ActiveCampaign vs Brevo vs Kit: Best Email Automation for Solo Founders (2026)

ActiveCampaign is what you choose when email automation isn't a side task — it's the engine of your growth. The platform's core bet is on AI: you describe what you want in plain English, and Active Intelligence (their AI engine, still in Beta) builds the workflow for you.

I tested this during a free trial. I typed "welcome series for new newsletter subscribers" into the AI Automation Builder, and it generated a complete multi-step workflow with conditional branching, engagement-based tagging, and re-engagement paths for inactive contacts. Not a simple three-email drip — a genuine strategy with multiple decision points. Building it manually would have taken 30–60 minutes. The AI did it in under a minute. (I wrote a detailed walkthrough with screenshots in my ActiveCampaign AI review.)

Beyond the automation builder, the dashboard acts as a marketing advisor. The "Automate for me" tab suggests personalised workflows — win-back campaigns, webinar nurture series, prospect-to-sale sequences — based on what your account actually needs. The "Create an email" tab surfaces campaign ideas with ready-to-customise templates. For a solopreneur without a marketing background, this proactive guidance is the closest thing to having a junior marketing hire.

ActiveCampaign offers over 900 automation templates, 1,000+ integrations, and was ranked #1 for email deliverability in EmailTooltester's January 2024 study. In November 2025, they launched a direct integration with Anthropic's Claude — positioning themselves as having the first "autonomous marketing connector" for a major AI model.

Real businesses back this up. Motrain reported conversion rates jumping from under 10% to over 20% after implementing ActiveCampaign's automations. Spark Joy New York, a solopreneur-run business, tripled their sales volume and reported 85% faster campaign creation with Active Intelligence.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of charging per contact, it charges per email sent. You can store up to 100,000 contacts on the free plan and only pay based on sending volume. For a pre-revenue solo founder, this model makes a lot of sense.

The free tier gives you 300 emails per day (roughly 9,000 per month). That's enough to run a small newsletter and basic automations while you're validating your idea. The Starter plan at $9/mo removes the daily sending limit. Standard at $18/mo adds landing pages, A/B testing, and multi-user access. Professional starts at $499/mo — a significant jump that brings WhatsApp campaigns, web push notifications, and advanced segmentation.

Brevo includes a free CRM on all plans with contact management, deal pipelines (up to 50 open deals on Free), and a meeting scheduler. Native SMS is available as a credit-based add-on, and WhatsApp campaigns are available on Professional plans and above. The platform raised €500M in December 2025, reaching unicorn status — so it's well-funded and not going anywhere.

But the trade-offs are real. Deliverability scored 88.3% in EmailTooltester's January 2024 study — roughly six percentage points behind ActiveCampaign in the same test. Gmail-specific inbox placement has been reported even lower by some third-party monitors. For a solopreneur with a small list, every email that lands in spam is a lost opportunity.

Automation is functional but limited. You get a visual workflow builder with around 15 templates — compared to ActiveCampaign's 900+. There's no AI that generates workflows from a prompt. No predictive sending. No AI-generated campaigns. You're building everything manually. Brevo's AI assistant (Aura) helps with content generation and subject lines, but it doesn't create automation workflows.

Brevo offers around 150 integrations covering the essentials — Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, Zapier — but it's a fraction of ActiveCampaign's 1,000+.

Kit rebranded from ConvertKit in October 2024, signed names like Tom Brady and Dua Lipa, and doubled down on what it does best: serving creators who build audiences and sell digital products directly to their subscribers.

The free plan is the most generous of the three for audience size — up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, landing pages, and forms. You get one basic automation on Free, with unlimited automations on paid tiers.

Where Kit genuinely stands out is the creator economy ecosystem. Built-in digital product sales with Stripe checkout. Paid newsletter subscriptions. A Creator Network for cross-promotion. And Paid Recommendations, where other creators pay you $1–$4+ for every subscriber you refer to their list. If your business model is "grow audience → sell digital products," Kit was designed specifically for that workflow.

Kit's automation builder is visual and drag-and-drop with triggers for form signups, tags, purchases, and custom fields. It's perfectly fine for welcome sequences and basic funnels, but it's rule-based only — there's no AI that generates workflows for you. The sophistication ceiling is lower than ActiveCampaign by a wide margin.

Kit claims a 99.8% email delivery rate, but that measures server delivery (emails accepted by the receiving mail server), not inbox placement. Third-party inbox placement estimates range from around 78% to 88% depending on the testing source — competitive with Brevo but behind ActiveCampaign.

The limitations are clear. No built-in CRM — just tag-based subscriber management with no deal pipelines or lead scoring. No native SMS or WhatsApp (email only). AI features are minimal — a subject line generator and an AI support agent. The template library has around 23 designs, and reporting is basic. Kit also implemented its first price increase in 12 years in September 2025, moving Creator from $15 to $33/mo and Creator Pro from $45 to $66/mo — so it's no longer the budget option it once was.