Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: The Full Comparison
Getting the most out of your email marketing means you need to find the best email marketing tool for your eCommerce store. By now, you’ve probably realized that two of the top eCommerce-specific email marketing platforms are Omnisend and Klaviyo.
But of these two options, which has the better features, pricing, and support?
Today, we’ll go over the in-depth Omnisend vs Klaviyo comparison so you can find out which email marketing tool is best for you.
No fear: there’s no “it depends” clause in this article, which tends to leave everything up to you. There’s a clear winner for each section, and we provide the overall winner at the end. Not only will you understand which email provider is the best, but we’ll give you in-depth reasons why it’s so.
Omnisend & Klaviyo’s Email Builders
At the heart of every email marketing platform is emails, and the way to create and customize emails is with the tool’s email builder. If it’s easy to use and customize, has loads of eCommerce-specific features, and provides hints and templates to help you create high-converting emails.
But if your email marketing platform fails in this basic feature, then you’re not going to have an easy time with the other features. Luckily, both Ominsend and Klaviyo have the by-now standard drag-and-drop email builders that make it pretty easy and straightforward to create emails.
Klaviyo’s email builder allows you to add basic customizable text, columns, buttons, images, and tables. It also allows you to add products directly from your store into the email builder.
However, there are some eCommerce-specific things that Klaviyo misses, and you’ll need to do those manually. This includes creating unique discount codes that are different for each recipient (so that the codes aren’t shareable).
On the other hand, Omnisend’s builder has a lot more customization options. Besides offering the same basic functions that we listed above, you can also use the Product Listing tool to add products directly into your email.
However, here’s where Omnisend’s email builder really separates itself from Klaviyo’s builder, showcasing more goodies like unique discount codes, gift boxes and scratch cards to better engage and activate customers.
Winner: Omnisend
Here’s a quick summary of both platforms’ email builder features:
| Email Builder Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
| Drag and Drop Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Email templates | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile responsive | Yes | Yes |
| A/B Testing | Yes | Yes |
| Saveable content blocks | Yes | Yes |
| Product recommendations | For certain categories | Yes |
| Discount codes | Yes | Yes |
| Gamification | No | Yes |
List-building
If you build your email list, you’ll own it for as long as those people will want to hear from you. Having your own email list offers one of the best ROIs, especially at a time when digital ad acquisition costs are skyrocketing.
Which email marketing platform, Omnisend or Klaviyo, has the better email list-building features?
Again, both platforms cover the basics, but one takes it much further. Both Omnisend and Klaviyo allow you to create highly-targeted popups that can appear when and on which pages (or for which audiences) you want them to.
However, that’s more or less where Klaviyo stops. With Omnisend, you get much more, including landing pages that have been shown to convert better than popups. There’s also the gamified Wheel of Fortune signup form that makes it fun for visitors to sign up and spin to win a discount, free shipping, or other special offers you choose.
When compared to these features, Klaviyo doesn’t come close.
Winner: Omnisend
Summary of both platforms’ list-building features:
| Email list-building Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
| Popups (immediate, exit-intent, on specific URL, announcements) | Yes | Yes |
| Landing Pages | No | Yes |
| Gamified Popups | No | Yes |
| Signup Bars | Yes | Yes |
| Embedded Forms | Yes | Yes |
Targeting and segmentation
Segmentation is important since it’s a pretty bad practice to send exactly the same message to your entire list. People who bought different products, signed up from different forms, or became costumes during different promotions might want different things.
And that’s where segmentation comes into play. How do Klaviyo and Omnisend fare here?
Good thing: they both offer some pretty robust segmentation capabilities. Each platform lets you slice and dice, and later target, your email and SMS list using shopper behavior, demographic data, or campaign activity.
Each platform also allows you to sync up a segmented list (or your entire list if you want) with Facebook to create lookalike audiences for your Facebook ads. So, if you wanted Facebook to find the best audiences for your new fall shoe line, you can create a segment of customers that love your shoes and ask Facebook to create a lookalike audience using that segment.
Even though Klaviyo only has Facebook Custom Audiences sync, while Omnisend also offers Google Ads sync, we think this is pretty much a tie.
Winner: it’s a tie
| Segmentation Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
| Profile data | Yes | Yes |
| Campaign activity | Yes | Yes |
| Shopping behavior | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Properties (Tags) | Yes | Yes |
| Facebook Audiences | Yes | Yes |
| Google Retargeting Ads | Yes (but with third-party tools) | Yes |
Automation
This is where it’s all been heading. If you have a strong email marketing program, then its bread and butter most likely is automation. Omnisend statistics showed that while automated emails only make up about 2% of emails sent, they bring in nearly 30% of all revenue.
Automation workflows literally allow you to put your emails on autopilot, letting you make sales while you sleep. And that’s why it’s so crucial to any email marketing platform. How do Omnisend and Klaviyo compare?
Both platforms have feature parity when it comes to automation workflow capabilities. However, the most obvious difference is how they let you build those workflows.
Klaviyo has a powerful but easy-to-use automation flow builder, and you can easily use various triggers and splits to make simple or complex automation workflows.
With Omnisend, you can do equally powerful things, but this is where Omnisend pulls away from Klaviyo. They allow you to add multiple channels to their automation workflows, like SMS and even push notifications. With these channels, you have greater freedom and flexibility to reach your customers wherever they are.
Another huge difference is in the way that Omnisend and Klaviyo track abandoned carts. For Shopify stores, Omnisend uses cookie-based tracking, which allows you to identify shoppers earlier on in their abandonment when they add products to cart.
Klaviyo is only able to catch them later on, at checkout. Because of this delay, you’ll catch fewer cart abandons since fewer people get to checkout compared to those that add products to their carts.
For those two reasons, Omnisend bests Klaviyo again.
Winner: Omnisend
Customer support
There’s no need to beat around the bush here: Omnisend beats Klaviyo in terms of customer support. Klaviyo is well-known to be lacking in its support capabilities.
Firstly, Klaviyo offers very limited support to free users. All Klaviyo customers have limited access to support during weekends and big sales holidays (like Black Friday), since they work 6am-10pm on weekdays, and only 10am-4pm EST on weekends. Second, they’ve had entire weeks where they shut down their live chat due to various upgrades.
On the other hand, Omnisend’s customer support is 24/7, regardless of the day or season, with nearly 4,000 5-star reviews on Shopify. Omnisend offers dedicated Customer Success Managers (CSMs) for customers paying at least $400/month, while Klaviyo’s threshold is much higher at $2,000/month.
Winner: Omnisend
Pricing
This is probably the most important aspect of any email marketing tool, after you’ve confirmed that it has all the features you need.
So we won’t tease you: Omnisend beats Klaviyo here on pricing.
Both have three tiers for their plans: free, a standard (called “Email” on Klaviyo) and a premium (“Pro” on Omnisend and “Email and SMS” on Klaviyo). For both platforms, the standard plan is for customers that want to focus on email, while the premium is for customers who want to use both email and SMS.
While both Omnisend and Klaviyo have similar price offerings, it’s important to note that Omnisend offers global SMS, so you can text customers in any country. Klaviyo limits its SMS to the US, UK, Canada and Australia
To see why Omnisend bests Klaviyo on pricing, let’s look at the prices for each platform based on different list contact sizes:
(In order to keep things consistent, we kept both the email contacts and monthly SMS the same for both platforms’ premium plans)
| Contact size | Klaviyo Email | Omnisend Standard | Klaviyo Email and SMS | Omnisend Pro |
| 1,000 | $45 15,000 emails 150 free SMS | $20 12,000 emails 60 free SMS | $60 15,000 emails 1,250 SMS | $59 Unlimited email 3,900 SMS |
| 10,000 | $175 105,000 emails 150 free SMS | $115 120,000 emails 60 free SMS | $265 105,000 emails 10,000 SMS | $150 Unlimited email 10,000 SMS |
| 50,000 | $790 550,000 emails 150 free SMS | $330 600,000 emails 60 free SMS | $1,150 550,000 emails 40,000 SMS | $650 Unlimited email 43,000 SMS |
| 100,000 | $1,440 1,050,000 emails 150 free SMS | $720 1,200,000 emails 60 free SMS | $2,115 1,050,000 emails 75,000 SMS | $1,150 Unlimited email 76,000 SMS |
Overall, Omnisend is consistently cheaper than Klaviyo. Because Omnisend’s Pro plan has unlimited email, it will always be cheaper than Klaviyo. Also, the more contacts you have, the bigger the difference is – with 100,000 contacts, for example, you’re paying nearly double for Klaviyo.
It’s also important to note that Klaviyo announced that it would be increasing prices in later 2022. This table reflects pricing before Klaviyo’s price hike, which can see some plans going up by 15-50%.
Final thoughts
By now, the Omnisend vs Klaviyo has a pretty clear winner: Omnisend.
Feature-for-feature, they’re pretty much on equal standing, with Omnisend beating Klaviyo in the number of extra features it has in each category. With support (which is crucial for getting started or overcoming some challenge), Klaviyo has a less-than-stellar reputation, while Omnisend’s is award-winning.
And, finally, on pricing, Omnisend is consistently cheaper than Klaviyo, even when considering that you’re actually getting more.
The choice seems pretty clear. But if you’re still uncertain, remember that both of these platforms offer free plans (and Omnisend gives you full feature access, even on free), so you can try them out before you decide on one.