Mailchimp vs Brevo: Which Pricing Model Actually Fits Your List in 2026?

Updated August 2026

If you're comparing these two, you've probably already used Mailchimp, and you're checking whether Brevo's cheaper sticker price is real or a bait-and-switch. It's a fair question. Both platforms send campaigns, run automated sequences, and manage a contact list, and on the surface the feature lists overlap enough that the decision looks like a coin flip.

It isn't, and the place the comparison actually gets decided is the one most people skim past: how each platform counts what you owe. Mailchimp charges based on how many contacts you store, whether you email them once a year or every day. Brevo charges based on how many emails you actually send, no matter how many contacts sit in your database. For a small, actively-mailed list the difference is minor. For a large list you mail on a normal weekly cadence, or a big list you barely touch, the two bills stop looking like they're pricing the same product. This guide works through that pricing model in real numbers at 5,000, 25,000, and 100,000 contacts, then covers the parts of the decision that have nothing to do with price: automation depth, what's bundled into transactional email and SMS, template quality, and deliverability track record.

TL;DR

	Mailchimp	Brevo
Pricing driven by	Contacts stored, regardless of send frequency	Emails sent per month, regardless of list size
Free plan	250 contacts, 500 emails a month	Up to 100,000 contacts stored, 300 emails a day
Entry paid tier	Essentials from $13/month (500 contacts)	Starter from $9/month (5,000 emails/month)
Automation	Basic flows on Essentials, full multi-step flows on Standard and up	None on Starter, unlimited multi-step workflows on Standard and up
Transactional email	Separate product (Mailchimp Transactional), billed by 25,000-email blocks from $20	Bundled into every plan's send volume, no separate product
SMS	Paid add-on, select countries, credits expire monthly	Credits sold separately, available from Starter, priced by volume and destination
Template library	Large, long-established, widely cited as the category benchmark	40+ free templates, smaller but genuinely usable
Best for	Smaller, actively-engaged lists mailed regularly, ecommerce brands wanting Shopify-native automation	Large lists mailed on a normal cadence, teams that want SMS, chat, and transactional email under one bill

What Each Tool Is Actually Built For

Mailchimp built its reputation on being the email tool that didn't require a developer, and that positioning hasn't really changed since Intuit bought it in 2021. The product still leads with template quality, brand asset management, and an onboarding experience aimed at a marketing manager who wants professional-looking campaigns without hiring a designer. Its contact-based pricing reflects that heritage: you're renting access to a curated audience, and the platform charges for the size of that audience.

Brevo (built on the old Sendinblue infrastructure) made a different bet from day one: price the platform on what it costs the business to actually deliver mail, not on how many rows sit in a database. That single decision shapes almost everything else about the product, from how the free plan is structured to why transactional email ships bundled into every tier instead of sold as an add-on.

	Mailchimp	Brevo
Founded / heritage	2001, acquired by Intuit in 2021	2012 as Sendinblue, rebranded to Brevo in 2023
Core product bet	Campaign design and brand-safe templates for an audience you store	Email, SMS, and chat priced on send volume, not list size
Ideal company size	1 to 500 employees, marketing-led teams	1 to 200 employees, budget-conscious growth teams
Ideal list shape	Actively engaged, growing list mailed often	Large list mailed on a regular but not daily cadence
Signature strength	Templates, ecommerce integrations, brand recognition	Per-send pricing, bundled transactional email and SMS

Decision by Business Goal

If your goal is...	Lean toward
Keep costs predictable as a small, active list grows fast	Mailchimp, if growth stays inside a few thousand contacts
Hold a large list (cold leads, past customers, a big newsletter) without paying for every name	Brevo
Run Shopify or WooCommerce campaigns with revenue-per-email reporting	Neither is purpose-built for this. See our Klaviyo alternatives guide instead
Add SMS and transactional receipts without a second vendor contract	Brevo
Get the most polished, brand-safe templates with the least design effort	Mailchimp
Consolidate email, SMS, and live chat under one invoice	Brevo

Team and Role Fit

	Mailchimp	Brevo
Typical buyer	Marketing manager, small business owner	Marketing manager, founder running lean
Team size	Solo to a marketing team of 5 to 10	Solo to a marketing team of 5 to 10
Who manages it day to day	One marketer, sometimes a hired designer for templates	One marketer, often also owns SMS and chat
Where lead capture lives	Landing pages and popup forms are built in	Forms are built in on Starter; popups and landing pages need Standard or Professional
Cross-functional fit	Marketing owns it end to end; light CRM features exist but aren't built for a sales team	Same, though Professional's contact scoring gives sales a reason to look at the same data

Teams whose real bottleneck is capturing and qualifying leads before they ever reach an email platform should also look at dedicated opt-in tools; the best OptinMonster alternatives guide covers popup and form builders that plug into either platform.

The Real Difference: Contacts Stored vs Emails Sent

Here's the mechanic in plain terms. On Mailchimp, your monthly bill is set by how many contacts sit in your audience, full stop. Each paid tier then caps how many emails you're allowed to send against that list (Essentials allows 10 times your contact count, Standard 12 times, Premium 15 times), but the price itself doesn't move whether you send once a month or every day, as long as you stay under the cap. Store 25,000 contacts and email them once a quarter, and you still pay the 25,000-contact rate every single month.

On Brevo, the meter runs the other way. Your plan sets a monthly email-sending allowance (Starter and Standard both start at 5,000 emails a month, Professional at 150,000), and you pay for that allowance regardless of how many contacts you're storing behind it. Brevo's own configurator explicitly labels this as "monthly email volume (campaigns & transactional)," a single number that doesn't care whether it came from 500 contacts mailed 10 times or 20,000 contacts mailed once.

	Mailchimp	Brevo
What sets your price	Contacts stored	Total emails sent per month (campaigns plus transactional)
What's capped, not priced	Emails sent (10 to 15 times your contact count)	Contacts stored (soft limit, not the pricing driver)
Storing a large, rarely-mailed list	Full price every month regardless of activity	Cheap, since you're only billed for what you actually send
Mailing a small list very often	Cheap, since the contact count stays low	Can get expensive fast if send volume climbs past your tier
Pay-as-you-go option for infrequent senders	Yes, buy email credits with no expiration instead of a monthly plan	Yes, buy email credits with no expiration instead of a monthly plan

Both vendors offer that pay-as-you-go escape hatch for genuinely occasional senders, which softens the gap for anyone mailing a handful of times a year. But almost nobody on a real marketing team runs on PAYG month over month, because it drops phone support and some automation features. For any team sending on a normal recurring cadence, the model above is the one that actually decides the bill.

Real Math: 5,000, 25,000, and 100,000 Contacts at a Weekly Send Cadence

The numbers below assume a common, unremarkable cadence: one campaign a week, four sends a month, to your full list each time. That's realistic for both a B2B nurture program and a DTC promotional calendar, and it's frequent enough that Mailchimp's send cap never becomes a factor at these list sizes. Every figure was pulled directly from each vendor's own pricing calculator (mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing and brevo.com/pricing, checked August 2026), standard monthly billing, before any annual discount.

Contacts	Emails sent/month (4x)	Mailchimp Essentials	Mailchimp Standard	Brevo
5,000	20,000	$75/month	$100/month	~$32/month
25,000	100,000	$270/month	$310/month	~$82/month
100,000	400,000	Not available (contact ceiling exceeded)	$800/month	Exceeds Brevo's published Professional floor

At 5,000 contacts mailed weekly, Brevo runs roughly 57% cheaper than Mailchimp's cheapest tier that can hold the list. At 25,000 contacts, the gap widens: Brevo is about 70% cheaper than Essentials and holds that ratio because Mailchimp's price keeps climbing with every added contact while Brevo's stays anchored to your 100,000 monthly sends. This is the exact scenario the pricing-model difference was built to punish: a growing contact list, mailed on a normal schedule, on a platform that bills for storage.

The 100,000-contact row is where the story gets more interesting, and more honest. Mailchimp's Essentials tier can't hold a list that size at all (it errors out asking you to upgrade), but Standard scales cleanly to a published $800 a month with room to send up to 1.2 million emails, and Premium goes to $1,025 a month at a 1.5-million-email ceiling. Brevo's Professional plan starts at $499 a month for up to 150,000 emails, and our 400,000-email scenario already exceeds that floor, so a list this size mailed this often pushes past what Brevo publishes as a static rate; the actual number requires configuring Brevo's own calculator or talking to sales, and its Enterprise tier is explicitly aimed at "1M+ contacts needing custom solutions." Brevo wins decisively in the middle of the market. At the very top of the range, where list size and send frequency are both large, Mailchimp is the one with a clean, published, self-serve number, and that predictability is worth something on its own.

The Brevo figures above trace back to Brevo's own head-to-head comparison against Mailchimp (published at brevo.com/mailchimp, citing Mailchimp's pricing calculator as of August 7, 2026), so treat them as a vendor's own framing of the gap, not neutral third-party research, even though the underlying math checks out against the same calculator we pulled Mailchimp's numbers from directly.

Transactional Email and SMS: What's Bundled, What Costs Extra

This is where the pricing model shows up again in a second place. Brevo treats transactional email (order confirmations, password resets, shipping notices) as part of the same product and the same volume meter as marketing campaigns. Every plan, including Free, includes REST API and SMTP access, outbound webhooks, and unlimited log retention for transactional sends, with no separate signup or invoice.

Mailchimp splits this in two. Marketing email is one product with the pricing above. Transactional email is a completely separate product on its own pricing page, billed in blocks of 25,000 emails starting at $20 a block (dropping to $10 a block past 4 million emails a month), with its own account and its own bill. If your app sends password-reset emails and your marketing team sends newsletters, that's two Mailchimp relationships to manage, not one.

	Mailchimp	Brevo
Transactional email	Separate product (Mailchimp Transactional), own pricing page	Bundled into every plan's send-volume meter
Transactional entry price	From $20 per 25,000-email block	Included, no separate charge
SMS	Paid add-on, available on paid plans in select countries, credits expire monthly with no rollover	Sold as credits by volume and destination, available starting on Starter
WhatsApp	Not available	Professional tier and above
MMS	Standard and Premium only, US and Canada contacts	Not a listed feature

Neither platform gives you SMS for free; both sell it as metered credits on top of the email plan. The real difference is transactional email specifically, and there Brevo's single-bill model is the more straightforward one if your team currently juggles a separate transactional provider alongside Mailchimp.

Automation Depth: Both Gate the Good Stuff Behind Tier Two

Automation is the other feature that doesn't ship at the entry price on either platform, and the way each one gates it is worth knowing before you budget for the cheapest tier and assume you're covered.

Mailchimp's Essentials plan includes automation, but it's capped at single flows of up to 4 steps, enough for a basic welcome sequence and not much more. Standard and Premium unlock Marketing Automation Flows properly: up to 200 separate automated, multi-step workflows, conditional branching, and AI-assisted send-time optimization.

Brevo's Starter plan ships with zero listed automation. The feature simply isn't on the card. Standard adds it back as "an unlimited number of automated, multi-step workflows," along with A/B testing and web and event tracking, which is a bigger jump in relative terms since Starter has nothing to build on.

	Mailchimp Essentials	Mailchimp Standard+	Brevo Starter	Brevo Standard+
Automation included	Single flows, up to 4 steps	Up to 200 multi-step flows	None	Unlimited multi-step workflows
A/B testing	Yes	Yes	Not listed	Yes
Send-time optimization	Not listed	Yes, AI-assisted	Not listed	Yes, AI-assisted
Landing pages	Included	Included	Not included	1 included

If real automation is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, price the second tier on both platforms, not the entry price. At the shared 5,000-email baseline, Brevo Standard runs $9 a month more than Starter ($18 versus $9), and that same gap should carry through as volume scales, so treat the $32 figure in the table above as roughly $41 once automation is in scope. On Mailchimp's side, that same requirement moves you from Essentials to Standard, taking the 5,000-contact row from $75 to $100. If ActiveCampaign's deeper branching logic is the real requirement rather than either of these two, Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign and ActiveCampaign vs Brevo both cover that comparison directly.

Templates and Deliverability: Where Mailchimp's Head Start Still Shows

It's worth being straightforward about the two things Mailchimp still does better, because the pricing story above can make it look like an easy call, and it isn't.

Template quality is the clearer of the two. Mailchimp doesn't publish an exact template count, but the library has been built over close to two decades, spans dozens of industries and use cases, and is consistently the benchmark other platforms get measured against, including in our own reviews of competing tools. Brevo's own pricing page advertises "over 40 free, fully responsive email templates," which is a genuinely usable starting library, not a token one, but it's a fraction of what Mailchimp ships, and it shows in how much custom design work you'll do to get a campaign looking finished.

Deliverability is murkier, and worth being honest about that murkiness rather than quoting a single number as gospel. Mailchimp has been sending marketing email at scale since 2001, which means two decades of sending history and mailbox-provider relationships that a newer platform hasn't had time to build. Independent inbox-placement testing tends to put the major platforms, Mailchimp and Brevo included, within a few points of each other, and the ranking shifts depending on the testing methodology, the time period, and the industry mix being measured. Neither vendor publishes a guaranteed delivery rate, and neither should be trusted to grade its own homework here. What is durable, rather than a snapshot, is operating maturity: dedicated IP options at Standard and above, a support org that has handled deliverability escalations for longer, and a brand that shows up less often in spam-folder complaint threads than smaller ESPs sometimes do. That's a real, if qualitative, edge, and it's fair to weight it if consistent inbox placement matters more to you than the pricing gap above.

Migration and Time to First Campaign

Brevo ships a native Mailchimp import tool: connect your account or upload a CSV, map contact attributes and consent status, choose or create Brevo lists, and you're importing without hand-building a spreadsheet first. Rebuilding campaigns and automations is still manual work, since neither platform will translate a competitor's automation logic for you, but the contact migration itself is close to friction-free.

Migration step	What carries over automatically	What you rebuild by hand
Contacts and consent status	Yes, via native import or CSV	N/A
Tags and list membership	Yes, mapped during import	N/A
Engagement history (opens, clicks)	No	Starts fresh on the new platform
Templates	No	Recreate in the new editor or import custom HTML
Automations and workflows	No	Rebuild the logic manually
Domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)	Yes, it's set at DNS, not inside either tool	Verify settings after switching

Budget a real overlap period, not a same-day cutover. Run both platforms in parallel for two weeks, send one live campaign from the new platform before fully canceling the old one, and confirm your domain authentication is correctly pointed at the new sender before you judge deliverability on day one.

Support and Where Each Plan Tops Out

	Mailchimp	Brevo
Entry-tier support	24/7 email and chat (Essentials)	Email support, 6 languages (Starter)
Mid-tier support	24/7 email and chat (Standard)	Same as Starter (Standard)
Top-tier support	Phone and priority support, dedicated onboarding specialist (Premium)	Phone support, a deliverability specialist for 3 hours a year (Professional)
Onboarding	Up to 4 personalized sessions on Premium	Personalized, tailored onboarding on Enterprise only
Where the free/entry tier caps out	250 contacts (Free); Essentials tops out below 100,000 contacts	300 emails a day (Free); Starter and Standard share the same volume ceiling structure
Enterprise governance	Custom Premium plans past 250,000 contacts, contact sales	SSO/SAML, custom data integrations, multi-account management on Enterprise (1M+ contacts)

Neither platform publishes HIPAA or SOC 2 specifics on its public pricing page; if compliance documentation is a hard requirement, that's a question for sales on either side, not something to assume from the marketing site.

When Mailchimp Is the Right Call

Your list is a few thousand contacts, growing steadily, and you mail it often enough that per-send pricing wouldn't actually save you money
Template quality and brand consistency matter more than shaving the monthly bill, and you don't have a designer on staff to close that gap
You're running Shopify or WooCommerce and want ecommerce automation (abandoned cart, predicted demographics) built by a platform with years of retail-specific tuning
Your list is very large (well past 100,000 contacts) and mailed frequently; Mailchimp's published pricing stays predictable at a scale where Brevo's self-serve numbers stop being public
You need transactional email at serious volume and would rather have it as a dedicated product with its own scaling, not folded into a marketing plan's send cap

When Brevo Is the Right Call

You're sitting on a large contact list (a past-customer file, a cold-lead database, a big newsletter) that you don't mail every day, and Mailchimp's contact-based pricing is charging you for names you barely touch
You want transactional email, marketing email, and SMS under one invoice instead of stitching together a marketing platform and a separate transactional provider
Your list is actively growing past 10,000 to 25,000 contacts and mailed on a normal weekly-ish cadence; this is the exact zone where the per-send model saves the most money
You're budget-conscious and can live with a smaller template library and a more basic entry-tier feature set in exchange for a materially lower bill
You'd rather pay for what you send than pay a recurring tax on a list that grows every month whether you're actively using all of it or not

Decision Framework

If you are...	Pick
Under 5,000 contacts, mailing often, want the best templates with minimal design work	Mailchimp
10,000 to 50,000 contacts on a normal weekly send cadence, cost-sensitive	Brevo
Running Shopify or WooCommerce with real revenue-per-email attribution needs	Neither; see best Klaviyo alternatives
Sitting on a large, infrequently-mailed list (past customers, cold database)	Brevo
Past 100,000 contacts and mailing frequently, want a clean published price	Mailchimp
Want transactional email and SMS on the same invoice as campaigns	Brevo
Need the deepest multi-branch automation regardless of vendor	Neither is the deepest option; see best ActiveCampaign alternatives
Want hands-on phone support even on a small list	Neither leads here; see best Constant Contact alternatives

What to Do Next

Don't decide from the tables above alone. Pull your actual contact count and your actual average sends per month for the last quarter, plug both numbers into each vendor's own calculator (mailchimp.com/pricing and brevo.com/pricing), and compare the real quote against what you're paying today. If the two land within 15 to 20% of each other, let the other sections here, automation depth, template quality, transactional billing, decide it instead of price. If they don't, and one platform is charging you meaningfully more for the same list and the same sending pattern, that gap is real and worth acting on.

Run a two-week parallel trial before committing either way: import a real segment of your list, rebuild one actual campaign and one actual automation, and send it live. The friction you hit in week one, not the feature checklist, is what predicts whether the switch is worth the migration cost.

For the wider field beyond these two, the best email marketing software roundup ranks 12 platforms by fit rather than feature count. If Mailchimp specifically isn't working for you for reasons beyond price, the best Mailchimp alternatives guide covers 12 options across creator, ecommerce, and B2B use cases. If it's Brevo you've outgrown, the best Brevo alternatives guide covers where its automation ceiling and CRM depth fall short. And if the real bottleneck is choosing a category rather than a specific vendor, how to choose email marketing software and how to choose SMS marketing software both walk through the buying criteria independent of any single platform.

Frequently Asked Questions about Mailchimp vs Brevo

Is Brevo actually cheaper than Mailchimp?

At most real-world list sizes mailed on a normal weekly cadence, yes, often by 50 to 70%, because Brevo prices on emails sent rather than contacts stored. The gap narrows for small, frequently-mailed lists and can flip at very large scale, since Brevo's published self-serve pricing tops out lower than Mailchimp's.

Does Mailchimp or Brevo have better deliverability?

Independent testing generally puts the two within a few points of each other, and results shift by methodology and time period. Mailchimp's two decades of sending history and mailbox-provider relationships give it a maturity edge, but neither vendor publishes a guaranteed delivery rate, and neither should be taken at its own word on this.

Which platform is better for a large, infrequently-mailed list?

Brevo, decisively, because you're billed for what you send, not what you store. A 100,000-contact list mailed once a quarter costs a fraction on Brevo of what Mailchimp would charge every single month regardless of activity.

Does Brevo include transactional email for free?

It's bundled into your plan's monthly send-volume allowance rather than sold separately, so it's not free beyond that allowance, but there's no separate product or bill the way there is with Mailchimp Transactional.

Can I import my Mailchimp account directly into Brevo?

Yes, Brevo has a native Mailchimp integration that imports contacts, lists, and consent status. Templates and automations don't transfer and need to be rebuilt manually on the new platform.

Which platform has better automation?

Both gate real automation behind their second-tier plan. Mailchimp's entry tier includes basic single-flow automation up to 4 steps; Brevo's entry tier has none. Once you're on each platform's Standard tier, the depth is broadly comparable for most mid-market use cases, though neither matches a dedicated automation-first tool.

Is there a free plan on either platform?

Mailchimp's free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Brevo's free plan covers up to 100,000 contacts stored and 300 emails a day, which is far more generous on storage and reflects the same pricing philosophy that runs through both platforms' paid tiers.

What about SMS pricing on each platform?

Neither includes SMS for free. Mailchimp sells it as a paid add-on in select countries with monthly credits that expire and don't roll over. Brevo sells SMS credits separately by volume and destination, available starting on its cheapest paid tier.

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