Klaviyo vs MailChimp: Pricing, Email Features, & Automations

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Two of today’s most popular email marketing tools started out focused on entirely different businesses.

For MailChimp, it started with website design. While designing sites for clients, co-founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius realized the real goal was helping businesses grow—and that easily sending email was perhaps a harder part of that equation than web design. Thus was born MailChimp in 2001, as a web agency’s pivot into email.

For Klaviyo, founded just over a decade later, it started with customer data. Small businesses had customer info, had prospects looking around their website, but no easy way to do anything with that data. After first building a data segmenting tool, they focused on the eCommerce market by pulling in data from Shopify and other sales platforms. Thus was born Klaviyo, as a tool to send data-driven emails.

How are you going to reach your first customers and build an audience? That’s what MailChimp is built to solve.

How are you going to target a prospect with the info they’re most likely to be interested in? That’s what Klaviyo is built to solve.

Yet despite their different paths and endgames, both products are remarkably similar. Both are great for building an audience, emailing them targeted, well-designed emails, and turning leads into customers. Here’s how MailChimp and Klaviyo stack up—and which you should choose for your businesses’ email marketing.

A brief MailChimp overview

MailChimp is best for bringing in new contacts and keeping them engaged with email newsletters.

“Create something that gets noticed,” MailChimp suggests when you click its prominent Create button, where it offers tools to build landing pages to grab people’s interest, and emails to keep it.

MailChimp is organized around Audiences and Segments. Audiences are people who signed up from the same place—a MailChimp landing page, Fillout form, or perhaps an eCommerce store with data synced with a MailChimp integration. You’ll then email that whole audience together, or contact a portion of your audience with a Segment based on filters such as if their email includes a specific domain, if they opened a recent campaign, and more customized tags based on fields from a signup form.

So if you need an audience, start with a landing page to get people excited about something new. An upcoming product launch, say, or a promotion in your store. Or, just a new newsletter. Start with a template, drag-and-drop elements, add details about what you’re offering, and MailChimp will include a basic email signup form by default.

Then, time to email folks and keep their interest. Most of the time, you’ll click Create, choose Email, select your audience, then build a new email newsletter. You can start with a template, use MailChimp’s new Creative Assistant tool to imagine a new one based on your criteria (Minimal email for Sales, say), or drag-and-drop widgets in to build an email. Then send it right away, schedule it for later, or let MailChimp send each email at an optimized time depending on subscribers’ time zone and previous open times.

MailChimp can also onboard new subscribers with automated journeys to, say, send a welcome email an hour after they sign up or sort them into a segment if they open an email. You can also start out with pre-built journeys using MailChimp features and automations to pull in new emails from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram lead ads, notify your team in Slack about new subscribers, and more. And, with a paid add-on, you can add SMS marketing to market in shorter messages, or turn landing pages into basic eCommerce stores or appointment schedulers.

It’s all in service of staying in touch with your audience and keeping their interest, one email at a time.

A brief Klaviyo overview

Klaviyo is best for staying in touch with customers, with messages they’re most likely to notice.

It’s not just email: Klaviyo is built around email and SMS along with iOS and Android push notifications. And it’s not just about people interested in a new, upcoming thing, or a long-running email newsletter. It’s built around customers, with deep integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Square, and more.

Start by connecting Klaviyo to your store, and it’ll sync everything. If you’ve imported subscribers into Klaviyo or built a landing page to bring in new ones, Klaviyo will add them to Shopify. And it’ll copy over everything from Shopify or your other eCommerce platform: Contact info, order details, tags, and more. It can also sync data with native integrations for CRMs like Salesforce, ad platforms like Facebook Lead Ads, and even data warehouses like Snowflake, Amazon RedShift, and Google BigQuery. That way, if someone first clicks an ad, then signs up on your Klaviyo form, before finally buying something from your store, you’ll have visibility into the entire customer journey in Klaviyo.

That data powers automations, or Flows, in Klaviyo. Start with a pre-built workflow to ask customers to review a product or remind them about items in their cart or that they recently viewed—something you couldn’t do with simple email profiles. Add details—perhaps have Klaviyo only email people who didn’t return a product or unsubscribe from your emails. Then add additional steps to build out your automation to send email, SMS, or push notifications to your mobile app. You can even use Klaviyo to power your product reviews, with a Klaviyo form where customers can rate your products and share feedback that you can then showcase on your store and use to power Klaviyo emails for more targeted follow-ups.

It’s not just customer data that gets synced. Klaviyo can also sync product details to help build emails faster. So when building an email campaign, you can start with a template, then drag-and-drop widgets to build out your email—including product widgets that feature items from your store (MailChimp, on the other hand, shows only products from a MailChimp store), and coupon codes that are synced with Shopify. No more copying and pasting images, pricing, and links from your store to your promotion emails.

There’s also a core emphasis around messaging people who want to hear from you, without bugging them. When you set up a new email campaign, you choose both segments to send to and those to skip. Klaviyo will also by default not email people who’ve already received a message from you in the past 16 hours, a limit you can tweak in your settings. That will help reduce churn and unsubscribes, with targeted email, SMS, and mobile notifications sent to people most likely to want to receive them.

MailChimp vs Klaviyo pricing

Emailing your first contacts and customers is free in both MailChimp and Klaviyo—as is sending them SMS messages, in Klaviyo.

If you have 10,000 contacts to email, you’ll spend $150/month in Klaviyo, and either $100, $135, or $350/month in MailChimp, depending on your plan.

Klaviyo’s pricing is more straightforward, with only three plans. The free plan lets you store 250 contacts and send up to 500 emails and 150 SMS messages in total each month, with support for your first two months. Beyond that, the only thing you need to choose if you want email marketing only—or both email and SMS—as all paid plans include all of Klaviyo’s features.

Klaviyo’s core Email plan includes every email and mobile push notification feature—along with 150 complimentary SMS credits per month. The only difference is how many contacts you have. $20 for up to 500 contacts and 5,000 email sends per month, and goes up $10-$15 for each tier—$30 for 1,000 contacts and 10,000 emails per month, $45 for 1,500 contacts and 15,000 emails, and so on.

If you want to send more SMS messages, choose instead the Email and SMS plans, which for $15/month more than an email-only plan include 1,250 SMS credits, plus $10 per additional tier. Messages cost different numbers of credits, depending on where they’re sent. A message sent to a US number costs 1 credit, while a UK message costs 5 and a New Zealand message costs 10.

You can also add on automated review requests to confirm delivered orders starting at $20 for 250 orders, or a Customer Data Platform (CDP) from $500/month for 100,000 customer profiles.

MailChimp’s pricing is more granular, with 4 core email marketing plans, plus website and transactional email options. It also may include a signup discount for your first few months or year.

MailChimp’s free plan includes 500 contacts and 1,000 sent emails per month—double Klaviyo’s free offering. The Essentials plan, then, starts at $13/month paid annually for 500 contacts, 5,000 sent emails, 3 users, 3 audiences, and core features. That pricing goes up around $13 per tier; the $26.95/month plan includes 1,500 contacts and 15,000 emails, while the $39.50 plan includes 2,500 contacts and 25,000 emails, and so on.

MailChimp Standard includes every MailChimp feature for segmenting your audience and emailing specific people, with a few limits. Its plans include 5 users, 5 audiences, 200 journey points for automated workflows, a creative assistant to import brand style, content optimizer, A/B testing, and more. That starts at $20/month for 500 contacts, going up $15/month per tier.

MailChimp Premium starts at $350/month with 10,000 contacts and 150,000 email sends per month—and includes everything MailChimp has to offer with unlimited users and audiences, and priority phone support. Its plans go up by around $100 per tier.

And if you don’t have a website yet, you can build a free store site or upgrade from $10/month for customization. Same for transactional email: You can send email from your app with MailChimp from $20 per 25,000 emails.

All paid MailChimp plans let you add on SMS sending as well, from $20/month for 1,000 credits—which works out similar to Klaviyo’s SMS credit tiers.

In general, MailChimp is cheaper if you only need core email newsletter features. For more advanced email sending, Klaviyo’s pricing falls right between MailChimp Standard and Premium pricing.

Adding subscribers to MailChimp and Klaviyo

Both MailChimp and Klaviyo include simple form builders to add new subscribers to your email newsletter. MailChimp’s are focused on landing pages to subscribe to newsletters and product updates. Klaviyo focuses more on eCommerce store popups to sign up and get a coupon code. Both build simple forms to gather email addresses—you can add additional form fields, but the focus is on simplicity.

Or, you can go the integration route to bring in new subscribers. Klaviyo’s built around syncing contacts from Shopify, WooCommerce, and other eCommerce platforms. MailChimp automations focus more on ad platforms like Facebook Lead ads—but both platforms can bring in subscribers from ads, eCommerce, and hundreds of other sources.

But there’s a key limitation. A MailChimp or Klaviyo form can only add new subscribers to a single audience or segment. You can’t segment people based on their responses, show optional questions based on previous responses, or easily use form data in other apps.

That’s where a form builder like Fillout comes in. You can build more powerful forms, with logic to only show questions when appropriate, and AI to build forms in seconds. By default, Fillout can sync new form entries to a MailChimp or Klaviyo list. Or, you could use 3rd party integrations from Zapier to route signups to the list you want based on their responses.

And with Fillout-powered forms, you could always switch between platforms as your company grows. Announce your new product launch with a Fillout form, gathering not just email addresses but also details about that contact and why they’re interested. Follow up with a MailChimp email newsletter, keeping them engaged and interested as development progresses. Then, when your store’s open and your product’s ready for the world, and you’re trying to find ways to boost sales and streamline messaging, you could migrate to Klaviyo for more advanced segmenting and automation.

With those same forms, you could build a custom CRM to track details about your customers, or log order details in Airtable or Monday.com for followup. Instead of relying only on the features in your email app, then exporting data if you ever need to move platforms, using Fillout to gather data means you can do more with every form entry without any extra work.

Is MailChimp or Klaviyo better for your business?

MailChimp’s straightforward. It’s a quick and easy way to start sending email newsletters. And its automation tools are simple enough to build a drip campaign in minutes. It’s best for new businesses looking to start out simple with digital marketing.

Klaviyo’s comprehensive. It’s built to stay in touch with customers, message them when it’s most important, and avoid showing up in their inbox so much that they unsubscribe. It’s best for eCommerce stores looking to turn their shops into growing businesses.

You could email anyone from Klaviyo, use it to run an email newsletter or build interest in an upcoming product. You could also email your Shopify customers from MailChimp, add on SMS messaging, and use automations to follow up on orders. But you’ll likely find Klaviyo best for messaging customers, and MailChimp for staying in touch with a larger audience.

Either way, you’ll be able to stay in touch with your customers with nicely designed emails—without having to waste time hand-coding messages or sort out delivery issues.