The two benches lean in opposite directions. Brevo is ahead on integrations (8.0 vs 7.7; two judges lean Brevo, four tie), sovereignty (6.7 vs 1.5; six judges lean Brevo) and pricing transparency (6.2 vs 5.3; four lean Brevo). Mailchimp is ahead on list data control (7.0 vs 5.5; six judges lean Mailchimp, resting on a documented whole-account export), campaign and automation (7.0 vs 6.5; three lean Mailchimp, three tie), deliverability (6.8 vs 6.3; four lean Mailchimp) and consent and proof (5.5 vs 5.2; three lean Mailchimp). The weighted totals split as well: Brevo leads with the data protection officer, integrator and skeptic; Mailchimp edges ahead with the CRM manager and deliverability engineer. Sovereignty attributes: Brevo lists a German legal entity and EU-only data residency; Mailchimp lists a US legal entity, foreign-controlled ownership and US-default data residency; both list US Cloud Act subprocessor exposure.
Choose Brevo if
You need EU-only data residency for your subscriber data — Brevo's data residency attribute is EU-only, and the sovereignty lean runs six judges for Brevo (6.7 vs 1.5).
Your developers build against a documented API — Brevo's integrations mean is 8.0 to Mailchimp's 7.7, with two judges leaning Brevo and zero leaning Mailchimp, on a REST API with published rate limits, seven official SDKs and real-time webhooks.
You want published tier prices before committing — pricing transparency leans four judges to Brevo with zero for Mailchimp (6.2 vs 5.3), with Starter from €7, Standard from €15, Professional from €499 and Enterprise custom.
Your data protection officer signs off on the tool — that judge's weighted total reads 6 for Brevo vs 4.6 for Mailchimp.
Choose Mailchimp if
You must be able to export your whole account on demand — list data control reads 7.0 vs 5.5 with six judges leaning Mailchimp, resting on a documented whole-account export as a zip.
Your team runs journeys with conditional and percentage splits — campaign and automation leans three judges to Mailchimp with three ties (7.0 vs 6.5).
Deliverability is your top criterion in the scorecard — four judges lean Mailchimp there (6.8 vs 6.3).
Your CRM manager or deliverability engineer has the final call — their weighted totals read 6.7 vs 6.6 and 6.3 vs 6.1 in Mailchimp's favor.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Integrator
Has to wire this into a stack that already exists. Wants a documented API with rate limits, webhooks that retry, a sandbox and a deprecation policy. Treats a partner-form integration page as a missing API, and reads "Zapier supported" as an outsourced one.
Brevo
This judge's pick
Mailchimp
Criterion by criterion
Campaigns & automation
Brevo
Templates, segmentation that includes web tracking, ready-made and custom automation workflows with welcome, birthday and abandoned-cart triggers, subject-line A/B testing and AI send-time selection are all documented. We found no public information on journey branching on behaviour and data, dynamic content per segment, or tests that report statistical significance, so I stop below the full journey-builder mark.
Mailchimp
A visual flow map with conditional and percentage splits, up to three segmentable triggers, a webhook step and flow stats is a genuine journey builder, with dynamic content and custom-coded templates gated by plan and events able to start journeys from the API. We found no public information on send-time optimisation, holdout groups, or campaign-level testing that reports significance, which is what separates this from the top band.
Deliverability infrastructure
Brevo
SPF, DKIM and DMARC with a custom sending domain are documented down to API endpoints for validation and authentication, shared IPs ship on all plans with dedicated IPs from Professional, and a Deliverability Center surfaces a score with six months of history while unengaged subscribers can be auto-excluded. We found no public information on dedicated-IP warm-up, seed or inbox-placement testing, automatic hard-bounce suppression, or blocklist handling done on the customer's behalf, and the 99% inbox figure appears only as marketing copy.
Mailchimp
Authentication is documented down to the DNS records — two CNAMEs for DKIM and one TXT for DMARC, with automated setup via Entri — and dedicated IPs come with a documented warm-up of roughly 30 days, custom reverse DNS and sender-domain checks; bounces are auto-categorised soft or hard with engagement factored into cleaning. We found no public information on complaint-loop handling, seed or inbox-placement testing, or reputation monitoring surfaced to the customer, and bounce reasons are kept only 30 days and, per the vendor's own documentation, cannot be exported as a full list.
Consent, proof & tracking limits
Brevo
Double opt-in is the documented default, consent groups with a self-serve preference centre give topic-level granularity, and erasure handling is written down to removal across accounts when a contact writes to Brevo directly. We found no public information on what a stored consent record contains, on unsubscribe mechanics, or on switching open and click tracking off — tracking is listed as an included feature.
Mailchimp
Double opt-in exists per audience but is one of two offered methods rather than a default, and it can only be enabled on Mailchimp signup forms — API-created contacts sit outside it. The proof story is stronger than a bare timestamp: GDPR form wording is recorded in plain text and viewable on the contact profile, editing a checkbox invalidates prior consent, and SMS exports include consent source, time and revocation. We found no public information on turning open and click tracking off per campaign, pixel-free sending, unsubscribe honoured across audiences, or retention rules for inactive subscribers.
List ownership, import & exit
Brevo
Import and export are documented endpoints — CSV or JSON in with a completion callback, export with selectable attributes, metadata and email and SMS subscription status — and the GDPR pages commit to exporting data for transfer to a competitor. We found no public information on exporting engagement history, campaigns or templates, the export endpoint lists a too-many-requests error, and exit is tight: termination deletes content immediately and irrevocably unless requested within 24 hours, with the last monthly subscription amount named as a possible recovery fee.
Mailchimp
Exit is engineered rather than improvised: a whole-account export as a zip covering audiences, campaign and template content, contact events and granular reporting, per-contact CSV bundles with opens, clicks and campaign interactions, and API-driven export jobs, plus permanent-delete and forget actions per contact. The friction is explicit metering — one export at a time and one per 24-hour period, enforced with error responses — and contact-level data access exports must be run per audience; migration services are documented only for arriving Premium customers in their first 30 days, and we found no public information on outbound migration tooling.
Integrations & API
Brevo
This is one I can build against: a documented REST API with key authentication, official SDKs in seven languages, published rate limits per plan (1,000 requests per second on all plans, 2,000 on Professional and Enterprise, 6,000 Enterprise-only), real-time webhooks for delivered, opened, clicked, bounced and spam plus inbound parsing, idempotency keys, an API playground for live endpoint testing, transactional and marketing sending on one API, and a Shopify integration syncing purchase and abandoned-cart data. We found no public information on webhook retry behaviour or a deprecation policy, and the marketplace's Developed-by filter alongside a technology-partner contact form suggests not every listing is vendor-maintained — that caps it at the connection-surface mark for me.
Mailchimp
A versioned Marketing API at 3.0.91 with batch operations, list webhooks for core subscriber events, an events endpoint to trigger automations and a health check, next to a transactional API taking raw MIME, scheduling sends, managing subaccounts and documenting a rate limit of 20 calls per minute for message search; Shopify, Salesforce, Stripe and Square are named among 300+ apps with Salesforce described as two-way sync. Deprecation is practised with dates in public documentation — the legacy Export API was given a retirement date and Conversations endpoints were deprecated in favour of Inbox — but we found no public information on a sandbox, webhook retry behaviour, or general rate limits for the marketing API, which is exactly the documentation a builder needs before committing.
European sovereignty
Brevo
Hosting is EU with named providers — OVH in France and Germany, Google Cloud in Belgium — under an EU entity, with downloadable ISO 27001:2022 certification, a TÜV Rheinland audit of the technical measures, an Article 28 GDPR data processing agreement inside the terms, and transfers to the USA and India named with adequacy decisions or standard clauses as the basis. The captured pages name different entities for contracting and control — Sendinblue SAS in Paris in the terms, Brevo GmbH in Berlin as controller — the full subprocessor list is referenced to the data processing agreement rather than shown, and AI input and output including customer contents are transmitted to third-party AI providers, so I hold this just under the fully evidenced mark.
Mailchimp
Intuit Inc. is the US contracting entity, hosting is US by fixed default with no EU region offered in the captured pages, and a subprocessor list for the service is not published — names appear only incidentally, such as Google hosting export files and FullStory and Medallia for session replay. Transfers do carry a stated basis, with annual EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification and standard contractual clauses integrated into the data processing addendum as a fallback, which is the only reason this rises off the floor.
Pricing transparency
Brevo
Volume tiers are public with the billing period and VAT treatment stated — Starter from 5,000 emails per month at €7, Standard at €15, Professional from 150,000 at €499, Enterprise custom — alongside priced add-ons such as removing the logo at 8,10 € per month. We found no public information on overage rates, dedicated-IP or SMS pricing, and the credit model's price depends on the number of emails without a visible rate table; the captured pages also give different figures for the free plan's contact and send limits, so the real invoice is not fully computable from public pages.
Mailchimp
Headline prices are public — Essentials from €11.50 per month and Standard with up to 6,000 emails a month in one capture, while earlier captures give €11.34 and €17.45 for the same plans — alongside per-plan send limits, flow points, seats, a free tier under 250 contacts, annual plans above 10,000 contacts, pay-as-you-go credits and a 15% nonprofit discount. A real invoice still cannot be computed from these pages: we found no public information on the overage rate, VAT treatment, a monthly price for the Premium tier, or a price calculator, the SMS add-on requires an application and approval without showing a price, Customer Success appears only in custom plans from USD 299 per month, and the captured pages describe both sending paused at the limit and overage fees applying.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Brevo
Mailchimp
Legal entity
Incorporated in DE
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Foreign-controlled
Data residency
EU only
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.