MailerLite vs Brevo: Subscriber Pricing vs Email Volume Pricing

MailerLite and Brevo (the company formerly called Sendinblue) both offer a free plan, a drag-and-drop editor, signup forms and automation. The biggest difference is not a feature. It is how you pay. MailerLite charges by the number of subscribers you have, while Brevo builds its plans around how many emails you send. That one difference can make either tool clearly cheaper for you, depending on your list size and how often you send. This comparison is based on each company’s published pricing and help pages as of 28 October 2026, not on hands-on testing.

The short version

• MailerLite suits newsletters, creators and small businesses that send email regularly to a list of modest size and want a website builder, landing pages and automation in one place.
• Brevo suits businesses with a large contact database that they email less often, and teams that want SMS, WhatsApp, transactional email and a sales CRM alongside marketing email.

Neither is the better tool for everyone. The worked example below shows why.

How the pricing models differ

MailerLite: you pay for subscribers

MailerLite’s plans are Free, Comfort (formerly Growing Business), Power (formerly Advanced) and Enterprise. The plans were renamed in June 2026. Paid plans are priced by the number of active subscribers. Comfort starts from $12 per month and lets you send up to 10 times your subscriber tier each month. Power starts from $25 per month and offers unlimited sending under a fair use policy. Annual billing saves 10%, and nonprofits can get a 30% discount. Our MailerLite pricing guide goes through the tiers in more detail.

Brevo: you pay for email volume

According to Brevo’s help center, its paid plans are Starter, Standard, Professional and Enterprise, and the tier you choose sets your monthly email allowance, and plans also come with a contact storage quota. Even the free plan lets you store up to 100,000 contacts, so for most small and mid-sized senders the number that drives the price is how much you send, not how many people you store. We have not listed Brevo’s dollar prices because we could not load its pricing page directly for this update. Check Brevo’s pricing page for current figures in your currency.

A worked example (hypothetical)

Imagine two businesses.

A yoga studio has 3,000 subscribers and sends a weekly newsletter, plus a few event reminders. That is roughly 13,000 to 15,000 emails a month. On MailerLite, the studio pays for the 3,000-subscriber tier, and the Comfort plan’s monthly allowance (10 times the subscriber tier) covers this sending comfortably. On Brevo, the studio would need a plan with enough monthly volume for around 15,000 emails, and the bill grows each time it adds another send. For a list that gets frequent emails, subscriber pricing tends to be more predictable.

A furniture retailer has 20,000 past customers in its database but only emails them once a quarter, plus occasional order emails. On MailerLite, it would pay for the 20,000-subscriber tier every month, even in months when it sends nothing. On Brevo, it could store those contacts and pick a plan sized to its actual sending. For a big list that gets infrequent emails, volume pricing can work out better.

You don’t need exact prices to see the pattern. Write down two numbers: how many people are on your list, and how many emails you send per month. If emails per month is a high multiple of your list size, lean toward subscriber pricing. If it is low, lean toward volume pricing. Then plug both numbers into each official pricing page.

Free plans compared

The free plans are built very differently, so it helps to think about how you will actually use them.

MailerLite vs Brevo at a glance (October 2026)

Criteria	MailerLite	Brevo
Priced by	Active subscribers	Monthly email volume
Paid plans	Comfort, Power, Enterprise	Starter, Standard, Professional, Enterprise
Free plan audience	250 subscribers	Up to 100,000 contacts stored
Free plan sending	2,500 emails/month	300 emails/day
Free plan automation	3 active automations, 5 steps each	Up to 2,000 contacts in active automations
Entry paid price	Comfort from $12/mo	See Brevo pricing page
Websites and landing pages	Landing pages and website builder (Free: 1 landing page, 1 site of 5 pages)	Check Brevo plan details
SMS and WhatsApp	Not a focus	SMS via prepaid credits; WhatsApp on Professional and Enterprise
Sales CRM	No	Yes (sales pipeline tools)
Digital products	Stripe-powered digital products and paid newsletters	Not covered here

MailerLite’s free plan covers up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails per month, with 2 user seats, 3 active automations (up to 5 steps each), 3 forms, 1 landing page and 1 website of up to 5 pages. Support is through the knowledge base only. It is a small but complete starter kit: you can build a signup form, a welcome sequence and a simple site.

Brevo’s free plan is more generous on contacts and less flexible on sending. You can store a large database, but you can only send 300 emails a day. Brevo’s help center explains that if a campaign goes to more people than your daily allowance, only 300 receive it that day, and you need to resend to the remaining contacts once your next daily allowance becomes available. For a list of 1,200 people, one newsletter would take four days to reach everyone.

Features beyond the free plan

Email building and automation

Both platforms offer drag-and-drop email editors and visual automation workflows. MailerLite also offers a simple rich-text editor and a custom HTML editor, A/B testing on every plan including Free, and multiple automation triggers on the Power plan. Comfort raises you to 50 automations. Our MailerLite review covers the editor and automation builder in more depth.

Channels: where Brevo goes further

Brevo positions itself as a multichannel platform. According to its own feature pages, you can add SMS to any plan, including Free, by buying prepaid message credits. WhatsApp campaigns are listed as available on its Professional and Enterprise plans. Brevo also offers a transactional email service (for order confirmations, password resets and similar messages sent from an app or shop) and a sales platform with pipeline management.

If you want email, SMS and a sales CRM under one login, that is a real reason to choose Brevo. MailerLite is focused on email marketing plus the tools around it (forms, pop-ups, landing pages and websites) and connects to other tools through more than 150 integrations.

Websites, landing pages and selling

MailerLite includes a landing page builder and a website builder, plus Stripe-powered digital products and paid newsletters (paid newsletters require a paid plan). For a creator or small business that does not yet have a website, this can replace a separate site builder. It also integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce if you run an online shop; our ecommerce email guide explains what to automate first.

Support

MailerLite’s Free plan includes knowledge-base support, Comfort adds email support and Power adds live chat. Brevo’s support options vary by plan; check its pricing page for the current details.

Pros and cons

The trade-off on Brevo’s free plan is the 300-emails-per-day cap: lots of room to store contacts, limited room to email them all at once.

Who should pick which

Pick MailerLite if:

• You send regularly (weekly or more) and want a bill that does not rise with each extra campaign.
• You want landing pages, a website, forms and pop-ups in the same tool as your email.
• You are starting with a small list and want automations on the free plan, for example a welcome sequence.
• You sell digital products or want to launch a paid newsletter.

Pick Brevo if:

• You have a large contact list and send infrequently.
• You want SMS or WhatsApp campaigns alongside email.
• You need transactional email and marketing email from the same provider.
• Your sales team would use a built-in CRM pipeline.

Still unsure? Our guide on how to choose email marketing software walks through the questions to ask, and our roundup of MailerLite alternatives covers other options.

See how MailerLite handles your list

MailerLite's free plan covers up to 250 subscribers, so you can build a form and an automation before committing.

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Switching between them

Whichever direction you move, the steps are similar. Export your contacts with their consent details, recreate your forms and automations, and authenticate your sending domain on the new platform before you send. Templates usually need rebuilding. Run both tools side by side for a short period rather than switching everything on a single day, and keep an eye on open and bounce rates in the first few campaigns.