Brevo vs Mailerflow: Pricing Models and Features Compared

Brevo and Mailerflow sit on opposite sides of one structural decision: Brevo prices on email volume tiers, while Mailerflow charges by contacts and gives unlimited emails on every paid plan. That single difference drives most of the practical consequences below — what you pay as your list grows, what you pay when you send more often, and which plan you land on when your list is large but your sending is uneven. Brevo's entry point is a free-forever plan with no credit card required, and Mailerflow's is a Free plan with 2,500 contacts and 10,000 emails a month. Everything in the comparison table was verified on 11 October 2026 against Brevo's pricing page and Mailerflow's own pricing; where a detail isn't listed there, check the official page rather than trusting a summary.

Comparison table (verified on 11 October 2026)

Verified 11 October 2026 on brevo.com/pricing and mailerflow.ai pricing. Brevo's exact contact limits per tier vary by plan and billing period — confirm them on the official page before you commit.

Pricing and plan limits: volume tiers vs contact tiers

Brevo's model charges for how much you send. The free-forever plan is aimed at individuals and solopreneurs building an online presence, Starter starts from 5,000 emails a month for single users beginning multi-channel marketing, and Standard is positioned for small businesses ready to automate and test campaigns. Yearly billing takes 10% off, and SMS credit is sold separately rather than bundled.

Mailerflow's model charges for how many contacts you store. Free covers 2,500 contacts and 10,000 emails a month. Paid plans run €9.90 (5,000 contacts), €29.90 (15,000), €69.90 (50,000), €199 (200,000) and €499 (500,000) — and every one of them sends unlimited emails. Yearly billing costs the same as 10 months.

A worked example

This is an illustrative calculation, not a quote from either vendor. Say you have 12,000 contacts and send four campaigns a month, so roughly 48,000 emails monthly.

• Under a volume model, 48,000 emails pushes you well past a 5,000-email entry tier and into a higher sending band, even though your list is only 12,000 people.
• Under a contact model, 12,000 contacts lands on Mailerflow's Growth plan at €29.90, with unlimited sends — the fourth campaign costs nothing extra.

The reverse case matters too: if you have 800 contacts and send 60,000 emails a month (a high-frequency newsletter to a small, engaged list), a volume model can be cheaper than paying for contact headroom you don't need. Run your own numbers against both pricing pages before deciding.

Email editor and templates

Brevo's Starter plan includes a drag & drop email editor, email templates and an AI content generator. In practice, that means you pick or build a layout, then use AI to help with the words inside it.

Mailerflow takes a different route. There's a visual block editor (headings, heroes, products, columns, social links) and reusable templates, plus an AI email builder where you describe the email you want and get a complete responsive design back, along with subject lines and preview text. The workflow difference is where the AI sits: assisting copy inside an editor versus generating the design itself. Both approaches are legitimate — try each on a real campaign you'd actually send, not a demo, and see which one gets you to a finished email faster.

Automation

Brevo's marketing automation arrives on the Standard plan and allows an unlimited number of automated, multi-step workflows. If workflow count is your constraint, that's a genuinely strong position.

Mailerflow's automations are visual, with waits, conditions, webhooks and AI steps, triggered by signups, events, dates, inactivity and website behavior. There's also an AI automation builder: describe a workflow in a sentence and it drafts the trigger, waits, conditions and emails for you to review before activation. The trade-off is that active automations are capped by plan — 3 on Free, 10 on Starter, 50 on Growth, unlimited on Pro and above.

When you evaluate either tool, check which limit actually binds you: number of workflows, number of steps per workflow, or number of contacts entering the workflow per month. A platform with unlimited workflows but a low contact-entry ceiling can be more restrictive than it looks.

Segmentation and personalization

Brevo includes advanced segmentation on Starter, alongside basic reporting and analytics. That covers the standard cases: split by engagement, by list, by attributes you've stored.

Mailerflow builds dynamic segments on fields, tags, engagement, events and website behavior, and adds AI segmentation — describe the audience in plain language and it builds the segment. Personalization steps and website-behavior data via a JS SDK let you tailor emails to what each contact actually read or did.

What to test in a trial

Ask one question of both tools: can I build a segment like "clicked in the last 30 days but hasn't purchased" without exporting data to a spreadsheet, and can I reuse that exact segment as an automation trigger? If the answer is no on either count, you'll end up maintaining two systems instead of one.

Deliverability and sending infrastructure

Mailerflow handles own-domain sending with guided DKIM, SPF and DMARC setup and automatic verification, automatically suppresses bounces and complaints, and applies reputation monitoring and warm-up limits. That's the plumbing you want in place before your first large send.

Brevo is an established multi-channel platform covering email and SMS; for deliverability specifics such as shared versus dedicated IPs and warm-up policy, ask both vendors directly and get the answer in writing for your expected volume. Neither answer is a substitute for sending to people who opted in.

Transactional email, API and integrations

Mailerflow's transactional email API runs on a high-priority lane with templates and variables, and the REST API includes scoped keys, idempotency keys, an OpenAPI spec, code samples and a JS SDK. Signed real-time webhooks with retries and delivery logs make it straightforward to keep your application in sync with what actually happened to each message.

Brevo's verified Starter features include MCP for ChatGPT & Claude, and SMS is available as a separate credit purchase. Brevo is generally known as a multi-channel suite spanning email, SMS, chat and CRM — for transactional limits, endpoints and SLAs, go to Brevo's own developer documentation, since those details change and shouldn't be taken from a third-party summary.

Support, data location and compliance

Brevo offers email support in 6 languages on Starter. Mailerflow hosts data in Europe and provides GDPR tooling: data export, erasure, consent logs and configurable retention, plus embeddable signup forms with double opt-in and consent records.

If compliance is a deciding factor, put these four questions to both vendors:

1. Where is my contact data stored, and can it stay in a specific region?
2. What is the retention policy for contacts, logs and suppression lists?
3. Can I produce a per-contact consent log on request?
4. What is the DPA process, and who signs it?

Which one to choose

Choose Brevo if you want a free-forever entry point with no credit card, you need SMS and multi-channel marketing in one place, MCP access for ChatGPT & Claude matters to your workflow, or you'd rather pay for email volume than for list size — particularly if your list is small and your sending is heavy.

Choose Mailerflow if your list is large but your sending is bursty or high-volume, you want unlimited emails on every paid plan, you want an AI builder that generates the complete email design from a description, you need transactional email on a high-priority lane, or EU data hosting and free migration help on eligible paid plans matter to you. Mailerflow's pricing page lists the plan-by-plan contact and automation limits.

How to decide in 20 minutes

1. Export your last three months of send volume and your current list size from your existing tool.
2. Price both models against those two numbers — not against the plan names.
3. Build one real campaign in each editor.
4. Check the one automation trigger you actually depend on, and confirm it exists on the plan you're considering.
5. Confirm the migration path: Mailerflow imports CSV with duplicate and validity checks, custom fields and tags, and offers free migration help (contacts, suppression lists, templates, core automations) on eligible paid plans.

FAQ

Is Brevo free forever?

Yes. Brevo offers a free forever plan with no credit card needed, aimed at individuals and solopreneurs (verified 11 October 2026 on brevo.com/pricing). Contact and sending limits apply, so check the official page for the current numbers.

Does Mailerflow have a free plan?

Yes — 2,500 contacts and 10,000 emails a month, with 1 sending domain, 1 user and 3 active automations. Paid plans start at €9.90/month and include unlimited emails.

Can I migrate my Brevo contacts and templates?

Mailerflow supports CSV import with duplicate and validity checks, custom fields and tags, and offers free migration help covering contacts, suppression lists, templates and core automations on eligible paid plans. Export your Brevo data first and check the format before importing.

Does Brevo charge for SMS?

SMS credit is sold separately from the email plans (verified 11 October 2026 on brevo.com/pricing). If SMS is part of your channel mix, factor that into the total cost.

Is Mailerflow's pricing per contact or per email?

Per contact. Emails are unlimited on every paid plan, so sending more campaigns doesn't move you to a higher tier — only adding contacts does.

If the volume-versus-contacts math points your way, the fastest way to settle it is to run your own numbers inside the product: try Mailerflow on the Free plan (2,500 contacts, 10,000 emails a month, AI automation builder included), import your contacts by CSV, and ask about free migration help on eligible paid plans.