Brevo vs Close

Brevo, known as Sendinblue until its 2023 rebrand, is a French marketing and sales platform founded in Paris in 2012. It started with email marketing and transactional email and now covers SMS, WhatsApp campaigns, marketing automation, a sales CRM, live chat and landing pages, with a focus on small and mid-sized businesses.

Its pricing model is the main differentiator: marketing plans are based mainly on the volume of emails sent rather than the number of stored contacts, so companies with large but infrequently emailed lists pay much less than with contact-based tools. The free plan stores a large contact list but caps sending at 300 emails per day and adds Brevo branding. Starter removes the daily limit, Business adds marketing automation, A/B testing, send-time optimization and phone support, and Enterprise adds dedicated IPs, SSO, sub-accounts and service levels. Transactional email and SMS are also available through APIs, often used by developers for password resets and order notifications.

Brevo suits European SMBs, e-commerce stores and startups that want email, SMS and a light CRM in one place at a reasonable price, with GDPR-native data handling. Its template editor and automation builder are capable but less refined than the leaders. Mailchimp is more polished but costlier as lists grow, Klaviyo is stronger for Shopify-focused e-commerce, MailerLite is simpler and cheaper for newsletters, and ActiveCampaign offers deeper automation. For transactional email alone, Postmark or Amazon SES are more specialized.

Close is a sales CRM designed for inside sales teams whose day revolves around calls, emails and text messages. Originally known as Close.io and co-founded by sales author Steli Efti, the company is fully remote and largely bootstrapped. Its central idea is that reps should not need a separate dialer, sequencing tool and CRM: calling, SMS, email and meeting notes live on the lead record, and every interaction is logged automatically.

Built-in telephony covers local numbers in many countries, power and predictive dialers, call recording, voicemail drops and call coaching with listen, whisper and barge. Workflows, formerly called sequences, combine automated and manual email, call and task steps, and AI features generate call summaries and help draft emails. Smart views, custom activities and multiple pipelines organize the work, and reporting focuses on activity and funnel metrics. Plans are priced per user, with calling and email included in every tier and call minutes billed on usage.

Close suits SDR and account executive teams of roughly 3 to 50 people doing high-volume outbound or fast inbound follow-up, plus agencies and recruiters who live on the phone. It deliberately omits marketing automation, service desks and deep custom reporting, so companies wanting one customer platform usually prefer HubSpot. Pipedrive is cheaper and more visual for deal management but needs add-ons for calling; Salesforce suits complex enterprise processes; Attio appeals to teams wanting a flexible, data-model-first CRM.