Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Which One Should You Choose?

Last Updated on April 22, 2023 by Ewen Finser

Omnisend and Klaviyo are both are highly-rated email marketing tools for e-commerce businesses. These cloud-based marketing tools are designed for different audiences, though.

Omnisend is better for beginners or almost-beginners, while Klaviyo is suited to more advanced marketers or companies with higher budgets to devote to marketing. While both tools share many of the same features, one is noticeably more robust than the other – though that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the better choice for your purposes.

Bottom Line Up Front Summary: While Klaviyo can be more comprehensive in some respects, we found the easier to use, more automated, and affordable Omnisend pricing plans to be more approachable and scalable for smaller enterprises. 

Let’s go through Omnisend and Klaviyo to explore their features, pros and cons, and use cases.

Main Differences Between Omnisend vs Klaviyo

The main differences between Omnisend vs Klaviyo are:

• Omnisend is lacking when it comes to email list segmentation, whereas Klaviyo has tons of segmentation options, allowing you to reach practically any customer or segment you want.
• Omnisend has simple email templates, whereas Klaviyo has a wider selection of richer templates.
• Omnisend is a simpler email marketing tool that’s geared toward the beginner, whereas Klaviyo’s broad feature set and higher price tag are better for more experienced users.

Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Omnisend Overview

Omnisend is a cloud-based marketing automation tool for more advanced users who may have outgrown their beginner-friendly email marketing platform. (Note, though, that it’s not as advanced as Klaviyo – we’ll talk about that more later on.)

It’s designed for sales-driven e-commerce businesses, and one of its top features is that you can see who purchased items from specific emails. Omnisend is ideal to use if your main concern is automation, even over list segmentation.

Omnisend Features

• A/B testing
• Abandoned cart follow-up
• Analytics and advanced reporting
• Auto-responders
• Customizable email template library
• Drip email marketing campaign functionality
• Event-triggered emails
• Integration with e-commerce platforms
• Integration with messaging platforms
• Landing pages
• List management
• Regulation compliance
• SMS marketing
• Web forms

Check out Omnisend vs Mailchimp to learn more about how Omnisend measures up.

Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Pros and Cons of Omnisend

Omnisend has a couple of unique features that make it a standout tool, but it also has some drawbacks that users may consider deal-breakers. Let’s go over Omnisend’s pros and cons.

Omnisend Pros

• Product Picker for newsletter campaigns. Select a product from your store and it’ll be automatically inserted into your newsletter. You won’t have to manually add images or descriptions.
• Pre-filled popups. You can adapt the wording if you’d like, and it’s all done. Set them to appear at a certain time interval and/or on a specific product page.
• Clean backend design.
• User-friendly; very easy to get started and send your first newsletter and welcome email.
• Automations are easy to learn, use, and implement. Overall, they’ll save you time.
• Great customer service.

Omnisend Cons

• With Omnisend, there aren’t as many email design options as you’ll get with other providers.
• When Omnisend rolls out updates, they may be lacking when it comes to communication with their customers. If something seems to look or work differently than you’re used to, reach out to customer service to find out if there was a recent update.

Omnisend Pricing

Like many email marketing platforms, Omnisend has flexible pricing based on your number of contacts.

The free plan lets you create email campaigns and send 15,000 emails per month. The Standard plan is $16 per month for up to 500 subscribers. Send 15,000 emails per month, automate emails, and get access to SMS marketing. The Pro plan is $99 per month for up to 500 subscribers. Send 15,000 emails per month, use omnichannel marketing, and get $99 in SMS credits per month.

The Standard and Pro plans go up in price as you add more subscribers. For example, Standard is $25 for 1,500 subscribers, while Pro stays the same. If you double that to 3,000 subscribers, the Standard plan is $60 per month and the Pro plan goes up to $120 per month.

You can go to the pricing page and enter your number of subscribers to see how much you’ll pay as your list grows. You can pay annually for a discount, too.

Omnisend offers a free plan, and you won’t be charged. You can opt to upgrade, but until you do, you’ll be automatically placed on the free plan. 

Why Choose Omnisend?

Choose Omnisend if you’re more focused on lead capture (thanks, pop-ups!) and automation than list segmentation and creating highly-styled emails. If on the other side, you are more into well-designed emails, check how Omnisend vs Mailchimp compare.

Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Klaviyo Overview

Klaviyo is a cloud-based email management and marketing tool that’s perfect for advanced users but easy enough for even beginners to learn.

It’s designed for e-commerce stores, and it seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce. It’s also useful for B2B and B2C companies that have a custom website instead of an e-commerce platform.

Once integrated with your e-commerce store, Klaviyo will import customer information so that you can start segmenting customers to target them with specific emails, campaign activity, and flows.

For example, you can send a specific promotional email campaign to predefined subscribers, then send abandoned cart reminders to those who didn’t complete a purchase (cart abandonment). You can also send targeted emails to repeat customers.

Klaviyo Features

• A/B testing
• Analytics
• Auto-responders
• Customer data
• Drip email automation
• Event-triggered emails
• Integration with e-commerce platforms
• Integration with Facebook audiences
• Landing pages
• List segmentation and management
• Regulation compliance
• Templates
• Web forms
• Workflow creation

Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Pros and Cons of Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an altogether intuitive tool, and even though it’s packed with features, it’s also designed to be easy to learn and use. There are a few drawbacks, though, namely unreliable customer service experiences and a higher-than-expected price tag.

Klaviyo Pros

• It’s easy to use and offers an intuitive user experience (UX). The visual platform is a breeze to learn and navigate when setting up email automation and flows.
• You can create a visual map of the different emails you want to send, then, decide when they’ll be sent and who they’ll go to.
• There’s individual user tracking as well, allowing you to see details about each customer’s journey. By looking at individual profiles, you can see when someone has visited your website, opened an email, or made a purchase. You can get details about their purchases, too.
• There are tons of segmentation options to create groups and manage leads and potential customers.
• Built-in templates and automation workflows to get started fast.
• Split-testing to see if one format works better than another.
• Analytics to see which campaigns have the best click-through, conversion, and open rates.
• The map that shows where your active subscribers are in the world.

Klaviyo Cons

• Designed specifically for e-commerce businesses. Service providers may not be able to use Klaviyo to its full potential.
• Tons of features to choose from, which can give it a steep learning curve for beginners.
• Klaviyo is expensive, but if you’re going to use most of its features, it may be worth the cost.
• Some users report negative customer service experiences, but others say customer service is reliable.

Klaviyo Pricing Plan

You can pay for just email marketing, just SMS marketing or email and SMS bundled. There’s a price estimator on their website to get an accurate idea of how much you’ll pay.

The email-only cost is $20 per month for up to 500 contacts. You’ll get unlimited email sends, plus email and chat support (customer support). For 1,500 contacts, it’s $45 per month, and for 3,000 contacts, it’s $70 per month. There’s a free option, too, but you can only add 250 contacts and send 500 emails max.

Once you’ve chosen your email marketing package, you can add SMS. For example, if you wanted to add 100 SMS messages to your 500 contacts package, it would cost you $3.50. That cost is the same whether you bundle or not.

Why Choose Klaviyo?

If you’ve been marketing your e-commerce shop for a while and are ready to upgrade – or if you’re a tech-savvy beginner who will take the time to learn your way around a bunch of features – consider Klaviyo.

The tool is especially useful when it comes to listing segmentation and advanced targeting, so you’ll want to ensure you’re gathering a lot of customers and lead information.

If you are a bit skeptical to go with the first choice, and you want to check a few more alternatives here follow the Best Klaviyo Alternatives and SendinBlue vs Klaviyo.

Migrating from Klaviyo to Omnisend

By far the most common thing I’m seeing recently is ecommerce operators migrating from Klaviyo to Omnisend, typically due to price increases. If this might be you in the near future (or now), here’s the transfer process:

1. First off, do NOT close your Klaviyo account until fully migrated. Seems obvious, but a surprising number of store owners cancel first and ask questions later.
2. Start by migrating your contacts via the export function in Klaviyo: Go to Lists & Segments > Click List/Segment that you need to export > Click Manage/List Segment > Click Export List/Segment to CSV
3. Next we need to Migrate information about customers subscription status: Go to List & Segments > Click on Manage List > then List Suppression > and finally Export CSV
4. Repeat the above process for ANY other important list or category (Loyal or VIP lists, etc…)
5. Next, we need to ensure the data is cleaned and presented in the right format for Omnisend: Omnisend only accepts Boolean, String or Text, Date Fields, and Number Values.

Properly formatted CSVs should look something like this:

Once you have all the customer data from Klaviyo, we can upload it to Omnised: Within your Omnisend dashboard navigate to the Audience tab > lick on the Add contacts button > File import > Select file. 

All of your data SHOULD now be imported. Next you have follow a similar process to upload any segments you have, with the main change being to ADD a custom tag when prompted in the import process (e.g. “Last Clicked” or whatever other segment categories you care about transferring from Klaviyo). 

Omnisend Migration Note: If you ARE planning to move from Klaviyo to Omnisend, Omnisend is offering a one-time offer of 30% off your first 3 months AND a full migration support plan (basically: they’ll do most of the heavy lifting).

Migrating from Omnisend to Klaviyo

I also sometimes see a few Omnisend users looking to move back to Klaviyo or some Klaviyo loyalists who purchase stores with Omnisend and want to stick with what they know.

Unfortunately, Klaviyo basically pretends Omnisend doesn’t exist and provides no specific documentation or auto-integrations for Omnisend lists.

In this case the best process for migrating from Omnisend to Klaviyo that I’ve found is to make use of this Zapier integration to feed data between the platforms. It’s not an “all in one” solution, but you can start migrating specific lists and segments (as much as you can). 

If this fails, you can try:

1. Using the export list function in Omnisend
2. Then, within Klaviyo going to the list that you want to add subscribers to.
3. Clicking the Manage List dropdown in the upper right-hand corner
4. Selecting Import Contacts

While this “works” in the sense that you get contacts imported, there can be a lot of cleanup to do with missing fields or improperly formatted data.

Omnisend vs Klaviyo FAQs

Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Which One is Better for Your eCommerce Business?

Klaviyo has lots of segmentation options, giving you pretty much endless ways to connect with subscribers and customers no matter what stage of the customer experience journey they’re in – or what type of action you want them to take.

Klaviyo also has a wider selection of email templates to customize to your liking, too. And overall, Klaviyo has a broader feature set. That said, Omnisend is catching up quickly and doing so at a much more competitive price for most store owners.

Bottom Line Summary: While Klaviyo can be more comprehensive in some respects, we found the easier to use, more automated, and affordable Omnisend pricing plans to be more approachable and scalable for smaller stores navigating an uncertain economic outlook. 

Other Email Marketing Service and Marketing Automation Options

If you are still not quite decided on the best email builder for your ecommerce store, check out some of our head-to-head comparisons of Omnisend and Klaviyo below.

Klaviyo vs Other Competitors

• Klaviyo vs Sendinblue Email Marketing Solution

Omnisend vs Other Alternatives

• Omnisend vs Mailchimp
• Omnisend vs Constant Contact
• Omnisend vs GetResponse
• Omnisend vs Hubspot
• Omnisend vs Sendinblue
• Omnisend vs Shopify Email
• Omnisend vs Privy
• Omnisend vs ActiveCampaign

eCommerce Email Marketing Tools by Platform

If you are on a specific platform and looking for an easy add-on, check these out:

• Best Email Marketing for Shopify Integration eCommerce Marketing
• Best BigCommerce Email Marketing Services