Brevo vs Twenty

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.

Twenty is an open-source CRM founded in Paris by Félix Malfait and Charles Bochet. It aims to be a modern alternative to Salesforce and HubSpot that teams can fully own: the code is open source, the data model is customizable and the product can run on Twenty's cloud or on your own servers.

The interface feels closer to Notion or Airtable than to legacy CRMs, with table and kanban views, filters, keyboard shortcuts and a command menu. You can create custom objects and fields to model any process, sync Gmail and Google Calendar or Microsoft accounts to log emails and meetings automatically, and build workflows that run on record changes, schedules or manual triggers. Developers get GraphQL and REST APIs generated from the data model, webhooks and the ability to extend the product. Self-hosting is free, while cloud plans are priced per user per month, with a higher tier adding SSO and more advanced features.

Twenty fits startups, developer-led teams and companies that want control over their CRM data or need to customize it heavily without enterprise licensing. It is a younger product, so integrations, reporting and mobile apps are less mature than in established CRMs, and self-hosting requires technical effort for updates and backups. Attio is a polished closed-source alternative with a similar modern feel, HubSpot offers far more built-in marketing and sales tools, and EspoCRM or SuiteCRM are older open-source options.