If you’re looking for an email marketing platform two names that often come up are Omnisend and Klaviyo. So which is the best email marketing tool to grow your business? We’ll break down Omnisend vs Klaviyo below.
💡 Our take: We think both are great options, and we don’t think you can go wrong with either. They are both purpose built for eCommerce companies which is great if that describes your business. The TLDR is that Omnisend will be better for smaller businesses where price is the main concern and Klaviyo will be better for Medium & Enterprise size companies that can take advantage of its more advanced features. There are tons of nuances which we’ll discuss below, but that’s our high level advice.
Omnisend is best for:
Klaviyo is best for:
Omnisend is an email marketing platform that caters to small and medium size eCommerce companies. It was founded in Lithuania in 2014 which is likely why it is more popular Internationally than in the US. It’s a user friendly email marketing tool but is more robust than other user friendly tools like Mailchimp. We recommend it for smaller eCommerce companies that have ambitions to scale. On the higher end, it competes directly with Klaviyo and Sendlane. Like those platforms, Omnisend was purpose built for eCommerce and offers email and SMS marketing in one platform (although we recommend choosing point solutions for email and SMS).
Klayiyo (pronounced "clay-vee-oh") is the largest email marketing tool for eCommerce brands. It was founded in 2012 and has used its head start on competitors to grow and develop features. At one point it directly competed with Mailchimp for eCommerce merchants but it has recently focused on adding features catering to enterprise size customers. It’s still easy enough to install and learn and priced at a level that it’s a great option for small merchants, but the current focus is on larger (more profitable) merchants. It's one of the few tools like Shopify that can scale with your business from your first dollar in revenue to well into 9 figures.
One key difference when comparing the two platforms is price. Both Omnisend and Klaviyo are priced based on list size. Both also offer SMS in addition to their email offering which will be priced on a per send basis.
Across nearly all list sizes and plans, Omnisend will be the cheaper option. The savings on Omnisend will be between 9 and 43% which is significant especially at higher numbers of email subscribers.
In the table below, we compare the price of Omnisend to the price of Klaviyo. Since Omnisend includes "free" SMS sends in its Pro offering, we have calculated the price on Klaviyo's email + SMS plan to send an equivalent number of text messages.
🏆 Winner: Omnisend
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer drag and drop email builders with tons of pre-designed templates that you can use to get started quickly. We think both are very comparable in this dimension, and the differences are largely at the margin. With Klaviyo you will get more pre-built templates, but it will be harder to create unique discount codes (so that they don’t leak onto coupon sites and hurt your margin). Both platforms will allow you to design great looking emails without touching a line of code. Both platforms also allow you to pull products directly from your store into your emails.
🏆 Winner: Tie
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo give you tools to build your email and SMS list. The core feature here is popups on your site that collect emails and phone numbers. They both have tools that let you customize and design the popups to maximize your conversion. Like the email designer, both also offer pre-built templates to give you inspiration. Omnisend will tell you that they have an option for a ‘spin to win’ popup out of the box, but we personally hate that popup (regardless of how well it might convert). Again, we think both tools are largely similar in this category and any differences are minor.
🏆 Winner: Tie
Both companies offer SMS (text message) marketing in addition to their core email offering. The SMS marketing features will come at an additional cost to email and be priced on a per send basis. For this reason, we don’t typically recommend that brands who are doing less than $10M in annual sales to focus here. We think those efforts are better spent on optimizing an email program. Their core text messaging offering is very similar, but we give the slight edge to Omnisend because it will support all international markets whereas Klaviyo’s SMS offering is limited to the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. That said, we recommend using a point solution for SMS marketing (read our guide on the best SMS marketing tool). We think the point solutions are laser focused on building a best in class SMS offering, whereas for both Omnisend and Klaviyo, SMS is something of an afterthought.
🏆 Winner: Slight edge to Omnisend, but we recommend the point solution Postscript
As you can see up to this point we’re tied in terms of features and Omnisend is winning on price. We think that’s a great summary. In terms of basic features, both companies are at a relative parity. We’ll dive into the differences below.
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer analytics and reporting tools out of the box. Both tools suffer from the same defect - they will over attribute sales to email. All email tools would like to take ‘credit’ for sales on your site. Most brands only rely on their ESPs for send, open, and click information although with the Apple privacy update, open information reporting has become more difficult (Apples email client automatically opens all emails). Companies typically use Google Analytics (GA) or GA’s competitors for order and revenue attribution data. Where Klaviyo has an edge is in its dashboards and reporting capabilities. Omnisend’s dashboards are relatively basic when compared to Klaviyo.
🏆 Winner: Klaviyo
The real place that Klaviyo shines relative to Omnisend is in its ability to do segmentation and automation. Segmenting (selecting subscribers based on certain attributes e.g., having not made a purchase in the last 30 days) and automating (sending automated emails when certain criteria have been met e.g., sending a welcome sequence when someone subscribes to your list) are crucial aspects of running a successful eCommerce business. The capabilities become even more important as your brand scales and you are looking to do more segmentation and automation. Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer segmentation and automation features, but Klaviyo’s are more advanced. You will be able to segment based on more data and create more complex automations than you will be able to in Omnisend. This is where the price increase of Klaviyo vs Omnisend becomes ‘worth it’ especially for larger brands. Smaller brands might also consider using Klaviyo from the beginning so that they won't reach a point where they scale off of Omnisend and need to go through the painful process of replatforming and rebuilding their email program on another ESP.
🏆 Winner: Klaviyo
A/B testing is another area where Klaviyo wins. You can A/B test using Omnisend but only on the sender name and subject lines. With Klaviyo, you can A/B test you can test everything from send time, content, and CTA button color in addition to sender name and subject lines. A/B testing becomes more important for larger brands where small differences in conversion can lead to huge $s for brands with large email lists.
🏆 Winner: Klaviyo
The final area that Klaviyo wins is on integrations. They have more an deeper integrations than almost any other email marketing platform. Omnisend has a solid and growing list of integrations, but it still trails Klaviyo. Integrations are important because you want your ESP to be able to ingest data from as many sources as possible and to be able to act on it. An example would be hosting a quiz on your website with Octane AI you want to make sure the quiz answers are able to be imported into Klaviyo, so that you can send marketing emails based on the quiz responses. In this case, Octane AI would automatically integrate with Klaviyo, but you would have to use a third-party integration tool like Alloy Automation in order to integrate Octane with Omnisend.
🏆 Winner: Klaviyo
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