Mailchimp, Brevo, Zoho Campaigns, SendGrid and neuMails, compared on the things that actually decide the bill: pricing model, free plans, data residency and log retention.
We build one of the tools on this list. Read our entry with a pinch of salt.
Every other entry we have tried to make accurate enough that you can check it yourself. Every price below is from the vendor's own pricing page. Where a competitor beats us, we say so.
Three or four tools on this list are good answers to “which email marketing tool should I use in India.” Which one fits you depends less on features than on what you actually do with email.
| Tool | Best for | Free plan | Entry price | Data location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | Ecommerce, large integration needs | 250 contacts, 500 emails/mo | $13/mo (Essentials) | Primarily US |
| Brevo | Large lists emailed infrequently | 300 emails/day | From $9/mo (Starter) | EU |
| Zoho Campaigns | Zoho ecosystem users; unlimited sending | 2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/mo | By contact tier, INR available | India* |
| SendGrid | Developer-led transactional sending | 100 emails/day, 60 days | $19.95/mo (Essentials) | US, EU option |
| neuMails | Full campaign + transactional platform on Indian infrastructure | 5,000 emails/mo | ₹528/mo | India (Mumbai) |
*Zoho's own pricing page does not state data centre location; the India data centre claim comes from a Zoho partner listing and should be verified directly.
Owned by Intuit. The name most Indian marketers reach for first.
Pricing. The free plan caps at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, with a 250-per-day ceiling. Paid tiers are Essentials at $13, Standard at $20, and Premium at $350 — those are 12-month promo rates, so check what renewal looks like.
Mailchimp prices by contact count, not sends. Your monthly send allowance is a multiple of contacts: 10× on Essentials, 12× on Standard, 15× on Premium.
The India angle. INR sits in the currency selector. Data sits mostly in the US.
Where it wins. Integration depth. Template quality. A mature product that does what it says on the box. If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store and want the safest choice, this is it.
Where it costs you. Contact-based pricing hurts large lists that get emailed rarely. If you have 50,000 contacts and mail them twice a month, you pay for all 50,000 every month.
Brevo's pitch is simple: pay for what you send, not who you store.
The free tier — 300 emails a day, no card, no time limit — works out to about 9,000 emails a month. Nobody else on this list matches it, ours included. Paid plans start at Starter (5,000 emails/month), then Standard (which adds automation, A/B testing, and landing pages), then Professional (from 150,000/month).
For a large list you mail once a month, this model is cheaper than Mailchimp by roughly an order of magnitude. For frequent senders with automated sequences, it flips the other way.
Two things worth checking before you sign up. Removing the Brevo footer from your emails is a paid add-on on Starter, not included — Standard and up get it as standard. And dedicated IPs only appear at Enterprise, which is aimed at lists above 1M contacts.
Payment goes through Adyen card or PayPal. Data sits in the EU.
If you already live in Zoho, stop reading and pick this. We mean that.
The Forever Free plan covers 2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails a month, and 5 users. Paid plans are priced by contact tier from 500 contacts up — Standard bundles 10 users, Professional 20+. Both paid tiers include unlimited emails with no daily cap. INR sits in the currency selector. Annual billing saves 25%.
That unlimited-send number matters. If you mail a stable list often, Zoho's model is the cheapest on this list — pay for contacts, send as much as you like.
Dedicated IPs are a separate yearly purchase, and Zoho suggests them once you cross 100,000 emails a month.
The other side. Contact-tier pricing means a rarely-emailed list costs the same as a heavily-emailed one. Payment is card, PayPal, or bank transfer on annual plans. And the product is built to live inside the Zoho ecosystem — standalone, it is less compelling than the feature list suggests.
A developer tool that Indian teams land on by default, usually because it comes up first when a backend engineer searches for “email API.”
The free trial runs 100 emails a day for 60 days — time-limited, unlike almost everything else here. Essentials starts at $19.95, Pro at $89.95. Pro is the first tier where dedicated IPs come included, though other plans can buy them as add-ons.
Two things to know before you commit. Marketing Campaigns and the Email API are billed as separate products — want both campaign sends and transactional API sends? You buy two plans. And activity history is capped at 3 days on Essentials and 7 days on Pro, which makes debugging older delivery problems painful.
SendGrid offers an EU data residency option. No India equivalent.
The API and docs are excellent. For pure transactional sending at volume, this is a strong pick. The marketing side is weaker than the transactional side.
Ours. Here is the narrow case.
It is a full platform, not a niche tool. Campaign management (regular, autoresponder, recurring). A drag-and-drop builder with multiple template editors. Lists, segments, custom fields. A/B testing. Landing pages. Suppression lists, blacklists, bounce processing, feedback loop handling. Surveys, webhooks, API keys. And on the same account — an SMTP relay and a REST email API. Feature-for-feature, it stands against anything else on this list.
The infrastructure runs in India. AWS Mumbai, ap-south-1. Subscriber data, campaign content, and logs stay in the country. Most Indian businesses email mostly Indian recipients — so mail travels a shorter path than from a US or EU platform, where a message to a Delhi inbox may cross continents twice on the way.
We are not going to quote you a latency number. Any figure we published would depend on your recipients, their mailbox providers, and the time of day. The architectural point stands on its own: infrastructure closer to recipients means fewer network hops.
Data residency is a compliance question, not just a technical one. Under the DPDP Act 2023, where personal data gets processed matters. If you are in financial services, healthcare, education, or any regulated sector, being able to say “subscriber data never leaves India” makes the compliance conversation much shorter. Zoho can make this claim too. Mailchimp, Brevo, and SendGrid cannot.
Campaigns and transactional on one account, sharing one suppression list and one reputation. On SendGrid, you would buy two plans for this.
Pricing: ₹528 a month. The free tier includes 5,000 emails every month — a recurring allowance, not a countdown trial.
Where we would not pick us. Need 9,000 free emails a month with no compliance angle? Brevo. Send very high volume to a stable list? Zoho's unlimited tiers work out cheaper. Live in Zoho CRM? Zoho Campaigns integrates in ways we cannot. Need only a transactional API at very high volume, no campaigns? SendGrid's tooling is more mature. And we are younger than Mailchimp or Zoho, with a smaller integration library.
Start with your recipients. If most are in India, infrastructure located here is a real advantage — shorter routing, and local ISP relationships that matter for delivery. If your audience is global, that advantage narrows.
Now think about data residency. Preference or compliance requirement? These are different problems. Only one of them shortens your shortlist — for regulated industries under the DPDP Act, being able to name your data centre is often required, which cuts the list to two.
Then look at how often you email your list. Frequent sends to small lists suit contact-based pricing. Occasional sends to large lists suit send-based pricing. This one question changes the cost comparison by an order of magnitude.
One more thing: transactional email. OTPs, receipts, password resets — a different workload from newsletters. Running them on one platform means one suppression list and one reputation to protect. Splitting them across two vendors means two of everything.
And check what happens when delivery goes wrong. Every platform here sends email successfully most of the time. The differences show up when a campaign lands in spam and you need to work out why. Check log retention before you commit. Several platforms are quietly restrictive here.
Depends on volume and whether data residency matters. Brevo's free plan is the most generous to start with. Zoho suits existing Zoho users. neuMails suits businesses that need Indian infrastructure with campaigns and transactional email on one account.
Several. Brevo gives 300 emails a day free with no time limit. Zoho Campaigns has a free tier covering 2,000 contacts. neuMails includes 5,000 emails a month free. Mailchimp's free plan is the tightest at 250 contacts.
Under the DPDP Act 2023, yes — particularly in regulated sectors. It also has a routing effect: infrastructure closer to recipients means a shorter network path.
Some platforms support both on one account. Others sell them as separate products. SendGrid bills Marketing Campaigns and the Email API separately. Check before you assume.
Log retention. Whether dedicated IPs are on your tier. How bounces and complaints get handled automatically. Whether the pricing model matches how you actually send.
5,000 emails free every month. No credit card required.
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