Brevo vs Mailchimp: The Honest Comparison for People Who Send Email

The Short Answer

Pick Brevo if you have a large list and send infrequently, need SMS and transactional email under one roof, or want real automation features without paying $90 a month.

Pick Mailchimp if consistent inbox placement is your top priority, you run a Shopify store with complex behavioral flows, or your team needs 330+ native integrations.

Mailchimp has cut its free plan limits multiple times while Brevo has quietly become the default recommendation in practitioner communities. Mailchimp has cut its free plan limits multiple times. Brevo has quietly become the default recommendation in practitioner communities. If you are still defaulting to Mailchimp because it is the name you know, read this before you renew.

The Pricing Model Difference Is Everything

I've read dozens of Brevo vs Mailchimp comparisons, and they all bury the lead. The single most important difference is how each platform charges you.

Mailchimp charges per contact stored. Brevo charges per email sent.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. It completely changes what you pay depending on how you use email.

Here is a concrete example: a nonprofit sending two emails a month to a list of 50,000 contacts would pay $385 per month with Mailchimp. The same sending pattern on Brevo costs $69 per month.

That is not a rounding error. That is $3,792 per year in savings for the same output.

Here is another real scenario: 2,500 contacts, 20,000 emails per month. Mailchimp Essentials runs $45 per month. Their Standard plan is $60 per month. Brevo charges $29 per month for the same volume, with the added benefit of unlimited contacts once you cross higher tiers.

Brevo's pricing page cites a 9x cheaper figure for large lists with low sending frequency. For a high-frequency sender with a tiny list, costs converge. For most small businesses and newsletters, Brevo's model is structurally less expensive at scale.

The Mailchimp Free Plan Has Been Gutted

Mailchimp's free plan used to be genuinely useful. It is no longer. The platform has reduced the free plan allowance multiple times, dropping to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month.

The free plan went from 2,000 contacts, to 500, to 250. Automation was stripped from the free tier entirely. You cannot even set up a basic welcome email without paying now.

Brevo's free plan gives you unlimited contacts up to 100,000, 9,000 emails per month, 300 per day, and automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts.

A business with 2,000 contacts sending one monthly newsletter pays nothing on Brevo. On Mailchimp, that same business would hit the free plan limit immediately and need a paid plan starting at $13 per month.

The 300 per day cap is a genuine bottleneck if you want to blast a large list at once. Brevo branding appears in emails unless you pay extra to remove it. And automation on the free tier is capped at 2,000 contacts entering workflows.

But compared to Mailchimp's near-useless free offering, Brevo's is in a different category entirely.

What Mailchimp's Paid Plans Cost

Mailchimp's pricing page looks reasonable at a glance. The reality is different once you understand how the billing works.

First, Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts equally toward your limit. Someone who opted out two years ago still takes up a paid slot unless you manually archive or delete them. For businesses that have been on Mailchimp for a while, 20 to 40 percent of the contact list is often dead weight inflating the monthly bill.

Second, if the same contact appears in two different Mailchimp audiences, they are counted twice. This surprises a lot of users.

Third, test emails count toward your monthly send limit.

Add overage charges, inactive contact billing, duplicates, and paid add-ons for SMS and transactional email, and actual monthly spend commonly runs 20 to 40 percent above the listed plan price. This finding is consistent across independent reviews from multiple sources.

Brevo's billing model does not charge for unsubscribed contacts. You are not penalized for list size. You pay for what you send.

The Hidden Costs on Brevo's Side

Brevo is not free of pricing traps either. A few things to know before you sign up.

The Starter plan at $9 per month keeps Brevo branding on your emails by default. Removing it costs an additional $9 to $12 per month depending on which source you check. That more than doubles the entry-level price for anyone who cares about clean branded email.

The Standard plan at $18 per month removes branding and adds real automation, A/B testing, click heatmaps, and AI send-time optimization. For most businesses this is the entry point.

Brevo's Professional plan starts around $499 per month. That is a steep jump from $18. If you are growing quickly and need more than Standard offers, plan for that cliff.

Add-ons for sales tools, dedicated IPs, and multi-user seats can also add up. These are optional, but teams expecting a full CRM out of the box should budget accordingly.

The cleanest head-to-head: for 10,000 contacts, Brevo's Starter plan costs $29 per month. Mailchimp Essentials for 10,000 contacts costs $100 per month.

Automation: Where Brevo Has a Real Edge

I see this every week - comparison articles glossing over automation entirely. Automation means your welcome sequence fires, abandoned cart flows run without a babysitter, and a new lead gets nurtured instead of going cold.

On Mailchimp, automations require a paid plan. Even a basic automated welcome email is locked behind the paywall. Multi-step automation workflows require the Standard plan, which starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts and climbs to $90 or more for 5,000.

On Brevo, multi-step workflows are available on the free plan, limited to 2,000 contacts entering those workflows per month. The Standard plan removes that contact cap and adds unlimited automation.

Brevo's automation can trigger off email opens, link clicks, page visits, contact data changes, and ecommerce activity. You can include SMS and WhatsApp messages inside the same workflow. You can remove inactive subscribers and score leads automatically from within the same interface.

Setting up a welcome sequence on Brevo costs $0. Setting up the same sequence on Mailchimp requires a paid plan from day one.

Where Mailchimp wins on automation is depth and integrations at the higher tiers. Their Customer Journey Builder includes 100+ pre-built journeys covering welcome sequences, order confirmations, and abandoned cart reminders. Their AI tools on Standard and above help with segmentation and workflow design in ways Brevo has not matched yet. For advanced ecommerce flows where behavioral data from Shopify is central to the automation logic, Mailchimp's higher tiers are stronger.

Pricing Comparison at Real Contact Counts

Brevo's advantage is most dramatic for large lists with moderate sending. Mailchimp is most competitive for small, frequently-emailed lists where the per-contact charge stays low.

Deliverability: The One Area Mailchimp Still Has an Argument

Deliverability is where the Mailchimp camp makes its strongest case. In independent tests, Mailchimp tends to post higher and more consistent inbox placement, often in the low 90 percent range. Brevo has shown more fluctuation, sometimes in the mid-70s in certain test periods.

Deliverability data is contested. At least one independent deliverability comparison site currently shows Brevo beating Mailchimp. Results vary significantly by industry and sender behavior.

The practical reality: your own deliverability practices matter more than the platform you are on. Good list hygiene, strong open rates, proper domain authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and a clean sending history will outperform a lazy sender on even the best infrastructure.

If your campaigns are compliance-sensitive or mission-critical, Mailchimp's historically steadier deliverability is worth considering. For most other use cases, the deliverability difference between the two platforms is smaller than the pricing difference.

Brevo's deliverability reporting is more granular in one respect: it shows inbox placement data by email provider, including Gmail and Yahoo. Mailchimp does not surface that level of detail in its dashboard.

Multi-Channel: Brevo Is a Platform. Mailchimp Is Still Mostly Email.

This difference rarely gets mentioned.

Brevo includes email, SMS, WhatsApp campaigns, web push, mobile push, live chat, a sales CRM, deal pipelines, transactional email via SMTP, and a customer data platform. All of this lives in one account.

Mailchimp includes email primarily. SMS is available as an add-on, with coverage limited mainly to the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Transactional emails require a separate paid add-on on top of your monthly plan, billed in blocks of 25,000 emails for $20 each that expire after a month.

Brevo includes transactional emails in all plans, including the free one.

For developers building products or small ecommerce stores that need transactional emails, this is a decisive difference. Brevo is being adopted as a combined SMTP and marketing tool by a generation of builders who want one billing relationship instead of three. Mailchimp almost never appears in those conversations.

Brevo's SMS integration sends from the same dashboard, with pay-as-you-go credits and coverage in 130+ countries. WhatsApp campaigns are also supported, giving it multi-channel depth that Mailchimp simply does not match outside add-on territory.

Integrations: Where Mailchimp Leads

If your tech stack runs on native integrations and you need plug-and-play connections to every tool your team uses, Mailchimp has a meaningful lead. Mailchimp offers 330+ native integrations. Brevo offers roughly 150.

This matters for two types of businesses. First, ecommerce stores running on Shopify that want deep behavioral data flows. Mailchimp's Shopify integration captures purchase behavior, lifetime value, and predictive purchase likelihood that feeds back into segmentation. Brevo's ecommerce integrations exist but require more manual setup work.

Second, marketing teams at companies with complex existing tech stacks who need everything to talk to everything without Zapier as a workaround.

For lean teams, solo operators, and businesses where the stack is simple, 150 integrations is plenty. That missing coverage only hurts when you need something in Mailchimp's 330 that Brevo doesn't have.

One Reddit commenter put it plainly: Brevo has little to no native integrations. If you are skilled in IT you get away with it, otherwise you will need help very often. That is not a dealbreaker for everyone. But for teams without technical resources, it is worth knowing upfront.

List Management: Mailchimp's Most Hated Feature

Ask anyone who has managed a Mailchimp account for more than six months and they will mention the list management problem.

Mailchimp runs on four layers: audiences, segments, tags, and groups. These structures are not interoperable in intuitive ways. The most painful part: audiences are mutually exclusive. If the same contact is in two different audiences, they are counted as two separate contacts and billed twice.

This means a subscriber who signed up through two different forms, or who was imported into two different lists at different times, costs you money twice without sending them a single extra email.

Brevo uses a single unified contact list. A contact is a contact. You filter and segment with conditions, folders, and attributes. There is no double billing.

For teams migrating from Mailchimp, cleaning up duplicate audience contacts is often the first task and it frequently reveals that the Mailchimp bill was inflated by 10 to 20 percent from duplicate billing alone.

Templates and Design: Mailchimp Wins Visually

Mailchimp's templates are more current and better looking. The platform has 100+ templates, a Creative Assistant that generates branded templates from uploaded assets, and flexible layout blocks with integrated stock image libraries. Free plan users are limited to 8 basic templates, but the paid template library is genuinely strong.

Brevo's templates look more dated. The email editor works well and the drag-and-drop builder is functional, but if your email design is a key brand expression and you need visually sophisticated layouts without custom HTML, Mailchimp is the better tool.

One area where Brevo outperforms: Brevo does not charge for inbox preview testing across email clients. Mailchimp gives you 25 tokens per month on paid plans and charges for more. For teams that frequently test across multiple email clients before sending, this adds up.

Reporting and Analytics: It Depends on What You Need

Both platforms give you the standard metrics including opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. The differences are at the edges.

Mailchimp has stronger ecommerce and social reporting at paid tiers. The analytics dashboard is generally considered more readable. Custom reports with grouping, trend visualization, and charts are available on the Standard plan. Predictive demographic data and purchase likelihood scoring live on higher tiers.

Brevo's analytics shows deliverability data by inbox provider including Gmail and Yahoo. This is more useful for monitoring inbox placement and diagnosing delivery problems. Mailchimp does not surface this at the dashboard level.

For businesses running ecommerce with revenue attribution as a core metric, Mailchimp's reporting is deeper. For developers and SMTP users monitoring deliverability health, Brevo's reporting is more actionable.

The Use-Case Decision Map

What Practitioner Communities Are Using

Practitioner-tier email marketing recommendations have quietly shifted. On Reddit and in active operator communities, Mailchimp is increasingly framed as the legacy default - something people inherited rather than chose. Brevo is framed as a considered choice.

In one practitioner breakdown that circulated with significant engagement, the email marketing tool market was tiered this way: Tier 1 for complex automations went to ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo for ecommerce. Tier 2, described as budget-friendly for email, SMS, and CRM for growing brands, went to Brevo. Mailchimp did not appear in the breakdown at all.

Reddit threads on the Mailchimp vs Brevo question consistently show the same pattern: users who left Mailchimp for pricing reasons and found Brevo to be a workable replacement. The dissatisfaction is concentrated around Mailchimp's billing structure, specifically the count of unsubscribed contacts and the surprise overage charges.

One user in an r/Emailmarketing thread captured the dynamic clearly: Brevo is best for large lists with infrequent sending habits. You can have a huge list of 20K contacts that you send one email to a month and pay almost nothing. That is not a marketing claim. It is how the pricing math works.

The counterpoint that also appears in those same threads: Brevo has integration limitations. For teams with complex existing stacks, that friction is a real problem.

Where Ecommerce Brands Keep Landing

The most consistent pattern in practitioner comparisons is that ecommerce brands with serious volume end up at Klaviyo, not Brevo or Mailchimp.

Businesses at 30,000 contacts running Shopify stores tend to find Mailchimp's automation too limited for true behavioral flows and the pricing creeping upward. Brevo's integrations create friction with their existing stack. Klaviyo's native ecommerce data model and pre-built flows for abandoned cart, post-purchase sequences, and win-back campaigns are simply better designed for that use case.

If you are running a serious ecommerce operation, this is worth knowing before you spend time migrating to either Brevo or Mailchimp. Both platforms have ecommerce features. Neither is the best tool for the job if revenue-attributed behavioral automation is central to your email strategy.

Account Suspensions and Platform Risk

Both platforms perform aggressive anti-spam screening, both at onboarding and during use. Neither is permissive about affiliate-heavy content, certain niches, or low-permission lists.

The difference in how these events land publicly: a Mailchimp account ban story circulated with significant engagement in email marketing communities, featuring a user whose account was suspended for content Mailchimp flagged as problematic. The story spread widely. A Brevo account suspension story from a similar period got almost no amplification.

This does not mean Brevo is softer on enforcement. It likely reflects Mailchimp's much larger user base creating more visible incidents. Both platforms have the same types of policies. Read the prohibited content lists before committing to either one if your content operates near any grey areas.

The Lead Generation Connection

One scenario where this platform choice intersects with the broader marketing stack: cold outreach list building. Brevo handles cold email poorly - it is designed for permission-based lists, not outbound prospecting. Mailchimp is even stricter.

If you are building a list from outbound prospecting - finding contacts by title, industry, location, or company size - those contacts need to come from a specialized tool designed for that purpose, not your email marketing platform. The email list you build through a lead generation tool feeds your Brevo or Mailchimp account, not the other way around. Try ScraperCity free to find and verify B2B contacts before they ever touch your ESP.

Migration: How Hard Is It to Switch?

Moving from Mailchimp to Brevo is straightforward for most businesses. Brevo supports CSV import for contacts, and the migration of segments, tags, and basic automation logic is manual but not technically difficult.

The friction points are specific. Custom HTML templates do not transfer automatically. Automation workflows need to be rebuilt. If you have complex multi-audience structures in Mailchimp, the migration is a chance to clean them up - which you should do anyway given the duplicate billing problem.

Moving from Brevo to Mailchimp is similarly manual. The main consideration going in that direction is the billing model change: your costs will scale with your contact count, not your send volume. Running the numbers before you migrate will tell you whether the switch makes financial sense.

One thing worth noting: Mailchimp bills based on peak contact total during the billing period. If you import a large list for migration purposes and then clean it down, you are still charged for the peak. Plan your import timing accordingly.

AI Features: Both Platforms Have Them, With Different Access Models

Both Brevo and Mailchimp have integrated AI tools for writing subject lines and email body copy. The quality is similar. The access model is where they diverge.

Brevo's AI content generation tools are available across all plans including the free tier. Mailchimp restricts generative AI to its Standard plan as a no-cost add-on.

Mailchimp has a feature called Intuit Assist, currently in beta, that auto-generates content and design for pre-built journey emails by pulling from your brand kit. If it matures past beta, it could be a genuine differentiator for teams that spend significant time building automated sequences.

Mailchimp also has stronger predictive AI tools on higher tiers including purchase likelihood scoring, predicted demographics, and send time optimization at scale. These require the data volume to be useful, so they are most relevant for established businesses with rich contact histories.

I work with small businesses on this regularly - the AI features in both platforms are table stakes. Neither will write a great email for you. They will write a passable first draft you still need to edit.

Support: Mailchimp Has More Coverage, Brevo Is Functional

Mailchimp offers 24/7 email and chat support on all paid plans, with phone support on Premium. Brevo's support is email-based on lower tiers, with no phone support on entry plans and no onboarding assistance.

For a first-time email marketer who will need hand-holding during setup, Mailchimp's support coverage is better. For an operator who can figure things out from documentation and community resources, the gap closes fast.

Both platforms have help documentation that covers standard use cases well. Brevo's support gets better as you move up tiers. Mailchimp's support is consistently available but has received complaints about response quality in user reviews on G2 and Capterra, where expensive appears in 81 Mailchimp reviews and limited features appears in 58.

Brevo vs Mailchimp on Sender Reputation Management

One topic the standard comparisons skip: how each platform handles shared vs dedicated IP infrastructure and what that means for your sender reputation.

Both platforms put new accounts on shared IP pools by default. This is fine for most senders. It means your deliverability is influenced in part by the behavior of other senders on the same pool. If a bad actor on your shared pool gets flagged, it can temporarily affect your inbox placement even if your own list hygiene is perfect.

Dedicated IPs are available on both platforms at higher tiers. Mailchimp offers dedicated IPs on Pro plan. Brevo offers them as a paid add-on. For high-volume senders who need full control over their sender reputation, both paths exist. The cost is similar.

What differs is warmup guidance. Moving to a dedicated IP requires warming it up gradually over weeks to build reputation. Brevo's documentation on this process is more detailed. For developers and technical senders, Brevo's SMTP documentation is generally considered cleaner and more developer-friendly.

Segmentation: What Separates Them at Scale

Both platforms handle basic segmentation. The differences show up when you need to do something more complex than filter by open rate or geography.

Mailchimp's segmentation on Standard and above includes predictive segments - groups of contacts identified by purchase likelihood, churn risk, and predicted lifetime value. These are generated automatically from engagement and purchase data. For a business with hundreds of thousands of contacts and transactional history, this is genuinely valuable.

Brevo's segmentation is behavior-based and rule-based. You can build complex multi-condition segments combining email activity, purchase history, SMS engagement, and CRM data. The segments update in real time. There is no predictive scoring layer equivalent to Mailchimp's, but the behavioral segmentation depth is solid for most use cases.

The practical difference: Mailchimp's predictive segments can surface contacts you would not have found otherwise. Brevo's segments surface what you tell them to look for. For data-savvy marketers who know how to build the right filters, Brevo's flexibility is sufficient. For teams that want the platform to surface insights automatically, Mailchimp's predictive layer is a genuine advantage at scale.

What the Numbers Say About Platform Momentum

Mailchimp has roughly 11 million users. Brevo has around 500,000. That is a 22-to-1 difference in user base size.

But user base size is a lagging indicator. It reflects where people were, not where they are going. The practitioner communities that influence where serious marketers land are increasingly omitting Mailchimp from their recommendation lists entirely. It appears in how-I-got-started stories, not in what-I-would-choose-today discussions.

Brevo's growth has been fueled largely by Mailchimp's pricing changes. Every time Mailchimp cut its free plan or raised rates, a cohort of users started evaluating alternatives. Brevo was the most prominent alternative that could match Mailchimp's core feature set without requiring a complete workflow rebuild.

The viral moment that captured the broader dissatisfaction: a tweet about a self-hosted alternative to Mailchimp attracted over 170 likes - the highest engagement in the entire email marketing conversation dataset. Both platforms are losing users to self-hosted alternatives over pricing structure.

The Verdict

For most small and mid-sized businesses I evaluate, Brevo is the stronger choice right now. The pricing model is structurally more fair. The free plan is meaningfully usable. Automation is accessible without paying $90 a month. The multi-channel breadth including email, SMS, WhatsApp, transactional email, and CRM is unmatched at the price points where Brevo operates.

Mailchimp makes sense in specific circumstances: you have a small, frequently-emailed list where per-contact pricing is competitive; you need the 330+ integration library; you are running Shopify ecommerce flows that depend on behavioral data; or consistent deliverability is genuinely non-negotiable for your use case.

The most honest summary is this: Mailchimp built its moat on being the brand everyone knew. Practitioners who evaluate the tools on their merits are increasingly routing to Brevo for budget and features, to Klaviyo for serious ecommerce, and to Mailchimp for teams that are already in the ecosystem and whose costs are manageable.

If you are starting from zero, Brevo is the default choice. If you are at Mailchimp and the bills are starting to sting, the math is worth running before your next renewal.