Brevo vs Sender
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentSender compared with Brevo
Brevo prices on emails sent with unlimited contacts and adds a CRM, transactional infrastructure, and SMS, making it the stronger single-vendor story for a business that also needs a sales pipeline. Sender prices on subscribers with a send multiplier and is cheaper for a small list mailed frequently, with a far more generous free tier. Brevo has the larger company and the deeper feature set; Sender has the better economics for a small list and a lighter, faster product to actually use.
Choose Brevo if
European small businesses and anyone with GDPR or data-residency pressure, plus any business holding a large list it mails infrequently, and teams that want marketing email, transactional email, SMS, chat, and a light CRM on one invoice instead of five.
Choose Sender if
Price-sensitive small businesses, ecommerce stores, and solo operators who want a complete marketing email platform with automation and SMS for single-digit monthly spend, and anyone whose list is under 2,500 subscribers and would rather not pay at all.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Brevo | Sender |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $0 (free, 300 emails per day), then $9/mo on Starter at 5,000 emails | $0 free for 2,500 subscribers, then from $9 a month (Standard, 500 subscribers; $108 a year) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of list size, priced on a slider rather than in a published static table. Prepaid email credits are available as an alternative for occasional senders. |
| Free plan | 300 emails per day, roughly 9,000 a month, with the Brevo logo on every email. Historically contacts were unlimited on the free plan; the 2026 pricing page now shows a contacts selector starting at 500, so confirm the current ceiling for your account. | 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, including automation workflows, 10 landing pages, popups and forms, responsive templates, and transactional email access. Sender branding appears in the footer, and SMS, A/B testing, branding removal, and advanced reports are excluded. |
| Free trial | No fixed trial; the free plan at 300 emails a day is the evaluation path, unlocked after account validation | The free plan is permanent and serves as the trial; paid features can be evaluated from it |
| Best for | European small businesses and anyone with GDPR or data-residency pressure, plus any business holding a large list it mails infrequently, and teams that want marketing email, transactional email, SMS, chat, and a light CRM on one invoice instead of five. | Price-sensitive small businesses, ecommerce stores, and solo operators who want a complete marketing email platform with automation and SMS for single-digit monthly spend, and anyone whose list is under 2,500 subscribers and would rather not pay at all. |
| Setup time | A day, with one caveat unique to Brevo: new accounts go through a validation review before sending is unlocked, so you cannot sign up and send within the hour the way you can elsewhere. Budget for that. Once unlocked, list import, template setup, and a first campaign are straightforward, and pointing an application at the SMTP relay is a fifteen-minute job. | An hour or two. Sign up on the free plan, import or collect subscribers, authenticate a sending domain, and send. There is nothing gated behind a sales call and nothing that needs configuring before a first campaign. |
| Learning curve | Low to moderate. Campaigns and lists are conventional. The two things that take adjustment are thinking in emails sent rather than contacts stored when planning cost, and navigating a product surface that spans marketing, transactional, chat, and CRM, which makes the interface busier than a single-purpose ESP. | Low. The product is deliberately conventional and anyone who has used another email platform will recognise every concept. The automation builder is the only part that rewards deliberate learning, and it is simpler than its competitors' by design. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, SMTP relay, WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento plugins | Web application, REST API, SMTP relay, Webhooks |
| Compliance | ISO 27001:2022 certified, GDPR-native with a published DPA, B Corp certified since May 2025, CCPA and CASL support claimed | GDPR as an EU-established processor, CAN-SPAM, CCPA |
| Founded | 2012 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Paris, France | Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Ownership | Private, majority-backed by General Atlantic and Oakley Capital following a December 2025 buyout; not publicly listed | Privately held and bootstrapped |
Strengths and limitations
Brevo
Strengths
- Billing by emails sent rather than contacts stored is a structural advantage for anyone with a large list and modest send frequency, and it eliminates the dead-weight contact problem outright.
- Transactional email and an SMTP relay ride the same plan as marketing sends, so one vendor covers both password resets and newsletters without a second subscription.
- Genuine breadth: SMS, WhatsApp, push, landing pages, live chat with a shared inbox, and a sales CRM with deal pipelines, all sharing one contact database.
- The strongest European compliance posture in this category: French company, EU data centers by default, ISO 27001:2022 certified, B Corp since 2025, and AI agents running on Brevo's own EU infrastructure.
Limitations
- The send meter penalizes high-frequency senders. A small list mailed daily costs more on Brevo than on a flat contact-priced plan, which is the exact inverse of its strength.
- The 2026 lineup puts a $499 Professional tier directly above an $18 Standard tier, which is a severe cliff, and it moved multi-user access, automatic IP warmup, and phone support up into it.
- The historically unlimited contacts position now appears qualified by a contacts selector on the pricing page, so the flagship claim needs checking against your own plan.
- Charging separately to remove the Brevo logo on the Starter plan is a poor look at a $9 price point.
Sender
Strengths
- The most generous free tier in the category: 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month with automation, landing pages, and popups intact rather than stripped out.
- Paid plans starting at single-digit dollars, with 30 percent off the first year, undercutting almost every competitor at the same list size.
- Transactional email API and SMTP included on every plan including free, which no other budget marketing platform offers.
- Automation workflows available on the free plan, where most competitors reserve them for paid tiers.
Limitations
- Pricing above the entry point is set on a slider rather than published as a static table, which makes budgeting for a large list harder than it should be.
- Automation is competent but a clear tier below ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, and Omnisend on conditional logic and ecommerce personalisation.
- A team of roughly thirty people supporting over 180,000 accounts means email and chat support rather than a phone line, with phone support only on Enterprise.
- The transactional feature is a convenience rather than infrastructure: no message stream separation, no inbound parsing, and nothing resembling Postmark's or Mailgun's logging and observability.
Pricing compared
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, $17 at 10,000, $32 at 20,000, $46 at 40,000, $82 at 100,000
- Standard (formerly Business)$18 at 5,000 emails, $35 at 10,000, $69 at 20,000, $97 at 50,000, $139 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 $97 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.
Sender
Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of list size, priced on a slider rather than in a published static table. Prepaid email credits are available as an alternative for occasional senders.
- Free Forever$0
- StandardFrom $9
- ProfessionalFrom $15
- EnterpriseCustom
At the volumes this directory compares, Sender is the cheapest credible option on the list. A 1,000-subscriber list is entirely free, including automation, landing pages, and popups, where Constant Contact would charge $30 to $110 and AWeber $20 to $45. A 10,000-subscriber list moves onto a paid tier whose price the slider sets from the $9 and $15 entry points, and which in practice lands well below the $120 to $275 Constant Contact charges and the $100 to $135 AWeber charges at the same size. Fifty thousand subscribers likewise sits far below the $430 to $575 range at Constant Contact. The send multipliers of twelve and twenty-four times are competitive, sitting between Constant Contact's ten to twenty-four and AWeber's ten to twelve. What the low price does not buy is depth: the automation is a tier below the serious platforms, the reporting is thinner, there are no events or webinars, and support is a small queue rather than an organisation. For a business whose email needs are a newsletter, a welcome flow, a cart recovery sequence, and occasional SMS, Sender delivers all of it for less than anything else here.
Editorial verdict on each
Brevo
Brevo is the value pick in this category, and unusually its value comes from a structural pricing decision rather than from being a cheaper version of the same thing. Charging for emails sent instead of contacts stored genuinely changes what a small business can afford to do with a large list, and bundling transactional email, an SMTP relay, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, and a light CRM on top removes subscriptions rather than discounting one. For European buyers the ISO 27001 certification and EU-default hosting are worth money on their own. The weaknesses are real: an unremarkable editor, no meaningful ecommerce attribution, a logo-removal upsell that should not exist at $9, no published SOC 2 or HIPAA, and a 2026 repackaging that opens a punishing gap between $18 Standard and $499 Professional. Buy Brevo if you hold a big list you mail occasionally, if you need transactional and marketing email from one vendor, or if EU data residency is a requirement rather than a preference. Look elsewhere if you mail a small list daily, or if ecommerce revenue attribution is the job.
Read the full Brevo profileSender
Best ValueSender is the best answer in this category to the question of how little you can pay. The free tier at 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, with automation workflows, ten landing pages, popups, and a transactional API included, is more than several competitors give you on a paid plan, and the paid tiers start at single-digit dollars with SMS and A/B testing added. For a solo operator, a small ecommerce store, or any business under a few thousand subscribers, it is very hard to justify paying Constant Contact ten times as much for something that does the same job less generously. The limits are honest ones. The automation is a tier below the serious platforms, the reporting is thin until the Professional plan, there are no events or webinars, and roughly thirty people are supporting over 180,000 accounts, so support is a queue and the integration ecosystem is small. The transactional feature is a convenience, not infrastructure, and should not replace Postmark or Resend for a real dependency. Pricing above the entry point also lives on a slider rather than a published table, so read it for your own list before budgeting. Within those limits, this is the most email per dollar available to a small business today.
Read the full Sender profileBrevo profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Sender last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Email Service Providers
22 trackedEmail service providers are the platforms that store an audience and send it email at scale: list management, campaign editors, automation, and the sending infrastructure underneath.
Still the default small-business ESP, with the broadest template, integration, and education ecosystem in email marketing.
The most generous free tier in email marketing, from a bootstrapped Lithuanian team that undercuts everyone above it.
Made monetization the product and became the platform serious newsletters migrate to.
Rebuilt email sending around developer experience and React components, making the transactional API something engineers actually enjoy.
Under an hour from signup to a published newsletter, with no domain authentication, no templates, and no deliverability setup exposed to the writer.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Brevo and Sender?
Brevo prices on emails sent with unlimited contacts and adds a CRM, transactional infrastructure, and SMS, making it the stronger single-vendor story for a business that also needs a sales pipeline. Sender prices on subscribers with a send multiplier and is cheaper for a small list mailed frequently, with a far more generous free tier. Brevo has the larger company and the deeper feature set; Sender has the better economics for a small list and a lighter, faster product to actually use.
Is Brevo or Sender cheaper?
Brevo starts at $0 (free, 300 emails per day), then $9/mo on Starter at 5,000 emails. Sender starts at $0 free for 2,500 subscribers, then from $9 a month (Standard, 500 subscribers; $108 a year). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Brevo pricing model: 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. Sender pricing model: Subscriber-based subscription with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of list size, priced on a slider rather than in a published static table. Prepaid email credits are available as an alternative for occasional senders.
Does Brevo or Sender have a free plan?
Brevo has a free plan. 300 emails per day, roughly 9,000 a month, with the Brevo logo on every email. Trial terms: No fixed trial; the free plan at 300 emails a day is the evaluation path, unlocked after account validation. Sender has a free plan. 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, including automation workflows, 10 landing pages, popups and forms, responsive templates, and transactional email access. Trial terms: The free plan is permanent and serves as the trial; paid features can be evaluated from it.
Who should choose Brevo?
European small businesses and anyone with GDPR or data-residency pressure, plus any business holding a large list it mails infrequently, and teams that want marketing email, transactional email, SMS, chat, and a light CRM on one invoice instead of five.
Who should choose Sender?
Price-sensitive small businesses, ecommerce stores, and solo operators who want a complete marketing email platform with automation and SMS for single-digit monthly spend, and anyone whose list is under 2,500 subscribers and would rather not pay at all.
What are the best alternatives to Brevo and Sender?
SaaSTracker profiles 22 products in Email Service Providers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Mailchimp (Category Leader), beehiiv (Momentum), Resend (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
