Brevo vs MailerLite Pricing: Which Is Cheaper at Your List Size and Team Size

Brevo is cheaper than MailerLite at almost every list size, and usually by a lot. At 10,000 subscribers emailed weekly, Brevo Starter costs $9 a month against MailerLite Comfort at $89. But MailerLite includes three user seats on that $12 entry plan and Brevo includes one, and above three people Brevo jumps to $499. Team size decides this, not list size.

That is a strange result, so it is worth showing the work. These two tools bill on completely different units. MailerLite charges for the subscribers you store. Brevo charges for the emails you send. When you put them side by side at matched list sizes, the difference is not the ten or twenty percent you get comparing two subscriber priced tools. It is often ten times.

Every figure below is on monthly billing for both vendors. Both offer roughly ten percent off for annual commitments, so the ranking does not change, but mixing one vendor's annual rate with the other's monthly rate is the most common error in published comparisons and it can reverse a conclusion.

How Brevo and MailerLite actually bill you

MailerLite prices on active subscribers. Unsubscribed and bounced addresses do not count, which is fairer than Mailchimp, but the number you store is the number you pay for. The Comfort plan then caps your monthly sends at ten times your subscriber tier.

Brevo prices on emails sent, campaigns and transactional traffic counted together, and does not meter contacts at all. You can hold a hundred thousand addresses on the free plan. What you cannot do is send to them often without moving up.

So the two systems agree on one thing without meaning to. MailerLite Comfort effectively allows ten emails per subscriber per month. Brevo lets you buy send volume directly. That gives us a clean way to compare them: pick a list size, pick a send frequency, multiply.

At 50,000 subscribers on a weekly newsletter, Brevo is $18 and MailerLite is $319. That is not a close call, and the gap widens the bigger your list gets, because Brevo's price is driven by a number that grows with volume rather than with storage, and its Standard plan absorbs half a million sends a month before it runs out.

Where MailerLite closes the gap

Two places, and both are about how many people work on your email.

MailerLite Comfort includes three user seats at $12 a month. Brevo Free and Starter are single user plans. Brevo Standard reaches three users only through a paid add-on. So for a two or three person team, the honest comparison at 1,000 subscribers is MailerLite Comfort at $12 with three seats against Brevo Standard at $18 plus a seat add-on, and the price advantage largely evaporates.

Above three people it inverts completely.

MailerLite Power includes unlimited seats and costs $25 a month at 500 subscribers, rising to $389 at 50,000. Brevo's only plan with multi user access is Professional at $499. A five person marketing team on a 10,000 person list pays $129 on MailerLite Power and $499 on Brevo. The vendor that was ten times cheaper on the last table is now four times more expensive.

This is the single most useful thing to know about these two products, and it appears in none of the comparisons currently ranking for the query. Count your logins before you count your subscribers.

Which free plan is better?

Neither, straightforwardly. They are shaped for different people and it is worth being precise, because both are commonly described wrongly.

Brevo's free plan stores as many contacts as you like and rations your sending by day. MailerLite's rations your contacts and gives you a monthly send budget. If you have 5,000 addresses and email them once a quarter, Brevo free works and MailerLite free does not exist for you. If you have 200 readers and email them twice a week, MailerLite free works and Brevo's 300 a day cap will not stop you either.

The daily cap is the part people misjudge. Three hundred a day is not the same as nine thousand a month. A single campaign to 1,000 people cannot go out on Brevo's free plan on any day, no matter how quiet the rest of the month was. MailerLite's monthly budget can absorb one big send.

Also worth noting: MailerLite cut its free plan twice in nine months, from 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails down to 250 and 2,500. Most articles still quote the old figure. If you are reading a comparison that says MailerLite gives you 1,000 free subscribers, it has not been rechecked since 2025.

Does Brevo or MailerLite cost less for transactional email?

Brevo, clearly, and this is one of its strongest cards. Transactional email through SMTP and a REST API is included on every Brevo plan including the free one, with unlimited log retention. MailerLite does not position itself as a transactional provider at all, so a business that needs receipts, password resets and shipping notices alongside its newsletter is buying two products.

The catch on the Brevo side is that transactional sends draw down the same monthly allowance as your campaigns. An ecommerce store with a modest list and a busy checkout can spend most of its plan on emails no marketer ever wrote, so count those before choosing a tier.

If those messages are going out of your own application rather than a shop platform, the failure mode is worth planning for too, because a transactional email that never sends is usually a symptom of something upstream being down rather than an email problem. Worth having something that tells you within seconds when the app behind them stops responding, since nobody opens a support ticket to report a receipt they never received.

Which should you pick?

If you are one person with a large list you email occasionally, take Brevo. The pricing model is built for exactly that shape and the saving is not marginal.

If three or more people need a login, price MailerLite Power first. Unlimited seats at $25 to $389 beats a $499 floor at every list size below the point where you would be talking to enterprise sales anyway.

If you send daily to a small list, MailerLite's subscriber pricing gives you a bill that does not move when you decide to send more, which is worth real money in predictability even when the average is higher.

If you need transactional email from the same account, Brevo, without much argument.

And if the reason you are comparing email platforms is that the campaigns are not going out, neither of these will help, because both are senders and the missing piece is the writing. That is the part we handle: AutoMarketer reads your site and drafts the campaigns, the SEO content, the social posts and the ad copy on flat plans from $49 a month. We do not send email, so you will still want one of the two tools above.

The full ladders, add-on costs and seat rules for each are broken down in our Brevo pricing breakdown and our MailerLite pricing breakdown, both checked at the vendors' own pricing pages. If you are switching away from Brevo rather than towards it, the Brevo alternatives comparison covers where each rival actually wins. Brevo prices were read from brevo.com on 7 September 2026 and MailerLite's from mailerlite.com on 3 September 2026.