Brevo
Brevo is an all-in-one email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing platform that charges by email volume instead of contact count, making it one of the most affordable options for large lists.
Overview
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Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, was founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge and rebranded in May 2023 to reflect its growth from a simple email tool into a full customer engagement platform. Headquartered in Paris with offices across 8 countries, Brevo now serves more than 500,000 active customers worldwide, and it's especially popular among businesses that want email, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat under a single dashboard instead of stitching together separate tools.
What sets Brevo apart from most competitors, including Mailchimp, is its pricing model. Instead of charging based on how many contacts you have, Brevo charges based on how many emails you actually send each month, and every plan including the free one allows unlimited stored contacts. That means a business with a large list that only sends occasionally can end up paying far less on Brevo than on a contact-based platform, while a business sending daily campaigns to a big list may find the math works out differently. The free plan alone allows up to 100,000 stored contacts and around 300 emails a day, which is one of the more generous free tiers in the category.
Beyond pricing, Brevo includes a genuinely capable feature set: marketing automation with a visual workflow canvas, a built-in CRM with deal pipelines, transactional email via SMTP or API, and multichannel campaigns spanning email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Paid plans start at $9 a month for the Starter tier, move to $18 a month for Standard where automation and landing pages unlock, and scale up to $499 a month for Professional, which adds AI segmentation and phone support. Being EU based also makes Brevo a strong option for businesses that need EU data residency for GDPR compliance.
The main tradeoffs are a smaller template library than Mailchimp and automation depth that's solid but not as advanced as tools built specifically around complex workflows. For small to mid-sized businesses that want multichannel marketing and predictable costs without enterprise pricing, Brevo is one of the strongest values in the category.
Features
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Pricing
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Company
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Technical
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