Brevo Email Marketing Review: A Budget-Friendly Powerhouse for Growing SMBs

Signing up for a Brevo account only requires an email address or an Apple or Google account. After verifying my account, I provided details about myself and my mock business, including my name, the company name, business address, and website. Brevo also asked for my team size, the number of company contacts my business has (to help guide me toward an appropriate plan), and whether I sold products or services online.

Once I finished entering the requested information, Brevo asked me to select a plan. There are four plans, each tailored to specific business needs. Email volume is the most important metric, as Brevo's plans automatically scaled my contact list cap based on the amount I choose in this step. Brevo no longer offers the convenient "unlimited" contacts as it did when I last reviewed it, making pricing more complex for businesses with expansive contact lists.

Still, the Free plan is ideal for businesses that want to explore Brevo's features without spending any money. This tier limits you to just 300 emails per day, and gives you email templates, the drag-and-drop editor, and transactional emails. Brevo also gives free users access to Aura AI assistance for text and image generation. The Free plan caps you at 100,000 contacts; oddly, upgrading to a paid plan reduces your list limit, unless you buy more email volume. I'll touch on that below.

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Starter is the next tier up. Starting at $9 per month (or $8.08 per month with an annual plan), it adds basic analytics and reporting, email support, and 5,000 email sends per month (with a 500-contact cap). You can scale the numbers to 100,000 email sends and 500,000 contacts with a convenient slider, but that increases the monthly rate to $69 per month (or $62.08 with an annual plan). By default, Free and Starter plans use Brevo branding in campaigns. If you want to remove the branding, it costs an additional $12 per month (or $10.80 per month with an annual plan).

The $18-per-month Standard plan (or $16.17 per month, billed annually) is the next tier up. It's designed for e-commerce professionals and marketing managers. Standard also starts at 5,000 email sends per month, but scales to 1 million (plus 500,000 contacts) for $669 per month (or $602.08 per month with an annual contract). It includes all the features in Starter, but adds A/B testing, marketing automation, advanced statistics, and Aura AI functionality that lets you optimize your send times, firing off emails when your contacts are most likely to engage.

If your company has even higher demands, Professional ($499 per month) is Brevo's supercharged business plan. It includes everything in Standard, boosts the starting send limit to 150,000 emails with two million contacts, adds multi-user access for 10 seats, and includes advanced AI-powered segmentation. Professional plans also provide additional customer support, including direct support from a success manager and a deliverability specialist, as well as priority phone and email support. It scales to a massive 10 million emails with the same two million contact limit, for $4,543 per month (down to $4,088.67 per month with an annual plan).

Brevo also has a more tailorable solution called Enterprise. This plan provides enterprise-level security, advanced integrations, multi-account management, personalized support, and flexible contract options, but you must contact the sales department to craft a precise plan for your business.

Despite the changes to contact list limits, Brevo's pricing remains appealing. It's easy to understand because it condenses monthly email sends and contacts into a single pricing structure. Competitors like HubSpot Marketing and Zoho Campaigns often offer multiple structures, not just based on email volume but also on contact volume (and sometimes a combination of the two). That can be a headache when you're trying to project what a service will actually cost. In addition, Brevo simply costs less than many competitors.10,000 contacts on Brevo's Starter plan costs $32 per month. With Mailchimp, that same contact volume costs $110 with its Essentials plan. Brevo comes out ahead, especially considering all the new marketing muscle it offers.

That said, Brevo has a few additional costs that aren't immediately obvious. The platform lets you create SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, but these are additional charges that use a credit system. You must buy credits to send these mobile campaigns, which are sold in bundles. These aren't subscriptions; they're pay-as-you-go plans with pricing that varies by region. In the United States, for example, a 100-message add-on costs $1.09 a pop. WhatsApp bundles start at 1,000 messages for a $32.23 add-on cost.

Landing pages are extremely useful when you want to direct your clients to a campaign-related web page, but they also incur additional costs. Free and Starter plans get none, while the Standard plan only offers one. If you wish to create more than one, be that for multiple products or clients, it costs $24 per month for five additional pages.

Brevo is a wonderfully user-friendly platform with a clean user interface (UI) that's easy to understand. In addition to the prominent welcome message that appears whenever I log in to my account, Brevo has a handy list of suggested tasks to help me optimize my reach. If you have a more pressing task to handle, all the vital work-related tabs, including campaigns, automation, and contacts, are on the left side of the screen.

I like that Brevo is liberal with its suggestions, making it extremely easy for beginners to get started. Pop-up messages and windows are packed with help whenever you initiate a task, be that a campaign, segmentation, or automation, highlighting some of the more common tasks within the category. For example, when I created a new segment, Brevo suggested predefined segments, such as engaged email subscribers, inactive email subscribers, contacts from a specific country code, or contacts with a pending task. It's quite handy, though a seasoned professional might find the tips and onboarding a bit excessive.

The only real criticism here is the occasionally sluggish loading. Brevo is responsive overall, but swapping to new tasks or different pages feels oddly sluggish. This didn't cause major issues during testing, but it made using the various tools feel a little clunky at times.

The first thing you want to do after creating an account is upload your contacts. I modified an Excel sheet containing my test emails for this purpose, matching the fields Brevo suggested. During my initial contact upload, some information was not correctly transferred. You can opt not to upload unmatched fields or create a new attribute and field type in the Settings section of the Contacts tab. For instance, you could add a date field for birthdays and a text field for gender. The issue was relatively minor, and Brevo highlighted inconsistencies before saving my data, allowing me to make the appropriate changes. The process wasn't quite as straightforward as ActiveCampaign, which gives you a downloadable template to edit and upload.

Once my clients were saved, I returned to Contacts to segment them into whatever categories I needed for my campaign tasks. Brevo's dedicated Segments section makes it easy to create as many as you need, based on your own criteria or predefined segments. You don't necessarily need to do this to start campaigning, but it is an invaluable tool when you later tailor campaigns to specific clientele.

Creating a campaign is a cinch, and you can choose many platforms, including email, Facebook Ads, SMS, or WhatsApp. I could also create custom automations. With email, I could either create a regular campaign or choose an A/B test to send different versions of a campaign to two different test groups. Either way, you simply select a campaign name, subject line, and sender email. You can even use Brevo's Aura AI to cook up a subject line, but the results were fairly bland and robotic in my tests. Once done, I jumped into the design module to create the face for my campaign.

Brevo offers more than 40 handsome templates and six clean layouts that can be customized to your liking. The drag-and-drop editor lets you move and adjust elements with ease. You can manually add code if you are comfortable with HTML or the Rich Text Editor (or have someone on staff who is). Once you finalize the look of the email, you can preview it in your browser and then schedule it as needed.

Aura AI is a suite of specialized AI assistants built into Brevo’s CRM to automate marketing, sales, and some other tasks. It is particularly useful for practical automation, like generating email copy and summarizing customer support threads. Its advanced features (available in Standard and Professional plans) automatically update contact profiles by sourcing data from incoming emails and autoresponders, which is handy if you have gaps in your customer details.

Aura AI’s generated content is convenient, but it is better at some tasks than others. I found the generated emails somewhat generic; they needed additional input from me to polish them. The image generation in Brevo's drag-and-drop editor is fairly decent, however. I made a mock email blast about a new Martian coffee import company and received some good, albeit silly, images.

Brevo's budget-friendly pricing makes Aura AI a valuable tool. For comparison, Mailchimp's similar Intuit Assist AI is available only in the higher-tier Standard and Premium plans. Brevo provides many of its Aura AI features to all subscription tiers.

Brevo's marketing automation features are also surprisingly easy to understand and use. The tool features basic workflow templates that you can further edit and customize for your tasks. Examples include welcome messages, birthday messages, activity-based templates, and notifications triggered by abandoned carts, page visits, website visits, or product purchases. Most of these workflows are automated in their own right, with pop-up messages that ask for information such as targeted contacts, a time frame, and an email template. These are a great starting point for commerce-focused and drip campaigns.

If you need something more specialized, you can start a custom workflow with the following types: a basic contact file; a contact who has completed an email or website activity; a contact who has submitted data; or a contact who was tagged while visiting your website. Once you've determined which contact to add to your workflow, you base your sequence on a series of if/then conditions to determine what to send in your follow-up communication. There is no limit to the interactions you can create, but your account is still restricted by the volume of emails you pay for per month.

These robust automation features are also what enhance Brevo's CRM integrations. The convenient subscription tracking, analytics tools, and seamless contact management give you everything you need to capitalize on the opportunities your campaigns create. Overall, Brevo's automation features are fairly robust for a platform with a relatively low price point. Admittedly, Brevo aims its solutions squarely at SMBs. For email marketing and automation tools for enterprise-sized businesses, consider HubSpot Marketing or Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Salesforce Pardot).

Brevo currently supports more than 150 integrations, including e-commerce platforms, Google Analytics, Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress. You can combine digital marketing with basic product purchase monitoring and add to them workflows based on their activity. It also integrates with the Facebook Ads extension to get the most out of the platform if you have active Facebook subscribers.

That said, Brevo's integrations are leaner than those of competitors like HubSpot Marketing Hub or Mailchimp. For anything outside its 150 native apps, you will need to lean on third-party connectors like Zapier or Brevo's developer-friendly API. Mailchimp has 300+ integrations with hundreds of popular web services, making it easier for non-technical users to build a connected marketing stack. HubSpot Marketing Hub beats both with 1,500+ integrations, delivering a massive enterprise ecosystem that spans sales, service, operations, and more.