Making the right choice of an email marketing automation platform is vital for ecommerce brands. However, the abundance of competing tools can make the decision challenging. Two notable options in this field are ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo.
Klaviyo primarily targets ecommerce businesses, while ActiveCampaign is a versatile automation platform suitable for various industries.
In this ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo review, we’ll compare their features and pricing to help you make an informed decision.
ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo: Quick overview
Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign are both popular email marketing platforms that offer a range of features, such as automation, segmentation, personalization, and analytics.
However, Klaviyo stands out for its robust integrations with ecommerce platforms. On the other hand, ActiveCampaign’s integrated CRM functionality enables businesses to handle their customer interactions and marketing campaigns from a unified platform.
When it comes to ratings, Klaviyo receives a rating of 3.9 out of 5, whereas ActiveCampaign has an impressive 4.4-star rating on the Shopify App Store.
Here is a brief summary of the features offered by ActiveCampaign compared to Klaviyo:
In the next section, we’ll explore the key features offered by ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo, including segmentation, user-friendliness, personalization, customer support, and more.
ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo comparison: Feature by feature
To assist you in making the appropriate choice for your business, we’ve done a detailed ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo feature comparison.
Here we go.
Ease of getting started
ActiveCampaign’s signup process is pretty straightforward. When signing up via their homepage, you only have to answer some questions about your business and add credit card information.
Signing up on Klaviyo is just as easy and it doesn’t require credit card information.
When it comes to navigation, both offer a simple interface designed to be user-friendly, even for beginners. If you have doubts about using ActiveCampaign, you can always rely on its ‘getting started’ wizard.
ActiveCampaign is a bit easier to set up than Klaviyo. Although getting used to the advanced features requires technical expertise on both platforms, ActiveCampaign fares marginally better.
Building an email campaign
Both Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign offer user-friendly drag-and-drop email campaign editors. You can design emails effortlessly by simply moving content blocks.
Here’s a comparison of the email campaign builders offered by ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo.
Although they may appear quite similar, both tools offer distinct features. If you are on a high-tier ActiveCampaign plan, you have the option to request customized email designs that align with your brand’s aesthetics. Message Variables, which enable you to retrieve a single consistent value from a centralized location (such as a signature), also serve as a convenient time-saving feature.
On the other hand, Klaviyo allows you to integrate your email campaigns with mobile push notifications. The recommendation content block is particularly noteworthy, as it enables the addition of products based on recently browsed or liked items, resulting in a powerful marketing impact.
Klaviyo takes the lead in this comparison. From our perspective, Klaviyo’s templates look more up-to-date, also the product recommendation element is significant.
Marketing automation
ActiveCampaign is known to be one of the most powerful marketing automation platforms. It provides a wide array of customizable workflows, trigger options, and actions that enable the creation of highly targeted campaigns.
How does Klaviyo compare with ActiveCampaign in terms of automation capabilities?
Here’s a quick head-to-head comparison:
ActiveCampaign provides users with comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, allowing them to manage and track their customer interactions, deals, and sales pipelines.
In contrast, Klaviyo places a significant focus on ecommerce and delivers specialized automation features specifically designed for online stores.
Whether you use Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign, advanced skills will be required to make the most of the automation features.
Luckily, both platforms offer lots of resources that provide guidance along the way.
ActiveCampaign wins, hands down. There are very few marketing automation tools in the market that offer the flexibility and variety that ActiveCampaign does.
Signup forms and landing pages
The effectiveness of your marketing and lead generation endeavors greatly relies on the presence of signup forms and landing pages.
In this section, we’ll take a look at the list-building features offered by ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo.
There are some overlaps in the features offered by both tools, but there are also significant differences. Let’s find out what those are in this side-by-side comparison.
One thing we noticed is that ActiveCampaign’s layouts and forms are pretty basic.
That said, we really like that list management is closely related to CRM, data collection, and sales management. It’s very convenient to have all the information about your customers in one place.
Coming to Klaviyo, one of its unique features is the ability to A/B test signup forms.
And it really helps that Klaviyo’s signup forms are categorized based on purpose. These include collecting emails, collecting phone numbers, collecting emails and phone numbers, coupons and offers, and announcements.
Klaviyo wins. This platform provides more beautiful and more functional signup forms.
Segmentation
Next, let’s compare ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo on their segmentation capabilities.
ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer any pre-built segments.
You can create your own segments using contact details, customer email actions, geography, attribution, shopping behavior, and more.
However, there are certain limitations on the number of conditions you can use to create segments. For instance, a maximum of 20 conditions can be used in a single segment.
Conversely, Klaviyo provides seven pre-built segments. You have the flexibility to add as many rules as you need to make your segments highly specific.
These rules can be based on various factors, such as:
- Contact activity or inactivity
- User attributes
- Purchase history
- Location (e.g., EU or non-EU)
- Predictive analysis
Klaviyo ensures that your segments are continuously updated with real-time data. Additionally, you can synchronize your list with Facebook or Instagram for targeted social ad campaigns.
However, note that utilizing Klaviyo’s segmentation feature and effectively managing the segments requires a certain level of expertise.
Klaviyo wins this round as its segmentation capabilities are unmatched. Although its segmentation tools are a bit complex, they are a lot more flexible and robust.
Analytics
For businesses prioritizing ecommerce tracking and in-depth customer insights, Klaviyo is a more suitable option. But, if sales pipelines are essential to you, ActiveCampaign is a better match.
That being said, let’s compare the features side-by-side.
One drawback of ActiveCampaign is that advanced reports, such as attribution and customer reports, are only available on the Professional and Enterprise plans.
For businesses prioritizing ecommerce tracking and in-depth customer insights, Klaviyo may present a more suitable option.
Klaviyo wins this round. This is simply because it offers more advanced business insights, such as peer benchmarks and predictive analytics.
Customer support
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced marketer, having access to a strong customer support team is always great. That’s why it’s crucial to assess and compare the support services provided by each of these tools.
Here’s a quick look.
It’s a tie. There are limitations on availability and accessibility with both platforms. Fortunately, both offer lots of other resources for assistance.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo boast an extensive list of integrations, including the most popular ecommerce platforms and additional integration services like Zapier.
ActiveCampaign offers 920+ integrations with all sorts of tools and software.
And if you can’t find what you need, you’d be happy to know that the vendor is always taking app requests from its customers.
As for Klaviyo, it provides a selection of more than 300 integrations. They are categorized by their specific purposes and include advertising, CRMs, helpdesk, payments, and more.
Moreover, Klaviyo offers curated collections tailored to various industries, such as enterprises, restaurants, and wellness.
Clearly, ActiveCampaign offers more integrations. That being said, unless your needs are very specific, Klaviyo is just as good.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
Compatibility with multiple marketing channels is important because it enables omnichannel marketing, expands reach, and delivers an integrated customer experience.
So, Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign, which one fares better in this regard?
With ActiveCampaign, you can access SMS marketing with add-ons and extra payments.
It is also compatible with Facebook Custom Audiences, Facebook lead ads, mobile applications, and site messages.
Similarly, Klaviyo facilitates retargeting on popular platforms like Facebook and Google through integrations. This allows businesses to maximize their reach and engagement with customers.
It also supports SMS and app push notifications.
However, the SMS feature is currently limited to customers in the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
It’s a tie between ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo.
While ActiveCampaign provides more marketing channels, the popular SMS channel doesn’t work seamlessly without additional setup and extra cost.
On the other hand, Klaviyo offers a more streamlined process for sending text messages, despite having a shorter list of available channels. Ultimately, the winner depends on your business needs and priorities, specifically which channels are more crucial for you to utilize.
Price Comparison
Pricing is often the deciding factor when it comes to choosing an email marketing platform. After all, it is important to ensure that the price you’re paying aligns with the value you’re getting.
Let’s find out which tool is more economical for your business.
ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan. The maximum option available is a 14-day free trial that allows you to test some of its features. It is important to note that not all features are accessible during the free trial.
On the other hand, Klaviyo does offer a free plan. Although it has a limit of 250 contacts and 500 monthly emails, you pretty much get access to all features. As a result, you can better test the platform and feel its benefits. Here are some of functionality to try:
Free plan comparison
- No free plan. Paid plans only.
- Drag-and-drop automation builder
- 300+ pre-built integrations
- Email A/B split testing
- Email templates
- Analytics and reporting
- Personalized product recommendations
- Built-in forms and pop-ups
- Email support for the first 60 days
Once you cross 500 contacts, you can choose one of its two paid plans:
- Email plan: Starts at $20 per month
- Email and SMS plan: Starts at $35 per month
Here’s how much ActiveCampaign’s paid plans will cost you:
- Lite: Starts at $39 per month (no ecommerce features included)
- Plus: Starts at $70 per month (some of the ecommerce features, like ecommerce platform automation, segmentation, reporting)
- Professional: Starts at $187 per month (most of the features unlocked)
- Enterprise: Customized plan for bigger businesses
Are the plans truly worth the investment? We’ll explore this further in a concise overview.
SMS marketing is available as an add-on with ActiveCampaign.
Whether you choose Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign, the size of your subscriber list will decide how much you pay monthly.
The key difference between the tools is that with Klaviyo, no matter what plan you choose, you’ll be getting access to all features. This isn’t true for ActiveCampaign.
And while Klaviyo has limits on monthly email sends, ActiveCampaign lets users send unlimited emails across all plans with up to 250,000 contacts.
But compared to many other email marketing tools, ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo get pretty expensive as your subscriber count grows.
Summary: Which one wins?
4.5
4.6
1,000 subscribers – $39
5,000 subscribers – $99
10,000 subscribers – $174
50,000 subscribers – $486
100,000 subscribers – custom pricing
1,000 subscribers – $30
5,000 subscribers – $100
10,000 subscribers – $150
50,000 subscribers – $720
100,000 subscribers – $1,380
– Paid plans only
– 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month
– Mobile push notifications (beta)
– Built-in compliance and deliverability
– 150 free SMS/MMS credits per month
– Email support for the first 60 days
– Strong marketing automation
– Beautiful email templates
– Extended tracking and reporting capabilities
– Broad functionality including CRM
– Transactional emails
– Pre-built signup forms
– Powerful automation workflows
– Modern email templates
– In-depth analytics and reports
– Out-of-the-box segmentation
– More expensive than other tools
– Overwhelming for beginners
– Ecommerce reports only on higher-tier plans
– No templates for signup forms
– Limited customer support
– Price is on the higher side
– Steep learning curve
– Lacks a regular landing page builder
– Experienced ecommerce users
– Well-established ecommerce businesses, B2B companies
– Experienced ecommerce users
– Well-established ecommerce businesses
– Email marketing beginners, marketers with a tight budget, non-profit organizations
– Email marketing beginners, marketers with a tight budget, non-profit organizations
Klaviyo has advanced features for ecommerce stores, but they come at a higher cost and require expertise. In contrast, ActiveCampaign offers the advantage of managing both wholesale and retail customers within a single platform.
This means you can rely on ActiveCampaign to handle both customer types while benefiting from a highly flexible marketing automation platform that can grow with your business.
Also, if you anticipate sending a high volume of emails, ActiveCampaign may be a better choice as its plans allow unlimited monthly emails.
Read full reviews
Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.
