Mailchimp vs Brevo: Which Email Platform Works for Small Businesses

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the better choice for most small businesses because it offers unlimited contacts on all paid plans and includes SMS marketing, while Mailchimp charges per contact and limits SMS to higher tiers. If you're bootstrapped and sending fewer than 500 emails monthly, Mailchimp's free tier works, but Brevo's free plan ($0–$20/month) scales better as you grow.

Pricing: Where Brevo Wins for Lean Operations

Mailchimp's free plan lets you email up to 500 contacts with basic automation, but the moment you hit 1,001 contacts, you're paying $20/month for up to 1,500 contacts. That contact-based pricing stings: 10,000 contacts = $350/month. It's designed to pull you toward paid plans quickly.

Brevo charges by email volume, not contacts. You can email 300,000 contacts for $20/month if you're only sending 20,000 emails daily. This matters for small businesses with large subscriber lists but infrequent sends. At Brevo, you're never penalized for simply having subscribers—only for actually mailing them.

SMS marketing adds another layer. Mailchimp charges $0.0075 per SMS on Premium ($300/month+) plans. Brevo bundles SMS credits into most paid tiers starting at $20/month. For a small business running seasonal promotions via text, this difference is real money.

Features and Automation: Mailchimp's Legacy Strength

Mailchimp has been around since 2001 and it shows—the feature set is deep. Drag-and-drop template builder, A/B testing, customer journey automation, and integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and 1,200+ apps. The UI is familiar to millions, which lowers your learning curve.

Brevo's automation is solid but less mature. It has conditional branching, workflows, and e-commerce integrations, but the interface feels more technical. Your team won't pick it up as intuitively as Mailchimp. That said, Brevo's CRM is built-in, which is valuable if you're managing contacts across channels.

For most small businesses, either platform delivers the fundamentals: segmentation, templates, reporting, and basic workflows. The gap only widens if you need advanced marketing automation—at that point, you're probably outgrowing both and looking at Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign anyway.

Deliverability and Support

Both maintain solid sender reputations and inbox placement rates around 95%+. Mailchimp has more robust documentation and community support; Brevo's support is faster but varies in quality depending on your plan tier.

Deliverability largely depends on *your* sending practices (list hygiene, authentication, content), not the platform. Don't assume either is a magic fix for spam folder problems.

The Practical Choice

Pick Mailchimp if: Your team values ease-of-use, you have fewer than 5,000 contacts, and you want proven stability with tons of tutorials and integrations.

Pick Brevo if: You have a large subscriber list, need SMS marketing, or want to avoid contact-based pricing as you scale.

For founders building on a tight budget, Brevo's per-send pricing often costs less month-to-month. But if you're already in Mailchimp and it works, the switching cost isn't worth it—get good at what you have.

If you need a fast launch and don't want to manage email infrastructure yourself, platforms like these beat building in-house. But if you're time-constrained and need both the site *and* the email flow built simultaneously, services like fivedaylaunch handle the full stack.