ActiveCampaign vs Brevo

ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Hubs in Chicago, Sidney, and Dublin.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a French company that was founded in Paris in 2007 and rebranded in 2023.

No coding or design skills are required as there are plenty of automation recipes available. The system itself is comparatively complex, though, and needs some getting accustomed to.

Beginner-friendly, since the product is minimalist feature- and UI-wise

Businesses that plan to scale their email marketing up to include CRM, e-commerce integrations, and diverse automation schemes.

Small and medium-sized businesses, beginners in marketing automation, ecommerce businesses

No free plan. Has a free 14 days trial with up to 100 email sends to 100 contacts. The features available within the trial match the Professional tier of features.

The trial is limited to 1 user and doesn’t include:

• Predictive Sending
• Predictive Content
• Sending auto-responder campaigns
• Custom fields in forms
• Using “Email Results” in subscription forms
• SMS credits or sending
• Adding a domain to a landing page

The forever free Brevo Marketing Platform plan includes:

• 300 emails/day and unlimited contacts
• 1 shared inbox
• Automation limit for 2,000 contacts
• 500 push notification impressions
• Email support
• Basic email marketing and automation features

Marketing + CRM

For 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:

• Lite $9 / $15
• Plus $49 / $70
• Professional $149 / $187
• Enterprise — individual pricing

Other pricing features:

• 2-year price lock
• Billing pause for 12 months with the account and campaigns intact.
• Only charges for the contacts the client actively markets to, no matter how many lists they’re on.
• A 20% discount for nonprofits.
• Free 14 days trial.

Dynamic, depending on sending volume, features, and add-on products. Brevo Marketing Platform offers 3 pricing tiers.

Starter: starts from $25/month, includes everything from Free plus:

• 20k emails/month, no daily sending limit
• Basic reporting and analytics
• Add-ons to pay for separately: Brevo logo removal and a dedicated IP

Business: starts from $65/month, includes everything from Starter plus:

• Unlimited automation
• Landing page builder
• A/B testing
• Send time optimization
• More push notification impressions and a multi-user access to pay for separately
• Advanced analytics
• Phone support

BrevoPlus: custom pricing, includes everything from Business plus

• Customized shared inboxes
• A dedicated IP
• Customized number of push notification impressions
• Multi-user access
• A dedicated manager and tailored onboarding
• SSO & SAML
• Service level agreement

Working hours: 9 am – 11 pm CDT (GMT-5)
Either live chat or email requests

Aside from online support, ActiveCampaign offers:

• Free online training
• Community and forum
• FAQ website section
• Study Hall — in-person learning classes

Email support is available for all users, including those on the free plan. Phone and live chat support channels are only available for Business and BrevoPlus users. The support is available in 6 languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German.

• Marketing automation
• Landing page builder
• Built-in CRM for small-medium-sized businesses
• Many service integrations
• Drag-and-drop email designer
• Free migration from other services
• SMS marketing
• Site messages
• Live chat and automated chatbot workflows

• Drag-and-drop email builder
• Email automation
• SMS campaigns
• WhatsApp campaigns
• Push notification campaigns
• Facebook ads
• Landing pages
• Signup forms
• Segmentation and personalization
• Autoresponders
• A/B testing
• Native CRM
• Transactional emails
• Pipeline management
• Shared inbox
• Sales reports

125+ templates
No-code dynamic content available
Email template recommendations and guides

Templates for:

• Abandoned Cart
• Conference Event
• Customer Service
• Holiday
• Newsletter
• Reviews Feedback

Templates for email campaigns, automation (i. e. birthday emails), and transactional emails with dynamic content included. All templates are responsive and optimized for dark mode.

Brevo also offers creating custom templates for your business as a separate service.

Facebook, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, Salesforce, Zapier, and more

58 integrations are currently available, including WordPress, other ESPs like Mailchimp, CRMs like Zoho, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, and more. Brevo also provides an API for custom integrations.

• Website
• Email extensions for Chrome and Outlook
• Mobile app for Android and iOS (possible to review email reports, track customer activity, and manage CRM data).

• No installable solution

A web app, a desktop app, and iOS and Android apps for phone calls and conversations (chatbot marketing). The two latter services are separate and not included in the Marketing Platform.

Czech Dutch English French German Hungarian Indonesian Italian Polish Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Russian Slovenian Spanish Danish Finnish Simplified Chinese Turkish Vietnamese

English French Italian Spanish Portuguese German

800+ automation recipes for email and other marketing channels.

Offers the whole customer experience automation:

• Links different integrated services (like Shopify or Facebook) into cohesive scenarios.
• Collects broad data on each customer, so it’s possible to customize segments based on almost any parameter.
• Helps to choose the best content, send time, and delivery channel for each individual customer.
• Has AI advice on improving the marketing strategy.

Automation templates for welcome series, cart abandonment, post-purchase, email or website action, anniversaries, and page visits.

• Hundreds of automation options even for sophisticated purposes
• CRM features
• Mobile app
• A dedicated email deliverability specialist checks the client’s email for compliance before sending
• Automation of 1:1 communications to customers on the website or social media

• Great customer support
• Easy to set up and implement
• Very clean and user-friendly interface

• High price and no free plan
• Customer support is often unavailable or slow
• Complicated automations system
• Steep learning curve
• Reports aren’t great (not enough information, no real-time results, visually unappealing, etc.)

• Limited CRM functionality compared to other tools
• Many add-ons, which leads to extra costs
• Occasionally sluggish loading