Hands-On Review · Personal Recommendation · Testimonial
Brevo Review: The All-in-One Email Marketing Platform I Switched To and Stayed On
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an all-in-one email marketing platform that combines email, SMS, WhatsApp, a built-in CRM and genuine marketing automation in one tool — and, unusually, it bills by emails sent rather than by the size of your contact list. After more than two decades using just about every email tool there is, I moved off Mailchimp to Brevo and haven’t looked back. Start on the free plan with no credit card required.
If you want a professional, full-featured email marketing platform that won’t pile on costs as your list grows — with automation, segmentation and a CRM included rather than bolted on — Brevo is the one I’d point you to first. Start on the free plan and only pay when you genuinely outgrow it.
![[ALT: Headshot of Leonard Wass, CEO of TriOrbit Digital]](https://www.triorbitdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/leonard-wass-500-500.png)
Highly recommended by
Leonard Wass — CEO, TriOrbit Digital
“I switched from Mailchimp to Brevo and haven’t looked back. It’s a professional, full-featured email platform that doesn’t accumulate costs from day one — exactly what I wish I’d moved to sooner.”
What This Brevo Review Covers — and How to Find What You Need
Brevo is an all-in-one email marketing platform that brings email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp, marketing automation and a built-in CRM into a single tool, with pricing based on the emails you send rather than the contacts you store. This is a hands-on review based on real, switched-over use — not a quick demo or a feature checklist.
Below you’ll find everything you need to make a decision: what Brevo actually is, why it replaced Mailchimp for me, what it does best, how it compares to the legacy email platforms, who it suits, and exactly what you get when you start through our link. Use the links below to jump straight to whatever matters most to you.
Billing is based on emails sent, not contacts stored — a big advantage if you have a large list but send at a moderate pace.
Email, SMS, WhatsApp, automation and a built-in CRM in one platform — not five separate subscriptions stitched together.
A genuinely useful free tier — including automation — with no credit card required to begin. Upgrade only when you outgrow it.
New to Brevo? The simplest first step is to start a free account through our link — no credit card needed — or jump straight to the section that answers your question.
What Brevo Is: An All-in-One Email Marketing Platform With CRM, SMS and Automation Built In
Brevo is an email marketing platform that has grown well beyond email — it bundles campaign sending, marketing automation, audience segmentation, transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp Business messaging, live chat and a built-in CRM into one connected tool. Founded in 2012 as Sendinblue and rebranded to Brevo in 2023, it now serves hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. The rebrand wasn’t cosmetic: what started as a newsletter service had genuinely outgrown its original name and become a full customer relationship platform.
The part that sets it apart from the legacy tools is the billing model. Instead of charging by the size of your contact list, Brevo charges by the emails you actually send. In practice, one Brevo subscription stands in for several things small businesses usually piece together separately:
- Email campaigns with a drag-and-drop builder
- Marketing automation triggered by behaviour and engagement
- A built-in CRM with pipelines and deal tracking
- SMS and WhatsApp Business messaging
- Transactional email through a dedicated SMTP service
It sits in the same category as Mailchimp and other established email tools, but it’s built for businesses that want multi-channel marketing and a CRM in one place — without paying enterprise prices to get there. If you run email as part of a broader strategy, it slots naturally alongside the work of an email marketing agency.
Brevo at a Glance
The essentials, before you read the full review:
- Category: All-in-one email marketing & CRM
- Best for: Small and growing businesses
- Standout: Pricing by emails sent, not list size
- Channels: Email, SMS, WhatsApp, CRM, automation
- Sign up via our link: Free plan, no card needed
Everything below expands on these points.
Why Brevo Became My Email Marketing Platform After Years on Mailchimp
I’ve been building businesses online for over two decades, which means I’ve used just about every email marketing platform there is — and I watched several early pioneers slowly fall behind as newer tools quietly overtook them. I was a loyal Mailchimp user for a long time, back when it was the default recommendation for small business. But over the years it became more complicated, more expensive, and harder to justify for anyone not running an enterprise budget. I felt like I was paying more for features I didn’t need and fighting the interface to do things that should be simple.
Moving to Brevo fixed that. The platform feels clean and uncluttered — everything is where you’d expect it to be, and building a form, styling it to match your site and embedding it takes minutes rather than an afternoon. There’s even version history on the email builder, so if you make a mistake while editing you can roll back to a previous version; that alone has saved me more than once. Because that kind of reliable, no-friction tooling is exactly what we set clients up with, Brevo sits naturally alongside our email marketing agency work.
What Won Me Over
The things that made the switch stick:
- A clean interface that doesn’t fight you
- Version history to undo editing mistakes
- Fair billing based on emails sent
- Real automation, not a watered-down version
It simply made sense from day one.
What Brevo Does Best: Fair Pricing, Free Automation and Clean List Management
Brevo’s real strength is doing the serious work — automation, segmentation and sensible billing — without locking it all behind expensive tiers. The headline is the pricing model: most legacy platforms charge by contact list size, so your bill climbs whether you’re emailing those contacts or not. Brevo charges by emails sent, which means a large list you mail occasionally costs far less than it would elsewhere. You pay for what you actually use.
Its list management is just as refreshing. On older platforms, a contact sitting on several lists could be billed multiple times, and unsubscribed contacts still counted toward your total — a system that quietly penalised good housekeeping. Brevo treats one contact as one contact regardless of how many lists or segments they appear in. And, unusually, real marketing automation — triggered by email engagement, website behaviour or e-commerce activity — is available on the free plan, not a stripped-back preview of it.
The Standouts
Where Brevo genuinely shines:
- Send-based pricing — pay for emails, not list size
- One contact, one count — no double billing
- Automation on the free plan — the real builder
- Advanced segmentation with AND/OR logic
- Built-in CRM with pipelines and deals
- AI send-time optimisation per subscriber
Serious features without the enterprise bill.
Brevo vs Mailchimp and the Legacy Email Marketing Platform: Which Is Better Value?
For most small and growing businesses, Brevo offers better value. Mailchimp is a genuinely capable, well-known tool — for years it was the default recommendation — but it charges by contact list size, and that model gets expensive fast as your audience grows. Brevo’s send-based billing flips that: you pay for the emails you send, so an organised database doesn’t quietly inflate your bill. On equivalent feature levels, Brevo tends to come in more affordable, though you should always check current plans on Brevo’s own site, since pricing changes over time.
On capability, Brevo more than holds its own — and in places it does more out of the box. Where Mailchimp keeps email as its centre of gravity, Brevo bundles SMS, WhatsApp Business, transactional email over SMTP and a built-in CRM into the same account, with automation available even on the free plan. To be fair to the alternatives, Mailchimp’s template ecosystem and brand familiarity are strong, and a long-time user may prefer to stay put. But if you’re choosing fresh or feeling squeezed by list-size pricing, Brevo is the email marketing platform I’d recommend looking at first.
Brevo vs Legacy Tools
How it stacks up at a glance:
- Pricing: By emails sent, not list size
- Contacts: One contact counted once
- Automation: Included on the free plan
- Channels: Email, SMS, WhatsApp, CRM
- Best when: Choosing fresh or scaling a list
Value and breadth over brand familiarity.
Who Brevo Suits Best — and Is This Email Marketing Platform Worth Switching To?
Brevo is worth it if you want a professional, full-featured email marketing platform without accumulating costs from day one. It’s an especially strong fit for anyone starting out who wants real automation and a CRM from the off, for small businesses with a sizeable list they mail at a moderate pace, for owners who want email, SMS and WhatsApp from one account rather than three, and for anyone currently on a legacy platform watching their bill climb while the product feels like it’s standing still.
Who is it not for? If you’re a long-time Mailchimp user deeply invested in its templates and integrations and you’re happy with the cost, there may be no urgent reason to move. And if your needs are enormous and highly specialised, you’ll want to trial Brevo against your exact workflow before committing. For the vast majority of small and growing businesses, though, Brevo is an easy recommendation — and because the free plan needs no credit card, finding out whether it fits costs you nothing.
Best Suited To
An especially strong fit for:
- Businesses starting out wanting automation from day one
- Large-list owners who send at a moderate pace
- Multi-channel marketers needing email, SMS & WhatsApp
- Anyone squeezed by list-size pricing elsewhere
Less urgent if you’re settled on Mailchimp.
The Deal: Start on Brevo’s Free Email Marketing Platform With No Credit Card
When you start with Brevo through our link, you begin on the free plan — no credit card required. This isn’t a time-limited trial that locks you out after a fortnight; it’s a genuinely useful free tier that includes the real automation builder, a daily send allowance and a generous contact allowance, so you can run live campaigns and test the platform properly before paying a cent. Because exact figures change, check the current free-plan limits on Brevo’s site when you sign up.
There are no gimmicks and no pressure here — just an honest on-ramp to a platform I’ve happily moved my own work onto. When you do outgrow the free plan, the jump to a paid tier unlocks advanced automation, A/B testing and higher send volumes at pricing that stays competitive on equivalent features. You only ever pay when the value is already proven, which is exactly how choosing an email marketing platform should work.
Sign Up — Here’s What You Get
Exactly what starting through our link gives you:
- A free plan with no credit card required
- The real automation builder, not a preview
- A daily send and large contact allowance
- Room to upgrade only when you outgrow it
Prove the value first, pay later.
A Closer Look at Brevo’s Email Marketing Platform
If you want the detail behind the verdict, the sections below break down how the main parts of Brevo work in practice. Jump to whatever matters most to you:
Inside Brevo’s Drag-and-Drop Email Builder, Signup Forms and Version History
The day-to-day heart of Brevo as an email marketing platform is the campaign builder, and it’s deliberately uncomplicated. The drag-and-drop editor lets you assemble a clean, on-brand email quickly — drop in blocks, adjust styling, preview, send — without wrestling with fiddly layout tools. For anyone who has lost time fighting a clunky editor on an older platform, the speed here is the first thing you notice.
Signup forms are handled in the same spirit. You can create a form, style it to match your website and embed it in minutes, then connect it straight to your lists and automation so new subscribers are captured and nurtured without manual steps. It’s the kind of small-but-constant task that quietly eats your week on a clumsier tool, and Brevo keeps it brisk.
The feature I’d single out, though, is version history on the email builder. If you make a change you regret while editing — delete the wrong block, break a layout, lose a section — you can roll back to an earlier version rather than rebuilding from scratch. It’s an unglamorous safety net, but anyone who sends email regularly knows how valuable it is the first time it saves a campaign you’d half-wrecked five minutes before send.
More Than Campaigns: Brevo’s Marketing Automation, Segmentation and Built-In CRM
Brevo is more than a send button — the marketing automation, segmentation and CRM turn it into a system that works while you don’t. The automation builder lets you create workflows triggered by email engagement, website behaviour or e-commerce activity: a welcome sequence for new subscribers, a follow-up when someone clicks but doesn’t buy, a re-engagement nudge for a contact who’s gone quiet. Crucially, this is the real builder, available even on the free plan, rather than a feature you can design but not switch on without upgrading.
Segmentation is where that automation gets sharp. Brevo lets you combine contact attributes with campaign engagement using AND/OR logic, so you can target, say, contacts in a particular city who opened your last campaign but haven’t purchased — and send exactly the right message to exactly the right people. Good segmentation is the difference between email that feels personal and email that feels like spam, and Brevo gives you the controls to stay on the right side of that line.
Underpinning all of it is a built-in CRM with pipelines, deal tracking and live chat. Because your contacts, conversations and deals live in the same place as your campaigns, you’re not exporting CSV files between an email tool and a separate sales system. For a small business, that single source of truth — marketing and light sales management under one login — is genuinely useful, and it’s the kind of consolidation that usually costs far more when assembled from separate tools.
Beyond the Inbox: SMS, WhatsApp Business and Transactional Email Over Dedicated SMTP
Brevo’s multi-channel reach is what pushes it past a pure email tool. From the same account you can run SMS campaigns and WhatsApp Business messaging alongside email, which matters because different audiences respond on different channels — a time-sensitive reminder often lands better as a text than as one more email. Having those channels in one platform means your contact data and automation logic are shared across all of them, rather than fragmented across separate apps.
Just as important for anyone running a website is transactional email. These are the automated, one-to-one messages your site sends — order confirmations, password resets, receipts, shipping updates — and Brevo handles them through a dedicated SMTP service separate from your marketing sends. That separation helps protect deliverability: your critical transactional mail isn’t competing with bulk campaigns for sender reputation, so the messages people genuinely expect are more likely to reach the inbox.
For a small business, the practical payoff is consolidation. Marketing campaigns, automated transactional mail, SMS and WhatsApp all run from one platform with one set of contacts — fewer logins, fewer integrations to maintain, and one place to look when you want to understand how a customer has been contacted. It’s the sort of breadth you only fully appreciate once you stop juggling four separate services to do what Brevo does in one.
Brevo’s AI Email Builder and Per-Subscriber Send-Time Optimisation
Brevo’s AI features are a genuine assist rather than a gimmick, and — like the automation — they’re available on the free plan. The AI email builder can help generate content, adjust the tone of what you’ve written and shape a campaign more quickly, which is a real help when you’re staring at a blank editor and a deadline. It won’t replace knowing your audience, but it removes a lot of the friction of getting a solid first draft on the page.
The feature I rate most is send-time optimisation. Rather than calculating one average best-time-to-send for your whole list, Brevo can optimise delivery timing for individual subscribers based on their own engagement history — so each person tends to receive your email when they’re most likely to open it. That level of per-recipient personalisation, offered at no cost, is genuinely unusual in this space, and it’s the kind of quiet improvement that lifts open rates without you doing any extra work.
None of this is essential to get started — you can send perfectly good campaigns without touching the AI at all — but it’s there when you want it, included rather than sold as an add-on. After moving my own work across, the overall impression is consistent: Brevo gives you serious capability on sensible terms, and lets you grow into the advanced features rather than paying for them before you need them. You can start with Brevo for free and explore them at your own pace.
Run Email, Automation and a CRM From One Free Platform
Build campaigns with a clean drag-and-drop editor, automate the follow-up, segment with real precision, and add SMS, WhatsApp and a built-in CRM when you need them — all billed by what you send, not how big your list gets. Start on the free plan with no credit card required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Brevo as an email marketing platform, answered honestly from real, switched-over use.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is an all-in-one email marketing platform that combines email campaigns, marketing automation, audience segmentation, SMS, WhatsApp Business messaging, transactional email and a built-in CRM in one tool. It’s pitched at small and growing businesses, and unusually it charges based on the emails you send rather than the size of your contact list. There’s a free plan to start with no credit card required.
Is Brevo the same as Sendinblue?
Yes. Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in 2023. It’s the same company and product, just under a new name — the rebrand reflected how far the tool had grown from a simple newsletter service into a full marketing and CRM platform. If you used or read about Sendinblue in the past, Brevo is its current incarnation.
How does Brevo’s pricing work?
Brevo charges based on the number of emails you send, not the number of contacts you store. That’s the opposite of many legacy platforms, where your bill rises with list size whether you’re emailing those contacts or not. It means a large list you mail occasionally can cost considerably less on Brevo. Exact plan prices change over time, so check the current tiers on Brevo’s own site when you sign up.
Is Brevo really free?
Yes — Brevo has a genuinely useful free plan, not just a short trial, and it doesn’t require a credit card to start. The free tier includes the real automation builder along with a daily send allowance and a generous contact allowance, so you can run live campaigns and test the platform properly. Because the exact limits can change, confirm the current free-plan details on Brevo’s site when you create your account.
How does Brevo compare to Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is capable and well known, but it charges by contact list size, which gets expensive as your audience grows. Brevo charges by emails sent, counts each contact once regardless of how many lists they’re on, and includes automation even on the free plan. It also bundles SMS, WhatsApp and a built-in CRM. Mailchimp’s template ecosystem and familiarity are strengths, but for value and breadth Brevo is the platform I’d recommend looking at first.
Does Brevo include marketing automation?
Yes, and notably the real automation builder is available on the free plan rather than locked behind a paid tier. You can create workflows triggered by email engagement, website behaviour or e-commerce activity — welcome sequences, follow-ups, re-engagement nudges and more. Combined with segmentation that uses AND/OR logic across contact attributes and engagement, you can send targeted, behaviour-driven email without upgrading first.
Can Brevo send SMS and WhatsApp messages?
Yes. Alongside email, Brevo lets you run SMS campaigns and WhatsApp Business messaging from the same account, sharing your contacts and automation across channels. That’s useful because different audiences respond on different channels — a time-sensitive reminder often performs better as a text than as another email — and keeping everything in one platform avoids fragmenting your data across separate apps.
Does Brevo handle transactional email?
It does. Brevo sends transactional email — order confirmations, password resets, receipts and similar one-to-one messages — through a dedicated SMTP service kept separate from your marketing campaigns. That separation helps protect deliverability, so the critical messages your customers expect aren’t competing with bulk sends for sender reputation. It’s a key feature for anyone running a website or online store.
Does Brevo include a CRM?
Yes, Brevo has a built-in CRM with pipelines, deal tracking and live chat, all in the same account as your email and automation. For a small business, that means your contacts, conversations and deals live in one place rather than being split between an email tool and a separate sales system — a single source of truth that usually costs far more when assembled from separate products.
What AI features does Brevo offer?
Brevo includes an AI email builder that can help generate content, adjust tone and speed up drafting, plus send-time optimisation — and these are available on the free plan. The send-time feature is the standout: instead of one average send time for your whole list, it optimises delivery for individual subscribers based on their own engagement history, so each person tends to receive your email when they’re most likely to open it.
Who is Brevo best for?
Brevo suits small and growing businesses that want a professional email marketing platform without costs piling up from day one — especially those starting out who want automation and a CRM immediately, owners with a large list they mail at a moderate pace, and anyone wanting email, SMS and WhatsApp from one account. If you’re settled and happy on Mailchimp’s templates, there may be less urgency to move. You can read more about how email fits a wider strategy on our email marketing agency page.
Is Brevo worth switching to?
For most small and growing businesses, yes. It delivers fair send-based pricing, automation on the free plan, advanced segmentation, multi-channel messaging and a built-in CRM in one tool — and after years on Mailchimp, it’s the email marketing platform I switched to and stayed on. Because the free plan needs no credit card, you can test it against your own workflow before committing. You can start with Brevo for free here.
This page contains affiliate links. If you sign up to Brevo through our link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we use ourselves, and Brevo is the email marketing platform we genuinely switched to and rely on.