Brevo Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

Brevo is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers email marketing, SMS marketing, and automation tools for businesses of all sizes.

In this review, we’ll put Brevo’s key features to the test, providing you with an honest assessment of whether it truly delivers the value it promises.

Now, let’s see what Brevo offers to enhance your email marketing and automation efforts.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for Brevo

I give Brevo a strong 9 out of 10.

Brevo stands out with its easy-to-use email builder and powerful automation tools. I liked how I could personalize emails and even the sender’s name.

The clean and modern look of the platform made my work smoother. On the downside, I wish they had more direct integrations with other tools, and it’d be nice to download reports as PDFs, not just CSVs.

But honestly, these are small things compared to how good Brevo is overall. If you’re looking for a great email marketing tool that’s both powerful and easy to use, Brevo is an excellent choice.

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	9
Marketing Automation Capabilities	8.5
Email Builder	9
Personalization and Customization	9
Campaign Performance Tracking	8.5
User Interface and User Experience	9
Integrations and Compatibility	9
Customer Support	8
SMB Guide Rating	9

In this review of Brevo, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the marketing automation software.

Pricing & Plans

Brevo offers 4 pricing plans: Free, Starter, Business, and Enterprise

Free

Price

• $0/month

Features

• Drag & drop editor
• Automation builder
• Email template gallery
• Email & SMS personalization
• Advanced templating language
• Transactional email sending
• Real-time email statistics
• Customizable signup forms
• Advanced segmentation

Who it’s for: Small businesses or individuals just starting with email marketing

Starter

Price

• $9/month

Features

• Everything in the Free plan
• No daily sending limit

Who it’s for: Growing businesses that need to send more emails

Business

Price

• $18/month

Features

• Everything in the Starter plan
• Remove Brevo branding
• Landing page builder
• A/B testing
• Predictive sending AI
• Geography & device reporting
• Heat map reporting
• Advanced open & click stats
• Phone and chat support

Who it’s for: More established businesses requiring advanced features like A/B testing and chat support.

Enterprise

Price

• Custom pricing

Features

• Everything in the Business plan
• Multi-user access
• Dedicated IP
• Dedicated account manager
• SSO & SAML
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Who it’s for: Large organizations needing customized solutions and dedicated account management.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

The “Create your first automation” button caught my eye immediately. Clicking this button is the first step in building your automated marketing workflows.

After clicking the button, Brevo gave me two options for creating my automation:

1. Classic editor: This is the traditional method for building automations from scratch. It offers a familiar interface for those who have experience with other marketing automation tools.
2. New editor: This is Brevo’s latest offering that features a modern drag-and-drop interface.

If you’re not ready to build automation from scratch, Brevo offers pre-made templates. These templates are categorized into different sections, making it easy to find one that suits your needs.

I decided to test the platform using the “Abandoned cart” template.

Then, I was taken to the main automation builder interface. Here’s a breakdown of the key elements:

• Visual workflow: The center of the screen displays a flowchart-like representation of your automation. Each step in the process is represented by a box.
• Action blocks: These are the building blocks of your automation. They represent specific actions like sending an email or updating a contact property.
• Condition blocks: These allow you to create branching paths in your automation based on specific criteria.
• Timing elements: These include wait steps and delays. They allow you to control the pacing of your automation.
• Entry points: These define how contacts enter your automation flow. It could be based on a specific action (like abandoning a cart) or a manual import.

To edit any element of the automation, I simply needed to click the pencil icon next to it. This opened up a new panel with detailed options for customizing that particular step.

While the automation builder is user-friendly, I noticed one limitation: the lack of flexibility in moving sections within the automation. The structure is somewhat static, and you can’t freely move them wherever you want within the flow.

Despite that limitation, I found Brevo’s automation builder to be a robust tool that can handle most standard marketing automation needs.

Email Builder

Creating a new email campaign in Brevo is straightforward. You start by naming your campaign and clicking “Create campaign.”

The platform then guides you through adding recipients, writing a subject line, and working on the email design.

When it comes to email design, Brevo offers a template gallery with over 90 options. This variety should be sufficient for most users’ needs.

After selecting a template, you’re taken to the main email builder interface.

The builder’s layout is intuitive, with editing tools on the left side of the screen. These tools are divided into two main categories:

• Blocks
• Sections

Blocks are individual elements you can add to your email. These include:

• Images
• Videos
• Buttons
• Text
• Payment links
• HTML snippets
• Social share buttons
• Dividers

Sections offer pre-designed layouts for organizing your content. For example, you can choose from various image arrangements like four side-by-side circular images or a grid of eight images (four above, four below).

The style settings allow you to customize the overall look of your email:

• Change background colors
• Add background images
• Insert images from URLs
• Adjust body color and width

Text appearance is highly customizable:

• Set heading sizes and colors
• Choose fonts
• Adjust line height

Button customization options include:

• Size
• Color
• Width
• Corner radius
• Border thickness

A standout feature of Brevo’s email builder is its integrated AI writing assistant. I tested it with a prompt to draft a short announcement for a plant sale.

The result was good—the copy felt natural and you hardly noticed the robotic tone often associated with AI-generated content.

While there’s always room for refinement, it’s a valuable tool for quickly generating email copy ideas.

Personalization and Customization

Brevo offers some neat personalization features that can help your emails stand out. Let me explain how it works.

First off, Brevo lets you use contact attributes to personalize your emails. These attributes are pieces of information you have about each person on your contact list—things like their name, location, or purchase history.

You can use these to make your emails feel more tailored to each recipient.

To use these attributes, you add placeholders in your email templates or campaigns. It’s pretty flexible—you can do this using the personalization tool in their drag-and-drop editor, or if you’re more tech-savvy, you can manually insert personalization in the rich text or HTML editors.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Brevo takes personalization a step further. It lets you customize what your recipients see in their inbox before they even open your email.

This is pretty cool because it can boost your open rates. You can personalize two key elements:

• The sender name
• The subject line

I believe this level of personalization is really valuable. It’s not just about making the email content feel personal—it’s about making the whole experience, right from seeing the email in the inbox, feel tailored to each recipient.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Brevo’s reporting features are centralized under the Statistics tab. Click on it, and you’re immediately presented with a user-friendly interface that offers a comprehensive overview of your email and SMS campaigns.

The first thing you’ll notice is the time frame selector at the top of the page. Below the time frame selector, Brevo displays a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you a quick snapshot of your campaign’s health.

These metrics include:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Unsubscribe rate

On the right side of the page, Brevo provides aggregate data for your campaigns. This includes:

• Total campaigns sent
• Total recipients
• Total opened
• Total clicked
• And more

I like this format because such cumulative statistics offer a bird’s-eye view of your email marketing efforts.

One limitation I’ve noticed is that Brevo only allows you to export your reporting data in CSV format. While CSV is versatile, the lack of a PDF export option might be inconvenient for those who prefer a more presentation-ready format.

This is a minor drawback, but it’s worth noting. Overall, the interface doesn’t feel cluttered, and even users who aren’t data analysts should be able to navigate and understand the reports with ease.

User Interface and User Experience

From my experience using Brevo, I found the user interface and overall user experience to be impressive. The platform’s design is clean, and navigation is intuitive, with clearly labeled menus and a logical flow between different sections of the platform.

I particularly liked the dashboard, which provides a quick overview of key metrics and recent campaign performance at a glance. This feature helped me stay on top of my marketing efforts without having to dig through multiple reports.

Another aspect I enjoyed was the seamless integration between different features. For example, moving from creating an email campaign to setting up an automation flow felt natural and didn’t require learning a whole new interface.

The platform’s responsiveness is worth mentioning too. Pages load quickly, and I didn’t experience any lag when working with large contact lists or complex automations.

While there’s always room for improvement, I found Brevo’s user interface to be well-designed for marketers of all skill levels. It strikes a good balance between offering advanced features and maintaining ease of use, which I believe is key for a marketing platform.

Integrations and Compatibility

Brevo offers a comprehensive range of integration options to connect with various other platforms and services. Brevo provides direct integrations across different categories:

• Helpdesk systems
• Email creation tools
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms
• Contact management solutions
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Automation platforms

Keep in mind that most of their CRM integrations happen through Zapier. However, Brevo directly integrates with many eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento.

Brevo also provides API access and webhook functionality, which are important for more advanced integrations and real-time data synchronization. Let me explain everything in detail for you.

Brevo offers a RESTful API, which is a common and developer-friendly approach. Their API allows for various operations, including:

1. Managing contacts and contact lists
2. Creating and sending email campaigns
3. Retrieving statistics and reports
4. Managing transactional emails
5. Handling SMS messages

The API is well-documented, with Brevo providing detailed guides and examples for developers to implement various features.

Brevo’s webhook functionality allows for real-time notifications of specific events. This is particularly useful for keeping external systems updated with the latest information from Brevo. Some examples of webhook events include:

• Campaign performance updates: Receive real-time notifications about ongoing marketing campaigns, allowing you to monitor performance instantly.
• Transactional message tracking: Get notifications when transactional messages are sent, delivered, or opened by recipients.

I must say the combination of direct integrations, Zapier connections, and a robust API offers flexibility for businesses of various sizes and technical capabilities.

Customer Support

Every Brevo plan—even the Free plan—gives you email support. This means you can always reach out with questions or issues via email.

If you want to talk to someone on the phone or use chat support, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business plan. This gives you more immediate help options.

For big companies or those needing extra attention, the Enterprise plan offers a personal Account Manager and a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This means you get dedicated help and guaranteed response times.

Brevo really stands out when it comes to helping you learn and grow. They have a big resource center with lots of helpful stuff:

• Articles
• eBooks
• Webinars
• Case studies
• Many more

For those who like to figure things out on their own, Brevo offers:

• Help center
• Developer guides
• API docs

Brevo also has its own online community. This is a place where you can ask questions, share your experiences, and learn from other Brevo users.

I’m impressed with how much help Brevo offers. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a tech expert, there’s something for everyone. The variety of resources means you can learn in whatever way works best for you.

The only downside is that you need to pay more for phone and chat support. But for many users, the email support and all the self-help resources might be enough.

Brevo — Unique Features

Check out some of the standout features that Brevo brings to the table.

Landing page builder

Brevo’s landing page builder is a standout feature that caught my attention. It’s a versatile tool that allows users to create professional-looking landing pages without any coding knowledge.

You can start with a premade template or build from scratch using their intuitive drag-and-drop editor. The editor lets you add premade sections, customize layouts, colors, and elements, and integrate fonts to match your brand.

When it comes to publishing your landing page, Brevo offers convenient options. You can host it on a Brevo subdomain if you don’t have your own website, or use your own domain for a more professional appearance.

For those who already have a website, there’s a simple embed feature. You can integrate your new landing page into an existing page with a straightforward copy and paste of some code.

What the Experts Say About Brevo

See what Brevo users have to say about their experience with the platform:

“Brevo is affordable compared to other services, easy to use, and provides a lot of valuable features. Also, provides statistics that are helpful and easy to interpret. The design of the campaigns looks modern and professional. I’ve also recently had a great experience with customer support where my problem was solved in 15 minutes.”

Polina E. – Verified G2 review

“Brevo not only offers competitive pricing but also excels in making it easy for professionals to deploy email campaigns, especially when other internet services seem to complicate the process. I love how the platform works; the intuitive dashboard and seamless user experience make it a breeze to use.”

John N. – Verified G2 review

Brevo Alternatives

If Brevo doesn’t feel like the right fit, explore these alternatives to Brevo.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a popular marketing automation platform that combines email marketing, CRM, and sales automation. Its key features include advanced automation workflows, CRM integration, predictive sending, site tracking, and machine learning capabilities for personalized customer experiences.

What I like about ActiveCampaign is its robust automation builder, which allows for highly complex and customized marketing workflows. The platform’s ability to segment contacts based on behavior and engagement levels is also impressive.

Sign up for your free trial of ActiveCampaign

MailerLite

MailerLite is a user-friendly email marketing platform designed for small to medium-sized businesses and bloggers. Its key features include an intuitive drag-and-drop email editor, landing page builder, automation workflows, subscriber management, and A/B testing capabilities.

What I like about MailerLite is its simplicity and ease of use, making it accessible even for marketing beginners. The platform offers a generous free plan and maintains a clean interface that doesn’t sacrifice functionality.

Sign up to MailerLite for free

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a powerful eCommerce-focused marketing automation platform that specializes in personalized email and SMS marketing.

Its standout features include advanced segmentation capabilities, pre-built automation flows for eCommerce, robust analytics and reporting, a visual flow builder, and deep integrations with major eCommerce platforms.

Get started with Klaviyo for free

Other options: Best Brevo alternatives

Getting Started with Brevo

Our goal was to provide you with a hands-on assessment of what Brevo offers and how it performs in real-world marketing scenarios. Apparently, Brevo stands out as a user-friendly marketing platform that combines powerful features with ease of use.

Why not give their free plan a try? You might just find it’s exactly what you need to improve your email marketing and automation.

Sign up to Brevo for free today!