whats-best.ai

Email Marketing & Newsletter

Brevo

EU-Made Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 2 of 4 dimensions proven

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Sendinblue SAS · www.brevo.com

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Shop Owner

Weighted verdict

Runs a shop where the newsletter is a revenue channel. Wants the shop connected properly — orders, carts, products flowing in, abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows out — and revenue attributed per campaign. Judges price against contribution, not against a competitor's tier.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Shop Owner

Campaigns & automation

How this is scored

Building the mail and the journey around it: editor, templates, segmentation, triggered sequences, A/B testing.

0 — One-off broadcasts from a fixed template; no segmentation and no automation of any kind.

3 — A drag-and-drop editor and simple list segmentation, but automation is a single welcome mail and there is no testing.

5 — Reusable templates, attribute and behaviour segmentation, multi-step automations on common triggers, and subject-line A/B testing.

8 — A visual journey builder with branching on behaviour and data, dynamic content per segment, send-time optimisation, and testing that reports significance rather than raw counts.

10 — Journeys treat the whole lifecycle: event-driven entry from other systems, branching on any attribute or event, holdout groups for measurement, and automations a marketer can read months later without a diagram.

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The Shop Owner

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. 8 9 17 1

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Deliverability infrastructure

How this is scored

Whether the mail arrives — authentication, sending reputation, bounce and complaint handling — judged on what the vendor documents rather than the inbox rate it advertises.

0 — No documentation of authentication or bounce handling; deliverability appears only as a marketing number.

3 — SPF and DKIM setup documented, but no DMARC guidance, no stated bounce policy and shared sending only.

5 — SPF, DKIM and DMARC documented with a custom sending domain, automatic hard-bounce suppression, and complaint-loop handling stated.

8 — The above plus dedicated-IP options with a documented warm-up, seed or inbox-placement testing, engagement-based sunsetting, and published guidance on list hygiene.

10 — Deliverability is operated as a service: reputation monitoring surfaced to the customer, per-domain and per-ISP diagnostics, enforced authentication before first send, and postmaster or blocklist handling the vendor documents doing on the customer's behalf.

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The Shop Owner

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. 17 10 11 9

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List ownership, import & exit

How this is scored

Whether the list and its history remain the sender's: import with attributes intact, full export including engagement history, deletion that executes, and no metering that prices leaving out of reach.

0 — Export is addresses only; engagement history, segments and automations cannot leave.

3 — CSV import and export of subscriber fields, but engagement history and unsubscribe state are not exportable.

5 — Full subscriber export including custom attributes, subscription status and unsubscribe state, plus API access sufficient to sync elsewhere.

8 — Everything exportable in open formats — subscribers, engagement history, campaigns and templates — with documented deletion of a subscriber across all records, and no export throttling.

10 — Exit is a documented feature: full-fidelity export of the whole account, contractual data return, deletion that is evidenced rather than asserted, and migration tooling in both directions.

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The Shop Owner

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. 14 15 12 3

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Integrations & API

How this is scored

The connection surface a newsletter lives on: shop and CRM systems, events in and out, webhooks, and an API somebody can build against without a partner agreement.

0 — No API and no named integrations; the list is maintained by CSV upload.

3 — A handful of native integrations and a read-mostly API, with no webhooks and no documented rate limits.

5 — Named integrations for common shop and CRM systems, a documented REST API with keys, and webhooks for the core subscriber events.

8 — Maintained bidirectional integrations with named systems including at least one major shop platform, event webhooks with retries, documented rate limits, and a sandbox.

10 — The tool is a component rather than a destination: transactional and marketing sending on one API, events flowing both directions, versioned API with a deprecation policy, and integrations the vendor maintains rather than lists.

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The Shop Owner

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. 16 9 17 14

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where subscriber data and behavioural tracking live, who the contracting entity is, and which subprocessors touch the send. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it — which in this category is heavily.

0 — US vendor and contracting entity, US hosting, subprocessors unnamed; subscriber behaviour leaves the EU with no stated basis.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option or for storage only, while sending, tracking or support access remains non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — sending infrastructure, analytics, support tooling — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting, sending and every subprocessor in the EU, certification published, and no transfer that needs a Schrems II argument to survive.

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The Shop Owner

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. 1 3 4 6

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

Whether a sender can compute the real invoice for their list size and send volume — including overage, extra domains and automation limits — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A headline price per contact tier exists, but send limits, overage rates or the tier where automation begins are not stated.

5 — Contact-tier prices public with the billing period stated and send limits given, but at least one commonly needed capability sits in an unpriced tier or add-on.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with contact and volume limits, overage rates, feature boundaries and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom volume lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator producing the annual invoice for a given list size and send frequency, including overage, additional domains and dedicated IPs.

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The Shop Owner

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. 17 2 3 9

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European sovereignty — proven facts

2 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency EU only ⚠ unverified 3/3 pts 1 Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Sources (17)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage www.brevo.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing www.brevo.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Terms www.brevo.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Privacy policy www.brevo.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Privacy policy www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Imprint www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Security / trust page — found from the homepage www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Campaigns & automation — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Campaigns & automation — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Deliverability infrastructure — found from sitemap developers.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Deliverability infrastructure — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Consent, proof & tracking limits — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  13. 13 Consent, proof & tracking limits — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  14. 14 List ownership, import & exit — found from sitemap developers.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  15. 15 List ownership, import & exit — found from sitemap developers.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  16. 16 Integrations & API — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  17. 17 Integrations & API — found from sitemap www.brevo.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →