The pricing models are the real difference
Brevo meters sends. MailerLite meters subscribers. The same list can be cheap on one platform and expensive on the other, and which way it falls depends entirely on how often you mail. One wrinkle on the Brevo side since its 2025 pricing change: each email volume tier also caps how many contacts you can store, so a big list can force a higher tier even if you rarely send.
Take a 20,000-contact list you email twice a month. On MailerLite you pay for the 20,000-subscriber tier, and the bill doesn't move whether you send two campaigns or twenty. On Brevo that same list generates 40,000 sends a month, and your plan has to cover the volume. Add a welcome sequence, a re-engagement flow, and a resend to non-openers, and the send count climbs while the subscriber count stays flat.
Flip the scenario and Brevo wins. A 60,000-contact list that gets one careful monthly newsletter costs MailerLite users a large-list tier every month, engaged or not. Brevo only bills the 60,000 sends. That's the pattern to remember: infrequent senders with big lists lean Brevo, frequent senders and automation-heavy programs lean MailerLite.
One detail in MailerLite's favor on the billing mechanics: it bills active subscribers only. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts don't count toward your tier, though anyone active at any point in a billing cycle counts for that cycle even if you delete them later.
Which free plan gives you more?
Brevo's free plan is bigger on volume, MailerLite's is more complete as a product. Brevo lets you send 300 emails a day, roughly 9,000 a month if you spread campaigns out, and store up to 100,000 contacts at no cost. MailerLite's free plan caps you at 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, but includes automations, a website, a landing page, signup forms, two user seats, and all three of its email editors.
The daily cap is Brevo's catch. Unused sends don't roll over to the next day, so a time-sensitive campaign to even a mid-sized free-plan list has to go out in 300-recipient batches. MailerLite's catch is the subscriber ceiling: 250 contacts is one decent lead magnet away from an upgrade, and the free tier shrank from 500 subscribers during the platform's 2025 and 2026 plan changes.
If you're choosing a free plan to park a big list while you figure things out, Brevo. If you're a new creator who wants the whole toolkit while your list is tiny, MailerLite.
What the entry paid plans actually include
Brevo's Starter plan runs from $9 a month for 5,000 emails a month with no daily sending limit, and that low price comes with two gates worth knowing about. Automation is capped at 2,000 contacts, and every email carries a "Sent with Brevo" footer unless you pay a $9 monthly add-on to remove it. Proper unlimited automation, A/B testing, advanced reporting, and a logo-free footer all arrive with the Standard plan, which starts at $18 a month.
MailerLite's Comfort plan starts at $12 a month and takes the opposite approach: nearly the full toolset from the first paid dollar. Unlimited templates, campaign auto-resend, multivariate testing, dynamic content, the AI writing assistant, and no MailerLite branding are all in. The constraint is volume rather than features. Comfort's monthly send ceiling is ten times the top of your subscriber tier, so a 1,000-subscriber tier gets 10,000 sends a month. Outgrow that and the Power plan removes the ceiling entirely, with unlimited monthly sending under a fair use policy, from $25 a month at the smallest tier.
So the entry decision is really a question about what you'd rather have gated. Brevo gates features and ungates volume pricing at the low end. MailerLite gates volume on Comfort and ungates features.
How does automation compare?
MailerLite ships automation on every plan including free, while Brevo makes you climb a tier for serious workflows. Brevo Starter's 2,000-contact automation cap makes it a newsletter plan in practice; anything sequence-driven needs Standard. Once you're on Standard, though, Brevo's workflow builder handles unlimited multi-step sequences, and the platform layers on send-time optimization and event-based triggers from your site.
MailerLite's builder is friendlier to start with and covers welcome sequences, tagging, and date-based flows on any plan. Its more advanced logic, including multiple triggers per automation, sits on the Power plan. Neither platform's published documentation settles which builder handles deeply branched workflows more gracefully, and that's the kind of question our full testing pass will answer; until then, the honest summary is that MailerLite gets you automating sooner and Brevo automates at larger scale for less feature-gating once you're past $18.
Beyond the inbox: channels and extras
The two products are drifting toward different jobs. Brevo has been building a multichannel marketing and sales platform: SMS credits on any plan, WhatsApp campaigns and push notifications on Professional, live chat, and a sales CRM with pipelines bundled alongside the marketing tools. Its Professional plan, from $499 a month at 150,000 emails a month, includes ten seats and phone support, which tells you who it's courting.
MailerLite has been building a creator business-in-a-box. Websites, landing pages, paid newsletter subscriptions, and digital product sales are native features, so a solo creator can run list, site, and storefront from one login. It doesn't try to be your CRM or your SMS platform.
Transactional email is a clean dividing line. Brevo includes transactional sending, SMTP relay, and API access on every plan, free included. MailerLite routes transactional email to MailerSend, a separate product with separate billing. If your app sends receipts and password resets, Brevo consolidates that on one bill; with MailerLite you're managing two products.
Deliverability: what can honestly be said
Both platforms send from shared IP pools on their lower plans, which means your inbox placement rides heavily on your own list hygiene and sending behavior, whichever logo is in the footer. Brevo sells dedicated IPs on its Professional and Enterprise plans and includes one with Enterprise, along with deliverability specialist support hours on Professional. MailerLite reserves dedicated IPs and deliverability consultation for its Enterprise tier.
We haven't run our own seed-list placement tests on either platform yet, so we won't quote inbox rates here. Our individual Brevo review and MailerLite review track the current published testing data and will carry our own figures once testing completes.
Which one should you choose?
Choose Brevo if your list is large relative to how often you mail it, if you want SMS or WhatsApp in the same tool, if your app needs transactional email without a second product, or if a built-in sales CRM saves you a separate subscription. The free plan's 100,000-contact storage also makes it the better parking spot for a big legacy list.
Choose MailerLite if you send weekly or run automation-heavy sequences and want a bill that tracks list size instead of send volume, if you're a creator who'd use the websites, paid newsletters, and digital product features, or if you want real automation and a clean, unbranded footer from the very first paid tier. Power's unlimited sending is the simplest cost model in this comparison for high-frequency senders.