ActiveCampaign vs Brevo

The meter: contacts at ActiveCampaign, email volume at Brevo

ActiveCampaign bills for the people in your account. Its own article on the true cost of email marketing says it charges once per unique contact, however many automations, tags or segments that contact belongs to, and gives Starter at 10,000 contacts as $149 a month. The pricing page adds a monthly sending allowance of 10 times your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12 times on Pro and 15 times on Enterprise. So a 10,000-contact Starter account may send up to 100,000 emails a month.

Brevo works the other way round. Per its pricing-plans article, you choose the number of emails you want to send each month, and that choice sets the price. On Starter and Standard the first three tiers (5,000, 10,000 and 15,000 emails) store up to 500, 1,500 and 2,500 contacts; from 20,000 emails the stored-contact ceiling is 500,000. If you pass the contact limit on one of those first tiers, Brevo upgrades you to the next tier automatically.

That coupling matters for a SaaS list. A product with 2,500 trial users who get one monthly digest sends only 2,500 emails, but the contact limit alone forces the 15,000-email tier, which is $25 on Starter or $49 on Standard with monthly billing. From 20,000 emails upward, list size stops mattering to Brevo and your volume decides everything.

• Brevo's Free plan stores up to 100,000 contacts but sends 300 emails a day, so it is a good parking place for an unmailed list while you build the first workflow.
• Brevo's prepaid email credits work on all plans, never expire, and are sold in packs from 5,000 to 1 million emails; they give Starter-level features, so they suit occasional campaign bursts rather than lifecycle automation.

Cost at 2,500, 10,000 and 50,000 contacts over a year

All numbers were read from the vendors' pricing pages on 2026-10-07. ActiveCampaign figures are the monthly rate with annual billing; Brevo figures are monthly-billing totals from the pricing slider, so each Brevo yearly figure below is 12 times the monthly price before its 10% yearly discount.

At 2,500 contacts with six emails per person per month (15,000 sends): ActiveCampaign Starter is $39 a month, or 12 x $39 = $468 a year; Plus is $95, or $1,140 a year; Pro is $149, or $1,788 a year. Brevo Starter at the 15,000-email tier is $25 a month, or $300 a year; Standard is $49, or $588 a year. The cheapest working comparison here is ActiveCampaign Plus at $1,140 a year against Brevo Standard at $588 a year, a gap of $552 a year.

At 10,000 contacts with five emails each (50,000 sends): ActiveCampaign Starter is $149 a month, or $1,788 a year; Plus is $189, or $2,268 a year; Pro is $375, or $4,500 a year. Brevo Starter at 50,000 emails is $56 a month, or $672 a year; Standard is $97, or $1,164 a year. Plus against Standard is $2,268 against $1,164, a $1,104 gap, and Pro against Standard is $4,500 against $1,164.

At 50,000 contacts mailed once a month (50,000 sends): ActiveCampaign does not offer Starter at that size; Plus is $609 a month, or $7,308 a year; Pro is $969, or $11,628 a year; Enterprise is $1,169, or $14,028 a year. Brevo is the same $56 or $97 a month as at 10,000 contacts with five sends each, so $672 or $1,164 a year. This is the shape where the two products are furthest apart, because ActiveCampaign charges for every dormant address.

Flip the shape and the comparison stops being about price. A 2,500-contact list that gets a daily changelog digest, 30 emails each, is 75,000 sends a month. Even ActiveCampaign Enterprise at 2,500 contacts allows only 15 x 2,500 = 37,500 sends, so you would have to ask ActiveCampaign what happens above the allowance or buy a larger contact band. Brevo's readouts jump from 50,000 to 100,000 emails ($56 and $82 on Starter, $97 and $139 on Standard), so price the 75,000 tier in your own account before deciding.

• ActiveCampaign prices come from its pricing page contact selector; Brevo prices from its pricing page slider, both read on 2026-10-07 and exclusive of tax.
• Brevo's yearly toggle subtracts about 10% (Starter at 5,000 emails reads $8.08 against $9.00 monthly), so a yearly Brevo commitment only widens the gap.
• Neither side's totals include add-ons: ActiveCampaign Pipelines and transactional, Brevo Sales Essentials at $31 a month or the logo removal.

What the entry plans leave out

• ActiveCampaign Starter: one seat, limited segmentation, 5 actions per automation, 15 active business goals, standard CRM and ecommerce integrations, no landing pages, and A/B testing for email only. Plus lifts the action cap, adds landing pages and raises goals to 25.
• ActiveCampaign Plus: still one seat and standard segmentation. Conditional content, predictive sending and attribution are Pro features, as are advanced segmentation and 3 seats.
• Brevo Free: 300 sends a day, one seat, automation limited to 2,000 contacts, basic reporting, email support. Transactional email, SMS campaigns, outbound webhooks and the free sales tools are all included.
• Brevo Starter: no daily limit, but the Sent by Brevo footer stays unless you buy the add-on, automation is still limited to 2,000 contacts, and there is one conversion metric.
• Brevo Standard: the footer goes away, automation covers all contacts, A/B testing, AI send-time optimization and advanced reports arrive, with up to 3 seats. Professional ($499 a month) is where contact scoring, one custom object and inbound webhooks start.

Accounts, deals and custom data: the B2B part

A B2B SaaS rarely mails individuals in isolation: three people at one company sign up, one books a demo, and the account renews in March. ActiveCampaign's pricing page puts account records, deal records and lead scoring inside the Pipelines enhanced CRM add-on, and adds a Sales Engagement add-on for automated one-to-one email and win probability. Custom objects, the place to model a subscription or a workspace, appear only in the Enterprise column. Premium CRM integrations (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics) are Enterprise too, while Freshsales, Pipedrive and Zoho sit under standard CRM integrations.

Brevo includes a lightweight sales CRM on every plan: 50 open deals, 1 pipeline, meeting scheduling, live chat, forecasting and task reminders. Sales Essentials ($31 a month) lifts the deal and pipeline limits and adds sales automation workflows; Brevo's Sales Advanced package ($64 a month, Professional and Enterprise only) adds multi-step email sequences for reps, calling and WhatsApp one-to-one messages. For customer data beyond contacts, the plan article lists 1 custom object on Professional and custom objects on Enterprise.

In both products the base email plan is contact-centric. If your lifecycle logic depends on company-level facts (seat count, plan, renewal date), store them as contact attributes on each user or budget for the CRM add-on on one side and the Professional tier on the other.

Product events and automation limits

ActiveCampaign's event tracking guide describes the flow: turn event tracking on under site tracking, copy the event key, optionally whitelist event names, then post each event with your account ID to its tracking endpoint. Events attach to an existing contact, so your backend must create the contact first. In the builder you then pick the Event is recorded trigger and choose whether it runs once or repeatedly. The guide calls it an advanced feature that needs a developer.

Brevo's Events documentation shows a server-side call, POST /v3/events, with a required event name (alphanumerics, hyphens and underscores, up to 255 characters) and at least one contact identifier, plus optional properties up to 50KB for segmenting and personalising. There is also a JavaScript tracker and a batch endpoint. Per its API limits page, events and contact endpoints run at 10 requests per second on the general tier, with 20 for Professional and Enterprise, so a nightly sync of 10,000 users should be batched.

Automation size is the other filter. An ActiveCampaign Starter automation tops out at 5 actions, enough for a welcome email, a wait and a follow-up but not for a seven-step trial path with a branch for activated users. Brevo Free and Starter run automation for up to 2,000 contacts, so a team at 5,000 contacts needs Standard for lifecycle workflows. Both limits push the realistic entry tier up one step: Plus on one side, Standard on the other.

Transactional email, SMS and WhatsApp

Brevo lists transactional emails and transactional SMS on its Free plan, and its API limits page sets the send endpoint at 1,000 requests per second on the general tier. That makes one vendor and one sending reputation for receipts, resets and the marketing sequence. ActiveCampaign's pricing page lists a transactional email add-on described as a way to send password resets, notifications and confirmations, and shows no price next to it.

For text and chat channels, ActiveCampaign sells an SMS add-on and separate WhatsApp plans: Core and Advanced from $99 a month and Premium from $218 a month, all billed annually, with WhatsApp messages capped at 25x, 50x and 100x the WhatsApp contact count. Brevo sells prepaid SMS credits on all plans, starting from 100 credits, and prepaid WhatsApp credits on Professional and Enterprise; prices vary by recipient country and template type and are shown inside the account.

Most B2B SaaS lifecycle programs stay on email, so treat these channels as a tiebreaker. They matter for onboarding in markets where WhatsApp is the main business channel, and there Brevo's Professional requirement ($499 a month) weighs against ActiveCampaign's separate $99 WhatsApp plan.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to Brevo

1. Clean the source first. Export contacts from ActiveCampaign, drop hard bounces and unsubscribed people, and decide which tags become Brevo lists, which become attributes and which are retired. Count your monthly sends so you pick the right Brevo volume tier before you import.
2. Choose between the two import routes. Brevo's ActiveCampaign integration article describes a free sync that moves contacts in real time up to 130,000 contacts; it says custom fields such as Gender and Company are not imported and that deleting a contact in ActiveCampaign does not delete it in Brevo. For custom fields, use the CSV route in Brevo's import guide, which lets you create attributes while mapping columns.
3. Build the attributes you need (plan, trial end date, signup source) and map them during import. Each imported contact needs at least one identifier such as an email address.
4. Rebuild automations by hand in Brevo's workflow builder. ActiveCampaign automations, goals and deal stages do not move over, so write each flow down by trigger, wait and exit condition before you rebuild it.
5. Authenticate your sending domain in Brevo, send test messages to your own inbox, and keep ActiveCampaign live for a week while you compare the first real sends. Check your ActiveCampaign renewal date before cancelling, since its prices are quoted as billed annually.

Moving from Brevo to ActiveCampaign

1. In Brevo, export contacts with every attribute you use and record which list each person belongs to, since ActiveCampaign imports lists and tags as separate things. Pull transactional templates and note which services call Brevo's SMTP or API so you can reroute them.
2. Create the target list in ActiveCampaign before importing, because its CSV import guide says lists cannot be created during an import. Map each column to a field (you can create new fields in the mapping step), add a source tag, and choose Active or Unsubscribed for the whole file.
3. Uncheck Trigger Automations in the import options. Without that, any automation triggered by a list, tag or field you import will start for the whole list at once.
4. Decide where transactional email goes. ActiveCampaign sells an add-on; the alternative is a dedicated sender. Reroute the application before you cancel Brevo, because the same Brevo account sends both marketing and system mail.
5. Rebuild flows, then check the send allowance: Starter and Plus allow 10x your contact limit per month, so 5,000 contacts allow 50,000 sends, which is more than Brevo's 20,000-email tier at the same list size but fewer than a daily digest needs.