When it comes to choosing the right email marketing and communications platform, Brevo and Sendgrid are two of the top options business owners evaluate. Selecting the platform that aligns best with your business goals is critical for effectively engaging customers, driving conversions, and growing your company.
In this comprehensive Brevo vs Sendgrid comparison article, we will analyze 10 key criteria to determine which platform is superior. We will scrutinize market position and popularity, ease of use, customization capabilities, integrations, and analytics.
Additionally, we will evaluate the customer support, community, pricing models, and overall reputation of each platform. By the end, you will have the information needed to decide if Brevo or Sendgrid is the best email marketing solution for empowering your business success.
1. Understanding the Basics
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur Armand Thiberge. As a relatively new website builder, Brevo is tailored specifically for small businesses and entrepreneurs through its easy-to-use drag-and-drop site editor.
SendGrid was launched in 2009, and founded by Isaac Saldana, Tim Jenkins, and Jose Lopez. As of 2022, SendGrid delivers emails to over 90,000 paying customers.
When it comes to popularity and reputation, Sendgrid leads thanks to its first-mover advantage and CEO Sameer Dholakia’s recognition as a preeminent thought leader. However, Brevo shouldn’t be underestimated as its less enterprise-focused features are resonating with many small business owners.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Brevo
Brevo makes it easy to set up basic automation for your email marketing campaigns and workflows without coding. Their drag-and-drop automation builder lets you trigger emails based on actions like signups, purchases, profile updates, and more. Prebuilt templates help you create common flows faster.
With the visual editor, you can customize email content, personalize messages, and adapt based on data. Branches and conditional logic empower more advanced sequencing. For example, you could send different follow-up series to customers vs one-time shoppers.
While powerful for beginners, Brevo lacks some features that growing businesses may need. There are only basic filters and you must create individual automations for each scenario you want to automate. The absence of tags and segmentation makes personalizing broadly across your list tedious. Still, it provides what most small companies need out of the box.
SendGrid
Sendgrid offers significantly more advanced, code-free automation for experts and businesses managing large lists. With the Workflow Editor, you build multi-branch flows using drag-and-drop modules for filtering, segmentation, data manipulation, and personalization without restrictions.
For instance, you could filter all customers who spent over $500 last month and then trigger a VIP loyalty campaign. Or append lifetime value data to contacts profiles to segment gold vs silver tiers. Dynamic content lets you pull in subscriber information to tailor messages.
SendGrid has over a dozen field types, operators, and campaign filters to orchestrate intricate automation at scale. However, the added complexity comes with a steeper learning curve that beginners may find overwhelming. However, its capacity can support even enterprise-level needs.
Winner: SendGrid
The Sendgrid Brevo comparison shows that Sendgrid is the clear winner for advanced marketing automation features, thanks to the advanced Workflow Editor enabling more sophisticated, customizable functionality suitable for businesses at any growth stage. While Brevo provides solid prebuilt templates for email marketing basics, Sendgrid’s superior filtering, segmentation, and personalization capabilities make complex automation more achievable for experts.
Email Templates
Brevo
Brevo offers customizable email templates that users can leverage and edit for their marketing campaigns. Templates likely cover common uses like transactional emails, welcome emails, promotions, newsletters, and more.
One can presume Brevo provides intuitive editing as a platform tailored for small businesses. Users probably utilize a drag-and-drop editor to quickly customize colors, fonts, content blocks, and basic design layouts. There may also be dynamic content capabilities to easily personalize messages with subscriber data as well.
While the total template selection cannot be confirmed, Brevo’s focus on ease of use suggests they contain professionally designed options encompassing needs for most retail, e-commerce, and service-based businesses. Without a background in coding, entrepreneurs can probably create on-brand, polished emails.
SendGrid
Similarly, Sendgrid states they empower users to build email campaigns with pre-made templates. Given its enterprise-scale audience, Sendgrid likely provides more overall choices across the most common email types.
One can extrapolate that template editing functionality leans more advanced since Sendgrid manages complex communication for large companies. Experts can probably leverage dynamic content for personalization along with code access to craft customized templates.
Sendgrid may enable using HTML/CSS for designing templates from scratch for full creative control. Robust analytics are also presumably available to optimize design and content choices. The focus leans more toward self-service for seasoned marketers compared to Brevo.
Winner: Tie
Both Brevo and Sendgrid enable access to professionally designed templates covering essential email types. Brevo likely better serves beginners with easier editing while Sendgrid provides greater overall choice and coding flexibility catered towards experts managing large-scale communications.
For the average small business owner, either seems to empower creating polished, effective email campaigns with templates.
Segmentation
Brevo
Brevo provides email marketing features to divide contacts into groups called segments to enable more targeted communication. When evaluating tools for smaller businesses and novices, key aspects include ease of use and simplicity.
Brevo likely allows manual and some automatic segmentation based on properties like user attributes, behaviors, and activity. This empowers creating filtered segments to run targeted campaigns. While useful functionality for beginners, Brevo probably lacks substantial depth in customization or complexity to cater to non-expert users.
SendGrid
For platforms targeting experienced marketers managing large contact volumes, advanced and customizable segmentation is a higher priority.
Sendgrid touts robust contact management features enabling segmented communication at scale. As a tool for tech-savvy experts, Sendgrid provides advanced segmentation including dynamic models, tag and event-based dividing, segment layering with Boolean logic, and more. The greater depth caters to users with segmentation experience looking for complexity.
Winner: SendGrid
Sendgrid’s presumed greater depth in segmentation approaches, complexity capabilities, and customization better serve high-volume expert users who require advanced functionality. Brevo covers the basics well but lacks in-depth options suitable for large enterprises.
Analytics
Brevo
As an email marketing platform for small businesses, we can presume Brevo provides basic analytics reports to help beginners understand campaign performance. Likely reports cover email stats like deliverability, open/click rates, and subscriber activity over time.
Easy-to-interpret charts and graphs visualize insights without complexity. Drag-and-drop reporting building allows customizing reports based on segments. However, complex multi-dimensional analysis is improbable for Brevo customers focused on simpler email strategies.
While real-time dashboard views help new users monitor active campaigns, long-term analysis may lack the depth or integration with broader business intelligence stacks that growing companies often desire. But it meets the core needs of most small retail and e-commerce sites.
SendGrid
Comparatively, Sendgrid offers robust analytics suitable for tech experts and enterprise customers distributing communications at an immense scale. Granular analysis on email effectiveness, subscriber engagement over time, and content performance guide data-driven optimization.
Custom dashboards leverage segmentation and multiple filters for deep analysis from different lenses, while scheduled reporting automates access to those insights. For direct integration into broader data ecosystems, APIs and integrations with leading business intelligence tools like Tableau allow leveraging email data.
The focus leans toward customizable analysis for experts who understand metrics implications and best practices interpreting the in-depth functionality provided. The learning curve proves higher, but serves high-volume mailers better.
Winner: SendGrid
For advanced analytics, Sendgrid provides more scope for customization and unlocking actionable insights than Brevo’s probable simpler reporting. For experts managing large subscriber volumes looking to connect email data directly into their broader analysis ecosystem, Sendgrid has greater capability.
Unique Features
Brevo
As a relative newcomer tailored for small business owners, Brevo likely aims to compete by providing an easy-to-use email marketing platform with modern features absent in legacy options.
Potential differentiators could include native integrations optimized for popular small business tools not typically supported in the email marketing space. For example, Brevo may enable seamless connectivity with platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, MailChimp, and apps like QuickBooks or Zapier.
They may also focus product development on emerging capabilities around artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to empower beginners. This could mean including predictive modeling for segmentation or partial automation through AI.
SendGrid
Alternatively, Sendgrid’s years of experience delivering large-scale email campaigns provide an advantage in terms of email deliverability and compliance. Advanced functionality around protecting sender reputation across major ISPs gives them an edge.
Sendgrid also offers a marketplace of third-party add-ons allowing customers to augment functionality like analytics, email design tools, and more. Their open development platform enables expanding core capabilities.
Lastly, Sendgrid’s focus on technology means rapidly integrating new protocols like SMS messaging alongside email communications into a multichannel customer engagement strategy.
Winner: SendGrid
Sendgrid appears the likely winner in terms of leveraging experience in developing innovative functionality given their specialization in scalable email delivery. Investments in compliance, deliverability, and third-party integrations cater well to high-volume expert users relative to Brevo’s probable more general small business focus.
3. Ease of Use
Brevo
As an email marketing platform built for small business owners without technical expertise, Brevo likely offers an intuitive user interface and simplified workflows for core tasks like creating campaigns, segmenting contacts, and reviewing analytics.
Easy-to-understand menus, pre-designed templates, and drag-and-drop editors enable beginners to quickly grasp platform capabilities. Guidance like tooltip prompts, in-line help, and automated recommendations as you use Brevo also smooth the learning curve.
While advanced controls catering to seasoned email experts may lack in favor of ease of use, the tradeoff benefits solopreneurs or small retail/e-commerce businesses new to email marketing software. The focus stays on what matters most to novice users.
SendGrid
Comparatively, Sendgrid targets more advanced functionality for technology companies distributing communications at scale. Therefore, the platform interface likely assumes proficiency with email marketing concepts and utilization.
While guided walkthroughs help get started, Sendgrid’s breadth of controls for segmentation, automation, and analytics proves more overwhelming or complex for novices. The flexibility caters better to agency professionals or expert marketers comfortable customizing every aspect of campaigns.
For enterprises dependent on email performance, some initial complexity pays dividends through fine-tuned delivery and hyper-personalization at scale. But smaller websites may find the platform steep to master if just need basic email blast capabilities.
Winner: Brevo
Considering the target entry-level audience, Brevo presumably prioritizes usability in its platform design. Simplified workflows, guided assistance, and opinionated limitations around advanced controls better serve beginners focused on basics like beautiful newsletter templates. Sendgrid offers greater overall capability but proves too complex to manage without specialized expertise.
4. Email Deliverability
Brevo
As an email service targeting smaller businesses, Brevo likely provides fundamental deliverability capabilities and adequate performance meeting basic sender reputation standards among major ISPs.
Potential foundational safeguards include practices like domain authentication to confirm sender identity. Automated monitoring may also identify issues jeopardizing deliverability, though advanced remediation tools are improbable relative to enterprise-oriented competitors.
Guaranteed rates likely fall below premium vendors but satisfy the inbox placement and spam filtering needs of most small product businesses and bloggers. For more advanced deliverability controls, Brevo seems better suited for beginners.
SendGrid
Comparatively, Sendgrid’s longstanding presence delivering large volumes of email for leading technology companies allows for assuming world-class deliverability and sender reputation. Their focus on experts sending millions of emails implies prioritizing more advanced deliverability functionality.
Sendgrid probably offers guarantees exceeding 99% inbox placement along with proactive delivery optimization and compliant infrastructure. Granular reports confirming spam filter rates and tools like IP warm-up help large enterprises maintain sender credibility.
For high-volume mailers where reputation directly impacts revenue, Sendgrid provides enterprise-grade reliability, though likely at premium pricing unsuitable for lightweight emailers.
Winner: SendGrid
Without further insight, we can deduce Sendgrid’s years of high-volume email delivery to demanding clients enables superior reliability and inbox access functionality relative to Brevo’s simpler, lower-cost offering more suitable to beginners. For advanced deliverability, Sendgrid appears the likely choice.
5. Customer Support and Community
Brevo
As a platform for small business owners, Brevo likely emphasizes responsive customer support and an approachable user community. We can deduce they offer multiple self-serve resources like FAQs, video tutorials, and document knowledge bases to enable customers to help themselves.
For incidents requiring assistance, Brevo probably staffs friendly support teams available during business hours across email, chat, and phone support channels. While lacking enterprise-grade 24/7 access, support times cater to solopreneurs and smaller teams. We can presume fairly quick responses measured in hours or days.
Their user community may consist of an engaged Facebook group focused on peer learning, troubleshooting issues, and networking around maximizing Brevo functionality.
SendGrid
Alternatively, Sendgrid’s enterprise orientation implies an emphasis on comprehensive customer support capabilities for demanding technical teams distributing mass communication.
Available channels span phone, chat, email, and likely 24/7 access for critical issues. However, focused exclusively on technology, the support team has response times that lean optimized for servers and integrations over end-user issues like designing emails.
Given Sendgrid’s scale, an extensive knowledge base and community forum enable access to documentation and peer wisdom when formal assistance lags. As a longstanding vendor, they boast a vastly larger user community than Brevo.
Winner: SendGrid
Considering expected audience needs and company maturity, Sendgrid seems better positioned for quality enterprise-grade customer support and facilitation of a broader user community for now. Brevo however shows promise filling the simpler needs of everyday entrepreneurs.
6. Integrations
Brevo
As an email marketing platform focused on serving solo entrepreneurs and small business owners, we can deduce that Brevo likely offers affordable pricing catered to humble budgets. Potentially pricing models include a forever free tier with core features but minimal list size, lack of automation, and overall constraints that compel upgrading for growth.
Simple monthly subscriptions scaling from basic to advanced capabilities as budgets expand, allow smoothly adding tools. Additionally, there may be the potential cost per additional email sent beyond plan thresholds, incentivizing loyalty versus constantly changing needs. Discounts could also be rewarded for annual commitments or referral sign-ups, enticing frugal loyalty.
While unconfirmed without actual plans, we can presume Brevo’s alignment with beginners informs pricing friendliness over predatory upselling. Their simplicity seems reflected in transparent pricing.
SendGrid
Comparatively, with Sendgrid targeting reliable mass communication at a Fortune 500 scale, we can infer premium positioning also permeates their pricing strategy.
As an enterprise-grade solution they likely price accordingly through limited low-cost tiers lacking expected performance assurances needed by high-volume mailers as well as premium pricing prioritizing reliability, deliverability, and compliance functionality vital for the enterprise.
Additionally, there is likely cost per email sent given extreme volumes, incentivizing maximum efficiency in outreach. Custom pricing for unique configurations or levels of dedicated support also seems probable. Finally, contractual discounts rewarding customer loyalty year-over-year seem feasible.
Winner: Tie
Both vendors appear aligned in pricing suiting core target customer needs. Brevo offers affordability alluring email marketing beginners while Sendgrid’s premium pricing matches advanced functionality and demanding delivery relied upon by experts.
7. Pricing
Brevo
Brevo offers the following pricing plans:
- Basic – Brevo’s free plan lets you send up to 300 emails a day
- Starter – This paid plan costs $25/month for 20K emails/month
- Business – $65/month for 5,000 contacts and email marketing automation features.
- BrevoPlus – Custom pricing for unlimited contacts.
The Basic plan provides core features like email marketing, forms, reports, and automation. Starter unlocks advanced options like A/B testing and API access.
At the Business tier, capabilities expand further with features like custom CSS, multi-user logins, unlimited contact storage, and product recommendations for e-commerce.
Storage, bandwidth, and contacts scale with each tier, with the highest-priced plan offering unlimited marketing automation. Overall, Brevo is positioned at the lower end of industry pricing but delivers robust capabilities even at low tiers.
SendGrid
Comparatively, with Sendgrid targeting reliable mass communication at a Fortune 500 scale, we can infer premium positioning also permeates their pricing strategy.
As an enterprise-grade solution they likely price accordingly through limited low-cost tiers lacking expected performance assurances needed by high-volume mailers as well as premium pricing prioritizing reliability, deliverability, and compliance functionality vital for the enterprise. Additionally, there is likely cost per email sent given extreme volumes, incentivizing maximum efficiency in outreach.
Custom pricing for unique configurations or levels of dedicated support also seems probable. Finally, contractual discounts rewarding customer loyalty year-over-year seem feasible.
Winner: Tie
Both vendors appear aligned in pricing suiting core target customer needs. Brevo offers affordability alluring email marketing beginners while Sendgrid’s premium pricing matches advanced functionality and demanding delivery relied upon by experts.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Brevo
As a relative newcomer in the email marketing space tailored specifically to solo entrepreneurs and small business owners starting, we can reasonably assume Brevo has earned positive word-of-mouth sentiment within its target beginner audience.
While metrics confirming market-wide penetration don’t exist, comments seem reflective of appreciation for simplicity meeting basic email needs for bloggers, local retailers, and service professionals getting started without breaking budgets.
We can deduce praise around intuitive drag-and-drop creation offsetting any limitations in advanced analytics or complex segmentation capability also offered by competitors.
SendGrid
Alternatively, with years cementing itself as the gold standard in delivering demanding bulk emails at an industrial scale for leading technology titans and multinationals, Sendgrid enjoys a dominant market share paired with public reviews praising effective reliability enabling such clients to drive revenue through communication while remaining inbox complaint.
Toolset completeness satiating wants around analytics flexibility plus segmentation finesse earns applause from technically seasoned users.
Though some critique setup and customization complexity that accompanies breadth of capability tailoring to experts managing enterprise email publishing flows. Nonetheless, Sendgrid takes reputation as the trustworthy industry workhorse facilitating billions of critical business and transactional messages annually.
Winner: SendGrid
Given the market presence and years of establishing trusted enterprise reliability for high-volume mailers, Sendgrid emerges as the winner in current reviews and reputation. For the highly-demanding needs of experts, Sendgrid provides the confidence needed in an industry leader.
9. FAQ’s
Brevo FAQs
- Is Brevo easy for beginners to start sending emails?
Yes, with an intuitive drag-and-drop designer requiring no coding and numerous pre-made templates, new users can create professional emails quickly.
- Does Brevo have deep analytics and segmentation features?
Brevo caters more towards providing sufficient functionality for basic email marketers over advanced enterprise-level options.
- Can Brevo help ensure my emails reach subscribers’ inboxes?
Brevo provides adequate deliverability protocols though lacks some premium protections guaranteeing high-volume delivery compared to enterprise competitors.
SendGrid FAQs
- Does Sendgrid offer phone, chat, or email support options?
Yes, Sendgrid staff multi-channel customer service is best suited for technical queries given their robust platform.
- Is Sendgrid user-friendly for small business owners?
While Sendgrid excels for experts at scale, the expansive options can overwhelm beginners simply needing email basics.
- Why might Sendgrid pricing exceed basic marketing platforms?
The reliability, compliance, and deliverability layers satisfying demanding enterprise email requirements justify Sendgrid’s premium pricing.
Final Thoughts
Choose Brevo if…
Brevo offers an easy-to-use email marketing solution catering to solopreneurs, startups, and small business owners focused on core functionality like beautiful newsletter templates, basic subscriber automation, and simplicity for beginners.
Given sufficient features fulfilling essential communication demands without overwhelming complexity, Brevo helps emerging online businesses scale while learning email best practices. For the everyday blogger, boutique, or service business needing an intuitive introduction to leveraging email, Brevo makes sense over advanced solutions.
Choose SendGrid if…
Sendgrid stands as the enterprise-grade email delivery juggernaut ready to satisfy sophisticated reliability, compliance, and analytics needs for high-volume mailers with technical expertise investing in customized workflows.
For global enterprises, technology companies, and expert marketing teams sending millions of transactional or engagement emails monthly who require ironclad deliverability at an immense scale, Sendgrid is the go-to platform. When email performance impacts revenue streams, Sendgrid’s arsenal of controls, configurations, and real-time visibility offer assurance.
Ultimately the right email marketing provider depends on your business’s maturity and specific functionality demands. Take time to thoroughly assess whether your priorities skew towards simplicity and ease of use versus advanced capabilities supporting growth at scale.
And please ask any questions below – we’re happy to offer tailored advice on how Brevo or Sendgrid may best empower your organization’s email success!