January 7, 2022

Top 7 Klaviyo Alternatives for Small Businesses in 2022

Reading time about 12 min
klaviyo alternatives

Klaviyo is one of the most popular email marketing services out there. It’s normal to wonder if Klaviyo is worth it when you see it recommended by influencers everywhere. 

But it’s always smart to check what Klaviyo alternatives are there, too. Comparing prices and capabilities will help you choose the best tool for your own needs.

So here we’ve selected the top email marketing solutions that can be called Klaviyo competitors in terms of features and pricing plans. You can look at the price comparison table and explore how each one compares to Klaviyo to decide whether to switch or not.

What Klaviyo offers

klaviyo alternatives

  • Ecommerce focused
  • SMS Marketing
  • Automation — advanced triggers, split flows, combine emails and SMS
  • Segmentation — behavioral and transactional data, customer profiles
  • Personalization thanks to extensive data
  • Forms — including multi-step ones
  • Reports — focused on revenue, not email metrics
  • predictive analytics — predict certain customer metrics and attributes
  • Email templates available
  • Integrations with all major ecommerce platforms, special focus on Shopify

Klaviyo pricing

This is an overview of Klaviyo’s pricing for different contact list sizes. This is only for emails, texting comes on top. 

ContactsUp to 2503001,0002,5005,00010,00025,000
Price / mofree$20$30$60$100$150$400

Klaviyo downsides

And here are a few reasons to make you look for Klaviyo alternatives:

  • Steep pricing. Emails and SMS to 10,000 contacts a month will cost you $600.
  • SMS available only in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.
  • Customer reviews most often mention dissatisfactory customer support.
  • If you have or want to grow to a large contact list, price can be prohibitive.
  • If you don’t run an ecommerce store where emails can pay for themselves directly, it might be too expensive for its worth. 
  • It might have features that are too complex for what your small business needs, e.g. predictive analytics.
  • Because of its high price, complexity, and a tendency to push you to talk to sales instead of letting you sign up directly, it feels like more of an enterprise solution.

Klaviyo Alternatives to Switch To

This is a price comparison table of the top alternatives to Klaviyo. It looks at the monthly price of sending email marketing campaigns only. Keep in mind that each platform provides different features (e.g. automation, logo removed) at different price tiers. 

*Prices above are based on pricing pages accessed in Jan 2022 and take email + SMS plans where available (SMS credits not included) for the closest possible comparison to Klaviyo.

Now, let’s look at each Klaviyo competitor and how it compares to it to help you choose.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform much like Klaviyo. It combines email marketing and automation tools (incl. transactional emails), SMS marketing, CRM, live chat, shared inbox, and landing page and signup forms builder. Push notifications and advanced ecommerce analytics are coming soon, thanks to Sendinblue’s recent acquisition of PushOwl and Metrilo respectively.

Sendinblue is a comprehensive email marketing service, offering all email features you’ll ever need:

  • an intuitive drag and drop email builder;
  • a huge range of dynamic content for email personalization;
  • A/B testing beyond the subject line; 
  • a library of email templates.

sendinblue email editor

Further features provided by Sendinblue are: 

  • multichannel automation (email + SMS + contact management);
  • pre-built automation flows (abandoned cart, product purchase, welcome message, interaction with a campaign, anniversary or birthday, etc.);
  • rich contact segmentation;
  • GDPR-compliant and multi-step forms;
  • and advanced subscribers list management.

What Sendinblue offers that Klaviyo doesn’t

  • Sendinblue doesn’t charge you for your contact list size! You pay only for the number of emails sent to unlimited contacts. Sendinblue’s mission is to help small businesses grow and not charging for contact storage is one way we do that. 
  • Dedicated transactional email capability. Klaviyo lets you send those through the email marketing automation, which is not ideal for deliverability and might take too much time. In contrast, Sendinblue offers you four ways to make sure your customers get those essential emails on time: a dedicated SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), API, ecommerce plugins, or automation. Pick the best option for your website and business!
  • Tons of merge tags (a.k.a. dynamic content) options
  • Email testing on different email clients
  • Email Send Time Optimization — send emails at the best time for each individual contact
  • Focus on GDPR across features
  • Additional marketing channels: live chat, landing pages, more coming soon

Reasons to choose Sendinblue over Klaviyo

First and foremost, Sendiblue’s way more budget-friendly than Klaviyo, while providing comparable service and tools. It even offers a generous free plan! See a simple price comparison: 

Why switch from Klaviyo to Sendinblue?

Other reasons to switch from Klaviyo to Sendinblue are:

  • Sendinblue is better for reaching European customers. It has EU-based servers and all the consent tools to help you be GDPR-compliant.
  • Klaviyo is aimed at ecommerce stores. For service-based businesses, non-profits, consultants, SMBs, offline businesses, or businesses with a longer sales process, Sendinblue can better answer your needs.
  • If you run a small business, non-profit organization, or otherwise want to engage your audience rather than sell directly, Klaviyo won’t pay for itself. Sendinblue is more suitable for sending mass emails to unlimited contacts to engage them at a better price. 

Here’s a detailed comparison of Sendinblue vs. Klaviyo to help you decide.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers all core email features and is wildly popular. Its ease of use is great for beginners just starting out with email marketing. 

Some noteworthy features are:

  • Import of branding elements from your site for easy and quick customization of emails
  • Predicted demographics
  • Website builder, forms and landing pages
  • Send time optimization
  • Surveys for gathering feedback
  • Subject line helper
  • Benchmark to peers

A few cons of Mailchimp:

  • No SMS marketing offered
  • Ready-to-use email templates are available only on paid plans. (Check out those 9 sites for free email templates.)
  • Advanced features like dynamic content are only available on more expensive plans.

Mailchimp vs Klaviyo pricing

Like Klaviyo, Mailchimp’s pricing isn’t based on the number of emails you send as much as the number of contacts you store. For those just starting out, this isn’t much of a problem. But once your business grows, you’ll quickly have to upgrade your plan.

For ecommerce businesses, note that Mailchimp changes a transaction fees on all purchases it handles in addition to making its users foot the credit card processing fees. To avoid this, consider these Mailchimp alternatives

Other than that, Mailchimp is more affordable than Klaviyo (see table above), especially if you don’t sell online.

Constant Contact

If you have a small business, non-profit, or organize events, Constant Contact might be the Klaviyo alternative for you. 

In addition to essential features such as a drag-and-drop editor and subject line A/B testing, it lets you collect feedback, request donations, and ask for RSVPs in emails. You can also manage events and even collect email addresses on the spot through Constant Contact’s integration with Eventbrite. 

A landing page builder is available for both lead generation and shoppable product display. CC doubles as a social media scheduling tool, too. You can post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and monitor performance and engagement.

If you’re looking for a more affordable alternative to Klaviyo, though, be warned that if you sell anything online, Constant Contact charges you 1.5% of all your online sales on top of the subscription plan. That’s a lot for ecommerce businesses! The good thing is you can take up their 60-day trial to see if you like it enough.

Read more: Constant Contact alternatives

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is yet another Klaviyo alternative. It tries to position itself as a marketing automation platform for small businesses, non-profits, tech companies, bloggers, real estate, and more, but mostly highlights its ecommerce functionality.

Regardless of your industry, you can take advantage of ActiveCampaign’s advanced automation that lets you set up complex sales funnels with conversion goals such as webinar sign-ups. This can be a challenge for beginners as much as it’s useful. Luckily, AC’s big library of pre-built automations and email templates can help.

Additional features include live chat and sales tools like pipeline management for companies with complex sales processes. 

Two reasons to choose it instead of Klaviyo:

  • AC’s SMS marketing works outside of the USA.
  • They offer you a price lock for 2 years, which gives you some room to grow your email list before you have to move to a higher tier.

Omnisend

Omnisend also positions itself for online stores. It offers email, SMS, and automation just like Klaviyo. It’s also closest to it in terms of pricing.

Omnisend has most features an ecommerce marketer would need under one roof:

  • Pop-ups and forms
  • Segmentation
  • Push notifications
  • Reports

Its best feature is the ability to create multichannel automations, including email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, and Google retargeting. Omnisend also offers a wheel of fortune sign-up form.

One downside of it is that there’s a limit on the number of emails that can be sent despite the pricing being tied to email list size. For example, with 5,000 contacts you can only send up to 60,000 emails unless you upgrade.

Drip

Drip is another close Klaviyo competitor. It is also focused on SMS & email automations (as the name suggests) for ecommerce businesses. 

It offers ready “playbooks” or automation workflows for most common ecommerce scenarios such as abandoned carts and welcome series. Powerful segmentation and advanced split testing let you run as many different campaigns as you can think of. Drip’s point-and-click visual email editor might be an inconvenience if you’re used to the drag-and-drop editor offered by Klaviyo and most other email marketing tools.

However, overall, compared to Klaviyo, Drip possibly has a friendlier interface. The pricing of the two is comparable, especially for bigger contact list sizes.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a user-friendly Klaviyo alternative. Its main focus is a drag-and-drop design tool that lets you create beautiful emails and email automation for optimal customer journeys.

Campaign Monitor also connects with your website, apps, and other sources to pull customer data to be used in campaigns. It also provides detailed email analytics to help you improve campaign performance. A nifty little feature Campaign Monitor has is Link Review — it checks your emails for broken links so you can update them. 

It’s worth mentioning that Campaign Monitor offers delivering each email at one and the same local time across geographies. Last but not least, they do have transactional email capabilities.

The Best Klaviyo Alternatives

One of Klaviyo’s biggest downfalls is its price. It surely is a comprehensive tool, but you can find cheaper email marketing services that offer the same features. Even better, why not get started with a free Klaviyo alternative? 

Start with email marketing for free

Free Sendinblue plan includes access to all core email features, 300 emails/day, 70+ email templates, signup forms, chat and unlimited contacts!

Open my free Sendinblue account now >>

Ready to find your marketing zen?

Take the stress out of your work day with a solution that’s built for you!

Get started free