ActiveCampaign vs Brevo: Whose Pricing Model Wins at Your List Size and Send Frequency

Updated August 2026

Both of these tools will build you a welcome sequence, segment your list, and send a newsletter. That's not the decision. The decision is that ActiveCampaign and Brevo charge you for fundamentally different things, and which one wins depends on a number most buyers never actually calculate: how many contacts you're storing versus how often you're mailing them.

ActiveCampaign meters you by contacts stored. Add a name to your list and your bill can move, whether you ever email that person or not. Brevo meters you by emails sent in a month. Store 100,000 contacts for free and pay nothing extra until you actually hit send. That single design choice is why the "which is cheaper" answer flips depending on your list size and your calendar, not just your feature checklist. This piece builds the real cost model at 5,000, 25,000, and 100,000 contacts across a light and a heavy sending cadence, using each vendor's own published pricing, so you can see where the crossover actually happens for a list your size.

TL;DR

What Each Tool Is Actually Built For

ActiveCampaign was built around one bet: that behavior should drive every marketing action. Visit a pricing page, click a specific link, cross a deal-stage threshold, and ActiveCampaign can branch you into a different sequence, alert a rep, or update a score, all inside one visual automation canvas. That bet rewards a team with someone dedicated to building and maintaining the logic. It's the tool a marketing ops hire reaches for.

Brevo was built around a different bet: that most teams don't need a marketing engineer, they need email, SMS, transactional messages, and a basic CRM in one login without assembling five vendors and five invoices. It's self-serve by default, and its pricing rewards a business with a big contact list that doesn't need to be emailed constantly, the opposite of ActiveCampaign's shape.

If you're still narrowing the field beyond these two, our best email marketing software roundup ranks twelve platforms by fit rather than feature count, and the email marketing software buying guide walks through the questions worth asking before you demo anyone.

How Each One Actually Meters and Charges You

This is the mechanic that decides your bill, and it's worth understanding before a single dollar figure matters.

ActiveCampaign's send cap is real but generous: Starter and Plus allow sends up to 10 times your contact count each month, Pro allows 12 times, Enterprise allows 15 times. For almost any realistic sending cadence, that cap never actually binds, which is precisely why ActiveCampaign's price barely moves with frequency. Brevo has no equivalent slack because frequency is the meter.

Brevo's contact storage, meanwhile, isn't unlimited on paid plans the way it sounds. It scales in steps tied to your chosen send-volume bracket, and the two matter together, not separately. Brevo's own help center publishes the exact steps:

Source: Brevo's official pricing plans article, verified August 2026. Read that table carefully, because it changes the "Brevo is cheap for big lists" story most comparisons repeat uncritically. The advertised $9/month floor only covers up to 500 contacts. Any list past 2,500 contacts, regardless of how rarely you mail it, already requires stepping up to at least the 20,000-email bracket just to have enough storage room. Brevo's real floor for a working list is higher than its headline price, the same trap ActiveCampaign gets criticized for.

ActiveCampaign's Published Price by Contact Count

Unlike Brevo, ActiveCampaign publishes a complete price grid on its own pricing page, selectable by exact contact count. Here it is at four sizes, billed annually, verified live in August 2026.

Two details worth flagging before you shortlist a tier. First, at 25,000 contacts, Starter costs more per month than Plus ($391 versus $389), and Starter isn't sold at all above 25,000 contacts. If you're on Starter and growing, you'll be pushed to Plus anyway, so there's rarely a reason to price out Starter beyond a small starting list. Second, all figures above are ActiveCampaign's own "billed annually" rate; its pricing page doesn't display a separate self-serve month-to-month number at these tiers, so treat these as the annual commitment price, not a month-to-month one.

Pricing at Real List Sizes: 5,000, 25,000, and 100,000 Contacts

Here's the model the brief for this piece actually cares about: what each vendor costs at three list sizes, under a light sending cadence and a heavy one. "Light" here means roughly twice a month, a biweekly newsletter pattern. "Heavy" means roughly eight times a month, closer to twice a week, a common cadence for an active nurture program or an ecommerce send calendar. Adjust the math for your own cadence; the mechanism is what matters.

For ActiveCampaign, Plus is the realistic comparison tier, since Starter caps every automation at 5 actions and can't run the kind of workflow most teams actually buy ActiveCampaign for. For Brevo, the required plan is dictated by whichever bracket your resulting send volume falls into, using the table above.

5,000 Contacts

At this size, neither vendor's price moves with frequency, for the same underlying reason on both sides: your usage sits well inside whatever cap or bracket you're already paying for. The real gap here is capability, not cost. Brevo doesn't publish the exact dollar figure for its 20,000-email bracket in a static table (only the $9 floor at 500 contacts and the $499 floor at Professional are published outright), but it's a fair bet it lands meaningfully under ActiveCampaign's $145 Plus price for a list this size, given Brevo's own Standard tier starts at $18/mo for a smaller send volume than this.

25,000 Contacts

This is where the crossover starts to show. ActiveCampaign is flat at $389/mo regardless of how often you mail 25,000 contacts. Brevo stays cheap at a light cadence but a heavy cadence forces an actual tier upgrade, from Starter to Standard, driven purely by send volume with the contact count unchanged.

100,000 Contacts

This is the clearest version of the story. At a light cadence, a 100,000-contact list on Brevo needs Standard, a plan whose published floor ($18/mo) is nowhere near ActiveCampaign's $1,199/mo, even accounting for the fact that 200,000 monthly emails prices well above that floor. At a heavy cadence, the same list crosses into Brevo Professional territory, whose $499/mo floor alone is still less than half of ActiveCampaign's flat $1,199/mo, though 800,000 emails a month prices above that $499 floor by an amount Brevo's calculator, not a published table, determines.

Where the Real Crossover Falls

Put the three tables together and the pattern is consistent: ActiveCampaign's bill is set almost entirely by your contact count and barely moves with how often you email, because its send caps are generous multiples of your list size. Brevo's bill is set by how often you actually hit send, and it stays genuinely cheap for a large list mailed rarely, then climbs, sometimes through a full tier change, as frequency rises.

The crossover isn't a single number, it's a shape. At small lists (5,000 contacts or fewer), the price gap between the two is modest and the real decision is automation depth. At large lists mailed infrequently (25,000 to 100,000 contacts, twice a month or less), Brevo's advantage is real and large. At large lists mailed often (eight or more times a month), that advantage narrows fast, and a heavy-cadence sender at 100,000 contacts should run their own numbers past Brevo's Professional tier before assuming it stays the cheaper option. If your list size and cadence sit outside the three scenarios above, Brevo's own pricing calculator and ActiveCampaign's own pricing page both let you plug in exact numbers.

Automation Depth and Lead Scoring: Being Fair About the Gap

ActiveCampaign's automation builder is genuinely the deepest in this price class, and no amount of Brevo bundling changes that. Multi-branch conditional logic, goal tracking, split-testing inside a live workflow, predictive sending, and CRM deal-stage triggers are available from Plus up, and Enterprise adds premium CRM integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Brevo's automation, while functional from Standard up, doesn't approach that branching depth. If your team will actually build and maintain complex, multi-step behavioral workflows, that gap is worth paying for on its own.

Lead scoring specifically is a more nuanced comparison than it first appears, and worth correcting here. ActiveCampaign doesn't include lead scoring natively on any tier, Starter through Enterprise. It's sold separately as part of the Pipelines add-on, regardless of which plan you're already paying for. Brevo, by contrast, includes contact scoring natively inside its Professional plan, covering engagement, RFM, and customer lifetime value scoring, no separate add-on purchase required once you're on that tier. So while ActiveCampaign's automation builder is clearly ahead, "lead scoring" as a specific line item is either a wash or tilts toward Brevo once you're comparing Brevo Professional against ActiveCampaign plus its Pipelines add-on. Check current add-on pricing directly with ActiveCampaign, since it isn't listed publicly alongside the base tiers.

For teams evaluating ActiveCampaign specifically against its full competitive set, not just Brevo, the ActiveCampaign alternatives guide covers where the rest of the category lands. For readers who need marketing automation as the primary job to be done rather than a bundled feature, the marketing automation buying guide is worth reading before you commit to either platform.

What Brevo Bundles That Would Otherwise Be Separate Line Items

Brevo's other genuine appeal, separate from pricing mechanics, is how much rides on the base plan before you add anything. A team piecing together ActiveCampaign, a transactional email API, an SMS tool, and a lightweight CRM is paying at least four vendors. Brevo's pitch is that most of that comes bundled from a low starting point, sometimes from the Free tier.

That bundling is Brevo's real differentiator for a lean team, arguably more than the pricing model itself. If your stack today is four separate tools stitched together with Zapier, folding transactional email, SMS access, live chat, and a basic pipeline into one login has value that doesn't show up in either vendor's headline price.

Implementation and Time to Value

Neither of these is a knock. ActiveCampaign's learning curve is the cost of the depth it offers; Brevo's simplicity is the cost of not offering that depth. Match the setup investment to whether you actually have someone who will use the harder tool.

Risk and Deliverability Considerations

Both platforms run their own sending infrastructure and have operated at meaningful scale for years, so neither carries unusual deliverability risk on its own; day-to-day sender reputation still depends on your authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and list hygiene more than which ESP you pick. Brevo publishes an EU data residency option, worth checking if your contacts are covered by GDPR and your compliance team asks about data location specifically. ActiveCampaign's premium CRM integrations (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics) and single sign-on are Pro-and-Enterprise-only, worth knowing if governance requirements are part of your decision, not just price.

When ActiveCampaign Is the Right Call

• You're running (or about to build) multi-branch, behavior-triggered automation, and someone on the team will actually own and maintain it.
• Your sending cadence is heavy, eight or more campaigns a month, at any list size; ActiveCampaign's flat contact-based pricing stops penalizing you for frequency the way Brevo's meter does.
• You need CRM deal-stage triggers feeding directly into your email logic, not just a bundled pipeline sitting next to your campaigns.
• You're prepared to shop the Pipelines add-on separately if lead scoring specifically is a requirement, not an assumption baked into the base price.

When Brevo Is the Right Call

• You have a large list, 25,000 contacts or more, and you mail it infrequently, twice a month or less; this is the scenario where Brevo's per-send meter is genuinely, substantially cheaper.
• You want transactional email, SMS access, and a basic CRM bundled from a low starting price instead of assembling four separate vendors.
• Your team is self-serve, without a dedicated marketing ops hire to build and maintain complex automation.
• You need contact scoring as a plan-native Professional feature rather than a separate purchase.

Decision Framework

What to Do Next

1. Count your actual contacts and your actual sends per month, not your aspirational ones. The crossover in this piece is driven entirely by those two numbers, and most buyers only ever check one.
2. Run your own figures through both calculators. ActiveCampaign's pricing page gives you an exact number by contact count. Brevo's pricing page gives you an exact number by send volume; use the table earlier in this piece to know which bracket your contact count already forces you into before you look at the price.
3. If you're leaving Mailchimp specifically, both of these tools show up as common next steps; the Mailchimp alternatives guide covers how they stack up against the rest of that shortlist, or go straight to Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp vs Brevo for the direct head-to-head against whichever one you're closer to picking.
4. If price is close after doing the math, default to capability. A cheaper tool that can't build the workflow you actually need costs more in workaround time than the monthly gap on the invoice.