Comparing Brevo vs. Mailchimp

Both Brevo and Mailchimp are award-winning platforms that offer email marketing services to help businesses reach their audiences, drive sales, and grow. Brevo holds G2 awards for enterprise and small business solutions and is a top-rated email marketing service on TrustRadius in 2023.

If you’re on a budget or just starting out, both Brevo and Mailchimp offer free plans. The majority of Brevo’s email marketing features are available for free. However, in comparison, Mailchimp offers very limited features on its free plan. Here’s what to expect for $0.

If you’re looking for a high-volume email marketing platform, switching to Brevo will generate serious savings, especially after Mailchimp announced yet another price increase of up to 14.5% for existing users in November 2023 (after a previous increase in December 2022).

When it comes to sending bulk email campaigns, Brevo is the cheaper option. Vs Mailchimp, Brevo can work out up to 9 times cheaper per month in certain cases. Take a look at some of these email sending scenarios.

To send transactional emails with Mailchimp (e.g. personalized one-to-one emails like shipping notifications and password resets), this service is charged as a paid add-on on top of your monthly plan. If your small business relies on transactional emails, Mailchimp’s transactional email API will be an added expense to take into account. On top of that, transactional emails are only available in blocks of 25,000 for $20 each and expire after one month. 

In contrast to Mailchimp, Brevo lets you send transactional emails as part of your monthly marketing campaigns plan via our SMTP server. You can also buy a plan exclusively for transactional emails, starting at $15/20,000 emails a month. Because transactional emails often contain sensitive information, you don’t want them to wind up in Junk Mail or the Gmail “Promotions” tab. That’s why it’s best to separate promotional and transactional emails into separate streams using different domains/IP addresses.

Brevo has the complete transactional functionality available natively within its email marketing solution. You can also send transactional SMS messages.

Another important consideration when it comes to ecommerce and Mailchimp is the transaction fees. Users on the free Websites & Commerce plan can create a Mailchimp store online, but every transaction is hit with a fee in the 0.5%-2% range and Stripe processing fees on top. On the paid plans, Mailchimp applies slightly lower transaction fees, but still leaves you with the credit card fees.

Brevo, on the other hand, doesn’t have any transaction fees.

Both solutions let you send personalized emails based on subscriber behavior but Brevo offers other automation possibilities, such as:

With Brevo’s Free Plan you can use our intuitive workflow editor to set up automation workflows (as simple or as complex as you need) for up to 2,000 contacts. Unlimited marketing automation starts at $65/month.

Mailchimp’s automation features start at $13 for 500 contacts for 1-step workflows. This price increases the more contacts you have, e.g. 5,000 contacts will cost $75.

At Brevo, we take email deliverability seriously. So you can rely on our shared IPs to get your campaigns to the inbox. Here are some ways we ensure our sender reputation:

Plus, you can take control of your email deliverability with dedicated IPs for high volume senders and the option to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication.

Mailchimp provides marketing some basic CRM functionalities specific to marketing, such as a single view of your campaigns. Brevo in contrast is an all-in-one CRM. While Mailchimp’s CRM features are geared towards email marketing, Brevo’s CRM powers growth with a Marketing Platform, Sales Platform, Transactional Email, and Conversations product that all work together.

Brevo’s CRM has powerful sales tools that Mailchimp doesn’t offer. Understand the customer journey with Brevo’s customizable deal pipelines and detailed sales reports. Brevo’s in depth CRM database provides real-time updates to contact profiles, giving you a 360-degree understanding of your customers. Make targeted customer segments and smarter marketing and sales decisions for each contact with Brevo.

Any business can grow with Brevo’s Marketing Platform. The generous free plan and unique pricing structure can suit both established companies and entrepreneurs who are just starting out.

No matter your business, Brevo gives you the flexibility to grow. If the free plan no longer fits your needs, upgrade for higher sending limits and advanced features such as A/B testing (subject lines, email content, etc.). Or, use Brevo to explore other marketing channels like WhatsApp and SMS.