Quick verdict
These two price on opposite axes, and that is the whole comparison. EmailOctopus charges for subscribers stored and lets you mail them ten times a month; Brevo charges for emails sent and does not care how many contacts you hold. The answer follows directly from your sending pattern. A large list mailed occasionally (a charity supporter base, an annual customer list) is dramatically cheaper on Brevo, sometimes by an order of magnitude. A small list mailed constantly is cheaper on EmailOctopus. Beyond price, they are not really the same class of product: Brevo includes SMS, a genuine CRM and transactional sending, while EmailOctopus does one job and does it cheaply.
Winner by use case
| If you want | Winner | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Large list, infrequent sends | Brevo | Unlimited contacts on every plan; you pay only for what you send. |
| Small list, frequent sends | EmailOctopus | Subscriber-based pricing is far cheaper when send volume is high relative to list size. |
| Simplicity | EmailOctopus | One product with a small surface area against a five-module platform. |
| Feature breadth | Brevo | SMS, CRM, transactional email and landing pages that EmailOctopus does not offer at all. |
| UK buyers | EmailOctopus | UK-based and UK-invoiced, which simplifies procurement and data questions. |
EmailOctopus vs Brevo at your list size
Cheapest
Brevo
Starter
£24/mo
Lowest effective monthly cost of every plan that meets your requirements.
Best value
EmailOctopus
Pro
£24.50/mo
Of the plans costing up to 2x the cheapest paid option, the one with the highest capability score.
Best automation
EmailOctopus
Pro
£24.50/mo
Highest automation score among plans that actually include automation on that tier.
Starter
£24≈ £24/moCheapest- Monthly
- £24
- Annual (per mo)
- £21.67
- Subscribers
- Unlimited
- Emails/mo
- 20,000
SMSFormsCRMNo daily sending cap. Marketing automation is not included on this plan. Tops out at 100,000 emails a month.
Verified8 September 2026sourcePro
£24.50≈ £24.50/moBest valueBest automation- Monthly
- £24.50
- Annual (per mo)
- £22
- Subscribers
- 5,000
- Emails/mo
- 50,000
AutomationLanding pagesFormsUnlimited landing pages, forms and users. Reports kept indefinitely. Send allowance is 10x your subscriber band, with a 10,000-email floor.
Verified8 September 2026source
Ranked by the effective monthly cost on your chosen billing cycle, converted to pounds where a provider quotes in another currency. Only the cheapest qualifying plan per provider is shown. Prices are the provider’s own published rate. Always confirm before buying.
Side by side
| EmailOctopus | Brevo | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | £9/mo (Pro) | £6/mo (Starter) |
| Same plan billed annually | £8/mo | £5.42/mo |
| Free plan | 2,500 subs · 10,000 emails/mo | Unlimited subs · 9,000 emails/mo |
| Uncapped sending available | No | No |
| Automation score | 5.5/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Ease of use score | 8.5/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Deliverability score | 7.5/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Support score | 6.5/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Pricing bands published | 15 | 25 |
Automation
Brevo is substantially ahead. It offers a full visual workflow builder with branching, contact scoring and website-event triggers, though the free plan restricts automation to 2,000 contacts. EmailOctopus provides time-based and trigger-based sequences with tag and list conditions: enough for onboarding drips, and nothing more. There is no branching, no scoring and no cart recovery.
Ecommerce features
Not a contest: EmailOctopus has no ecommerce features whatsoever, and says so. Brevo includes store integrations, abandoned cart recovery and purchase-triggered automation on its Business tier, plus a CRM to hold the customer record. If you run a store, EmailOctopus is not a candidate and this comparison resolves itself.
Forms and landing pages
Both include hosted signup forms and landing pages, with a caveat on each. EmailOctopus allows one landing page and one form on the free tier and removes the cap on Pro; the builder is basic but does the job. Brevo includes forms on every plan and reserves landing pages for Business, so the cheaper Brevo Starter plan is weaker here than EmailOctopus Pro.
Email send limits
The axis the whole page turns on. EmailOctopus Pro allows ten sends per subscriber per month. Brevo sells send volume directly, so its limit is whatever band you buy, with no contact ceiling at all. Work out your actual monthly send volume before choosing: it decides this comparison more reliably than any feature does.
Free plan limits
Both have real free tiers with different shapes. EmailOctopus Starter: 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, with EmailOctopus branding and reports kept for 30 days. Brevo Free: unlimited contacts but capped at 300 emails a day (about 9,000 a month) with the Brevo logo on emails and automation limited to 2,000 contacts. For a stored list above 2,500, only Brevo is free.
Integrations
Brevo has the broader catalogue, including Salesforce, Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress and Stripe, plus a well-documented API for the transactional service. EmailOctopus covers WordPress, Shopify, Ghost, Carrd and Zapier, a deliberately short list aimed at newsletter publishers. Both cover Zapier and Make, which fills most gaps.
Deliverability
Brevo runs a larger estate with separate marketing and transactional pipelines, so receipts do not share reputation with campaigns, and offers dedicated IPs. EmailOctopus supports SPF, DKIM and custom sending domains but has no dedicated IP option, which matters above roughly 100,000 sends a month. Neither score comes from our own inbox placement testing.
Support
Brevo offers email support on all plans including free, live chat from the mid tier and phone on Enterprise. EmailOctopus is email-only, in UK business hours, with no chat or phone escalation at any price. EmailOctopus replies are consistently helpful and technically literate, but if you need an answer during a send at 9pm, Brevo is the safer choice.
Ease of use
EmailOctopus is far quicker to learn precisely because it does less: most people send a first campaign within an hour. Brevo spans marketing email, transactional, SMS, chat and CRM, and finding the right screen genuinely takes longer. Neither is badly designed; they are solving different-sized problems.
Pros and cons
EmailOctopus
Low-cost sending for newsletters
Pros
- Free plan carries 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month
- Lowest-priced contact-based plan we track from 5,000 to 50,000 subscribers
- UK-based, which simplifies invoicing and data questions for UK buyers
- 20% lifetime discount for registered nonprofits
Cons
- No ecommerce features, cart recovery or SMS at all
- No CRM, no pipelines, no sales features
- Free plan puts EmailOctopus branding on every email
- Email-only support with no chat or phone escalation
Brevo
Priced per email sent, not per contact
Pros
- Unlimited contacts on every plan: you pay for sends, not list size
- Native SMS and WhatsApp alongside email
- Includes a genuine CRM with deals and pipelines
- Transactional email on the same account as marketing
Cons
- Expensive if you mail a small list frequently
- Daily send cap on the free plan constrains real use
- Interface sprawls across five product areas
- Template library is weaker than MailerLite or Omnisend
Alternatives worth checking
How we compared these two
Prices come from each provider’s own published pricing page. The source URL and the date we checked it are shown against every figure in the calculator above; where a band has not yet been confirmed against the source it is labelled “needs review” rather than presented as confirmed.
The ranking in the calculator is by price alone. Our editorial scores, automation, ease of use, deliverability, support, do not reorder it. They inform the verdict and the use-case winners above, and each score has its reasoning written out on the provider’s own page.
We do not run our own inbox placement tests, so nothing in the deliverability section should be read as a measured inbox rate. It reflects published sending infrastructure, authentication and IP options, and documented provider policy.
Pricing on this page was last verified on 8 September 2026. Read the full methodology.
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