Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo — Which Email Platform Is the Best for Business?

If you’re looking for an email marketing software that’ll take your marketing game to the next level, then you’ve probably come across Mailchimp and Klaviyo.

Both platforms are great for any ecommerce business that wants an advanced tool that offers great features without breaking the bank.

To help you choose, we created this Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo face-off, where we’ll compare their features and pricing, and ultimately help you decide which one is best for your business.

Let’s get started!

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform thanks to its easy-to-use tools and beginner-friendly interface.

Chestnut and Dan Kurzius launched the platform in 2001 and the brand has since captured the attention of over 13 million users with its quirky imagery, easy-to-use interface, and often humorous content.

While Mailchimp was initially created as an email marketing platform, nowadays it’s become more of an all-in-one solution.

Can Klaviyo contend with this fan favorite?

What is Klaviyo?

Klaviyo was founded by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen in 2012 as an ecommerce platform with data management in mind and has worked hard to give business owners control of their marketing.

Although they’re much younger than their opponent, Klaviyo has seen a recent surge in customers — doubling their user base to 70,000 in just 12 months and raising $675 million from investors so far.

Intrigued? Keep reading to find out how these platforms measure up based on real user feedback.

Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo — pros and cons

We know every moment is precious, so we’ve saved you the effort and scoured hundreds of reviews about these 2 platforms.

Here are some Mailchimp pros and cons, according to real users:

Pros

• The Free plan comes with generous access to most of their features

• Has an integrated CRM that collects a lot of data for ecommerce businesses

• Constantly updated and integrates with 250+ other online tools

• Accepts payments through all major credit cards, PayPal, and direct debit

• Has a Pay As You Go plan for buying credits that you spend when sending emails instead of paying a monthly fee

Cons

• The pricing plans get expensive fast and aren’t great if you plan to grow

• The template editor can feel over-simplified for experienced marketers and doesn’t allow for more complex designs

• Email support on the Free plan stops after 30 days and is notoriously poor

• They strictly forbid affiliate marketing

• If you for some reason violate their Terms of Use, even by accident, they can shut down your account without prior notice

Now, let’s compare those to the best (and worst) that Klaviyo has to offer, according to their customers:

Pros

• Offers advanced reporting and analytics

• Has a Free plan

• Gives you access to all features from the start

• Presents data in a way that’s easy to understand and take action

• Offers SMS marketing features

Cons

• Has a slight learning curve

• It’s more expensive than its competitors

• The pricing method is based on your total number of email contacts

• The Free plan has a limit of 250 contacts and 500 monthly emails sent

• Only paid users get customer support and chat support

If none of the cons is a dealbreaker for you, we can move forward to the main topic of this post — comparing their features.

Comparing the main features

Now, let’s take a deep dive into Mailchimp's and Klaviyo’s main features to see if they have what you’re looking for in your future email marketing software.

Below, we’ll cover:

• Email marketing
• Audience management
• Ecommerce and marketing automation
• Insights and analytics

Email marketing

Independently of what email marketing platform you choose, it must (at minimum) allow you to build, design, and launch fully-functional email marketing campaigns for your contact list.

Klaviyo and Mailchimp can do all of this and more for you, with a few differences.

Mailchimp’s email marketing

Mailchimp’s email marketing page

Mailchimp’s email marketing tools let you easily create professional-looking emails by choosing one of the 100+ free responsive email templates available and customizing it with their drag and drop email editor.

However, to erase Mailchimp’s branding from your emails you’ll have to be on a paid plan.

With Mailchimp, you also can:

• Build landing pages — Design a whole page dedicated to converting your contacts into customers
• Create signup forms — Integrate a form in your website to collect more emails
• Do A/B testing — Test your emails to see which perform better to improve future campaigns
• Optimize your subject line — Get real‑time feedback on how to refine subject lines as you're writing them
• Run design tests — Make sure that your emails will look great on all devices
• Send surveys and polls — Get direct feedback from your contacts about their interests and needs

Also, Mailchimp recently launched 2 new tools to help their users create better content for their emails:

1. Content Optimizer — Compare your copy to email best practices and get suggestions to improve your writing, imagery, and layout

2. Creative Assistant — Instantly create good-looking multichannel email designs with the power of A.I.

If email design is your top priority, you might want to check out those tools.

Now, let’s see what features Klaviyo has for you.

Klaviyo’s email marketing

Klaviyo’s send time scheduling

Klaviyo has a slight learning curve, but after you get the hang of it you’ll find it easy to create your emails and set up email marketing campaigns.

Klaviyo gives you:

• A drag-and-drop editor — Create an eye-catching email without coding
• Numerous pre-made templates — Customize hundreds of templates according to your marketing needs
• Sign up forms — Build forms that’ll collect emails to grow your list
• A/B testing — See what emails are performing better and use them to optimize your future email campaigns
• Consent management — Send compliant emails that’ll stay away from the spam folder
• Send time scheduling — Decide a specific time to send an email based on your contacts’ time zone

As an email marketing solution, Klaviyo gives you all the necessary tools to craft effective email campaigns that’ll reach and convert your contacts, but it lacks some of the advanced features Mailchimp offers.

Winner: Mailchimp — for offering more advanced design tools and for being simpler to use

Mailchimp: 1 - Klaviyo: 0

Audience management

To launch a successful email marketing campaign, you’ll need a platform that offers advanced segmentation tools — that way you can ensure that you’ll always send content your contacts want to click on.

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer good segmentation tools to divide your contacts based on their unique attributes.

Mailchimp’s audience management

Source: Mailchimp.com

Mailchimp has 3 main segmentation tools:

1. Tags — Label your contacts based on their interaction with your website

2. Groups — Let your contacts self-categorize themselves

3. Segments — Divide your audience based on the data you’ve collected from them

Many users don’t know how to use these features, so we’ll give you an example:

Let’s say that you’re offering a coaching service.

1. Every time someone signs up to get your service they get tagged as a coaching client

2. Then during the sign-up process, you display three groups for them to label themselves based on their experience level (Newbie, Pro, or Expert)

3. Lastly, you segment them based on the data you collected during the sign-up process (location, tags, clicked elements, selected group, etc.)

With these tools, you can carefully organize your audience according to what they want from you.

Mailchimp also offers:

• Behavioral targeting — Build and send emails according to how your contacts engage with your content
• Customization fields — Allow your contacts to tell you exactly what their preferences are
• Integrated CRM — Collect customer data to analyze and improve future interactions

However, Mailchimp has 3 crucial limitations:

1. You can only export an email list to Mailchimp using Comma Separated Value (CSV) files and copy-pasting

2. You can’t include contacts from different lists in the same email marketing campaign on their free plan

3. The advanced segmentation features are only available in the most expensive plan

Now, let’s see how Klaviyo stands against Mailchimp.

Klaviyo’s audience management

Source: Klaviyo.com

To manage your contacts, Klaviyo gives you some of the same tools that you get with Mailchimp, like tags, segments, and behavioral targeting, but you also get some additional features:

• Personalization — Make your content more personal and attractive for your contacts
• Customer profiles — Create and maintain a complete record of each contact you keep in your account

Klaviyo’s customer profiles feature allows you to see all the past interactions your customers had with your store — which helps you make possible predictions of future engagement.

Also, Klaviyo’s segmentation tools are far more advanced than Mailchimp’s, as they let you create 7 different types of segments to optimize your email marketing campaigns:

1. Cross-sell segment — Offer clients products that might complement their previous purchases

2. Location-based segment — Launch targeted promotions to contacts from specific regions

3. Item and brand-specific segment — Present your contacts with only the brands they’re interested in

4. Engagement tier segment — Divide your audience based on the level of engagement with your emails and ecommerce business

5. Churn risk segment — See the likelihood of customers stopping purchasing your products

6. Average order value (AOV) segment — Group your customers based on how much they spend on average

7. Holiday Shoppers Segment — Get a glance at what customers are more likely to make a purchase during special Holiday offers

When importing contacts, just like Mailchimp, you only have the option to do it through CSV files.

Winner: Klaviyo — for offering more segmentation opportunities to personalize your content and give value to your leads

Mailchimp: 1 - Klaviyo: 1

Ecommerce and marketing automation

To level up your ecommerce store, you’ll need your future email marketing platform to have advanced email automation capabilities to create automated workflows that will run parts of your business for you.

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo have great email marketing automation tools, but the former is far more limited.

Mailchimp’s ecommerce and automation tools

Mailchimp’s automation workflow

Mailchimp's automation features are very simple in comparison to its competitor, but they’re still good for creating automated triggers based on your marketing needs.

With Mailchimp, you’ll get:

• Customer journey builder — Visualize your customer’s experience and craft a path that’ll motivate your clients to make a purchase
• Behavior-based triggers — Build a deeper relationship with your contacts by crafting a personalized experience with them
• Date-based triggers — Reach out to your contacts on days that matter to them
• Scheduling — Set a specific time to launch a marketing campaign based on when your emails are more likely to be opened

You’ll also get a series of premade workflows that you can choose based on your marketing goals:

• Engaging with your contacts
• Welcoming new subscribers
• Offering birthday wishes
• Sharing blog updates
• Recovering abandoned carts
• Enabling order notifications

However, your automated workflow is limited to “and” conditions — which only allows you to set up a single path for your customer journey and forces buyers to meet all requirements to move to the next stage.

You’ll also need to be on a paid plan to get most of these features or you’ll be stuck with single-trigger welcome emails and order notifications.

Let’s see how Klaviyo does against Mailchimp.