Brevo vs Mailchimp

Brevo compared with Mailchimp

The clearest contrast in this category. Mailchimp bills for contacts including those who unsubscribed; Brevo bills for emails sent and does not care how many addresses you hold. At 50,000 contacts mailed monthly that is roughly $89 against roughly $450. Mailchimp has better creative tooling, deeper predictive segmentation, and vastly more integrations. Take Brevo on cost and EU hosting, Mailchimp on polish and ecosystem.

Mailchimp compared with Brevo

Brevo meters emails sent rather than contacts stored, hosts in the EU, and includes transactional sending, SMS, and a CRM on the same plan. Mailchimp has the better creative tooling, deeper predictive segmentation, and far wider third-party integration. Take Brevo if you have a large list you mail infrequently or you need EU data residency; take Mailchimp if journey building and design quality matter more than the invoice.

Brevo

Marketing plans are metered by emails sent per month rather than by contacts stored, selected from volume bands, with prepaid non-expiring credit packs as the alternative to a subscription. SMS and WhatsApp are pay as you go by destination, and Conversations and the Sales Platform are priced separately per seat.

• Free$0
• Starter$9 at 5,000 emails, about $29 at 20,000, about $39 at 40,000, about $69 at 100,000
• Standard (formerly Business)$18 at 5,000 emails, about $65 to $69 at 20,000, about $129 at 100,000
• Professional$499
• EnterpriseQuoted

Brevo is the best-value general-purpose ESP in this category for a specific and common shape of business: one holding a large list it mails occasionally. At 50,000 contacts mailed monthly you are looking at roughly $89 a month on Standard against roughly $450 on Mailchimp Standard and considerably more on Klaviyo, and that gap only widens as the list grows without the send frequency growing with it. Bundling transactional email, an SMTP relay, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, and a light CRM into the same account compounds the saving by removing subscriptions rather than discounting one. The value case weakens for high-frequency senders, where the send meter punishes exactly what a contact meter rewards, and the new $499 Professional tier is a jarring cliff above $18 Standard that will push some growing accounts into a decision they did not expect. For EU buyers, the ISO 27001 certification and EU-default hosting are worth real money on their own.

Mailchimp

Self-serve tiers priced by contact band, where the billable contact count includes Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Non-subscribed contacts but excludes Archived, Cleaned, Pending, and Deleted. Monthly email sends are capped at a multiple of contacts per plan, and exceeding either cap produces an automatic overage charge rather than a block.

• Free$0
• EssentialsAbout $13 at 500 contacts, about $110 at 10,000, about $385 at 50,000
• StandardAbout $20 at 500 contacts, about $135 at 10,000, about $450 at 50,000
• PremiumAbout $350 at 10,000 contacts, about $815 at 50,000

Mailchimp is no longer the value choice and has not been for several years. What you are buying now is breadth and familiarity: a competent journey builder, real predictive segmentation, landing pages, forms, surveys, ads, and SMS in one account from a vendor everyone recognizes, backed by Intuit. For a general small business with a list under about 5,000 that wants one tool and no specialist learning curve, Standard is defensible. Above roughly 10,000 contacts the arithmetic turns against it hard, because MailerLite and EmailOctopus deliver the core job for a fraction of the price, Brevo does not charge for stored contacts at all, and Klaviyo does ecommerce properly. Add the inclusive contact meter and the silent overage billing and Mailchimp is the platform most likely in this category to cost more than the buyer planned.