Brevo vs Mailchimp

Brevo

The workflow editor with smart triggers covers exactly what my shop runs — abandoned-cart recovery, welcome sequences, birthday and anniversary mails — on top of a drag-and-drop editor, behaviour segmentation via web tracking and website events, subject-line A/B testing and AI send-time selection. We found no public information on branching journeys, dynamic content per segment, significance reporting on tests, or revenue attributed per campaign, so I stop short of the top band.

Mailchimp

The journey builder is real: a visual flow map with conditional and percentage splits, wait-for-trigger steps, up to three triggers filterable by segmenting conditions, and abandoned-cart, product-retargeting and follow-up workflows wired straight to e-commerce carts, with e-commerce data in the reports I would bill against. Dynamic content and the bigger flow budgets sit in paid tiers only, and we found no public information on send-time optimisation or testing that reports significance, which holds it a step below the top of the scale.

Brevo

Automatic SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration is documented with three domain-verification routes and public API endpoints, dedicated IPs sit on the Professional and Enterprise plans, transactional and marketing streams can be split on separate IPs for free, unengaged subscribers can be auto-excluded, and a Deliverability Center surfaces a score, bounce and open drivers, and six months of history. We found no public information on warm-up guidance, seed or inbox-placement testing, or published list-hygiene practice, and the 99% inbox-placement figure appears only as a marketing claim.

Mailchimp

Authentication is documented end to end — two CNAME records for DKIM and a TXT record for DMARC on a domain I own, with an automated setup route and nudges at the right moments — plus dedicated IPs with a roughly thirty-day warm-up and automatic soft/hard bounce categorisation that factors in engagement. We found no public information on complaint-loop handling, inbox-placement testing or reputation monitoring surfaced to the customer, so the top of the scale is not evidenced.

Brevo

Double opt-in is the documented default, and the newer consent groups with a self-serve preference centre give contacts topic-level granularity rather than all-or-nothing — good for a shop mailing buyers on several lines. Erasure and subject-request handling is documented with a 30-day window, but we found no public information on what the stored consent record contains, on unsubscribe mechanics, or on whether open, click and web tracking can be limited or switched off.

Mailchimp

Consent is provable, which matters when a regulator writes: a plain-text version of the signup form's GDPR wording is recorded and viewable on each contact's profile, double opt-in runs per audience with a customisable confirmation mail, and formal data-subject-request processes plus a contact export to answer access requests are documented. Double opt-in can only be enabled for their own signup forms, and we found no public information on switching open and click tracking off per campaign, on unsubscribe honoured across lists, or on retention rules for inactive subscribers.

Brevo

Import and export are real API operations — attributes selectable, subscription and SMS status exportable, list IDs and timestamps included, blacklist options on import — and portability to a competitor is promised with contact deletion documented. We found no public information on exporting engagement history, campaigns or templates, and the terms make customer content available for only 24 hours after termination before irrevocable deletion, which makes exit something to plan rather than a relaxed feature.

Mailchimp

Exit is nearly a feature: a full account export as a zip covering audiences, campaign and template content, contact events and granular reporting, per-contact CSVs including opens, clicks, campaign interactions and consent data, and permanent per-member deletion is documented. The metering is real though — one export at a time and only one per 24-hour period, with contact exports per audience only — so leaving with a large account is slowed rather than priced out, but it stops this short of the top.

Brevo

The Shopify integration syncs purchase data and abandoned cart details to trigger recovery, one-click connections cover WordPress, Shopify and PrestaShop, and the marketplace lists WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe and Klarna — that is my shop wired end to end. Real-time webhooks for delivered, opened, clicked, bounced and spam events, documented rate limits per plan, seven official SDKs and an API playground to test endpoints round it out; we found no public information on webhook retries or an API deprecation policy.

Mailchimp

This is the connection surface I want behind my counter: named connectors for Shopify, Square, Stripe and Lightspeed, a two-way Salesforce sync, an e-commerce store API feeding carts and orders into abandoned-cart journeys, list and batch webhooks with full management endpoints, batch operations, and both marketing and transactional sending on documented, versioned APIs with a stated rate limit on the search endpoint. We found no public information on a sandbox or on documented webhook retries, which is what keeps this just under the next rung.

Brevo

Hosting is EU as standard with named providers — OVH in France and Germany, Google Cloud in Belgium — under a French contracting entity with a German subsidiary, transfers to the USA and India are named with their legal basis under adequacy decisions or standard clauses, and the ISO 27001:2022 certificate is downloadable. What keeps me below full marks: we found no confirmation of a complete subprocessor list published on the vendor's own pages, and the terms state AI input and output including customer content is transmitted to third-party AI providers such as OpenAI.

Mailchimp

Everything contractual points west: Intuit Inc. and The Rocket Science Group are the entities, storage sits in the US, and we found no public information on an EU hosting option or a published subprocessor list for the platform — the privacy statement instead names US services such as FullStory, Medallia and Google-hosted export files touching my subscribers' behaviour. The Standard Contractual Clauses in the data processing addendum and the Data Privacy Framework certification give a stated legal basis for the transfer, which is the only thing lifting this off the floor for me; as a buyer who weighs this heavily, it is disqualifying for a list I actually own.

Brevo

Tier prices are public with monthly volumes and the yearly discount — Starter at €7, Standard at €15, Professional at €499 — VAT treatment is explicitly stated as exclusive, the free tier's 2,000 contacts and 300 mails per day are stated, and add-ons like removing the logo at 8,10 € per month carry numbers. But the email-credit model is described only as priced by email number with no rate stated, contact limits per paid tier are unclear across the captured pages, and SMS campaigns are described as volume- and destination-dependent without figures, so I cannot fully compute my invoice.

Mailchimp

Headline prices, send limits and a plan comparison are public — free under 250 contacts, Essentials from €11.34 /Monat on one captured page and €11.50 /Monat on another, Standard likewise €17.45 and €17.68, with 5,000 / 6,000 / 150,000 monthly sends across the paid tiers — but the captured pages give different figures for the same plans, overage is announced without a rate, and contact sales is required above 200,000 contacts on one page and 250,000 on another. With SMS sold as an unpriced, approval-gated add-on, automation gated to higher tiers and no VAT treatment or invoice calculator stated, I cannot compute my real monthly invoice from these pages alone.