Brevo Review (2026)

Pricing (2026)

✓ Pricing re-verified 19 Sep 2026

Brevo serves a different price list depending on where you open the page, and the two are not each other's conversion: Starter and Standard differ by more than the exchange rate ($9 and $18 against €7 and €15), while Professional lands on the same 499 in both. Both ladders are below, each with the date it was read. Read on brevo.com/pricing on 6 September 2026 with the currency switched to US dollars and the yearly tab open: Free at $0 with 300 emails a day; Starter from $9 a month for 5,000 emails, or $8.08 on yearly billing; Standard from $18 ($16.17 yearly) adding marketing automation and A/B testing; Professional from $499 ($449 yearly, from 150,000 emails) with multi-user access and contact scoring; Enterprise on quote.

Email volume is the headline meter, but every send tier also caps stored contacts: Free stores up to 100,000 contacts (automation on 2,000 of them); on Starter and Standard, 5,000 monthly sends store up to 500 contacts, 10,000 sends up to 1,500, 15,000 up to 2,500 and 20,000 sends or more up to 500,000; Professional stores up to 2 million and only Enterprise is unlimited (help.brevo.com, About Brevo's pricing plans, read 15 September 2026).

Plans change, so check the live price on their site before you buy.

Category context: Growth & Revenue. Across the 85 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is about $30 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →

Brevo’s pricing page, as we read it

Watch the video review

The video version of this review, from our YouTube channel.

What Brevo does

Email, SMS and a light CRM, priced by monthly send volume rather than contact count — cheaper for a large list you email selectively. Model your real send volume if you mail frequently.

What buyers report about Brevo

Hands-on: tested 2026-10-24Reported by buyers: G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and OMR Reviews, read August 2026

Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We tested Brevo ourselves on 2026-10-24, but one test is a narrow sample, so here is what other buyers report. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.

When the paid plan is worth it

Brevo's own API documentation names five account types, Free, Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise, and the rate-limit table shows exactly where those tiers separate. The general rate limits, including 1,000 requests per second on the transactional email endpoint, are listed as available to all five, so a free account is not throttled below a paid one on raw sending throughput. The first real gate is Professional: the advanced rate limits, 2,000 requests per second on email and 600 requests per hour on the SMTP endpoints instead of 300, are available only to Professional and Enterprise accounts.

The widest jump in the tables is Enterprise, where extended limits reach 6,000 requests per second and the quota table moves active automation workflows from a general 50 to 500 and stored contacts from 5M to 900M. Upgrading does not solve deliverability, domain authentication or list hygiene, since the DNS and sender setup is identical on every tier. If your constraint is monthly send volume rather than throughput, campaign count or workflow count, the documented tier differences buy you nothing you would notice.

What we found running Brevo ourselves

Hands-on · 2026-10-24

The first findings are at the top of this page. The rest:

• We created the two contacts by hand instead. FREE_TEXT is a single-line field, so the line break could not be entered. Both contacts started as subscribed to email; we then blocklisted them.
• The CSV export, downloaded through Notifications with export by email switched off, had both contacts with their external IDs, custom codes and Unicode names, plus CONTACT ID 2 and 3, but no subscription or blocklist status column.
• Monthly billing was preselected. Starter (5,000 emails, 500 contacts) showed EUR 7.00 as subtotal and total due, with no VAT line; removing the Brevo logo (EUR 9.00 a month) was switched off. The plan text mentions automatic upgrades when the contact limit is reached, and the checkout box authorizing that was unticked. We stopped before paying.

Claim vs. what we measured

We set a claim from Brevo's own pages next to what we saw in our test, on the plan named. The status says whether the two describe the same thing and match; it is not a verdict on the product. Confirmations are listed too.

What the vendor says	What we measured	Status	What it means if you buy
From €7 per monthSource: app.brevo.com, read 24 Oct 2026	Measured 2026-10-24: Starter monthly preselected; displayed subtotal EUR 7.00 and total amount due EUR 7.00, no VAT line; 5000 emails and 500 contacts; logo removal EUR 9.00/month off.Our test, 24 Oct 2026; Starter monthly	Not testableDisplayed monthly EUR base-price labels agree with the dossier; no applicable cost rule exists. Tax-inclusive comparison is unavailable because the checkout has no VAT line. Optional logo-removal amounts in dossier and checkout lack a pinned common billing basis.	Monthly billing is preselected; the displayed amount due has no VAT breakdown. Logo removal is optional and off. Contact-limit auto-upgrade copy and the unchecked checkout authorization are recorded separately.

Exit test: can you take your data out?

A CSV export of two manually created contacts was opened and checked. Test date: 24 Oct 2026. We describe the friction rather than score it; this is one run with synthetic records, not a verdict on Brevo.

What we checked	What we saw
Came along in the export	Two contacts, external IDs, custom codes and Unicode names. Calendar dates and numeric amounts remained equivalent; currency was not verified. CONTACT ID values are present; comparison with independent pre-export IDs was not tested.
Lost in the export	The UI blocklist status is absent from the contact export.
Awkward but not lost	FREE_TEXT is a single-line field in the contact form, so the fixture line break could not be entered. CSV preview split quoted multiline values into extra rows and shifted columns; XLSX preview showed the correct rows. Both file import and re-import stopped at a mandatory opt-in declaration that was untrue for synthetic addresses.
Export route	Select test contacts, choose Export, then download through Notifications; export email delivery was switched off.
Export format	CSV contact attributes; no contact attachment archive or native tags in the observed path.
Re-importing the export	Not tested: mandatory opt-in declaration was not made. Prepared update used email matching; native-ID updating was not tested.
Cancelling	Cancellation and deletion were not tested.

What the exit test does not show:

• Signup on the existing account.
• File import, re-import and native-ID update preservation.
• Currency preservation and independent before-export native-ID equality.
• Support response time, inbox monitoring, invitations and cancellation.

Kit check counts

Kit email-nieuwsbrief 1.0.0; run brevo-2026-10-24; observed 2026-10-24.

• export / AIBM-001: Of 10 checks: 4 kept, 1 changed, 0 lost, 2 not offered, 3 not tested
• export / AIBM-002: Of 10 checks: 4 kept, 1 changed, 0 lost, 2 not offered, 3 not tested
• reimport / AIBM-001: Of 10 checks: 0 kept, 0 changed, 0 lost, 0 not offered, 10 not tested
• reimport / AIBM-002: Of 10 checks: 0 kept, 0 changed, 0 lost, 0 not offered, 10 not tested

Each record and phase uses this kit’s checks. Counts describe this run; they are not a score or a comparison between kits.

Mail in the first 14 days

Mail timeline: not measured.

Screenshots from our test (click to enlarge)

What this test does not show:

• Signing up (we used an existing account)
• Importing or re-importing a file
• Inviting a colleague (Free has single-user access)
• Cancelling or deleting the account

Most of our reviews are researched rather than run. How we review explains which is which, and why we do not pretend otherwise.

How to actually use Brevo

Brevo's quickstart is short. You generate an API key from the Brevo account, optionally whitelist your IP address, then send a first request to the v3 API with the api-key header. That is 3 steps, and a 200 response carrying your account details means you are through.

Distilled from This is built entirely from Brevo's own developer documentation (quickstart, rate limits, platform quotas, SMTP integration and domain authentication), because the public pricing page returned no readable content and the Zendesk help centre refused every non-browser request; we found no independent walkthrough worth citing.

Common Brevo setup mistakes

Where Brevo setups actually go wrong, and what it costs you when they do. Same sources as the setup notes above.

The natural comparison is Mailchimp or MailerLite: contact-count-priced email tools. Weigh it against Mailchimp on the job you actually need done.

Visit Brevo →

Frequently asked questions

Can you export your data from Brevo?

Exit check 2026-10-24; route excerpt: Select test contacts, choose Export, then download through Notifications …; came along (excerpts): Two contacts, external IDs, custom codes and Unicode names / Calendar dates and numeric amounts remained equivalent … / CONTACT ID values are present …; lost (excerpts): The UI blocklist status is absent from the contact export; re-import: not tested.

Can I start sending on the free plan straight away?

Not quite: there is an approval step between signing up and sending. Brevo's own pricing FAQ, read 19 September 2026, says that when you create an account you automatically have a Free plan to upload your contacts, and that once we approve your account for sending you can start sending up to 300 emails per day. So the free tier is free, and it holds a large list (up to 100,000 contacts, per Brevo's help centre) but the first thing you can do with it is import, not broadcast, and the timing of that review is not published anywhere on the page. Plan a day of slack rather than scheduling your first campaign for the afternoon you sign up. Note too that the 300 is a daily ceiling and not a monthly one, so a free account cannot make a single large send at all.

I have a big list but email it rarely. Does the cheapest send tier still fit?

Check the contact number before the email number, because the send tier caps both. In the plan builder on brevo.com/pricing, read 19 September 2026, the 5,000-emails-a-month step lists 500 contacts and 1,000 web-push subscribers as what is included. A 20,000-name list therefore does not fit on the cheapest rung however seldom you write to it; Brevo's help centre puts 20,000 sends a month as the step that stores up to 500,000 contacts. That is the opposite of the intuition the pricing sells: paying by sends looks like the model for a big quiet list, but the storage that list needs drags you up the same ladder anyway. Model both numbers (list size and monthly sends) and buy whichever tier is higher.

Is Brevo's branding on my emails, and what does removing it cost?

On Starter it is, and the price of removing it is what makes the tier above worth reading twice. On the pricing page, read 19 September 2026, Starter lists No Brevo logo with €8.10 per month printed next to it, while the same line sits in Standard's included features as removing the “Sent with Brevo” footer. So Starter at €7 a month plus €8.10 for unbranded email comes to €15.10: against €15 for Standard, which also brings marketing automation, A/B testing, send-time optimisation, web and event tracking and one landing page. On yearly billing it is €6.33 plus €8.10 against €13.50. If unbranded email is a requirement rather than a nicety, Starter is the wrong rung: you would pay more for less.

Is this a hands-on review of Brevo?

Yes. We tested Brevo ourselves on 2026-10-24; the section above says what we tested, what we found and what we did not test, and where a figure comes from the vendor's own documentation instead. Most of our reviews are researched rather than run; we say which is which. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.

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