Sender vs Brevo
Generous free marketing plan versus broader all-in-one email, CRM, and SMS coverage.
What matters for early-stage startups
At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.
| Priority | Sender | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free forever for 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails/mo | 300/day permanent |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Starts at | Paid plans start at the 1,000-subscriber tier; exact price is shown in the account slider | $9/mo for 5,000 emails |
| DX score | 6/10 | 7/10 |
| Deliverability | Marketing sender with shared IPs on lower plans and dedicated IP availability on Professional accounts by request. | Reliable for marketing and transactional; per-day free-tier limits prevent spam abuse. |
| Operating since | 2012 | 2012 |
| Scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| SDKs | None | node, python, go, ruby, php, java, dotnet |
| Webhooks | Yes | Yes |
For a pre-revenue or early-revenue team running a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, Brevo takes every priority that separates them here (developer experience and SDK breadth), while Sender matches it on the rest. On free tier, Sender offers Free forever for 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails/mo against 300/day permanent from Brevo. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Sender | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free forever for 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails/mo | 300/day permanent |
| Starts at | Paid plans start at the 1,000-subscriber tier; exact price is shown in the account slider | $9/mo for 5,000 emails |
| DX score | 6/10 | 7/10 |
| Deliverability | Marketing sender with shared IPs on lower plans and dedicated IP availability on Professional accounts by request. | Reliable for marketing and transactional; per-day free-tier limits prevent spam abuse. |
| SDKs | None | node, python, go, ruby, php, java, dotnet |
| Webhooks | Yes | Yes |
| Tagline | Budget-friendly email marketing with a generous free plan. | All-in-one with a generous daily free tier. |
| Pricing model | subscriber-based | tiered |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| Templates | rich | rich |
| React Email | No | No |
| Inbound | No | Yes |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Idempotency | No | No |
| Dedicated IP | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Budget-conscious startups that need newsletters, basic automation, forms, and transactional email on a generous free plan. | Small businesses that need email plus marketing plus SMS in one place. |
Sender
- ›Very generous permanent free plan
- ›Transactional emails are included instead of sold as a separate product
- ›Automation, forms, landing pages, and templates are available from the free plan
- ›24/7 support is promoted even for free users
- ›Paid prices were not available in the public pricing page crawl because the slider errored
- ›Less advanced lifecycle depth than Customer.io, Loops, or Encharge
- ›Dedicated IPs are tied to higher-volume Professional accounts
Brevo
- ›Generous permanent free tier
- ›Marketing plus transactional plus SMS
- ›Inbound parsing
- ›Surface area is large; pure-API teams may not want the rest
- ›UI can feel busy