Brevo vs Mailchimp 2026: Which Works the Best?

Email marketing continues to be one of the highest-ROI channels for businesses of all sizes. According to the latest email marketing insights, many small businesses report noticeable improvements in response rates and conversions after adopting dedicated tracking and analytics tools. Knowing when a lead opens an email or clicks a link can be the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed sale. How do you decide between two popular platforms like Brevo and Mailchimp?

In this comprehensive comparison, we'll break down everything from pricing models and automation capabilities to deliverability rates and customer support. Whether you're a startup founder, marketing manager, or small business owner looking to maximize your email marketing ROI, this guide will help you make an informed decision.

The Quick Overview

Before we dive into the details, here's what sets these platforms apart:

Mailchimp started as a recognizable household name in email marketing in 2001 and now serves over 20 million customers. It provides an inclusive set of marketing tools for traditional email marketing through HTML, integration, and an intuitive interface, which most marketing professionals are already acquainted with. Mailchimp advertises itself as a one-stop solution for marketing and provides features for email, social ads, websites, and landing pages.

Brevo (ex Sendinblue) is a fast-growing email and CRM solution that was founded back in 2012, catering to a whopping 300,000 subscribers from among the 180 countries that Brevo spans. What sets Brevo apart from the other email solutions is that it is a multichannel solution that encompasses email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, as well as CRM. Brevo's pricing is based on the number of emails that are sent, as opposed to the number of contacts.

Key Differences at a Glance

Email Marketing Features: Head-to-Head Comparison

Email Builder and Design Interface

The quality of your email builder directly impacts how quickly you can create campaigns and maintain professional brand consistency.

Brevo has developed a simple and quick drag-and-drop interface for building emails. It walks you through everything needed for building your campaign. The editor contains all the basic blocks – text, images, buttons, social links, and dividers. The ability to go back to past versions of your email is also very helpful in case you want to remove multiple updates from the last version. The editor itself is very simple and easy to use; everything is neatly positioned on the left sidebar of the editor window. You can either create a completely new email from scratch or choose from one of their many pre-designed templates.

Mailchimp has restructured its email builder by developing a more modern and tidy user interface (UI), where users now have the option to click on individual components within the UI to edit those sections in line. Users now have two options to choose from when creating an email: the classic email builder for those who have experience creating emails and a new and improved builder that the majority of users will prefer. The drag-and-drop component functions seamlessly when adding content to newsletters, promotional e-mails, and announcements.

Winner: Mailchimp edges ahead with more advanced built-in features, a polished interface, and superior ease of use for both beginners and experienced marketers.

Email Templates and Designs

Pre-designed templates help you launch professional campaigns quickly while maintaining brand consistency.

Brevo offers 48 mobile-responsive email templates organized into categories for easy navigation. These include templates for welcome emails, newsletters, announcements, and eCommerce promotions. While the template library is smaller than competitors, the designs are clean and functional. Brevo also provides four simple layouts that serve as starting points for custom designs. Users can create their own templates by coding HTML or importing from another Brevo account via a shared URL.

Mailchimp provides over 100 templates (called "themes") that are mobile-responsive and visually appealing. These templates cover various use cases and can be filtered by category, making it easy to find what you need. The designs are more modern and polished compared to Brevo's offerings. However, the free email plan only provides access to a handful of outdated templates, while the more aesthetically advanced options require a paid subscription. Users can also create custom HTML templates via code, URL, or ZIP file upload.

Winner: Mailchimp wins with a larger selection of modern, professionally designed templates, though Brevo's templates are adequate for most business needs.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Automation transforms email marketing from manual campaign sending into intelligent, behavior-driven communication that nurtures leads and customers automatically.

Brevo has powerful automation features, rivaling those of platforms way beyond its price range. The automation workflow builder gives you a visual canvas to create complex, multistep sequences according to various triggers. There are pre-built automation templates for the most common scenarios, like welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, birthday emails, and re-engagement campaigns. What sets Brevo apart, however, is multichannel automation: you can create workflows that will combine email, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, depending on what customers do or don't do. You are allowed to trigger automations based on email engagement, contact data updates, website visits (using the Brevo Tracker), and custom events.

Mailchimp offers prebuilt automation workflows for common email marketing use cases, such as welcome emails, recovering abandoned carts, sending follow-up emails after a purchase, and re-engagement campaigns. The Automation Builder allows you to build a multi-step sequence with conditional logic based on subscriber actions.

Automation features, however, are not available on the free plan; at least upgrade to the Essentials plan ($13/month for 500 contacts) for access to basic automations, and the Standard plan ($20/month) for higher-end features such as behavioral targeting and journey mapping.

Winner: Brevo significantly outperforms with more sophisticated automation available at lower price points, multichannel workflow capabilities, and better value for money.

Audience Segmentation and Targeting

Effective segmentation ensures you send relevant messages to the right people, dramatically improving engagement rates and conversions.

Brevo operates under the older "list" method of managing contacts, but it does offer unlimited segments for each of your lists. As an example, Brevo allows for segmenting based on demographic information, email activity (opens, clicks), custom fields, and behavioral patterns. The segmentation engine can handle complex conditions using the AND/OR logic structure, so marketers can build segments with extreme accuracy. It is worth noting that the segmentation options available through Brevo are a massive benefit to all users, since they are available on every plan (including Free). Brevo enables all users to take advantage of cutting-edge marketing options that competitors choose to keep behind their paywall or premium plans.

Mailchimp has moved away from lists and instead uses a tag-based approach to segmenting contacts. Users can create segments for their customers based on demographic information, purchase history, email engagement, website visits, and custom fields created by the user. The tagging system supports advanced AND/OR logic for creating highly targeted audience groups. Mailchimp integrates its tagging and segmentation into its CRM system, allowing you to track your customers' activity across several touchpoints. Unfortunately, the tagging and segmentation advanced features are only available on the upper-tier plans, and as your contact numbers rise, you will pay more money since Mailchimp's pricing model is based on the total contact count, not the subscribers you have actively engaged.

Winner: Brevo takes this round by offering free segmentation features on all plans with unlimited contacts, providing better value, especially for businesses with large but less active lists.

Interactive and Advanced Email Features

Modern email marketing goes beyond static HTML to create engaging, dynamic experiences that drive higher conversion rates.

Brevo provides support for traditional emails (HTML) grounded on core principles. Although it doesn’t have the most innovative forms of interactivity, this provider does provide all the fundamental elements of an effective email marketing campaign with proven results when it comes to delivery. The most significant focus of a Brevo marketing strategy is on developing multichannel campaigns where email works in conjunction with SMS, WhatsApp, and live chats to enhance a cohesive experience for existing and potential customers

Mailchimp continues to support traditional email (HTML) messaging and the inclusion of some interactivity through campaign efforts. However, while interactivity is available to recipients via Mailchimp emails, any user action taken still requires the recipient to be redirected to a separate, external landing page or website, making it more difficult for the user to convert.

Winner: Tie. Both platforms offer similar traditional HTML email capabilities without truly interactive in-email experiences.

A/B Testing Features

Testing different elements of your campaigns is essential for optimizing performance and understanding what resonates with your audience.

Brevo offers A/B testing functions where you can test subject lines, names, as well as the body of the emails. The platform allows you to divide your target audience to establish the best result before forwarding the mails to the other audience. The functions of A/B tests in the platform are quite simplistic, and there are no complex multivariate tests or AI analytics to provide insights into the performance differences of others.

Mailchimp provides strong A/B testing features that allow testing of subject lines, content, and sending information. The standard plan allows for testing up to three variations at once, while the premium plan, for $350 per month, allows for multivariate testing for up to eight variations of different elements. The winner is automatically sent to the remaining list of subscribers based on a specified success metric, either opens, clicks, or revenue, but Mailchimp does not offer A/B testing for its free and Essentials plans.

Winner: Mailchimp provides more comprehensive testing capabilities with multivariate options on higher tiers, though Brevo offers solid basic A/B testing at lower price points.

Forms and Landing Pages

Growing your email list requires effective signup forms and landing pages that convert website visitors into subscribers.

Sign-up forms may be built in Brevo via an inline form, pop-ups, slide-ins, and floating bars. You can also customize your form; for example, you could trigger a form based on user actions (e.g., exit intent, time spent on the page, scroll depth, etc.). With the form builder, you can use conditional logic to determine which follow-up questions to show based on the answers previously given by users. This helps to decrease abandonment rates for the forms created with Brevo, as well as allows you to create landing pages compatible with any other forms created using Brevo to be optimized for mobile use.

Mailchimp includes many different types of sign-up forms, which can be modified regarding color, fields, and general text. Mailchimp's landing page builder is integrated directly into email campaigns, and although Mailchimp's landing page builder does have a level of sophistication, it is not quite as capable or as functional as dedicated standalone landing page platforms. All sign-up forms made in Mailchimp will automatically synchronise with the Mailchimp CRM, allowing the population of segmented lists to occur automatically. The addition of the "Create" button makes it easier for users to build sign-up forms and landing pages quickly within the Mailchimp system.

Winner: Tie. Both platforms offer solid form and landing page capabilities, with Brevo providing more advanced form logic and Mailchimp offering better overall design polish.

Email Deliverability: Reaching the Inbox

Even the most beautifully designed email is worthless if it lands in spam folders instead of subscribers' inboxes.

Brevo prioritizes the deliverability of their emails with their high level of security measures, such as mandatory DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. The service ensures a good sending reputation with a careful validation policy that filters spammers and a special deliverability expert who monitors their servers. Additionally, they provide email automation that removes hard bounces for any future sending campaigns. For larger volume senders, Brevo offers IP addresses that provide a good sending reputation. Brevo uses shared IP addresses for most clients and has good delivery rates. Additionally, they provide infrastructure that supports good inbox delivery and also supports GDPR-compliant organizations located in the EU.

Mailchimp's deliverability has been an issue for many of its users. Currently, tests conducted by an independent third party indicate that their deliverability results in an estimated 81% delivery rate and an estimated 14% spam rate, which is well above the current industry average. One of the reasons for this is that Mailchimp follows a shared IP model where your personal sender reputation can potentially be impacted by the activities of other users. Mailchimp does support SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, and it has been reported that many of their users still experience deliverability problems.

Winner: Brevo significantly outperforms Mailchimp in deliverability, with better infrastructure, proactive monitoring, and stronger sender reputation management.

Reporting and Analytics

Understanding campaign performance through detailed analytics drives continuous improvement and better marketing decisions.

Brevo provides comprehensive analytics covering all standard email metrics, including open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, and spam reports. The dashboard presents data in an organized, easy-to-read format with geographic information showing where your subscribers are located. You can track revenue attribution for eCommerce campaigns and analyze trends over time. The reporting includes click maps showing which links receive the most engagement, device and email client breakdowns, and the ability to compare campaign performance. However, the analytics lack AI-powered insights or automated recommendations for improving future campaigns.

Mailchimp offers excellent reporting with visually appealing charts and graphs. Standard metrics are covered comprehensively, with additional insights like industry benchmarks for comparison, predictive analytics including customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood, geographic data showing subscriber locations, click maps displaying link performance, and revenue tracking for connected eCommerce stores. The reporting interface has improved significantly with recent updates, making it easier to find specific metrics and understand campaign performance at a glance.

Winner: Mailchimp edges ahead with more sophisticated reporting, predictive insights, and better data visualization, though both platforms cover essential analytics well.

Integrations and Third-Party Apps

Your email platform needs to work seamlessly with other tools in your marketing technology stack.

Brevo offers integration with popular services like Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Google Analytics. With Zapier, you can connect Brevo to other services, even when a specific integration is not provided. Here, the important aspect that will differentiate this service from its competitors is that of multi-channel integration, where data from various services like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Live Chat will be connected. For eCommerce, you can trigger events based on abandoned carts, and you can track purchasing activities. They provide a powerful API to integrate services of your choice.

Mailchimp has over 300 native integrations with many other successful platforms, including eCommerce, CRM, social, analytics, web hosting, as well as business apps. This is a very connected email platform. There is a very well-organized marketplace that makes it simple to search for and install the integration that is required. Some of the main integrations that Mailchimp offers include Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Canva, Eventbrite, Facebook, Instagram, Google Analytics, and many others. Mailchimp is also integrated with Zapier.

Winner: Mailchimp wins decisively on sheer number and variety of integrations, though Brevo offers sufficient connectivity for most businesses.

Multichannel Marketing Capabilities

Modern marketing requires reaching customers across multiple channels beyond just email.

Brevo (formerly known as Sendinblue) is an excellent example of a true multi-channel marketing platform. In addition to email, Brevo allows for sending SMS campaigns, sending WhatsApp messages, running Facebook ads, and sending web push notifications, all from one centralised dashboard. You can also embed a live chat feature on your website to chat with visitors directly through Brevo. The live chat has built-in chatbot functionality, which automates responses and helps reduce customer service workload. Brevo offers a full CRM with sales pipeline functionality to help track deals and negotiations, making it a great option for small businesses looking for a complete system to manage their sales process. 

 Mailchimp has evolved into a full-service one-stop shop for all your marketing needs. Mailchimp now includes email marketing, social ads (Facebook and Instagram), Google ads, a landing page builder, a website builder, and basic sms (text) functionality. However, the sms capability is an add-on, and to use it, you'll need to purchase extra credits. SMS reporting is only available on Mailchimp Standard and Premium plans. Mailchimp sees itself as an all-in-one place for small businesses to manage all aspects of their digital marketing. They also provide a simple website builder as part of the overall platform. 

Winner: Brevo wins for businesses prioritizing multichannel communication with superior SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat features, while Mailchimp offers better social advertising and website building capabilities.

Pricing Comparison(2026)

Understanding the true cost of each platform is crucial for making an informed decision that fits 

Cost Comparison Examples

Unique Features and Strengths

What Makes Brevo Stand Out?

• Unlimited contacts, even on the free plan

• Pay-per-email pricing model saves money at scale

• Full CRM with sales pipeline and deal tracking

• Live chat and chatbot functionality

• True multichannel marketing (email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, ads)

• All features are available at lower price points

• Transactional email capabilities built in

• EU data residency for GDPR compliance

• Strong automation without premium pricing

• No daily sending limits on paid plans

What Makes Mailchimp Stand Out?

• Over 20 years of brand recognition and trust

• 300+ native integrations with popular tools

• Website builder included in plans

• Predictive analytics (customer lifetime value, purchase likelihood)

• More sophisticated reporting and data visualization

• Larger template library with modern designs

• Postcard direct mail marketing

• Advanced multivariate testing on Premium plans

• Comprehensive mobile app

• Large knowledge base and community resources

Use Cases: Who Should Choose Each Platform?

Choose Brevo if you:

• Have a large contact list (10,000+ contacts) with moderate email frequency

• Need multichannel marketing (email, SMS, WhatsApp) in one platform

• Want a full-featured CRM without paying for a separate tool

• Need live chat and chatbot functionality on your website

• Operate on a tight budget and want maximum value

• Send transactional emails alongside marketing campaigns

• Require EU data residency for GDPR compliance

• Prefer unlimited contact storage without penalty

• Are you a consultant, solopreneur, or small agency

• Value automation features without premium pricing

Choose Mailchimp if you:

• Have a small to medium contact list (under 5,000 contacts)

• Send frequent campaigns multiple times per week

• Need extensive third-party integrations

• Already use Mailchimp and are comfortable with the platform

• Want an all-in-one platform, including a website builder

• Require predictive analytics for eCommerce

• Prefer a well-known, established brand

• Need phone support (Premium plan)

• Value polished design and user interface

• Have a budget for contact-based pricing as you scale

Final Thoughts

Both Brevo and Mailchimp are capable email marketing platforms, but they serve different needs and business models.

For most small to medium businesses, Brevo offers better overall value with lower costs, more features at entry-level price points, and multichannel capabilities that Mailchimp can't match. The pricing difference becomes dramatic as you scale, with Brevo costing as little as 10-20% of Mailchimp's price at higher contact volumes.

However, if integrations are critical to your workflow or you need advanced eCommerce analytics, Mailchimp's mature ecosystem might justify the higher price tag.

The best email marketing platform ultimately depends on your specific needs, budget, and growth trajectory. We recommend signing up for free trials of both platforms to test them with your actual use case before committing to a paid plan.