Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is for the business whose asset is an audience: you write to a list, you sell them something, and the tools that matter are tags, sequences and a checkout. Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is for the business that sends several kinds of message: a newsletter, an order confirmation, an appointment SMS, and would rather not buy three products to do it.
The clearest difference is not features. It is what you are charged for. Kit charges by how many subscribers you keep. Brevo charges by how many emails you send. Work out which of those numbers grows faster in your business and the decision mostly makes itself.
The short answer
- Pick Kit if you publish regularly to one audience and sell digital products, courses or paid subscriptions to it.
- Pick Brevo if you need marketing email and transactional email from one account — the promotion and the receipt.
- Pick Brevo if SMS or WhatsApp is part of how you reach people, or you want a simple sales pipeline alongside the mailing.
- Pick Kit if your emails are text-first and you would rather have good automation than good templates.
When neither is the right answer
If you only send transactional messages — password resets, receipts, shipping notices — and no marketing at all, use a developer-first service such as Postmark or SendGrid. You will get better delivery logs and diagnostics, and you are not paying for a campaign builder nobody opens.
If you sell physical products with a real catalogue, both of these are compromises. Store-first platforms such as Klaviyo or Omnisend do product recommendations, catalogue sync and revenue attribution properly, and that attribution is the whole argument for ecommerce email.
If you already pay for HubSpot and use its CRM, send from there first. Adding an email tool alongside a suite you already fund is how businesses end up with two contact databases that disagree.
And under a few hundred subscribers, sending a plain text email from your own mailbox to a small list is not a failure of professionalism. The reason to buy a platform is automation, unsubscribes handled properly and deliverability — not because a list exists.
What Kit is genuinely better at
One subscriber, many tags. Someone who signs up through three forms is one record, not three, so you are not paying to store the same person repeatedly or trying to reconcile duplicate lists. For anyone running multiple lead magnets, this alone removes a category of admin.
Automation you can draw. The visual canvas branches on form submissions, link clicks, purchases and tag changes. Launch sequences and onboarding flows get built by the person who writes the emails, without a specialist.
Selling without a second platform. Kit handles checkout, delivery and paid newsletter subscriptions itself, and the Creator Network turns signup pages into a genuine acquisition channel by recommending newsletters to each other.
The trade-off: the design is deliberately plain. If you want elaborate templates and layout control, you will fight the editor or write your own HTML. Ecommerce depth is thin — catalogue syncing and revenue attribution are not what it is for. And because pricing scales with subscriber count whether or not those people open anything, list hygiene has a direct effect on your bill.
What Brevo is genuinely better at
One account for marketing and transactional. The newsletter and the order confirmation go out from the same place, through SMTP or API, with searchable delivery logs for when a customer insists nothing arrived. For a small shop, consolidating those two is the reason to look at it.
Channels beyond the inbox. SMS, WhatsApp, and web and mobile push are part of the platform. Service businesses sending appointment reminders get real value from that without a second vendor.
A pipeline attached. The Sales module covers deals, stages, tasks and meeting booking, with a shared inbox and chat widget available alongside.
The trade-off: breadth over depth, and you can feel it. The CRM handles simple pipelines but reporting, forecasting and customisation are limited next to a dedicated sales tool — if pipelines matter more than email, look at Pipedrive or HubSpot and add email separately. The editor is functional rather than polished. Modules are priced separately, so “all-in-one” is not one line on the invoice. And new accounts are reviewed before sending, so you cannot import a list and send the same afternoon.
Pricing, checked August 2026
Kit publishes its rates against a subscriber tier. At 1,000 email subscribers, the Newsletter plan is $0 per month and includes one basic visual automation; Creator is $33 per month, or $390 billed yearly; Pro is $66 per month, or $790 billed yearly. There is a 14-day trial with no card required. Selling digital products and subscriptions carries a transaction fee of 3.5% + 30c on all plans, and Kit lists a 23.5% fee on paid recommendations for Creator and Pro. Every one of those prices rises as your subscriber count does — check the figure at your own list size, not at 1,000.
Brevo does not display fixed figures in a form we could verify. Its pricing page is driven by a volume selector, and when we checked in August 2026 the plan cards showed “per month” without amounts. What is verifiable: the free tier allows 300 emails a day with no card required, the paid marketing tiers are priced by monthly email volume rather than by contacts stored, an entry paid tier is described around 5,000 emails a month, billing is monthly or yearly with a discount for yearly, and the Sales Platform is sold separately on a per-user basis. Get a quote at your own sending volume rather than trusting any figure quoted second-hand.
The structural point is worth more than either set of numbers. A newsletter writer with 20,000 subscribers emailing weekly sends roughly 80,000 emails a month — expensive on a volume model, and on Kit they pay for the 20,000 regardless. A shop with 3,000 customers sending two campaigns and 4,000 order confirmations a month has a small list and moderate volume, which the volume model handles cheaply. Model twelve months of both numbers before you commit.
This comparison is compiled from both vendors’ published documentation and pricing pages. We have not tested either product hands-on.
Migration and lock-in
Subscribers are portable. Both platforms export contacts with their attributes, and importing a CSV into the other is an afternoon’s work. That is the part people worry about, and it is the part that is fine.
What does not move: automations and sequences, forms and landing pages, tag logic, segment definitions, and template design. Every one of those gets rebuilt by hand. A creator with six sequences and a dozen forms should budget a week, not an evening.
Deliverability is the underrated cost. Sending reputation is built against the platform and your authenticated domain setup, so a move means re-doing SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and ramping volume gradually rather than blasting your full list on day one. Brevo’s sender review at signup makes this explicit; it is good practice on any platform.
Kit’s specific tie is commercial. If you sell digital products through Kit’s checkout, take newsletter sponsorships, or grow through the Creator Network and paid recommendations, leaving means replacing a revenue channel, not just a sending tool. That is a much heavier decision than swapping email providers, and it is worth being clear-eyed about before you build a business on it.
Brevo’s specific tie is technical. If your application sends transactional mail through Brevo’s SMTP or API, moving requires a code change and a deployment, and any deals sitting in the Sales module have to be exported and re-mapped into whatever CRM comes next.
Side by side
| Decision criterion | Kit (formerly ConvertKit) | Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) |
|---|---|---|
| What you are billed for | Subscribers stored | Emails sent per month |
| Free tier | Newsletter plan, $0 at 1,000 subscribers, 1 basic automation | 300 emails per day |
| Entry paid tier (Aug 2026) | Creator, $33/month or $390/year at 1,000 subscribers | Priced by volume; figures not displayed on the pricing page |
| Higher tier | Pro, $66/month or $790/year at 1,000 subscribers | Volume tiers up to a custom enterprise plan |
| Transactional email (SMTP/API) | Not the focus | Yes, same account as marketing, with delivery logs |
| SMS and WhatsApp | No | Yes, part of the platform |
| Sales pipeline | No | Yes, sold separately per user |
| Selling digital products | Built in, 3.5% + 30c per transaction | Not built in; integrate a store |
| Audience model | One subscriber record with tags | Contact lists and attributes |
| Email design | Deliberately plain, text-first | Functional drag-and-drop, not design-led |
| Time to first send | Immediate | After sender review |
The recommendation
Newsletter writer, coach, course seller or author: Kit. The tagging model, the sequences and the built-in checkout match how the business works, and the Creator Network is a real acquisition channel. Start on the free Newsletter plan and move to Creator when you need more than one automation.
Online shop already sending order confirmations from somewhere else: Brevo. Consolidating marketing and transactional into one account with one contact database is worth more than any editor comparison — unless your catalogue is large, in which case Klaviyo or Omnisend deserve the shortlist instead.
Service business booking appointments: Brevo, for SMS reminders alongside email on the same contact record.
Large list, infrequent sends, no ecommerce: price both carefully. Kit charges for storage you are not using; Brevo charges only when you send. This is the case where the volume model usually wins.
Design-led brand that wants pixel-perfect campaigns: neither is your best answer. Both will disappoint you, and a design-first email tool is the right category.
FAQs
Is Kit’s free plan usable, or is it a trial?
It is a real plan, at $0 for the 1,000-subscriber tier, but it includes only one basic visual automation. Since automation is the main reason to use Kit, most people move to a paid plan within a few months. Treat the free tier as the on-ramp rather than the destination.
Can Brevo replace a CRM?
For a solo founder or a small team tracking a handful of deals, yes. For a dedicated sales team, no — reporting, forecasting and customisation are limited compared with a purpose-built platform. Buy Brevo for the messaging and judge the pipeline as a bonus, not a reason.
Which has better deliverability?
Neither vendor’s marketing claim on this is worth much, and comparable public figures do not exist. Deliverability depends far more on your list quality, authentication records and sending consistency than on the choice between two established platforms. Fix the domain setup and stop emailing people who never open, and either will perform.
Plan limits, subscriber and volume tiers, transaction fees and module packaging change regularly in both products. Kit’s figures above were taken from its own pricing page in August 2026; Brevo’s page did not display verifiable amounts at the time of checking, so request a quote at your own sending volume.
