Both Brevo and MailerLite advertise generous free plans, and when people ask me about Brevo vs MailerLite, the honest answer depends on how you actually send, not what the pricing page promises.
Brevo's free plan is generous on contacts, you can hold an unlimited number of subscribers, but it caps you at roughly 300 emails a day. That works fine if you have a large list you email occasionally, or if you're using Brevo for transactional email alongside marketing sends.
MailerLite flips that structure: it caps you around 1,000 subscribers on the free plan but lets you send more freely within that limit. If you're a creator with a small but growing list who emails several times a week, MailerLite's free plan tends to fit better than Brevo's.
MailerLite is known for a clean, genuinely beginner-friendly drag and drop builder, and its templates look polished without much fiddling. If you want to open the editor and have something send-ready in twenty minutes, that's where MailerLite earns its reputation.
Brevo, which used to be Sendinblue, has broader automation baked in, including SMS and WhatsApp alongside email, plus a built-in transactional email API and light CRM features. It's a more complete marketing stack if you need more than newsletters, but that breadth means a slightly steeper interface than MailerLite's.
Both are mid-market platforms with generally decent shared IP reputations, but shared IP means your inbox placement is partly tied to how well other senders on the same infrastructure behave, see dedicated IP vs shared IP email for how that tradeoff actually works. Whichever platform you pick, take the time to set your authentication records up properly rather than relying on the platform's defaults, see SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup.
Neither platform will rescue a list full of stale addresses, so the free plan's daily cap on Brevo or the subscriber cap on MailerLite matters less than whether the people on your list actually open what you send.
Brevo's paid pricing scales with how many emails you send rather than list size, so a large but infrequently-emailed list can stay cheap for a while. MailerLite's pricing scales with subscriber count instead, so a smaller, highly engaged list that you email daily stays affordable in a way it wouldn't on a volume-based platform.
Roughly speaking, expect both to land in a similar range at moderate list sizes, with the gap widening depending on whether your sending pattern is high-frequency-to-few or low-frequency-to-many.
If you need SMS, WhatsApp, or a transactional API bundled with your marketing sends, Brevo does more out of the box. If you're a creator or small business that wants the cleanest possible newsletter-sending experience without extra features getting in the way, MailerLite tends to feel lighter and faster to use.
If you're specifically building a content-driven newsletter business rather than a general marketing list, it's also worth comparing platforms built for that use case directly, see beehiiv vs Substack before committing either way.
It depends on your sending pattern. Brevo's free plan is generous on contacts but capped on daily sends, while MailerLite caps contacts but lets you send more freely within that limit.
Yes, Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, includes SMS and WhatsApp alongside email. MailerLite is focused on email and light automation rather than multichannel messaging.
Yes, both support CSV import and offer migration tools, though automations and segments typically need to be rebuilt by hand rather than transferring automatically.
Neither Brevo nor MailerLite can save you from a messy list or a domain missing SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records, that part is still on you regardless of which one you pick. I offer a free audit at Unbury if you want a second pair of eyes before your next campaign.