GetResponse vs Brevo (2026): The Six-Email Line

Brevo's own GetResponse comparison page lines the two up at $17 against $19 a month for 1,000 contacts mailed once a month. Both figures are real. Neither tells you what you'll pay, because Brevo bills by the email, GetResponse bills by the contact, and each one quietly counts something you never look at.

If you're choosing between these two, don't start with how big your list is. Start with last month's sending report. Automations send too, so the total on it can sit well above newsletters times list size, and the gap between those two numbers is where this decision gets made.

My take after mapping both price lists tier by tier: feature for feature, Brevo is cheaper until you send about six emails per contact a month. A weekly newsletter already uses four of those six. So the emails nobody puts on a calendar (welcome series, webinar reminders, receipts, launch sequences) decide which tool wins.

Quick answer

• Pick Brevo if you mail a large list once or twice a month, need transactional email or SMS in the same account, or are starting from zero on a free plan.
• Pick GetResponse if you run webinars, launches or long automation sequences, so your real send volume is well past six emails per contact per month.
• Check GetResponse's own meter first if you keep the same people on several lists. It counts every copy.

The ratio every comparison uses, and what it leaves out

Most of the top-ranking comparisons land in the same place: Brevo charges for emails, GetResponse charges for contacts, so a big list you rarely mail belongs on Brevo and a frequent sender belongs on GetResponse. That's correct as far as it goes. One Hacker News commenter put the Brevo case in a sentence back in 2023: "My company has 500k+ 'contacts', but we rarely send emails... I'll stick with Brevo/SendInBlue."

Brevo customers still describe it that way. An SEO agency on Reddit's r/seogrowth said of its move to Brevo that "despite a large contacts list, the sends are pricing-based, which made sense for all the dormant leads we keep around." In r/Emailmarketing, another user named the condition that comes with it: "Brevo is one option people often overlook because its pricing scales by emails sent rather than number of contacts, which means a fast-growing list stays predictable as long as your send volume is stable."

The trouble is the next step. Nobody tells you where "rarely" ends. So I took the full 2026 price ladders for both tools and, for each GetResponse list size, found the highest Brevo email volume that still costs the same or less.

I compared Brevo Standard with GetResponse Marketer because both remove the automation limits of their cheaper plans. On the entry plans (Brevo Starter vs GetResponse Starter) the crossover sits at 6–10 emails per contact for lists up to 10,000. Brevo Starter stops at 100,000 emails a month, so big lists need Standard anyway.

Read the 5,000-contact row as a decision. GetResponse Marketer costs $95 a month whether you send one email or fifty. Brevo Standard costs $89 for 40,000 emails, which works out to eight per contact. A weekly newsletter is about 4.3 sends per contact per month (52 weeks divided by 12). That leaves you roughly 3.7 emails per contact of headroom for everything else before Brevo stops being the cheaper bill.

• Under one newsletter a week, light automation: Brevo, and it isn't close at most list sizes.
• Weekly newsletter plus a welcome series and a monthly promo: you're on the line. Billing cycle decides, because GetResponse's yearly discount is 18% and Brevo's is 10%, which pulls the crossover down by up to two emails at some list sizes.
• Two or more broadcasts a week, or regular launch sequences: GetResponse.
• Under 1,000 contacts: Brevo almost always. The crossover there is 10 to 15 emails per contact.

The cheap-to-hold, pay-to-mail framing isn't mine; Omnisend's comparison states it cleanly. What every version leaves out is the input. People estimate their sending from the newsletter calendar, and the calendar is missing a big share of the email.

Count what your account sends without you

Autopilot volume means every email your account sends that nobody presses "send" on. Welcome sequences. Webinar confirmations and reminders. Replay emails. Abandoned-cart nudges. Order receipts and password resets if your store or app routes them through the same account.

On GetResponse, autopilot volume is free. Its help center says "We don't impose limits on how many emails you send during the billing period," and no paid plan lists a monthly send cap.

On Brevo, every one of those messages is a credit. The pricing page describes the monthly volume as covering "campaigns & transactional." The help center defines a credit as "one email sent to one contact" and even warns that automation test messages "consume credits, just like regular messages."

To see how much this moves the answer, I ran three setups through both price lists. They're common small-business shapes, with round numbers I picked so you can check the math. None of them is a real account.

The weekly sender is the one to look at. On paper that business "sends a weekly newsletter," which sounds like 20,000 emails a month. The welcome series and the monthly promo nearly double it to 37,500, and that's what pulls it from comfortably Brevo onto the line.

It's also the easiest plan to size wrong on Brevo. Size this business from its calendar and you buy the 20,000-email tier, $69 on Standard. Four newsletters fill it on their own. The welcome series and the promo add 17,500 more, so the account actually needs the 40,000 tier at $89. On the calendar this business looks like an easy Brevo customer. On the sending report it's a borderline one.

Find the row that looks like you:

• Mostly broadcasts, few sequences: you're the quiet list. Brevo is the clear pick: $32 against $79 on the entry plans, $69 against $114 with full automation.
• Weekly broadcasts plus sequences: you're the weekly sender, and a coin flip decides it. Choose on features and billing cycle, not price.
• Webinars or launches every month: you're the webinar seller. The email bills tie, so the deciding cost is everything Brevo doesn't include.
• Can't fill in the table because you don't know your sequence volume: pull last month's sending report from your current tool before you compare anything.

Two Brevo rules make autopilot volume more expensive than the arithmetic suggests. Brevo's Starter plan limits automations to 2,000 unique contacts, so anyone whose business runs on sequences ends up on Standard, which costs roughly double Starter at most volumes. And unused monthly credits expire. The help center says it plainly: "Any unused credits expire just before the new credits are added." A business that launches four times a year has to size its plan for launch month or keep buying top-ups. Either way you pay for your busiest month. On GetResponse the busy month costs the same as the quiet one.

Brevo's second meter switches on at contact 501

If autopilot volume were Brevo's only catch, the advice would be simple: count your sends. It isn't, because Brevo also caps contacts on its small tiers. And the cap is lower than what the free plan gives you.

Brevo Free stores up to 100,000 contacts at 300 emails a day. The cheapest paid tier, Starter at $9, stores 500. The next two tiers store 1,500 and 2,500. Only from the 20,000-email tier ($32 Starter, $69 Standard) does the cap jump to 500,000. Hit the cap on a small tier and Brevo upgrades you automatically. Replying to a one-star Trustpilot review in April 2026, the company said "exceeding this contact limit automatically triggers an upgrade to the next plan tier."

Users noticed. A thread on Brevo's own community forum opened in March 2025 with a free user trying to upgrade, and a few posts later the same user boiled it down: "Why can I have more contacts in a free account than in a payed account? That is really the main question." In December 2025 another member added the agency case: "There is zero incentive for me at all to move to a paid plan if it means I'm going to have to cull 4500 contacts even if I'm not planning on sending 5000 emails a month." A three-star Trustpilot review from May 2026, listing what it called dark patterns in Brevo's onboarding, included the same mechanism seen from the inside: "Forced auto-upgrade upon reaching the limit — you must agree in advance to be automatically upgraded to a more expensive plan, otherwise you cannot use the account."

The cap bites hardest on a free list that grew. Someone has gathered 3,000 contacts on Brevo Free from forms and events, mails them twice a month, and wants to just move to the $9 plan. That's 6,000 sends. By volume it fits the 10,000-email tier at $17. The contact cap pushes it to the 20,000-email tier at $32. The $9 plan holds 500, so staying on it means deleting five of every six contacts, the kind of cull that forum member refused to make. GetResponse Starter for 3,000 contacts (its 5,000 tier) is $54, so Brevo still wins.

My verdict on the cap: it rarely changes which tool is cheaper. It does change what Brevo costs you. Anyone holding more than 2,500 contacts should treat $32 (Starter) or $69 (Standard) as Brevo's real starting price and ignore the $9 headline. The people it hurts most are the ones who gathered contacts on the free plan (customers, form leads, old event lists) and mail them rarely. That's the exact profile the big-quiet-list advice sends to Brevo.

GetResponse's meter runs on your list structure

For webinar sellers the one-line answer is GetResponse, because the reminder emails are free. Everything above still points that way. GetResponse's own billing page adds a condition.

GetResponse doesn't bill on the people you have. It bills on rows. Its pricing help page says billing "is determined by the peak number of active subscribers during the billing month and the total number of contacts added within that billing month, regardless of what happens to those contacts after they are added." Then it adds: "if an email address is assigned to multiple lists, it counts as multiple contacts." The page's own example is four people spread across three lists, billed as eight.

Trustpilot reviewers have found both edges of that rule. One, writing in March 2026 after switching from another platform, said: "Any contact that enters your system counts toward your monthly limit, even if you delete them two minutes later." Another, in October 2026: "My account was restricted after a billing dispute related to repeated contact imports for maintenance, even though my active contact count never exceeded my plan limit."

Now rerun the webinar seller with the setup that billing page warns about: a new list for every webinar. Most of the 500 registrants are already on the 2,500-person newsletter list, but each webinar list counts them again. That's 3,000 billable contacts by month's end, past the 2,500 tier. Creator jumps from $79 to $109 and Marketer from $69 to $95. Deleting the webinar lists afterward doesn't help that month, because additions count "regardless of what happens to those contacts."

That's where the one-line answer breaks. The tool picked because sends are free would charge this business $30 a month, mostly for copies of people it already had.

So the six-email line comes with a condition: it's only honest if your GetResponse contact count equals your real number of people. If your business is built on many overlapping lists (an agency running several clients' audiences in one account, a creator with a list per lead magnet, anyone who cleans data by deleting and re-importing), GetResponse's meter is the one you'll trip. The crossover table above then understates what GetResponse costs. For that setup my verdict flips toward Brevo, whose billing doesn't care how you slice the audience.

What you're actually buying: a launch platform or a message pipe

Price models aside, the two products are built for different jobs, and the feature lists show it more clearly than the marketing does.

GetResponse is a launch platform that happens to send email, and that's why it can afford to give sends away. Autopilot volume is what a launch business produces most of, so GetResponse prices the thing launch businesses have least of: contacts. The value is in the bundle: a registration page, the webinar room, the reminder sequence, the replay and the sales funnel live in one account, and the sends cost nothing extra. If you sell through events, that bundle is the product.

The bundle is also why GetResponse is the wrong pick for a lot of people. A one-star Trustpilot review from August 2025 put it bluntly: "I don't need all the fancy landing pagegs [sic], webinars and other nonsense... the price is way too much for most of us that just want to send and test emails and build auto responder sequences." If that's you, the tables above agree, and the 1,000-contact prices make the case on their own: Creator is $69, Marketer (no workflow cap) is $59 and Starter is $19. Even the generous comparison means $10 a month for a webinar room you won't open. If Starter's single custom workflow covers your sequences, it's $50 a month for a launch kit you'll never use. For a business that sends a newsletter and an autoresponder, that gap is the whole argument, and it's why those builds shouldn't start on Creator.

Brevo is a message pipe. Transactional email through API or SMTP on every plan, SMS on all plans and a free sales CRM make it the better fit when email is plumbing for a store or an app rather than a launch engine. Its weak spot sits at the low end. A five-star Trustpilot reviewer in September 2026, who liked the features and found the prices okay overall, still noted that "it is pretty expensive from the start if you want some subscribers and not a watermark." Starter emails carry a "Sent with Brevo" logo unless you pay for the removal add-on, and the contact cap means "some subscribers" quickly means the $32 tier.

One more thing for webinar sellers in North America. GetResponse's help page notes that "North American accounts may not have access to purchase or enable add-ons," so the webinar add-on for Starter or Marketer may not be an option. Plan on Creator. Also plan on 100 live attendees: the pricing page says 100, while one line of the help center says 300 and another says 100 a few paragraphs later. I'd trust the pricing page and confirm with sales before a big launch.

Verdict: who should pick which

Pick Brevo if:

• you mail a list of any size two or three times a month and your automations are light;
• your list is under about 1,000 contacts;
• you need transactional email or SMS from the same account as your newsletters;
• you organize your audience in many overlapping lists or clients' accounts;
• you're starting from nothing and want a free plan that keeps your automations running.

Pick GetResponse if:

• your real volume, autopilot included, passes six to eight emails per contact a month;
• you sell through webinars, launches or courses and want registration pages, webinars and funnels in one bill (GetResponse's free trial is the cheap way to check);
• your send volume swings hard from month to month, since GetResponse charges the same for launch month and quiet month;
• you can keep everyone on one list and separate people inside it: with tags on Marketer or higher, or with segments on Starter, which has no tagging.

Where I could be wrong. This comparison prices the tools; it doesn't measure inbox placement, and deliverability can matter more than a $10 price gap. The no-cap promise isn't absolute either: GetResponse's terms of service include a fair-usage policy that lets it act on use it judges "excessive or unreasonable relative to other Customers under similar Subscription Plans, Billing Periods and List Sizes." No number is published, so a very heavy sender is trusting a judgment call. My crossover assumes you'd use the automation-capable plan on both sides. If GetResponse Starter's single custom workflow covers you, compare Starter with Starter instead. And both vendors change pricing often. In 2023 one Hacker News user summed up Brevo as "Contact are unlimited and it's around $30 per month for 40K emails." Today 40,000 emails cost $46 on Starter, contacts top out at 500,000, and the three smallest tiers cap you at 500, 1,500 or 2,500.

That last point is the direction I'd bet on. Both vendors now meter more than their headline unit. Brevo, priced on email and once sold on uncapped contacts, caps contacts on its small tiers. GetResponse, priced on contacts, counts rows and additions rather than people. Each has tightened the side of its model that used to be loose. If I had to guess where the next tightening lands, it's GetResponse's uncapped sends, which its own terms already qualify. So pick the tool whose meter you can actually control. For an occasional newsletter that's your email count, which favors Brevo. For a launch business it's your list structure, which favors GetResponse as long as you keep it to one list.

So back to $17 versus $19. Those prices assume one email a month to 1,000 people, a business that barely exists. The two-dollar gap is the smallest number in this decision. Before choosing either tool, divide last month's total sends by the number of real people on the account, and count how many lists the average person sits on. The first number puts you on one side of the six-email line. The second tells you whether GetResponse's meter agrees with it.

Compare current plans: GetResponse pricing · Brevo pricing

FAQ

Is Brevo cheaper than GetResponse?

For most lists mailed a few times a month, yes. Once your total sends, automations included, pass about six to eight emails per contact per month, GetResponse's uncapped sends usually win.

Do Brevo automation emails count toward my monthly email limit?

Yes. Brevo counts one credit per email sent to one contact, and its plan volume covers campaigns and transactional email. The help center notes that even automation test messages consume credits. Welcome series, reminders and cart emails all draw from the same monthly allowance.

How do I avoid GetResponse charging me for duplicate contacts?

Keep everyone on one list and separate webinar registrants, buyers and lead-magnet signups inside it. On Marketer and Creator, use tags: GetResponse's plan comparison includes contact tagging on those plans, its help center explains how to segment with tags, and a tag is a label on an existing contact, not a second copy of it. Tags need Marketer or higher; Starter has no tagging, so on Starter segment by contact details and by the actions people take within that one list. If you already run several lists, consolidating them is the fix, but GetResponse's billing page doesn't say how a move between lists is counted. Before consolidating, ask support how the move will be billed, then check the next invoice. Avoid cleaning a list by deleting contacts and re-importing them, because the help page bills additions regardless of later deletion. One Trustpilot reviewer reported an account restriction tied to repeated maintenance imports. Do the consolidation once, then leave the list structure alone.

What happens if I run out of Brevo emails during a launch?

You can buy prepaid email credits, which Brevo says never expire, or upgrade to a higher tier mid-cycle. Monthly plan credits that go unused still expire each month, so a plan sized for launch month wastes credits in quiet months.

Which free plan is better, GetResponse Free or Brevo Free?

Brevo Free, for almost everyone. It stores up to 100,000 contacts, sends 300 emails a day and keeps automations running for up to 2,000 contacts with no time limit. GetResponse Free allows 500 contacts and 2,500 newsletters a month, and after the 14-day premium trial it sends newsletters only, with no autoresponders or automation. GetResponse's free plan page also contradicts itself: one spot says one landing page, the FAQ on the same page says as many as you want up to 1,000 unique visits, and the contact limit for the first 14 days is given as both 500 and 1,000. GetResponse Free is useful as a test drive of the editor. Brevo Free is something a small business can actually run on.

Can I get GetResponse webinars without the Creator plan?

Sometimes. Webinar add-ons exist for Starter and Marketer, but GetResponse says North American accounts may not be able to buy add-ons, so Creator ($69/month at 1,000 contacts) is the dependable route.