Klaviyo is often considered the gold standard for e-commerce email marketing tools, while Mailchimp has long been regarded as the go-to platform for beginners and small businesses.
However, framing the difference in such binary terms doesn’t do justice to either platform. The reality is far more nuanced.
And if you’re trying to decide between the two, you’ll need more than just a surface-level comparison.
At Mavlers, we’ve had hands-on experience working with both platforms across a variety of use cases and industries. That puts us in a strong position to help you determine which one aligns best with your business needs and growth plans.
So don’t worry if you seem lost in the feature-fair of these ESPs.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a much clearer idea. But first, let’s begin with a quick overview of both platforms.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: At a glance
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: At a glance
When choosing between Klaviyo and Mailchimp, the best option depends on your specific needs, especially regarding e-commerce email marketing tools, customization, ease of use, and budget.
Very quickly, here’s how they stack up.
1. Features
Klaviyo features include advanced customization, segmentation, Klaviyo email automation, and analytics, making it ideal for businesses needing deep personalization and sophisticated email flows. It supports unlimited segmentation conditions and predictive analytics powered by AI, which helps create highly tailored campaigns.
Mailchimp features, on the other hand, prioritize simplicity and user-friendliness. It offers a straightforward drag-and-drop editor, pre-built templates, and Mailchimp automation tools. The platform offers extensive integrations and AI-powered creative assistance but is less customizable than Klaviyo.
2. Pricing
Klaviyo pricing includes a free plan with all email features but a cap on send volume. Its paid plans tend to be more expensive.
Mailchimp pricing is more flexible, with various affordable paid tiers. However, many advanced Mailchimp features are locked behind higher-tier plans.
3. Ease of use
Mailchimp is famous for being easy-to-use thanks to its intuitive interface and simpler feature set.
Klaviyo offers more powerful tools, but the trade-off is a steeper learning curve, especially in the case of email automation and advanced data usage.
4. E-commerce focus
Klaviyo was built for e-commerce, and offers robust integrations with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. If you’re evaluating Klaviyo for e-commerce, it delivers powerful capabilities like predictive analytics and real-time segmentation.
Coming to the other contender, it also supports e-commerce but has a broader focus. Still, Mailchimp for e-commerce includes useful templates, product recommendations, as well as integrations that work quite well for smaller stores.
So that’s the tl:dr. Refer to the table below for a quick overview.
| Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: At a glance | ||
|---|---|---|
| Klaviyo | Mailchimp | |
| Customization | Klaviyo features allow for advanced personalization | Easier to use, less customizable |
| Pricing | Klaviyo’s pricing is higher with more features | Lower cost, but Mailchimp’s pricing locks many features behind paywalls |
| Ease of use | Steeper learning curve | Beginner-friendly |
| E-commerce | Strong e-commerce focus, predictive analytics | General marketing |
| Customer support | 60 days free support, comprehensive resources | 30 days of free support, social media support |
| Integrations | 350+ ecommerce-focused | Extensive, including design and social tools |
Choose Klaviyo if: You run an e-commerce business and need powerful, customizable automation, segmentation, and predictive analytics, and you are willing to invest time learning the platform and pay a premium for advanced features.
Choose Mailchimp if: You want an easy-to-use, affordable, and flexible email marketing tool with broad integrations and simpler automation, especially if you’re not ecommerce-focused or are just getting off the ground.
Let’s get into the details now.
1. Target audience
Let’s start with Klaviyo.
Klaviyo’s target audience primarily consists of e-commerce businesses and online retailers seeking to leverage data-driven marketing to enhance customer engagement and drive sales.
These businesses typically operate on platforms like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, where Klaviyo’s deep integrations allow seamless synchronization of customer data across multiple touchpoints.
Kenda MacDonald at Made with Intent, a software company specializing in real-time intent prediction and personalization for e-commerce retailers, points out, “Retroactive segmentation is a relic in the age of modern ecommerce. It struggles to be what good looks like. This is where predictive segmentation steps up to the plate.” And Klaviyo does more than step up.
Source: Klaviyo
Klaviyo appeals especially to e-commerce brands that value advanced segmentation and automation capabilities. The platform enables these businesses to segment their customers based on granular criteria such as purchase history, browsing behavior, demographic data, and predicted future actions.
This level of segmentation supports personalized messaging that can increase repeat purchases, reduce churn, and improve customer lifetime value.
But at the same time, Klaviyo is also well-suited for businesses that want a comprehensive view of each customer through unified profiles that consolidate data from over 350 sources, including email, SMS, web activity, etc.
In sharp contrast, Mailchimp’s target audience is notably broad, encompassing a wide range of users from small businesses and startups to larger organizations, as well as both B2C and B2B marketers. The platform is designed for anyone looking to reach a specific group with their marketing efforts.
Consequently, Mailchimp is suitable for businesses that may not have extensive technical expertise, as its interface is user-friendly and its campaign-building tools are accessible.
But it also offers advanced segmentation and analytics features for more experienced marketers who look to refine their strategies further. The platform’s versatility makes it a popular choice for e-commerce brands, nonprofits, content creators, and agencies, as well as traditional businesses seeking to expand their digital marketing efforts.
2. Email creation and design
At its core, Klaviyo provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop email editor. This intuitive interface allows you to build visually appealing emails without needing any coding knowledge.
You can easily add and arrange various content blocks, such as text, images, buttons, dividers, and product recommendations, to create engaging layouts. The editor also offers pre-designed layouts to help you get started quickly.
Source: Klaviyo
Klaviyo boasts a library of over 160 professionally designed email templates. These templates cover various use cases, from promotional campaigns and newsletters to automated flows like welcome series and abandoned cart reminders.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers a larger and more diverse library of pre-designed templates catering to a broader range of industries and email purposes beyond just e-commerce.
Their templates are often well-designed and visually appealing, with a good selection available even on their free plan. As in all things, Mailchimp’s focus tends to be on ease of use and providing visually rich templates that are simple to customize.
Source: Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s editor is often praised for its simplicity and ease of use, making it very accessible for beginners. And their Creative Assistant feature is also a notable advantage.
It’s an AI-powered design tool that helps users quickly generate stylish, on-brand graphics and layouts for emails, social posts, customer journeys, and other marketing materials.
It automatically creates custom designs based on your brand’s assets-such as colors, fonts, logos, and images-stored in your Mailchimp brand kit, ensuring consistency and professionalism across all your marketing channels.
3. Segmentation
Klaviyo segments update automatically in real time as contacts meet or no longer meet specific criteria, ensuring campaigns are always targeting the right audience.
There is no limit to the number of conditions you can use to define a segment, allowing for highly granular targeting. Klaviyo’s AI can predict customer behavior, such as likelihood to purchase or churn, and even estimate gender.
In Mailchimp, however, segments can be created based on up to five conditions, which restricts the complexity of audience targeting compared to Klaviyo. But it offers a variety of pre-built segment options (e.g., new subscribers, engaged/disengaged users, repeat customers), which makes it easy for beginners.
Segmentation often relies on manual tagging and managing multiple audiences, which can be cumbersome and may increase costs if the same contact appears in multiple lists. Mailchimp can segment based on general characteristics such as demographics, purchase history, and engagement, but lacks the depth of real-time behavioral tracking found in Klaviyo.
It does include AI for content optimization and basic predictive analytics (e.g., likelihood to purchase, CLV prediction), but these are simpler and less customizable than Klaviyo’s.
4. Automation
Klaviyo supports multi-step, conditional workflows triggered by highly specific customer behavior such as cart/browse abandonment, product recommendations, win-backs, as well as post-purchase follow-ups.
Source: Klaviyo
Significantly, tight integration with other e-commerce platforms enables automations like in-stock alerts, price-drops, and dynamic product recommendations. And Klaviyo offers a library of pre-built flows for common e-commerce scenarios, along with the ability to build custom automations from the ground up.
Klaviyo also supports advanced logic.
This includes branching based on customer attributes or actions, and connecting to external systems via webhooks.
In Mailchimp, on the contrary, automation setup is simple, with a visual journey builder. The platform offers a range of pre-built “Customer Journeys” for common scenarios like welcome series, abandoned cart, and birthday emails.
Mailchimp supports event-based triggers, but with much less granularity and fewer behavioral triggers than Klaviyo.
Mailchimp is primarily focused on email automation; SMS and other channels require third-party integrations. Personalization and segmentation options are more basic, especially on lower-tier plans, and advanced behavioral targeting is limited.
5. Analytics and reporting
Both platforms excel in analytics and reporting, each bringing unique strengths to the table.
Klaviyo offers in-depth analytics, including detailed tracking of conversions, revenue, campaign performance, and customer engagement across campaigns and automated flows. Klaviyo supplies industry benchmark data, enabling users to compare their performance against similar businesses.
Klaviyo really shines when it comes to slicing and dicing your data. You can create incredibly specific segments based on a wide array of behaviors and characteristics.
Source: Klaviyo
And the beauty of Klaviyo’s analytics isn’t just the data itself, but how easily you can turn those insights into action.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, provides analytics on delivery, opens, clicks, orders, average order value, and unsubscribe rates, with the ability to analyze specific campaigns or timeframes.
A key advantage is Mailchimp’s pre-built integration with Google Analytics, unlocking over 50 additional reports. You can view email campaign data within their Google Analytics dashboard.
Source: Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers predictive analytics, but only on Standard and higher-tier plans, and these features are generally less advanced than Klaviyo’s. Custom reports and dashboards are available, however, some advanced analytics are restricted to paid plans.
As far back as 2020, Loren McDonald declared analytics to be the new metrics. Fast-forward to now, 77% of new martech tools are AI-driven, indicating a strong industry shift toward platforms that offer sophisticated analytics and automation. In terms of sophistication, Klaviyo is the clear winner.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo is purpose-built for e-commerce and offers seamless, deep integrations with major platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Ecwid, and PrestaShop.
Mailchimp also integrates with all major e-commerce platforms, but its Shopify integration has historically been less seamless, sometimes requiring third-party connectors like ShopSync. (As you must recall, in 2019, Mailchimp and Shopify had ended their native integration due to disagreements. It was re-introduced two years later.)
However, Mailchimp pulls ahead in integrations with widely used business apps. It has built-in connections with Google Analytics, Canva, Vimeo, QuickBooks, and other popular tools.
Klaviyo covers a wide range of integrations but may lack direct connections to some of these popular non-ecommerce apps. Users can bridge gaps using tools like Zapier to connect Klaviyo with additional services.
Both platforms allow for migration between each other, syncing contact data, lists, segments, and even engagement history.
7. Customer support
Klaviyo offers email and chat support, but free plan users only get access for the first 60 days. After that, continued support requires upgrading to a paid plan. The platform provides a robust resource library, including a help center, academy, community forums, partner directory, and live training sessions.
In Mailchimp, free plan users receive email support for the first 30 days only; after that, support is limited to a chatbot, which is generally considered unhelpful. Paid plans unlock 24/7 email and chat support, with phone and priority support available at the highest tiers.
8. Pricing
Mailchimp is generally more cost-effective for small businesses and those starting out, but many features are locked behind higher-priced plans and duplicate contacts can increase costs.
Klaviyo is pricier, especially as your list grows, but offers greater transparency, all features at every tier.
| Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Pricing | ||
|---|---|---|
| Klaviyo | Mailchimp | |
| Free plan | Up to 250 contacts, 500 emails, most features | Up to 500 contacts, 1,000 emails, limited features |
| Entry paid plan | $20–$45/month (500 contacts) | $13–$20/month (500 contacts) |
| 10,000 emails | $35/month | $19.40/month |
| 100,000 contacts | $1,000+/month | $350/month |
| Feature unlock | More generous free plan, advanced e-commerce tools | Lower cost, but more features paywalled |
Klaviyo offers combined Email + SMS plans. But SMS pricing is credit-based, and unused credits do not roll over.
In Mailchimp, SMS marketing is not native and typically requires third-party integrations. Also bear in mind that Mailchimp counts the same contact multiple times if they appear in different lists, which can inflate costs.
Klaviyo counts each contact only once, regardless of how many lists they’re on.
Quickly, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of both platforms.
So here’s Klaviyo’s pros and cons.
| Klaviyo: Pros and Cons | |
|---|---|
| Pros | Cons |
| Advanced segmentation for highly targeted campaigns | Steep learning curve, especially for new users |
| Powerful marketing automation and prebuilt workflows | Higher pricing, especially as contact lists grow |
| Robust analytics and reporting tools | Limited free plan (restricted contacts/emails) |
| Seamless integrations with major eCommerce platforms | Customer support can be slow or limited, especially on lower tiers |
| User-friendly drag-and-drop email editor | Email builder less interactive than some competitors |
| Extensive template library and signup forms | Deliverability issues reported by some users |
| SMS marketing and multi-channel options | |
And here’s Mailchimp’s pros and cons.
| Mailchimp: Pros and Cons | |
|---|---|
| Pros | Cons |
| User-friendly interface and easy setup for beginners | Pricing increases rapidly as contact list grows; less cost-effective for large lists |
| Extensive integrations (over 300 apps, including Shopify, WordPress, Zapier) | Charges for duplicate, unsubscribed, and inactive contacts, leading to potential overpayment |
| Wide range of templates and a drag-and-drop email builder | Essential features (A/B testing, advanced automation) locked behind higher-tier plans |
| Strong automation and segmentation tools (especially on higher plans) | Monthly send limits on all plans, including paid ones |
| Good reporting and analytics capabilities | Customization and advanced features are limited on lower tiers |
| Social posting, retargeting ads, and predictive analytics included | Customer support is limited on free plans and can be slow on lower tiers |
| Pay-as-you-go and monthly pricing options | Interface can sometimes be buggy or less responsive |
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: The wrap-up!
At the end of the day, the choice between Klaviyo and Mailchimp comes down to your business model, marketing goals, and technical readiness.
If you’re an e-commerce business looking to scale through highly personalized campaigns, real-time automation, and deep customer insights, Klaviyo is the clear frontrunner. It’s built to handle the complexity of modern e-commerce, and while it comes with a steeper learning curve and higher price tag, the value it offers is unmatched for serious growth.
On the other hand, if you’re a small business, solopreneur, nonprofit, or general marketer looking for a cost-effective, easy-to-use platform with broad functionality, Mailchimp remains a solid choice. It gets you up and running quickly and offers plenty of tools to build and manage campaigns without overwhelming you.
Ultimately, both platforms are capable and well-respected in the industry. But they serve distinct purposes. Understanding your specific needs will guide you to the right platform.
And if you’re still on the fence, remember: at Mavlers, we’ve worked extensively with both. We’d be happy to help you evaluate your requirements and make the smartest choice for your marketing journey.
Need help deciding or migrating? Reach out, we’re just a click away.
Susmit Panda - Content Writer
A realist at heart and an idealist at head, Susmit is a content writer at Mavlers. He has been in the digital marketing industry for half a decade. When not writing, he can be seen squinting at his Kindle, awestruck.
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