Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue, ranks among FocusCore’s top recommendations for email marketing services, especially for beginners. Its user-friendly interface makes it an excellent choice for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking for a straightforward solution. Brevo offers more than just email marketing. it provides a comprehensive suite of features, including SMS marketing capabilities, a built-in CRM tool, the Conversations app, and the ability to conduct WhatsApp campaigns. With all these tools at its disposal, Brevo seems to have everything a modern online business needs to reach and engage its customers effectively. However, as we delved deeper into the platform, we discovered a few minor drawbacks, such as occasional slow loading times and fussy data importing, that you should be aware of before making a commitment. In this review, we’ll explore both the strengths and limitations of Brevo, helping you determine if it’s the right choice for your business needs.
Brevo Pros and Cons
| ✅Pros | ❌Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy to Use | Limited Landing Pages |
| FREE CRM | Deliverability Issues |
| Marketing Automation | Pricey Additional Functionality |
| Great Free Tier | Customer Support Needs Improvements |
| Ecommerce Friendly | Slow-ish load times between screens |
| SMS Marketing | – |
Pros Analyzed:
East to Use: Brevo, despite adding so much functionality and features since rebranding, have also managed to improve their ease of use. All the main navigational tabs for each function such as automations, contacts and campaigns is laid out on the left. The user interface utilizes alot of white space and is manages to acheive high functionality without all the cutter.
There are always helpful suggestions as you use each feature as well as the trusty get started with marketing list as soon as you login. Everything worthwhile is carefully crafted for excellence and you can tell that Brevo spent ample time in this department.
Free CRM: What can we say. Not much email marketing providers offer a Free CRM. And by free we mean it is offered starting at the Free forever plan.
Marketing Automation: This is another real strength of Brevo. Brevo offers a fantastic workflow builder where you can create your own automation steps or choose from the 8 prebuilt workflows. These include abandoned cart, product purchase, welcome message and transactional activity such as a password reset.
The automations allow for their Whatsapp and SMS features to be integrated into a sequence. Automations can also be set up to remove inactive subscribers, score leads and update contacts (contact management).
Great Free Tier: Marketing automations, CRM, integrations, real time reporting and advanced segmentation all make the free tier one of the best out their. Only down side is the 300 emails a day limit.
Ecommerce Friendly: Brevo marketing automations and integrations make it an excellent choice for those who want a great email tool for their online store. Integrations include Shopify, Woocommerce, WordPress, Big Commerce, Prestashop and Stripe.
SMS Marketing: Right out of the box, you can use Brevo’s SMS Marketing, which is often not included or separate with other providers. You will however, have to purchase SMS credits to send out SMS messages. The process is simple and easy to get used to. SMS campaigns can be included in any of your automation steps and can be sent out as apart of your transactional marketing campaign.
Cons Analyzed:
Email Deliverability: Brevo falls well below the average deliverability of many of its competitors. We see Mailerlite, Constant Contact, Zoho Campaigns and Moosend all have high deliverability. Its not that its bad, but it just isn’t the best.
Customer Support: Brevo’s customer support is actually good. We aren’t complaining, on top the many online resources they provide, we have gotten quick responses when email queries are made to them. The one thing making this a con is that on the Starter plan they don’t offer phone and chat support, while some other providers do. If you want phone and chat support you will have to upgrade to the Business plan which isn’t ideal for many SMBs.
Reporting: Similar to the Customer support, to unlock the advanced reporting with heat maps, geolocation tracking and more in depth click insights, you need the Business Plan. Moosend, for example offers much more insights at the starter level. This is lacking in the lower tiered packages on Brevo, which only offer basic and sort of outdated display of metrics for your reporting needs.
Pricey Additional Functionality: Simple things like removing the Brevo logo on the start plan, or wanting more landing pages on the business plan greatly affects the price. Not the best pricing models for customers.
Slowish Load times between screens: While simple to use and well organized with a minimal interface, sometimes moving screen to screen takes a little time.
Brevo Recommendations:
We recommend Brevo if:
- You need something that is really easy to use
- If you need additional functionality without having to use other tools such as CRM, SMS, Transactional Email, Chat with clients and Meetings.
- If you want something great for ecommerce
We don’t recommend Brevo if:
- You want to send more than 300 daily emails on the free plan
- If you want the highest email deliverability
- If you want the best possible in depth reporting
Brevo Ratings
Brevo Pricing
$0 Free Forever Plan – 2000 Subscribers, 9000 monthly emails (300 daily limit), Marketing Automation, Free CRM, limited features on Reporting. Brevo Logo in footer of email.
$9 Starter Plan – 500 subscriber , 5000 monthly emails, Brevo Logo included in footer if you dont pay extra $12 per month, no landing page, basic reporting and no A/B Testing Feature, No daily sending limit
$17 Starter Plan- 1500 contacts , 10,000 monthly emails
$18 Business Plan – 5000 emails per month, 500 monthly emails, Push notifications, landing page, different user roles, phone support, advanced reporting , A/B Testing
$29 Starter Plan- Unlimited contacts , 20,000 monthly emails
$35 Business Plan- 1500 contacts , 10,000 monthly emails
$55 Starter Plan- Unlimited Contacts, 60,000 monthly emails
$69 Business Plan- Unlimited Contacts, 20,000 monthly emails
Brevo Comparison
Zoho Campaigns is great if you want more volume of emails at a lower cost. It is definitely not as easy to setup and use as Brevo but will give you much more email volume at a lower cost. In fact their Standard package at $4 per month offers unlimited emails to 500 contacts.
Mailerlite will offer you much better deliverability, slightly better reporting and is just a tad bit easier to use for beginners. But will not give you some of the additional features that are big selling points for Brevo such as Whatsapp Marketing and a built in CRM
Constant Contact has way more integration options than Brevo. But you won’t be using all of these integrations so take into consideration the other tools that you use in your business.
Navigating Brevo
Brevo, despite adding so much functionality and features since rebranding, have also managed to improve their ease of use. All the main navigational tabs for each function such as automations, contacts and campaigns is laid out on the left. The user interface utilizes alot of white space and is manages to acheive high functionality without all the cutter.
There are always helpful suggestions as you use each feature as well as the trusty get started with marketing list as soon as you login. Everything worthwhile is carefully crafted for excellence and you can tell that Brevo spent ample time in this department.
With the additional features and clean interface, a drawback is that it does feel a bit slow moving from one to section which may or may not affect your productivity or workflow. Load times are not the fastest but not enough to deter our team from loving this tool.
Brevo Features
Email Editor
The email Editor, just like the rest of the navigation, is easy to use. There are tons of templates and a new feature called brand assets. By pre-creating your brand’s creatives, it speeds up your email creation. There are tons of great blocks and sections which allows you to create a variety of different email styles and functionalities.
Email Templates
Brevo offers 57 different email templates for you to choose from. This includes welcome emails, Newspaper style, announcements, notifications, blog posts, abandoned cart email amongst others. So right from the start you can edit these templates and save them as your own. In no time you will have a template customized and built with your brand embedded and ready to send on a regular basis.
Sign up Forms
The sign up form process is also very refreshing and easy to use. There aren’t multiple templates like other email service providers but you have all the tools to create something unique. To the left you have the various different widgets to add to your form including ready to use GDPR checkbox and declaration. Under the form design tab you can adjust background, colors and overall styling. You can then share your form by embedding it into your website, by a link or QR code.
Marketing Automation tools
Brevo offers 8 pre made automations which oyu can choose from. They cover alot of ground when it comes to the common automations a small and medium business would want to have. You can however create automations from scratch with their classic or new editors.
SMS Marketing
SMS Marketing is a unique feature offered by Brevo that isn’t offered by other email service providers. Like all their tools it is easy to navigate and setup and is definitely a plus for using this product. Its another great tool to engage your audience. Just be sure to check their compliance options based on the countries you are sending messages in.
Whatsapp Marketing
Whatsapp Marketing through Brevo was also very easy to make use of. Creating a message and adding a link to send out to your contacts in a one off broadcast or as part of an automation is great to have.
Conclusion
Brevo is not the absolute best out there in any specific area. But it is a strong Jack of all trades. Its fairly easy to use, offers a feature rich free tier (albeit the daily email limit), and has top notch marketing automation. There are improvements needed in the areas of reporting, deliverability and Customer support. But Brevo might be right for your. Give it a go and you will know for sure!
Brevo FAQs
Can I use Brevo for free?
You can use Brevo for free by first using their free trial plan. If after the period you do not wish to continue to one of their paid plans, their free forever plan is one of the best out there.
Does Brevo’s deliverability make it a no-go?
They might not have the best deliverability out there, but it is on the up. Since they have now completed their rebranding, we anticipate them focusing more on improving this aspect.
What is Brevo Meetings?
Brevo meetings is a completely free tool similar to Calendly that allows your visitor to view your calendar and book meetings, including paid appointments.
