MailerLite vs Brevo: which is better in 2026?

This is the closest head-to-head in budget email marketing, and the two tools disagree about something structural: what you should pay for. MailerLite bills by the number of contacts you store, the standard model in the category. Brevo bills by the number of emails you send and lets you store unlimited contacts. That single difference decides most of the price comparisons below, and it means the cheaper tool depends on the shape of your list, not on which vendor shouts louder about value.

Our verdict up front: MailerLite wins for most buyers, and it wins on the metric that governs email ROI. In our full MailerLite review it scored a 9.2 Lab Score on the strength of a 94.41% average inbox-placement rate and the lowest credible pricing at every list tier. Brevo, covered in our full Brevo review, scored 8.4: one of the cheapest capable tools we have tested, with genuinely useful SMS, WhatsApp, and transactional email bundled in, held back by 88.3% inbox placement that ranks 8th of 15 in independent testing. There is one profile where Brevo is clearly the right answer, and we will be specific about it.

Pricing and real cost at scale

The entry prices are close enough to be a coin flip. MailerLite’s Comfort plan starts at $12 a month billed monthly and its Power plan at $25; Brevo’s Starter plan begins at $9 a month for 5,000 emails and Business at $18 for the same volume. Both vendors take roughly 10% off for annual billing. At the sticker level, Brevo is $3 cheaper. That gap does not survive contact with the add-on list, which we will get to.

Because the two pricing models measure different things, the honest comparison is by scenario: a list of a given size, mailed at a given frequency. Here is what that looks like at four realistic shapes, using MailerLite’s Comfort tier and Brevo’s Starter tier, both billed monthly and verified June 2026.

Read the last row twice, because it is the entire Brevo pitch in one number. A 50,000-contact list that gets mailed once a month costs $289 a month on MailerLite whether you send or not, and $69 on Brevo because only the sends are billed. The more contacts you hold relative to how often you mail them, the more Brevo’s model wins. Flip the shape, a modest list mailed hard, and MailerLite pulls ahead: at 2,500 contacts on a weekly schedule, MailerLite is $25 against Brevo’s $29, with better inbox placement thrown in.

Now the asterisks, which land almost entirely on Brevo’s side of the ledger. Removing the Brevo logo from your emails costs an extra $12 a month, and it is not bundled even on Starter, so the real price of a clean, branded $9 plan is $21. A dedicated IP runs roughly $251 a year, and many Brevo senders will want one precisely because of the shared-IP deliverability concerns covered below. Extra users on Business are $12 a month each, a five-page landing-pages bundle is around $24 a month on lower tiers, and pay-as-you-go SMS to the US and Canada is about $10.90 per 1,000 messages. Stack branding removal and a dedicated IP on a $129 Business plan and you are quietly at about $162 a month plus the IP’s annual charge. MailerLite’s list is shorter: its Comfort plan caps monthly sends at ten times your subscriber limit, and annual billing is the only real discount lever. What you see on its tier table is close to what you pay.

For the plan-by-plan detail, add-on tables, and the ways to pay less on each tool, see our dedicated MailerLite pricing breakdown and Brevo pricing breakdown. If you want the math run on your own list size and send frequency, our real cost calculator does the scenario work for you.

Deliverability: the number that decides the winner

For an email tool, inbox placement is the whole game. A campaign that lands in spam cannot be opened, clicked, or converted, and it trains the receiving mailbox to distrust your domain. This is the metric where these two tools separate most sharply, and it is the main reason MailerLite’s Lab Score sits 0.8 points above Brevo’s.

MailerLite holds EmailToolTester’s “Best of 5” deliverability award with a 94.41% average inbox-placement rate across the last five blind test rounds, the sixth time it has taken that rolling-average crown. Single rounds swing, a January 2024 test had it at 89.8%, but the five-round average is the meaningful figure because it rewards consistency rather than one good result. Brevo, in EmailToolTester’s latest round, placed 88.3% of messages in the inbox and ranked 8th of 15 tools, at the top of that tester’s “acceptable” band and just under the 89% “excellent” cutoff. Independent testing outside EmailToolTester points the same direction: Encharge’s June 2025 testing put Brevo at 89.1% overall, with per-provider inbox rates of 72.1% at Gmail and 75.3% at Outlook, and reviewers consistently blame the shared-IP pool for the inconsistency.

Six percentage points sounds small until you translate it. On a 100,000-email send, the gap between 94.41% and 88.3% is roughly 6,100 messages that reach the inbox on one platform and do not on the other, every single campaign. If your sends are forgiving, newsletters and promotions to an engaged list, that gap matters less than the money Brevo saves you. If your sends are revenue-critical, cart recovery, lead nurture, transactional flows, the gap is the cost.

One caveat cuts each way. MailerLite’s placement partly comes from a strict, sometimes opaque account-approval gate that keeps spammers off its shared infrastructure; on Capterra, 60% of 88 approval-related reviews were negative, so budget for a slower onboarding. And MailerLite’s in-app deliverability tooling is average, no built-in spam or inbox-preview testing. Brevo senders can narrow the gap by paying for the dedicated IP, but that is another $251 a year on top of the plan.

Automation and CRM

Neither tool is the automation heavyweight of the category, and buyers who need deep, behavior-driven journeys should be reading about ActiveCampaign instead. Between these two, the differences are real but narrower than the marketing suggests.

MailerLite’s automation is linear and shallow by design. The trigger set is limited to events like joining a group, clicking a link, or a field update; there are no site-visit or behavioral triggers, no lead scoring, and no detailed automation reports. A workflow on the Power plan can use multiple triggers, but the logic stays comparatively flat. It handles the common cases, a welcome series, a post-purchase flow, and stops there. There is no CRM at all.

Brevo goes a step further on both counts. Its automation builder handles welcome series, abandoned carts, and basic re-engagement well, and the Business plan includes unlimited automation workflows plus predictive send-time optimization. It still lacks the deep conditional branching and goal logic of premium tools, and the builder gets fiddly once you model anything with multiple branches, but the ceiling is higher than MailerLite’s. Brevo also includes a free built-in CRM on every plan, including Free. It is a light CRM, contact and deal tracking rather than a system you would run a quota-carrying sales team on, but MailerLite offers nothing comparable.

Score this section for Brevo, with a caveat: if automation depth is why you are choosing, neither tool should be your shortlist. If automation is a secondary need, Brevo’s version is more capable and comes with contact management attached.

Beyond email: SMS, WhatsApp, and transactional sending

This is Brevo’s clearest structural advantage. MailerLite is an email tool; Brevo is closer to a small multichannel stack with email at the center. Alongside campaigns, Brevo bundles pay-as-you-go SMS and WhatsApp, a chat and shared-inbox tool, landing pages, Facebook ads, and a transactional email layer with a dependable SMTP relay and REST API that traces straight back to its Sendinblue heritage. For a developer or a lean team that needs password resets, receipts, and system alerts running reliably next to marketing email, that transactional layer is a legitimate reason to pick Brevo on its own.

MailerLite’s answer is narrower but not empty. Transactional email is handled through MailerSend, its sister product, so receipts and resets can run on the same family of tools, and the platform connects natively to Shopify with customer sync, WooCommerce, Stripe, and WordPress, with Zapier as the gateway to more than 5,000 other apps. What MailerLite does not have is SMS or WhatsApp in any form. If texting your customers is part of the plan, this comparison is over and Brevo wins it. If it is not, Brevo’s extra modules are just more dashboard to navigate.

Builders, landing pages, and commerce

Here the advantage flips back to MailerLite, and it is the part of the product its 4.6 and 4.7 satisfaction scores rest on. One drag-and-drop editor builds emails, landing pages, and full websites, and landing pages and sites are included in the plans rather than sold as an upsell. The commerce layer is native rather than bolted on: built-in e-commerce, digital-product selling, paid newsletter subscriptions, and bookings. A solo creator who sells a course or runs a paid newsletter can replace a separate site builder and a checkout tool with one $12-to-$39-a-month subscription. Campaign tooling is deep for the price, too: multivariate testing, dynamic content, smart send-time optimization, and auto-resend to non-openers.

Brevo covers the basics competently, a clean drag-and-drop editor, 40-plus templates, an AI content assistant, but the template library is thinner than design-first tools offer, and landing pages have moved off the entry plans; a five-page bundle now costs around $24 a month on lower tiers. There is no equivalent of MailerLite’s websites, paid newsletters, or digital-product sales. Both tools are easy for a first-time sender; Capterra reviewers rate ease of use 4.6 on Brevo, and it is among the highest-scored sub-attributes on MailerLite’s listings. The difference is what the builder can produce once you are past your first campaign, and there MailerLite simply ships more.

Independent ratings

Both tools are unusually well liked for budget software, which is worth saying plainly before splitting hairs. MailerLite scores 4.6 out of 5 on G2 across roughly 1,100 reviews, 4.7 on Capterra from 2,286 reviews, and 4.0 on Trustpilot from about 3,162, with support the most-praised attribute on every platform; Capterra rates its customer service 4.8 on its own. Brevo posts 4.5 on G2 from a larger base of 2,637 reviews, 4.6 on Capterra from about 3,474, and roughly 4.2 on Trustpilot from around 7,000 reviews, a figure that towers over the 2.6 to 2.8 the big incumbents post there.

The complaint patterns differ more than the averages do. MailerLite’s recurring knocks are the strict account-approval gate, occasional post-approval suspensions that are hard to reverse, and the absence of phone support on any tier; Comfort gets 24/7 email support and Power adds 24/7 live chat. Brevo’s knocks are add-on creep and gated, variable support: phone help is Business-plus only, and its Capterra customer-service score is a solid 4.5 with mixed reviews on response times. Neither pattern is disqualifying. MailerLite’s friction is front-loaded into onboarding; Brevo’s is spread across the invoice.

Who should choose MailerLite

Choose MailerLite if your list is modest and active, and you mail it regularly enough that inbox placement compounds. At 2,500 subscribers on a weekly schedule it is both the cheaper tool and the better-delivering one, which settles the question. It is the stronger pick for creators and newsletter publishers, who get paid subscriptions, digital-product sales, landing pages, and websites in the same subscription; for small e-commerce stores running straightforward flows on Shopify or WooCommerce; and for anyone whose email is revenue-critical enough that the difference between 94.41% and 88.3% placement shows up in the numbers. Budget around $12 to $39 a month for most small lists, $73 a month at 10,000 subscribers, and accept two known costs: a strict onboarding review before you can send, and a free tier that was cut in June 2026 to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month.

Who should choose Brevo

Choose Brevo if your list is large and quiet. A 50,000-contact list mailed monthly costs $69 on Brevo against $289 on MailerLite, and no deliverability edge is worth a 4x price difference for forgiving, promotional email to an engaged audience. It is also the right pick if you need channels MailerLite does not have: SMS and WhatsApp for flash sales and alerts, a free CRM to track contacts and deals, or a solid SMTP relay and API for transactional email alongside marketing campaigns. A SaaS startup that needs system email plus a newsletter, or an e-commerce store sitting on a 75,000-person list it mails a few times a month, is squarely in Brevo’s sweet spot. Budget honestly, though: add $12 a month to remove the logo, about $251 a year for a dedicated IP if email matters to revenue, and pay-as-you-go rates for every text.

FAQ

Is Brevo cheaper than MailerLite?

It depends entirely on your list shape. Brevo starts lower ($9 versus $12 a month) and charges by emails sent with unlimited contacts, so a 50,000-contact list mailed monthly costs $69 on Brevo against $289 on MailerLite. But a 2,500-contact list mailed weekly costs $25 on MailerLite against $29 on Brevo, and Brevo’s add-ons, $12 a month to remove its logo, about $251 a year for a dedicated IP, erode its headline price. Big and quiet favors Brevo; small and active favors MailerLite.

Which has better deliverability, MailerLite or Brevo?

MailerLite, by a wide margin. It holds EmailToolTester’s “Best of 5” award with a 94.41% average inbox-placement rate across five test rounds, while Brevo’s latest result was 88.3%, ranked 8th of 15 tools. Independent testing elsewhere puts Brevo between 88 and 92 depending on the round, with reviewers blaming its shared-IP pool. Brevo senders can improve their odds with a dedicated IP at roughly $251 a year.

Can I try both tools for free?

Yes, and Brevo’s free tier is now the more generous one. It sends up to 300 emails a day, about 9,000 a month, stores up to 100,000 contacts, and includes the editor and a basic CRM, with a Brevo logo on every email. MailerLite cut its free plan on June 16, 2026 to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, though it remains free forever with no card required and includes the builder, a website, and a landing page.

Does either tool include a CRM or SMS?

Only Brevo. It bundles a light CRM, contact and deal tracking, on every plan including Free, plus pay-as-you-go SMS at about $10.90 per 1,000 messages to the US and Canada and separately billed WhatsApp. MailerLite has neither a CRM nor SMS; its adjacent strengths are built-in websites, paid newsletters, digital-product sales, and transactional email through its sister product MailerSend.

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