Mailchimp vs Brevo: One Page Has Twelve Prices, the Other Has None

Brevo publishes no price in the visible text of its pricing page. Not a low price, not a hidden tier, nothing: zero dollar amounts in 9,872 characters of text served from an American address, across four named tiers and a free plan^[25].

Mailchimp publishes twelve amounts on its equivalent page. For once in this cluster, Mailchimp is the transparent one.

OUR TAKE: This is the comparison where Mailchimp's pricing page looks good, and that says more about the category than about either product. Brevo assembles its figures in the browser, which means you price it inside the product or not at all. If you need to budget before signing up, Mailchimp lets you do roughly half of that and Brevo lets you do none. A note on what this comparison is. We have measured Mailchimp in full: its pricing pages read as served from the United States, its terms read end to end, its ratings counted with the shared-ownership platforms counted once, and one hundred reviews cross-tabulated by theme. For the other product we read its own pricing page, served the same day from the same American address, and nothing else. No feature testing, no support testing, no review analysis. When that product gets its own cluster this article will be rewritten rather than appended to.

What each page actually contains

Product	Dollar amounts in visible text	Markup served	Named tiers	Free plan
Mailchimp	12	607,797 characters	Free, Essentials, Standard, Premium	yes, 250 contacts
Brevo	0	632,459 characters	Free, Starter, Standard, Professional, Enterprise	yes, "free forever"

Brevo's markup is the larger of the two and its visible text is a third the size. The figures exist inside that markup and are composed by JavaScript at load time, which is the same pattern we measured on HubSpot, where a rendered page produced two dollar signs and a runtime API call produced the whole table.

So the prices are not secret. They are simply not in the document, which for a buyer comparing options in a spreadsheet amounts to the same thing.

## What Brevo does publish

Structure, and quite a lot of it. Five tiers named: Free, Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise^[25]. A free plan described as free forever with no credit card needed, positioned for individuals and solopreneurs^[25].

Marketing automation on Standard and above, described as an unlimited number of automated multi-step workflows^[25]. Transactional email features across the plans, including RESTful APIs, SMTP, outbound webhooks and unlimited log retention^[25]. A pay-as-you-go option, with its own FAQ entry explaining why you might choose it^[25]. And a dedicated IP, also explained in the FAQ^[25].

That is a clear picture of what the product does. It is not a picture of what it costs.

Where Mailchimp is the clearer of the two

Four figures at the entry, two ceiling prices on the comparison page, a published send multiple per tier, and a documented overage mechanism^[2][3][5][6].

Add the documentation, which is the best we have measured in this category. The peak-total billing rule, the billable and non-billable contact statuses, the archiving lever, the cancellation path through to the final click^{[6][5][15][16]}.

A buyer can get within one unknown of a Mailchimp budget: the list price from month thirteen. With Brevo, from the page alone, every number is unknown.

That is a low bar and Mailchimp clears it. We are stating it plainly because this cluster has spent a lot of words on what Mailchimp does not publish, and the category context matters.

## Where Mailchimp is still the weaker argument

Month thirteen. Every paid figure on Mailchimp's page is a twelve-month promotional rate, and the rate afterwards is published as a rule and withheld as a number^[8]. Derived from the vendor's own fifteen percent, the three cards become about fifteen twenty-nine, twenty-three fifty-three and four hundred and eleven seventy-six.

So the comparison is between a page with no prices and a page whose prices expire. Brevo's buyer has to open an account to learn anything. Mailchimp's buyer learns the first year and has to ask about the second.

Neither of those is what a pricing page is for.

The structural overlap nobody mentions

Both vendors sell the same five things, which makes them closer competitors than their pages suggest.

Marketing campaigns on a subscription. Transactional email through an API. SMS. A pay-as-you-go option for irregular senders. And a dedicated sending IP as an add-on.

Mailchimp's transactional ladder is published in full: blocks of twenty-five thousand emails at twenty dollars falling to ten, which is eighty cents per thousand falling to forty, with a dedicated IP at twenty-nine ninety-five^[12]. Brevo's transactional features are described and not priced^[25].

If transactional volume is a real part of your plan, that is the single most decidable difference between these two products from public information.

## Free tiers

Mailchimp's is a hard 250 contacts, 500 monthly sends and 250 a day, with sending held rather than billed when you reach it^[5]. Fifteen capabilities read "Not included", among them email scheduling and A/B testing^[3].

Brevo's is described as free forever with no card required, aimed at individuals and solopreneurs building an online presence, and the vendor states that every new account starts on it so you can upload contacts and look around^[25].

We did not measure Brevo's free limits, because we measured its pricing page and its pricing page does not carry numbers. That is an honest gap rather than a finding, and it is the kind of gap that only closes when a product gets its own cluster.

How to run this comparison yourself

Open a Brevo account and price it inside the product, because there is no other way. Take your own contact count and your own monthly send volume with you.

Then price Mailchimp twice: once at the promotional rate for your band, and once at that rate divided by nought point eight five for month thirteen onward.

Compare the second Mailchimp number against Brevo's in-product number. Comparing the first one is the mistake the promotion is designed to produce.

## Why Brevo's page looks like this

This is not carelessness and it is worth understanding before you conclude anything about the vendor.

We have measured the same pattern on HubSpot, where a rendered pricing page produced two dollar signs in 743,000 characters of document and the real table arrived through a runtime API call. The figures are computed per visitor rather than printed, usually so that currency, region and current promotion can all be resolved at load time.

Mailchimp does a milder version of the same thing. Its currency selector offers sixteen currencies and the selected value is set on the server from the reader's address, which is why the same URL yields twelve dollar amounts in Ashburn and nineteen euro amounts in Europe^[2].

So the two vendors sit on the same spectrum. Brevo composes everything in the browser, Mailchimp composes some of it, and for the one figure that matters most, the post-promotional rate, Mailchimp composes it for European readers and not for American ones.

The practical consequence is identical in both cases. A buyer cannot build a budget from the page.

The five lines both vendors sell

Line	Mailchimp	Brevo
Marketing campaigns	four tiers, twelve published figures	five tiers, no published figures
Transactional email	six-step ladder, $0.80 to $0.40 per thousand	described, not priced
SMS	credits, expire monthly, approval required	present, not priced
Pay as you go	nine credit quantities, no rates published	present, explained in the FAQ
Dedicated IP	$29.95 a month, stated	present, explained in the FAQ

Brevo publishes more structure and fewer numbers. Mailchimp publishes fewer product descriptions and more figures, although two of its own five lines carry no price either^[10][13].

The one row a buyer can decide from public information is the second. If you send receipts and confirmations in volume, Mailchimp's ladder lets you model the cost before you sign up and Brevo's does not.

## The ratings you will meet

Mailchimp's five readings disagree widely: Trustpilot 2.5 from 1,538, Gartner Peer Insights 4.3 from 1,268, TrustRadius 8.4 out of 10 from 2,885, the App Store 4.9 from 51,654 and Google Play 4.7 from 23,329.

The spread is the information. The app stores carry 74,983 ratings between them and rate the software; the review platforms carry a fraction of that and rate the commercial relationship.

Two method cautions apply wherever you see these quoted. A displayed score is not the mean of the platform's own published histogram, and we measured the gap on both five-star platforms: 2.5 against 2.08 on Trustpilot and 4.3 against 4.40 on Gartner, running in opposite directions. And four of the nine properties we tried refused the reading entirely, including two of the three Mailchimp itself cites when it claims thirty-three thousand reviews.

We have no ratings for Brevo at all, because we measured one page of its website.

What would change this comparison

Brevo needs its own cluster, and when it gets one this article is rewritten. Three things would move it materially.

Actual prices, read from inside the product rather than from the page, at a stated contact count and send volume, from the United States.

The free tier's real limits. Brevo describes a free-forever plan for individuals and solopreneurs and we have not measured what it contains^[25], so the free-tier row of any comparison you read today, including ours, is one-sided.

And a transactional price. That is the single row where Mailchimp's publication gives it a decidable advantage, and it would stop being an advantage the moment Brevo prints a number.

## What the review themes say about living with Mailchimp

A comparison built on pricing pages tells you what signing up costs. The reviews tell you what the year afterwards is like, and we read one hundred of them in full and sorted them by star rating.

Theme	Share of 1-2 star reviews	Share of 4-5 star reviews	Gap
Billing and charges	33%	3%	+30
Support	52%	26%	+27
Cancellation	17%	0%	+17
Locked out of the account	16%	0%	+16
Price and increases	11%	0%	+11
Contact limit	3%	0%	+3
Interface	3%	13%	-10

Four of those rows are commercial and one is about access to your own account. The contact limit, which the whole of this comparison has been about, appears in three percent of unhappy reviews.

That is a useful corrective. The pricing structure is where the money is, but it is not where the anger is. The anger is in billing disputes, in support that does not answer, and in sixteen percent of low reviewers describing days spent trying to get back into an account they pay for. None of those appear in any feature table.

The row that runs backwards matters too. The interface is named more often in praise than in complaint, which is rare in this corpus, and it is supported by 74,983 app store ratings at 4.9 and 4.7. People like using this software.

So weigh the pricing analysis for the signing-up decision and the review analysis for the staying decision. They point in different directions and both are measured.

What a pricing page is for

It is worth being explicit about the standard both these vendors are being held to, because otherwise this reads as a complaint about marketing.

A pricing page should let a prospective customer compute what they will pay, at their own size, on their own billing term, before they create an account. That is the whole job.

Brevo fails it completely from the page alone: five named tiers, no figures in the visible text, and every number composed in the browser^[25].

Mailchimp fails it partially and in a specific place. You can compute the first twelve months at the entry band. You cannot compute the thirteenth month, because the list price is published as a rule rather than a number^[8]. You cannot compute any band between five hundred contacts and the two published ceilings. And you cannot compute an annual total at all, because the annual rate is sales-gated above ten thousand contacts^[4].

So the honest scoring is not that one vendor is transparent and the other is not. It is that one gives you a first year and the other gives you a structure, and neither gives you a two-year cost.

We score Mailchimp 2.6 on value for money largely because of that gap, and we have no score for Brevo because we have not measured it.

Reading vendor comparison pages, including this category's

Both of these vendors run comparison content, and so does nearly everyone else in this category. A note on how to read it.

Mailchimp's own comparisons hub names Klaviyo seven times, ActiveCampaign and Brevo five each, Constant Contact four and HubSpot twice. It does not name GetResponse, MailerLite, Kit or Beehiiv at all, although three of those publish their prices more clearly than Mailchimp does.

That is how vendor comparison pages work. They argue with the products they lose customers to, not with the products that undercut them. The absence of a competitor from a vendor's comparison hub is information about the vendor's fears rather than about the competitor's quality.

Our own list has a gap of the same kind and a different cause. The two comparisons with the most measured demand in this category, Mailchimp against Constant Contact at 1,600 searches a month and against Klaviyo at 720, are missing because neither product is in our catalogue yet. That is our limitation, we are naming it, and the demand we measured is the argument for closing it.

## What we would want before recommending either

For Brevo, a cluster: pricing read properly from inside the product, terms read in full, ratings counted, and a review corpus cross-tabulated. Until then anything we said about its value would be borrowed rather than measured.

For Mailchimp, one number in writing from its sales team, and the price of an add-on contact block^[6].

Two products, two different unknowns, and only one of them can be closed with an email.