Every “Mailchimp alternative” article lists ten options, and most of them are not real alternatives. Brevo (the company you may still remember as Sendinblue) is one of the few that genuinely competes, and the reason is a pricing model that inverts Mailchimp’s. Understanding that difference will tell you in five minutes whether switching is worth your time.
Contacts versus sends: the whole argument
Mailchimp charges by audience size. Store 5,000 contacts and you pay for 5,000 contacts whether you email them once a month or four times a week. Brevo charges by emails sent per day (with monthly caps depending on plan), and unlimited contacts on every tier.
Run your own numbers against both models. A 20,000-person list that receives two campaigns a month is cheap on Mailchimp’s tiers but might strain Brevo’s daily limits. The same list on a niche newsletter that emails weekly with heavy segmentation can flip the other way, because Brevo counts sends rather than stored contacts. There is no universal winner; there is only your sending pattern.
Feature trade-offs
Mailchimp’s marketing tooling is deeper: more template options, a bigger integration directory, more mature automations for e-commerce, and reporting that agencies and stakeholders tend to expect. It is the safe pick for a marketing team that lives in its dashboard.
Breo — sorry, Brevo — bundles more channels for the money. Transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, and a lightweight CRM are all in the same account, which removes a whole category of integration work for small teams. The automation builder is less flashy than Mailchimp’s but entirely capable for welcome series, re-engagement flows, and cart follow-ups.
Transactional email, included
The quiet superpower here is that Brevo does transactional and marketing email in one platform with one reputation. With Mailchimp you get marketing only; transactional means wiring up a second provider. If you are a small team that wants order confirmations and newsletters from one place with one bill, Brevo removes a real cost — not just the invoice, but the operational overhead.
Where Mailchimp still wins people over
The template editor and the design system remain better. If your campaigns are heavily designed and your team is non-technical, Mailchimp produces nicer results with less fighting. Its deliverability on marketing sends is consistently solid, and the support documentation is the best in the industry. There is a reason it is the default name people know.
Brevo’s weak points are real: the free plan’s daily cap is modest, send times get throttled on lower tiers, and the reporting is thinner. None of those are dealbreakers for most small lists, but power users notice.
How I would decide
Compute one number: your true monthly email volume and your true contact count. Feed both into each platform’s pricing calculator. If Mailchimp is cheaper or the difference is trivial, stay — migration overhead is not worth small savings. If Brevo’s model saves you real money, plan the move: export your audience, re-verify your domain, warm up gradually rather than flipping the switch overnight.
Where to start
Whichever you pick, get your authentication records right first — our SPF, DKIM, and DMARC guide covers the mistakes that sink deliverability during a provider switch. And if you are comparing the big four side by side, read the full field test.