Brevo (Sendinblue) Review 2026: Is the Free Plan Any Good?

Brevo — most people who’ve been in this space a while still know it as Sendinblue — takes a different approach to pricing than almost everything else in this category: it charges by how many emails you send, not by how many contacts you store. That one decision shapes almost everything else about who Brevo is a good fit for. This review covers what you actually get at each tier, works through a concrete example of how the pricing model plays out, and tells you plainly who should (and shouldn’t) use it.

Quick verdict

Brevo is the strongest free option in this category if you have a large contact list but email it infrequently — its free plan supports up to 100,000 stored contacts, far beyond Kit or GetResponse’s free tiers. It’s a weaker choice if your strategy depends on frequent automated sends (daily emails, dense drip sequences), since billing by email volume means that kind of usage gets expensive faster than it would on a contact-based platform like Kit.

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What Brevo actually is

Brevo launched as Sendinblue in 2012, built originally around transactional and marketing email for small businesses in France, and rebranded to Brevo in 2023 as it expanded into SMS, CRM, and broader marketing tooling. The product and underlying infrastructure didn’t change with the rebrand — just the name and visual identity — so if you come across “Sendinblue” in an older tutorial, integration guide, or review, it’s describing the exact tool you’d sign up for today. Brevo positions itself as an affordable, all-in-one platform for small businesses: email marketing, SMS, a lightweight CRM, and transactional email, all under one pricing structure.

Brevo pricing in 2026

Before looking at the plan table, it’s worth understanding the pricing model itself, because it’s genuinely different from every other tool in this category. Brevo charges based on how many emails you send per month, not how many contacts you store. Kit, GetResponse, and Mailchimp all price by contact count — your bill rises as your list grows, whether or not you ever email most of those contacts. Brevo flips that: your list size is nearly irrelevant to cost; what matters is your sending volume.

A concrete example makes this click: if you have 20,000 newsletter subscribers but only send one email a week, you’re sending roughly 80,000 emails a month — comfortably inside Brevo’s free-plan daily limit most days, meaning a list that would cost real money on a contact-based platform can stay free on Brevo. Flip the scenario, though — a smaller list of 2,000 contacts running a dense automation sequence that fires several emails a day per subscriber — and you can burn through Brevo’s email allowance fast despite the small contact count, ending up paying more than you would on Kit’s contact-based pricing for that same list size.

Pricing below is current as of November 2026 on brevo.com/pricing:

Plan	Price	Email allowance	Automation	Logo
Free	$0	300/day (~9,000/mo)	Up to 2,000 contacts	Brevo logo included
Starter	$9/mo	5,000/mo	Not included	Brevo logo (removable +$12/mo)
Business	$18/mo	5,000/mo	Included, plus A/B testing	No logo

A few things worth knowing before picking a plan:

• Contact storage is effectively unlimited on the free plan, up to 100,000 contacts — the real constraint is the daily send cap, not list size.
• Starter removes automation entirely — somewhat counterintuitively, the free plan’s automation (capped at 2,000 contacts) is more capable than Starter’s, since Starter has none. If you want automation on a paid plan, you need Business.
• Removing the Brevo logo on Starter is a separate $12/month charge, which narrows the price gap with Business (at $18/month, with no add-on needed) more than it first appears.
• Higher email-volume tiers exist above Business for larger senders, priced on a sliding scale by monthly email volume rather than flat tiers.

Key features

Email campaigns and automation

Brevo’s automation builder covers the standard set of triggers and actions — form submissions, tags, purchase events, date-based triggers, feeding into emails, waits, and branching logic. It’s functional and visually clean, though reviewers who’ve used Kit’s or GetResponse’s builders tend to describe Brevo’s as slightly less polished for complex, multi-branch journeys. For straightforward sequences (welcome series, abandoned cart, re-engagement), it covers the job well.

SMS marketing

This is one of Brevo’s clearer differentiators versus Kit and GetResponse: SMS is a native channel, not a bolted-on integration, and can sit inside the same automation workflow as email — for example, sending an SMS follow-up only to contacts who didn’t open an email within 24 hours. SMS is billed separately from email send limits, on a pay-as-you-go or bundled-credit basis depending on your plan.

CRM (lightweight)

Brevo includes a basic CRM — contact records, deal pipelines, and task reminders — aimed at small sales teams who want a lightweight alternative to a dedicated CRM tool rather than a full-featured HubSpot competitor. It’s a genuinely useful bundled extra if you don’t already use a separate CRM, but not a reason on its own to switch platforms if you do.

Landing pages and forms

Paid plans include a landing page builder and embeddable signup forms, broadly comparable in scope to Kit’s — simple, fast-loading templates rather than a full marketing-page design tool.

Transactional email (API)

This is a standout feature for developers and ecommerce sites: Brevo’s transactional email API (order confirmations, password resets, shipping notifications) runs on the same infrastructure and reputation pool as marketing email, with solid documentation and SDKs for most major languages. It’s billed separately from marketing email volume and is one of the more consistently well-reviewed parts of the platform among technical users, closer in spirit to a dedicated transactional provider like Postmark or SendGrid than to a typical newsletter tool’s bolt-on feature.

Deliverability

Brevo maintains standard sender-authentication support (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and dedicated IP options on higher tiers. As with every tool in this category, independent inbox-placement studies don’t show a consistent, large gap between Brevo and its competitors — results vary by methodology and shift month to month — so treat any specific deliverability percentage as a snapshot rather than a permanent ranking. Brevo’s free-plan branding (“Sent with Brevo”) doesn’t directly hurt deliverability, but it is a visible signal to recipients that you’re on a free plan, which some senders prefer to avoid for brand reasons alone.

Support and migration

Free-plan users get access to Brevo’s help center and community forum; paid plans add email and chat support, with response-time priority increasing on Business. Brevo provides import tools for contacts from most major platforms (including direct Mailchimp import), though hands-on migration assistance is more limited than what Kit offers on its paid plans — expect to do more of the setup yourself.

Who should use Brevo

Brevo is a strong fit if most of the following describe you:

• You have a large contact list but email it relatively infrequently (weekly or less)
• Budget is a real constraint and you want to stay at $0 for as long as possible
• You want SMS and email managed inside the same platform and workflow
• You run a small sales process and want a lightweight CRM bundled in rather than a separate subscription
• You need a solid transactional email API for order confirmations or account notifications alongside your marketing email

Who should look elsewhere

• Anyone running dense automation with frequent sends per subscriber will likely find Brevo’s email-volume pricing more expensive in practice than it looks on paper — compare against our Kit review, which prices by contact count instead.
• Course creators or webinar hosts should look at our GetResponse review instead — Brevo has no native webinar hosting, while GetResponse builds it in starting at the Marketer plan.
• Newsletter writers planning to sell paid subscriptions or digital products directly will find Kit’s native checkout more useful, since Brevo has no built-in commerce or paid-newsletter tools.

See our full roundup, best email marketing software for bloggers, for a side-by-side look at Brevo against Kit and GetResponse.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Free plan supports up to 100,000 stored contacts — far higher than Kit’s or GetResponse’s free tiers
• Automation included free (up to 2,000 contacts), unlike most competitors’ free plans
• Native SMS marketing, combinable with email in the same automation workflow
• Strong transactional email API, well-regarded among developers
• Lightweight CRM bundled in at no extra cost
• Pricing by email volume can work heavily in your favor for large, infrequently-emailed lists

Cons

• Starter plan ($9/mo) drops automation entirely — a step down from the free plan’s capabilities
• Removing the Brevo logo on Starter costs an extra $12/month on top of the base price
• Frequent-sending use cases (dense automation, daily emails) can end up costing more than contact-based competitors despite Brevo’s “cheap” reputation
• No native digital-product checkout or paid-newsletter tools
• Automation builder is less polished than Kit’s or GetResponse’s for complex, multi-branch journeys

Final verdict

Brevo’s pay-per-email model is genuinely the right fit for a specific, common situation: a growing list that you don’t email every day. For that case, the free plan’s 100,000-contact ceiling makes it hard to beat at $0. The same pricing model becomes a disadvantage the moment your strategy depends on frequent automated sends, where a contact-based platform like Kit can actually work out cheaper despite a smaller free tier. Know which category you’re in before picking Brevo on reputation for being “the cheap one.”

Start with Brevo’s free plan