Comparison

Mailchimp vs Brevo in 2026: Which Billing Model Actually Costs You Less

Mailchimp charges for contacts, including the ones who unsubscribed. Brevo charges for emails you actually send. That single difference decides which is cheaper for your list, and it is not the same answer for everyone. Here is the head-to-head, with a worked example.

By Sangeeth · November 2026 · 13 min read

Most Mailchimp vs Brevo comparisons line up feature checkmarks and declare a winner. That is not how the decision actually goes. Both tools send campaigns, both run automations, both have a drag-and-drop editor, and for a small business the feature lists overlap almost completely.

The difference that shows up on your card every month is the billing model. Mailchimp prices on how many contacts you store. Brevo prices on how many emails you send. Which one is cheaper depends entirely on the shape of your list and how often you mail it, and the answer flips depending on which way those two numbers lean.

This comparison works through that properly, then covers the places where the two genuinely differ: deliverability setup, store integrations, and what a migration costs you in time.

The short answer

If you are skimming, here is the decision in three lines.

• Choose Brevo if you have a large list you mail selectively: thousands of contacts, a lot of them dormant or unsubscribed, and you send to segments rather than everyone. You stop paying for people who will never open another email.
• Choose Mailchimp if you have a small, clean, engaged list that you mail often. A few hundred contacts you email three times a week is the case where per-contact pricing with a generous send multiple wins, and Mailchimp's reporting and template ecosystem are more mature.
• The tie-breaker is your unsubscribe pile. Mailchimp bills for unsubscribed contacts. Brevo does not bill for stored contacts at all. If a big fraction of your list has opted out, that is money you are currently paying for nothing.

How each one bills you

This is the section that matters. Everything else in this comparison is a rounding error next to it.

Mailchimp: you pay for contacts, including the ones who left

Mailchimp's pricing plans help article is explicit: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts are included in your contact count. Archived, cleaned and deleted contacts are not.

That one sentence is the single most expensive line of documentation in email marketing. It means:

• Everyone who ever unsubscribed is still on your bill, forever, unless you archive them by hand.
• If your store syncs customers into Mailchimp, every buyer who never opted into marketing is billable as a non-subscribed contact.
• A wave of bot or spam signups raises your bill directly, and keeps it raised until you clean up.

You can fix it by archiving, but archiving is a recurring manual chore, and an archived contact loses its history if you ever un-archive it. Most small teams forget for a few months and then wonder why the invoice climbed.

The send allowance is also tied to the contact limit rather than set independently. Per the same help article, your monthly send limit is 10 times your contact limit on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Essentials stores up to 50,000 contacts, Standard up to 100,000 and Premium up to 200,000.

Two more behaviours worth knowing before you plan around a tier:

• Paid plans do not stop you; they bill you. If your contact total goes past your limit mid-cycle, Mailchimp says it will not interrupt service and you will instead see an additional charge on your bill.
• The Free plan does stop you. Free covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month with a 250 daily cap. Go over 250 contacts and Mailchimp places a hold on sending live or test emails until you upgrade or reduce your contact total. You can keep building emails and importing contacts; you just cannot send.

Brevo: you pay for emails, not for people

Brevo inverts the model. Pricing on its marketing plans is driven by monthly email volume, and contact storage is not the billable dimension. Store 50,000 contacts and mail 5,000 of them, and you pay for roughly 5,000 emails.

Figures read on Brevo's pricing page in October 2026: the Free plan allows up to 300 emails per day once the account is approved, the Starter plan was listed at $9/month from 5,000 emails per month, and the next tier up at around $18/month, with higher volumes costing more. Confirm these on the live page; the tier names in particular have moved around, and third-party summaries disagree with each other about them.

The trade-offs in Brevo's model are real and you should know them up front:

• The entry plan is mostly a campaign tool. Unlimited multi-step automation workflows and A/B testing sit on the tier above Starter. If you need a welcome series and an abandoned cart flow, price the higher tier, not the $9 one.
• Brevo branding is on Starter emails. Removing the Brevo logo is a paid add-on at the entry level.
• Per-email pricing punishes blasting. If you mail your whole list four times a week, volume pricing is not your friend. It rewards teams that segment.

Worked example: one list, two bills

Take a store with 10,000 contacts in Mailchimp, broken down the way store-synced audiences usually break down:

Now suppose you mail the 3,000 engaged contacts weekly and the rest of the subscribed list monthly. That is about 12,000 plus 6,500, so roughly 18,500 emails a month.

On this list, 3,500 of the 10,000 contacts you are paying Mailchimp for cannot legally or usefully be mailed. Brevo charges you nothing to keep them. That is the case for switching.

Now change one variable. Keep the same 10,000 contacts but mail all 6,500 subscribed contacts twice a week. That is about 56,000 emails a month. Mailchimp's send multiple probably covers it inside the tier you were already paying for; Brevo's bill roughly triples. That is the case for staying.

Mailchimp vs Brevo at a glance

Mailchimp was showing a 50% discount for 12 months on paid plans when we checked on 10 November 2026, along with a one-month Premium trial and a 15% nonprofit discount. Promotional pricing is the normal state of this market, so compare the post-promotional rates. A twelve-month discount is not a price; it is a discount on a price you will pay in month thirteen.

Where each one is stronger

Mailchimp's genuine advantages

• Ecosystem. Nearly every ecommerce platform, form builder, CRM and point-of-sale system has a Mailchimp integration, usually the best-maintained one it offers. If your stack is unusual, check whether Brevo supports it before you move.
• Reporting depth. Comparative reports, benchmarking against your industry, and revenue attribution are more polished.
• Templates and the editor. More templates, and an editor more people on your team will already know.
• Hiring and help. Freelancers who know Mailchimp are easy to find. That has a real value if you are a one-person marketing team.

Brevo's genuine advantages

• One account for marketing and transactional email. Order confirmations, password resets and newsletters in one place, with one sending reputation to look after. On Mailchimp, transactional email is a separate product.
• SMS and WhatsApp in the same tool. Useful if you want an order-shipped SMS without another vendor.
• A dormant list is free to keep. You can hold onto contacts for a seasonal re-engagement campaign without paying monthly rent on them.
• Built-in CRM and shared inbox. Lightweight, but enough for a small team that would otherwise buy a second product.

Deliverability and authentication

Neither platform will fix a bad list, and neither has a secret deliverability advantage. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC record, support one-click unsubscribe and keep spam complaint rates low. Both tools support all of it.

What differs is how much the setup fights you, and there are two things to check whichever you pick:

• Send from your own authenticated domain. Not a shared vendor subdomain. Both platforms support this; do it on day one, not after your first campaign underperforms.
• Warm up a new sending setup. Moving platforms resets nothing about your list but does change your sending infrastructure. Start with your most engaged contacts and build volume over two to three weeks rather than mailing 10,000 people from a cold setup.

The one deliverability point that favours Brevo is consolidation: transactional and marketing mail under one authenticated domain gives you a single reputation to monitor instead of two. The one that favours Mailchimp is maturity of tooling around complaint monitoring.

If you are moving because your current emails are landing in spam, the platform is probably not the cause. Our guides on SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup and why emails go to spam cover the actual causes, and switching vendors without fixing them just moves the problem.

Store integrations

If you run a store, this is the second-biggest factor after billing.

"Integrates with Shopify" can mean a nightly customer sync or real-time cart and checkout events. The three things to verify, for either platform, on the plan you intend to buy:

1. Product sync, so you can drop a product into an email without copying images and prices by hand.
2. Cart and checkout events, which is what an abandoned cart flow runs on. Without these, no abandoned cart email is possible, regardless of what the feature list says.
3. Order history, so you can tell a first-time buyer from a repeat customer and run a post-purchase sequence.

Mailchimp's Shopify and WooCommerce integrations are widely deployed and well documented. Brevo's cover the same ground and its WooCommerce plugin is actively maintained, but if you are on a less common platform, check first. For either tool, the WooCommerce integration is typically less mature than the Shopify one, which is worth knowing before you plan flows around it.

One trap specific to this comparison: Mailchimp's store integration is also what inflates your contact count, because it syncs every customer as a non-subscribed contact. The integration you install to make Mailchimp more useful is the one that makes it more expensive.

Switching from Mailchimp to Brevo

Moving contacts takes an afternoon. Everything else takes a fortnight. Plan for the fortnight.

1. Export your unsubscribes separately. This is the step people skip and it is the one that gets you blocklisted. Export unsubscribed and cleaned contacts as their own file and import them into Brevo's suppression list before you import anyone else. Mailing someone who opted out is a legal problem and a deliverability problem at the same time.
2. Export subscribed contacts with their merge fields and tags. Map Mailchimp merge fields to Brevo attributes before importing, not after. Retrofitting a field mapping across 10,000 contacts is miserable.
3. Authenticate your domain in Brevo and verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC resolve correctly. Do this before the first send.
4. Rebuild the three flows that earn money first: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase. Do not try to port twelve automations at once.
5. Run both in parallel for one cycle. Keep Mailchimp alive, on a downgraded plan, for one billing cycle while you send real campaigns from Brevo. Compare delivery and engagement on the same segment before you cancel.
6. Warm up. First campaign to your most engaged 10%, then widen over two or three weeks.
7. Then cancel, and archive before you do. If you are keeping Mailchimp as a backup, archive contacts first so the dormant account is not billing you for 10,000 people.

Who should pick which

If neither fits, the wider field is covered in our Mailchimp alternatives guide, which compares seven options including MailerLite, Kit, Klaviyo and Omnisend on the same billing-model basis.

Common mistakes

• Comparing promotional prices. Both vendors discount the first year. Compare month thirteen.
• Pricing the wrong Brevo tier. Quoting $9/month and then discovering automation workflows are a tier up is the most common costing error in this comparison.
• Forgetting the branding add-on. On Brevo's entry plan, removing the logo is extra. Include it in the comparison.
• Switching to fix deliverability. If your mail lands in spam on Mailchimp, it will land in spam on Brevo. Fix authentication and list hygiene first.
• Importing unsubscribes as active contacts. The single most damaging migration mistake. Suppressions go in first, as suppressions.
• Not downgrading the old account. Mailchimp keeps billing a dormant account for its stored contacts. Archive and downgrade, or cancel outright.
• Assuming a clean-up lowers the Mailchimp bill automatically. It does not. Archiving reduces the count, but you still have to select a lower tier yourself.

Troubleshooting

"My Mailchimp bill went up and I did not add subscribers"

Check your non-subscribed count. If a store integration is syncing customers, every order adds a billable contact. Bot or spam signups through an unprotected form do the same. Filter the audience by status, archive what you cannot mail, then downgrade the tier manually, which Mailchimp will not do for you.

"Brevo is more expensive than I calculated"

Almost always one of three things: you are on a higher tier than the headline price because of automation or A/B testing, you are paying the add-on to remove Brevo branding, or your real send volume is higher than you assumed because automated flows send continuously rather than in campaign bursts. Check actual sends, not planned campaigns.

"Engagement dropped after we moved"

Expected for two to three weeks if you did not warm up, and usually recoverable. Check that your domain authentication is complete, that you are not sending from a shared subdomain, and that you started with engaged contacts rather than the full list. If it persists past a month, the problem is list quality, not the platform.

"Which one is better for deliverability?"

Neither, materially. Both authenticate properly and both have good infrastructure. Your sending domain, list hygiene and complaint rate decide your deliverability, and they travel with you.

Key takeaways

• Mailchimp bills on contacts stored and counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts. Brevo bills on emails sent and does not charge for storage.
• Big list, mailed selectively, with a lot of dead weight: Brevo is usually cheaper. Small clean list, mailed often: Mailchimp usually is.
• Mailchimp's Free plan stops your sending at 250 contacts. Going over on a paid plan adds a charge instead of blocking you.
• Brevo's headline $9 Starter price is a campaign tool. Price the tier that includes automation workflows, plus the branding-removal add-on.
• Mailchimp wins on ecosystem, reporting and hireable expertise. Brevo wins on consolidating marketing, transactional and SMS in one account.
• Neither switch fixes deliverability. Authenticate your domain, clean your list, warm up your sending.
• On migration, import suppressions before contacts, rebuild the three revenue flows first, and run both platforms in parallel for one billing cycle.

Running a small Shopify or WooCommerce store and want the store-triggered flows without the per-contact arithmetic? See how SendDoggie prices, or start free.

Sources

1. Mailchimp — About Mailchimp pricing plans (contact counting, send multiples, overage and Free plan behaviour; read 10 November 2026)
2. Mailchimp — Marketing pricing (plan names, Free plan limits, current promotional discounts; read 10 November 2026)
3. Brevo — Pricing (plan model and figures read October 2026; confirm on the live page)
4. Gmail — Email sender guidelines (authentication and complaint-rate requirements for bulk senders)