Brevo Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

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 AI is called Aura, an assistant included on the Free plan. Brevo says its AI content generator drafts subject lines and email copy and adjusts tone. On the Standard plan and above, AI send time optimization delivers each email when a contact is most likely to engage. The Professional plan adds AI segmentation and AI product recommendations based on recently viewed items. Brevo describes the Professional tier as built for teams using data and AI across channels. Its AI features are more modest than the agent tools some competitors promote, focusing on writing help, timing and targeting rather than building whole campaigns automatically.

The Free plan is free forever and sends 300 emails a day, stores up to 100,000 contacts and includes automation for up to 2,000 contacts, the CRM and Aura. Starter starts at $9 a month for 5,000 emails with no daily limit. Standard starts at $18 a month and adds marketing automation for unlimited contacts, A/B testing, send time optimization and removal of Brevo branding. Professional starts at $499 a month for 150,000 emails and 10 seats, according to Brevo's help center, although Brevo's machine-readable pricing file listed an entry price of $350 in September 2026. Enterprise is custom priced. Yearly billing saves about 10%.

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.