Do you need to send a few sales mailings and are you looking for an email marketing tool with a free account? Mailchimp, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) and Mailrelay look similar.
In fact, there are plenty of options, including many that offer free accounts like these.
Are they all the same? Do they all do the same job?
Although it may seem that all mailing tools are more or less the same and do the same thing (send emails), especially in their free versions, it’s not that simple.
There are many important differences.
Differences that can affect the cost and lead you to end up paying more in the short and medium term.
As well as how much you can get out of the free accounts and the email campaigns you can send with them.
If you’re not one to throw money away and overpay, stay and read this comparison of the best email marketing tools.
· Mailchimp competitors
Mailchimp is one of the best-known and most popular email marketing tools on the market.
However, there are several reasons why a company may look for alternatives, such as limitations in the features of free plans, the specific needs of its business, price changes, user interface preferences, or the search for better technical support and customer service.
There are several alternatives that offer different features and prices, which may be better suited to the specific needs of your business.
Some of Mailchimp’s main competitors include Brevo and Mailrelay.
Each of these tools has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of features, ease of use, free sending volume and customer support.
Exploring different email marketing tools is essential to find the solution that best fits your goals and budget.
Throughout this article, we’ll analyze the differences between Mailchimp, Brevo and Mailrelay in detail to help you make an informed decision about the email marketing platform that best suits your needs.
· Email marketing tools comparison. First point: free email sending volume
This is probably the first thing you’ll check when comparing mailing or newsletter sending tools: how many emails will you be able to send for free?
It’s the most visible point, and also the easiest to relate to “money”. Or rather, to savings.
It’s also the easiest to compare, or is it?
It’s actually not that simple, as you’ll see little by little in this comparison.
It’s not that simple because many tools “hide” certain conditions.
Even comparing sending volumes isn’t that easy, as some tools are quite convoluted.
So let’s compare:
⌐ Mailchimp
Since January 2026, Mailchimp’s free account only lets you manage 250 contacts and send 500 emails per month (with a maximum of 250 per day). It also no longer includes automations.
⌐ Brevo
Brevo’s free plan is a bit more convoluted, as it states that it lets you send 300 emails per day and store up to 100,000 contacts. That actually works out to about 9,000 emails per month at most.
On the downside, it only lets you send 300 emails per day, which can have a negative impact on mailing campaigns that you need delivered quickly. For example, if you’re sending an offer, you don’t want it to take 5 days to reach all your contacts. It’s not practical.
⌐ Mailrelay
Mailrelay is often considered Mailchimp’s competitor when it comes to bulk email sending.
Especially when it comes to free accounts. Over the years, Mailchimp has been cutting back the features of its free account, while Mailrelay has been expanding them.
The limits of Mailrelay’s free account are stated simply and clearly.
As soon as you sign up for your free account, you can send 80,000 emails per month, with a limit of 20,000 contacts.
And that’s it.
When it comes to sending bulk mailings for free, Mailrelay’s free account lets you send the largest volume at zero cost.
Let’s not stop at volume, although it’s very important for your email campaigns. Let’s take a closer look.
· Using your own domain or a generic one
This is mainly a matter of brand image, which is also important.
It refers to whether, when you send your email campaigns, your company’s domain will be used as the sender, or a generic one belonging to the tool you use.
For your contacts, receiving an email from:
isn’t the same as receiving one from:
Which of the two do you think customers will recognize as coming from the latiendademascotas.com website?
Of the three tools we’re comparing, the odd one out is Mailchimp, as its free account does not let you use your own domain for sending.
Both Mailrelay and Brevo do allow it.
On the one hand, this may seem to make the tool easier to use, as it avoids having to configure SPF, DKIM and so on.
However, in terms of image, it’s much poorer for the sending company (there’s a reason they charge you for this feature).
· The harsh reality: statistics, available or not?
When you send bulk email campaigns, you’ll naturally want to know their results. Sales are clearly the best indicator. In fact, some people are content to count the sales generated (roughly) by each mailing.
The problem with that is that you need to be able to compare the number of clicks obtained with the number of sales generated.
Getting 5 sales from 10 clicks isn’t the same as getting 5 sales from 100 clicks, is it? Having statistics will let you make adjustments and improvements as you go.
That’s why most mailing tools provide open and click statistics. That said, not all of them offer them in their free account. That’s another story.
⌐ Mailchimp
It does offer some statistics in its free accounts, although not in detail.
⌐ Brevo
Its free account includes basic reports, but the more complete statistics are reserved for paid plans.
⌐ Mailrelay
It does offer advanced, complete open and click statistics for your email campaigns. Statistics that you can also export, in case you want to work with them in Excel, for example.
· Technical support
Is technical support an unimportant detail? Or can it become essential for your business?
It’s one of those things you only truly appreciate when you suddenly need it.
You may need support at any time, and as usually happens with these things, that moment will be the worst possible moment.
However, providing technical support is expensive, which is why most tools don’t include full support in their free accounts.
⌐ Mailchimp
Where to start with Mailchimp and support for free accounts?
Mailchimp offers support to free accounts:
· Exclusively by email (and I imagine in English and during U.S. business hours)
· Only during the first 30 days after the account is created, after that …
As I mentioned before, customer support is very expensive, and Mailchimp clearly keeps it for paying customers. It’s a business decision, of course.
⌐ Brevo
Its free account offers email and chat support, reserving phone support for its higher paid plans.
In other words, if you want to talk to someone on the phone, you’ll have to pay.
⌐ Mailrelay
Mailrelay includes every possible immediate support option in its free accounts:
· Ticket and email
· Phone
· Live chat with real people (no bots)
This way, whenever a question or issue comes up with your email campaigns, there’s someone there who can solve it.
· Multi-user access to the email marketing tool
Another feature of little use?
It must have some use, and an important one, because many tools charge precisely for this feature.
It’s actually very useful, as you’ll quickly see.
If your team is made up of several people, each one may need to handle different tasks. For example, one of them may be in charge of uploading and managing contacts, another of preparing the newsletters, and so on.
And you may not want the person who prepares the newsletters to have access to contact management, for example. Not for any particular reason, just a simple division of tasks.
With different users who have different permissions, you could do this without any difficulty and set up an effective, trouble-free workflow.
What do the different email tools include when it comes to this feature?
⌐ Mailchimp
It only allows one user, with all permissions and access of course, but only one.
If you need more team members to access the account, they’ll all use the same login details.
⌐ Brevo
Its free account only allows one user.
Additional users are reserved for its paid plans.
⌐ Mailrelay
Mailrelay’s free account lets you create both users and profiles for those users.
As many as you need to organize your account and the required access properly. No problem at all, it’s all there.
· Dedicated IP available
Most email marketing tools use shared outgoing IPs.
The reasons are varied, both technical and financial, and although you don’t need dedicated IPs to send bulk mailings, having the option if you want it doesn’t hurt either.
The options available in the tools we’re comparing are:
⌐ Mailchimp
It lets you purchase dedicated IPs if you want.
⌐ Brevo
It lets you purchase dedicated IPs only on its higher paid plans.
⌐ Mailrelay
It lets you purchase dedicated IPs even if you’re using the free account.
In the end, it makes sense to allow dedicated IPs regardless of volume, as it gives you more flexibility for your project.
· A/B testing
For your email campaigns to get the best results, and for that to translate into sales, one of the best tools you can use is A/B testing.
This feature lets you try different subject lines or senders for the same mailing. That way you don’t have to guess which subject line would be the most effective; instead, sending a few hundred emails with different versions can tell you, very accurately, which option is best.
Do you think a rude or risky subject line would work better? You can test it without any problem and, above all, without betting the whole mailing’s results on a hunch.
Now, which email marketing tools offer this feature in their free version?
⌐ Mailchimp
It doesn’t include this feature in its free accounts, only in paid ones.
⌐ Brevo
This feature isn’t available on its free plan, only on paid plans.
⌐ Mailrelay
It does include this feature in all accounts, whatever their type.
In short, sending a mailing, or a series of emails, for free is great, yes, but also making sure the results will be good is undoubtedly much better.
· What all mailing tools have in common
With the points discussed, we’ve covered the ones where the tools differ most, so you can decide which one suits you best based on what the free accounts include.
However, almost all tools have some things in common:
· Easy-to-use newsletter editor > in Mailrelay’s case, it’s an editor that lets you drag and drop various blocks wherever you want (images, text, etc.)
· Scheduled sending > so you don’t have to keep an eye on sending your mailings, you can schedule them to be sent on a specific date.
· Automated contact management > for email marketing, it’s very important to keep your contact list clean of invalid emails. That’s why most tools handle possible errors (bounces). It’s important both for deliverability issues that could affect your domain and so that you don’t pay for emails that won’t arrive.
· Subscription forms > they’re essential for any lead generation strategy. Mailrelay lets you create and manage forms easily.
· Contact import > clearly, all mailing tools let you import contacts one way or another. With Mailrelay, you have 3 different import options.
· Etc.
And even in these common features, we can find some important differences between Mailrelay and the other tools; we’ll look at them in the next point.
· Useful and interesting differences between Mailrelay and other free mailing tools
Over the years, we’ve adapted our email marketing tool to users’ needs, based on their suggestions and feedback.
Some of the most requested features are these:
· Automated RSS mailings > if you have a website with an RSS feed (such as a WordPress site), you can set up an automation that sends a mailing with the new posts.
· Flexible audiences > unlike other tools that count each contact once for every audience it belongs to, Mailrelay groups are much more flexible. So a contact can be in as many groups as you want, without being counted more than once toward account or billing limits.
· Real-time segmentation > when you create a segment in Mailrelay, you do so using certain conditions (field values, actions taken); the contacts that meet these conditions form a segment. In Mailrelay, if a contact’s values change, it will leave the segment. And if a new contact meets them, it will be added. That way you always, always have only contacts that meet the condition in each segment.
· SMTP server > Mailrelay includes an SMTP server in the Standard and Enterprise plans; with the free account you can try it for 30 days and then add it for €14.95/month. This SMTP server includes email tracking.
· Conditional content in newsletters > within the newsletter design you can include conditional variables, which will show one piece of content or another based on each contact’s custom fields.
· First mailing wizard > to make things easier for new users, Mailrelay has a step-by-step guide for sending your first mailing, which includes several ways to import your contacts easily.
· Support chat available in your account > so you can ask any question while working in your Mailrelay account, without having to stop what you’re doing.
These points can make a big difference in whether your mailings succeed or not.
· Now you can choose what’s best for you
With the points we’ve covered, I think you can make the best decision about which free email marketing tool fits your specific needs.
These differences aren’t always clear or obvious, so I hope you find this post very useful.
Jose Argudo
CMO at Mailrelay. Writes about email marketing, copywriting, and conversion for small businesses and entrepreneurs.