priced platform charges a 50,000-subscriber list hundreds of dollars a month whether you email them or not; Brevo charges by monthly email volume with unlimited stored contacts, so that same list emailing once a month can cost a fraction as much. The math flips for small lists mailed daily — this is not universally cheaper, it is differently shaped — but for the enormous category of businesses with big databases and disciplined sending frequency, retailers with seasonal rhythms, venues, associations, newsletters that publish weekly, the per-send model is simply the correct one, and Brevo is its most complete implementation.
The second differentiator is scope. Brevo grew out of Sendinblue’s transactional-email roots, so the platform natively handles both your marketing blasts and your receipts, password resets and shipping notices — via SMTP relay or API — plus SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, web push, live chat, a free sales CRM with pipelines, and a meetings scheduler. For a small business, that consolidation replaces a Mailchimp-plus-Calendly-plus-HubSpot-free-plus-Twilio sprawl with one contact database and one invoice. And because the company is French, GDPR compliance is native rather than bolted on: EU data residency, consent tooling and data-processing terms that European lawyers approve without a second meeting.
Key features
Pay-for-sends pricing with unlimited contacts
Every plan, free included, allows unlimited stored contacts; your bill scales with monthly email volume instead. This makes Brevo effectively the only mainstream platform where growing your list costs nothing and the incentive is to email thoughtfully rather than to prune subscribers you paid to acquire. For big-list, low-frequency senders the savings against contact-priced rivals can run to thousands a year.
Marketing plus transactional in one system
Brevo ships a drag-and-drop campaign editor, segmentation and automation on the marketing side, and a serious SMTP/API transactional service on the other — with shared templates, shared analytics and one deliverability reputation to manage. Businesses that currently run Mailchimp for newsletters and a separate relay for receipts can consolidate both, and the transactional side alone is competitively priced against dedicated providers.
Built-in CRM, meetings and multichannel
The sales platform — contact records, deal pipelines, tasks — is included free, as is a booking tool for meetings, with paid tiers adding phone and more seats. SMS and WhatsApp campaigns run from the same audience data, so a flash-sale text and its follow-up email share segmentation. None of these pieces beats the best dedicated tool in its category; all of them together, in one database, is the point.
Automation that covers the essentials
The workflow builder handles welcome series, abandoned-cart flows, page-visit triggers, lead scoring and behavioral branching. On the free and Starter tiers automation is limited to a smaller audience, with full automation opening up on the Business plan. It is genuinely capable — we built multi-branch flows without hitting walls — but the canvas and logic feel a generation behind the slickest specialist builders.
Plans & pricing
Brevo prices by monthly email volume, with four tiers. Free gives 300 emails/day with unlimited contacts. Starter, beginning around $9/month for 5,000 emails as of this writing, removes the daily cap and scales with volume. Business, from roughly $18/month, adds marketing automation for unlimited contacts, A/B testing, send-time optimization, landing pages and phone support. An Enterprise tier adds SSO, dedicated infrastructure and account management. SMS, WhatsApp and dedicated IPs are metered separately. Prices shift with promotions and volume brackets, so confirm current numbers on the pricing page.
| Plan | Typical starting price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts, basic templates, CRM, limited automation |
| Starter | ~$9/mo (5k emails) | No daily cap, basic reporting; pay more to remove branding |
| Business | ~$18/mo (5k emails) | Full automation, A/B tests, send-time AI, landing pages, phone support |
| Enterprise | Custom | SSO, sub-accounts, dedicated IP, tailored volume |
The volume brackets are the real pricing page: 20,000 emails/month on Business costs meaningfully more than 5,000, and heavy senders should model a typical month before comparing against contact-priced rivals. The free CRM and meetings tools stay free regardless of email tier — worth remembering when comparing whole-stack costs.
How to get started
- Sign up free and complete sender verification — add your domain and set up the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records Brevo generates; this single step does more for deliverability than anything else.
- Import contacts with their consent history and tag their source — Brevo’s GDPR tooling works best when provenance is recorded from day one.
- Build a master template in the drag-and-drop editor matching your brand, and save reusable blocks for headers and footers.
- Create one welcome automation triggered by your signup form before you send any campaigns — it is the highest-ROI flow in email marketing.
- Send a small test campaign to a seed list, check rendering and spam placement, then scale to the full audience.
The free tier’s 300-email daily cap is an onboarding feature in disguise: it forces a gradual ramp-up that warms your sender reputation properly. Most businesses can run the entire evaluation without entering a card number.
Common setup mistakes to avoid
The most damaging mistake is skipping domain authentication and blasting from a free-mailbox address — modern inbox providers will junk unauthenticated bulk mail regardless of platform, so set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC before your first real campaign. Second, importing a stale purchased list: Brevo’s abuse systems are strict, as an EU company must be, and high bounce rates can suspend sending — clean old lists first. Third, misunderstanding the daily cap: on the free plan, a 3,000-contact campaign takes ten days to trickle out, which surprises people mid-launch; budget the upgrade before a time-sensitive send. Finally, do not run marketing and transactional traffic through one shared sending identity without thought — separate streams protect your receipts from your promotions’ reputation.
Watch: Brevo email marketing platform walkthrough
Brevo vs alternatives
Against Mailchimp, the incumbent it most often replaces, Brevo wins on price for any large list, on transactional email, and on GDPR posture, while Mailchimp counters with a bigger template gallery, more polished reporting and a deeper integration catalog. Against GetResponse, the fight is feature breadth: GetResponse bundles webinars, a website builder and slicker funnels, while Brevo answers with the free CRM, WhatsApp and per-send pricing that punishes GetResponse’s contact-based bills on big lists. Against Kit (formerly ConvertKit), the audiences barely overlap — Kit is built for individual creators selling their voice, Brevo for businesses juggling channels and receipts. If your list is large, your sending is periodic, and you want one platform for email, SMS and CRM, Brevo is the arithmetic favorite; if you live inside sophisticated automations all day, the specialists still hold the crown.
Performance, support & value
Deliverability: Brevo’s scale as a transactional provider means its infrastructure and postmaster team are serious, and independent deliverability tests generally place it in the solid middle-to-upper band of mainstream platforms. Your results will depend far more on your authentication, list hygiene and content than on the platform — but nothing in our testing suggested a platform-level handicap, and the guided domain setup is better than most.
Support: email support on all paid tiers, live chat and phone arriving with Business, and a multilingual team reflecting the EU roots. Response quality in our checks was competent and human, with the usual pattern of faster answers on higher tiers. The documentation is thorough, though its translated-from-French cadence occasionally shows. Free-tier users rely on docs and community — standard for the category.
Value: for the target profile, exceptional. A 30,000-contact list sending one monthly campaign can run on a tier costing less than what contact-priced rivals charge for merely storing that list. Add the free CRM, meetings tool and consolidated SMS/WhatsApp billing, and Brevo frequently replaces $150–300/month of stacked SaaS for a fraction of that. Small-list, daily-send businesses should run the math the other way — the model can lose there — but that is precisely the honesty the pricing deserves.
Our testing notes: the pay-per-send math in practice
We priced three realistic scenarios. A 40,000-contact association emailing monthly: Brevo’s required volume tier came in at a small fraction of contact-based quotes, the clearest win. A 5,000-contact e-commerce store sending weekly plus abandoned-cart flows: Brevo and the incumbents landed within coffee-money of each other, with Brevo’s edge coming from bundled transactional email rather than headline price. A 1,500-contact newsletter publishing three times a week: contact-priced platforms with unlimited sending were equal or slightly cheaper. The model has a clear shape — savings scale with list size and shrink with frequency — and Brevo is refreshingly predictable once you know your monthly volume.
Inside the product, the campaign editor was quick and stable, segmentation handled multi-condition queries without complaint, and the automation builder completed every flow we designed — a welcome series, a cart-recovery branch, a re-engagement sweep — with somewhat more clicking than the specialist tools require. Transactional sends via API showed the low-latency behavior you would expect from a company that started life as an SMTP provider. The rough edges were cosmetic: a smaller template gallery than rivals and reporting that answers the important questions without delighting anyone.
What real users say
Aggregated review sentiment on Brevo clusters around three praises: the price (“we cut our email bill by two-thirds”), the consolidation (CRM, chat and SMS replacing separate subscriptions), and the free tier’s genuine usefulness for very small businesses. European users add a fourth — relief at GDPR compliance that does not require a lawyer’s interpretation of a US vendor’s addendum. The 2023 rebrand from Sendinblue confused some long-time customers, but the sentiment trend since has been steady or improving on major review platforms.
The recurring criticisms match our own findings: an automation builder that power users outgrow, occasional stiffness in the editor, template selection that forces more DIY design, and support waits on lower tiers during busy periods. A minority report friction with account validation when importing large lists — the flip side of the strict anti-spam posture that protects everyone’s deliverability. Notably rare are complaints about surprise billing, the category’s classic sin, because volume-based pricing is simply harder to be ambushed by.
Who should use it — and who should not
Choose Brevo if you have a large list and a measured sending cadence, if you want marketing and transactional email under one roof, if you need SMS or WhatsApp from the same audience data, or if you are an EU business for whom GDPR-native tooling removes real legal friction. It is also the strongest free tier in mainstream email marketing for a bootstrapping business that needs a CRM too.
Skip it if you are a creator monetizing a newsletter — Kit is purpose-built for that — if your marketing lives and dies on intricate automation journeys where specialist builders earn their premium, or if you want a vast template library and best-in-class reporting out of the box. Brevo is a broad, fairly priced toolkit; it is not the sharpest single blade in any one category.
Honest limits
The automation builder covers the essentials but lacks the elegance and depth of the best specialist tools, and complex multi-path journeys expose that fastest. The template gallery is modest, so expect to build your own designs. Meaningful features — full automation, A/B testing, send-time optimization, landing pages — require the Business tier, which narrows the gap to competitors’ pricing. Branding removal costs extra on low tiers. And the very breadth that makes Brevo good value means each module (CRM, chat, meetings) is solid rather than category-leading. Know which of these touches your workflow before committing.
Brevo deals
Brevo discounts annual billing by roughly 10% versus monthly, runs periodic promotions on first-year Starter and Business subscriptions, and its free tier is a permanent no-card trial of most of the platform. Because pricing is volume-based, the quiet trick is right-sizing your tier to your true monthly send count rather than chasing coupons. We track current Brevo promotions and comparable email-platform offers on our deals page.
Frequently asked questions
Is Brevo really free for unlimited contacts? Yes — every plan including the free one allows unlimited stored contacts; the free tier limits you to 300 emails per day, and paid tiers price by monthly email volume.
What happened to Sendinblue? Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in 2023 after acquiring several complementary tools; the platform, French ownership and infrastructure continuity remained.
Does Brevo handle transactional email? Yes, natively — SMTP relay and API sending for receipts, resets and notifications is a core product, shared with the marketing side’s templates and analytics.
Is Brevo GDPR compliant? Yes, and more natively than most: it is an EU (French) company with EU data hosting options and consent tooling built into forms and imports.
Can I send SMS and WhatsApp campaigns? Yes, both run from the same contact database as email; messages are metered separately by volume and destination country.
Is the CRM really free? The core sales platform — contact records, pipelines, tasks — is free for unlimited contacts, with paid additions for phone features and larger teams.
When is Brevo cheaper than Mailchimp or GetResponse? Broadly, whenever your list is large relative to your sending frequency; if you email a small list very often, contact-priced platforms with unlimited sends can match or beat it. Run one month’s real numbers through both models.
How to choose an email marketing platform: a practical guide
Start with your ratio of list size to sending frequency, because it decides which pricing model is objectively cheaper: big list, few sends favors volume pricing like Brevo’s; small list, constant sends favors contact pricing with unlimited sending. Second, inventory what you actually need beyond email — CRM, SMS, landing pages, webinars, transactional — and price the consolidated stack, not the headline plan, since a platform that eliminates two other subscriptions can be the cheapest at a higher sticker price. Third, weigh automation honestly: sketch your most complex intended journey and confirm the builder handles it before you migrate, because switching costs in email are all about rebuilt automations and re-warmed domains. Fourth, check deliverability fundamentals — guided authentication, list-hygiene enforcement, sender-reputation tooling — which predict inbox placement better than any brand name. And if you operate in Europe, treat GDPR posture as a feature with a price on it. Brevo’s scores on that checklist — model flexibility, consolidation, compliance, with automation elegance as the trade-off — are exactly why it lands where it does in our rankings.
