Brevo review – the most generous free email marketing tool in 2026?

Brevo has a claim that no other mainstream email marketing tool can match: unlimited contacts on the free plan.

Not 500 contacts like Mailchimp. Not 1,000 like MailerLite. Unlimited. You can have 100,000 subscribers on the Brevo free plan and pay nothing – as long as you stay within the daily sending limit of 300 emails.

That single feature makes Brevo genuinely interesting for a specific type of user. Whether it’s the right tool for you depends entirely on whether that model fits how you actually email your list. This Brevo review gives you the honest picture.

One thing upfront: this review contains affiliate links. If you sign up to Brevo’s paid plan through a link here, I earn a small commission at no cost to you.

Brevo at a glance

	USA	UK
Best for	High-volume list builders, infrequent senders, transactional email users
Free plan	Unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day
Paid plans from	~$29/month (Starter – 20,000 emails/month)	~£19/month (Starter – 20,000 emails/month)
Automation on free	Basic – limited workflows
Landing pages	Paid plans only
SMS marketing	Yes – included on paid plans
WordPress integration	Official plugin
Support	Email support (free); chat and phone (paid)

What is Brevo?

Brevo – formerly Sendinblue, rebranded in 2023 – is a French email marketing and CRM platform founded in 2007. It serves over 500,000 businesses worldwide and has positioned itself as an affordable alternative to enterprise marketing tools.

The rebranding from Sendinblue to Brevo coincided with a broadening of the product – adding CRM, live chat, and landing page tools alongside the core email marketing functionality. The email marketing product remains the most commonly used feature and the one this review focuses on.

Brevo’s pricing model is fundamentally different from most email tools. Rather than charging based on subscriber count, Brevo charges based on the number of emails sent. This is the source of both its most compelling advantage (unlimited contacts on the free plan) and its most significant limitation (the 300-email-per-day cap on the free tier).

Brevo pricing

Free plan

Unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day (9,000/month maximum) – the same in the US and the UK

Brevo’s free plan is genuinely distinctive. The unlimited contacts feature is not a marketing gimmick – you can import a list of any size and store it in Brevo at no cost.

What the free plan includes:

• Unlimited contacts
• 300 emails/day (9,000/month)
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Basic email templates
• Basic automation workflows
• Transactional email (up to 300/day)
• SMS marketing (credits purchased separately)
• Basic reporting
• Brevo branding in emails

What the free plan doesn’t include:

• Removal of Brevo branding from emails
• Landing pages – paid plans only
• Advanced automation
• A/B testing
• Multi-user access
• Priority support – email support only with slower response

The 300 emails/day reality:

This is the most important thing to understand about Brevo’s free plan. 300 emails per day means:

• A list of 300 subscribers gets one email per day
• A list of 1,500 subscribers takes 5 days to email everyone
• A list of 9,000 subscribers can be emailed once per month (just barely)
• A list of 50,000 subscribers cannot meaningfully be emailed on the free plan

For a site with a very large list that emails infrequently – a monthly newsletter, a quarterly update – the free plan’s daily limit may not be a real constraint. For a site with any list that wants to email more than a few hundred people at once, the 300/day cap is a significant restriction.

Paid plans

Brevo’s paid plans are priced by email volume rather than contact count – which makes them potentially excellent value for large lists that email infrequently. Pricing is quoted separately for the US and UK sites, so here’s both side by side at the same email volume:

	USA	UK
Starter plan 20,000 emails/month, no sending limit	~$29/month	~£19/month
Business plan 20,000 emails/month, marketing automation, A/B testing, landing pages	~$65/month	~£38/month
Enterprise	Custom pricing

At 20,000 emails/month on the Starter plan, a list of 20,000 contacts can be emailed once per month. A list of 5,000 contacts can be emailed four times per month. Note that Brevo’s plan names and exact figures shift periodically, and the Business plan sometimes appears as “Standard” depending on when and where you’re looking – worth double-checking the current price on Brevo’s own pricing page before you buy.

How Brevo’s pricing compares to MailerLite:

Situation	Brevo	MailerLite
5,000 contacts, email weekly	~£38/month (Business – ~80k emails)	~£29/month
20,000 contacts, email monthly	~£19/month (Starter – 20k emails)	~£57/month
50,000 contacts, email monthly	~£38/month (Business – 50k emails upgrade)	~£139/month

For large lists emailed infrequently, Brevo’s volume-based pricing is dramatically cheaper than subscriber-count-based pricing. For smaller lists emailed regularly, the advantage disappears.

The email editor

Brevo’s drag-and-drop email editor is functional and capable – not the most refined interface available, but competent for building standard newsletter layouts.

The block-based editor works similarly to MailerLite – add content blocks, customise styling, and arrange elements. The template library includes around 40+ designs covering common email types -newsletters, promotional campaigns, transactional emails.

Strengths of the editor:

The responsive design preview – viewing your email in desktop and mobile view within the editor – is clean and reliable. The template quality is decent for promotional and newsletter use cases.

Weaknesses compared to alternatives:

The interface feels slightly less polished than MailerLite’s. The design customisation options, while adequate, are less refined. The template library is smaller than some competitors.

For a business that primarily sends plain-text newsletters or simple promotional emails, Brevo’s editor is perfectly adequate. For a creator who wants elaborate, beautifully designed emails, MailerLite or Klaviyo offer more.

Automations

Free plan

Brevo’s free plan includes basic automation – limited to simple workflows with restricted trigger and action options.

The free automations cover:

• Welcome email when someone subscribes
• Simple time-based sequences
• Basic conditional logic

For a new list with simple email needs, the free automations cover the essentials. For anything beyond a straightforward welcome sequence and a basic drip campaign, a business plan is required.

Paid plans

The Business plan unlocks Brevo’s full automation suite – a visual workflow builder with a broader range of triggers, conditions, and actions.

Available triggers:

• Email activity (opened, clicked, didn’t open)
• Contact attribute changes
• Page visit (with website tracking)
• Transactional email events
• Date-based
• API trigger

Available actions:

• Send email
• Send SMS
• Update contact attribute
• Add/remove from list
• Assign lead score
• Notify a team member

Brevo’s automation depth is solid for the price – comparable to MailerLite at a comparable cost and sufficient for most small businesses and content creators’ needs.

The automation builder interface is functional but less visually polished than those of Kit or MailerLite. It gets the job done without being particularly elegant.

Transactional email

This is one of Brevo’s distinctive capabilities compared to most email marketing tools – and a meaningful advantage for certain use cases.

Transactional emails are automated emails triggered by specific user actions rather than sent as marketing campaigns – order confirmations, password resets, account creation emails, shipping notifications, and invoice emails.

Most email marketing tools don’t handle transactional emails at all – they’re designed for marketing campaigns, not for automated one-to-one triggered emails. Separate transactional email services (SendGrid, Mailgun, AWS SES) are typically used for this.

Brevo handles both marketing emails and transactional emails from the same platform. For a small business that sends both marketing newsletters and transactional emails via its website or application, using a single platform simplifies the stack.

For a WooCommerce store: WooCommerce’s native order confirmation and shipping emails are transactional. Brevo’s WordPress plugin and WooCommerce integration can route these transactional emails through Brevo rather than your hosting server – improving deliverability for order emails. This is a genuinely useful feature for WooCommerce store owners concerned about the deliverability of their order emails.

SMS marketing

Brevo includes SMS marketing alongside email – both managed from the same platform without needing a separate SMS tool.

SMS credits are purchased separately based on volume. SMS marketing is available on all plans, including free (though credits must be purchased).

For businesses that want to combine email and SMS campaigns – promotional messages, transactional SMS, and marketing sequences – Brevo’s combined platform avoids the need to manage separate tools.

SMS support is strong but less developed than Klaviyo’s SMS integration for e-commerce-specific use cases.

WordPress integration

Brevo’s official WordPress plugin provides straightforward integration.

What the plugin includes:

• Sync WordPress users and WooCommerce customers to Brevo lists automatically
• Add subscription forms and widgets to your WordPress site
• Route WordPress and WooCommerce transactional emails through Brevo’s SMTP
• Track form submissions and conversions

The SMTP routing feature is particularly useful – it means emails sent from your WordPress site (contact form confirmations, WooCommerce order emails, password reset emails) go through Brevo’s email infrastructure rather than your hosting server’s email system, improving deliverability significantly.

Brevo vs the alternatives

Brevo vs MailerLite

The most direct comparison for most new website owners.

Brevo advantages: Unlimited contacts on the free plan. Volume-based pricing better for large lists emailed infrequently. Transactional email included. SMS included.

MailerLite advantages: More polished interface. Better email design tools. More templates. Landing pages on the free plan. More generous free plan sending limit (12,000/month vs Brevo’s 9,000/month). Better documentation and community support.

The honest framework: For a site with a very large list (10,000+ contacts) that emails infrequently (monthly or quarterly), Brevo’s pricing model is significantly better value. For a site with a smaller list emailing regularly (weekly), MailerLite’s interface quality and feature completeness at comparable price points make it the better choice.

Read our MailerLite review →

Brevo vs Kit

Kit’s 10,000-subscriber free tier is more generous than Brevo’s 300/day sending limit for most regular senders. Kit’s creator-focused philosophy, tagging model, and automation depth are better suited to content creators building an audience.

Brevo’s advantages over Kit are transactional email capabilities, SMS marketing, and volume-based pricing for large, infrequent-sending lists.

For most content creators and bloggers, Kit is the better fit. For businesses that need transactional email alongside marketing, Brevo is worth considering.

Read our Kit review →

Brevo vs Mailchimp

Both platforms have historically competed for similar audiences. Brevo’s unlimited-contacts free plan is more generous than Mailchimp’s 500-contact plan. Brevo’s paid pricing is generally more competitive than Mailchimp’s current pricing structure.

For most use cases where Mailchimp is being considered, Brevo or MailerLite offer better value.

Read our Mailchimp review →

Brevo pros and cons

The good:

• Unlimited contacts on free plan – genuinely distinctive
• Volume-based pricing – excellent value for large lists emailed infrequently
• Transactional email included – one platform for marketing and transactional
• SMS marketing included
• WooCommerce integration with SMTP routing
• CRM features included – contact management, deal tracking
• Reasonable automation on paid plans
• Live chat and landing pages on paid plans

The not so good:

• 300 emails/day free plan limit – severely restricts free plan usefulness for regular senders
• Interface is less polished than MailerLite
• Landing pages require a paid plan – MailerLite includes them on free plan
• Automation less refined than Kit or Klaviyo
• Template library smaller than some competitors
• The Sendinblue → Brevo rebrand has created some confusion and ongoing name inconsistency across the web
• Support on the free plan is email only, with slower response times

Who is Brevo best for?

Brevo is the right choice for:

Businesses with large contact databases that email infrequently. A 50,000-contact list that sends a monthly newsletter pays dramatically less under Brevo’s volume pricing than under MailerLite’s or Kit’s subscriber-count pricing.

Businesses that need both marketing and transactional email from a single platform. The combined capability eliminates the need for separate tools for marketing campaigns and order confirmations.

WooCommerce store owners who want to improve their transactional email deliverability through Brevo’s SMTP routing while also running basic marketing campaigns.

Budget-conscious beginners who want to import a large list immediately without paying by subscriber count – the unlimited contacts free plan is genuinely useful for this.

Brevo is probably not right for:

Bloggers and content creators who email their list weekly or more frequently – the 300/day sending cap on the free plan is too restrictive, and MailerLite or Kit offer better value on paid plans for regular senders.

Ecommerce stores where deep Shopify or WooCommerce integration and ecommerce-specific automations are the priority – Klaviyo is significantly more capable for this use case.

Creators who prioritise email design quality and a polished interface – MailerLite and Kit both offer better experiences here.

Brevo review: the verdict

Brevo’s unlimited contacts free plan is a genuine differentiator – there is no mainstream competitor that lets you store an unlimited number of contacts at no cost. For the right user, this is a meaningful advantage, making Brevo the most cost-effective choice.

The 300 emails/day sending limit is the honest limitation that significantly constrains that advantage. For a site that sends weekly newsletters to a growing list, the sending cap on the free plan quickly becomes a real friction point.

The sweet spot for Brevo is a specific profile: a large list, an infrequent sending cadence, and a need for transactional email alongside marketing. For that user, Brevo’s pricing model is genuinely the best value available.

For most bloggers, content creators, and small businesses that email regularly, MailerLite’s polished interface, better free plan features, and comparable paid pricing make it the stronger default choice.