Brevo vs ActiveCampaign: Pricing, Features, Differences [2026]

Brevo and ActiveCampaign are two very popular names in the email marketing industry. Both are capable platforms that combine CRM with the email marketing features you’d expect from a modern vendor. But which one will fit your business better? Let’s find out in our detailed comparison.

TL;DR Brevo vs ActiveCampaign at a glance

Quick answer: Brevo is a better choice for most small businesses watching their budget. It has a free plan, charges by emails sent, includes transactional email, and costs less than ActiveCampaign at every list size we priced above 1,000 contacts. ActiveCampaign is a better fit if you need advanced, behavior-based automation and a more powerful CRM. It scores higher overall in our testing (8.9/10 vs 8.8/10).

Here’s a quick look at all the categories we tested and evaluated during this comparison.

If that’s not enough, and you want to dig deeper into what these two platforms have in common and where they differ, read on for our detailed Brevo vs ActiveCampaign comparison and evaluation.

Create and send high-performing emails

Use an AI assistant, pre-made templates, advanced segmentation, and feature-rich automation to run campaigns without coding. Send up to 15,000 monthly emails at no cost.

Get started for free

Brevo vs ActiveCampaign pricing and feature differences

For this comparison, we spent several weeks testing both platforms hands-on. We built emails, created automation workflows and signup forms, and explored the interfaces to see how easy the platforms are to use in practice. We also went through their documentation and compared what they say about their capabilities with what there actually is. These were a fascinating few weeks, and below you’ll find the results of our work.

Pricing plans

⭐ Brevo: 8.5/10 | ActiveCampaign: 8/10

Disclaimer: Pricing changes frequently. All prices in this comparison were verified against Brevo’s official pricing and ActiveCampaign’s official pricing as of September 29, 2026. Always confirm current costs on the official pages.

Brevo’s pricing model differs from what we’ve seen with many other email marketing platforms. Instead of charging based on the number of contacts, it bills you for the number of emails you send each month. To compare it with ActiveCampaign’s contact-based pricing, we matched each contact tier with an email volume of ten emails per contact per month. We chose this ratio because it’s the maximum ActiveCampaign allows on its Starter and Plus plans, so each row shows what both platforms cost at the same sending volume.

We’ve also included each platform’s next plan up, since some of the most advanced and interesting features on both platforms are only available in those plans. Finally, we added SendPulse for extra context – to show how much a versatile email marketing platform can offer while still keeping its pricing affordable.

Keep in mind that ten emails per contact is a fairly heavy schedule, roughly two to three campaigns a week. If you send less often, your ActiveCampaign price won’t change, but your Brevo bill will go down. For example, sending four newsletters a month to a 10,000-contact list adds up to 40,000 emails. With Brevo’s Starter plan, that costs $41.42/month (billed annually). ActiveCampaign’s Starter plan costs $149/month (billed annually) for the same 10,000 contacts, more than 3.5 times as much.

For very small lists of around 1,000 contacts, the two platforms cost about the same. Beyond that, Brevo is cheaper at every volume in our table, even when ActiveCampaign users send the maximum their plan allows. If you’re a B2B company with a large contact database that you email rarely or only in selected segments, the gap grows even wider. So if you choose ActiveCampaign, it should be for its automation and CRM depth, not its price.

Transactional email makes the pricing difference between Brevo and ActiveCampaign even more interesting.

Brevo includes transactional sending in every plan, and marketing and transactional messages share one email allowance within the same account. ActiveCampaign handles transactional email through Postmark, a separate service with its own pricing, account, and approval process. Postmark’s free developer plan includes only 100 emails/month, while paid sending starts at $15/month for 10,000 emails.

This makes Brevo considerably more practical for low-volume senders already using it for marketing. Postmark’s approach has its own advantages, though. It keeps transactional messages separate from marketing email and applies stricter approval and compliance checks, which helps protect the delivery of critical messages like password resets and receipts. At very high volumes, its per-email price can also become competitive.

Ease of use and interface

⭐ Brevo: 8.5/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.5/10

The tie is fair, but only because the two platforms are beneficial in different ways. Brevo asks less of you at the beginning, so it’s a better choice if you want to get productive without spending much time learning the platform. ActiveCampaign requires more patience, but that extra effort pays off once you start using its more advanced tools. Choose Brevo for a shorter path to everyday productivity and ActiveCampaign if you’re willing to invest more time upfront for greater flexibility later.

Here’s what your learning curve might look like in practice:

Email builder and templates

Brevo: 8.4/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.8/10

ActiveCampaign has the stronger email design toolkit overall. It gives you more room to move beyond a standard campaign, especially if personalization and optimization are important to you. Brevo also has personalization, but its main advantage is simplicity. Its single-editor approach is easier to understand and avoids the awkwardness of having different builders that don’t fully work together.

And here’s what you will see once you start using the platforms.

Brevo has a clean, content-focused builder. Dynamic content is a regular draggable block so that you can show different content to different segments. There’s also a Product block for pulling store items into emails. The library isn’t huge, but the templates themselves are nice – the Halloween template we tested felt properly designed, with full-width photography, strong typography, and a layout that went well beyond a basic promotional email.

The standout in ActiveCampaign’s email builder is a built-in countdown timer, which is great for sales, launches, and events, while the RSS block can automatically pull new blog or news content into an email. There are also reusable modules, instantly accessible AI for writing individual blocks, and a contact-level preview that lets you check what a particular recipient will see. Overall, the builder feels especially well suited for eCommerce and emails driven by timing, frequently updated content, and personalization data.

ActiveCampaign’s email builder gets a higher score in our comparison, but that doesn’t make Brevo a bad choice. Both offer solid builders, good personalization, and attractive templates. However, ActiveCampaign is slightly more eCommerce-focused, with countdown timers for promotions, product catalog blocks that pull store products directly into emails, and abandoned cart blocks that automatically show shoppers the products they left behind. Its predictive content can also choose the message variant each contact is most likely to engage with.

Marketing automation

Brevo: 8.8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 10/10

ActiveCampaign is the clear winner for automation and earns its 10/10 because there’s very little room to outgrow it. Its biggest advantage is that its workflows can respond to detailed customer behavior and business events, creating highly specific paths through the customer journey. This makes it suitable for advanced eCommerce, sales, and CRM automation.

Brevo is easier and more accessible, especially for smaller teams, yet still strong and efficient, so it easily earns its 8.8/10.

Now let’s see how these builders look in practice.

For Brevo, we tried the SMS automation builder, which looks exactly like its email automation builder. In the flow we tested, a contact joins a list, waits five minutes, and receives a personalized SMS, with the actual message and personalization token visible directly on the canvas. The builder is easy to scan – triggers, actions, and rules are separated into searchable, color-coded areas, and different node types have their own colors. That makes even multi-channel workflows easy to follow.

ActiveCampaign shows its strength when customer behavior gets more specific. The eCommerce flow we tested starts after a purchase, waits a minute, then checks both the product category and product variant before deciding whether to send an upsell email. You can also add multiple entry triggers, while open and click rates appear directly on email nodes. The freeform canvas and minimap are useful once workflows start branching, since you can see a complicated customer journey without being stuck in one long vertical flow.

The two builders are both good. What we liked most is that both offer AI assistance for creating workflow logic. Brevo has the advantage in multi-channel automation, particularly when SMS or WhatsApp needs to work alongside email without extra complexity. It also offers a cleaner building experience. ActiveCampaign goes deeper when automation depends on detailed customer behavior. Its purchase-driven logic and more flexible canvas make it better suited to eCommerce businesses building targeted upsells and other workflows around exactly what someone bought.

Contact management

Brevo: 9/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9.5/10

Tagging and segmentation become more important as your audience grows larger and becomes more diverse. A small business sending the same newsletter to everyone may barely need them. Still, eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, agencies, and businesses with different customer groups rely on them to keep contacts organized and send more relevant campaigns. Here’s how Brevo and ActiveCampaign compare in contact management.

Both platforms can handle advanced targeting, but ActiveCampaign gives you more ways to organize contacts. Tags are especially important here since they become part of how contacts move through campaigns and automations.

Brevo is strong if you prefer a more structured, data-driven approach. Still, ActiveCampaign is more flexible for marketers who constantly create, combine, and reuse audiences based on customer behavior, which makes its contact data more useful across the platform.

CRM and sales pipelines

Brevo: 8.7/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9.2/10

ActiveCampaign is one of the stronger CRM options among email-first platforms, with sales pipelines closely tied to automation. Brevo added CRM much later and offers a lighter solution for small to medium businesses that want sales and marketing in one system.

Both platforms go beyond traditional email marketing here, but ActiveCampaign is closer to a full-featured CRM solution, while Brevo covers the essentials for teams that mainly need a simple pipeline next to their marketing toolkit.

Signup forms and landing pages

⭐ Brevo: 8.5/10 | ActiveCampaign: 7.2/10

Brevo is a stronger option for signup form creation overall, but the two builders aren’t aimed at the same needs. Brevo is a more practical lead generation tool as it gives you better control over when and where forms appear. ActiveCampaign is more interesting for businesses where forms feed directly into a larger sales and automation system; it has more strengths for sales-oriented lead capture.

Brevo keeps form building simple, and its strongest points are mobile checking and compliance. Its mobile preview renders the form inside an actual smartphone frame. The builder also has dedicated GDPR, GDPR Declaration, and CAPTCHA blocks. The negative part is a lack of design flexibility – mobile mode is preview-only, so you can’t customize the mobile version separately from desktop.

ActiveCampaign gives you much more control over how a form looks on your website. One of its best features is the ability to preview a pop-up directly over a real webpage. This way, it’s easier to spot whether the pop-up covers important content. There’s also a Trigger Automation option right in the builder, making the connection between collecting a lead and acting on it direct.

Brevo is a winner here because it offers better built-in targeting options for deciding when and where forms appear. You can also easily create mobile-friendly, GDPR-ready forms with it. ActiveCampaign also has some clear advantages. Its builder gives you more control over how forms look in the context of your website and connects lead capture closely with automation.

Integrations

Brevo: 8.8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9/10

Integrations matter when your email platform is only one part of a larger business setup. eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, and businesses with dedicated sales or support teams often need to connect email marketing with their store, CRM, payment system, help desk, analytics tools, or other software. Good integrations keep customer data moving between these systems automatically, so you can target campaigns and trigger automations based on what customers do elsewhere. The more tools your business relies on, the more important a strong integration ecosystem becomes. Here’s what Brevo and ActiveCampaign offer.

ActiveCampaign has the edge for integrations, particularly for businesses that already use a fairly complex tech stack. Its ecosystem is better suited to connecting marketing with eCommerce, sales, and other business systems, so data can move between tools and feed directly into campaigns and automation. Brevo is less dependent on external connections, which can be an advantage for businesses looking for a simpler, more self-contained setup.

AI features

⭐ Brevo: 9/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9/10

We’ve covered some AI features earlier in this comparison, but if AI-powered optimization matters to you, here’s a side-by-side comparison of Brevo vs ActiveCampaign.

Both platforms have moved well beyond basic AI writing and can now use AI to create campaigns, build automations, work with customer data, and improve targeting. Where the two are evenly matched – content generation and predictive customer metrics – both deliver comparable depth: full campaign generation with brand awareness, and built-in predictive scoring out of the box. ActiveCampaign pulls ahead specifically where AI extends into ongoing context: it builds automations informed by past campaigns. It remembers stated preferences, and it proactively suggests audience segments based on behavior rather than waiting for a prompt.

We rated both platforms 9/10 because Brevo matches ActiveCampaign step for step on the fundamentals – generation quality and predictive analytics – even though ActiveCampaign’s AI reaches further into the platform’s day-to-day workflows.

Deliverability

⭐ Brevo: 10/10 | ActiveCampaign: 9.8/10

Brevo has a narrow win, 10/10 vs 9.8/10. Its advantage is mainly practical, since it gives you more visibility and control over deliverability. It also makes dedicated sending infrastructure considerably more accessible to businesses that don’t operate at massive scale. ActiveCampaign has a conservative approach, particularly for high-volume senders, but Brevo provides a more complete day-to-day deliverability toolkit for a broader range of businesses.

However, email marketing best practices often matter more for deliverability than the platform’s technical stack. Here are some of them:

• list quality – valid, permission-based contacts rather than purchased or outdated lists;
• engagement – how often recipients open, click, reply, or otherwise interact;
• spam complaints – recipients marking your messages as spam;
• sending frequency – consistent sending rather than sudden volume spikes;
• segmentation – sending relevant messages instead of blasting the entire list;
• inactive contacts – regularly suppressing people who consistently don’t engage;
• opt-in quality – clear consent from people who actually expect your emails;
• content quality – relevant content, trustworthy links, and no misleading subject lines.

If you follow them, you should get good deliverability with any modern email marketing platform.

Reporting and analytics

⭐ Brevo: 9/10 | ActiveCampaign: 8.4/10

Reporting tells you what’s actually working and what needs optimization. It helps you see which campaigns bring results, how customers respond, and whether your marketing is making money. This matters even more for eCommerce businesses, larger teams, and anyone running lots of campaigns, automations, or channels, where opens and clicks only tell part of the story.

Brevo wins reporting overall, even though ActiveCampaign covers more areas. The thing is, Brevo gives you more freedom to analyze data your own way and, importantly, access fresh data without waiting for the next refresh.

ActiveCampaign is better if you want lots of ready-made reports across marketing and sales without doing much analysis yourself; it also has more flexible export options. However, if your business relies heavily on reporting to make day-to-day decisions, Brevo’s faster data and stronger custom analytics make it a better choice.

Customer support

⭐ Brevo: 7.6/10 | ActiveCampaign: 7.2/10

Customer support matters both when you’re learning a new platform and months or years later when something goes wrong. Good onboarding can save hours of trial and error, while reliable support is what you need most when a campaign won’t send or an automation breaks. Documentation and AI can answer routine questions, but for complicated or urgent problems, reaching a real person who can look into your case makes a big difference.

Brevo wins this category on customer feedback: its support is rated slightly higher on both G2 (8.7/10 vs 8.5/10) and Capterra (4.5/5 vs 4.4/5). ActiveCampaign offers more ways to reach support and more hands-on onboarding, but users rate the help they get a little lower.

What users say about Brevo. Reviewers regularly praise the quality of Brevo’s support, describing replies as detailed and understanding. Response times vary, though: some users had an issue sorted out in a few hours, while others say support can take a couple of days. Access is also limited, since phone support is reserved for the Professional plan and higher.

What users say about ActiveCampaign. Reviewers highlight ActiveCampaign’s responsive support and its 1:1 onboarding. On the downside, some users say it can be hard to get in touch with a human agent.

Key differences between Brevo and ActiveCampaign

Here’s another variation of the too-long-didn’t-read table we had at the beginning. This time, we’ve gathered all the key differences between the platforms so you can immediately spot which ones might be particularly important for your choice.

If this table doesn’t tell you enough, we have a few other ways to help you make the right decision and choose the email marketing platform that best fits your business.

Join 3M+ businesses growing with SendPulse

From solo creators to global brands, millions trust SendPulse to run email campaigns, chatbots, automations, and more – all in one place.

Get started for free

Your decision checklist

Here are the key areas that matter most when marketers and business owners choose an email marketing platform. If one platform comes out on top in three or more of them, it’s probably the better choice for your business.

If neither Brevo nor ActiveCampaign quite fits your business, these platforms are worth a look:

• SendPulse, if you want AI-assisted email and chatbot marketing in one place. It also offers SMS marketing and a built-in CRM with sales pipelines.
• Kit (ConvertKit), if you mainly send newsletters. Its free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers, though automations require a paid plan.
• Klaviyo, if you run an online store and want automation, segmentation, and reporting built around your store data.

Final verdict and recommendations

⚖️ Final scores: Brevo – 8.5/10 | ActiveCampaign – 8.9/10

Would we recommend Brevo? Absolutely! Especially if you have a large or growing contact list but don’t email it very often. It’s affordable, capable, and well-liked by its users.

Would we recommend ActiveCampaign? Even more so! However, only if you’re actually going to use its capabilities. Brevo is more universal and can work well for almost any business. At the same time, ActiveCampaign makes the most sense if you run an eCommerce business or need sophisticated automations connected to your CRM. It costs about the same for very small lists but noticeably more as your list grows, so its extra automation and CRM depth are what you pay for.

Whatever you choose, make sure you choose carefully before committing. Onboarding and migration take time and resources, so it’s much easier to pick the right platform from the start.