The cheaper alternative to Brevo

What you pay

Both platforms price by monthly volume. The table takes six volumes. Each row shows the cheapest plan on each side, in your region’s currency.

Brevo prices its plans up to 100,000 emails a month. Above that its page offers higher volumes on the Standard plan and asks you to get in touch. The last three rows read on request. Every mailkube plan carries a published price, from Free to Volume.

Dedicated IPs are included from the Elite plan. Elite carries one at 100,000 emails a month, and Volume carries six at 750,000. Each new one warms on a six-stage ladder, from 50 messages a day to 10,000. Brevo sells a dedicated IP as an add-on on its Professional and Enterprise plans, and warms it automatically from Professional.

Feature by feature

The rows below hold what each platform documents today. A docs link opens the mailkube page behind that row.

Two rows carry most of the weight for an application sending transactional email. Every mailkube webhook arrives signed with an HMAC, and the SDKs verify it for you. Every send takes an idempotency key(opens in a new tab) . A retried call then returns the first result instead of sending twice. Brevo’s documentation describes neither.

Where your data lives

Customer data is stored in the European Union. Our infrastructure runs in European data centres, in the French OVHcloud group.

Brevo is a French company and states that its hosting sits inside the European Union as well. On this comparison the two platforms stand in the same place, and the rest of this page is where they part.

The detail is in the data processing agreement.

Two transports, headers included

POST to the REST API, or point the SMTP client you already run at smtp.mailkube.com. Everything the API takes as a JSON field, SMTP takes as a header. Those headers are stripped before the message reaches the recipient.

• X-Mailkube-Tags carries the same tag list as the REST tags field
• X-Mailkube-Topic attributes the send to a topic, so recipients who opted out are filtered
• X-Mailkube-Template-Id and X-Mailkube-Template-Version render a saved template server-side

An SMTP send is the same message as an API send. It lands in the same logs, counts against the same quota and fires the same webhook events. The SMTP reference(opens in a new tab) lists every header, reply code and rate limit.

Brevo relays SMTP on smtp-relay.brevo.com with a key of its own, and its relay accepts a template and a scheduled time. It publishes no header name for either, and those values travel through its generic custom-header mechanism. Batch sending is documented as unavailable over that relay.

Your stack, already covered

Official SDKs cover Node, Python, Go, Java, PHP and Ruby, plus C# on the Brevo side. Django, Laravel, Rails and Spring Boot each have a package of their own here. It plugs into the framework’s mail layer, and every client verifies your webhook signatures for you.

Brevo publishes plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify. Its documentation describes no framework mail package and no command-line tool.

The CLI is a single binary. It sends over either transport and manages scheduled sends. While you develop, it runs a local webhook receiver. It carries a skill file, and a coding assistant reads the real command surface. Start from the SDK documentation(opens in a new tab) or the CLI guide(opens in a new tab) .

Migrating from Brevo

Install your language’s client, then replace the constructor and the key. The send call keeps its shape, and the nested sender and recipient objects flatten into plain fields.

import * as brevo from "@getbrevo/brevo";

const api = new brevo.TransactionalEmailsApi();
api.setApiKey(
  brevo.TransactionalEmailsApiApiKeys.apiKey,
  process.env.BREVO_API_KEY,
);

const email = await api.sendTransacEmail({
  sender: { email: "hello@example.com" },
  to: [{ email: "customer@example.com" }],
  subject: "Hello world",
  htmlContent: "<p>It works!</p>",
});

import { Mailkube } from "@mailkube/mailkube-node";

const client = new Mailkube({ apiKey: process.env.MAILKUBE_API_KEY });

const email = await client.emails.send({
  from: "Acme <hello@example.com>",
  to: "customer@example.com",
  subject: "Hello world",
  html: "<p>It works!</p>",
});

SMTP is just as short. Change the host, the port and the credential in your mailer, and leave everything else alone. The messages you already send go out unchanged, and tags, topics and templates arrive as headers when you want them. Nothing forces a cutover date: run both platforms side by side and move one service at a time. The quickstart(opens in a new tab) covers the REST path and the SMTP guide(opens in a new tab) covers the relay.

When Brevo is the better fit

Brevo keeps transactional logs indefinitely by default, and an account can set a retention period of up to 24 months. mailkube keeps 7 days on the entry plans and 90 days on Volume. A team that reads its sending history a year back is better served there.

Brevo is also a marketing platform. Campaigns, contact lists, automation workflows, a CRM with deal pipelines, SMS and WhatsApp all live in the same account as the transactional sends. Its free plan carries 300 emails a day with no expiry. mailkube sends your application’s email and tells you what happened to it.

The pricing page details every plan. The REST API and SMTP relay pages go deeper on the two transports.