MailerLite vs Brevo: The Budget Email Marketing Showdown (2026)

The Two Best Budget Options

If you have read our other comparisons, you will have noticed two names that keep appearing as recommended alternatives: MailerLite and Brevo. There is a reason for that. These are the two platforms we consistently recommend for businesses that want capable email marketing without spending $75 to $150 per month.

Both start at around $9 to $10 per month on their entry-level paid plans. Both offer genuinely usable free tiers. Both regularly outperform tools that charge three to five times more on core metrics like deliverability and user satisfaction. And both have built loyal followings by focusing on value rather than premium positioning.

But despite the similar price points, MailerLite and Brevo solve the email marketing problem in fundamentally different ways. MailerLite is a focused email marketing platform — it does email, landing pages, and automation, and it does them cleanly. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a broader marketing platform that includes email, SMS, CRM, transactional email, WhatsApp campaigns, and live chat under one roof.

This distinction matters because it affects everything from the user experience to the pricing model to the type of business each serves best. A solo creator who wants beautiful newsletters will have a different experience on each platform than a small ecommerce business that needs transactional emails alongside marketing campaigns. Understanding which profile matches yours is the key to making the right choice.

Pricing Models: Subscribers vs Emails

The most important difference between these two platforms is not a feature — it is how they charge you. MailerLite prices based on the number of subscribers on your list. Brevo prices based on the number of emails you send. This structural difference changes the entire cost equation depending on your specific usage pattern.

MailerLite charges per subscriber with unlimited email sends. Their Growing Business plan starts at $10 per month for up to 500 subscribers, $25 per month for 2,500, and $54 per month for 10,000. You can send as many emails as you want to those subscribers — daily newsletters, multiple automations, promotional blasts — without any incremental cost.

Brevo charges per email sent with unlimited contacts. Their Starter plan begins at $9 per month for 5,000 emails, $18 for 10,000 emails, and $29 for 20,000 emails. You can have 100,000 contacts on your list — you only pay based on how many emails you actually dispatch.

This changes everything. Consider two scenarios. A creator with 2,000 subscribers who sends three emails per week (roughly 24,000 emails per month) would pay $25 per month on MailerLite versus approximately $29 per month on Brevo for that email volume. Comparable cost.

Now consider a small business with a 20,000-person contact list that sends one monthly newsletter (20,000 emails per month). On MailerLite, they would pay approximately $105 per month for 20,000 subscribers. On Brevo, the same business pays roughly $29 per month for 20,000 emails. That is a massive difference driven entirely by the pricing model.

Do the maths for your specific situation before choosing. Count your subscribers, estimate your monthly email volume, and compare both models directly. The "cheaper" platform depends entirely on your list size and sending frequency.

Deliverability

Deliverability is where MailerLite pulls ahead in the objective data, though Brevo has its own structural advantages worth understanding.

MailerLite achieves a 94.41% average inbox placement rate across EmailToolTester's independent test rounds — the highest score of any major platform. This result is consistent across multiple tests, suggesting it is not a one-off fluke but a reflection of genuinely strong sending infrastructure. Part of the credit goes to MailerLite's strict account approval process, which filters out senders who might damage shared IP reputation before they send their first email.

MailerLite also includes MailerCheck, their built-in email verification tool. Before sending a campaign, you can run your list through MailerCheck to identify and remove invalid, risky, and disposable email addresses. Clean lists lead to better deliverability, and having the tool built into the platform means you are more likely to actually use it.

Brevo's EmailToolTester deliverability score sits at approximately 89.1% — respectable but noticeably below MailerLite's mark. However, Brevo offers something MailerLite does not: dedicated IP addresses available at reasonable price points. A dedicated IP means your sending reputation is entirely in your own hands, unaffected by other senders on shared infrastructure. For businesses sending high volumes and willing to invest in proper IP warming, this can ultimately lead to strong deliverability.

Brevo also provides full support for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, and their transactional email infrastructure is battle-tested from years of handling password resets, order confirmations, and other time-sensitive messages where deliverability is critical.

For most small businesses on shared sending infrastructure, MailerLite's higher baseline inbox rate is the safer bet. For businesses with the volume and expertise to manage a dedicated IP, Brevo gives you more control over your sender reputation.

Features Beyond Email

This is where the platforms diverge most sharply, and it is the primary reason some businesses should choose Brevo despite MailerLite's advantages in other areas.

Brevo is a multi-channel marketing platform. Alongside email marketing, it includes a built-in CRM with contact management and deal tracking. It offers SMS marketing to contacts in supported regions. It handles transactional emails — order confirmations, password resets, shipping notifications — through the same account and dashboard. It supports WhatsApp campaigns for markets where WhatsApp is a primary communication channel. And it includes live chat functionality for your website.

For a small business that needs all of these capabilities, buying them separately would cost significantly more than Brevo's all-in-one pricing. A basic CRM alone costs $15 to $50 per month. Transactional email through a service like Postmark or Mailgun adds another $10 to $25 per month. SMS marketing is an additional expense. Brevo bundles everything at a starting price of $9 per month.

MailerLite is a focused email marketing platform that does not attempt to be everything. It provides email campaigns, landing pages, a simple website builder, pop-up forms, and email automation. These features are polished and well-executed, but the scope is deliberately narrow. If you need transactional email, CRM, or SMS, you need separate tools.

The focus question is straightforward: do you need just email marketing, or do you need a broader marketing toolkit? If you need multi-channel communication and transactional email alongside your marketing campaigns, Brevo is one of the only platforms that provides everything at a budget price point. If you just need to send great marketing emails, MailerLite does that single job better.

Ease of Use

MailerLite has built one of the most intuitive interfaces in the email marketing category, and the review data consistently confirms it.

On both G2 and Capterra, MailerLite ranks among the highest-rated platforms for ease of use, a distinction it has maintained every year from 2023 through 2026. The email editor is fast, clean, and visually clear. Drag-and-drop blocks behave predictably. The template gallery is curated rather than overwhelming. Navigation is flat — most features are accessible within one or two clicks from the dashboard. For someone who has never used an email marketing tool, MailerLite is about as gentle an introduction as exists.

Brevo is a straightforward platform that does not present any major usability hurdles, but the broader feature set inevitably means more menus, more settings, and more options to navigate. The email editor is functional and produces good results, but it lacks the refinement and speed of MailerLite's editor. Setting up transactional emails, configuring SMS campaigns, or navigating the CRM each adds another layer of interface to learn.

For non-technical users — small business owners, solo operators, and marketing generalists — MailerLite's narrower focus translates directly into a simpler learning curve. You can be productive within your first session. Brevo requires more exploration to discover and configure its full range of capabilities, though none of it is prohibitively complex.

The time-to-productivity difference is real. If you want to have your first email campaign live within 30 minutes of creating your account, MailerLite makes that achievable. Brevo will get you there too, but expect to spend more time in settings menus and configuration screens along the way.

Our Verdict

MailerLite is the better choice for most small businesses that need straightforward email marketing. It has the best deliverability in the category at 94.41%, the most intuitive interface, predictable per-subscriber pricing, and user satisfaction scores that consistently outperform more expensive competitors. If your marketing needs centre on email campaigns, landing pages, and automation — and most small businesses' needs do — MailerLite delivers exceptional value.

Brevo is the right choice when you need more than just email marketing. If your business requires CRM functionality, SMS campaigns, transactional emails, or WhatsApp messaging alongside your marketing emails, no other platform at this price point offers that combination. The per-email pricing model also makes Brevo uniquely cost-effective for businesses with large contact databases and moderate sending frequencies — the maths can work heavily in your favour.

Either way, you are getting roughly 80% of what Mailchimp offers at a fraction of the price, which is why we recommend both of these platforms so frequently. The remaining 20% is mostly Mailchimp's deeper analytics and larger integration ecosystem, which most small businesses never fully utilise anyway.

If you are genuinely torn, start with the free plans. MailerLite gives you 500 subscribers (reduced from 1,000 in September 2025) with 12,000 monthly emails. Brevo gives you unlimited contacts with 300 emails per day. Test both for a week, send some real campaigns, and let the experience guide your decision. The right tool is the one that feels natural to use — because you will be using it every week.