Acquiring new customers is expensive, and keeping them returning is the real measure of ecommerce growth. You’ll need a reliable platform to handle your marketing automations and customer communications. Choosing the right software can make all the difference, and you’re about to find out why.

Two of the biggest names you’ll hear are Omnisend and Klaviyo. Both platforms offer powerful tools for email and SMS marketing. However, they serve entirely different needs, budgets, and technical skill levels.

Before we break it down, here are the key insights you need to know:

• Omnisend focuses on speed, intuitiveness, and revenue generation
• Klaviyo provides deep data analytics suited for large teams with dedicated experts
• Automated emails drive 37% of all email-generated sales from just 2% of email volume
• Omnisend offers better pricing and full feature access, even on the free plan

We’ll compare these platforms to help you decide which one fits your business goals best.

Adding products

When building an email campaign, you want to be able to showcase your products without putting in hours to do that. Manually downloading images, copying descriptions, and pasting links takes far too much time. Your email builder should do the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on strategy.

Omnisend makes this as intuitive as it gets with the Product Picker block. Once you add it to your email in the campaign builder interface, you get access to the items from your store right on the sidebar. From there, you select the exact items you want to feature in your campaign, and everything from the product image to the price and link is pulled in automatically.

Klaviyo also offers a way to add products to your emails. They provide product blocks that connect to your store’s catalog. You can set up dynamic product feeds to show personalized recommendations based on browsing history, which is also available on Omnisend.

While Klaviyo’s feeds allow for more customization options, setting them up takes more time as opposed to Omnisend where you can set everything up in minutes.

Pricing comparison

Budget is always one of the primary concerns when evaluating new software for your store. You want a platform that grows with you without causing unexpected spikes in your bills.

Omnisend gives you a highly predictable pricing structure, and an incredible price-to-value ratio. They give you a free plan that you can stay on until you outgrow it. On top of that, you get all the features with no restrictions, so you can test them before you pay for them.

You get access to:

• Unlimited segments to divide your email list into smaller groups
• Access to pre-built automation workflows like cart abandonment
• Bonus SMS credits to try out text messaging campaigns
• 24/7 live chat and email support for all your questions

Klaviyo also offers a free tier, but it places significant limits on the features you can access. For example, their free tier restricts support options and limits access to most AI features. As your audience grows, the price difference between the two platforms also becomes much more noticeable.

Here’s how the pricing scales for both platforms:

And that’s just for the base features regarding Klaviyo. With Omnisend, you get nearly everything right off the bat, only global SMS comes with a Pro plan. Everything else is included in the Standard plan. Klaviyo locks some of their other features behind other monthly payments, so if you need all the functionality, you may be looking at thousands of dollars every month.

You shouldn’t have to overpay for capabilities you might never use. Omnisend delivers the tools you need to drive revenue without the heavy price tag, which allows you to scale your business confidently and efficiently.

AI features

Both platforms provide advanced AI tools, but their accessibility varies significantly. Omnisend provides access to all their AI tools right from the start, so you can use them even on the free plan with no restrictions. Klaviyo, on the other hand, only allows its AI subject line generator tool in the free plan.

If you want to test AI writing tools or segmentation tools, you’ll have to become a paying customer, whereas with Omnisend, you don’t need to do that.

However, Klaviyo does provide better functionality in terms of data analytics. They offer an AI-driven predictive analytics tool that estimates exactly when a customer might buy again. You can also forecast customer lifetime value using their predictive models to plan long-term strategies. But it does, however, come at a heavier price tag and learning curve.

If you have a team of data scientists, Klaviyo’s predictive tools offer incredible depth and flexibility. However, you will need a massive amount of historical data for it to work correctly.

We believe AI should remove friction from your daily tasks, so we focus more on automating most time-consuming parts of email creation, which, for us, are segmentation and copywriting. For these purposes, you don’t need to look beyond Omnisend.

Migration support

When looking at email marketing platforms, we also like to check out how they handle the backend stuff like migration. It usually shows the true nature of the brand. Everyone says they value their customers, but not everyone actually shows it.

If you’re an existing Klaviyo’s, Brevo’s, Mailchimp’s, or any other email marketing platform’s customer, and you’re looking to switch, Omnisend makes it a breeze. They offer a migration service, called Kickstarter, to handle the entire move for you. They dedicate an in-house person to transfer your contacts, automations, segments, templates, signup forms, and more.

The entire process takes just three to five business days, you don’t need to figure out any complex technical steps yourself, and it’s completely free, if upon switching you sign up for a  $250 monthly plan or more.

Klaviyo handles migrations very differently for new customers joining their platform. They typically provide extensive documentation for you to read through, and you’re expected to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Alternatively, you can use their agency partners to help you migrate, but they charge their own fees.

Conclusion

While both platforms are great tools for email marketing, they’re not exactly the same. Klaviyo is great if you’re going to use niche automations, build complex segments, and use a data science team to utilize super advanced data analytics. Otherwise, you’ll be spending way too much money for features you don’t use.

Omnisend is generally the best choice for businesses of any size that require standard ecommerce workflows and capabilities. You can build whatever you need for a successful ecommerce store to run: automations, segments, campaigns, and you can even send SMS globally, whereas Klaviyo only supports 18 countries.

In short, if you’re an enterprise and require niche capabilities that not many other providers can match, choose Klaviyo, but for ecommerce-focused flows and functionalities, Omnisend is your best choice.