Brevo Review The Cheapest All-in-One Solution?

• Brevo Review

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Brevo Screenshots

Brevo Pricing

The most significant difference between Brevo and other email marketing services is that Brevo charges per email rather than per subscriber. In fact, there is no limit to the number of contacts you can upload.

It is also worth noting that there is a ‘pay-as-you-go’ option (Email Credits) available for customers who do not send newsletters every month.

Learn more in our comprehensive Brevo pricing guide.

Pros and Cons

Is Brevo the right newsletter service for you?

Rating Details

A More Detailed Look at Brevo’s Features

As you can see, Brevo offers a good range of pro features, and gains points for being so affordable for small businesses. Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of Brevo’s key features:

Brevo Templates

Brevo’s templates aren’t bad at all. There are 47 responsive designs available, and they are organized by purpose (sale, re-engagement, welcome, etc.) rather than industry (fashion, marketing, etc.). Compared to many of Brevo’s competitors it’s an uncommon approach, but in my opinion, this makes more sense, as the design will already be optimized for specific call-to-actions.

All email templates are included on all plans, including the free one. Though, bear in mind that you’ll need to pay in order to remove Brevo’s branding.

You also have the option to code your own newsletter and save it as a template.

Note that once you’ve chosen your template, you won’t be able to change it without starting from scratch.

Brevo SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is offered on the free plan, though you’ll need to purchase credits. The price depends on the country you’re sending them to. For example, sending SMS within the US will cost you €5 for 500 SMS, €10 for 1000, etc. Note that you’ll be charged in Euros regardless of where you operate.

Having the ability to send SMS is an added bonus, as not many email marketing platforms offer this. Not even the popular newsletter tool Mailchimp has this capability.

I compared prices to emailing tool Omnisend and found them to be very similar.

Brevo for transactional emails

Brevo’s SMTP relay service is used to send transactional emails and avoid spam filters. This is great for those who need to send time-sensitive bulk emails.

Brevo promise rapid delivery:

• 50% of emails delivered within 1 second
• 99.98% of emails delivered in under 20 seconds

You can use Brevo’s SMTP service for free with a limit of 300 emails per day. If you are going to send a higher volume, you need to pick one of their paid plans. In our tests of the transactional email service, I found some deliverability issues, unfortunately. So if you’re only planning to send emails via SMTP or API, you should check out competitors such as SMTP2Go or Postmark.

Brevo CRM

Aside from unlimited contacts, marketing automation and web tracking, its free plan also comes with a built-in CRM.

Most all-in-one email marketing services charge extra for this pro feature, so having it for free is a great advantage to using Brevo.

I even included it in our guide to the best CRM software for small businesses for that very reason.

It’s true that dedicated CRMs like HubSpot offer greater functionality, though if you only need a simple solution, Brevo’s CRM could be enough for you. After all, we have listed it as one of the best HubSpot alternatives.

In our opinion, Brevo’s deal pipeline is well-designed and easy to use. It’s definitely one of the simpler CRM solutions, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, you won’t be overwhelmed by hundreds of options and layers of navigation. Instead, you’ll find editing columns and adding/editing attributes a breeze.

That said, it is missing two key things: lead scoring and analytics. There is no reporting at all on deals, which isn’t great.

Live Chat with Brevo Conversations

Finally, I got around to fully testing the Conversations feature. I honestly didn’t expect much from it. Given our extensive reviews of live chat software on our sister site Tooltester, I thought it would be a tall order for Brevo to measure up to established players like LiveChat and Tidio.

However, to my surprise, Brevo Conversations proved to be an exceptionally adept live chat tool, which we’ve even begun utilizing on EmailTooltester as you can see here:

Brevo Conversations live visitors feed

Available even on the free plan, it offers unlimited chats and retains a full conversation history. The Pro plan is priced at a competitive $15/month per user, a rate that’s hard to beat. In comparison, many live chat solutions easily charge double, if not more.

An added perk is that Conversations can be used ‘stand-alone’, meaning you don’t necessarily need to be an email marketing user to take advantage of this feature.

Pros and Cons of Brevo Conversations

WhatsApp Campaigns

As one of the first Meta partners for WhatsApp Campaigns, with Brevo, you can now send targeted messages to your audience through the messaging app.

Unlike with SMS, you can customize your WhatsApp campaigns with images, videos, attachments, and CTAs. This could be a great way to keep your customers engaged. You’ll be required to add an unsubscribe link to your WhatsApp campaigns, and we’d advise keeping an eye on the unsubscribe rate, as a high one will affect your quality score. It would be great if you could A/B test such campaigns – something that isn’t possible currently.

You can upload your contacts in bulk and create segments that you can use across other channels (SMS and email campaigns). So the fact that you can manage various channels all in one place is really useful.

This feature is available on all plans, though sending charges vary per country.

Brevo Deliverability

It’s been interesting to monitor Brevo’s deliverability rates over the years, their scores have fluctuated from the mid-nineties to a disappointing 67.7% in our test in June 2023, coming second to last. However, on a more positive note, they saw quite an improvement in our latest round, moving up 6 places with an increase of 16.6 percentage points.  We look forward to seeing if they can keep this performance up.

Conclusion

After conducting this Brevo review and having used them intensively for more than a year, it’s clear that Brevo is really one of the top providers for small businesses.

They’ve built-in some very clever options to help small businesses optimize their email marketing strategies, including advanced email automation, segmentation, and landing pages and forms that are geared towards increasing conversions.

While its automation features may not be enough to topple the email marketing software giants like ActiveCampaign, it’s not a long way off.

Brevo has also been working on its CRM features, incorporating a deal pipeline and inbox where you’re able to send emails to customers directly by integrating with your email client.

Aside from offering a generous free plan, with its paid plans starting from $25 for up to 20,000 emails, Brevo is one of the cheapest email marketing providers on the market, providing tremendous value.

In terms of features, there’s no denying that Brevo is impressive. Our best advice? If, after reading this Brevo review, you’re really interested in what they could offer you, try it out on the free version to see if you like it. Who knows, you might find yourself enjoying sophisticated marketing automation on a budget?

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Brevo Alternatives

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MailerLite is, along with Brevo, one of the most budget-friendly tools we’ve tried. They offer a generous free plan as well. MailerLite is more suitable for beginners as it’s a bit easier to use than Brevo.

GetResponse has some extra (advanced) features like a webinar hosting platform. It also comes with thorough reports and useful analysis features. We are also big fans of their email automations and list management capabilities.

ActiveCampaign is, generally speaking, a more advanced tool than Brevo. For example, their flexible and powerful automation system, can’t be compared to Brevo’s. However, Active Campaign is more expensive and you’ll need some budget to use it – no free plan.

See how Brevo and Mailchimp compare. And check out where we place Brevo as a Constant Contact and Mailchimp alternative.