Brevo Review: We tested it with 640,000 emails

I’ve used Brevo across several of our ventures over the last decade. We’ve sent more than 640,000 emails through the platform, and it’s been the workhorse for our transactional email since long before the Sendinblue → Brevo rebrand.

When I wrote our original guide on the best transactional email tools, we hadn’t come across Sendinblue yet. After several recommendations in the comments, I tested it on the venture we were working on at the time. The platform has since raised €500M, launched the Aura AI suite, and grown well beyond a transactional email service into a serious all-in-one marketing platform.

In this Brevo review, I’ll cover where the platform performs well, where it doesn’t, and what changed in last year’s major plan restructure.

Review Summary

Brevo has matured into one of the best-value all-in-one email platforms on the market. The standout strengths are deliverability (consistently strong across the 640,000+ emails we’ve sent), email-volume pricing that’s uniquely friendly to large lists, and a transactional email offering that holds its own against dedicated providers like Postmark and Mailgun.

The 2024-2026 stretch has been transformative for the platform:

• February 2025 — €50M / 5-year Brevo AI Lab announced
• May 2025 — Aura AI agent launched (subject lines, content generation, send-time optimisation)
• October 2025 — Plan restructure: Business → Standard, new Professional tier ($499+/mo), WhatsApp moved to Pro+
• December 2025 — Brevo became a unicorn following a €500M / $583M funding round led by General Atlantic, with ARR exceeding $218M

Brevo’s automation isn’t as deep as ActiveCampaign’s — no split-testing of automation paths, no per-contact predictive sending — but for the vast majority of businesses, it offers more capability per dollar than most rivals. The multichannel breadth (email + SMS + WhatsApp + push + chat + a separate Sales Platform / CRM) is genuinely impressive at this price point.

I personally use ActiveCampaign for our core marketing automation and CRM, and Brevo for transactional email and as a backup ESP for higher-volume sends. That combination has worked well for over a decade.

Plans & Pricing

The October 2025 plan restructure is the most important pricing change to know about: the Business plan was renamed Standard, and a new Professional tier was inserted above it for high-volume senders. WhatsApp messaging and landing pages also moved to higher tiers in the same restructure.

A few non-obvious pricing details:

• Brevo prices on email volume, not contacts. Paid plans have unlimited contacts. This makes Brevo uniquely cost-effective for large lists with moderate sending frequency.
• The Free plan limit is 300 emails/day, shared across marketing and transactional. That works out to roughly 9,000 emails/month before you hit the cap.
• The 2,000-contact automation limit only applies to the Free plan now — paid plans have unlimited contacts inside active workflows.
• Logo removal add-on is roughly $10/month if you want to send unbranded emails on the Starter plan.
• Annual prepay saves approximately 10% across all paid tiers.
• Pay-as-you-go email credits never expire — useful for irregular senders. One credit equals one email.
• Dedicated IPs are a $251/year add-on on Standard/Professional and included on Enterprise.

For a business with 25,000 contacts emailing weekly (roughly 100,000 emails/month), Brevo Standard at $129/mo compares to ActiveCampaign Plus at $389/mo or Mailchimp Standard at approximately $260/mo. The savings widen as your list grows.

Pros & Cons

We’ve used Brevo continuously across multiple ventures for transactional email and surveyed several hundred Brevo users via our annual email marketing software research. The pros and cons below summarise the most common themes.

Detailed Platform Review

We tested Brevo across the same ten areas we use for every email marketing review on this site:

1. Marketing Automation
2. Email Marketing
3. CRM
4. AI Features
5. Cross-Channel Automation
6. Reporting
7. Landing Pages
8. Forms
9. Customer Support
10. Deliverability

01Marketing Automation

Brevo’s automation builder is visual, drag-and-drop, and considerably more capable than its predecessors at the price. Standard (was Business) and above include the full automation feature set; the Free and Starter plans cap automation at 2,000 contacts inside active workflows.

Triggers cover the standard set:

• Email engagement (opens, clicks, link clicks)
• Site events (page visits, custom events via API/webhook)
• Contact attribute changes
• List joins
• Ecommerce events (purchase, abandoned cart, browse abandonment)

Actions include send email, send SMS, send WhatsApp (Professional+), wait, condition branch, score, tag, list management and webhook calls. The cross-channel orchestration is genuinely native — you can build a single workflow that sends email, waits, fires SMS if unopened, then follows up with WhatsApp.

What Brevo’s automation does well:

• Workflow templates — Pre-built sequences for welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, lead scoring.
• Lead scoring — Classic rule-based scoring plus the new Predictive Lead Scoring from Brevo AI Lab (shipped 2026), which assigns a conversion probability to each contact.
• A/B testing — Content and subject lines on Standard+. Path-level A/B testing is supported.
• Cross-channel triggers — Email + SMS + WhatsApp orchestration in a single visual workflow.

Where it falls short of best-in-class:

• No split-testing of full automation paths. ActiveCampaign lets you A/B test “5 emails over a week” vs “10 emails over a month” inside a single workflow. Brevo does not.
• No per-contact predictive sending below Standard — predictive send-time optimisation requires Standard+.
• The 2,000-contact automation cap on Free can be limiting for production use.

For most SMB marketing programmes, the automation is more than sufficient. For automation-led growth teams running multi-path optimisation, ActiveCampaign remains the deeper tool.

02Email Marketing

The drag-and-drop editor has been steadily improved over the past few years. 40+ responsive templates, brand library for typography and colour palettes, reusable content blocks and the Aura AI content generator all built in.

You can edit HTML directly, build mobile-responsive designs without code, and preview across devices and major email clients before sending. The editor still isn’t as polished as Mailchimp’s (which remains one of the best in the category), but it gets the job done for the vast majority of teams.

A/B testing on Standard+ supports content and subject lines. Sending options include Time Travel-style timezone delivery, send-time optimisation (Standard+), and audience segmentation across all plans.

The features I find myself using most often:

• Brand library — Lock typography and colour palette across every send.
• Reusable content blocks — Save headers, footers and CTA blocks once, reuse across campaigns.
• Aura AI subject line generator — Suggests subject line variants based on email content. Available on every plan.
• Inbox previews — Cross-client previews before send.

For most newsletters, drip sequences and campaign sends, the email designer is a solid choice. For heavily branded or interactive emails, Mailchimp’s editor still has the edge.

03CRM

Brevo Sales Platform launched as a separate product alongside the marketing platform. There’s a free Sales tier, with paid plans for teams that need deal pipelines, sales sequences, team-level reporting and quoting.

The Sales Platform is genuinely useful for SMBs that want CRM and email in one ecosystem — deal pipelines with stages, contact records, activity timelines, meeting scheduling. It’s not as deep as HubSpot’s Smart CRM (which has Clearbit-powered enrichment, conversation intelligence and the broadest reporting in the category), but it covers the basics well.

Brevo also offers a separate Customer Data Platform (built on the Octolis acquisition) for unifying customer data across the marketing, sales and conversations products. The CDP is sold as a standalone product rather than bundled with the marketing plan.

For SMBs that want a single platform for email, automation and a basic CRM, the Sales Platform is sufficient. For teams with a mature sales process, you’ll likely want to integrate Brevo with a more capable CRM.

04AI Features

Brevo’s AI agent is named Aura, the first product from the Brevo AI Lab (announced February 2025, backed by €50M / 5-year investment). Aura launched in May 2025 and has expanded steadily through 2025-2026.

The current Aura suite:

• Aura Assistant — Chat-style in-dashboard AI assistant. Available on every plan including Free.
• AI subject line generator — Suggests variants from email content. All plans.
• AI email content generator — Drafts copy, CTAs and tone variations. Includes translation. All plans.
• AI image generator — Image generation in the editor. Free and paid.
• Predictive send-time (“Send at best time”) — Per-contact send-time optimisation. Standard+.
• AI segmentation — Natural-language list building plus automatic enrichment of contact data (job title, company, location). Standard+.
• AI Data Analyst — Natural-language reporting queries. Standard+.
• Predictive Lead Scoring — Assigns a conversion probability to each contact, shipped into the workflow builder in 2026. Standard+.
• MCP connector — Lets Claude, ChatGPT and Le Chat integrate directly with Brevo, also shipped in 2026.

What sets Aura apart from most ESP AI features is the breadth of its availability on lower tiers. Subject line generation, content drafting and the assistant are all on Free — Brevo isn’t gating the basic AI capabilities behind expensive plans like HubSpot or Mailchimp do.

Where Aura still falls short of ActiveCampaign’s Active Intelligence is in contextual learning. Active Intelligence builds a persistent model of your brand voice and engagement patterns over time. Aura’s content generation is closer to a brand-aware ChatGPT wrapper — useful, but not deeply learning from your historical campaigns yet.

05Cross-Channel Automation

This is where Brevo genuinely leads most of the email-only competition. The platform natively supports:

For ecommerce businesses in particular, this is a compelling proposition. You can build customer journeys that start with an email, fall back to SMS if unopened, layer in WhatsApp for high-intent moments, and capture inbound questions through the live chat — all from one platform, with shared contact data and segmentation.

The October 2025 move of WhatsApp to Professional+ is the main caveat. If you were running WhatsApp campaigns on the previous Business plan, you’ll have been migrated to Standard (which doesn’t include WhatsApp) and need to upgrade to Professional to keep it.

06Reporting

Reporting differentiates Brevo’s lower-tier plans from the more capable ones. Free and Starter get basic reporting; Standard, Professional and Enterprise add:

• Geography and device reports — Where opens and clicks are happening, on what devices.
• Click heatmaps — Visual heatmap overlay showing where in your email subscribers click.
• Advanced open and click reports — Engagement scoring, time-of-engagement breakdowns.
• Send-time optimisation data — How Aura is performing on a per-campaign basis.
• AI Data Analyst (Standard+) — Natural-language reporting queries.

If Brevo is your only ESP, it’s worth investing in at least the Standard plan for the heatmaps and advanced engagement reporting — they’re genuinely useful for iterating on email design and content.

The reporting isn’t as visually polished as HubSpot’s, and there’s no native multi-touch attribution. But for most SMB marketing programmes, it gives you everything you need to optimise.

07Landing Pages

Brevo’s landing page builder is solid but not best-in-class. The October 2025 restructure moved landing pages to higher tiers, so they’re now Standard+ rather than available on lower plans.

Templates are clean, drag-and-drop is intuitive, and forms integrate natively. Conversion tracking ties into the broader Brevo reporting.

For most SMB use cases — webinar registration pages, lead-magnet pages, simple campaign landing pages — the builder is sufficient. For heavier landing-page programmes (high volumes of A/B-tested PPC pages), dedicated tools like Unbounce or Leadpages remain stronger.

08Forms

Brevo’s form builder covers inline forms, popups (Standard+), embedded forms and slide-ins. GDPR consent fields are built in, including double opt-in confirmation.

Form-level reporting shows impressions, conversions and drop-off. The popup behaviour controls (timing, exit intent, scroll triggers) are workmanlike — not as flexible as dedicated tools like Sumo, but sufficient for most use cases.

09Customer Support

Email support is included on all plans including Free. Live chat support is available on paid plans. Phone support and a dedicated deliverability specialist are Professional+. Enterprise customers get a dedicated customer success manager.

What I appreciate about Brevo’s support:

• Multilingual — Particularly useful given Brevo’s strong European customer base.
• Strong knowledge base — Well-organised, searchable, and translated into multiple languages.
• Active community forum — Useful for niche use cases and integration questions.

Response times on email support are typically 24-48 hours; live chat is faster on the higher tiers.

10Transactional Email & Deliverability

This is the feature that has kept me using Brevo for over a decade. Brevo’s transactional email — RESTful API, SMTP relay, outbound webhooks, unlimited log retention — is included on every plan including Free. It rivals dedicated providers like Postmark, Mailgun and SendGrid for reliability.

What this means in practice: you can send order confirmations, payment receipts, password resets, shipping notifications and other transactional emails from the same platform that handles your marketing campaigns. You can build automations that trigger follow-ups based on transactional email interactions (e.g., “send a review request 5 days after the order confirmation is opened”). And you get reports on inbox placement, open rates and bounces specifically for transactional sends.

This matters because transactional email is one of the highest-engagement channels you have — and most ESPs treat it as an afterthought. Brevo treats it as a first-class citizen.

On marketing deliverability, Brevo is genuinely strong in our experience. Across the 640,000+ emails we’ve sent through the platform we’ve consistently seen high inbox placement, low complaint rates and stable IP reputation — all of which is reflected in the Brevo statistics dashboard above. The deliverability has held up through the Sendinblue → Brevo rebrand and across multiple list migrations.

What Brevo does well on deliverability:

• Authentication setup — SPF, DKIM and DMARC walkthrough during onboarding.
• Hard-bounce auto-suppression — Addresses that hard-bounce are automatically blacklisted to protect IP reputation.
• Engagement-based segmentation — Filter contacts by recent engagement and re-engagement status.
• Dedicated IPs — $251/year add-on on Standard/Professional, included on Enterprise.
• Deliverability specialist access — Available on Professional and Enterprise plans.

The one caveat: some users on lower-tier shared IP pools report variance, particularly on lists with weak hygiene. If deliverability is mission-critical, budget for the dedicated IP and consider Professional for the deliverability specialist access.

Rating Details

I’ve rated Brevo across each of the ten areas covered in this review.

Marketing Automation

★★★★★

3.5 / 5

Visual workflow builder, lead scoring (now with Predictive Lead Scoring from Brevo AI Lab), cross-channel triggers. Loses points for the 2,000-contact cap on Free, no split-testing of automation paths, and depth that lags ActiveCampaign.

Email Marketing

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Drag-and-drop editor with brand library, 40+ responsive templates, AI content generation. Editor isn’t as polished as Mailchimp’s, but it gets the job done well. A/B testing on Standard+.

CRM

★★★★★

3.5 / 5

Brevo Sales Platform handles deal pipelines, contact records, sales sequences. Useful for SMBs wanting CRM + email in one ecosystem; not as deep as HubSpot Smart CRM. Separate Customer Data Platform available for data unification.

AI Features

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Aura AI suite is genuinely useful and uniquely available on Free. Subject line generation, content drafting, predictive lead scoring, MCP connector for Claude/ChatGPT. Less contextual learning than ActiveCampaign’s Active Intelligence.

Cross-Channel

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

Best multichannel breadth in the category at this price point — email + SMS + WhatsApp + web push + mobile push + chat + Phone, all in one ecosystem. October 2025 move of WhatsApp to Professional+ is the main caveat.

Reporting

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Heatmaps, geography and device reports, advanced engagement reporting on Standard+. AI Data Analyst for natural-language queries. No native multi-touch attribution.

Landing Pages

★★★★★

3.5 / 5

Solid but not best-in-class. Moved to Standard+ in October 2025 restructure. Drag-and-drop, mobile-responsive, integrated with forms and reporting. Sufficient for SMB use; dedicated tools (Unbounce, Leadpages) remain stronger for heavy landing-page programmes.

Forms

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Inline, popup, embedded and slide-in forms. GDPR consent built in. Form-level reporting included. Workmanlike, not exceptional.

Customer Support

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Email support on all plans including Free. Multilingual knowledge base, active community forum. Phone support and deliverability specialist on Professional+. Dedicated CSM on Enterprise.

Deliverability

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

Consistently strong inbox placement across the 640,000+ emails we’ve sent through the platform. Strong authentication setup, dedicated IP available ($251/year), deliverability specialist on Professional+. Plus best-in-class transactional email infrastructure included on every plan.

If we sum these stars (39.5) and divide by ten we get a 4.0 / 5 star rating, rounded up to 4.1 / 5 for the genuinely best-in-class transactional email infrastructure that’s hard to find at this price point.

Why I use Brevo alongside ActiveCampaign

I mentioned at the start of this review that I personally use ActiveCampaign for our core marketing automation and CRM, and Brevo for transactional email. That combination has worked for over a decade and survived the Sendinblue → Brevo rebrand without disruption.

The reason I haven’t consolidated onto Brevo alone is the automation depth. For Venture Harbour’s core marketing programmes — multi-step nurture sequences, split-tested automation paths, per-contact send-time optimisation — ActiveCampaign remains the deeper tool. The pricing premium is worth it for the automation gain.

Brevo’s role is the transactional infrastructure (order confirmations, password resets, shipping notifications) and as a backup ESP for higher-volume sends that don’t need ActiveCampaign’s full automation capabilities. The transactional email is genuinely best-in-class at this price point — there’s no dedicated provider I’d swap it for.

For most teams, though, Brevo on its own is more than enough. The 2025-2026 evolution — Aura AI, Predictive Lead Scoring, the €500M funding round, the multichannel breadth — has closed most of the gap with the more expensive platforms. If you’re starting fresh today and want a single tool that handles email, transactional, automation and basic CRM, Brevo is a genuinely strong choice.

What are the best alternatives to Brevo?

Three scenarios where I’d recommend something else:

1. If you need automation depth at any price, ActiveCampaign is the answer. 135+ triggers, split-testing of automation paths, per-contact Active Intelligence.
2. If you’re an eCommerce business, Omnisend is purpose-built for Shopify and WooCommerce, with revenue attribution that’s more granular than Brevo’s.
3. If you need an integrated B2B CRM + marketing suite with revenue attribution, HubSpot is the more complete platform — at a meaningfully higher price.

Here’s a quick side-by-side. For a deeper analysis, see our full email marketing software comparison.

If you have any questions about Brevo that we haven’t covered in this review feel free to drop them in the comments below. Otherwise you can start with Brevo’s free plan here.

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