Mailchimp vs Brevo: A feature by feature comparison

The winner - Mailchimp

4.5

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What Mailchimp features are better than Brevo?

Mailchimp and Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) are among the finest email marketing tools in the market. 

In the Shopify App Store, Mailchimp has a 3.4 rating while Brevo has a rating of 4.2. But that’s probably not enough information to make a buying decision, is it?

You need to know if the tool has features tailored for ecommerce. It’s also important to know if it can boost your conversions without costing a lot, leading to a higher ROI.

To help you make the right decision, we’ve put together this Mailchimp vs. Brevo guide.

Mailchimp vs Brevo: quick overview

Brevo and Mailchimp are both popular tools with practical features for ecommerce stores. Each tool has areas where it shines and others where it’s lacking.

We’ll do an in-depth comparison of the marketing features that Brevo and Mailchimp offer. We’ll compare their pricing, integrations, customer support, and ease of getting started.

Here’s a quick summary.

Mailchimp vs. Brevo comparison: feature by feature

Let’s get a little deeper in the comparison.

Ease of getting started

A marketing software that has a short learning curve and fewer complications makes it much easier to get the hang of it.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp has an easy signup process.

You’ll need to provide your credit card details to access the 30-day trial for the Standard and Essentials plans. However, you don’t need to provide your credit card details for the free plan.

Details required during signup include:

• Email address and username
• Account name
• Business name
• Phone number
• Business physical address
• Website URL
• Number of contacts
• What you expect to achieve with Mailchimp

For a first-time user, Mailchimp is fairly easy to use. It has a clear design and intuitive navigation.

The best part is that you get a checklist that helps you set up your account properly. It’s a helpful feature for ecommerce business owners dipping their hands in email marketing for the first time.

A downside here is that Mailchimp has a lot of functionality, which makes it hard to find the features you need. For instance, we had a hard time finding where to change a sender’s email.

Brevo

Brevo’s signup process is easy as well.

You don’t need to provide your credit card details to get started with Brevo’s free plan. Once you choose to upgrade, you’ll have to provide those details.

For signup, you’ll need to provide details like:

• Name
• Business name and website address
• Email address
• Physical address
• Number of people on your team
• Number of contacts

You’ll also need to verify your phone number.

Brevo has a beginner-friendly user interface.

You may find it a little different than other email marketing automation software. But you’ll find everything you need with ease. For instance, unlike Mailchimp, we could easily find where to change the sender’s email address.

However, a little more guidance for people with no prior experience with marketing automation software would be good.

Whether you use Brevo or Mailchimp, you get an intuitive user interface.

It’s easy to find features in Brevo, but it’s a struggle with Mailchimp. But Brevo fails to provide proper guidance to beginners, an area where Mailchimp shines.

Building an email campaign

With both builders, it’s easy to add your campaign details and get it running.

Mailchimp gives you a user-friendly email builder powered with AI tools.

Using Brevo to build an email campaign is easy. The inbox preview tool, in particular, is helpful.

Neither Mailchimp or Brevo goes the extra mile to provide out-of-the-box features to help ecommerce business owners with their email campaigns, like Omnisend has done with its Product Picker.

Generating unique coupon codes, for instance, is only possible through integrations like Coupon Carrier.

Let’s look at the features each offers for building email campaigns:

Mailchimp

Mailchimp has some unique capabilities like sending postcards, creating surveys, and getting recommendations for your subject lines.

It also gives you 25 inbox preview tokens courtesy of Litmus. But that’s only available on the paid plans.

In addition, you can only schedule email campaigns under the paid plans.

Brevo

Nothing much stands out about Brevo’s email campaign features.

However, the email editor isn’t already populated with your branding data, like colors and logo when you open it. You have to import your brand elements into the editor, and this feature isn’t easy to find.

What’s more, the A/B test can only test the subject line or content. Mailchimp allows you to test the subject line, content, send time, and ‘From’ name.

Mailchimp wins this round. It offers better capabilities for building email campaigns. It supports more email types, has more templates, and you can test more elements with A/B testing.

Marketing automation

Automation helps you save time spent on repetitive tasks. You can focus on other areas like creating strong ecommerce marketing strategies and analyzing your campaign results.

Let’s do a Mailchimp vs. Brevo comparison in this area.

Mailchimp

The user-friendliness of Mailchimp’s automation is similar to other top email automation software like Omnisend and Klaviyo.

You get over 70 pre-built journey templates. The templates include different social media channels (additional integrations might be required) and a ready workflow structure. Adding the content is up to you.

Standard and Premium plan customers get multiple starting and branching point capabilities.

An area Mailchimp fails in is the inability to add web push notifications or built-in text messages in automation. For this functionality, you will need extra integration, for example with Twilio.

Brevo

Marketing automation using Brevo is logical. Plenty of pre-built journey templates are available, but not as many as Mailchimp.

Like Mailchimp, you only get a ready workflow, but adding content is up to you. Plus, Brevo doesn’t pre-fill the company logo and branding assets.

But unlike Mailchimp, Brevo lets you add SMS, WhatsApp, and web push notifications into the workflow, which is a great addition.

You can also add splits and conditions to the automation.

Brevo also provides a transactional email offering with a pre-built automation template for it, which is very helpful for beginners.

That said, a downside to Brevo is that the automation capabilities are a step behind when compared to other email marketing tools.

Brevo wins. Its support for multiple channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and web notifications helps ecommerce store owners adopt an omnichannel marketing approach.

Signup forms and landing pages

Signup forms and landing pages are powerful lead generation tools.

A well-designed signup form strategy helps you build your audience and boost your conversions.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp doesn’t offer ready-to-use signup forms. But it’s pretty easy to design modern signup forms using your brand’s colors.

You can also measure the performance of your forms. However, only basic analytics are available, such as the number of subscribers generated.

For landing pages, you get nine easily customizable templates and a powerful landing page builder.

Managing the list of subscribers is fairly easy on Mailchimp. You can tag and segment your lists with ease.

It’s important to note that, unlike other marketing tools, you’ll still pay for repetitive contacts in your database. This can cause unnecessary expenses and extra work to ensure there aren’t any duplicates on your lists.

Another weakness with Mailchimp is that you can only have one hosted popup for an audience.

Brevo

Brevo’s forms look very similar to Mailchimp’s. No ready-made templates offered. When you open the form builder, you’ll find one editable form suggestion and a flexible builder to edit it according to your brand. 

The form performance analytics that you can see in Brevo is the number of signups through that particular form. 

Although signup forms are available for all Brevo customers, the landing page builder is only available for the Business and Enterprise plan.

Contact management in Brevo is rather basic. For instance, you can’t add tags. What’s unique, however, is:

• Brevo’s scoring system for contacts. It facilitates personalization and segmentation.
• The multi-list subscription feature. You can ask customers about their interests and preferences during signup. The form then automatically adds the contact to the corresponding contact list.
• You can add CAPTCHA to your forms. But the setup is a little complicated
• You can block contacts

A major flaw with Brevo is its inability to automatically launch your popup forms on your website. You have to manually copy and paste your HTML or iframe snippet into the website code to integrate them.

In addition, contact migration from other tools is lacking. This is a vital feature provided by other email marketing tools.

Mailchimp’s landing page builder is one of the best you can find. It’s comprehensive and suitable for an ecommerce store. Brevo’s landing page builder seems a bit more complicated.

The form builders look like a tie. Both don’t have ready-made templates and you have to customize them on your own.

Although Brevo provides a few unique features to help ecommerce businesses, it also lacks a lot of important features, such as contact migration, form analytics, and a seamless form launch into the website. In this regard, Mailchimp wins.  

Segmentation

Email list segmentation enables you to send personalized messages, which increases the likelihood of conversions.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers a powerful segmentation tool which includes three basic ready-to-go segments. When creating a new segment, you can include up to 5 conditions in each segment. While this may be enough for most ecommerce businesses, knowing you can add more when the need arises would be good.

Mailchimp also offers predictive segmentation, which puts customers into segments based on their likelihood to buy. However, this feature is part of its advanced segmentation and is available only for Premium plan users.

Brevo

Brevo’s segmentation features are a bit basic for ecommerce when compared to other tools like Klaviyo and Omnisend. There are only a few ready segments: most engaged subscribers, inactive email subscribers, all email subscribers and contacts from a country code.

That said, all plans get advanced segmentation, including the free one. You can sort subscribers based on source, email activity, and attributes like location.

A downside is that you can’t segment your contacts based on attributes related to ecommerce, such as shopping behavior and website activity.

Mailchimp’s segmentation capabilities are more suited for ecommerce businesses. 

Analytics

Good analytics can help you make or break your business. Comprehensive insights on customer behavior, email engagement, and revenue sources are all crucial for online stores. But other websites probably won’t miss them at all. So what can you expect from these two platforms?

Mailchimp

Mailchimp analytics are wide. You get metrics, such as:

• Conversions
• Standard opens, clicks, and unsubscribe rates
• Social media engagement
• Landing page engagement
• Email forwards and opens

You get real-time statistics on your campaigns — all in a centralized location.

Additionally, you can get shareable comparative reports for regular and RSS campaigns you’ve sent in the last 18 months. This can help you identify patterns with your engagements.

However, the advanced reporting is only available to Premium plan customers.

Although Mailchimp provides a variety of analytics, tools like Klaviyo outperform it with some ecommerce insights.

Brevo

Brevo’s analytics provides geolocation data and device statistics. You get open and click activity reports, as well as a heat map. But these are only available in the Business and Enterprise plans.

Conversion reports are also available to see the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp’s analytics will be enough for the vast majority of ecommerce businesses. However, they are only available on the highest tier plan. Lower tier plans offer quite limited reporting. 

It’s a similar situation with Brevo. On the lower tier plans you’ll get very basic email engagement reports, and the ecommerce insights are available only on the higher tier plans.

Overall, Mailchimp offers better reporting if you are ready to pay for it.

Customer support

Support needs to be available when you get stuck or need guidance with the features.

Mailchimp

For Mailchimp’s free plan, customer support is only available through email for the first 30 days. Paid plans come with:

• 24/7 email and live chat support
• Onboarding support with dedicated onboarding offered in the Premium plan
• Marketing advice from experts

Premium plan members get phone support as well.

The quality of support isn’t bad. We got a response from the live chat support in about 2-3 minutes.

There are loads of useful resources and guides on the website too. This includes a library with articles categorized by marketing channel, business stage, etc.

There’s also Mailchimp 101, which is a tutorial for Mailchimp beginners. For those who prefer videos, there are plenty of YouTube videos available in a variety of languages.

Brevo

With Brevo, everyone gets unlimited email support. 

24/7 phone and live chat support are only available in the higher-priced plans though. Enterprise plan customers also get a dedicated account manager.

Like Mailchimp, there are YouTube tutorials and a help center with articles categorized by topic.

There’s also a free email marketing course—Brevo Academy, which includes a certification.

Mailchimp offers more support to ecommerce business owners, such as marketing advice and onboarding support. However, Free plan users are left on their own.

Integrations

Integrations make it possible for the email marketing tool to work with your other existing software without restrictions.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp integrates with over 300 tools of a wide variety.

From customer service to developer tools, analytics, payments, and point-of-sale tools, you can integrate almost all your favorite ecommerce tools.

Brevo

Brevo has over 150 integrations, half that of Mailchimp’s. However, they cover a wide range of functionalities and have some integrations with connectors like Zapier.

Categories covered include payment services, helpdesk, contact management, CMS, and CRMs, among others.

Both tools are generous with integrations, but Mailchimp offers more than Brevo.

Compatibility with other marketing channels

An email marketing tool that helps you connect with your customers through other channels is great. It enables you to boost customer engagement and expand your reach.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp connects with many marketing channels including:

• SMS
• Facebook ads
• Instagram ads
• Google ads

It lacks compatibility with push notifications (both web and mobile). You can get those channels via integrations with other tools.

Brevo

Brevo connects with:

• SMS
• Push notifications
• Facebook ads – available for Business and Enterprise plan customers

You can also connect with your customers through Brevo Conversations. This is a live chat via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and a chat widget.

Brevo takes this one. It supports more marketing channels than Mailchimp does.

Generative AI tools

Regarding AI features, Mailchimp has more of them to offer. Recently, it has launched Intuit Assist which can help you personalize and create content and subject lines, optimize your marketing strategy, and more.

Meanwhile, Brevo, offers email content generator only.

Mailchimp has more robust AI tools.

Price comparison

When choosing a plan, pay more attention to the features offered on each plan. Not just the price.

The most basic plans often lack the features necessary to effectively market your ecommerce store.

Mailchimp has four plans:

• Free
• Essentials: Starts at $13/month  
• Standard: Starts at $20/month 
• Premium: Starts at $350/month

The free and Essentials plans lack features like pre-built customer journeys, dynamic content, and send time optimization.

Brevo has four plans:

• Free
• Starter: Starts at $25/month  
• Business: Starts at $65/month  
• Brevo+: Custom

The free and Starter plans lack features like a landing page builder and A/B testing.

Summary: which one wins?

If you are in the early stages of starting your ecommerce business, you can use Brevo or Mailchimp. However, if you are a more established business, we recommend choosing Mailchimp. It offers more advanced features that cater to your specific needs.

If you’re looking for a solution for a blog or non-profit organization, Brevo is cheaper while providing enough features to support your needs.

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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.