ActiveCampaign vs Brevo
Trying to choose between ActiveCampaign vs Brevo as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 3.6 TrustPilot
- 4.6 Capterra
- 4.6 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
ActiveCampaign
An automation platform that combines email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for cross-channel management, segmentation, and personalization. It can also be used to automate sales and support processes.
Pricing
Starts from $9 a month for 500 contacts (billed yearly)
Key features
- Automation features for marketing
- Integrated CRM tools
- Integrations with various popular services
- Landing page constructor
- Intuitive email builder
Support
Availability: 9 am - 11 pm CDT (GMT-5) Communication in the chat or via email
- 4.5 GetApp
- 4.6 Capterra
- 4.1 TrustPilot
Average 4.4 / 5
Brevo
Brevo (ex-Sendinblue) is an all-in-one platform for marketing automation over email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat.
Pricing
Dynamic, depending on sending volume, features, and add-on products, starts from $25/month.
Key features
- Email builder
- Email automation
- List management and segmentation
- Personalization
- Signup forms
- Landing pages
- SMS and WhatsApp marketing
- Native CRM
- Native tools for phone and video calls
- Push notifications
Support
Email and community support for all users, live chat and phone support for certain pricing tiers
General info about company
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Hubs in Chicago, Sidney, and Dublin.
Brevo
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a French company that was founded in Paris in 2007 and rebranded in 2023.
Difficulty
ActiveCampaign
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.
Brevo
Beginner-friendly, since the product is minimalist feature- and UI-wise
Best for
ActiveCampaign
Businesses that plan to scale their email marketing up to include CRM, e-commerce integrations, and diverse automation schemes.
Brevo
Small and medium-sized businesses, beginners in marketing automation, ecommerce businesses
Free plan
ActiveCampaign
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
Brevo
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
Pricing
ActiveCampaign
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.
Brevo
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
Support
ActiveCampaign
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
Brevo
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.
Features
ActiveCampaign
- 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
Brevo
- 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
Templates
ActiveCampaign
125+ templates
No-code dynamic content available
Email template recommendations and guides
Templates for:
- Abandoned Cart
- Conference Event
- Customer Service
- Holiday
- Newsletter
- Reviews Feedback
Brevo
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.
Video/screenshots
ActiveCampaign
Brevo
Integrations
ActiveCampaign
Facebook, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, Salesforce, Zapier, and more
Brevo
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.
Devices
ActiveCampaign
- 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
Brevo
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.
Languages
ActiveCampaign
Czech
Dutch
English
French
German
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian
Slovenian
Spanish
Danish
Finnish
Simplified Chinese
Turkish
Vietnamese
Brevo
English
French
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
German
Automation
ActiveCampaign
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.
Brevo
Automation templates for welcome series, cart abandonment, post-purchase, email or website action, anniversaries, and page visits.
Pros
ActiveCampaign
- 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
Brevo
- Great customer support
- Easy to set up and implement
- Very clean and user-friendly interface
Cons
ActiveCampaign
- 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.)
Brevo
- Limited CRM functionality compared to other tools
- Many add-ons, which leads to extra costs
- Occasionally sluggish loading
Reviews from experts
ActiveCampaign
“ActiveCampaign is a solid choice for your email marketing needs. There are few flaws (though they matter), and if you want a service you can integrate into almost any tool chain, ActiveCampaign’s feature-packed plans have few equals.
While its decent feature set could potentially be let down by the rather high prices on more expensive plans, ActiveCampaign still provides good value for your money”.
“So do we recommend ActiveCampaign?
As this ActiveCampaign review highlights, it’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within an email marketing platform, but they do it very well.
The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers, ecommerce and more. One area that is slightly lacking is the email builder, not offering an experience as slick as other services out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history)”.
Brevo
We like that Brevo is liberal with its suggestions, making it extremely easy for beginners to get started. Pop-up messages and windows are packed with help whenever you initiate a task, be that a campaign, segmentation, or automation, highlighting some of the more common tasks within the category. For example, when creating a new segment, Brevo suggests pre-defined segments, such as ones for engaged email subscribers, inactive email subscribers, contacts from a specific country code, or contacts with a pending task. It's quite handy, and we appreciate the helpful suggestions, even though a seasoned professional might find the tips and onboarding a bit excessive.
Services outages became frequent and emails cannot be tested or sent during that time. Brevo is pushing its CRM and close features that were available for free before. For people who are never going to swtich to their CRM such moves are clearly wrong. For example, the conversations feature is much more limited as of now and to reply to Whatsapp conversations, subscribers need to pay.
*This information is current as of 02/20/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
