Brevo

Brevo is an all-in-one messaging and light CRM platform that handles email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp and transactional messages from a single account. It started life as Sendinblue, a French company, and rebranded to Brevo in 2023. The pitch is breadth rather than depth: instead of buying an email marketing tool, a separate transactional sending service and a separate sales pipeline, you get workable versions of all three in one place. For a small business that sends both newsletters and order confirmations, that consolidation is the main reason to look at it.

What you can actually do with it

Most people arrive for the email and stay for the things bolted around it.

• Send marketing campaigns. Build newsletters in a drag-and-drop editor, segment your contact list on attributes or behaviour, and run A/B tests on subject lines and content.
• Send transactional email through SMTP or API. Password resets, receipts and shipping notices go out through the same account as your marketing, with delivery logs you can search when a customer says they never got it.
• Reach people outside the inbox. SMS, WhatsApp, and web and mobile push are part of the platform, so a campaign can fall back to another channel rather than living or dying on open rates.
• Automate follow-up sequences. A visual workflow builder triggers on signups, page visits, purchases or contact attributes, which covers the usual welcome series, abandoned cart and re-engagement patterns.
• Run a basic sales pipeline. The Sales module gives you deals, stages, tasks and meeting booking, with a shared inbox and live chat widget available alongside it.
• Capture contacts on your own site. Signup forms and landing pages are built in, and there are maintained integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Stripe and Zapier.

Who it fits best

Brevo suits small and mid-sized businesses that have outgrown a plain newsletter tool but do not want a marketing suite that needs a specialist to run. Ecommerce shops are the clearest fit, because the same account can send the promotional email and the order confirmation. Service businesses that book appointments and want SMS reminders alongside email get good value too.

It is also a reasonable pick for a solo founder or a two-to-five person marketing team where one person owns everything customer-facing. If you have a dedicated sales team who live in a CRM all day, Brevo’s sales side will feel thin next to a purpose-built one.

Things worth knowing before you commit

• The CRM is a companion, not a replacement. It handles simple pipelines fine, but reporting, forecasting and customisation are limited compared with a dedicated sales platform.
• New accounts get reviewed before sending. Brevo vets senders to protect deliverability, so plan for a short approval delay rather than importing a list and sending the same afternoon.
• Templates and the editor feel functional rather than polished. You can build a decent email, but design-led teams often find the builder more constrained than specialist tools.
• Modules are priced separately. Marketing, sales and add-ons like conversations are billed as distinct pieces, so the all-in-one price is not always one line on the invoice.
• Support depth varies by plan. Lower tiers lean on documentation and email; phone and priority support sit higher up.

Alternatives to compare it against

If email is genuinely all you need and you care about design and audience tooling, a specialist like Mailchimp or a creator-focused tool like Kit is a cleaner fit. If transactional sending is the priority and marketing is secondary, a developer-first service such as Postmark or SendGrid will give you better deliverability tooling and logs. If the sales pipeline is the part you actually care about, look at HubSpot’s free CRM tier or Pipedrive and add email separately. Brevo wins when you want one bill and one contact database covering several of those jobs at once.

Pricing, plan limits and included features change regularly. Check Brevo’s own pricing page before making a decision.

Further reading

• Best Email Deliverability Tools for Businesses in 2026 — explains the sender reputation issues behind Brevo’s account vetting and delivery logs.
• 10 Best CRM Email Marketing Software 2024 — the direct comparison set for combining a contact database with campaign sending.
• How to Integrate Live Chat with CRM Systems — relevant to Brevo’s chat widget and shared inbox feeding the same contact records.
• 10 Best Email Marketing Platforms for Personalization — useful for judging whether Brevo’s segmentation is deep enough for your campaigns.

Have you used Brevo?

One sentence is enough. Would you pick it again, and why or why not? We publish the critical reviews too — that is the point.