Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Comparing Email Marketing Software

Sometimes the best choice is obvious. If you live 15 miles from town, driving is almost certainly the best way to get to the grocery store. More often, the best option is subjective. You can’t just tell a realtor you’d like to rent the best apartment; you need to weigh things like cost, location, and lease terms.

Choosing an email marketing platform falls into the second category. The email marketing space is crowded, and marketing features and pricing models vary by platform. With your business’s growth on the line, you need a platform that not only delivers emails reliably but also helps you build meaningful connections with customers that drive sales. Here’s an overview of two popular email marketing platforms: Klaviyo and Mailchimp.

What is an email marketing platform? 

Email marketing software helps businesses plan, execute, and monitor email campaigns. While features vary by platform, most offer customer data management, email design tools, basic automation, and analytics and reporting features.

Here are key features to consider when evaluating platforms:

• Contact management systems

• Email design tools

• Prebuilt email templates

• Analytics and reporting dashboards

• Embeddable opt-in forms

• Prebuilt integrations

• Marketing automation templates

• Audience segmentation tools

• Customer support services

• Website and landing page add-ons

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: What’s the difference?

1. Price
2. Design tools
3. Analytics and reporting
4. Contact management and segmentation
5. AI features
6. Customer support
7. Automation
8. Integrations

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp are sophisticated email marketing platforms with advanced integrations, marketing tools, and analytics features that make them popular with ecommerce brands. Here’s how the platforms stack up in terms of cost, features, and support:

1. Price

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp base cost on total number of contacts and monthly send volume, but they use different pricing models. Mailchimp operates on a tiered model, while Klaviyo offers base plans with feature-based add-ons. Both platforms have free tiers; Klaviyo limits free plan users to 250 contacts and 500 monthly email sends, and Mailchimp limits users to 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly email sends.

Malchimp offers three paid plans: Essentials, Standard, and Premium. More expensive plans offer access to advanced features, add more seats and user roles, and have higher contact limits. Costs vary within tiers based on contact cap.

Mailchimp pricing: Essentials plan starts at $13 per month for up to 500 contacts and $385 per month for up to 50,000 contacts.

Klaviyo charges based on features and total number of contacts, offering two paid plans—Email and Email + SMS—and add-ons like Reviews, Marketing Analytics, and the Advanced Klaviyo Data Platform. All costs increase based on your number of contacts.

Klaviyo pricing: Email plan starts at $20 per month for up to 500 contacts, and its Marketing Analytics add-on costs an additional $100 per month for the same contact volume.

2. Design tools

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer no-code email editors with customizable email templates. You can select a template and use drag-and-drop tools to add or remove elements, edit styles, and preview emails. Higher-paid tiers for each platform include built-in optimization suggestions and email testing features.

All Mailchimp plans include access to Content Studio, which is a digital asset management platform for email marketers. Premium and Standard plans add custom-coded template options and the ability to automatically apply your branding using the Creative Assistant brand kit feature. Just upload your logo and Mailchimp pulls fonts, colors, brand personality, and button styles from your site.

Klaviyo’s tools allow users to upload assets, but its asset management system—Klaviyo Portfolio—is a separate product designed for multi-account management. Klaviyo requires users to manually upload branding information—although once you’ve done so, you can apply your brand across emails with one click. 

3. Analytics and reporting

Mailchimp’s Essentials plan includes A/B testing features, and its Premium and Standard plans add comparative, anomaly, and custom reports. Higher-tier plans also offer real-time audience reporting, engagement tracking, and revenue attribution and use predictive analytics to calculate customer lifetime value (CLV) and predict purchase likelihood.

All Klaviyo paid plans include performance reports, industry benchmarking, and customizable attribution models and use predictive analytics to estimate CLV. Advanced features—available with the Marketing Analytics and Advanced Data Platform add-ons—include audience and conversion dashboards, customer behavior funnels, cohort reports, purchase pattern insights, advanced personalization, cross-selling insights, data export, and data transformations. 

4. Contact management and segmentation

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp store contact data in the platform and can create segments based on key customer data points. Both also offer prebuilt segments for engaged, disengaged, and new subscribers, and Mailchimp provides additional segments for first-time customers, new customers, and potential customers.

Mailchimp’s audience dashboard allows you to add notes and tags to customer profiles, view customer interaction history, and manage contacts through its mobile app. All plans include an audience dashboard with basic segmentation. Paid plans can manage multiple audiences, and the Premium and Essentials tiers bump you up to advanced segmentation features.

All Klaviyo plans include AI-powered customer segmentation, and paid plans track your all-time customer history with customer profiles. Klaviyo’s paid plans also support personalized campaigns and can display content blocks based on profile conditions to help users avoid duplicate sends.

5. AI features 

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo include AI-powered segmentation, personalized product recommendations, predictive analytics, testing tools, and content generation tools in all paid plans. Their free plans have limited AI functionality; Mailchimp’s free plan offers a subject line helper and personalized product recommendations, while Klaviyo’s free plan includes send-time optimization.

6. Customer support

Mailchimp’s free plan comes with email support for the first 30 days. Paid plans provide ongoing email and live chat options, although phone support and migration services are limited to the Premium tier. All users can access guides and tutorials in the Mailchimp Help Center.

Klaviyo offers 60 days of email support for its free plan and ongoing email and chat support with paid plans. Although phone support isn’t available, the platform maintains Klaviyo Academy and Klaviyo Community to help users build their skills and troubleshoot issues. 

7. Automation

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo offer extensive prebuilt automation libraries and no-code custom automation builders.

Mailchimp offers single-step automations on all plans and multistep automations with its Standard and Premium tiers. Paid plans also provide access to Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder, which includes more than 100 prebuilt automations, including automated email workflows for welcome messages, abandoned cart reminders, and customer birthday celebrations. Premium and Standard can also accommodate branching customer journeys and automations with multiple starting points.

Klaviyo offers more than 80 prebuilt marketing automation templates, allowing users to create custom journeys and send behavioral trigger emails based on actions like viewing a product, placing an order, or filing out a form. The company’s drag-and-drop automation builder is included with all plans. 

8. Integrations

Both platforms offer hundreds of prebuilt integrations as well as API access, allowing users to build custom integrations.

Mailchimp’s library of more than 300 prebuilt integrations is available on all plans, and the platform offers native integrations for QuickBooks, Google Analytics, Shopify, and Shopify Plus.

Klaviyo offers more than 350 integrations for things like your ecommerce store and customer relationship management (CRM) system, but prebuilt integrations aren’t part of the free plan. Klaviyo’s prebuilt Shopify integration is available on the Shopify App Store, but the platform doesn’t directly integrate with popular platforms such as Google Analytics and QuickBooks.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: How to choose

1. Evaluate your resources
2. Review your tech stack
3. List key features
4. Estimate costs
5. Give it a try

Klaviyo and Mailchimp are both sophisticated email marketing software systems with extensive feature lists at multiple price points—which can make it difficult to choose the best platform for your ecommerce brand. Here’s how to approach the decision-making process:

1. Evaluate your resources

Take stock of the resources available for your email marketing program, including budget, hours, and your team’s proficiencies. Consider skills related to email design, branding, content creation, building landing pages, writing custom code, working with APIs, segmenting audiences, and configuring marketing automations. 

2. Review your tech stack 

Note the platforms you’d like to integrate with your email marketing service provider, such as the platform you use for your ecommerce store, your CRM, and your customer data platform.

3. List key features

Cross-reference the information you gathered in steps one and two with your email marketing strategy, and use your findings to create a list of all the features your ideal email marketing platform would provide. Consider prioritizing needs or creating two separate lists for must-haves and nice-to-haves.

If nobody on your team has experience with APIs, for example, you might consider a prebuilt integration with your ecommerce store a must-have. If you have limited time to spend writing email content, you could flag AI-powered content generation and optimization as a nice-to-have.

4. Estimate costs

Use the interactive Klaviyo and Mailchimp price calculators to estimate the cost of a plan that offers the must-have features on your list while considering your current contact counts and projected growth. If both offer plans that fit your budget, review nice-to-have features and consider the benefits to your business. You might weigh the relative benefits of Klaviyo’s SMS marketing support versus Mailchimp’s free website builder, for example, even if neither made your original features list. 

5. Give it a try

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo have free plans, and Mailchimp offers a 14-day free trial for Premium and Standard tiers. If both platforms have the potential to meet your needs, go ahead and try both to see which you like better.

At a minimum, experiment with the free or trial version of your preferred platform before you commit to a paid plan. You’ll spend a lot of time using your email marketing platform, so the right option for you might come down to the interface.