Brevo vs Klaviyo: pricing, features and which to choose

Brevo began in 2012 in Paris as Sendinblue, founded by Armand Thiberge, and renamed itself Brevo in 2023 as it expanded from email into a broader customer relationship platform. It serves small businesses, ecommerce stores, agencies and larger companies that want marketing, sales and transactional messaging in one place. Its biggest difference from rivals such as Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign is pricing: most plans are priced by monthly email sends, while contact storage is generous, so businesses with large but infrequently emailed lists can pay much less. Brevo also runs a widely used transactional email and SMTP service for developers sending receipts, password resets and notifications.

The platform covers email campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor and templates, SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, web and mobile push, live chat, landing pages, signup forms and marketing automation. Free sales features include a CRM with deals, tasks and meetings, while a Sales Essentials or Advanced package adds more pipeline tools. Ecommerce features include product data feeds, back-in-stock alerts and AI product recommendations on higher plans. Higher plans also add contact scoring, custom objects, an analytics studio with dashboards, marketing pressure controls that limit how often contacts are messaged, and multi-language content. Developers get APIs, SMTP relay, inbound and outbound webhooks, and integrations with Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce and other tools.

Brevo's strengths are send-based pricing that suits large lists, a generous free plan, strong transactional email, built-in CRM and multichannel messaging including WhatsApp. Its weaknesses are a large jump in price to the Professional plan, add-ons for features such as extra seats and branding removal on Starter, and AI features that trail rivals. Mailchimp is more familiar with polished templates. ActiveCampaign offers deeper automation. Klaviyo and Omnisend focus on ecommerce data. HubSpot provides a fuller CRM at higher cost. Choose Brevo if you need affordable email and SMS for a big list, or a single tool for marketing and transactional messages.

Klaviyo is a B2C CRM and ecommerce marketing platform founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. The company says more than 205,000 brands use its products, and it trades publicly on the New York Stock Exchange under KVYO. Its catalog includes email, mobile messaging, Reviews, Customer Hub, Helpdesk, Customer Agent, Composer, Data Platform, and Analytics. That range makes Klaviyo broader than an email sender, although ecommerce marketing remains its clearest center. Its strongest identity is a customer data and automation system for brands that sell directly to consumers online. The company says it began as a customer database, added email marketing in 2013, SMS in 2021, Reviews and a CDP in 2023, and a unified B2C CRM in 2025.

Klaviyo connects an online store and other first-party sources, then unifies customer profiles with behavioral events. Teams build segments, campaigns, and event-triggered flows, send through email or mobile channels, and measure revenue attribution. Klaviyo lists Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and WooCommerce integrations, while its 2024 filing described more than 350 integrations as of 2023. Typical journeys include abandoned-cart reminders, post-purchase messages, replenishment prompts, and targeted promotions. Product activity and predictive analytics can influence audience selection and send timing. The system depends on clean event data and thoughtful profile design, making implementation more demanding than a basic newsletter tool. Marketers can connect browsing, purchase, engagement, and service signals to coordinated messages, then examine reported revenue.

Klaviyo’s limits are operational as well as financial. Reachable-profile growth can increase recurring costs, while separately billed products make the total harder to estimate than a single-channel plan. Its AI features require customer review, and necessary prompts or data may be sent to providers to generate requested outputs. Klaviyo says provider contracts prohibit global-model training on customer data, while its policy describes controls that depend on applicable products, settings, contracts, and provider terms. Mailchimp is broader for general small-business marketing, ActiveCampaign is a close automation alternative, and Omnisend also targets ecommerce brands. Klaviyo offers deeper behavioral ecommerce segmentation and revenue attribution than many newsletter-focused tools, but requires better data discipline and a larger budget as reachable profiles grow. Pick Klaviyo when behavioral ecommerce data, profile-based journeys, and revenue reporting matter more than the lowest setup cost.