I have looked at Mailchimp, Brevo and MailerLite, and for my needs MailerLite usually wins. I prefer its clean interface, and to me its free tier is generous for small lists, which suits a niche audience such as buyers of bespoke leather briefcases. Marcellino NY, which has been my own business since 2010, is that audience. I have no financial interest in any of the three companies, and none of them paid for a word of this.

Brevo vs MailerLite: Stop Guessing – Here’s Exactly What You Get With Each, EmailTooltester on YouTube

A small list asks different questions than a big one

Hand placing a blank card into a small wooden tray on a shop counter

A list of a few hundred people who each asked to hear from you is a counter, not a stadium. Everyone on it can be named, and most of them can be remembered. That changes what a free plan has to do, because the usual selling points of email software (huge send volumes, ten tiers of segmentation, a template library the size of a phone book) matter very little at that scale.

What matters is whether the free plan stays free while the list is still small, whether the editor lets one person finish a newsletter in an evening, and whether the plan keeps working the day the list grows past its starting size. Those are three separate questions, and the three companies answer them in three different ways.

If the list does not exist yet, the post on starting an email newsletter from scratch comes before any of this, and the one on collecting email addresses at the counter covers how names get onto it in the first place.

How the free plans are built

I am leaving the numbers out on purpose. Free-plan limits move more often than anything else on a pricing page, and a figure printed here would be stale before anyone used it. What does not move as fast is the shape of each plan, meaning what the company chooses to cap. Each company publishes its current terms: Mailchimp, Brevo and MailerLite. Read the live page before you decide, because those pages are the only authority on the current numbers.

ToolWhat the free plan capsWhere the company holds back
MailchimpThe size of the contact list and the number of sendsIts own branding stays on free emails, and several tools such as scheduling and automation flows sit on paid plans
BrevoHow many emails can go out in a day, rather than the size of the listThe logo removal is sold with the paid tiers
MailerLiteThe size of the list and the number of emails per monthIts logo stays on the free plan, and the full template library, email support and some automation triggers are paid

The table describes what each company’s page says at the time of writing. Terms change, so treat it as a map of where to look and not as a quote.

Mailchimp

Three blank kraft envelopes in a row on a wooden shop counter beside a brass bell

Mailchimp is the name most people know, and its pricing page lists four tiers (Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium) along with a pay-as-you-go option for people who send rarely. The free plan is built for a small list, and the company says plainly that sending pauses if a contact limit or send limit is passed.

That pause is the thing to understand before signing up. A cap is fine while the list is small and a nuisance the week the list grows, and a plan that stops sending is a plan that has made a decision for you at the worst possible moment. Mailchimp also leaves its own branding on free-plan emails and keeps tools such as scheduling and automation flows for paid plans, according to the same page.

None of that makes it a poor tool. It makes it a tool built so that the free plan is a doorway, and a doorway is fine as long as you know which side of it you are standing on.

Brevo, formerly Sendinblue

Brevo used to be called Sendinblue. The company’s own announcement, dated May 4, 2023, gives the reason in six words: “our product simply outgrew our name.” It began as a newsletter service and describes itself now as a multichannel CRM suite covering email, SMS, WhatsApp and chat.

The free plan is built differently from the other two. On its pricing page Brevo describes the free plan by a daily send ceiling, and the page mentions no cap on how many contacts you may hold. The same page says accounts must be approved for sending and that every plan, the free one included, comes with transactional email tools such as an API and SMTP. The paid tiers advertise removing the Brevo logo, which tells you the free plan carries it.

For a list that is small but busy, a daily ceiling is a reasonable trade. For a shop that sends one newsletter a month, the ceiling is a number you will never touch, and the extra weight of a CRM suite is something you carry without using. That is the honest turn against my own preference. A shop that wanted email, texting and chat in one place would find Brevo built for exactly that, and my preference for MailerLite says nothing against that.

MailerLite

Laptop turned away on a leather-topped desk beside a closed ledger and mug

MailerLite’s free plan is built around list size. Its pricing page lists a cap on subscribers and a monthly send allowance, three editors (drag and drop, custom HTML and a simple one), a limited set of newsletter templates, a small number of active automations, signup forms, one website and one landing page. Support on the free plan is the knowledge base only. The logo comes off on a paid plan.

The plan also states what happens at the cap: campaigns and automations lock until the list is under the limit or the account is upgraded. So MailerLite and Mailchimp behave alike on this point, and nothing about the free-plan arrangement lets you ignore the cap.

The page also advertises more than a hundred integrations on the free plan, which matters if the signup form lives on a site built with something else, and it limits API access on that plan, with sending through the API reserved for paid accounts. A shop that only wants a form on a page and a newsletter to the people who filled it in will not notice the API limit. A shop that wants its order system to trigger emails will notice it at once, and should read that line of the pricing page twice before committing a list to the tool.

My reasons for choosing it are the two I already gave. The interface is clean. The free tier, to me, is generous for a small list. Both of those are statements about how it fits my needs, and neither is a measurement. A person with a list ten times the size, or one who sends daily, could reach the opposite conclusion and be right.

What the law asks of any sender

Whichever tool you pick, you are the sender, and the federal rules for commercial email apply to you and not to the software. The Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide lists the requirements. The header information has to be accurate, the subject line cannot be deceptive, and a message that is an advertisement has to say so. It must carry a valid physical postal address and a clear way to opt out, and the opt-out requests must be honored within 10 business days.

The guide also puts a price on getting it wrong. It says each separate email in violation is subject to penalties, and gives a figure that the FTC adjusts for inflation. I will not repeat the number, because it changes and the page that holds it is linked.

The practical point sits one level below the law. Before the first send, open the test email and look for the unsubscribe link and the postal address. If either is missing, fix it before anything goes out.

Choosing for a niche list

Three questions settle it, and they can be answered in an afternoon.

  • How many people are on the list today, and how many will be on it in a year? A cap that sits comfortably above both is a free plan you can stay on.
  • How often do you send? A daily ceiling punishes a shop that sends in bursts, and a monthly allowance punishes a shop that sends often.
  • Will you build anything other than a newsletter? If the answer is a landing page and a signup form, check that the free plan includes one of each, because that is where free plans differ most.

For a small audience of people who bought or asked about one particular kind of thing, the cost of a clumsy tool is paid in your own hours. That is why the better comparison is the number of clicks between an idea and a sent newsletter, and not the length of a feature list. The tool that makes that gap shortest, for you, wins. For me it usually is MailerLite. For somebody else it will be one of the other two, and the pricing pages above will say which.

For informational purposes only. Plan terms and legal requirements change, so check each company’s current page and, if the list is large or you are unsure about the email rules, consult a licensed attorney.

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