Brevo vs MailerLite (2026): Which Budget Email Tool Wins?

If you are shopping at the budget end of the email market, Brevo and MailerLite both show up on every shortlist, and for good reason. Both have a real free plan. Both start cheap. Both have been around long enough that you are not betting your list on a startup that vanishes next year.

But they are built on two different billing ideas, and that one difference decides which one is cheaper for you. Brevo charges for the emails you send. MailerLite charges for the subscribers you store. Get that wrong and you can end up paying double what you should.

I have used both. This is the honest head-to-head, with a clear pick by use case at the end, and a short note on where neither one fits.

Quick comparison

Here is the short version before we get into the detail.

Pricing is current as of 2026 and changes often; confirm on each provider's site.

The core difference: emails sent vs subscribers stored

This is the whole game, so it is worth slowing down on.

Brevo prices primarily by email volume. Your contact storage is huge on the free plan, and paid plans still revolve around how many emails you actually send each month, but current Starter and Standard tiers also attach contact-storage caps to those send tiers. A 5,000-email Starter plan is $9/month, but the right question is now both "how many emails do I send?" and "how many contacts does this tier store?"

MailerLite prices the opposite way. You pay for how many active subscribers you store and, on the Comfort plan, how much volume you send. Comfort starts at $12/month for 500 subscribers and gives you 10x the ceiling of your subscriber tier each month. Power starts at $25/month and includes unlimited monthly emails subject to fair use. Exact prices climb by subscriber tier, so use the live calculator for 2,500, 10,000, or larger lists.

So the question that decides everything is simple. Do you have a small list you email constantly, or a large list you email occasionally?

A daily newsletter with 3,000 readers sends a lot of email but stores few contacts. MailerLite Power may be the cheaper home for that because the send volume is not billed the way Brevo bills volume. A 60,000-person list you broadcast to once a month stores a lot of contacts but sends relatively little. Brevo may win that one, but only if the contact cap on the tier you choose fits the list.

I have watched people pick the wrong one and not notice for months. If you are on MailerLite and your list is growing faster than your send frequency, your bill creeps up for contacts who never open anything. If you are on Brevo and you mail a small list every single day, your email volume costs can overtake what a flat MailerLite plan would have charged.

Free plans, compared honestly

Both free tiers are usable for real work, which is rare.

Brevo's free plan gives you up to 300 emails a day. That is about 9,000 a month if you spread it out, and you can store a large contact list alongside it. The catch worth knowing is the daily cap, not a monthly one, so you cannot send one big 9,000-email blast on the free plan. You would hit the 300/day wall. Emails also carry Brevo branding until you pay, and the automation is limited to a smaller slice of your contacts.

MailerLite's free plan is built around the list and monthly volume, not the day. You get up to 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, and you can send those without Brevo's daily ceiling. You also get campaigns, basic automations, one website, one landing page, and signup forms. The trade is the hard 250-active-subscriber cap. Cross it and sending locks until you upgrade or remove active subscribers.

For testing the product, both are fine. For actually running something small for free, MailerLite is better if your list is under 250 and you need more than 500 monthly sends, while Brevo is better if you have a big list you only mail in small daily batches.

Features beyond sending

If all you want is a newsletter, both tools cover the basics: templates, a drag-and-drop editor, signup forms, segmentation, and automation. The differences show up at the edges.

MailerLite stays in its lane and does that lane well. Email campaigns, automation, landing pages, a light website builder, and digital product selling on the higher plans. It does not bundle SMS, and it does not include a CRM. Its transactional email lives in a separate product called MailerSend with its own pricing, so if you need to fire off password resets and receipts, that is a second account to set up.

Brevo is the wider toolkit. Inside one account you get marketing email, transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and a basic sales CRM. For a small business that wants email and SMS reminders and a place to track deals without buying three tools, that consolidation is the real selling point. The cost is complexity. There is simply more to learn, and the interface reflects that.

If you want a deeper look at either tool on its own, I have written a full Brevo review and a MailerLite review that go further into the automation and deliverability detail than I can here.

Automation, in practice

Automation is where the two tools feel most different in daily use, even though both technically have it.

MailerLite's automation is visual and approachable. You build a flow of triggers and steps on a canvas, and for the common jobs (a welcome sequence, an abandoned-signup nudge, a re-engagement series) it is quick to set up and easy to reason about. It covers what a newsletter or small store actually needs without making you think too hard. Where it stops is depth. If you want branching logic that reacts to a dozen different conditions, you will feel the ceiling.

Brevo's automation goes further. You get multi-step workflows with conditional branches, scoring, and triggers that can fire off website behavior or transactional events, which matters if you are coordinating email and SMS off the same logic. The trade is the same one that runs through the whole tool: more power, steeper climb. Expect to spend real time learning it before it pays off.

If you are new to this whole idea, what a drip campaign actually is is a gentle starting point, and it applies equally to either tool.

Ease of use

MailerLite is the easier tool, and it is not close. The editor is clean, the dashboard does not overwhelm you, and a first-time user can build and send a decent campaign in an afternoon. That ease is a big part of why it is so popular with solo creators, writers, and small newsletters.

Brevo is more capable and, as a result, busier. The automation builder is powerful once you know it, but it takes longer to feel at home, and the spread of features (email, SMS, CRM, transactional) means more menus and more settings to wade through. None of it is badly designed. There is just more of it.

If you value getting up and running fast over having every channel in one place, MailerLite is the more pleasant daily tool.

Pricing at real list sizes

Starting prices are easy to compare. Real-world prices are where the two models pull apart, so here is roughly what you pay once you are actually running something. Treat these as ballpark figures and check each site for your exact numbers, because both vendors adjust their rate cards.

Say you have 2,500 contacts.

On MailerLite, 2,500 subscribers means using the pricing calculator rather than the headline starting price. Comfort gives you 10x the top of your subscriber tier in monthly sends, so a weekly campaign is usually fine; daily sending may push you toward Power for unlimited monthly sends. The exact bill depends on the subscriber tier and whether you choose Comfort or Power.

On Brevo, 2,500 contacts require checking the contact cap as well as the send volume. If you send those 2,500 people one campaign a week, that is roughly 10,000 emails a month, but Brevo's help docs list the 10,000-email tier with a lower contact cap than 2,500, so the cheapest tier may not be enough. If you want automation and landing pages, you are looking at Standard, not the old Business label. Send the list a daily email and you are at around 75,000 sends a month, which pushes you higher again. Same list, very different bills depending on how often you hit send.

Now scale the list to 25,000 contacts you only email once a month.

MailerLite charges you for storing 25,000 subscribers regardless of that light sending, which puts you well into the three-figure monthly range. Brevo charges you for 25,000 sends a month, which is cheap volume, so you stay in the lower paid tiers. This is the scenario where Brevo's model saves real money, and it is exactly the kind of large, infrequently mailed list a lot of small businesses sit on.

The lesson is not that one is cheaper across the board. It is that you have to map your own send frequency against your list size before the price tags mean anything. If you are weighing this against the wider field, the best bulk email services breaks down how volume-based pricing works across more providers.

Watch the hidden costs

Both tools have line items that do not show up in the headline price.

On Brevo, extra marketing seats are currently listed as an add-on around $9 per seat per month, and SMS is pay-as-you-go on top of your plan, priced per message by country. WhatsApp availability depends on higher plans. The 300/day free limit is a daily cap, so a free account cannot send a single large blast. And the cheap Starter tier does not include the landing page builder or A/B testing, which is what nudges people up to Standard.

On MailerLite, the jump from Comfort to Power is where unlimited monthly emails, unlimited user seats, multiple automation triggers, unlimited websites and landing pages, unlimited signup forms, and 24/7 live chat arrive. Transactional email through MailerSend is billed separately, so a SaaS team that needs both marketing and transactional sending is really paying for two products. And because the bill tracks active subscriber count, an uncleaned list quietly inflates your cost with contacts who never open anything.

Neither of these is a dealbreaker. They are just the kind of thing you only discover on the second invoice, so it is worth pricing your actual setup, seats and all, before you commit.

Deliverability

Both land in the inbox at rates that are competitive for their price tier, and for most senders the difference will not be the deciding factor. Brevo runs shared IP pools by default with dedicated IPs available on higher plans, which matters more for high-volume and transactional sending. MailerLite has invested heavily in its sending reputation and is well regarded for newsletter deliverability.

Whichever you choose, your own list hygiene and authentication setup affect inbox placement far more than the vendor does. If you want to get that part right, our email deliverability guide covers SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the list habits that actually change where you land.

So which one should you pick?

Here is the call by use case.

Pick MailerLite if you run a small or mid-size newsletter, you email your list often, and you want the cleanest tool for the lowest predictable price. Creators, writers, and small businesses sending regular campaigns to a list under roughly 10,000 people are its sweet spot. The paid-plan send allowance and the gentle learning curve are what you are buying.

Pick Brevo if you store a large list you mail less frequently and that list fits the tier cap, or if you want email, SMS, transactional messages, and a basic CRM in one account. The per-email billing means a big stored list can cost less than a subscriber-based tool when you send sparingly, and the bundled channels save you from stitching together separate tools. It is the better fit for a small business doing multi-channel customer messaging.

If you are squarely a newsletter person on a budget, MailerLite. If you are a small business that needs more than email and has a big list, Brevo.

Still weighing other names? Our roundups of the best Brevo alternatives and the best MailerLite alternatives put both tools next to the rest of the market, and if you are specifically trying to keep costs down, the best email marketing for small business goes wider on the cheap options.

A third option if neither fits

Both Brevo and MailerLite assume you are a marketer logging in to design campaigns and click send. That is the right tool for newsletters, promotions, and broadcasts.

It is the wrong tool when your emails are really driven by your application. If you are building a SaaS product on Supabase or Postgres, most of your important email is not a campaign at all. It is the welcome email after signup, the password reset, the trial-ending nudge, the "you left something half-finished" reminder. Those are triggered by what happens in your database, and trying to wire them through a marketing platform usually means brittle integrations and a lot of glue code.

Dreamlit is built for that case instead. It connects directly to your Supabase or Postgres database and builds the email workflows from your schema. You describe what you want in plain English, and it handles the trigger logic, the templates, the copy, and the timing. There is no campaign builder to learn because you are not running campaigns. You are wiring your product's email to your data.

The honest scope: Dreamlit is centered on database-triggered email workflows for Supabase and Postgres. It has no SMS, no landing pages, and no broadcast newsletter editor. It also does not ship a REST API or SMTP relay; it exposes an MCP server that works from Claude, Cursor, Lovable, and Bolt. So it is not a replacement for Brevo's SMS or MailerLite's newsletter editor. It is the tool for the database-driven email those two were never designed to handle. If that sounds like your problem, the piece on thinking in database-driven notifications explains the approach, and pricing lives at dreamlit.ai/pricing.

For everyone else, this stays a two-horse race. Big stored list plus transactional and SMS, check Brevo's send and contact caps. Simple, cheap newsletters you send often, go MailerLite.

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Frequently asked questions

Is Brevo or MailerLite cheaper?

It depends on how you send. Brevo bills mainly by emails sent, so if you store a big list but mail it occasionally, Brevo is usually cheaper, provided your contact count fits the paid tier. MailerLite bills by subscriber count and send volume: Comfort gives a 10x subscriber-tier send allowance, while Power includes unlimited monthly sends subject to fair use. If you email a small list often, MailerLite can still come out ahead. For a large list you only mail once a month, Brevo can win, but check both send volume and contact caps.

Does Brevo really have a free plan with 300 emails a day?

Yes. Brevo's free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day, which works out to roughly 9,000 a month, and you can store a large number of contacts on it (up to around 100,000). Emails carry Brevo branding until you upgrade, and some automation is capped. There is no fixed end date on the free plan.

How does MailerLite's free plan compare?

MailerLite's free plan covers up to 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with campaigns, basic automations, one website, one landing page, signup forms, and limited support. It is smaller than older MailerLite free tiers, but it caps you by subscriber count and monthly sends rather than by a daily send limit. MailerLite branding stays on emails until you upgrade.

Does MailerLite do transactional email and SMS like Brevo?

Not in the same way. MailerLite focuses on marketing email, newsletters, and basic automation. It has a separate transactional product, MailerSend, sold on its own pricing for API/SMTP email and SMS API use cases. The MailerLite marketing app does not bundle SMS marketing or a CRM. Brevo includes transactional email, pay-as-you-go SMS, plan-limited WhatsApp, and a basic CRM inside the same account, so if you want those channels together, Brevo is the broader tool.

Which one is easier to use?

MailerLite. Its editor and dashboard are cleaner and faster to learn, which is why a lot of solo creators and small newsletters pick it. Brevo does more, so the interface is busier and the automation builder takes longer to get comfortable with. If simplicity is your top priority, MailerLite is the friendlier pick.

Can I store a large contact list without paying for it on Brevo?

Mostly, yes on the free plan, but check paid-tier caps. Brevo charges primarily for emails sent rather than subscribers stored, and its free tier can hold a large list, but current Starter and Standard tiers also include contact-storage limits. That is still a structural advantage over subscriber-based tools like MailerLite when you mail infrequently, but it is no longer accurate to treat contact storage as unlimited on every paid tier.

Is there a third option if I run a SaaS or Supabase app?

If your emails are driven by what happens in your database (signups, password resets, trial reminders, usage alerts) rather than by manual newsletter sends, a marketing tool like Brevo or MailerLite is an awkward fit. Dreamlit connects to your Supabase or Postgres database and builds those email workflows from your schema, which is a different job than what these two are built for. Sources:

• https://www.brevo.com/pricing/
• https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/208589409-About-Brevo-s-pricing-plans
• https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/9168632514066-What-are-the-different-quotas-applied-in-Brevo
• https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing
• https://www.mailerlite.com/help/plan-and-billing
• https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing-mailersend