Brevo vs Mailchimp

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.

Mailchimp is the most widely known email marketing platform, founded in 2001 in Atlanta by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius and acquired by Intuit in 2021 for about 12 billion dollars. It grew by making email campaigns approachable for small businesses and now positions itself as a marketing platform with email, automation, SMS, landing pages, forms and a basic CRM.

The drag-and-drop editor and template library let non-marketers build campaigns quickly. Customer journeys automate welcome series, abandoned cart emails and post-purchase flows, and integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce and other stores feed product recommendations and revenue reporting. Higher plans add A/B and multivariate testing, send-time optimisation, predictive segments and advanced reporting, while Intuit Assist provides AI help with content and campaign creation. Pricing depends on contact count and sending limits: the free plan is now limited to 250 contacts, Essentials and Standard scale with list size, and Premium starts at 10,000 contacts with phone support.

Mailchimp fits small businesses and online stores that send a few campaigns a month and value ease of use and integrations. It has become expensive as lists grow, prices have risen several times, and unsubscribed contacts still count toward billing unless you archive them. Brevo and MailerLite offer similar features for less, Klaviyo is stronger for e-commerce segmentation, and Kit and beehiiv suit creators and newsletter publishers.