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There’s a lot to love about the Paris-based email platform that used to be called Sendinblue. Its free plan is one, as is its range of multichannel marketing features.
That said, the platform is far from perfect. Perhaps you aren’t impressed by its ecommerce capabilities, range of email templates, or something else. In this case, you might need to explore Brevo alternatives — and you have no shortage of options here!
Drawing on our in-depth knowledge and experience in testing email platforms, we’ve shortlisted 10 of the best email marketing solutions available — including free ones — if Brevo isn’t your cup of tea. Let’s check them out.
Brevo Pros
- Good free plan
- Solid range of email automation features
- Multichannel marketing features available (e.g. SMS, WhatsApp, web push notifications)
Brevo Cons
- Small range of email templates
- Limited ecommerce features
- No ecommerce reports
- Cannot sell digital products
- Daily sending limit on free plan
- Poor deliverability in recent tests (learn more about Brevo deliverability)
An Overview of The Top Brevo Competitors
| Email Marketing Service | Ease of Use | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) |
User-friendly drag-and-drop builder and simple menu navigation. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $25 per month |
Good free plan and range of multichannel marketing features. Not the best for ecommerce. |
MailerLite |
Intuitive navigation and the interface loads fast. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $15 per month |
Fantastic deliverability, but newsletter and landing page templates are a paid feature. These features are free in Brevo. |
Moosend |
Not the easiest to use. | Paid plans start at $9 per month | Moosend allows for multi-user access, whereas Brevo reserves this for its higher-tier plan.. But unlike Brevo, Moosend has no SMS marketing, chat, or CRM features. |
Omnisend |
Fairly easy to use, although some users have reported experiencing difficulties. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $16 per month |
Niche ecommerce features such as product recommendations. Unlike Brevo, blocklisting is not available. |
GetResponse |
Clean and intuitive interface that’s generally easy to navigate. | Free version available
Marketing plans start at $19 per month |
Pre-built templates for creating entire conversion funnels. Plans are not as affordable as Brevo’s. |
Mailchimp |
Easy to use as a whole, though setting up opt-ins may present an initial learning curve. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $13 per month |
Nice range of email marketing, social media management, and digital ad tools. Brevo’s list management features are more user-friendly, however. |
ActiveCampaign |
User-friendly design and easy-to-navigate menus. Beginners may need some time to familiarize themselves with the sheer number of features. | Paid Marketing plans start at $39 per month | Powerful email marketing automation tools. But unlike Brevo, there is no free plan. |
Constant Contact |
Generally easy to navigate, though some features have become more buried over time. | Paid plans start at $12 per month | Apart from the usual email marketing features, you can create social media posts and post them to multiple social platforms at once. Brevo has more flexible automations, though. |
AWeber |
Easy to navigate, but experienced email marketers may be confused by the platform’s unconventional terminology and list management. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $19.99 per month |
Phone and chat support is available for free users. Brevo doesn’t count unsubscribed contacts against your monthly quota like AWeber does. |
Mailjet |
Relatively easy to navigate as you set up email marketing campaigns. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $15 per month |
Multiple users can collaborate on a single email at the same time. But Mailjet’s free plan isn’t as generous as Brevo’s. |
Benchmark Email |
The minimalist interface that’s easy to use. | Free version available
Paid plans start at $9.99 per month |
Auto-generate email content using AI. Deliverability is much poorer than Brevo’s. |
The Best Brevo (Sendinblue) Alternatives
Based on our extensive tests, we’ve found the following email service providers (ESPs) to be the best alternatives to Brevo out there. Keep reading to learn more about them!
- MailerLite – Best email deliverability
- Moosend – Generous range of features at a lower price point
- Omnisend – Dedicated e-commerce marketing platform
- GetResponse – Build end-to-end conversion funnels
- Mailchimp – All-rounded marketing platform with more integrations
- ActiveCampaign – Powerful automation
- Constant Contact – Manage email and social media post creation together
- AWeber – Accessible phone and chat customer support
- Mailjet – Real-time email collaboration
- Benchmark Email – Generate email content using AI
MailerLite
MailerLite is a joy to use. Its interface is clean and intuitive and makes creating emails fuss-free. We’ve been so wowed by MailerLite’s user-friendliness that we’ve awarded it our Best Email Marketing Tool For Ease of Use badge for 2023!
This newer email marketing platform may also be of interest to creators and digital product sellers. Integrate MailerLite with Stripe, and you’ll be able to fulfill and take payment for digital product sales from within the MailerLite platform.
Where MailerLite beats Brevo:
Of all the email platforms we’ve tested, MailerLite comes in tops for email deliverability. Brevo’s deliverability score has suffered lately, and is still significantly lower than MailerLite’s.
Unlike Brevo, you can also sell digital products — including subscriptions — from within the MailerLite platform.
Where Brevo wins:
From our research, most email platforms — Brevo included — provide access to newsletter and landing page templates even on their free plan. So it’s surprising to see that MailerLite has made these templates a paid feature.
MailerLite also isn’t the best option if you need transactional emails, integrated live chat, SMS marketing, or sales CRM features. Unlike Brevo, it doesn’t offer these features out of the box.
Moosend
Moosend’s cutesy logo may raise your eyebrows, but don’t underestimate this email marketing software.
This modern email platform provides a drag-and-drop email builder, landing pages, and marketing automation features at an affordable price point. The interface is also clean and easy to use. Advanced email marketers will like Moosend’s extensive range of reports that help you understand where your subscribers are located, which parts of your emails are getting the most clicks, and more.
Where Moosend beats Brevo:
Moosend has some neat features you won’t find in Brevo. For example, you can add countdown timers to your emails, as well as AI-powered product recommendations. You’d need to install third-party integrations to do the same in Brevo.
Moosend also beats Brevo in terms of price. Moosend’s paid features start at $9 per month under its Pro plan, which is much cheaper than Brevo’s $25 per month and up for its Starter plan. Find out more about its pricing and more in our Moosend review.
Where Brevo wins:
Being a dedicated email marketing platform, Moosend doesn’t offer SMS marketing and WhatsApp campaign features like Brevo does. Neither does Moosend have chat or sales CRM features.
Apart from that, business owners on a budget may like how Brevo has a “forever free” plan. Moosend does provide free access to its features, but only on a 30-day free-trial basis.
Omnisend
Recognizing the specialized email marketing needs of ecommerce stores, a handful of email platforms have niched down into serving the ecommerce market. Omnisend is one of them, offering email and SMS automations for online stores.
The result is a marketing platform aimed at helping online stores grow, nurture, and convert their customer base. If you run an online store on Shopify, BigCommerce, or some other leading ecommerce platform, Omnisend is a strong Brevo alternative to consider.
Where Omnisend beats Brevo:
Built with online store owners in mind, Omnisend sports a few ecommerce features not available in Brevo out of the box. These include discount code generation and product recommendation. We’ve actually named it the best email marketing tool for Shopify.
Omnisend’s free plan is also especially generous, giving you access to almost all the platform’s features (except for advanced reporting). You generally need to upgrade only if you’ve exceeded either the monthly email send limit or the recipient quota for each email.
Find out more about Omnisend’s pricing.
Where Brevo wins:
Users have reported having difficulty setting up and navigating the Omnisend platform. In contrast, users generally find the Brevo platform easy to use.
GetResponse
Over the years, many email marketing tools have diversified into all-in-one marketing platforms with landing page builders, social media post creation tools, and other features. But very few have managed to have such a comprehensive suite of marketing offerings as GetResponse.
Yes, you can send emails in an easy-to-use interface, but you can also host webinars, take out Facebook, Instagram and Twitter ads, set up web push notifications, and even build a full sales funnel! If you find all this interesting, GetResponse is definitely worth a closer look.
Where GetResponse beats Brevo:
GetResponse’s Conversion Funnel feature is something you won’t find in Brevo. Choose from over 30 pre-built templates to build your own conversion funnel, and GetResponse provides the necessary tools for fleshing out your funnel’s landing pages, automated email marketing campaigns, and more.
And if you plan on holding webinars, you’ll like how GetResponse has built-in webinar features for hosting up to 1,000 live attendees, live-streaming your webinar, and storing up to 20 hours’ worth of webinar recordings. Brevo doesn’t provide similar webinar features.
Where Brevo wins:
While GetResponse offers marketing automations, you have to be on quite a pricey subscription plan to access them. On the other hand, Brevo lets you set up marketing automations even on its free plan (though with a 2,000-contact limit). Find out more about GetResponse’s pricing.
Mailchimp
No comparison of email marketing services is complete without the chimp!
Mailchimp is a popular option for small business owners who need easy-to-use email automations and landing pages. While it started out as just an email marketing solution, Mailchimp has since branched out to offer social media management and digital ads tools — and even a postcard feature if you feel like sending customers a postcard or two.
Where Mailchimp beats Brevo:
If you’re promoting products in your emails, you’ll appreciate how Mailchimp provides ecommerce reports on the products you’ve sold via a particular email and the total revenue generated from it. Brevo doesn’t offer a similar report.
Mailchimp also integrates with many more apps than Brevo — over 300 versus Brevo’s 60+.
> See how these two marketing tools compare in our Brevo vs Mailchimp guide.
Where Brevo wins:
Brevo provides its full range of marketing automation features even on its free plan. This is unlike Mailchimp, whose free plan limits you to single-step automations.
Brevo’s list management features are also far more user-friendly than Mailchimp’s. Using conditions (up to 20 of them in a single segment), you can flexibly split up your contact list based on customer data points to target a particular segment of contacts.
While Mailchimp has a similar segmentation feature, it ties your segments to specific audiences (which is Mailchimp’s terminology for contact lists). You can’t include contacts in one audience in a segment you’ve created for another audience.
ActiveCampaign
Want more than email features? ActiveCampaign may be for you. Apart from its powerful email and SMS marketing automations, it also sports a decent CRM tool for keeping track of deals, scoring leads, and automating sales engagements. Of course, there's also a fully featured landing page builder. They've recently changed their pricing model, so in order to access these Sales features, you'll need to sign up for their Sales plan, or a combination of both Marketing and Sales, which can be purchased as a Bundle.
After running our deliverability tests, we were so impressed by ActiveCampaign that we awarded it the Best Email Marketing Tool badge for 2023.
Where ActiveCampaign beats Brevo:
ActiveCampaign’s powerful marketing automation features simply dominate. Unlike Brevo’s marketing automations, you can filter contacts going through ActiveCampaign’s marketing automations using more detailed segmentation and personalization conditions and create more personalized user journeys.
Separately, ActiveCampaign also has a much wider range of responsive email templates than Brevo.
Find out how they compare in the email marketing and CRM department here.
Where Brevo wins:
Brevo offers a free plan, which is a good option for small businesses on a budget. The free plan is pretty generous too, containing features such as SMS marketing, transactional email sending, and marketing automation. ActiveCampaign doesn’t have a free plan and is much more expensive overall.
Beginners and/or business owners who just need a simple email marketing solution may also find Brevo’s leaner set of features easier to work with.
Constant Contact
If there’s one email marketing solution that’s constantly been around since the 1990s, it’s none other than Constant Contact. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.)
Constant Contact offers all the standard email marketing features, including a drag-and-drop email editor and hundreds of email templates. However, its pricing may be an off-putter, especially considering how you can get similar — and maybe even better — email features at lower prices elsewhere.
Where Constant Contact beats Brevo:
Unlike Brevo, Constant Contact comes with social media features such as social media post creation and simultaneous posting to multiple social platforms. You may find these useful if you want a one-stop shop for managing your email and social media marketing.
We also find Brevo’s range of email templates to be much smaller than Constant Contact’s.
Where Brevo wins:
From our experience, Constant Contact’s automation workflows are more limited than Brevo’s. You can create simple automated email funnels that send an email after a fixed time period with no issues. But if you want to set up more complex automations that involve conditional paths and A/B splits, you’ll have to use Brevo instead.
Brevo’s plans also allow for unlimited contacts — you pay more only if you need more premium features and/or a higher monthly email send limit. The price increases are also quite reasonable.
In contrast, Constant Contact’s plans cap the number of contacts you can have, and you’ll have to pay significantly more if you exceed this cap. For example, exceeding the first 500-contact limit will see your email bill dramatically increase from $12 per month to $50 per month!
If you have a large contact list, you may find it more economical to use Brevo instead of Constant Contact. See our top tips on how to build a bigger contact list!
AWeber
AWeber has been around since 1998 — it’s practically a dinosaur in email marketing years. It also suffered a partial system outage while we were writing this section, so it didn’t exactly make a good first impression.
Nevertheless, the email service provider has been making an effort to keep up with the times. There are some plus points that make AWeber a potential Brevo alternative, as you’ll read about below.
Where AWeber beats Brevo:
AWeber lets you sell products and services, and take payments for them, directly within its platform. From our experience, not many other email platforms offer this feature. And particularly not Brevo, for the purposes of this guide.
If you prefer getting help via chat or phone support, you’ll like how AWeber makes both support options available to free users. Brevo users can obtain phone and chat support only if they’re on the platform’s more expensive Business and Enterprise plans.
Where Brevo wins:
Love to optimize email campaigns to perfection? You may find Brevo’s send time optimization feature up your alley. It uses machine learning algorithms to predict the best email send times for the highest engagement rates. AWeber doesn’t provide this feature.
Also, the way AWeber counts subscribers for billing purposes can be a bit unfair. That’s because users who subscribe to multiple email lists belonging to the same AWeber account will be double-counted as separate subscribers. You’ll even be charged for unsubscribed contacts. In this regard, Brevo’s pricing is much fairer as the platform counts each subscriber only once. Find out more about AWeber’s pricing.
Mailjet
All the standard email marketing features can be found in Mailjet’s platform: a drag-and-drop email editor, mobile-responsive email templates, and autoresponder emails, among others. But team collaboration is where Mailjet really excels.
Its email editor can accommodate simultaneous edits to a single email marketing campaign from multiple users (think Google Docs, but for emails). This will prove handy if you have a team managing your email campaigns.
Where Mailjet beats Brevo:
As mentioned, Mailjet’s real-time email collaboration feature lets different team members work on the same email at the same time. Based on our research, neither Brevo nor many other email marketing platforms have this feature.
In Mailjet, you’ll also be able to A/B-test up to 10 different versions of your email at once for identifying which converts the best. Brevo’s own A/B-testing feature is limited to two different email versions.
Where Brevo wins:
Brevo’s free plan is more generous than Mailjet’s. With it, you can send up to 300 emails per day, compared to Mailjet’s daily limit of 200. You also get access to contact segmentation, dynamic content, and marketing automations. These features are available only on Mailjet’s paid Essential and Premium plans.
Brevo is also the better platform for consolidating your multichannel marketing efforts — it has built-in features for creating landing pages, sending push notifications, and managing sales in a CRM tool. These features are missing in Mailjet, which focuses on email marketing services.
Benchmark Email
AI writing tools are hot these days, and Benchmark is quick to ride on this trend. One of its latest features, Smart Content, helps you generate original email content using AI in a matter of seconds. Say goodbye to writing emails from scratch!
The Smart Content feature is directly accessible from Benchmark’s email editor too, so you don’t have to repeatedly switch browser tabs to add AI-generated content to your emails.
That said, emails — even those written with the help of AI — are helpful only if they reach their recipients. So on that note, you might find Benchmark’s poor deliverability to be a deal-breaker.
Where Benchmark Email beats Brevo:
Benchmark has useful built-in features for sending feedback surveys to customers or polling them on their interests. On the other hand, you’ll need a third-party integration to add such survey and poll features to the Brevo platform.
Also of note is Benchmark’s Smart Content AI copywriting tool, which helps generate — or even rewrite — email content based on prompts you provide. Brevo doesn’t offer such an AI content tool at this time. (Neither do many other platforms actually, based on our research.)
Where Brevo wins:
Brevo’s deliverability score is much, much better than Benchmark’s. To give you an idea of the situation, Benchmark came in 15th — and dead last — in pretty much all our email deliverability tests. Ouch.
You’ll also have an easier time segmenting subscribers in Brevo over Benchmark. Brevo’s segmentation setup is simpler to navigate and more flexible, while Benchmark’s isn’t as intuitive. For example, you can’t set up “or” logic to create a segment of contacts with either ABC criteria or XYZ criteria.
FreeAlternatives to Brevo
Brevo has one of the best free plans we’ve seen on the market. But if Brevo isn’t for you and funds are limited, consider these free plans from other email platforms.
MailerLite
MailerLite’s free plan is an attractive alternative to Brevo’s. You can send email campaigns to up to 1,000 subscribers, subject to a generous monthly send limit of 12,000 emails. Features-wise, we like how you can build automations and landing pages for free. You’ll also be able to get basic email customer support on weekdays if you find yourself needing help.
Omnisend
New ecommerce store owners who are on a budget will appreciate Omnisend’s free plan. On it, you can enjoy pretty much Omnisend’s full suite of features, including email and SMS automations, web push notifications, product recommendations, and contact segmentation.
The main downsides of Omnisend’s free plan are that you’re restricted to basic reporting features and can send only 500 emails per month. And while you can store an unlimited number of contacts, you can email only 250 of them at any one time.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s free plan is another popular option. It lets you send up to 2,500 emails per month to a maximum of 500 contacts. Landing page and social media post creation features are also available. And while some other platforms we’ve reviewed put their marketing automation features behind a paywall, you can build simple automations on Mailchimp’s free plan.
That said, free users can’t schedule emails, which is a bummer. Mailchimp also provides free users with email support for only the first 30 days of account creation. After that, you’re left to read the platform’s guides and figure things out on your own.
Our guide to free email marketing services covers these platforms’ free plans in more detail if you need more info to make a decision.
Why Use Brevo?
(We're currently in the process of updating our video to reflect the new Brevo interface and branding, however, the features offered remain the same)
Of all the email marketing platforms available out there, you might find Brevo to be the best email marketing platform in these situations:
You’re on a tight budget
With generous features such as unlimited contacts, email templates, marketing automation, and contact segmentation, Brevo’s free plan is a good choice if you don’t need to send more than 300 emails per day.
You need multichannel marketing features
Brevo is one of the few platforms that offer not just email marketing features, but also features for engaging contacts via SMS, WhatsApp, transactional emails, and web push notifications! If you plan on marketing via these channels, you may find Brevo a compelling all-in-one marketing platform for your business.
Who Should Look For Brevo Alternatives?
If you aren’t sure whether our recommended 10 alternatives to Brevo are more appropriate for your needs compared to Brevo, it might be helpful to check if you fall within any of these categories of users:
You want more powerful automation features
Brevo’s automations are solid, but there are certain limitations. For example, there is only so much filtering you can do to ensure that the right contacts go through your automations. If you can afford them, other more advanced marketing automation platforms may be better choices.
Alternative email platforms for automations: ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and Omnisend
You are an ecommerce seller
While Brevo integrates with all the major ecommerce platforms and has useful SMS marketing features, you may find it insufficient for meeting your ecommerce marketing needs. Common ecommerce features, such as product recommendations and discount code creation, are available only as third-party integrations (which you may have to pay for separately).
Alternative email platforms for ecommerce: Omnisend, GetResponse, and Mailchimp
You want to sell digital products
Various email platforms are muscling into the digital product fulfillment space, and turning their email forms into simple checkout forms that help creators sell digital products. (Sorry, Gumroad!)
At this time, however, Brevo isn’t one of these platforms. Unless it is building similar digital product fulfillment and payment features, Brevo may find itself getting left behind as the creator economy grows.
Alternative email platforms for selling digital products: MailerLite and AWeber
You want to manage your email and social media campaigns in one place
We’ve mentioned how Brevo is great for multichannel marketing, but social media post creation curiously isn’t within its suite of features. (Only Facebook ad creation is, if you’re on Brevo’s more expensive plans.) If you value such convenience, other email platforms stand ready to fill this gap.
Alternative email platforms for social media campaign management: Mailchimp and Constant Contact
You’re focused on generating and converting leads
You can generate leads with Brevo’s email forms and improve your conversion rate with its send time optimization and A/B-testing features. If you’re new to marketing, though, you may struggle to tie all of Brevo’s features together and build a high-converting email funnel.
And in this regard, we like GetResponse. It offers pre-built templates that guide you in creating a complete conversion funnel within its platform, from start to finish. Other helpful marketing features, such as webinars and order fulfillment, only pad out your funnel for greater effectiveness.
Alternative email platform for social media campaign management: GetResponse
You run an email marketing team
Multi-user access is available in Brevo only on its more expensive plans, which you may not need at this time otherwise. Various other email platforms allow for the creation of multiple user accounts on lower-tiered plans. Mailjet also goes one step further here, allowing different team members to collaborate on the same email in real-time.
Alternative email platforms for team collaboration: Mailjet, Moosend, MailerLite, and Mailchimp
You want to leverage AI for your email content
Brevo uses machine learning for its send time optimization feature. But some of its rivals go one step further, with AI features that help users generate their emails’ text and product recommendations. Whether Brevo will include similar AI-powered content generation features in the future remains to be seen.
Alternative email platforms for AI features: Benchmark Email and Moosend
What’s Right for You: Brevo or Something Else?
Brevo may claim a 500,000-strong global user base, but that doesn’t necessarily mean blue is the right color for your own email marketing strategy. Depending on your specific needs, you may find one of the Brevo alternatives we’ve covered here to be the better choice.
For example, we’d strongly recommend ActiveCampaign if you’re in the market for powerful automation features. Ecommerce store owners may also prefer to invest in a good email marketing platform tailored to their needs, such as Omnisend.
And if you think a free email service is good enough for the time being, MailerLite’s generous free plan is a clear contender.
If you’ve got a question on whether Brevo or an alternative platform is right for you, leave us a comment! We’d love to help.
FAQ
Yes – Brevo is the new name for the email marketing service previously known as Sendinblue. With the rebrand, the company hopes to establish a reputation as an all-in-one digital marketing platform, rather than the newsletter-focused service that Sendinblue was better known for.
A free plan is available with Brevo. It gives you 300 emails per day, and access to automations, transactional emails and SMS features. However, landing pages, A/B testing, and Facebook ads are not included. More information is available here.
For most things, we’d say so. Brevo stands out for its robust automation capabilities and advanced list management features. In terms of pricing, Brevo is also a more affordable option compared to Mailchimp. However, it’s worth noting that Mailchimp tends to have more consistent deliverability rates. Read more in our Brevo vs Mailchimp comparison.
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We keep our content up to date
13 Oct 2023 - General article update
25 Aug 2023 - Small updates and corrections
10 Jul 2023 - Added FAQs
05 May 2023 - Updated Omnisend Features and Brevo banner
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This article has been written and researched following our EmailTooltester methodology.
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