Brevo vs MailerLite: Pricing, Free Plans & Features [2026]

Paris or Vilnius? Brevo started in 2012 in Paris as Sendinblue and was renamed in 2023, while MailerLite was founded in Vilnius in 2010. On paper, they look like twins: both are European, both offer free plans, and both are built for small businesses that don’t want to pay a Mailchimp-sized bill.

MailerLite doesn’t hide the rivalry either, openly pitching itself as the free alternative to Brevo. But look closer, and they play different games. Brevo is a multi-channel toolbox, with email, SMS, WhatsApp, transactional email, and a basic CRM under one roof. MailerLite is a simplicity-first platform built around newsletters, landing pages, and creator tools.

Which one is right for you depends on how big your list is compared with how often you send, which channels you need, and how much hand-holding you want. We tested both, section by section, so you’ll know exactly where each one wins.

TL;DR Brevo vs MailerLite at a glance

Brevo wins our comparison by a narrow margin, but MailerLite may be the better choice for many smaller businesses. Brevo offers a more complete marketing and sales toolkit, while MailerLite makes email marketing, website creation, and selling digital products easier to manage.

Here’s a quick recap. If one category matters most to you, click it to jump to the detailed comparison.

Choose Brevo if you want an all-in-one platform that combines email marketing, CRM, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, and transactional emails, with strong automation to connect everything.

Choose MailerLite if you’re a creator, freelancer, or small business looking for simple email marketing alongside websites, landing pages, and selling digital products, paid newsletters, or bookings.

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Brevo vs MailerLite pricing and feature differences

This comparison is not just a collection of everything the platforms say about themselves in promo materials and on their websites. What interested us much more was our own experience of testing and using them – creating emails, flows, and pop-ups – and the feedback from real users on websites like Capterra and G2. This makes our comparison more of a practical one – something you can use if you don’t want to test the platforms yourself.

Pricing plans

⭐ Brevo: 8.5/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 8.5/10

Disclaimer: Pricing changes frequently. All prices in this comparison were verified against MailerLite’s official pricing and Brevo’s official pricing as of October 23, 2026. Always confirm current costs on the official pages.

Brevo and MailerLite use different pricing models, which makes a direct price comparison a little tricky. Brevo bases its plans on monthly email volume, while MailerLite charges by subscriber count. The sections below show how those models work, what the free plans include, and where the price differences start to matter.

How Brevo pricing works in 2026

Brevo has five plans: Free, Starter, Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. The Free plan allows you to send 300 emails per day and store up to 100,000 contacts.

On paid plans, you choose a monthly email volume, and that tier also determines how many contacts you can store. The three smallest Starter and Standard tiers allow 500, 1,500, and 2,500 contacts. Once you reach the 20,000-email tier, the contact limit jumps to 500,000. So if you have more than 2,500 contacts, the 20,000-email tier is your starting point.

Starter keeps the price low, but it is fairly limited. You get one user, Brevo branding unless you pay $9/month to remove it, no A/B testing or landing pages, and automation for up to 2,000 contacts. Standard unlocks those missing features. Professional starts at $499/month and brings in tools such as pop-ups, WhatsApp, predictive analytics, and phone support. Enterprise is custom-priced.

How MailerLite pricing works in 2026

MailerLite charges by the number of subscribers on your list. It has three self-serve plans: Free, Comfort, and Power, plus Enterprise for lists above 200,000 subscribers. On Comfort, your monthly sending allowance is 10 times the subscriber tier. Power removes that cap and adds unlimited users and automations, as well as multiple automation triggers.

MailerLite also changed its pricing quite significantly in 2026. On June 16, the Growing Business plan became Comfort and the Advanced one became Power, with prices increasing by around 10–38% depending on the tier. Comfort also moved from unlimited sending to a monthly cap but gained the preference center, Smart sending, and the AI writing assistant.

The Free plan changed too. It now supports 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails per month, down from 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails.

New accounts got the new pricing on June 16, 2026. Existing paid accounts switch at their next renewal, so annual subscribers may keep their old rate until as late as June 2027.

Brevo vs MailerLite free plans compared

The Free plans are quite different as well. Brevo gives you much more room for contacts, while MailerLite includes more tools for building your online presence.

Brevo is a more generous option if you already have a large list, but the 300-email daily cap changes how useful that allowance is. For instance, sending to 1,000 contacts would take four days. MailerLite gives you far fewer subscribers, but its free plan includes a website, landing page, and product page, which may be more useful for someone starting a business from scratch.

We kept this category a tie. Brevo starts cheaper at $9/month versus $12 for MailerLite and still has the more generous free plan, especially after MailerLite’s June 2026 cuts. On comparable paid plans, though, MailerLite can work out better for smaller lists. At 2,500 contacts, Comfort costs $33/month, while Brevo Standard, its closest equivalent, costs $49. It’s also far cheaper for frequent senders – emailing 5,000 contacts every day costs $69/month on MailerLite Power and $179 on Brevo Standard.

In practice, Brevo is more attractive if you want a low entry price or a large free contact allowance. MailerLite makes more sense once sending frequency becomes a bigger part of the cost.

Ease of use and interface

Brevo: 8.5/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 9/10

MailerLite wins on ease of use, but Brevo isn’t far behind. MailerLite keeps the experience focused on everyday email marketing tasks, making it easier to get things done. Brevo offers a broader set of capabilities, and that inevitably adds some complexity, even with a well-designed interface. For teams focused primarily on email marketing, MailerLite’s simplicity is an advantage. But if you need Brevo’s additional tools, the extra effort may be a worthwhile trade-off.

Based on our experience testing both platforms, here’s how long we estimate it might take your team to get familiar with each one.

Email builder and templates

Brevo: 8.4/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 8.6/10

MailerLite wins email design, although the gap is small. It’s the better choice for teams that produce campaigns regularly and want consistently attractive results without involving a designer. Brevo is a capable alternative, particularly for businesses that value precise control over their layouts and mobile experience. But for most teams, MailerLite offers a more complete creative toolkit and makes it easier to put that toolkit to good use.

Brevo puts almost everything you need to add to an email in front of you. There are 13 blocks, from Text, Image, and Button to Product, Navigation, HTML, and Dynamic content, and you can drag any of them straight onto the canvas.

Blocks, complete Sections, and your own Saved elements are also grouped together, so reusing something you’ve already created doesn’t require digging through menus. We also liked seeing Dynamic content among the regular blocks instead of hidden somewhere in advanced settings. You get the pieces and decide how to combine them, which leaves plenty of room for custom layouts without making the editor crowded.

MailerLite gives you much more ready-made material to work with. Its sidebar is divided into categories with search on top if you don’t want to browse through them. Many elements are already assembled for you.

For example, when we selected a Standard hero, we could change its padding, background image, image position, colors, button style, headings, and individual content elements from one panel. Revision history is also right at the top, and individual component changes can be saved or canceled. There are more controls to go through, but you also have fewer design decisions to make from scratch.

After using both, MailerLite is the one we’d pick if the goal is to create a good-looking email fast. You start with more finished components and then adjust them, so you don’t need much design experience to get a polished result. Brevo gives you fewer ready-made decisions and more individual pieces, which is useful when you already know how you want the email structured. MailerLite does more of the assembling for you; Brevo gives you more freedom to do the assembling yourself.

Transactional email

Winner: ⭐ Brevo (not scored separately)

Transactional emails are easy to overlook until one fails to reach the inbox. Order confirmations, password resets, receipts, and shipping updates need to reach customers reliably, and this is one of the areas where the Brevo vs MailerLite comparison shows a clear difference.

With Brevo, you can manage marketing and transactional email from the same account. Templates use the same editor, and you can connect your website through SMTP or the API. Delivery, open, and bounce data are available in the dashboard, and a single API request can send up to 1,000 emails.

Those sends do count toward your email allowance, so this is worth factoring into your plan if you run a busy store or app.

MailerSend keeps transactional email separate. It has its own templates, analytics, and inbound routing, so the functionality is there, but you’re managing another product with its own limits and pricing.

For low volumes, that may not be a problem. The free MailerSend plan covers 500 emails per month. If you need more than that, the extra cost sits on top of your MailerLite subscription.

Marketing automation

⭐ Brevo: 8.8/10 | MailerLite: 7.5/10

Brevo is a much stronger automation platform, and the difference is substantial. Its biggest advantage is that businesses can automate more of their customer communication in one place, without relying on separate tools to handle different parts of the journey.

MailerLite is still a good choice for businesses whose automation needs are limited to email, and its simplicity is a genuine advantage for smaller teams. But Brevo offers far more opportunities to put marketing on autopilot, making it the clear winner for businesses that want to get serious about automation.

Brevo gives you Triggers, Actions, and Rules as three separate groups, and that structure makes sense once workflows start getting complicated. There’s plenty to work with: automations can react to contact and segment changes, email activity, forms, website behavior, and even WhatsApp replies, while actions can go beyond email to SMS, WhatsApp, and web push.

The editor is also prepared for larger workflows, with step search, zoom controls, testing, autosave, undo and redo, and an Activity section where you can check what happened after an automation started running. We also liked how hard it is to overlook an unfinished step – Brevo puts a visible warning directly inside anything that still needs configuration. And if you don’t want to build the initial structure yourself, its AI, Aura, can generate one from a written description.

MailerLite fits a lot of information onto one canvas without making the workflow difficult to follow. Steps name themselves and show what they do underneath, branches are simply labeled Yes and No, and small status indicators tell you whether everything has been configured.

Its toolkit covers Delay, Condition, A/B test, email, webhooks, internal notifications, custom field updates, and group management. Move to step is particularly useful: instead of recreating the same sequence after different branches, you can send subscribers back to another point in the workflow.

The limitation becomes obvious when you look beyond email, though. Most of what you can do revolves around sending emails, controlling the sequence, and updating subscriber data, so there’s much less room to expand a workflow into other marketing channels.

MailerLite may actually be nicer for a simple email sequence – its compact canvas is easier to read, and you can understand a finished workflow without spending much time studying it. But its simplicity also defines where the limits appear. Once you want SMS, WhatsApp, web push, more varied triggers, or a workflow that several people will need to build, test, and troubleshoot, Brevo has much more to offer. MailerLite is excellent for getting straightforward email automations running without much fuss; Brevo gives you room to turn those automations into much larger customer journeys.

Contact management

⭐ Brevo: 9/10 | MailerLite: 8/10

Sending the same emails to everyone on your list is rarely a good idea. Subscribers have different interests, needs, and levels of engagement, and treating them all alike can lead to fewer opens, more unsubscribes, and spam complaints. Over time, that can also damage your sender reputation and hurt deliverability. Good contact management and audience segmentation help you send relevant messages to the right people, identify inactive subscribers, and keep your list healthy. That’s why we consider these capabilities essential when comparing email marketing platforms.

Brevo wins contact management because it gives you a much deeper understanding of your audience. Its strength isn’t just organizing contacts, but using customer data to identify opportunities and make campaigns more relevant.

MailerLite makes everyday contact organization easier and more intuitive, which many smaller businesses will appreciate. But for businesses that want to do more with their customer data, Brevo offers considerably greater potential.

Signup forms, landing pages, and websites

Brevo: 8/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 8.5/10

MailerLite wins this category because it gives businesses more opportunities to turn website visitors into subscribers. Its tools encourage experimentation with different offers, designs, and signup experiences. Brevo is a solid choice when collecting accurate subscriber information and consent is the main priority, but it offers less flexibility for creative lead generation. MailerLite also makes its more engaging features accessible to smaller businesses, so you don’t need a large marketing budget to start experimenting with what attracts subscribers.

Brevo’s signup form builder is mostly concerned with what data you collect and whether you collect it properly. Its draggable elements include standard content blocks alongside contact attributes, single- and multiple-choice fields, checkboxes, and multi-list subscription, which can let subscribers choose the lists they want to join.

GDPR also gets its own section with two dedicated blocks, while CAPTCHA is required, so privacy and bot protection are hard to overlook even if you’re building your first form. Design is handled in a separate tab and is fairly straightforward. It’s not an editor for creating elaborate signup experiences, but it gives you a practical way to collect structured contact data and consent.

MailerLite can turn a signup form into much more of a promotion. The pop-up editor we tested included detailed controls for size, layout, backgrounds, opacity, corners, and shadows, and content elements like video and countdown timers.

More interesting is what you can build with them: spin-to-win forms have separate Pop-up, Success, and Losing states, so visitors can enter their email and immediately interact with the offer. And these pop-ups aren’t reserved for expensive plans – even Free users can create them, although they carry MailerLite branding.

The screenshots aren’t a perfect like-for-like comparison because we tested a regular embedded form in Brevo and a spin-to-win pop-up in MailerLite. Still, that difference reflects how each platform approaches lead capture: Brevo focuses on clean data and consent, while MailerLite focuses on making the signup itself engaging.

MailerLite’s advantage grows once a visitor has signed up. Beyond forms and landing pages, it lets you build a website and sell from it, while Brevo stops at landing pages.

What makes MailerLite’s setup useful is that everything feeds the same subscriber database. Someone who buys an eBook, books a coaching session, or joins a paid newsletter can be segmented and added to an automation based on that action. The main limit is that MailerLite only sells digital goods, so you’ll still need a separate store for physical products.

Overall, MailerLite is the stronger option if you want lead capture, landing pages, and simple selling tools in one place. Brevo makes more sense if your priority is collecting accurate subscriber data, managing consent, and connecting those leads to a broader marketing and CRM setup.

CRM, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat

Winner: ⭐ Brevo (not scored separately)

MailerLite is mainly an email platform with some extras for creators, so CRM, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat all require separate tools. Brevo covers those channels in the same contact database, though some features are included on lower plans while others require a paid sales package or a higher marketing tier.

Brevo wins easily if you want more than email. A small team can handle deals, SMS, and live chat without stitching together several separate tools. If email is all you need, though, this difference matters much less.

Integrations

⭐ Brevo: 8.8/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 8.8/10

Even though the scores are tied, MailerLite has some advantages for businesses using several external tools, particularly CRMs. However, Brevo has its own built-in CRM, so many businesses won’t need an external integration in the first place. It also offers broader API capabilities and more Zapier triggers and actions.

For eCommerce businesses, integrations can be especially important, and the two platforms have different strengths here. Brevo has deeper Shopify integration, with abandoned cart recovery, browse abandonment, and back-in-stock automations across multiple communication channels, and it offers native plugins for self-hosted stores built on WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, or Shopware. MailerLite connects natively to hosted website builders like Wix and Squarespace and offers an eCommerce API for custom stores. So, Brevo has the edge for Shopify and self-hosted shops, while MailerLite is the easier choice if your store runs on Wix or Squarespace.

AI features

⭐ Brevo: 9/10 | MailerLite: 8/10

You might think you don’t need AI in your email marketing platform. After all, you can write emails, build automations, and segment contacts yourself. But what if some of that work could take minutes instead of hours? Or you could discover patterns in your customer data that you’d never think to look for? That’s where AI starts getting interesting, and some platforms are already doing much more with it than others. Let’s see what Brevo and MailerLite have to offer.

Brevo wins this category because its AI can take on more of the work that would otherwise require your time and expertise. This is particularly useful for teams on Brevo’s higher plans that want to make better use of customer data without spending hours setting everything up manually. MailerLite’s AI tools are helpful, but they won’t change how much work goes into managing your marketing. Brevo’s tools have more potential to do just that.

Deliverability

⭐ Brevo: 10/10 | MailerLite: 9.8/10

Brevo has a slight edge in deliverability tools, but that doesn’t mean your emails are more likely to reach the inbox with Brevo. Both platforms have strong technical foundations, and in our testing, both delivered reliably once domains were authenticated.

Customer feedback tells a similar story: users praise deliverability on both platforms, while most complaints concern account suspensions caused by strict automated enforcement. We’d keep Brevo as the narrow winner for the extra control and visibility it provides, but both are equally strong choices when it comes to actual email deliverability.

The bad news is that your deliverability depends much more on how you send emails than on which platform you use. Most modern email marketing services already have the technical side well covered. The rest is largely up to you. Here are a few email marketing best practices that can help you:

• Never buy mailing lists and send only to people who have agreed to hear from you.
• Clean your lists regularly and remove invalid addresses; stop emailing subscribers who haven’t engaged in a long time.
• Keep a consistent schedule and increase sending volume gradually.
• Send emails people actually want – use segmentation to make your campaigns relevant.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe.
• Take a closer look at rising bounce rates, spam complaints, and falling engagement.

Reporting and analytics

⭐ Brevo: 9/10 | MailerLite: 7.8/10

How much can you learn from your campaign reports? Opens and clicks are nice, but they are only a part of the story. You might also want to know which campaigns bring in the most revenue or how different audiences respond. We decided to give reporting its own section because the amount of data a platform collects matters much less if you can’t easily find, analyze, and use it.

MailerLite provides enough information to track campaign performance and understand what’s working, but Brevo gives you more freedom to explore your data and answer specific business questions. This is even more valuable if you need to understand how different channels and customer activities contribute to your results.

Customer support

Brevo: 7.6/10 | ⭐ MailerLite: 7.8/10

Customer support is one of those things you might barely think about when choosing an email marketing platform, but that’s just until something goes wrong. When a campaign won’t send or your account gets suspended right before an important launch, access to someone who can solve your problem becomes crucial. We compared Brevo and MailerLite not just by the support options they advertise, but also by how satisfied real customers are with the help they receive.

MailerLite wins customer support, and the Capterra ratings make its advantage more convincing. A 0.3-point difference on a five-point scale is worth paying attention to, especially when both platforms have established user bases. Some of that satisfaction may come from MailerLite’s emphasis on simplicity: users who find a platform easy to navigate have fewer frustrating support experiences in the first place. But that alone doesn’t explain the gap, and MailerLite also makes it easier to reach a support agent on its paid plans. We can’t separate the influence of product simplicity from support quality based on ratings alone, but MailerLite users clearly report greater satisfaction with the help they receive.

Interestingly, Capterra gives both platforms the same 4.6/5 for ease of use, which weakens the idea that simplicity alone explains the support gap. Reviews also specifically praise MailerLite’s responsive support team, suggesting that the quality of assistance itself contributes to its higher rating.

Real users’ reviews on Brevo and MailerLite

Our experience is valuable, but we also wanted to check whether our impressions were too subjective. To do that, we turned to software review platforms to see what real users had to say. Here’s what we found.

Ease of use is where MailerLite gets the most consistent praise:

Brevo reviewers find everyday campaigns easy too, but many say the more advanced tools take time to learn:

On pricing, Brevo users focus on how much they get for the money:

MailerLite’s subscriber-based pricing is less forgiving if you rarely send, which is exactly where Brevo’s volume-based model fits better:

Both platforms share one complaint about getting started: strict checks on new accounts can hold up your first campaign. Some Brevo users were suspended right after signing up:

MailerLite users describe a similar delay:

Overall, reviewers see MailerLite as the easier tool to pick up and Brevo as the more capable platform for the money. The main trade-offs are a steeper learning curve on Brevo, pricing that doesn’t suit infrequent senders on MailerLite, and strict account checks on both.

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Your decision checklist

Now let’s put it all together. Read each row and note which column describes your business better. If most rows point to one platform, it’s probably the better fit for your company.

But what if neither feels quite right? Don’t settle for less! There are plenty of other platforms to choose from, and it’s worth exploring your options before committing. Onboarding takes time and money, and migrating to another platform later can be just as costly. So it’s better to find the right fit from the start than to compromise now and regret it later.

• What if you need a more eCommerce-focused platform? In that case, take a closer look at Klaviyo, one of the strongest options in this niche.
• What if you want to automate almost everything and keep manual work to a minimum? Consider ActiveCampaign.
• What if you need more than email marketing, with chatbots and CRM in one platform, but without enterprise-level costs? Then SendPulse is worth exploring.

Final verdict

⚖️ Final scores: Brevo – 8.5/10 | MailerLite – 8.4/10

Would we recommend Brevo? Absolutely. It’s a great, multifunctional platform with plenty of communication channels and affordable pricing. Its billing model takes a minute to understand, but that might actually work in your favor if you email a large list once a week or less.

Would we recommend MailerLite? Of course. Even after its June 2026 price increase, it remains one of the more affordable options on the market. It lets you sell digital products, paid newsletters, and bookings without extra tools. It’s also simple and straightforward, making it a great choice for creators, small teams, and solopreneurs.