MailerLite vs Brevo: Which EU-Friendly Tool Wins?

Most email marketing comparisons treat “affordable” and “GDPR-compliant” as afterthoughts. For a lot of European businesses — and any US sender with EU subscribers — those two criteria come first. MailerLite and Brevo both tick both boxes. But they work very differently, and choosing the wrong one can mean overpaying by hundreds of dollars a year or missing features you actually need.

The biggest source of confusion: they price in opposite ways. MailerLite charges by the number of subscribers in your list. Brevo charges by how many emails you send per month. That difference changes which tool is cheaper for you — and it changes significantly depending on your situation.

MailerLite at a Glance

MailerLite launched in 2010 out of Vilnius, Lithuania, and has stayed EU-headquartered since. It serves around 1 million customers and pitches itself at small businesses, bloggers, and solopreneurs who want clean, professional email marketing without a steep learning curve.

The free plan covers up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. Paid plans start at $10/month for up to 500 subscribers (Growing Business), scaling upward as your list grows. The Advanced plan, which adds a custom HTML editor, multiple automations, and promotion pop-ups, starts at $20/month. Annual billing brings costs down by 10%.

What MailerLite does well: a genuinely clean interface, 90 email templates, drag-and-drop editing, landing pages, and built-in digital product sales — all at a price that feels honest for a small business budget. Deliverability comes in at 97%, among the best in the subscriber-tier pricing category.

The weaknesses matter too. MailerLite has no SMS marketing. Its integration library covers around 140 tools — solid, but behind the deeper stacks offered by ActiveCampaign or HubSpot. The account approval process is stricter than most platforms; senders in certain industries (supplements, crypto, MLM) get rejected. Automation is capable but not as deep as dedicated automation tools.

Brevo at a Glance

Brevo — formerly Sendinblue — was founded in 2012 in Paris and is one of the more genuinely European entries in the market. It rebranded from Sendinblue to Brevo in 2023 as it expanded beyond email into a fuller CRM and multi-channel suite.

The free plan is unusually generous: unlimited contacts, but capped at 300 emails per day (around 9,000 per month). Paid plans start at $9/month for the Starter tier, which removes the Brevo logo, lifts the daily cap, and gives you up to 5,000 emails per month. The Business plan starts at $18/month for the same 5,000 emails but adds marketing automation, A/B testing, advanced analytics, and multi-user access. Removing the Brevo logo from the Starter plan costs an additional $9/month if you want it.

Brevo’s multi-channel credentials are real. SMS, WhatsApp messaging, web push notifications, and live chat are all built in — not add-ons from third-party integrations. The transactional email infrastructure is mature; many developers run their product notification emails through Brevo’s API.

The downsides: fewer email templates (around 60 vs MailerLite’s 90), an interface that feels cluttered compared to MailerLite’s calm UI, and automation that is less intuitive to set up. Deliverability sits at 96.5% — good, but a half-point behind MailerLite. Some features, particularly the CRM components, feel underdeveloped relative to dedicated CRM products.

Pricing: The Model That Actually Matters

This is the decision most people get wrong. Because the pricing models are inverted, the cheaper tool depends entirely on your list and sending behaviour.

MailerLite is cheaper when: your list is small and you send frequently. If you have 800 subscribers and send 8 campaigns per month, MailerLite’s free plan covers you entirely. A 5,000-subscriber list on MailerLite costs roughly $39/month on the Growing Business plan.

Brevo is cheaper when: you have a large list but send infrequently. A business with 50,000 contacts that sends one newsletter per month (50,000 emails) would pay more on MailerLite’s subscriber-based pricing. On Brevo, 50,000 emails per month would land you in the Business tier — check Brevo’s pricing page for the current volume-tier cost, as it scales based on exact send volume.

One catch with Brevo’s free plan: the 300 emails/day limit is a hard ceiling. If you want to send a campaign to 2,000 subscribers at once, the free plan can’t do it in a single day. You’d need to either spread it across days or upgrade. MailerLite’s free plan allows up to 12,000 emails per month with no daily cap, which is more practical for actual campaigns.

Ease of Use

MailerLite consistently earns the higher ease-of-use scores, and the gap is real. The interface is minimal without being sparse. Building a campaign takes a few clicks. Automation sequences are built on a simple visual flowchart that new users can navigate without training. The tool rates 4.8 on ease of use versus Brevo’s 4.4.

Brevo’s UI is functional but busier. Navigation between the email editor, CRM, SMS, and automation sections requires jumping around a side panel with a lot of options. New users frequently report needing more time to find where things are. If you are setting up email marketing for the first time, the mental overhead is higher.

That said, Brevo’s flexibility is the trade-off. Once you know where everything is, the range of channels you can manage from one place is wider than MailerLite offers.

Email Templates and Design

MailerLite ships with 90 email templates organized by industry and use case. The drag-and-drop editor is one of the most polished in this price range — responsive layouts, clean typography controls, and an easy way to reuse saved content blocks across campaigns.

Brevo offers around 60 templates. The editor is capable but not as refined. Template variety is narrower, and for highly design-conscious teams, the selection can feel limiting. On the other hand, Brevo supports HTML editing across more account tiers, which matters if you have a developer who prefers to code emails from scratch.

Automation

Both tools include automation, but the ceiling differs.

MailerLite’s automation builder covers welcome sequences, abandoned cart flows (on ecommerce plans), date-based triggers, and conditional branching. For most small businesses, it covers 90% of common use cases. The visual editor is approachable. Where it falls short is complex multi-path branching and advanced scoring-based automations — those need a tool like ActiveCampaign if they are critical to your workflow.

Brevo’s automation is more feature-rich on paper but harder to use in practice. The Business plan adds A/B testing within automations and more advanced triggers. If your automation strategy involves SMS alongside email (for cart recovery or appointment reminders, for example), Brevo can handle it natively — MailerLite cannot.

GDPR and EU Data Compliance

Both companies are genuinely EU-based, which simplifies GDPR compliance for European senders.

MailerLite is a Lithuanian company (UAB MailerLite) with servers in the EU and US, and it offers a standard Data Processing Agreement at no extra cost. Consent management, double opt-in, and automatic unsubscribe handling are all built into the platform by default.

Brevo is a French company (Brevo SAS) with primary servers in the EU, and similarly offers a DPA ready to sign. Because Brevo’s pricing model doesn’t charge per contact, you can legally store large EU contact databases (for CRM purposes) without the cost ballooning — which is one concrete compliance-adjacent advantage.

For a deeper look at GDPR requirements for email senders, see our GDPR compliance guide for email marketing.

Deliverability

MailerLite posts a 97% deliverability rate in independent tests; Brevo sits at 96.5%. Both are solid. MailerLite’s slightly higher number reflects their stricter account approval process — the same thing that can be frustrating when signing up actually protects the IP pools shared across their customer base.

Brevo’s transactional email infrastructure is particularly reliable. If you are sending product emails (order receipts, password resets, shipping notifications) alongside marketing campaigns, Brevo separates these cleanly and maintains good deliverability on the transactional side regardless of your marketing reputation.

Neither tool is a weak choice on deliverability grounds. The difference is small enough that your sending practices — list hygiene, engagement rates, spam complaint rate — will matter far more than the platform you chose. See our email deliverability guide for more on building that foundation.

Who Should Choose MailerLite

MailerLite makes sense if:

• Your list is under 10,000 subscribers and growing steadily
• You want the easiest possible setup for someone new to email marketing
• You sell digital products (courses, ebooks, templates) and want payment integrated
• You value clean design over channel breadth
• You don’t need SMS or WhatsApp

Check pricing and plan details at MailerLite’s pricing page or read the full MailerLite review.

Who Should Choose Brevo

Brevo makes sense if:

• You have a large contact database but send infrequently (volume-based pricing saves money)
• You need SMS, WhatsApp, or live chat alongside email
• You are a developer who wants a strong transactional email API
• You manage a CRM alongside your marketing lists and want both in one place
• You need to store a large suppression or consent list without paying per contact

Check current prices at Brevo’s pricing page or read the full Brevo review.

The Bottom Line

Neither tool is universally better. They solve different problems.

If you are a small business, blogger, or freelancer building an audience from scratch, MailerLite’s pricing, interface, and free plan make it the easier starting point. You can run a professional email program without touching anything complicated.

If you run a larger operation — a business with a big contact list, a need for SMS, or an ecommerce store that needs transactional email and marketing in the same platform — Brevo’s multi-channel reach and volume-based pricing are harder to beat at this price point.

For more options across different budgets and use cases, see our best email marketing tools for small businesses and the head-to-head pricing comparison across the leading platforms.

Sources

1. Brevo Pricing Plans — accessed 2026-04-10
2. MailerLite Data Processing Agreement — accessed 2026-04-10
3. Brevo Privacy Policy & DPA — accessed 2026-04-10