Here’s a real, slightly uncomfortable finding from our own domain audit: we found a verified Brevo sender (DKIM records pointing at Brevo’s infrastructure) that nobody on our current team had set up. A legacy third-party integration we no longer use was still relaying account-confirmation emails through it, from an address spammy enough that a recipient flagged it. We traced the DKIM records back to Brevo and killed the credential. That’s a lesson about email infrastructure sprawl more than a review of Brevo as a product — so the rest of this piece is genuine research into what Brevo actually offers, not a story about us using it day-to-day.
TL;DR
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue, rebranded in 2023) is a French email marketing and CRM platform that’s grown from a newsletter tool into a broader suite covering email, SMS, WhatsApp, a built-in CRM, sales pipelines, and marketing automation, priced by monthly email volume rather than contact count. The free plan is generous for a small list — 300 emails/day and up to 100,000 stored contacts — and paid plans start at $9/month. It’s a reasonable pick for small-to-mid businesses that want marketing email, transactional email, and light CRM in one place without paying separately for each. The biggest caveat: automation, A/B testing, and multi-user access don’t unlock until the Standard tier ($18/month and up), so the cheap Starter plan is more limited than the headline price suggests.
Brevo at a glance
| What it is | Email/SMS marketing platform with built-in CRM, sales pipelines, and transactional email |
| Category | Marketing automation and CRM (all-in-one) |
| Pricing model | Freemium, then tiered by monthly email volume (not contact count) |
| Standout feature | Single contact database feeding email, SMS, CRM, and transactional sending from one account |
| Free tier | 300 emails/day, up to 100,000 stored contacts, 1 user seat |
| Founded | 2012 in Paris (as Sendinblue), rebranded to Brevo in 2023 |
What Brevo does
Brevo was founded in 2012 in Paris by Armand Thiberge as Sendinblue, starting as a straightforward newsletter and email marketing tool. It rebranded to Brevo in 2023 to reflect how far the product had grown beyond email — the company has said only around a third of its customer base by 2023 was using it purely for newsletters, with the rest relying on SMS, transactional email, CRM, and automation features layered on since. Brevo now describes itself as an all-in-one marketing and sales platform built around one shared contact database that feeds every channel, rather than separate tools with separate contact lists that need to be kept in sync.
Email and multichannel marketing
The core product is a drag-and-drop email builder for newsletters and campaigns, paired with list segmentation based on behavior, purchase history, and engagement. Beyond email, Brevo sends SMS, WhatsApp messages, and web/mobile push notifications from the same campaign tools, plus landing pages, signup forms, and popups for capturing new contacts — the kind of channel breadth that would otherwise require separate vendors for email, SMS, and landing pages.
Marketing automation
A visual automation builder lets you design multi-step journeys triggered by specific behaviors: a signup, a purchase, an abandoned cart, or a website visit. This is where Brevo shifts from “send campaigns” to “respond to what a contact does” — but it’s worth flagging early that this specific capability isn’t available on the cheapest paid tier; automation is a Standard-plan-and-up feature, not something every paying customer gets by default.
CRM, sales pipelines, and transactional email
Brevo’s CRM covers contacts, companies, and deal pipelines with a 360-degree view of each customer tied back to the same database used for marketing sends — so a sales rep can see which campaigns a lead opened without switching tools. Separately, Brevo offers transactional email and SMS via SMTP relay and a REST API for things like receipts, password resets, and shipping notifications, positioned as strong enough to compete directly with dedicated transactional providers like SendGrid or Postmark rather than being an afterthought bolted onto the marketing product.
AI features and reporting
As of 2026, Brevo has added AI-assisted tools for subject-line generation, send-time optimization, and campaign copy suggestions, following the same pattern most email platforms have adopted over the past couple of years. Reporting covers standard campaign metrics — opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes — plus revenue attribution for ecommerce sends when integrated with a store platform. None of this is unusual for the category by 2026, but it means Brevo isn’t missing table-stakes features a buyer would expect from a modern platform in this price range.
Pricing
| Plan | Price/mo | Email volume | Key gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 300/day | 1 user, no automation |
| Starter | From $9 (5,000 emails) | Scales with volume (~$65 at 100,000) | No automation, no multi-user, Brevo logo shown |
| Standard | From $18 (5,000 emails) | Scales with volume | Adds automation, A/B testing, landing pages, multi-user, logo removal |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Advanced permissions, SLAs, dedicated support |
Brevo prices by monthly email send volume rather than contact list size, which is a real structural difference from competitors like Mailchimp and Klaviyo — you can hold a large contact list at no extra cost as long as you don’t exceed your plan’s sending allowance. The gating that matters most in practice isn’t the price step from Free to Starter, it’s the step from Starter to Standard: automation, A/B testing, landing pages, and multi-user access are all held back until Standard, so a team on Starter that assumes they’re getting “the marketing platform” at $9/month will hit a wall the moment they want to build a triggered email sequence. Removing the Brevo logo from emails also costs an extra $9/month on Starter but comes free with Standard — a nudge that makes Standard the more sensible entry point for most businesses despite the higher sticker price. Note that Brevo retired its previous “Business” plan tier in late 2025, so pricing comparisons or reviews that still reference a Business plan are describing an outdated structure.
Pros
Genuinely useful free tier. 300 emails a day and up to 100,000 stored contacts at $0/month is a large allowance compared to competitors that cap free plans at a few hundred contacts total.
One database across every channel. Email, SMS, CRM, and transactional sending all draw from the same contact records, so a behavior tracked in one channel (a click, a deal stage change) can trigger action in another without manual syncing.
Transactional email is a first-class feature, not an afterthought. Brevo’s transactional sending is reportedly strong enough to be compared directly with dedicated providers like SendGrid and Postmark, which is unusual for a platform whose roots are in marketing newsletters.
Pricing by send volume, not contact count. Businesses with large but infrequently-emailed lists (a big past-customer database, for instance) aren’t penalized for list size the way contact-based pricing models penalize them.
Built-in CRM removes a separate tool. Small businesses that would otherwise pay for a standalone CRM alongside their email tool can consolidate into one subscription.
Cons
Automation is locked behind Standard, not included with any paid entry tier. The $9/month Starter plan gets you higher sending volume and not much else — no automation, no A/B testing, no multi-user access — which makes the real “starting price” for a functional marketing platform closer to $18/month.
Verified sender identities don’t disappear when you stop using the product. Our own experience is a case study in this: a DKIM/sender configuration stays live on your domain until someone actively finds and revokes it, regardless of whether your team is still using the account.
Pricing structure has changed enough to confuse comparison shopping. Brevo retired its old Business tier in October 2025, so a meaningful share of pricing guides and reviews still online describe an outdated plan lineup.
Breadth can mean shallower depth per channel. An all-in-one platform covering email, SMS, CRM, and automation is convenient, but teams with serious needs in any one of those areas (ecommerce-grade automation, for instance) may find a specialist tool like Klaviyo does that specific job better.
We didn’t independently verify current numbers against Brevo’s own pricing page. Brevo’s pricing page is JavaScript-rendered and returned only the page title to a direct fetch attempt — the figures above come from third-party pricing trackers instead of a first-party page we could read directly ourselves, so treat exact dollar amounts as a snapshot to double-check against brevo.com/pricing before purchasing.
How Brevo compares
Against Mailchimp, the pricing philosophy is the clearest split: Brevo charges by email volume with unlimited contacts, while Mailchimp charges primarily by contact count, and Mailchimp’s contact counting has historically included unsubscribed contacts in some plan calculations — a detail that’s tripped up plenty of users comparing sticker prices without reading the fine print. Mailchimp also cut its free plan significantly in 2026, reducing free contacts from 500 to 250 and removing automation from free accounts entirely, which makes Brevo’s free tier look considerably more generous by comparison. Mailchimp’s ecosystem and integration library remain broader for general SMB marketing, though.
Against Klaviyo, the difference is target market. Klaviyo prices by number of active profiles and is purpose-built for ecommerce — deep integration with platforms like Shopify, sophisticated behavioral triggers tied to purchase data, and SMS/email blended plans starting around $20/month. Brevo is more general-purpose and cheaper at the entry tier, but Klaviyo’s ecommerce-specific automation (abandoned cart flows, post-purchase sequences tied to product data) is more mature if online retail is the core use case. The common framing among reviewers is straightforward: Klaviyo for ecommerce, Brevo or Mailchimp for general small-business marketing.
Who it’s for
Small businesses that want email, SMS, and CRM in one subscription. If you’d otherwise be paying for three separate tools, Brevo’s shared-database approach and moderate pricing make consolidation genuinely worth considering.
Teams with a large, infrequently-emailed contact list. Because pricing is based on send volume rather than contact count, businesses sitting on a big historical list that they don’t email constantly avoid the “pay more just to store contacts” problem some competitors create.
Anyone budgeting for Standard, not Starter. If automation, A/B testing, or multi-user access matter to you, plan around the $18/month-and-up Standard tier from the start rather than assuming the $9 Starter plan gets you there.
Not the top pick for ecommerce-first automation needs. Stores with complex, purchase-triggered email flows as a primary growth lever will likely find Klaviyo’s ecommerce-specific tooling more mature than Brevo’s more general automation builder.
Frequently asked questions
Is Brevo the same company as Sendinblue?
Yes — Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in 2023. The underlying company, founded in Paris in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, is the same; only the name and broader product positioning changed, because the platform had grown well beyond email newsletters into a full marketing and CRM suite.
Is Brevo free to use?
Yes, with real limits: the free plan includes up to 300 emails per day and storage for up to 100,000 contacts, with a single user seat and no marketing automation. It’s usable for a small business’s basic newsletter sending but not for anything requiring automated sequences.
How is Brevo’s pricing different from Mailchimp’s?
Brevo charges based on monthly email volume, with contact storage effectively unlimited within that. Mailchimp charges primarily by contact count, which can penalize businesses with large lists even if they don’t email them often.
Does Brevo include marketing automation on the cheapest paid plan?
No. Brevo’s Starter plan (from $9/month) does not include automation, A/B testing, landing pages, or multi-user access — those unlock starting at the Standard plan (from $18/month), which is the tier most reviewers recommend as the realistic starting point for a functional marketing setup.
Can Brevo send transactional email, or is it only for marketing campaigns?
Both. Brevo offers transactional email and SMS sending via SMTP relay and a REST API, aimed at receipts, password resets, and account notifications — separate from its marketing campaign tools but drawing on the same underlying contact and sending infrastructure.
Does Brevo have a built-in CRM?
Yes — contacts, companies, and deal pipelines are managed within the same platform, tied to the same contact database used for email and SMS marketing, so sales and marketing activity for a given contact live in one place rather than two disconnected tools.
How do you check if an old email tool is still sending from your domain?
Look at your domain’s DNS records for DKIM selector entries (subdomains like selector._domainkey) you don’t recognize, trace the selector back to the sending provider, and revoke the integration’s credentials if it’s no longer in active use — this is exactly the process that surfaced our own legacy Brevo sender.
Is Brevo good for ecommerce email marketing?
It supports ecommerce use cases (abandoned cart triggers, order confirmation email) but isn’t as deeply specialized for it as Klaviyo, which is purpose-built around ecommerce platform integrations and purchase-data-driven automation. Brevo is a more general-purpose option that happens to cover ecommerce adequately rather than exceptionally.
What happened to Brevo’s Business plan?
Brevo retired its Business-tier plan in October 2025 as part of restructuring its pricing lineup around Free, Starter, Standard, and Enterprise. Any pricing comparison that still references a Business plan is describing the older structure.
Does Brevo charge extra to remove its logo from emails?
On the Starter plan, yes — logo removal is a separate $9/month add-on. On the Standard plan and above, logo removal is included at no extra cost, which is one more reason most reviewers point buyers toward Standard rather than treating Starter as the real entry tier.
What countries or regions does Brevo primarily serve?
Brevo is headquartered in Paris and has historically had a strong footprint in Europe, alongside offices including one in Noida, India, established early in the company’s history. It serves customers globally, but its European roots show up in features like built-in GDPR-focused consent tools.
Verdict
Brevo is a sensible choice for a small-to-mid-sized business that wants email marketing, transactional sending, and a lightweight CRM without stitching together three separate vendors, and its free tier is genuinely more generous than most competitors’ at the same price point of zero dollars. Just don’t budget around the $9 Starter price if automation or multi-user access matter — those live at the $18-and-up Standard tier, and that’s the number to compare against Mailchimp or Klaviyo, not the Starter headline. For ecommerce businesses where purchase-triggered automation is core to the growth strategy, Klaviyo’s deeper specialization is worth the higher price; for most other small businesses, Brevo’s broader, cheaper, all-in-one approach is a reasonable default.
See Brevo’s full profile, pricing, and verified reviews on Spotsaas, listed under Email Marketing Software alongside its competitors.
Sources
- Brevo — From Sendinblue to Brevo (company blog)
- Wikipedia — Brevo (checked July 2026)
- Internal DNS audit, Spotsaas team, 2026
Brevo’s own pricing page (brevo.com/pricing) is JavaScript-rendered and did not return readable plan data to a direct fetch attempt at time of writing; pricing figures here are drawn from multiple independent 2026 pricing trackers rather than verified directly against Brevo’s live page, and should be confirmed at brevo.com/pricing before purchasing. Features and prices change; this reflects the product as of July 2026. Written by the Spotsaas team, based on a real infrastructure audit finding plus independent research — not day-to-day product usage.
