ActiveCampaign vs Brevo: One Charges for Contacts, the Other for Emails

ActiveCampaign charges you for the people on your list. Brevo charges you for the emails you send to them. Everything else about this comparison follows from that one sentence.

OUR TAKE: These two are not cheaper or dearer versions of each other. They are priced on different axes, so which one is cheaper depends on a number neither pricing page asks you for: how many emails per contact you send in a month. Work that out before you compare anything else.

Two different meters

Brevo's plans are built around monthly email volume. Its Starter plan is described as "From 5,000 emails per month", and its free plan is capped at five hundred contacts.

ActiveCampaign's plans are built around contacts, in bands from one thousand upward, with sending included as a multiple of that band: ten times on Starter and Plus, twelve on Professional, fifteen on Enterprise^[2].

So ActiveCampaign effectively sells you a sending allowance tied to list size, and Brevo sells you a sending allowance directly. If you mail your list twice a month, the contact meter flatters you. If you mail a small list every day, the email meter does.

## What each one charges

Plan	Monthly, $/mo	Annual, $/mo	Metered on
ActiveCampaign Starter	19	15.00	contacts, 1,000 band
ActiveCampaign Plus	59	49.00	contacts, 1,000 band
ActiveCampaign Professional	99	79.00	contacts, 1,000 band
Brevo Starter	9	8.08	from 5,000 emails a month
Brevo Standard	18	16.17	monthly email volume
Brevo Professional	499	449.08	monthly email volume

Brevo's figures come from its own page's structured data, which carries dollars. ActiveCampaign's come from the vendor's billing catalogue, which carries both terms for every tier and band^[3].

The jump in the middle of Brevo's ladder

Standard to Professional is eighteen dollars to four hundred and ninety-nine, a step of more than twenty-seven times.

We have seen a gap like that before in this business and it usually means the top plan is a different product sold under the same brand rather than a bigger version of the one below. We have not measured what sits inside Brevo's Professional plan, so we are flagging the shape rather than explaining it.

ActiveCampaign's equivalent ladder at the entry band runs $15, $49, $79, $145 — a little under ten times from bottom to top, with the steepest capability jump at the first step rather than the last.

## One thing we noticed while reading Brevo's page from the United States

Rendered from a United States address, the visible pricing on Brevo's page was shown in euros, with the dollar figures carried in the page's structured data rather than in the layout we read.

We report it because a price in the wrong currency is a real friction for a buyer, and because we have measured the same class of mismatch on other vendors' pages. It may be a default that a visitor can change in a click. We did not test the selector.

Capability, and where our measurement stops

For ActiveCampaign we have the vendor's own billing catalogue, which names every entitlement: seventy-nine on Enterprise, seventy-one on Professional, fifty-six on Plus, eleven on Starter^[3]. We can say exactly what each tier contains and exactly where each capability begins.

For Brevo we have read one page. Its Starter plan names email and SMS sending with SMS credits sold separately, a drag-and-drop editor and templates. That is what the page says; it is not a measurement of the product.

Brevo's own cluster is in our queue for this category. When it is published, this comparison gets rewritten with the same depth on both sides. We are saying that explicitly because the alternative — filling the gap with what we assume a product like this contains — is how comparisons become wrong.

## What ActiveCampaign does with the contact meter

Three mechanics matter if you are choosing the contact-metered option.

The limit stops your sending rather than raising your bill. "Once you reach your contact limit, you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9], with automations continuing to run while their send steps are skipped. Auto-upgrade is opt-in and the vendor recommends it; with it on, fees "increase immediately according to usage"^[5].

Every contact counts. "All contacts, regardless of their list status, count towards your contact limit"^[11], for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025. Unsubscribed and bounced records are included.

And going down is not symmetric with going up. "If you need to decrease your contact limit, please contact our Customer Experience team"^[10].

The whole ActiveCampaign ladder, since the contact meter is the thing being compared

Plan	Month to month, $/mo	Billed annually, $/mo	Charged once a year, $	Sends a month
Starter	19	15	180	10,000
Plus	59	49	588	10,000
Professional	99	79	948	12,000
Enterprise	179	145	1,740	15,000

That is the entry band of one thousand contacts. The sends column is the part that makes this comparable to a volume-metered product at all: the allowance is ten, ten, twelve and fifteen times the contact limit, so it scales as your list grows.

At ten thousand contacts the four tiers become one hundred and forty-nine, one hundred and eighty-nine, three hundred and seventy-five and five hundred and eighty-nine dollars a month on annual terms, with allowances of a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand emails.

Work your own ratio against those two columns. That is the comparison.

## The add-ons, because they change the sum

Six are named on ActiveCampaign's pricing page and none is priced there^[2]: Pipelines enhanced CRM, Sales Engagement enhanced CRM, Custom Reporting, SMS, AI Activities and WhatsApp Messaging. Every appearance is "Available add-on" or "Included in add-on".

The catalogue prices some of them — SMS at twenty-one dollars a month for a thousand non-rolling credits, Postmark at fifteen dollars for ten thousand transactional emails — and leaves the two CRM add-ons with empty price ladders on every tier^[3].

That matters for this comparison specifically. Brevo sells SMS alongside email with credits sold separately, and ActiveCampaign does the same thing at a published price. On the CRM side neither page gives you a number, and ActiveCampaign's own billing system does not either.

Documentation, which is a buying criterion

ActiveCampaign publishes more working detail than any product we have measured. The overage rate, the shutoff at three times the limit, warning thresholds at 75, 90 and 100 per cent, the reset day for monthly and annual plans, the export columns, the seven-day download link, the pause rules, the trial's hundred-send ceiling, and a dedicated article on whether unsubscribed contacts count^[8]. Each piece is dated.

The exception is prices. The pricing page publishes no monthly rate and no add-on price, and the terms of service and the help centre give different answers about what happens when you pass the send limit^[5]. A vendor that documents its mechanics this well and its prices this thinly is telling you something about where to spend your questions.

## What the reviews argue about

Trustpilot displays 2.7 from 1,446 reviews while the distribution table on the same page averages 3.47^[17]. The Gartner Digital Markets pool shows 4.6 from 2,570, counted once. TrustRadius shows 8.6 out of ten from 946.

In the eighty-four English reviews we read and cross-tabulated, cancellation appears in 38% of the one and two-star reviews and 4% of the four and five-star ones. Contract runs 29% against zero. Complexity is flat and hitting the contact limit runs the other way, which is the interesting part: the meter is not what people complain about.

Seats and ceilings

ActiveCampaign's entry tier includes one seat and allows a maximum of two, where every tier above allows nine hundred and ninety-nine^[3]. It also carries two ceilings that money does not move: five lists, and five actions per automation.

Those are the three numbers that decide whether Starter is a real plan for you or a trial with a price on it.

Leaving

No refunds, in the vendor's own words: "As a policy, our company does not provide partial or full refunds"^[6]. Cancellation is self-service and may be emailed, with three exceptions that require a conversation^[7]. Pausing exists for monthly plans only, three months maximum, once every twelve^[12].

And the data line that matters more than any of those: "Upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data"^[5]. Export before you cancel, not after. The export covers contacts with custom fields, lead scores, deal scores and tags, and excludes contact notes^[13].

We have not read Brevo's equivalent terms.

Which one to pick

Do the arithmetic first. Count your contacts, count the emails you send them in a typical month, and divide. If that number is under ten, ActiveCampaign's included allowance covers you and the contact meter is the one that suits your pattern. If it is well over ten, you are paying ActiveCampaign for contacts and then paying again for sends, and a volume-metered product deserves a serious look.

Beyond that, the honest summary is short. ActiveCampaign is the deeper platform by a margin we can show from the vendor's own catalogue, with the largest integration count we have measured at 1,056^[16] and the best documentation. Brevo's entry price is lower and its meter is simpler.

Everything else about Brevo in this article came from one page read on one day, and we would rather say that than pretend to a comparison we have not earned.

Working the ratio, with numbers

An example makes this concrete, and the arithmetic is the whole decision.

Take five thousand contacts. On ActiveCampaign that band costs $79 a month on Starter or $145 on Plus, both annual rates, and the included allowance is ten times the band, so fifty thousand emails a month^[3]. If you send your list four campaigns a month plus automated follow-ups, you are at roughly twenty to twenty-five thousand sends and comfortably inside it.

Now take five hundred contacts and a daily email. That is about fifteen thousand sends a month against an allowance of five thousand, so the contact meter is working against you: you would be paying for a band you do not need and buying sends on top at half a cent each^[8].

Brevo's model inverts both cases. The small, high-frequency sender pays for volume and nothing for the extra contacts; the large, low-frequency sender pays for a volume tier that their list size would have covered more cheaply elsewhere.

There is no universal answer, which is exactly why neither pricing page can give you one. Count first.

What a second year looks like

Worth checking on both, for different reasons.

On ActiveCampaign the renewal mechanism is published and simple: the subscription is "continuous until you cancel it", at whatever term you selected^[5]. The thing to watch is not the renewal but the band. Contacts accumulate, every contact counts regardless of list status^[11], and moving up a band is self-service while moving down requires contacting support^[10]. A list that grows 20% a year moves you up the ladder on its own.

There are also no refunds of any kind, so an annual term is a full year of commitment with the fourteen-day trial as the only published way to de-risk it^[6].

On Brevo we have not read the renewal terms and will not guess at them. It is the first thing we will check when we measure that product properly.

## What we measured, and what we did not

On ActiveCampaign: the pricing page as served, the vendor's billing catalogue of eighteen products, the published fallback price file, the terms of service in full, fifteen help-centre articles, the app marketplace, three review platforms and ninety-nine reviews, with every quotation checked against the vendor's own text before it was written.

On Brevo: one page, its pricing page, rendered from the United States on the same day, plus the structured data that page carries.

We are naming that gap rather than papering over it. Brevo's full measurement is queued for this category, and this comparison will be rewritten when it lands.