Brevo vs. Mailchimp is a classic battle of popular email marketing tools. Which is best? The good news is that each has unique features and pricing structures that make choosing the best fit for your business relatively easy.
Mailchimp’s advantage lies in its feature-rich lower tiers, which include A/B testing, a landing page builder, multi-step popup forms, and branding removal in all paid plans. SMS is available as an add-on with monthly credits.
Brevo integrates SMS and transactional emails in all plans. It also supports phone marketing with call statistics in all plans and WhatsApp as an add-on.
Both services have free plans and low-cost entry points — Mailchimp starts at $13/month and Brevo at $9/month. Their pricing models differ fundamentally, with contact count (Mailchimp) versus email volume (Brevo) determining costs.
Join us below for a complete comparison and analysis of Mailchimp vs. Brevo to determine which email marketing platform is best for you.
Omnisend offers a free plan with access to all ecommerce features
Email and SMS only, limited SMS features on basic plans
Support
Email support in all plans, phone and chat support from Business plan
24/7 chat and email, phone support on Premium, onboarding sessions
Mailchimp excels in journey mapping, template design, and integration depth for those needing sophisticated automation and wide tool connectivity. Brevo is a Mailchimp alternative for multichannel features, comprehensive segmentation, and AI tools across all pricing tiers.
$13/month for 500 contacts and a 10x contacts send limit
Brevo Business/Mailchimp Standard
$18/month for 5,000 emails/month
$20/month for 500 contacts and a 12x contacts send limit
Mailchimp Premium
No comparative plan
$350/month for 500 contacts and a 15x contacts send limit
Brevo is cheaper than Mailchimp, although its pricing is based on emails per month versus Mailchimp’s contact list size.
Mailchimp has a 10x, 12x, or 15x contacts email send limit, so if your list has 500 contacts, you can send 5,000 emails/month on the Essentials plan, 6,000 emails/month on the Standard plan, and 7,500 emails/month on the Premium plan.
Brevo vs. Mailchimp: Features
Both platforms have standout and overlapping features. They share several core capabilities:
Email campaign creation
Drag-and-drop template editing
Pre-built templates
Automation and workflow tools
Note: While both offer A/B testing, Brevo restricts this to Business and Enterprise plans
Mailchimp’s email automations can be more complex than Brevo’s, with multi-step automations available from the Standard plan. All paid plans have the Customer Journey Builder, which lets you map your customer journey and add workflows.
Mailchimp offers a landing page and form builder across all plans (even the free one). The Standard and Premium plans also have Dynamic Content, which lets you create one email layout and personalize the content for different audience segments.
Here’s Mailchimp’s landing page builder in action:
Brevo offers several features across all its plans that Mailchimp only offers on its most expensive ones. These include advanced segmentation, real-time email statistics, transactional email sending, and SMS marketing.
Uniquely, Brevo supports chat widgets, phone, and WhatsApp as marketing channels, so it trumps Mailchimp for cross-channel marketing. You can reply to customers on some channels, such as email, WhatsApp, and chat, directly from Brevo:
Winner:Draw. Mailchimp offers features different from those of Brevo in its lowest tiers. The best one depends on your use case. If you want advanced segmentation and transactional emails, Brevo is best. If you want landing pages and forms, Mailchimp is best.
Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder lets you create complex, multi-step automation workflows from its Standard plan upward. To find relevant templates, you can filter Mailchimp’s pre-built journey maps by channels, topics, and integrations.
Here’s Mailchimp’s pre-built journeys library:
Image via Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers sophisticated branching and conditional logic, letting you create complex customer journey maps with multiple paths.
Here’s an example of the Customer Journey Builder with a pre-built journey:
Image via Mailchimp
As you can see, it’s a visual builder with drag-and-drop elements. Building an automated workflow is as easy as 1-2-3.
Brevo’s automation editor focuses on specific use cases with pre-built templates. Templates for abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase follow-ups, welcome sequences, and anniversary messages are available.
Here’s the Brevo automation dashboard:
Image via Brevo
Brevo’s system focuses on direct, action-based triggers like email interactions, website events, and transactional activities. It lets you add SMS and transactional communications in the same automation workflow, helping you reach subscribers at the best moments.
While less visually complex than Mailchimp’s journey mapping, Brevo includes transactional email capabilities across all plans, making it effective for ecommerce automations.
Winner: Mailchimp edges ahead with its Customer Journey Builder. While Brevo excels at multichannel integration, Mailchimp’s sophisticated journey mapping and branching logic make it the stronger choice for automation.
Mailchimp’s Free and Essentials plans limit you to five conditions that apply equally — meaning if you use “Lives in California OR opened last email OR made purchase OR clicks over three OR subscribed recently,” any ONE of these conditions would qualify someone for the segment.
In other words, it offers basic segmentation in its lowest tiers. The Standard and Premium plans unlock nested grouping for complex combinations, like “(Lives in California AND purchased in last 30 days) OR (opened all recent emails AND viewed website).”
If you don’t want to mess around with the segment builder, all Mailchimp plans have pre-built segments for engagement, customer behavior, and demographics.
Here’s Mailchimp’s segmentation builder in action:
Image via Mailchimp
Brevo gives you full segmentation power from the start, with up to 100 conditions available on every plan. You can create complex segments with grouped conditions without upgrading and get more granular control over real-time behavioral triggers.
Pre-built templates cover engagement, ecommerce, demographics, and sales. Unlike Mailchimp’s fixed pre-built segments, you can fully customize these templates to match your needs, thanks to leeway with conditions.
Here’s a screengrab of Brevo’s segment builder:
Image via Brevo
Winner: Brevo edges ahead by offering full segmentation capabilities across all plans. While Mailchimp’s advanced builder provides more sophisticated logic options, upgrade requirements limit its accessibility.
Integration and compatibility
Mailchimp and Brevo integrate with hundreds of popular tools and platforms using Zapier and Make. Both also have preconfigured integrations. Mailchimp advertises that it has over 250 pre-built integrations available, while Brevo has over 70.
The winner:Mailchimp. It wins for having significantly more integrations within its marketplace without leaning on Zapier/Make. However, integrations are always a case of quality over quantity. Check out the offerings on both to ensure compatibility with your existing tools.
Only Brevo offers generative AI in its template builder across all plans. Mailchimp restricts generative AI to its Standard plan as a no-cost add-on.
Brevo’s AI tool helps create campaign content in multiple ways:
Generating email subject lines for campaign topics and suggesting persuasive variations to increase open rates
Crafting email body content, including titles, paragraphs, and call to action buttons
Here’s what Brevo’s AI feature looks like in the template editor:
Image via Brevo
You type in a prompt, and the AI creates content you can use in your email. The content is okay but needs professional editing to remove fluffy adjectives and points that aren’t relevant to the subscriber.
Mailchimp’s AI feature works the same way and produces near-identical results, but as noted, it isn’t available across all plans.
A Mailchimp-unique AI feature is Intuit Assist (in beta), which auto-generates content and design for pre-built journey emails, pulling from your brand kit to create tailored welcome sequences, cart recovery messages, and anniversary campaigns.
The winner: Brevo. It provides generative AI across all plans, and it works well. Mailchimp has a hidden gem in Intuit Assist, which could slash the time it takes to build automated workflows. However, like the generative AI feature, it’s in beta.
Reporting and analytics
Mailchimp and Brevo have excellent reporting capabilities. Mailchimp’s marketing dashboard provides a snapshot of email performance, displaying total sends, open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate from campaigns:
Image via Mailchimp
It also shows performance over time (with toggles for day, week, and month), plus a conversions funnel with revenue attribution:
Image via Mailchimp
The custom reports feature, which lets you build reports with the metrics that matter most to you, becomes available in the Standard plan. You can group data, see trends over time, and visualize data using charts and line graphs.
It’s crucial to point out that Mailchimp’s reporting is limited in its Free and Essentials plans, so if you want complete data, you need the Standard plan at least. However, Brevo does the same, limiting reporting features below its Business plan.
Brevo’s advanced analytics shows opens, clicks, revenue, deliverability, and unsubscribes on different pages, with an easy-to-use dashboard offering a snapshot:
Image via Brevo
You can also view heatmaps showing engagement patterns, geographic distribution maps of interactions, device-specific breakdowns, domain-level performance tracking, and revenue tracking with first-time buyer identification and average basket analysis.
Here’s an example of the heatmap:
Image via Brevo
A/B testing is included in the Business plan, letting you test subject lines and content to see what works for your audience. Mailchimp includes A/B testing across all paid plans.
The winner: Brevo. It gets granular with heatmaps and provides a more professional layout to its data. However, Brevo and Mailchimp hide their most useful reporting features behind more expensive paid plans (Business for Brevo, Standard for Mailchimp).
Templates
Brevo’s email template library includes over 100 templates pre-designed for welcome series, new products, special offers, blog posts, confirmations, greetings, and more. Here’s a snapshot of the templates library:
Image via Brevo
The pre-designed templates have decent layouts and stock imagery. Selecting a template takes you to the template editor with drag-and-drop elements:
Image via Brevo
You can save templates built from scratch or edited from one of the pre-designed emails. There’s a preview feature to see how emails look.
Mailchimp’s templates library also offers over 100 choices, but before you get there, Mailchimp provides a few options to help out:
Image via Mailchimp
Selecting either Basic layout or Fully designed template takes you to the template library. The fully designed templates have stock imagery and appropriately sized headings, making it incredibly easy to send a professional email:
Image via Mailchimp
The fully defined templates are more professional than Brevo’s, with better color choices and varied layouts. However, you’ll probably edit these anyway.
The basic layouts offer more of a blank canvas and are better suited to order confirmations and other post-purchase emails:
Image via Mailchimp
The Optimize option in the sidebar helps catch link and merge tag errors, ensuring you don’t miss any important design steps.
Winner: Mailchimp. The pre-designed templates look better, and the drag-and-drop editor is slightly more intuitive. Brevo’s templates are still decent, though.
Multichannel features
Brevo is a much more capable multichannel marketing tool. It covers email, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone to cover direct communication channels. Mailchimp only covers SMS and email, and its SMS features aren’t as accessible.
For instance, SMS marketing is available in all Brevo plans, including the Free plan, with the purchase of credits. WhatsApp marketing is an add-on, with messages charged per session in a conversation-based pricing model.
A unique feature of Brevo is the Conversations dashboard, which puts chat, email, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other communications in one place. You can connect your account and communicate on these platforms through Brevo:
Image via Brevo
Mailchimp’s multichannel features are limited to email and SMS. SMS is available as an add-on in all paid plans. It requires purchasing monthly SMS credits.
Combining email and SMS can optimize your customer experience. Typically, you use SMS for behavioral, post-purchase, and transactional communication, such as abandoned carts, delivery updates, and order confirmations.
Mailchimp has pre-built SMS templates and enables bulk and two-way conversations, letting you talk to customers through SMS.
SMS reporting capabilities include key metrics like delivery rate, click rate, and revenue to see how your text messages perform.
However, SMS reporting is only available on the Standard and Premium plans, despite the Essentials plan allowing the purchase and use of the SMS add-on.
Winner:Brevo. It covers many more channels and integrates them into the Brevo dashboard for communication within the tool.
Brevo vs. Mailchimp: A video breakdown of features
Watch this video for a closer look at Brevo’s features, plus a comparison with other tools:
Mailchimp vs. Brevo: Deliverability
Mailchimp and Brevo focus on providing the infrastructure for optimal email delivery, such as requiring DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication protocols to help verify sender identity and improve delivery rates. Still, actual inbox placement depends on your practices.
Your deliverability success ultimately depends on list hygiene, engagement rates, content quality, and sending consistency.
These factors shape your unique sender reputation with email providers like Gmail and Yahoo, determining whether your emails land in inboxes or spam folders.
Rather than relying on platform-provided deliverability metrics, focus on maintaining a clean list, using authenticated domains, avoiding spam triggers, and maintaining consistent engagement. These factors have the most impact on your emails reaching recipients.
Mailchimp vs. Brevo: Customer support
Here’s a comparison table of Brevo vs. Mailchimp’s support options:
Support feature
Brevo
Mailchimp
Email support
All plans
24/7 for paid plans, free plan has 30 days of email support
Chat support
Has opening hours, available only on Business and Enterprise plans
24/7 for paid plans
Guides and tutorials
Yes
Yes
Phone support
Has opening hours, available only on Business and Enterprise plans
24/7 plus priority support for Premium plan
Personalized onboarding
Not available
One session for Standard plan, four for Premium plan
Mailchimp offers more support than Brevo, with chat support in all paid plans and phone plus priority support on the Premium plan. Brevo offers support mainly via email and doesn’t offer any onboarding.
Mailchimp vs. Brevo: User reviews
Software reviews platform G2 is the best place to see what users think of Brevo and Mailchimp, and its ratings don’t disappoint. Brevo has a 4.5/5 star rating, while Mailchimp has a 4.3/5 star rating. Here are some of those user reviews:
Brevo
“You won’t find another service that offers dynamic retargeting in the same way as Brevo”
This Brevo user praises its quick campaign creation and automated workflows for cart abandonment while noting template customization limitations and performance issues with large contact lists:
“It’s like having all my marketing tools in one place”
This Brevo user values the unified email, SMS, CRM, and live chat platform, highlighting cost-effectiveness and regular updates. Their complaints focus on weekend support gaps and lacking specialized marketing analytics and automation capabilities:
Image via G2
“Its simplicity and intuitive interface make it easy to manage”
This Brevo user values its contact database management and segmentation capabilities, particularly product-based targeting. Their sole critique focuses on needing better unsubscribe management and reactivation options:
Image via G2
Mailchimp
“Mailchimp makes our emails EASY!”
This Mailchimp user appreciates the Eventbrite integration for database growth and newsletter scheduling but desires better onboarding tutorials. They highlight automatic contact syncing as a key efficiency benefit:
Image via G2
“Mailchimp makes it easy to create automated email sequences”
This Mailchimp user values the template preview system to ensure quality before sending campaigns. They criticize slow support response times but highlight the platform’s strength in automated email sequences and customer journey mapping:
Image via G2
“Mailchimp is a pretty great place to start”
This Mailchimp user praises its beginner-friendly interface and expanded features beyond email marketing. They caution about growing costs, inconsistent email editors, and limited support access, particularly for free users.
Image via G2
Our methodology
We created free accounts to verify basic features, studied official documentation to understand capabilities, analyzed published user reviews to gauge real-world experiences, and mapped out feature availability across pricing tiers.
Pricing analysis across paid plans and multiple contact/email send limits revealed Mailchimp’s contact-based approach and Brevo’s email volume model.
A crucial part of our testing was checking which features were available at each tier, revealing Brevo and Mailchimp’s strategy of gating advanced features in low-tier plans.
Screenshots and video demos helped us understand workflow differences across Mailchimp’s journey builder and Brevo’s less visual approach.
We wanted to determine which platforms have the best features for automation, campaigns, multichannel, reporting, and other factors for email marketing success. The result is a thorough comparison of Brevo vs. Mailchimp.
Brevo vs. Mailchimp: Which option should you choose?
Brevo charges for email volume, while Mailchimp bills by contact count, making Brevo better for high-frequency senders. Mailchimp’s rich feature set in lower tiers, including A/B testing and landing pages, suits growing businesses focused on web presence.
Brevo excels at multichannel communication by integrating SMS, WhatsApp, and phone support across all plans. Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder enables complex automation workflows, making it ideal for businesses needing sophisticated customer journey mapping.
Brevo’s advanced segmentation in all plans suits businesses requiring detailed email targeting without paying for upgrades. Mailchimp’s extensive integration marketplace connects with more third-party tools, benefiting companies with diverse tech stacks.
Choose Brevo if you need multichannel marketing and transactional capabilities at lower costs. Pick Mailchimp if your priority is building landing pages and creating intricate customer journeys with comprehensive analytics.
Omnisend merchants make $68 for every $1 spent. Ready to start driving sales?
Milda is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Omnisend, with extensive experience in communication, helping brands establish a unique and authentic online presence.
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