Brevo vs Mailgun

Mailgun compared with Brevo

Brevo is the closest thing to a single vendor covering both jobs: a real marketing platform with campaigns, automation, and a CRM, plus a transactional API on the same account, priced on emails sent rather than contacts stored. Mailgun is transactional only, with better inbound routing, better validation, and better raw API primitives. If you want one bill for newsletters and receipts, Brevo. If transactional email is a serious engineering dependency and marketing lives elsewhere, Mailgun.

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.

Mailgun

Volume-metered on emails sent, with four tiers that differ mainly in included volume, log retention, inbound route allowance, and dedicated IP availability. Email validation is metered separately.

• Free$0
• BasicFrom $15
• Foundation$35
• Scale$90
• CustomQuoted

Modelled at this directory's three reference points, Mailgun is mid-market on price and top of the category on inbound capability. A product with 1,000 users receiving three emails each sends 3,000 a month and fits inside Basic at $15, or the free tier if the daily cap allows. Ten thousand users at three emails each is 30,000 sends, still inside Basic at $15 but far better served by Foundation at $35 for the log retention and the inbound routes. Fifty thousand users at three emails each is 150,000 sends, which is Scale at $90 plus roughly $55 of overage, about $145 a month. That sits between Resend at around $80 and Postmark at around $199 for the same volume, and it is roughly ten times Amazon SES. What separates Mailgun from the cheaper options is inbound routing with rules rather than a single webhook, and validation from the same vendor. What separates it from the more expensive ones is that Postmark keeps a year of full message content where Mailgun keeps 30 days of events. Buy Mailgun for inbound; buy something else if outbound is all you do.