Brevo Review 2026: The Sendinblue Rebrand, Reviewed

Brevo charges you for what you send rather than for who you know. Almost every rival — Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot — meters your contact database and bills you monthly for storing it. Brevo meters outbound volume instead. That single inversion decides whether Brevo is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives or quietly more expensive, and the answer depends entirely on the shape of your list and your sending habit.

It's also the platform most likely to be misdescribed in whatever else you're reading, because it changed its name three years ago and much of the internet never updated. This is a researched buyer's guide, not a hands-on test, drawn from Brevo's own published pages.

It describes pricing structure rather than quoting figures: Brevo's pricing page localises currency by visitor region and toggles between monthly and discounted-yearly rates, so any figure quoted here would be wrong for most readers, as of July 2026. Read Brevo's pricing page for the current rate in your own currency, and check the billing term before you budget.

Yes, Sendinblue is Brevo — and here's exactly when that happened

Sendinblue announced its rename to Brevo on 4 May 2023, per the company's own press announcement and its blog post explaining the decision. The company's stated reason was that the product had outgrown the name: it wrote that Sendinblue "started as a newsletter service. But today, only 31% of our clients are focused solely on sending newsletters."

What changed: the name, the brand, the domain and the positioning — from email service provider to what Brevo calls a full CRM suite spanning email, SMS, WhatsApp and chat.

What didn't: the company, the founder, the product lineage or your account. Brevo is the same business founded in 2012, still headquartered in Paris, still led by founder Armand Thiberge. No acquisition, no discontinued product. A Sendinblue account simply became a Brevo account.

Why so much content still says Sendinblue. A decade of accumulated SEO doesn't evaporate. The roundups and comparison tables built on that query still rank — many updated only cosmetically, with a 2026 date stamp on a description of the 2022 product. Treat any article calling it Sendinblue as evidence nobody re-checked the facts.

One genuine consequence: plan names moved too. Older content describes Lite, Premium and Enterprise tiers. That ladder is gone. The current marketing plans are Free, Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise, with the CRM sold separately as Sales Essentials and Sales Advanced.

The pricing model is the product decision

The whole thing in one line: Brevo's marketing plans are metered on emails sent per month, not contacts stored. On Brevo's pricing page, Starter is "From 5,000 emails per month" and Professional "From 150,000 emails per month" — the volume attached to each tier is a send allowance. Contact count appears only as a descriptor at Enterprise, which Brevo positions for "companies with 1M+ contacts."

Under the standard model your bill rises every time your list grows, whether or not you email anyone on it. A 60,000-name list emailed four times a year costs the same as one emailed daily. Under Brevo's model it costs a fraction as much. So the answer to "is Brevo cheap?" is a shape, not a number:

Right if you have a big list and send infrequently. A membership body emailing 80,000 members monthly; a B2B company with years of accumulated leads and a quarterly newsletter; an events business with a huge database and three campaigns a year. These teams are punished hardest by contact-priced platforms, and the saving is not marginal.

Wrong if you have a small list and send constantly. A 3,000-contact list on daily sequences, behavioural triggers and abandoned-cart flows burns through send allowance fast, while a contact-priced rival charges for 3,000 contacts and lets you send until your fingers hurt.

Do the arithmetic first: total emails sent in the last twelve months, divided by twelve. That number, not your contact count, is what you're buying — and most teams have never calculated it, which is exactly why they don't know whether they're overpaying today.

What each tier unlocks, and what is metered

Tier	Metered on	What it unlocks	Watch for
Free	300 emails per day	Contacts, drag-and-drop editor, templates, transactional email and API	Daily cap, not monthly — you cannot batch a big send
Starter	Monthly volume, from 5,000/month	Email + SMS campaigns, segmentation, forms, basic reporting, email support	Marketing automation is not here
Standard	Monthly volume	Adds automation, A/B testing, advanced reporting, heatmaps, send-time optimisation, web/event tracking, 1 landing page	The real entry tier for a marketing team
Professional	Monthly volume, from 150,000/month	Adds WhatsApp, push, popups, 10 seats, contact scoring, AI segmentation, phone support, 3 hrs/yr deliverability specialist	Multi-user access starts here
Enterprise	Custom, positioned at 1M+ contacts	Adds custom objects, multi-account, dedicated IP, SSO/SAML, custom integrations, onboarding, CSM	Quote-only; expect to negotiate
Sales Essentials / Advanced	Per user, per month	The CRM, sold separately	A second line item, not a bundle
Pay-as-you-go	Credits, 1 email = 1 credit	Same features, no phone support; credits do not expire	Genuinely useful for irregular senders

Four structural notes that matter more than any price.

The free plan's cap is daily, not monthly. Brevo's pricing FAQ states that once your account is approved for sending, "you can start sending up to 300 emails per day." Thirty days at the cap is 9,000 emails — more than most free tiers allow — but you cannot send 9,000 in one campaign. That suits trickle and transactional sending and is useless for a monthly newsletter to a real list. Free emails also carry a Brevo footer; removing it is a paid feature.

Marketing automation starts at Standard, not Starter. If automation is why you're evaluating Brevo, price Standard and ignore the entry tier.

Annual billing is discounted; the toggle advertises 10% off yearly. Check which state the page is in when you read a number — presenting an annual-effective rate as a monthly price is the most common error in email platform roundups.

SMS and WhatsApp are credits on top of the plan. Brevo's pricing page states SMS credits are sold separately, so multichannel is a second meter, and WhatsApp campaigns are gated at Professional.

Channels and automation depth

The multichannel story is the strongest non-pricing argument for Brevo. Email, SMS, WhatsApp, web and mobile push, live chat and a chatbot all run from one contact database and one automation builder; the alternative is a separate vendor and a sync you maintain forever. The caveat is depth — each channel is competent rather than best-in-class. If WhatsApp is your primary revenue channel you'll want a dedicated platform; if it's a supporting channel you'd otherwise skip, having it in the box is exactly right.

Automation follows the same pattern. Standard and above include unlimited multi-step workflows with web and event tracking; Professional adds contact scoring, including RFM and lifetime-value models, plus AI-assisted segmentation. The builder handles welcome series, abandoned cart, re-engagement and lead nurture well, and thins out on complex branching and multi-object conditions. If your workflows fit on one page you won't notice the ceiling; if they don't, test the exact sequence you care about during a trial rather than reading a feature list. Our B2B email marketing platform comparison places that ceiling against the field.

Transactional email and the API

This is Brevo's quiet strength and the least-discussed part of the product. Per Brevo's pricing FAQ, all plans — including Free — include transactional email: RESTful APIs, SMTP relay, outbound webhooks and unlimited log retention.

Most teams run a separate transactional provider alongside their marketing ESP, paying two vendors and maintaining two sender reputations. Brevo covers both from one account — one fewer contract, one fewer domain setup, one place to debug a bounce. A genuine de-stacking move.

The caution: on shared infrastructure, marketing complaints can affect the reputation your receipts ride on. Brevo offers a dedicated IP at Enterprise. High transactional volume plus aggressive marketing means you should separate the streams.

The built-in CRM: useful, but not a CRM replacement

Brevo sells a Sales Platform — pipelines, deal tracking, meetings, shared inbox, call recording, sales reports and an AI assistant — priced per user per month as Sales Essentials and Sales Advanced, separately from the marketing plans. There's a free tier, so it's easy to try.

Be clear-eyed about what it is: a competent pipeline tracker attached to a marketing database. For a founder-led business where the same person sends the newsletter and closes the deals, having contacts and deals in one system is a real advantage.

It is not a replacement for a real CRM for a sales-led team. No sophisticated forecasting, no territory or quota model, no deep customisation of the sales data model, and a far thinner integration ecosystem than the CRM market expects. Three or more reps and a manager who wants pipeline reports, and you'll outgrow it — and migrating a CRM hurts far more than migrating an ESP. Our comparison of HubSpot and Pipedrive covers that bar; the budget CRM roundup covers cheaper dedicated options.

That's the honest version of the all-in-one trade. Bundles are adequate at everything and excellent at nothing. Buy one when "adequate" clears your bar and the alternative is four subscriptions and three integrations; refuse one when a bundled function is the engine of your business. For most B2B teams, email is what Brevo should be doing and the CRM is a bonus, not the reason to buy.

Deliverability and EU data residency

Deliverability. Brevo is a shared-infrastructure sender with a generous free tier — the structural condition that attracts spam and drags shared IP reputation. That's not Brevo-specific; it applies to every platform with a free plan, but it's why deliverability complaints cluster around low-cost ESPs. Brevo approves accounts before enabling sending and sells dedicated IPs at Enterprise. Anyone quoting a specific inbox-placement percentage for any ESP is quoting a test methodology, not a fact about your mail. Authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, warm up gradually and prune inactive contacts — those habits move deliverability further than platform choice does.

Note the incentive quirk: paying per send rather than per contact means no financial pressure to clean your list. That's a saving and a trap. Cheap storage of dead addresses is how sender reputation rots.

EU data residency and GDPR. Brevo's security page states its servers are located in the EU, that it holds ISO 27001:2022 certification, that data is backed up across three geographically distinct servers, and that it supports GDPR, CASL and CCPA compliance. Its GDPR page sets out the data subject rights process, including a 30-day erasure commitment and contact-level export.

For a European team, an EU-headquartered vendor on EU infrastructure removes a whole category of procurement friction — the international transfer analysis you run for every US-hosted platform. That's a legitimate reason to shortlist Brevo ahead of a nominally better-featured American competitor.

Who owns Brevo

Brevo remains privately held and founder-led. On 4 December 2025, General Atlantic announced a €500 million financing round: General Atlantic and Oakley Capital joined as new shareholders, Bpifrance and Bridgepoint remained minority investors, and Partech — an investor since 2017 — fully exited. Management and employees became the company's largest shareholder group, and Brevo reached unicorn status.

Read that as a stability signal with a caveat. Founder control and employee ownership favour product continuity; a round that size also implies growth expectations, and those arrive at your renewal eventually. Read the uplift clause before committing to multiple years — see our guide to negotiating SaaS renewals.

Who should buy Brevo, and who shouldn't

Buy it if: you have a large list you email infrequently; you're a European team with a procurement or DPO process; you pay a separate transactional provider you could retire; or you're a solo operator who wants marketing and a light pipeline in one place.

Buy something else if: you send daily lifecycle marketing to a small list; you're a sales-led team needing a real CRM; you run high-volume cold outbound, which Brevo isn't built for and which risks your sending reputation and your account (see our cold email software comparison); or your automation needs multi-object branching and custom attribution.

The verdict

Brevo is a good product with an unusually opinionated pricing model, and the model is the decision. For a big list sent to occasionally it is among the best-value platforms available, and rebrand-era confusion means many teams have never priced it properly. For a small list sent to constantly it is the wrong architecture, and no plan tier fixes that.

The de-stacking read: Brevo can legitimately remove two line items — a transactional provider and, for a small enough team, a CRM. Take the first happily; take the second only if you've been honest about how sales-led you are. Before deciding, run the tech stack audit: count your monthly send volume, count your contacts, and see which number your current bill is tracking. If it's contacts and you send rarely, you have found money.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Brevo the same as Sendinblue?

Yes. Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo on 4 May 2023, keeping the same company, founder, product and customer accounts — only the name, brand and positioning changed. The company said the rename reflected its evolution from a newsletter service into a multichannel marketing and CRM platform. Any article still calling it Sendinblue is three years out of date, so treat its prices with suspicion.

How does Brevo's pricing work?

Brevo meters its marketing plans on emails sent per month, not contacts stored — the reverse of most email platforms. The ladder runs Free, Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise, with the CRM sold separately per user and SMS and WhatsApp bought as credits. Brevo's pricing page renders figures client-side and localises currency, so check brevo.com/pricing and note whether you're seeing the monthly or discounted yearly figure.

What are the limits of Brevo's free plan?

The free plan allows up to 300 emails per day once Brevo approves your account for sending, per its pricing FAQ. That cap is daily rather than monthly, so it suits trickle and transactional sending but cannot accommodate one large newsletter blast. Free plan emails also carry a Brevo footer, and marketing automation only starts at Standard.

Is Brevo cheaper than Mailchimp?

It depends on the ratio between your list size and your send frequency, not on any headline rate. Because Brevo bills on volume sent while Mailchimp bills on contacts stored, a large list emailed occasionally is dramatically cheaper on Brevo, and a small list emailed daily is usually cheaper on Mailchimp. Work out your average monthly send volume and contact count, then price both against those numbers.

Is Brevo's built-in CRM good enough to replace a real CRM?

For a solo operator or very small business where one person handles both marketing and deals, it is genuinely usable. For a sales-led team with multiple reps and reporting expectations it is not — it lacks the forecasting, customisation and integration depth a dedicated CRM provides. Since migrating a CRM hurts far more than migrating an ESP, pick the dedicated tool if you'll cross that line within two years.

Is Brevo GDPR compliant and where is data hosted?

Brevo's security page states its servers are located in the EU, that it holds ISO 27001:2022 certification, and that it supports GDPR, CASL and CCPA compliance. Its GDPR page documents the data subject rights process, including a 30-day erasure commitment and contact-level export. For European teams that removes the international transfer analysis required for US-hosted platforms.