The Marketing Brain: Comparing ActiveCampaign and Brevo
Today's marketing automation market is crowded with tools and platforms that help businesses more effectively interact with their customers and engage them in communication. In this article, we offer a review and comparison of ActiveCampaign and Brevo, two of the most well-known and sought-after solutions in this space. Learn about the key features, significant differences, and current pricing of these marketing systems.
Introduction to the Competitors
The email marketing automation platform segment offers a wide range of solutions, but ActiveCampaign and Brevo often receive the most attention due to their functionality and accessibility. These platforms take different approaches to marketing automation and customer data management, making their comparison particularly revealing for businesses with different goals and budgets.
ActiveCampaign
Source: activecampaign.com
ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based customer experience optimization platform, including marketing automation tools, a CRM, and AI capabilities. It is designed to support the entire customer lifecycle — from lead generation and nurturing to sales management and repeat purchase encouragement.
The platform launched in 2003. Today, its user base exceeds 200,000, including primarily small and medium-sized businesses and startups.
With ActiveCampaign, businesses across industries of all sizes automate and personalize their customer interactions across multiple formats and channels. Companies use it to automate repetitive sales and marketing tasks, improve audience engagement through personalized communications, analyze campaign metrics, and gain data-driven insights for strategic decision-making.
Key platform features:
- AI-powered autonomous marketing optimization;
- automation of marketing campaigns and sales;
- omnichannel messaging (email, SMS, WhatsApp);
- CRM functionality;
- reporting and analytics;
- an ecosystem of integrations and extensions.
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Brevo
Source: brevo.com
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a popular all-in-one platform for managing and optimizing marketing and sales. It positions itself as one of the most cost-effective and accessible solutions in this field. The platform has been in operation since 2012. Today, its global user base has exceeded 600,000.
Brevo helps businesses simplify and accelerate communication and customer engagement by combining all necessary tools into a single, unified platform. It includes virtually everything needed for email marketing and automation, as well as CRM functionality. Entrepreneurs and marketers using Brevo can create personalized campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, and manage their subscriber base without requiring special skills or additional tools.
In addition to developing automated email workflows and sales automation, the platform offers a number of other features:
- CRM with contact and deal management functions;
- multichannel and transactional messaging;
- real-time analytics and reporting;
- built-in AI assistant.
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Core Functionality
ActiveCampaign and Brevo offer a wide range of tools for marketing automation, omnichannel communications, and data management. Each platform combines capabilities for campaign creation, personalization, and analysis, but implements these functions differently, reflecting differing approaches to audience engagement and process optimization.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign's list of features reflects the platform's focus on deep automation and personalization of the customer experience. The solution combines AI functionality, flexible campaign setup tools, and a well-developed integration ecosystem, making it versatile enough for tasks of varying levels of complexity. This approach allows businesses to build comprehensive marketing scenarios with a high degree of control and adaptability.
Key platform features:
- The built-in email builder supports several campaign types, including standard newsletters, RSS newsletters, autoresponder newsletters, A/B testing newsletters, and more.
- Users can easily create newsletters from pre-built blocks, adding headlines, text fields, customizable buttons, as well as images and other media content.
- Active Intelligence and Autonomous Marketing leverage built-in AI agents to develop goal-based marketing strategies and execute turnkey campaigns with audience segmentation, content personalization, cross-channel automation, and real-time performance optimization.
- The platform includes 900+ pre-installed automation templates, categorized by business area: e-commerce, finance, consulting, media, real estate, etc. The visual editor allows you to create custom automation workflows from scratch using a no-code approach.
- The ActiveCampaign library contains 250+ professionally designed email campaign templates with AI-powered customization of structure and content. These include newsletters, abandoned cart reminders, welcome emails, and more.
- Cross-channel orchestration ensures broad audience reach through automated omnichannel campaigns that utilize multiple communication channels simultaneously: email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, and other channels via integrations.
- Business Goals tracks the performance of campaigns, automations, and forms, analyzing key metrics such as the number of conversions or engagement rates. AI algorithms transform the collected data into actionable insights, providing summaries and visualizations on request.
- The ActiveCampaign integration ecosystem includes over 1,000 services and applications, categorized by various criteria: use cases, features, languages, plans, data synchronization, and more. An API is available for connecting custom integrations.
Brevo
Brevo’s features are designed for quickly launching campaigns, managing contacts, and analyzing results. They enable businesses to effectively build marketing processes and maintain customer engagement across multiple communication channels.
Main platform features:
- A drag-and-drop editor and a catalog of 50+ ready-made design templates allow you to create newsletters without special skills or third-party tools. A separate HTML/CSS editor allows for advanced customization.
- Segmentation options help you group contacts in your database based on a range of filters and attributes, segment them by demographic, geographic, and behavioral characteristics, and create dynamic lists with automatic updates.
- Built-in AI analytics tools collect and process a range of campaign metrics (opens, clicks, bounces, etc.) in real time, create click heatmaps and visualize them in customizable dashboards.
- AI agent generates and edits marketing content based on prompts, automatically segments audiences based on selected criteria in real time, generates product recommendations, and sends email newsletters at the best time.
- Brevo allows you to create and manage omnichannel marketing campaigns using channels such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile and web push notifications, live chat, chatbots, and phone calls.
- The Sales Software module customizes and automates sales funnels, helps manage calls, meetings, reports, and shared inboxes.
- The Data Platform allows you to collect data from various sources, structure it according to predefined models, apply data preparation rules and scoring, and transfer data to analytical services through integrations.
- The platform's catalog offers over 150 native integrations with popular business systems. They are categorized by topic: AI, analytics, CMS, CRM, contact management, ecommerce, email marketing, automation, productivity, payments, surveys, and more.
Key Differences
The main differences between the platforms cover automation, CRM, template design, pricing, interface, integrations, and AI functionality. A comparison of Brevo vs. ActiveCampaign based on these criteria allows you to clearly see how these functional differences impact your marketing processes. By weighing these factors, you can choose the optimal solution for your business.
Automation and CRM
ActiveCampaign offers more powerful marketing automation features, including complex multi-branch scenarios, lead scoring, dynamic content, and advanced integrations with popular e-commerce systems. It also features a full-fledged CRM and native sales funnel management tools.
Brevo is more limited in this regard, allowing users to automate only relatively simple campaigns and interaction flows. Its CRM also offers only the most basic features. Instead, the platform emphasizes supporting a wide range of communication channels between businesses and their audiences.
Design and templates
ActiveCampaign's catalog contains over 250 campaign design templates — all conveniently sorted by purpose and other criteria, and customizable. Brevo's library contains only 50+ templates, all of which are responsive and available even to free plan users.
Pricing
The starting price for an ActiveCampaign subscription is $15 per month. This platform does not offer a free plan, offering a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Considered one of the most affordable marketing automation tools, Brevo offers a fully functional free plan with a limit of 300 emails per day and 2,000 contacts per database. Paid plans start at $9 per month ($8 per month when billed annually).
Interface and ease of use
The Brevo campaign builder and dashboard interface are simple and intuitive, making it a preferred choice for beginners. ActiveCampaign's interface includes more features, but this adds complexity and requires time to learn.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign has a vast ecosystem with over 1,000 extensions and integrations, primarily focused on campaign and process automation. Brevo, on the other hand, has 300+ integrations with the most well-known business systems.
Additional features
ActiveCampaign boasts powerful AI functionality, enabling turnkey automation of marketing strategy development and campaign creation, execution, and analysis. It also features AI-powered content generation tools, landing page creation, SMS, and transactional email capabilities.
Brevo's built-in AI assistant focused on content generation, messaging summaries, and campaign optimization. The platform also includes its own data storage, functionality for creating loyalty programs, and sending transactional campaigns via email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
Subscription Tiers
ActiveCampaign pricing for email marketing (excluding WhatsApp campaigns) offers a range of 4 plans (prices shown are for an annual subscription):
- Starter (from 10,000 emails per month, 1 user, up to 5 automation actions, 15 goals, standard forms, limited segmentation and analytics, Marketing CRM, integrations, AI functionality with limits, etc.) — from $15 per month for 1,000 contacts.
- Plus (all Starter + Gen AI features, 25 goals, unlimited automation actions, standard segmentation and analytics, automation integration with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) — from $49 per month for 1,000 contacts.
- Pro (from 12,000 emails per month, 3 users, all Plus features + 200 goals, unlimited AI functionality, dynamic content, advanced segmentation and analytics, conversion tracking, etc.) — from $79 per month for 1,000 contacts.
- Enterprise (from 15,000 emails per month, 5 users, all Pro features + premium segmentation and analytics, SSO, corporate account, etc.) — from $145 per month for 1,000 contacts.
Brevo features pricing for marketing offers a range of 5 plans with the following terms:
- Free (1 user, up to 300 emails per day, up to 2,000 contacts, customizable templates, drag-and-drop editor, transactional emails, AI assistant, etc.).
- Starter (1 user, up to 100,000 emails per month, all Free features + no daily limit on emails, basic analytics and reporting, email support, Sales Essentials package, dynamic content, etc.) — from $9 per month.
- Standard (3 users, up to 1 million emails per month, all Starter features + automation, unlimited contacts, A/B testing, advanced analytics and reporting) — from $18 per month.
- Professional (10 users, up to 10 million emails per month, phone support, all Standard features + Analytics Studio features, Sales Essentials & Sales Advanced packages) — from $499 per month.
- Enterprise (custom email count, unlimited users, all Professional features + sub-account management, advanced integrations, onboarding, dedicated account manager, enterprise-grade security, Sales Advanced package) — price upon request.
Subscription plans and available features may vary over time. Always refer to the official websites for the latest pricing and terms.
Final Thoughts
In summary of this comparative review of the best marketing automation software in 2026, it's worth noting that ActiveCampaign outperforms Brevo in terms of functionality, offering more templates, automations, integrations, and other options. Brevo, however, excels in its user-friendly interface and affordable pricing, boasting a key advantage: a fully functional free plan.
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