Brevo and Mailchimp’s most important difference is how they charge: Brevo by emails sent per month; Mailchimp by contacts stored. For businesses with large lists but infrequent sends — monthly newsletters to 50,000 people — Mailchimp can be very expensive while Brevo is cheap. For businesses with small lists but frequent sends — daily promotional emails to 5,000 people — Brevo’s pricing also wins. The comparison requires calculating your specific send frequency against both pricing models.

Brevo’s free plan includes 300 emails/day (9,000/mo) to unlimited contacts. Mailchimp’s free plan includes 1,000 sends/mo to 500 contacts. Completely different models.

Brevo’s send-based pricing shines for businesses with large contact databases that don’t email frequently. A nonprofit with 100,000 contacts that sends one monthly newsletter pays a fraction of what Mailchimp would charge. Similarly, businesses that want to keep their full contact database (including inactive contacts for suppression purposes) without paying per contact benefit from Brevo’s model.

Brevo handles both marketing and transactional email (order confirmations, password resets, account notifications) from the same account and pricing plan. Mailchimp’s transactional email is a separate Mandrill add-on with additional fees. For businesses that need both marketing and transactional email, Brevo’s consolidated approach is simpler and often cheaper.

Brevo is headquartered in Paris with EU data centers and is designed from the ground up for GDPR compliance. For EU businesses with data residency requirements, Brevo is a natural choice. Mailchimp is US-headquartered — GDPR compliance is available but requires more configuration and vendor assessment than Brevo’s native approach.

Mailchimp charges based on the number of contacts stored, meaning a list of 50,000 subscribers costs you whether you email them once a month or once a year. Brevo charges based on emails sent, so storing a large list is essentially free until you actually send. For businesses running monthly newsletters to large audiences, Brevo’s model can cut costs by 60-80% compared to Mailchimp’s equivalent tier. Even for high-frequency senders with smaller lists, Brevo’s per-send pricing tends to undercut Mailchimp once you run the actual numbers. Brevo wins this dimension decisively for almost any realistic sending scenario, and the only exception is extremely low-volume senders who store tiny lists and send constantly — a rare business profile.