Mailchimp vs Brevo: which email marketing tool fits a small service business

A small service business rarely needs exotic email marketing. It needs a welcome sequence for a new subscriber, a promotion sent a few times a month, and some proof that the emails are actually landing in an inbox rather than a spam folder. Mailchimp and Brevo both build toward that same job, and both include automation, templates, and reporting aimed at a business with no dedicated email specialist on staff.

The two companies bill for that job in fundamentally different ways. Mailchimp's price moves with how many contacts you store, whether you email them once a month or every day. Brevo's general model, by contrast, is built around how many emails you actually send in a period, which can matter a great deal if you have a large list you email rarely, or a small list you email constantly.

Because of that difference, the right way to compare the two is not a single headline price. It is your actual list size against your actual sending frequency, run through each company's own calculator, since a business that looks cheap on one billing model can look expensive on the other.

Mailchimp's own pricing page (mailchimp.com/pricing, accessed 2026-09-26) names four tiers. Free is capped at 250 contacts and costs nothing. Essentials is described on the page as built for sending the right content at the right time with testing and scheduling tools. Standard adds automation, personalization, and optimization tools aimed at selling more. Premium is described as the most advanced tier, with unlimited contacts and priority support built for teams.

Pricing brackets run from 0 to 500 contacts up through 1,000,000 plus, with the price rising at each bracket regardless of tier. As one example shown on the page, the Standard plan at the 10,000-plus contact bracket is priced at $28.45 a month for the first 12 months, described as a 15 percent discount, after which the standard bracket rate applies. Monthly sending allowances also scale by tier, with Standard permitting sends up to 12 times your total contact count each month.

Feature-wise, the page names marketing automation flows, up to 200 of them on Standard and Premium, dynamic content, custom reporting, and role-based account access. Predictive segmentation is named as a Standard and Premium feature specifically, not available on Essentials or Free. SMS and MMS messaging is sold as a separate add-on running on its own credit system rather than bundled into the base price. The page states 300 plus integrations are available across every plan, and names phone support as exclusive to Premium, with personalized onboarding included on both Standard and Premium.

Brevo's own pricing page (brevo.com/pricing, accessed 2026-09-26) renders its plan structure and dollar figures through an interactive tool rather than displaying them in the page's static content, so no specific tier price could be confirmed directly from what we were able to read on that date. What is clear from Brevo's general positioning, both on its own site and consistently across independent trackers, is that its pricing model is built around monthly email sending volume rather than the size of your contact list, a structural difference from Mailchimp worth checking directly before you compare a specific number.

Brevo names a free plan with no credit card required, positioned around a daily and monthly sending cap rather than a contact cap, meaning a business with a very large list that emails infrequently may find Brevo's free tier more workable than Mailchimp's 250-contact ceiling. Paid tiers scale upward from there by sending volume, adding automation, a CRM layer, SMS and WhatsApp messaging, and deliverability tools as you move up.

Because we could not confirm exact current dollar figures on Brevo's own page as fetched, treat any specific Brevo price you see anywhere, including on this page, as something to verify directly on brevo.com/pricing before you budget against it.

Mailchimp's contact-based model can penalize a business that keeps a large list of old, rarely engaged contacts on file, since the price rises with total contacts stored regardless of whether you actually email most of them. Cleaning an inactive list before upgrading a Mailchimp plan is a genuinely useful cost check most businesses skip.

A send-based model like Brevo's shifts that risk the other way: a business that emails a modest list very frequently, several campaigns a week plus automated flows, can use up its sending allowance faster than a similarly sized contact-based plan would charge for, even though the list itself never grows.

Neither company's page, as reviewed on 2026-09-26, made it simple to project a full year's cost without running your specific numbers through each calculator, since both list size and sending frequency move the price on their own timelines.

Choose Mailchimp when you want a published, contact-bracket price you can see without a calculator, you value predictive segmentation and deep automation flows once you reach Standard or Premium, and your list size is stable rather than growing fast.

Choose Brevo when your actual concern is sending frequency rather than list size, you want SMS and a CRM layer under the same login without treating messaging as a bolt-on credit system, or your contact list runs larger than 250 but you do not send to it constantly.

Before you commit to either, put your real contact count and your real monthly sending habits into both companies' own pricing tools on the same day, since a plan that looks cheaper in the abstract can flip once your actual numbers are entered.