Brevo vs Ghost

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.

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform created in 2013 by John O'Nolan and Hannah Wolfe and run by the non-profit Ghost Foundation. It combines a fast, focused editor, SEO-friendly themes, built-in email newsletters and paid memberships, and it is used by independent writers, media startups and company blogs that want to own their audience and their domain.

Memberships and subscriptions run through Stripe with zero platform fees, so publishers keep their subscription revenue apart from Stripe's own charges. Newsletters are sent from the same system that publishes posts, with free and paid tiers, segmentation and analytics. Ghost 6.0, released in 2025, added native web analytics and ActivityPub support, so publications can be followed and interacted with from the fediverse. Ghost(Pro) is the managed hosting with pricing based on member count and staff users; self-hosting is free under the MIT license but requires Node.js, MySQL and a bulk email provider.

Ghost fits writers and publishers who want a real website, strong SEO and memberships without a revenue share. It is not a general website builder, and custom themes require Handlebars and front-end skills. Substack is easier to start with and has a discovery network but takes 10% of paid subscriptions, beehiiv is stronger on newsletter growth tools, and WordPress is more flexible for sites that need many page types and plugins.