MailerLite vs Brevo: Feature by feature comparison

The winner – Brevo

4.1

Not great not terrible

Which Brevo features are better than MailerLite?

MailerLite vs Brevo, which is the right solution for you?

We’ve created a side-by-side comparison of their features, pricing, and more, to help you decide.

MailerLite vs Brevo: Quick overview

Let’s start with the most basic question: What are Brevo and MailerLite?

Brevo provides marketing tools across multiple channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook ads, and web push notifications. Our rating for this tool is 4.1.

MailerLite helps ecommerce businesses design engaging newsletters, popups, and landing pages. You can automate your campaigns and integrate them with social media marketing, and more.

The rating of MailerLite on Email Tools Guide is 4.0.

We’ll get into the details of the features each of these tools provides and see how these tools support ecommerce business owners. But first, a quick summary.

Ease of getting started

Always go for a software solution with an easy learning curve. You’ll spend less time figuring out how to maneuver the tool and more time using it to build winning email campaigns.

Which one is easier to set up, MailerLite or Brevo?

Let’s find out.

MailerLite

Besides the basic details common with all tools like providing your company name, email, and physical address, you’ll take a total of seven steps, including:

• Verifying ownership of your website
• Selecting the tools you’re interested in
• Giving details about your subscribers

Once you fill in these details, you still have to wait for MailerLite to review your account.

If you just want to test the features before choosing an email marketing tool, this process can look slightly redundant. However, MailerLite does this to avoid scammers.

Other than that, the MailerLite interface looks very clean and it’s very intuitive.

On MailerLite you won’t find any unusual titles — well-known functions have understandable and standard titles. That’s why everything, including settings are easy to spot. Things like changing a sender’s email address can be done in a minute. Kudos for that.

A few more benefits once you start using MailerLite:

• Email verifier to improve deliverability
• iPad subscribe app to collect leads offline
• Website creation option

Brevo

Brevo’s signup process isn’t complex either. And you don’t need to provide your credit card details.

You’ll only need to provide the standard details, such as names, the size of your team, and the number of contacts.

Verification of your phone number is also a part of the process.

What we found a bit surprising in Brevo is the “Conversations” section that comes up as the first window after signing up. Usually, platforms start with things like getting started wizards, most useful functions, and so on. But this might be related with the recent Brevo rebranding and positioning as an all-in-one CRM platform. 

Other than that, Brevo looks good. All necessary settings can be reached within a few clicks. Maybe a little more guidance with getting started would be useful for the beginners. But the rest seems pretty straightforward.

MailerLite seems a bit more intuitive, but it takes time to get your account approved. 

Meanwhile, Brevo doesn’t have this hussle of confirmations but it might take a moment to catch up with the platform’s features.

Building an email campaign

Let’s see how easy it is to build an email campaign using these two tools, and which one offers a better set of features.

MailerLite

Building your email campaign with MailerLite is easy.

You can build your email campaign using:

• A drag-and-drop editor: very intuitive and well-organized
• Rich-text editor: at first sight, a bit more complicated
• Custom HTML editor: lets you code your emails. It’s available only with the Advanced plan

Or choose from a selection of 90 modern templates.

MailerLite’s email builder has a bunch of useful features to support ecommerce business owners, such as:

• Option to add product listing elements to your email directly from your store. That’s a time-saving function.
• Options to add surveys, quizzes, events, countdown timers, etc. These things increase email engagement.  
• Option to add Twitter and Facebook posts to your emails
• Automatic resending of unopened emails. This feature boosts overall campaign performance. Only a few email tools we’ve reviewed have this feature. It’s very rare, but a great addition.

So MailerLite has a very good email builder and email campaign functionality. However, we also found some downsides:

• You’d expect that adding the logo in the account settings means you’ll not have to add it again in your emails, but that’s not the case in MailerLite.
• All beautiful templates are available on paid plans only.
• There is no obvious button or way to personalize email content, including the contact information. We had to look for it in the knowledge base. 

Brevo

While Brevo also offers a drag-and-drop email builder like most top email marketing tools, the editing process is not as smooth.

It offers 42 email templates, including occasion-specific templates. Some are quite modern and aesthetic, but others look outdated.

There are a few things Brevo is missing that could make things easier for ecommerce store owners:

• It doesn’t offer the option to set up your brand’s colors in the first steps. You have to add them when building your campaign.
• The ‘repeat block’ that helps with personalization isn’t very user-friendly.
• You can’t pull products with descriptions directly from your store.This means all products and their details will need to be added manually every time you build your email campaign.

Here’s a comparison of the email building features offered by MailerLite and Brevo.

MailerLite is the better option here. It goes the extra mile to cater to ecommerce businesses by offering features that help boost subscriber engagement and sales.

Marketing automation

Both MailerLite and Brevo’s marketing automation features are quite limited in comparison to bigger, more powerful platforms like Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, or Omnisend. However, they are very user-friendly and can definitely be sufficient for small ecommerce businesses.

Both tools provide user-friendly automation interfaces and logic-ready workflows. However, you have to prepare the content of your emails and messages all by yourself.

Brevo is ahead of MailerLite in terms of compatibility with other marketing channels. You can integrate text messages and web push notifications into your workflows and increase your reach.

Also, Brevo offers a few more unique features such as transactional emails and best sending time options.

Let’s do a side-by-side comparison.

Brevo takes the lead when it comes to marketing automation. The more comprehensive functionality, transactional emails, and additional marketing channels leave MailerLite far behind Brevo.

Signup forms and landing pages

Signup forms and landing pages are essential to growing your email list. Let’s see how these tools fare in this aspect.

MailerLite

The signup form feature is one of MailerLite’s best functionality.  

You can create popups, embedded forms, half-screen forms, narrow bars, and more. 

For this, you can choose from among 24 beautiful, modern-looking templates, and easily edit them if needed.

The signup forms come with analytics capabilities where you can see metrics like:

• Number of subscribers
• Views
• Conversion rate

You can do A/B tests and analyze the real-time performance of your forms.

In addition to that, MailerLite offers 49 modern and customizable landing page templates that you can use for your business. You can also choose to create your landing page from scratch with an intuitive editor.

Brevo

Brevo’s forms section isn’t as robust. For starters, you don’t get modern templates for designing your forms. Instead, you’ve got to build them yourself from scratch.

The good thing here is that the editor isn’t very complicated to use.

What’s more?

Brevo’s forms lack an analytics feature, which makes it slightly tricky for ecommerce businesses.

In addition, the landing pages feature is only available to Enterprise and Business plan users, making it difficult for small businesses to use it. However, if you’re on one of these plans, you’ll get loads of customizable landing page templates.

Finally, Brevo’s features are pretty basic when it comes to list management. For instance, it lacks the option to add tags. But it does provide an out-of-the-box scoring system that makes it easy to personalize your communications.

Brevo also provides a multi-list feature. Subscribers can choose the list they want to sign up for. You also get the option to blocklist your contacts.

You can also include a captcha in your form, but the step is a bit complicated.

MailerLite offers the best features for building popups and landing pages. The analytics feature and engaging templates make it a great choice for ecommerce businesses.

Segmentation

List segmentation powers personalization, which builds customer engagement and increases conversions. Let’s see how the two tools compare in this aspect.

It’s a tie. Both tools lack the option to segment the audiences based on their website browsing behavior, purchase behavior, lifetime value, and other criteria that would be helpful for ecommerce stores. 

It’s obvious the segmentation feature isn’t advanced enough on both platforms for well-established ecommerce businesses, but it can be a great start for ecommerce beginners. Also, if you don’t want to segment your audience, or feel like you’re not ready for it yet, both MailerLite or Brevo will serve your purpose.

Analytics

Never overlook the analytics part of an email marketing platform, because it can help you continuously improve your email marketing campaigns. Let’s compare MailerLite and Brevo on their analytics capabilities.

MailerLite

MailerLite has a simple reporting dashboard that shows metrics like subscriber engagement, popular links, devices customers are using, and opens by location.

You’ll also get:

• Email click -maps
• Real-time reports on the performance of your email automation
• Reports on your list growth
• Sales tracking for your ecommerce store
• Other ecommerce reports, like revenue generated by your email campaigns

The MailerLite reports feature is available with all plans.

Brevo

Brevo’s reports are also valuable. You can find:

• Heat map for your emails
• Open and click statistics
• Conversion reports
• Geo-tracking
• Device statistics

The conversion reports, however, have a quite complex setup process and you might need some time to be able to see them.

The reports available on both platforms are pretty evenly matched. However, in this round, MailerLite is slightly ahead because it’s easier to connect it to ecommerce platforms and see ecommerce analytics. 

Customer support

Let’s see how the tools compare in the support they offer to their customers.

In addition to these, MailerLite provides a platform where you can hire an expert to guide you with your email marketing strategy or email campaign designs.

Both tools provide good and fast support. But Brevo wins this round for the unlimited support it offers to free plan users.

Integrations

MailerLite integrates with 140+ tools, mostly signup form apps and CRM platforms. You can integrate it with automation tools, tools to add video to your emails, and more.

However, integrations with ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and WooCommerce aren’t the best. You also can’t integrate it with Wix and OpenCart, which is a flaw.

Brevo integrates with over 300 tools. Similar to MailerLite, you can integrate your favorite CRM, CMS, helpdesk tools, and more. Brevo integrates with Wix, but not with OpenCart.

We have to give it to Brevo. The platform seamlessly integrates with more tools than MailerLite. Some of MailerLite’s integrations are also poor compared to Brevo.

Compatibility with other channels

MailerLite supports Facebook retargeting, but only with the Advanced plan.

Brevo supports:

• SMS
• Push notifications
• WhatsApp
• Facebook ads for the Business and Enterprise plans

Brevo supports more channels. It makes it easy for ecommerce users to reach their customers wherever they are and create a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints.

Price comparison

It’s important to pay attention to the features you get with paid plans. You want to go for a plan that offers the best features for your specific requirements.

It’s also important to check the capacity you get in terms of monthly send volumes and the number of subscribers.

Here are the pricing plans MailerLite and Brevo offer.

MailerLite

MailerLite offers a very generous free plan that supports one user. It comes with:

• 1,000 subscribers
• 12,000 monthly emails
• Email and chat support for the first 30 days
• Email automation
• A/B testing
• 10 landing pages
• Signup forms and popups
• Surveys and quizzes
• Reports

Features like email templates, Facebook integration, and the auto-resend feature are missing. You can use it for building your lists and sending emails from scratch.

The paid plans are:

• Growing Business: Starts at $9/month
• Advanced: Starts at $19/month

MailerLite is one of the most affordable email tools in the market. 

Brevo

Brevo also comes with a free plan that offers:

• 300 daily emails
• Email templates
• Email support
• Transactional emails
• SMS and Whatsapp campaigns
• Email and SMS personalization
• Marketing automation for 2,000 contacts
• Web push notifications, for up to 500 impressions
• Basic reporting

You can’t do A/B testing or access advanced reporting features. But you can use this free version to try out the email marketing solution.

Paid plans include:

• Starter: Starts at $25/month
• Business: Starts at $65/month
• Brevo Plus: Custom price

Unlike most tools that charge per subscriber, Brevo charges per email. This means you can upload as many contacts as you need.

If you don’t send emails often, there’s a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) option. You get Email Credits that don’t expire. Each email you send deducts one credit.

PAYG customers get access to all features except phone support.

If you don’t need advanced reporting and A/B testing, the Starter plan is quite affordable. But if you need these two features, you’ll need a Business plan that gets expensive quickly.

Here’s a quick comparison of their prices.

Summary: which one wins?

If you’re a startup owner or a solopreneur looking for basic email marketing automation features, both MailerLite and Brevo are great choices.

MailerLite is the most affordable option. But if you have a large audience, Brevo can be more cost-effective because you can upload unlimited contacts.

If your business is established or in its active growth stage, there are other email marketing alternatives that’ll meet your needs better.

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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.