Mailchimp vs Brevo: Email Pricing Models Compared

Mailchimp bills for contacts stored; Brevo bills for emails sent. That one difference decides which is cheaper for your list. Compare the published prices here.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-08T07:22:13+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-08T07:22:13+00:00

Mailchimp vs Brevo: Email Pricing Models Compared

Mailchimp and Brevo charge for email in opposite ways. Mailchimp bills you for the contacts you store. Brevo bills you for the emails you send. That single difference decides which one is cheaper for your list, and it flips the answer depending on how often you email. This comparison uses both vendors' published pricing, checked in October 2026.

The short version: Brevo usually wins for big lists emailed rarely. Mailchimp usually wins for small lists emailed often, or for teams that want its automation and integrations. The details below show where each one pulls ahead.

Mailchimp vs Brevo at a glance

How Mailchimp pricing works

Mailchimp prices by contact band. Your bill rises every time your list crosses into the next band, even if you send the same number of emails. At 500 contacts, Essentials costs $13 a month and Standard costs $20. At 2,500 contacts, those rise to $45 and $60. At 5,000 contacts, they are $75 and $100. At 10,000 contacts, Essentials is $110 a month and Standard is $135. Premium starts at $350 a month at 10,000 contacts.

Each plan also caps your monthly sends as a multiple of your contact count. Essentials allows 10 times your contact limit. Standard allows 12 times. Premium allows 15 times. Sends are rarely the limit that bites. At 2,500 contacts, Standard allows 30,000 sends a month, which covers a weekly email with room to spare.

Three billing quirks matter. First, Mailchimp charges for every contact in your audience, including unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts. Only archived, cleaned, or deleted contacts are excluded. Second, overages are billed automatically once you pass a contact or sending limit. Third, Mailchimp bills on the highest number of contacts you held during the billing period. A big import you clean up a week later is still charged at the peak.

The free plan is small. It holds 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with no more than 250 sends in a day. Sending pauses if you cross either limit until you upgrade or trim the list. Paid plans come with a 14-day free trial.

What the tiers buy: Essentials has 3 seats and 3 audiences, with automation capped at 4 flow steps. Standard adds up to 200 automation flows, branded templates, dynamic content, and custom reports, with 5 seats and 5 audiences. Premium starts at 10,000 contacts and adds unlimited seats and audiences plus phone support.

How Brevo pricing works

Brevo prices by monthly email volume, not by list size. The free plan sends up to 300 emails a day with no time limit and no card required. It stores up to 100,000 contacts and includes basic automation for up to 2,000 contacts. Every email on the free plan carries Brevo branding.

Starter costs $9 a month, or $8.08 a month billed yearly, for 5,000 emails a month. Standard costs $18 a month, or $16.17 billed yearly, for the same 5,000 emails, and adds full marketing automation, A/B testing, send-time optimization, and one landing page. Professional costs $499 a month for 150,000 emails. Yearly billing saves 10%.

The catch is a contact cap hidden inside each volume tier. The 5,000-email tier allows only 500 contacts to be stored. The 10,000-email tier allows 1,500 contacts. The 15,000-email tier allows 2,500. Only at 20,000 emails a month does the cap jump to 500,000 contacts. A free account with 3,000 contacts cannot simply buy the $9 Starter tier. It must buy the 20,000-email tier, which costs $32 a month on Starter or $69 on Standard, because that is the first tier whose contact cap holds 3,000 people.

Removing Brevo's logo costs extra on Starter, at about $10.80 a month as an add-on. Standard includes logo removal. SMS and WhatsApp are billed separately as prepaid credits, not bundled with the email plan.

Worked examples: who pays less

A 500-contact list, emailed weekly. Mailchimp Standard costs $20 a month. Brevo Starter costs $9 a month for 5,000 emails, which covers four weekly sends to 500 people. Brevo wins by $11 a month, though Mailchimp's automation is deeper.

A 2,500-contact list, emailed weekly. Mailchimp Standard costs $60 a month. On Brevo, a 2,500-contact list needs the 15,000-email tier to hold all its contacts, and the Starter plan at 20,000 emails costs $32 a month. Brevo still wins, by about half.

A 10,000-contact list, emailed once a month. Mailchimp Standard costs $135 a month, or $114.75 for the first 12 months under its 15% introductory offer. Brevo Starter at 20,000 emails costs $32 a month. The gap is wide, because Brevo charges for 10,000 sends while Mailchimp charges for 10,000 stored contacts.

A 500-contact list, emailed daily. Mailchimp Standard costs $20 a month and allows 6,000 sends. Brevo's 5,000-email Starter tier would not cover 15,000 monthly sends, so the bill rises with volume. Frequent senders to small lists are the one case where Mailchimp's contact-based model is usually cheaper.

Features beyond the price

Mailchimp's strengths are maturity and depth. It has a large template library, predictive segments on the upper plans, and hundreds of integrations, including deep e-commerce connections. Its automation is the real tier split: Essentials is thin, Standard is where welcome sequences and abandoned-cart flows live.

Brevo's strength is breadth in one account. SMS, WhatsApp, transactional email, and a basic sales pipeline sit alongside email marketing. A small business that wants one tool for several channels gets more from Brevo's free and Starter plans than from Mailchimp's equivalents. Brevo's free plan is also far more generous: 300 emails a day against Mailchimp's 500 a month.

Brevo's weaknesses are the contact cap quirk and the logo removal add-on, which costs more than the Starter plan itself. Mailchimp's weakness is the bill itself: it grows with every contact you keep, including people who unsubscribed months ago, unless you archive them.

Bottom line

Choose Brevo if you have a large list you email a few times a month, or you want SMS, WhatsApp, and a sales pipeline in one account. Its volume-based pricing is dramatically cheaper for infrequent senders. Choose Mailchimp if your list is small and you email often, or if you need deep automation, predictive segments, and e-commerce integrations. Either way, check the pricing page before you pay: both vendors change their plans, and Mailchimp's free plan has already shrunk twice since 2023.