Comparisons
HubSpot vs Brevo: which platform to choose for marketing and sales
Brevo is a European email, SMS and WhatsApp platform with a simple sales CRM. HubSpot brings marketing, sales and service together on a CRM built to scale.
If you are looking for an affordable tool to send email, SMS and WhatsApp with a basic sales CRM, Brevo is a very reasonable European option. If you want marketing, sales and customer service working on the same CRM, with revenue reporting, cross-department automation and AI with full context, HubSpot is the platform we recommend for most companies that want to grow.
Quick verdict: Brevo stands out for its cost relative to sending volume, its transactional email and its European roots. HubSpot wins on CRM, sales tools, customer service, reporting, ecosystem and ease of scaling, which is why it is the better choice once your business goes beyond sending campaigns.
What Brevo is and what HubSpot is
Brevo is a French company headquartered in Paris, founded in 2012 as Sendinblue. It started as an email marketing and transactional email tool and, when it changed its name in 2023, repositioned itself as a customer relationship platform: email, SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, automation, a conversations inbox, a sales CRM, loyalty programmes and its own AI called Aura. Its typical customer is an SME, an online shop or a start-up that sends a lot and wants to keep spending under control.
HubSpot is a customer platform built on a shared CRM, Smart CRM. On top of it run Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub (formerly Commerce Hub), with Breeze bringing AI to all of them. Its typical customer is a growing company that wants to connect acquisition, sales and service without depending on several tools.
The underlying difference is one of origin: Brevo is a messaging platform that has added a CRM; HubSpot is a CRM on which marketing, sales and service are built.
Does Brevo work as a CRM?
It works as a simple sales CRM. Brevo lets you manage deals in a visual pipeline with customisable stages, link companies and contacts, create tasks, book meetings, log calls and import opportunities. It has a free version with limits and paid per-user plans that unlock more pipelines, sales automation and calling features.
Where it falls short is depth. User reviews agree that contact management gets awkward with large lists, that filters and bulk actions could be better and that the CRM lacks the richness of Sales Hub in forecasting, reporting or permissions. For a team of two or three salespeople it may be enough; for a structured team, it usually is not.
HubSpot starts from the CRM: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products and, in Enterprise, custom objects, with labelled associations, team permissions and a full history on every record. Everything else rests on that data.
Sales: beyond the pipeline
Brevo’s pipeline is clear and easy to use, and Aura’s AI helps create deals, enrich contacts and transcribe calls. For small sales operations that live off email, it fits well with its campaigns.
Sales Hub adds what a growing sales team needs: follow-up sequences, meeting scheduling, quotes, playbooks, forecasting, call analysis, a prospecting workspace and the Breeze Prospecting Agent. On top of that comes a direct link with marketing: the rep sees which pages the lead has visited, which emails they opened and their score, without switching screens.
Marketing: Brevo’s big strength
Credit where it is due: Brevo is very capable at sending. Email campaigns with a visual editor, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, automation, AI segmentation, landing pages and forms. Its pricing model, tied mainly to sending volume on the marketing plans, is attractive for anyone with large databases who sends frequently. Its transactional email is also a go-to for many applications.
Marketing Hub covers email, forms, landing pages and automation, and adds what turns marketing into measurable revenue: SEO, ads, social media, account-based marketing, lead scoring connected to sales and revenue attribution by channel. With Content Hub, your website and blog also live on the same CRM.
The key difference is what happens after the click. In Brevo, the contact tends to stay in the world of campaigns; in HubSpot, that same record moves into a deal, a forecast and, after the sale, a ticket or a renewal.
Before
- Campaigns in Brevo
- Simple pipeline with no forecast
- Support in another tool
- Revenue worked out by hand
After
- Marketing Hub connected to sales
- Sales Hub with forecasting
- Service Hub with tickets
- Revenue attribution by channel
Customer service
Brevo offers a conversations inbox that brings together website chat, WhatsApp, social media messages and calls, with an AI agent to speed up replies. It is handy for answering customers and leads quickly from one place.
Service Hub goes beyond the inbox: tickets with queues and service level agreements, a knowledge base, a customer portal, satisfaction surveys, customer success management and the Breeze Customer Agent. If you need to measure resolution times, handle complex issues or anticipate renewals, compare carefully what each one covers at the level you need.
AI: Breeze vs Aura
Brevo has built in Aura, its AI assistant, with agents for marketing, sales and conversations: content generation, send-time optimisation, segmentation and scoring, natural-language analysis of results, contact enrichment and call transcription. Some advanced features are reserved for higher plans.
Breeze works on a broader set of data. Breeze Assistant helps you draft, summarise and analyse from anywhere in HubSpot; Breeze agents handle customer queries, prospect accounts and keep data up to date; and Breeze Intelligence enriches companies and contacts. Because HubSpot’s CRM holds deals, calls, tickets and revenue, the AI can answer business questions, not just campaign questions.
Reporting and attribution
Brevo’s reports cover campaign, automation and deal performance well, although some users would like more flexible filters and more analysis options. HubSpot lets you build custom reports across marketing, sales and service, team dashboards, sales forecasts and revenue attribution. For leadership, it is the difference between knowing how many emails were opened and knowing which channel brings in the most profitable customers.
Integrations and API
Brevo has a widely used API, especially for transactional email, plugins for common online shop and CMS platforms, and integrations with popular tools. HubSpot offers one of the broadest integration marketplaces around, native integrations with leading sales, invoicing and e-commerce tools, and a development platform with private apps, UI Extensions, serverless functions and webhooks. When an integration does not exist, it can be built inside the CRM.
Ease of use and adoption
Brevo is easy to get started with and its interface is available in several languages. HubSpot also stands out for its ease of use, and its advantage shows when several teams are involved: the same interface for marketing, sales and service, a full mobile app, HubSpot Academy with free role-based training and a huge community to turn to with questions.
Implementation and total cost of ownership
Brevo has a free plan with a sending limit and paid marketing plans that depend mainly on email volume and features, plus per-user sales plans and add-ons such as SMS or WhatsApp. HubSpot offers free tools and Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions per hub or as a full platform, priced per seat and by marketing contacts.
At first glance Brevo usually looks cheaper, and for sending-focused use it often is. But total cost includes the tools you would need to add to cover the gaps (help desk, forecasting, reporting, connectors) and the hours spent keeping them in sync. Compare HubSpot’s official pricing with Brevo’s pricing, and think about your company two years from now, not just today.
Support, community and partners
Brevo offers email and chat support, with more channels on higher plans, and a partner network. User ratings of its support are generally good, although some mention account suspensions for compliance reasons, which are worth knowing about if you import older lists. HubSpot adds Academy, a community, a marketplace and a global partner network. At Vexco we are a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner rated 4.9/5, with consultants and developers working in the same team.
Security, GDPR and EU data hosting
This is a point in Brevo’s favour: it is a European company, hosts data in the European Union and offers a data processing agreement. HubSpot, a US company, lets you host your account in its EU data centre, publishes its list of sub-processors and manages consent and lawful bases within the CRM. For most companies, both options allow GDPR compliance with the right configuration; if vendor sovereignty is a strict requirement, review it with your legal adviser.
HubSpot vs Brevo comparison table
| Criterion | HubSpot | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Customer platform on a shared CRM | Multichannel messaging with a CRM |
| CRM and data model | Associated and custom objects | Contacts, companies and deals |
| Sales tools | Sequences, forecasting, quotes, calling | Pipeline, tasks, meetings and calls |
| Email marketing | Complete, connected to sales | Very competitive on volume |
| SMS and WhatsApp | Available depending on edition and country | Native strength |
| Transactional email | Add-on for higher editions | Native strength |
| Customer service | Full Service Hub | Conversations inbox |
| AI | Breeze: assistant, agents, enrichment | Aura with agents |
| Reporting and attribution | Across departments, including revenue | Campaign and deal-focused |
| EU data hosting | EU data centre | European company and hosting |
| Pricing model | Free tools, editions per hub, per seat | By sending volume for marketing, per user for sales |
When could Brevo make sense?
- Your main activity is sending a lot of email or SMS and your sales process is simple.
- You need powerful transactional email for an application or online shop.
- You are a small company on a tight budget without a structured sales or support team.
- Having a European vendor is a deciding factor in your sector.
If you are also weighing up other email automation tools, see our HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign comparison; and if you run a service business built on bookings and payments, our HubSpot vs Keap comparison.
Verdict: why HubSpot wins
- A real CRM at the centre: a rich data model, permissions and associations that support complex processes.
- Marketing, sales and service on one platform: one record per customer and workflows across teams.
- Complete sales tools: sequences, forecasting and call analysis that sales teams actually adopt.
- Business reporting: revenue attribution and leadership dashboards without spreadsheets.
- Breeze with full context: AI that understands deals, tickets and revenue.
- An ecosystem built to scale: marketplace, custom development, Academy and partners.
How to migrate from Brevo to HubSpot
Migrating from Brevo is usually done by exporting contacts, companies and deals and importing them into HubSpot, or through the API when there is volume or history to preserve. The points worth planning:
- Lists and attributes: turn contact attributes into HubSpot properties and decide which lists stay as active lists and which are no longer needed.
- Consent: carry each contact’s subscription status and lawful basis over to HubSpot subscription types. It is the first thing we check in an audit.
- Deals and pipeline: replicate stages, owners and dates, and associate each deal with its company and contacts.
- Automations: they are redesigned as workflows; take the chance to simplify.
- Transactional email: decide whether it stays in Brevo or moves to HubSpot; there is no need to move everything on the same day.
- Sending domain: set up domain authentication in HubSpot and warm up sending to protect deliverability.
- 01List and consent audit
- 02Attribute and deal mapping
- 03Import and validation
- 04Workflows and sending domain
- 05Cut-over and training
Plan the switchover day with a proper cut-over plan so that marketing and sales are never left without a tool. We have run migrations from Salesforce, Odoo and Clientify, and if you would like us to help, our HubSpot migration and phased implementation services cover data, workflows, integrations and training.
