Brevo vs Loops

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.

Loops is an email platform built specifically for SaaS companies by a small team focused on lifecycle email. It brings marketing campaigns, event-triggered onboarding sequences (called loops) and transactional emails into one product, so a startup does not need Mailchimp for newsletters and a separate API service for password resets.

Contacts and their properties are synced through the API, SDKs and integrations such as Segment, Zapier, Stripe and Supabase, and product events trigger loops that branch on behavior. The editor is minimal and Notion-like, encouraging clean emails that look personal and land in the inbox, with optional styling and components. Transactional emails share the same contacts and domain setup, with separate unsubscribe handling. Pricing is based on the number of contacts, with a free tier for early products and paid plans that include unlimited sends.

Loops fits early and growth-stage SaaS teams that want lifecycle email done well without a complex marketing automation suite. Its limits are design depth, advanced segmentation, A/B testing and channels: there is no SMS or push. Customer.io is the step up when you need multichannel messaging and complex logic, Resend and Postmark are developer-first transactional services, and Brevo or Mailchimp suit businesses that need e-commerce features and heavy template design.