Brevo: the complete email marketing guide 2026

What is Brevo, in short

Brevo is an email marketing and contact CRM platform that started life as Sendinblue. Its free plan lets you send 300 emails a day and paid plans start at 6.33 euros a month with annual billing. It's the most popular option among SMBs and freelancers in Spain.

What is Brevo

Brevo is the former Sendinblue, the French company founded in 2012 that became the favorite email marketing tool of the Spanish market. The name change came in 2022, but the proposition remains the same: an affordable platform that combines email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp and a contact CRM in one place.

What sets Brevo apart from its rivals is the entry point. Its free plan gives you 300 emails a day, something Mailchimp removed years ago and which is still the perfect hook for anyone starting out. And the CRM is included in every plan, which in other tools you pay for separately.

I've used it on small client projects and on my own campaigns, and I'll tell you it delivers without fuss. It's not the most advanced on the market, but it's one of the ones that creates the least friction when your budget is real.

Another thing that makes it special in Spain is the language. The interface is in Spanish, support replies in Spanish and billing in euros doesn't surprise you with weird conversions. That seems like a small thing, but when you've spent years fighting with English tools, you notice it a lot.

What Brevo is for

Email marketing

The heart of Brevo is campaign sending. You design with a drag and drop editor, pick a template, segment your list and send. Deliverability is fine for its price range, with your own sending domain and SPF and DKIM authentication from the Starter plan.

Here it's worth separating two worlds that many people confuse. Email marketing sends promotions and newsletters to people who have given you permission. Cold email is something else, it's prospecting people who don't know you, and for that Brevo isn't the right tool because it's not built to warm up domains or manage deliverability at scale.

SMS and WhatsApp

Few tools in its range include SMS and WhatsApp out of the box. If your business lives on appointment reminders, order notifications or booking confirmations, this saves you from assembling a stack of two or three services and paying three invoices.

Contact CRM

Brevo includes a simple CRM for managing contacts, pipelines and deals. It's no Pipedrive, mind you, but for a freelancer who wants to see where each potential client stands and which emails they've received, it's more than enough and even lets you do decent follow-up.

Automation

The automation editor is visual. You build a welcome flow, an abandoned cart or a content drip without writing a line of code. The logic is the same as in cold sequences: messages that fire based on what the contact does, with waits and conditions.

Landing pages and forms

It has a built-in landing page and form builder. It's no Unbounce, but for capturing emails with a simple page it gets the job done and saves you another subscription.

How Brevo works

The typical flow is this. You create an account, import your contacts from a CSV or from the integrations with Shopify, WordPress or WooCommerce, and build your first campaign with a template.

Each contact is stored in the CRM with their full interaction history. You can segment by behavior, profile data or purchases, and launch campaigns aimed at each group. Segmentation is among the most accessible I've tried, because it guides you with segment templates instead of leaving you alone in front of the editor.

Automations are built on a visual canvas with triggers and actions. For example, if someone downloads your guide, they enter a three-email nurture flow and then move to a sales list. All without leaving the platform.

The weak point shows up when you grow. Large lists make the plans more expensive, and the most advanced features, like serious A/B testing or predictive sending, don't arrive until the higher plans. For an SMB it's not a problem. For a company with hundreds of thousands of contacts, it is.

How much Brevo costs in 2026

The prices I give you are from the official Brevo website in euros with annual billing. With monthly billing they go up around ten percent.

The free plan doesn't ask for a card and never expires. It's one of the few that stays genuinely free after the trial period, and that explains a good part of its popularity in Spain.

One detail worth knowing: the final price depends on email and contact volume. The pricing calculator on the website lets you move a slider and see the exact cost before paying, so there are no surprises.

Key Brevo features

• Free plan with 300 emails a day
• Visual marketing automation
• SMS and WhatsApp integrated
• Integrated contact CRM
• Landing pages and forms
• More than 150 integrations with everyday tools

Brevo versus the alternatives

Mailchimp was the king and still has the best brand, but its free plan stopped being free in practice and its price per volume climbs fast. Brevo beats it in Spain on price, on the free plan and on having Spanish-language support.

MailerLite is its most direct competitor. Cheaper in some ranges and with a better newsletter editor, but without SMS or WhatsApp out of the box and with a smaller community.

ActiveCampaign is another league. Its automation is much more powerful, with complex conditions, scoring and a deeper CRM, but it's also more expensive and has a real learning curve. If your problem is building complex nurture flows, don't compare Brevo with ActiveCampaign, because they don't play in the same division.

For lead generation in your own business, I recommend reading my article on B2B prospecting for freelancers, where I explain how email marketing fits into a complete acquisition strategy, and this one on prospecting tools for marketing agencies if you manage client accounts.

Who Brevo is for and who it isn't

Brevo is for SMBs, freelancers, small online stores and agencies managing modest clients. If your list doesn't go beyond a few thousand contacts and you want to send campaigns without paying a fortune, you'll struggle to find anything better in the Spanish market.

It's not for large marketing teams that need advanced omnichannel automation, nor for companies with huge databases. Nor for anyone looking for a serious sales CRM, because there it falls short and you're better off looking at a Pipedrive or a HubSpot.

If you work with real cold email, forget Brevo for that. You need a specialized tool with warmup and domain rotation, because Brevo is built for your own audiences, not for cold prospecting.

Pros and cons of Brevo

The good:

• Generous free plan that lasts forever
• Unbeatable price on paid plans
• SMS and WhatsApp included
• Integrated CRM at no extra cost
• Spanish interface and local support

The bad:

• Advanced automations require expensive plans
• Deliverability doesn't reach the level of specialized tools
• The CRM falls short for sales teams
• Price scales fast with contact volume

Is Brevo worth it?

Yes, for most SMBs and freelancers it's the best value for money in Spanish-language email marketing. The free plan lets you validate the tool without spending anything and the jump to Starter costs less than a coffee a day.

My advice is simple. Start on the free plan, build a welcome campaign and a couple of flows, and check deliverability with your own domain. If the tool responds, stay. When volume and complexity ask for more, you'll know exactly what you're missing and you can decide with data in hand.