Brevo vs EmailOctopus — which is cheaper for you?

These two are the cheapest in our comparison, but they are cheap for different people. The difference comes from what the service bills by: EmailOctopus counts subscribers, Brevo emails sent. That is why the price order flips at some point as the list grows — and that point is more precise than you would think.

The short answer

Choose EmailOctopus if the list is under about 5,000 subscribers. Under 2,500 subscribers it is free, and after that still cheaper.

Choose Brevo if the list is over 5,000 names or if you need text messages, a CRM or online shop events in the same tool.

Comparison table

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Prices exclude VAT, billed monthly unless stated otherwise.(ad) = ad link

• The price is the monthly price of the cheapest paid plan at that list size. The Free plan column shows when you do not have to pay.
• EmailOctopus: the price list only shows the monthly price on annual billing. Monthly billing costs more.

Where the line runs

Below is the cheapest paid plan by list size. Brevo’s figure is the package whose contact quota covers that list.

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From the price lists on 3 September 2026. EmailOctopus’s figures are monthly prices on annual billing, Brevo’s on monthly billing. EmailOctopus’s free plan holds 2,500 subscribers, so on the two smallest rows no paid plan is needed at all.

The turning point is around 5,000 subscribers. Below it EmailOctopus is cheaper or free; above it Brevo, because in Brevo’s 20,000-email package the contact quota jumps to half a million and list growth no longer raises the price.

Sending pace flips the calculation

The table above assumes two newsletters a month. If you send more often, Brevo’s price rises and EmailOctopus’s does not — EmailOctopus’s sending quota is at least ten times the subscriber count, so in practice it never comes up.

An example at a 10,000-name list: two newsletters a month is 20,000 emails and costs €28 at Brevo. A weekly newsletter is 40,000 emails and costs €41, at which point EmailOctopus’s €36 is cheaper. The formula is therefore: subscribers × sends per month, and that figure goes into Brevo’s price list.

What counts as a subscriber at EmailOctopus

When the price follows subscriber count, the counting rule is part of the price — and it is on the help page, not the price list. According to EmailOctopus’s own help page, the unsubscribed do not count toward the limit, nor do hard bounces and spam complaints, which are marked as unsubscribed automatically. Those awaiting double opt-in do not count either. The list therefore cleans itself off the counter, which is an unusually direct rule in this price class.

There is still one trap: the same address is counted separately for every list. A subscriber on six lists is six contacts, so the 2,500-subscriber free plan fills up at about 420 people if each is on six lists. The practical instruction is therefore to keep one list and separate readers with tags, not with separate lists.

At Brevo this question does not arise the same way, because contact count does not set the price — the meter is emails sent. That is the core of this comparison seen from the other side: at EmailOctopus watch the structure of the list, at Brevo the sending pace. Help pages read 5 September 2026; the rules for all seven services: how contacts are counted.

The free plans settle a different question

Both offer a free plan, but they limit from different ends. EmailOctopus gives 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month — a campaign can be sent to the whole list. Brevo does not limit list size, but you may send 300 emails a day, so sending to the whole list at once does not work.

For someone building a list, EmailOctopus’s model is therefore more usable. For drip emails and transactional emails Brevo’s daily limit is plenty.

What Brevo has that EmailOctopus does not

• Text messages and WhatsApp from the same tool.
• CRM and sales pipeline (partly priced separately: Sales Essentials €26.08/month).
• Transactional emails, i.e. order confirmations and password resets, through the same account.
• Marketing automation and A/B testing — note that these are on the Standard plan, not on Starter, so for anyone who needs automation the comparison price is Brevo’s pricier column.

EmailOctopus lacks all of these on purpose. It is a mailing list and a form, and that is the whole product.

Data location: both in the EU

Brevo is a French company and stores the data in the EU. EmailOctopus is operated by London-based Three Hearts Digital Ltd, but according to the privacy policy the contact lists are in AWS’s Irish data centre inside the EEA. Both read from the policies on 3 September 2026.

The difference is in the contracting party: Brevo is an EU company, EmailOctopus a non-EU company with data located in the EU. If you record transfer bases in your own documentation, Brevo is the shorter entry of the two. The topic in full: email marketing and GDPR.

Integrations: the difference is large

Neither publishes a total number of integrations, so the difference has to be read from names rather than figures. Brevo names Shopify, WordPress, Stripe and Zapier, among others, as native. At EmailOctopus the direct connectors are a WordPress plugin and Zapier, and Shopify, for example, works only through Zapier.

For an online shop this is a weightier difference than price. A connector that runs through Zapier means one extra fee and one extra point of failure at exactly the point where a purchase should trigger an email. For a plain newsletter and a WordPress site the difference does not show at all. Checked on the services’ own pages on 4 September 2026.

What each one limits on a paid plan

• EmailOctopus: the sending quota is ten times the subscriber count (10,000 subscribers = 100,000 emails a month), so in practice it never comes up. The limits are in features: no conditional automation branches, no CRM, no online shop event tracking.
• Brevo: there are more features, but some of them are on a different plan and at a different price. Marketing automation and A/B testing require the Standard plan, and removing the Brevo logo costs €8.10 a month separately on the Starter plan. Sending volume is what raises the bill.

The practical rule of thumb: at EmailOctopus you pay for list size and get less, at Brevo you pay for sending pace and get more — but part of that more is behind an extra fee.

What if neither is enough

These two are the cheapest in the comparison, and cheapness has its price. If you need multi-step conditional automations, neither stretches to it — ActiveCampaign does, and costs €149 a month at 10,000 contacts. If, on the other hand, you want sales funnels and online courses in the same price alongside email, Systeme.io does it at the lowest price: its free plan holds 2,000 contacts, while GetResponse’s equivalent Creator plan starts at €62 a month.

Deliverability: one has a meter, the other does not

We do not test deliverability ourselves. Below are two things: Tooltester’s 2017–2024 series as history — it ended in January 2024, and the source no longer stands behind its method — and eight points from the services’ own help pages, which are the current basis of this comparison.

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Tooltester ended the series with the January 2024 round and explained why in August 2026: seed lists proved unreliable and providers started optimising for them. The figures are therefore history, not a measurement of current deliverability.

Source: Tooltester deliverability test, 12 rounds 8/2017–1/2024. About 80 seed addresses, 28 providers, shared IP addresses. Average across all platforms in the latest round 83.1%. Average and range calculated from the published rounds.

Deliverability features from the help docs

Eight points read from each provider’s own help pages on 13 September 2026. This replaces percentages as a buying basis: a feature can be checked and dated, a seed-list result no longer can. Every cell links to the article it was read from.

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Yes = the help page describes the feature. No = the help page says it is absent or points to an external tool. — = not found in the help pages; that does not mean the feature is absent.

As history: in Tooltester’s series Brevo’s 12-round average was 82.7% and its range 28.6 percentage points, the largest of the five we compare. EmailOctopus was not in the series. The series ended in January 2024, and the source no longer stands behind its method — the figures are history.

Read from the help pages, the picture flips the other way. Brevo has a deliverability meter in the app, a dedicated IP with automatic warm-up and a named expert — the latter two only on the Professional plan, though. EmailOctopus’s help page describes no meter and no dedicated IP, but tells you to warm up the sender domain yourself: 50–100 emails a day and double the volume every few days. The basics are at both: authentication from the app, bounces and complaints removed automatically, purchased lists banned.

Most of deliverability is still the sender’s own responsibility — authentication, list quality and sending pace: what Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.

Which one for you