# Brevo vs Klaviyo Source: https://wraps.dev/versus/brevo-vs-klaviyo Klaviyo is built for ecommerce and bills every profile you store. Brevo is a generalist that bills what you send. The billing unit is not a detail here — it is the whole decision. A store owner comparing these two is comparing a specialist against a generalist, but the thing that will actually determine the outcome is arithmetic. Klaviyo charges for the people in your database. Brevo charges for the messages you send them. Run the same store through both models and the answers can differ by an order of magnitude in either direction, depending on how big your list is and how often you mail it. Feature comparisons come second. ## At a glance |   | Brevo | Klaviyo | | --- | --- | --- | | What it is | EU marketing platform with a transactional API attached | Ecommerce marketing automation | | Published pricing | Priced on send volume rather than contacts. Starter runs from roughly $9/mo at 5,000 emails to roughly $69/mo at 100,000; the Business tier is roughly double at each volume and is where automation and A/B testing live. | $30/mo at 1,000 profiles, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, $720 at 50,000, and $1,380 at 100,000 — an effective $0.014–0.030 per profile per month. | | Best for | Small EU teams wanting email, SMS, and a light CRM on one invoice. | Ecommerce, especially Shopify, where per-campaign revenue attribution is the metric. | | Watch out for | The headline tier is not the one you need — automation and removing the Brevo logo are both a step up. Shared-pool deliverability draws mixed reports. | Bills all active profiles since February 2025 and auto-upgrades without ever auto-downgrading. Volume is capped at ten times your profile count and sends halt past it. | Prices are each vendor's published list prices, verified August 2026. Check the vendor's own page before you sign anything. ## Where they actually differ ### The billing unit, and why it decides everything Brevo Brevo counts sends. Storing a hundred thousand lapsed customers is free; mailing them is what costs. For a store with a long tail of one-time buyers who will probably never return, this is enormously favourable, and it means list hygiene is an optional deliverability practice rather than a budget emergency. Klaviyo Klaviyo counts active profiles, and has billed all of them since February 2025 rather than only the subscribed ones. Every abandoned-cart visitor who gave you an email address is a line item forever. The upside is that unlimited sending to those profiles is included, so a store that mails its list several times a week gets very good value from the same arithmetic that punishes a dormant list. ### Ecommerce integration depth Brevo Brevo integrates with the major storefronts and can trigger on orders and carts, and it is plainly an integration rather than a native understanding of a store. The objects are contacts and events with commerce fields attached. That is enough for abandoned cart and post-purchase flows and it is not enough to segment on lifetime value across product categories without building the segments yourself. Klaviyo Klaviyo's data model knows what a product, an order and a catalogue are, and the Shopify integration in particular is the deepest in the category. Predictive fields, product-block personalisation pulling live catalogue data, and segments expressed in commerce terms rather than as generic event filters. If you run a Shopify store, this is the gap that justifies the price. ### Proving the channel made money Brevo Brevo reports opens, clicks and conversions where you have wired up tracking, which is standard email reporting and requires you to connect the revenue side yourself. It answers whether the campaign performed. It does not, without work, answer the question a store owner is actually asked, which is what email contributed to the quarter. Klaviyo Klaviyo's attribution is the product, not a report inside it. Revenue per recipient, per flow and per campaign, with an attribution window you control, presented as the default view. Whether you trust the number is a separate conversation — last-touch email attribution is generous to email — but having it in front of you changes how the channel gets managed and budgeted. ### The ratchet nobody reads the terms on Brevo Brevo's meter resets with your sending. A quiet quarter is a cheap quarter, and there is no mechanism by which last month's activity raises next month's floor. Whatever else is true about the product, its bill goes down as easily as it goes up, which is rarer in this category than it should be. Klaviyo Klaviyo auto-upgrades your plan when profiles cross a threshold and never auto-downgrades when they fall back. Combined with billing all active profiles rather than only subscribers, the bill ratchets in one direction unless somebody actively prunes the database and then asks to be moved back down. Set a calendar reminder to review it, because nothing in the product will. ### The sending cap inside an unlimited plan Brevo Brevo has no equivalent cap, because sends are the thing you are buying. Send a hundred thousand messages and you pay for a hundred thousand messages. The failure mode is a surprising invoice, not a stopped send, which is the better of the two failure modes on a launch day. Klaviyo Klaviyo's unlimited sending is capped at ten times your profile count, and sends halt past it. For normal campaign cadence that ceiling is invisible. For a store running a heavy promotional calendar on a small list — a flash sale sequence to twenty thousand people, several times in a month — it is reachable, and the way you find out is that the sending stops. ### Building an automation Brevo Brevo's automation builder is capable and general-purpose: conditions, delays, branches, across email and SMS. It is aimed at a marketer rather than an engineer and it does not presume your business is a shop. Building a good abandoned-cart flow in it is an afternoon of work rather than clicking a template, because the template library is thinner. Klaviyo Klaviyo ships the flows a store actually needs already built — browse abandonment, cart recovery, post-purchase, winback — with benchmark timings baked in. For a small team with no email specialist, starting from a flow that already reflects what works across thousands of stores is worth a great deal more than the equivalent blank canvas. ### Where each one stops being enough Brevo Brevo runs out when your segmentation ambitions outgrow generic event filters, or when the light CRM stops being adequate for a growing sales team. It is a good answer for a small business doing several things and a mediocre one for a business doing one thing extremely well. Klaviyo Klaviyo runs out when your business is not a store. Its whole vocabulary is commerce, so a SaaS product, a marketplace or a service business spends its time translating its own concepts into orders and catalogues. It also runs out on price, at exactly the moment a large list stops converting well enough to justify a per-profile bill. ### Sign-up forms and how people get onto the list Brevo Brevo includes form and landing-page builders, which for a business without a marketing site team is a genuine saving: a signup form that writes straight into the contact database, with double opt-in handling that satisfies European consent expectations by default rather than as a configuration choice. Klaviyo Klaviyo's forms are unusually good and unusually aggressive — targeted popups, teasers, multi-step flows with a discount reveal, all tied to on-site behaviour and reporting on submitted-to-purchase rates. For a store this is a real conversion lever. For a business whose customers would find a popup insulting, it is a feature you turn off and stop paying attention to. ## Pros and cons, side by side ### Brevo Strengths - A dormant list is free to keep, so hygiene stays a deliverability practice rather than turning into a monthly budgeting emergency nobody scheduled. - The meter falls as readily as it rises, so a quiet quarter is a cheap quarter and nothing about last month's activity raises next month's floor. - Email, text messaging, a shared inbox and a light sales pipeline arrive on one invoice, which for a small business is fewer suppliers rather than a worse tool. - Forms, landing pages and a confirmed opt-in path are included, so a business with no marketing-site team can start collecting addresses without building anything first. Trade-offs - The headline tier is not the tier you need. Automation and an unbranded footer both sit a rung above the number people quote at each other in comparisons. - The data model is contacts and events with commerce fields attached, so segmenting on lifetime value across product categories is something you assemble yourself. - Shared-pool deliverability draws mixed reports, and a new account is throttled while the vendor works out what kind of sender it has acquired. - Reporting answers whether a campaign performed rather than what email contributed, and closing that gap is a project with a data person in it. ### Klaviyo Strengths - The storefront integration understands products, orders and catalogues natively, so a merchant has segments on the second day that the other side would need an engineer to produce. - Revenue per campaign and per flow is the default view rather than a report somebody assembles, which is how the channel survives a budget conversation. - Templates render the actual items a shopper looked at, which is most of the reason its commerce flows convert the way the case studies say they do. - The pre-built flows carry timings drawn from thousands of stores, so a small team begins from something that already works instead of from an empty canvas. Trade-offs - Every active profile is billed, unsubscribed ones included, and the plan climbs across bands on its own while never once descending. - Sending is capped at a multiple of the profile count and halts rather than charging overage, so the failure is a stopped campaign rather than a larger invoice. - The vocabulary is commerce from end to end, so a business that is not a store spends its time translating and pays a specialist's price for the privilege. - The forms are aggressive by design, which is a conversion lever for a shop and a brand problem for anybody whose customers would find a popup insulting. ## Pick in thirty seconds ### Choose Brevo if - Your list is large, lapsed and unlikely to be mailed often, so paying per send rather than per stored profile is obviously cheaper. - You are not a store, or not only a store, and commerce-shaped data modelling would be a translation exercise. - You need SMS and a light CRM on the same account, and the value is in having one supplier rather than the best one in each category. - European data residency is a requirement rather than a preference. ### Choose Klaviyo if - You run a Shopify store and the integration depth translates directly into segments you could not otherwise build. - Email attribution needs to be defensible in front of whoever approves your budget, as a default view rather than a project. - You mail your list frequently and the unlimited-sending side of profile billing works in your favour. - You would rather start from flows that already encode what works than build equivalents from a blank canvas. ## What actually moves when you switch In roughly the order you would do it. The expensive parts of an email migration are never the send call. 1. Reconcile two incompatible shapes of opt-out before importing a single row. One holds a blocked flag on the contact alongside per-list unsubscribes, so a person can be off one list and perfectly reachable on another; the other holds a global subscription state with suppression reasons attached to it. Flattening per-list preferences into one global state silences mail somebody was happy to receive, and expanding a global state into list membership re-opens somebody who asked you to stop. Neither default is safe and somebody has to decide list by list. 2. Decide what happens to the tracking snippet on your storefront, because it is doing more than analytics. Both sides offer a script that identifies a visitor and records browsing, and both use it to drive the behaviour-triggered messages that earn the subscription. Swapping it is a deploy against a template you may not own, a cookie-consent question somebody has to answer again, and a hole in behavioural history for however long the two overlap or neither is running. 3. Establish whether any of your messages contain a product rather than a link to one. A platform holding your catalogue can place the exact items somebody abandoned inside the message body; a platform integrating with your store can trigger on the order and generally cannot render the merchandise. Travelling toward the second means those templates become a sentence and a link, which is a conversion difference somebody should measure in advance rather than discover in a month-on-month report. 4. Be explicit that the revenue figures on the two sides are not the same measurement. One credits an order back to the message that preceded it inside a window you configure; the other reports conversions only where somebody wired the tracking up. Placing the two series side by side on one slide is how a channel appears to collapse on the day of a migration, and the only honest remedy is to say out loud, in advance, that the series has a seam in it. 5. Decide which failure you would rather have on a launch day, because these two fail in opposite directions. One stops sending when a ceiling tied to your list size is reached; the other keeps sending and bills you for it. Put that question to whoever owns the revenue rather than to whoever owns the budget, because they answer it differently and only one of them will be awake at the hour it matters. 6. Work out which non-email things are quietly load-bearing before anybody cancels anything. A shared inbox, a meetings link, a deals pipeline and a chat widget accumulate users who have never thought of themselves as email people, and none of it has a counterpart on a specialist marketing platform. Find out who depends on each, because the person this migration hurts most is frequently somebody who was not invited to the meeting about it. 7. Carry the evidence of consent across, not only the consent. Where a person subscribed, on what date, and through which form is the record a regulator asks for and the one no export reconstructs afterwards. It matters asymmetrically in this pair: one of these platforms is operated by a European company under a regime where that evidence gets requested in earnest, and arriving without it is a problem you inherit rather than one you caused. 8. Understand how each side decides which addresses your mail leaves from, because at the volume most stores send neither hands you a choice. One places you in a shared pool alongside its other customers; the other assigns sending infrastructure according to how much you send and how your list behaves. The practical consequence is the same either way and worth planning around: placement on arrival is a property of the new operation rather than of your domain, and the first campaign is the worst moment to learn that. ## Questions to ask before you sign Put these to a sales rep, or find the answer in the documentation before anyone quotes you a number. 1. Can somebody say, for each person on our list, which specific things they agreed to receive and when? 2. Does any of our email contain actual products, or only links back to the site for people to find them? 3. Which is worse for us on a launch day — sending stopping dead, or an invoice growing without approval? 4. Who inside the company uses the parts of this subscription that are not email, and has anybody asked them? 5. Do we hold the date and the source of each opt-in, or only a column of addresses? 6. Who owns the tracking snippet on our storefront, and how long would a change to it realistically take? 7. If our revenue-per-campaign series gains a seam after the move, who needs to be warned before they see it? ## Common questions ### Which is cheaper for a store with fifty thousand contacts? Entirely a function of how often you mail them. Take your real send volume for a typical month, price it on Brevo's published send bands, and price fifty thousand profiles on Klaviyo's profile bands. Also check how many of those fifty thousand are unsubscribed but still active profiles, because Klaviyo has billed those since February 2025 and most people's mental model of their list size is wrong. ### Does Klaviyo really charge for people who unsubscribed? It bills active profiles, which is a broader category than subscribers. A profile that unsubscribed is still a profile you are storing and still counts. Suppressing is not the same as deleting. If your bill has drifted upward without your list growing in any way you recognise, this is very often why, and the fix is pruning the database rather than changing your sending. ### Can Brevo do abandoned cart flows? Yes, through its storefront integrations and its automation builder, and the flow will work. What you do not get is Klaviyo's library of pre-built commerce flows with benchmark timings, or predictive fields like expected next order date. You are building the logic rather than adapting someone else's, which costs an afternoon and gives you something you understand completely. ### What is Klaviyo's sending cap and will I hit it? Ten times your profile count per month, after which sends stop. Ordinary campaign cadence stays well under it. A promotional calendar with several multi-message sequences to a small list can reach it, and the discovery mechanism is unforgiving. Multiply your list size by ten and compare that to a heavy month before you assume unlimited means unlimited. ### Can I move from one to the other later? Contacts and consent state export from both, which is the easy half. What does not transfer is the flows, the segment definitions, the templates and the historical engagement data your segments were built from — so a new platform starts without the behavioural history it needs to segment well. Plan several weeks, and keep the old account alive until the new flows have run a full cycle. ### Do I still need a separate transactional provider? With Brevo, usually not: its transactional API is a real one and running order confirmations through the same account is reasonable. With Klaviyo it is more common to keep a separate provider, because Klaviyo's centre of gravity is campaigns and flows rather than low-latency single sends. Either way, think about domain separation before convenience. Marketing complaint rates and receipt deliverability should not share a reputation, and a subdomain per traffic type costs nothing to set up and is painful to retrofit. ### Which of these keeps better evidence of consent? Both can hold it and only one of them is under sustained pressure to. What a regulator asks for is not whether somebody is subscribed today but how they came to be: the date, the form or checkout they used, the wording they agreed to, and the IP or session that submitted it. That provenance is a property of how you collected the address rather than of the platform storing it, so a tool can only preserve what your signup process recorded in the first place. The asymmetry worth knowing is operational rather than technical. A European vendor operating under a regime where these requests actually arrive tends to surface the fields and to ask about them during onboarding; a platform whose customers are mostly stores tends to assume the checkout captured it. Whichever you choose, export the provenance alongside the addresses when you leave, because it is the single record that cannot be reconstructed later at any price. ### What happens to my revenue reporting the day I switch? It gains a discontinuity, and the discontinuity is usually mistaken for a collapse. Attributed revenue is computed inside a platform from its own model of what counts as a conversion and how long after a message one may be credited, so two platforms reporting on the same store in the same month will not agree. Move between them and the series breaks at the migration date, typically downward, because the new side starts with no history and frequently a narrower default window. Three things make this survivable. Snapshot the outgoing reports before the account closes. Tell whoever quotes the number quarterly that it is about to change measurement, in advance and in writing. And decide whether you want a holdout group, because an attribution window is a management tool rather than evidence of causation, and a migration is the one moment when nobody would notice you introducing a proper control. ### Can both tracking scripts run during a migration? Technically yes, and it is usually the right call for a few weeks, but there are three things to settle first. The obvious one is page weight: two behavioural scripts on a storefront is two sets of requests on every view, and a store measured on conversion should watch what that does. The second is consent, because your cookie banner names the vendors it is asking about and a second one appearing without being listed is a compliance problem rather than a technical one. The third is deduplication: if both scripts report the same browse and both platforms are allowed to trigger on it, somebody receives two abandoned-browse emails from two systems in one afternoon. The usual arrangement is to run both for collection while allowing only one of them to send, then switch which one is permitted to act once the new side has enough history for its segments to be honest.