ActiveCampaign vs. Brevo

Wondering which tool is right for you?

ActiveCampaign and Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) are both powerful marketing platforms, but they’re known for different strengths.

ActiveCampaign offers advanced automation and CRM features—think complex workflows, detailed lead scoring, and predictive sending that help you truly personalize and scale your marketing. Brevo is known for its easy-to-use email and SMS marketing, making it a great choice for businesses that want reliable communication tools without the extra bells and whistles.

If you’re considering choosing one or the other, it’ll come down to what specific features you're after and how they fit into your overall strategy. Let’s take a look at each platform before we dive into their features.

Founded in 2003, ActiveCampaign is an automation platform that gives you the power to automate your marketing communications, grow your sales pipeline, and send beautiful, personalized emails to your customers. They’ve established themselves as one of the best platforms for advanced automation in the email marketing space and offer powerful features for a competitive price.

ActiveCampaign is a great fit for both small and large businesses because it offers the tools you need without overwhelming you with unnecessary extras. Its pros include advanced automation, easy-to-use features, and a smart CRM, while a potential downside might be that it requires some initial setup to fully leverage its capabilities.

But once you're up and running, it’s a great choice for businesses looking to create consistent and effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

When you switch from to ActiveCampaign, enjoy free 1:1 migration

Adopting a new or switching to another platform can be an undertaking but it’s inevitable if you’re hitting certain limits with your current tool. When you sign up for an ActiveCampaign Pro or Enterprise plan, we’ll migrate your email lists, transfer your templates, rebuild your automations, and set up your forms and landing pages. All for free.

You’ll get one-on-one sessions with a real person along with resources like help articles and our community to get you set up fast.

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, was founded in 2012 with a focus on making digital marketing accessible and affordable, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. They’ve built a reputation for offering user-friendly email and SMS marketing, along with simple automation tools that don’t overwhelm you with complexity.

Brevo has all the standard tools you’d need to run solid, straightforward marketing campaigns: easy-to-use email and SMS features, basic contact management, and simple automation workflows. It’s great for getting the essentials done without too much hassle.

However, when it comes to more advanced automation—like branching workflows, detailed lead scoring, or mapping out a full customer journey—Brevo doesn’t quite go that far.

If you’re aiming to scale your marketing with complex automations that guide customers from start to finish, you might find Brevo a bit limiting. A more powerful platform like ActiveCampaign would likely be a better fit for those types of deeper journeys.

At a glance, ActiveCampaign and Brevo have some key differences. Let’s look at what real users think about each tool.

While they’re both solid marketing platforms, they shine in different areas and cater to different types of users.

ActiveCampaign is known for its automation and deep CRM integration. If you need complex workflows to handle lead nurturing, sales follow-up, and customer retention, ActiveCampaign has the tools to make it happen.

For example, it offers split automations (A/B testing entire workflows), predictive sending, and lead scoring. These features allow you to personalize your approach based on contact behavior, from when they open emails to their browsing habits on your site.

Brevo is known for its ease of use and affordability. It offers email and SMS marketing features that are simple but effective, with a clean, intuitive interface. Brevo’s automation tools are designed for straightforward campaigns, making it easy to set up basics like welcome sequences or abandoned cart reminders.

Let’s take a look at how both platforms perform across a range of features.

ActiveCampaign and Brevo take different approaches to things like segmentation, personalization, and automation. If email marketing is at the core of your marketing strategy, we’ll break these features down to showcase how they compare so you can see which platform may suit you better.

Segmentation

To start, ActiveCampaign is known for granular segmentation, allowing you to create highly targeted lists based on behavior, location, purchase history, and much more. You can use advanced segmentation criteria like page visits, email engagement, and even lead scores, which means you can create very specific segments and reach the right audience with precise messages.

It also offers dynamic segmentation, meaning contacts can automatically move between segments based on updated conditions. This keeps your contacts up to date and prevents them from receiving messaging that’s irrelevant to them at that precise moment.

Brevo offers basic segmentation that’s easy to set up and use. You can build segments based on criteria like demographics, email engagement, or purchase activity. It’s straightforward and works well for standard segmentation needs, but lacks the depth and flexibility that ActiveCampaign offers.

Personalization

ActiveCampaign allows for deep personalization at various stages. You can use conditional content to tailor email sections based on individual contact attributes or behavior, showing different messages to different users in the same email.

This includes options for personalizing email send times with predictive sending, which optimizes the time each contact receives an email based on their past open behavior.

Brevo keeps email personalization simple and effective, with options like inserting a contact's name, location, or other basic info right into the email for a more personal touch. You can easily create segments based on things like purchase history or engagement, so you’re sending the right message to the right group.

While it doesn’t have advanced conditional content, Brevo’s user-friendly design makes it easy to set up basic personalization that helps emails feel relevant and timely without getting overly complex.

Predictive sending

ActiveCampaign’s predictive sending uses AI to analyze each contact’s past engagement and determine the best time to send an email. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, predictive sending customizes delivery times for each contact to increase the chances of an open, whether they’re most likely to check their email in the morning, afternoon, or evening.

This feature can really boost open rates and engagement since emails land in inboxes when recipients are most active. It’s a great tool for businesses looking to optimize timing without manual scheduling, helping campaigns perform better with little extra effort.

Brevo currently doesn’t offer predictive sending. Instead, emails are sent based on your chosen schedule, meaning everyone on the list receives messages at the same time. This keeps things simple and easy to manage, but if you’re looking to optimize send times for individual contacts based on their activity patterns, Brevo might not be the best platform.

Conditional content

With ActiveCampaign’s conditional content, you can personalize specific sections of an email based on each contact’s data or behavior. For instance, if a customer has shown interest in a particular product category, you can set the email to display relevant product recommendations just for them.

This means different subscribers can see tailored messages, images, or offers in the same email, based on criteria like past purchases, location, or engagement level. It’s a powerful way to ensure each contact gets a message that feels uniquely relevant to them, boosting engagement.

Brevo doesn’t currently offer advanced conditional content. You can personalize email text with basic contact information like name or location, but you won’t be able to create dynamic sections that change based on behavior or specific criteria.

ActiveCampaign offers a wide selection of pre-built, customizable templates with advanced editing options and the ability to save reusable content blocks. These templates can be tailored with conditional content, allowing more complex designs that adapt to each contact’s information.

Brevo also offers a range of customizable templates, but there are only 40 and they focus on simplicity and ease of use. Their editor is straightforward, which works well for simple designs but doesn’t have the flexibility that ActiveCampaign offers.

Brevo gives you access to a range of features including email signup forms, and advanced reporting. You’re able to customize them with the drag-and-drop editor, rearrange the elements, and then edit the text directly. No HTML or coding knowledge is required.

There’s also a rich library of stock photos to use for free and it's very easy to set brand colors/logo and reuse them across email templates in just a click. This is similar to ActiveCampaign’s AI BrandKit.

Overall, it’ll come down to the level of customization you want and if you’ll be happy with Brevo’s 40 templates compared to ActiveCampaign’s 250+.

What good is your email campaign if nobody sees it? From the past three deliverability tests EmailTooltester ran this year, ActiveCampaign scored first over all other platforms with a 93.4% deliverability rate. Brevo came in thirteenth place and scored a lackluster 74.7% in deliverability.

When you choose ActiveCampaign, you can be certain that more of your contacts will see the emails you send and increase your chances of interaction (and hopefully conversion). This proves that ActiveCampaign is the go-to email platform if you care about deliverability and driving revenue.

And you should, because an undelivered or lost to the spam folder email is practically useless.

ActiveCampaign and Brevo both offer marketing automation, but they differ significantly in their complexity and depth.

ActiveCampaign is known for its customizable automation capabilities. If you’re looking for in-depth workflows, detailed targeting, and automation that adapts to your audience’s behavior, ActiveCampaign will work well for you.

Brevo, in contrast, focuses on keeping automation simple and easy to set up. It’s ideal for users who need basic automation without heavy customization.

Here’s a look at how they compare in key automation features.

A/B testing automations

ActiveCampaign allows you to A/B/C/D/E test entire workflows to see which sequence performs better. You can test different email paths, timing, or messages and compare which version drives more engagement or conversions.

This feature helps you continuously improve your automations by finding the most effective ways to guide users through the customer journey.

Automation goals

ActiveCampaign lets you set specific goals within a workflow, like “completed purchase” or “scheduled a demo.” These goals track when contacts reach a milestone, and you can create automations that adjust based on whether they’ve met those goals.

If a contact meets a goal mid-workflow, they can skip to a new stage, making your marketing process more efficient and personalized.

Brevo doesn’t support split testing within workflows or goal-based automation. You can still build multi-step sequences, but there’s no way to test different paths or set specific goals within the same automation.

Predictive content

ActiveCampaign uses machine learning to tailor email content automatically based on each contact’s past behavior. This way, contacts see the content most likely to resonate with them, improving relevance without extra manual work.

This is especially useful for large, diverse contact lists where different segments may respond best to unique types of content.

Brevo doesn’t offer predictive content for automations. Their automation tools focus on simpler workflows without AI-driven content adjustments, so while you can personalize messages, you won’t have predictive content capabilities.

Automation building

ActiveCampaign’s visual automation builder makes it easy to visualize complex workflows. You can add actions like “wait,” “if/then” logic, and triggers to shape each contact’s path.

This allows for conditional flows based on specific behaviors, like page visits or specific clicks, making it perfect for in-depth customer journeys.

Brevo’s automation builder has a straightforward, visual design with drag-and-drop functionality. While not as intricate as ActiveCampaign, it’s effective for setting up key workflows like welcome emails, cart abandonment, or promotional sequences.

Automations are limited in complexity but accessible and easy to implement, which works well for users just starting with automation.

Automation templates: hundreds of options vs. a few dozen

ActiveCampaign offers an extensive library of automation templates that cover a wide range of marketing and sales needs, making it easy to get started with automated workflows. These templates are designed for common tasks like welcome sequences, lead nurturing, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase follow-ups, win-back campaigns, and more.

Each template provides a ready-made structure, complete with suggested triggers, actions, and conditions, so you can quickly customize them to fit your specific goals.

For instance, the welcome email sequence template helps new subscribers get familiar with your brand, while the lead scoring template automatically assigns scores to contacts based on engagement, enabling you to prioritize leads. There are also templates for customer journeys that incorporate multiple channels (like email, SMS, and site tracking), which is useful if you’re aiming for a cohesive experience across different touchpoints.

Brevo offers a few dozen automation recipes, all very standard templates. This includes pre-built workflows for popular use cases, such as a welcome series, birthday messages, and simple nurture campaigns. These templates make it easy to get started without building from scratch.

This small selection of automations works well for teams that need quick, reliable workflows and don’t require extensive customization but they leave a lot to be desired.

ActiveCampaign includes a dedicated CRM add-on that’s integrated into the platform. This CRM functionality is designed to manage your sales processes and customer relationships effectively, giving you access to features like deal tracking, pipeline management, and sales automation.

The CRM allows you to organize contacts, track interactions, build pipelines, create deal records, assign deal owners, and automate your sales communications. It’s designed to work with your email marketing efforts, providing a more cohesive and powerful way to handle both marketing and sales activities.

If you need CRM capabilities to complement your marketing, ActiveCampaign is the platform you should choose. Just keep in mind that the CRM is an add-on available on the Plus plan or higher.

Brevo also offers a built-in CRM designed to help you manage and track customer relationships without the extra frills. It’s a straightforward tool that provides all the essentials you need to stay organized with your contacts and keep your sales team on track.

Their CRM centralizes your contacts so you can easily add, view, and update customer information. You can tag contacts, add notes, and track their engagement history (like email opens or link clicks), making it easier to personalize follow-ups.

Plus, with Brevo’s deal pipeline, you can track the progress of deals as they move through your sales stages, from initial contact to closing the sale. It’s a visual, drag-and-drop board where you can see at a glance which stage each deal is in and move deals along as needed.

Overall, Brevo’s CRM is user-friendly and efficient for teams that want to manage their sales without diving into heavy-duty CRM features. It’s great for businesses that need an accessible, organized way to track deals and tasks without the bells and whistles.

ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder features a drag-and-drop editor, which allows users to easily add and rearrange elements such as text, images, buttons, and forms. This user-friendly interface ensures that even those without coding skills can create professional-looking landing pages tailored to their brand. Users can adjust styles, fonts, colors, and layouts to create unique pages that align with their marketing goals.

You also have access to a library of professionally designed templates for various purposes, including lead generation, product promotion, event registration, and thank-you pages. Each template is fully customizable, enabling users to adapt them to fit their branding. Plus, ActiveCampaign supports dynamic content blocks, allowing marketers to show different content to different visitors based on data.

ActiveCampaign’s landing pages integrate smoothly with its form capabilities, allowing for efficient lead collection and the ability to trigger automations directly from the landing page. Users can choose from options such as embedded forms, pop-ups, and floating bars, making it easy to capture visitor information.

Brevo’s landing page builder is designed to help businesses quickly create effective landing pages without the need for extensive design skills. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to add elements like text, images, buttons, and forms, allowing users to build pages that align with their marketing goals.

While the customization options are somewhat basic compared to more advanced platforms, the simplicity of the builder ensures that users can set up a page in no time.

Brevo provides a selection of pre-designed templates to help users get started faster. These templates cater to common purposes, such as lead capture, event registration, and thank-you pages. Though the templates are straightforward, users can customize them to some extent, enabling them to match their branding and messaging without too much hassle.

Brevo’s landing pages also integrate with its form capabilities, allowing users to collect contact information and manage leads efficiently. The forms can be easily embedded into the landing pages, helping businesses funnel new contacts directly into their CRM for follow-up.

While Brevo does offer mobile optimization to ensure that landing pages look good on all devices, the lack of advanced features like A/B testing or dynamic content means that users may not be able to fully optimize their pages for different audience segments.

ActiveCampaign offers a range of reporting tools that give you deep insights into your marketing campaigns. One of the standout features is the Marketing Revenue Report, which ties your marketing efforts directly to revenue. This report shows exactly how your campaigns impact your bottom line, making it easier to see what’s working and where you might need to make adjustments.

With ActiveCampaign’s reporting, you can track email engagement, customer behavior, and sales performance. Customers can expect detailed analytics on everything from open rates and click-throughs to more advanced metrics like automation effectiveness and customer lifetime value. It’s designed to help you understand the full impact of your marketing strategies, whether you're focused on email campaigns, SMS, or broader automation workflows.

Brevo offers straightforward reporting capabilities that help users track the performance of their email campaigns and marketing efforts without overwhelming complexity. You can access essential metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, which provide a clear picture of how your campaigns are performing.

The platform also allows you to segment reports by different criteria, like contact lists or specific campaigns, making it easier to understand which audiences are responding best.

While Brevo's reporting tools are user-friendly, they don’t dive as deeply into analytics as other platforms might. You won’t find extensive A/B testing results or predictive analytics features, but the basics are covered well enough for users to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies.

In ActiveCampaign’s app marketplace, you’ll find 950+ apps that integrate with various tools and platforms, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and other marketing tools. It supports connections with popular services like Salesforce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and hundreds more.

Brevo offers 66 integrations, a much smaller number than ActiveCampaign. Their integrations include apps like Shopify, OptinMonster, Zapier, Wix, and more.

The platform that’s right for you will ultimately come down to which tools you’re already using and if ActiveCampaign or Brevo can easily integrate with them. By and large, ActiveCampaign offers more flexibility and power when connecting all your apps together (which makes every function a lot easier).

ActiveCampaign stands out with its comprehensive support options. They provide 24/7 live chat and email support, ensuring you can get help whenever you need it. Their extensive resource library includes webinars, detailed guides, and a community forum, offering a wealth of information to help you navigate and optimize the platform.

Additionally, ActiveCampaign offers one-on-one training sessions for those who prefer a more personalized touch, making it easier to get tailored guidance and support.

Brevo offers a range of onboarding and support options to help users get started and make the most of the platform. When you first sign up, Brevo provides a guided setup process that walks you through essential features and settings. This helps new users familiarize themselves with the platform and get their campaigns up and running quickly.

Brevo also offers live chat support during business hours, providing real-time assistance for users who need immediate help. This is great for quick questions or troubleshooting.

ActiveCampaign and Brevo have different pricing structures. For this comparison, we’ll look at pricing for up to 1,000 contacts on both platforms.

Brevo pricing

We’ll be looking at Brevo’s Marketing Platform pricing plans. There are four tiers: free, Starter, Business, and Enterprise.

Starting with the Free plan, you get up to 100,000 contacts total but can only send 300 emails a day. These are the features you’ll have access to to get you started.

The Free plan is a good place to test things out and see if the platform works for your specific needs. If you know you’ll need a bit more, you can move up to their Starter plan which starts at $9/month for just 500 contacts. For a standard starting contact limit of 1,500, the Starter plan will jump to $17/month and allow you to send 10,000 emails per month.

Next up is Brevo’s Business plan which is built for marketing managers and e-commerce pros. Using the same 1,500 contact benchmark, you can send 10,000 emails a month for $35/month.

The last tier of Brevo’s Marketing Platform is the Enterprise plan which is tailored for each business. This means there’s no set price and you’ll have to reach out to get a quote.

ActiveCampaign pricing

Compared to similar enterprise-level automation tools like HubSpot or Salesforce, ActiveCampaign is pretty budget-friendly for the amount of features you get. They don’t offer a free plan (just a free two-week trial), but their Starter plan gives you access to some pretty advanced features for only $15/month.

ActiveCampaign’s entry-level pricing starts at $15/month. This plan, aptly named the Starter plan, gives you access to multi-step marketing automation right out of the gate. Klaviyo doesn’t advertise advanced automation on any of their plans.

Moving up to the Plus plan, you unlock more automation and powerful customer insights for $49/month with 1,000 contacts.

With the Plus plan and up, you can add on the pipeline enhanced CRM to manage your sales automation or the sales engagement CRM that includes additional email and AI capabilities.

ActiveCampaign’s Pro plan will cost you $79/month to unlock full omnichannel marketing automation. This is where you can truly elevate your email marketing. You’ll have monthly email sends 12x your contact limit and three users instead of one.

The Pro plan allows you to get more granular about how your email campaigns are performing and understand what content, messaging, and offers move the needle for your business. You’ll have total control over your email cadence.

Finally, ActiveCampaign’s Enterprise plan starts at $145/month for 1,000 contacts and allows you monthly email sends 15x your contact limit plus five users.

No matter which ActiveCampaign plan you choose, ActiveCampaign offers services like contact migration, customer enablement workshops, chat and ticket support, video tutorials, a knowledge base, and help guides to help you get the most out of the platform so you can focus on running your business.

We know you’re aware that you’re on the ActiveCampaign website reading a comparison between us and a competitor but there really is a reason why so many people choose to migrate away from their current marketing automation platform. We’ve seen plenty of customers migrate and see real results.

UBITS, a corporate online Spanish-speaking learning platform were searching for a tool to replace their existing system Brevo. UBITS was encountering difficulties in their email communication strategy. Their delivery rates were low, click-through rates were minimal, bounce rates were high, and they were not attracting enough new students for their courses. Plus, managing communication processes required a lot of time and effort from the marketing team.

They were looking for a tool that would allow them to build personalized journeys for each of their students and deliver valuable information to over 100,000 contacts at the right time. They wanted to leave behind the hours wasted on building generic emails and the effects of manual errors they faced on a daily basis.

ActiveCampaign’s automation allowed the team to build campaigns quickly and focus on delivering value. They were able to send personalized, high-value emails at the best time using segmentation, tagging, and predictive sending. This resulted in a significant increase in open rates. Plus, the integration with ActiveCampaign and UBITS course library meant important information flowed freely between systems, saving time and creating a better customer experience overall.

ActiveCampaign or Brevo: which is best for you?

The platform you choose will depend on which features above are most important to you (and which you need to grow your business).

Choose ActiveCampaign if you value marketing automation that can do what you want it to, value deliverability, and need a platform that can easily connect to the tools you already use.

ActiveCampaign is great for businesses that need powerful marketing automation and advanced email features without a lot of extra frills—perfect for small to mid-sized teams looking for deep customization and data-driven decisions.

Choose Brevo if you need a straightforward tool with basic automation, simple landing page creation, and contact segmentation to cover your day-to-day needs.

Brevo is a solid, budget-friendly option for those just starting out. It’s appealing to small businesses that need a straightforward tool for managing email campaigns, capturing leads, and organizing customer interactions and don’t need advanced or complex features.

Are customer stories too biased for you? We get it. Let’s look at a few reviews from real users.

“Brevo is an affordable email marketing for individuals, freelancers, and solopreneurs just starting out.”

Source: G2

“Brevo is great, easy-to-use email marketing for small businesses.”

Source: G2

“ActiveCampaign has been a game-changer for my business!”

Source: G2

“Thanks to ActiveCampaign: we can make more informed decisions about our marketing.”

Source: G2

Lingering questions? We've got you.

💡 Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

ActiveCampaign is ideal for businesses that want to take their marketing to the next level with powerful automation and personalization features. It’s a great fit for small to mid-sized teams who need advanced tools to automate their marketing, segment their audience, and track detailed performance metrics.

If you're looking for a platform that offers deep customization, predictive analytics, and a visual workflow builder to create tailored customer experiences, ActiveCampaign could be a perfect match. It’s especially useful if you have a bit of experience with email marketing and want to leverage more sophisticated strategies to drive growth.

💡 Can you use ActiveCampaign as a CRM?

Yes, ActiveCampaign can be used as a CRM. It includes built-in CRM functionalities that allow businesses to manage their sales pipelines, track customer interactions, and automate follow-ups.

The combination of marketing automation and CRM in one platform helps simplify the sales process, improve customer engagement, and maintain organized records of customer data and interactions, making it easy to manage your marketing and sales in one place.

💡 Who is Brevo best for?

Brevo is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses seeking a cost-effective, all-in-one marketing solution. With features like email and SMS marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and transactional email capabilities, it enables companies to streamline customer engagement across multiple channels.

Brevo’s user-friendly design makes it accessible for businesses aiming to scale their marketing without the complexity or expense of larger platforms, making it well-suited for those looking to foster customer relationships and drive growth through multichannel outreach.

💡 What is the difference between ActiveCampaign and Brevo?

The major difference between ActiveCampaign and Brevo lies in their approach to automation and CRM capabilities.

ActiveCampaign is highly focused on advanced marketing and sales automation, offering in-depth segmentation, behavioral tracking, and complex workflow automation, which is ideal for businesses looking for a powerful, data-driven system to manage customer journeys and sales processes.

Brevo, on the other hand, provides a more straightforward, user-friendly platform geared toward multichannel marketing with email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, and is especially accessible for small to medium-sized businesses needing core CRM features and basic automation at an affordable price.