ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedActiveCampaign compared with Klaviyo
Klaviyo has the deeper commerce data model, predictive purchase analytics, and revenue attribution; ActiveCampaign has the deeper general-purpose automation and a real CRM. The dividing line is clean: if a checkout produces your revenue, take Klaviyo. If humans close your deals and the automation has to reflect a sales process, take ActiveCampaign.
Klaviyo compared with ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign has the deeper general-purpose automation builder and a real CRM with deal pipelines, which makes it the better fit for a business with a sales process. Klaviyo has the deeper commerce data model and the revenue attribution that comes with it. Choose ActiveCampaign if humans close your deals; choose Klaviyo if a checkout does.
Choose ActiveCampaign if
Small and mid-size businesses with a real sales process rather than a checkout: consultancies, agencies, coaches, B2B services, and course sellers who need behavioral automation, lead scoring, and deal pipelines in one system and will actually use the branching depth they are paying for.
Choose Klaviyo if
Direct-to-consumer and ecommerce brands on Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce doing enough revenue that abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows pay for the subscription several times over, and who want segmentation driven by purchase behavior rather than by tags they maintain by hand.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | ActiveCampaign | Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | About $15/mo on Starter at 1,000 contacts billed annually (about $19 monthly) (14 days trial) | $0 (free up to 250 profiles), then roughly $30/mo at 1,000 active profiles (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Self-serve tiers priced by contact count with a 14-day trial, where monthly sends are capped at a multiple of the contact count. Critically, accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed, unconfirmed, and bounced records; earlier accounts are grandfathered onto active contacts only. WhatsApp, SMS, transactional email, and deeper CRM capability are separately priced. | Self-serve tiers priced by active (marketable) profile count, with a monthly email send allowance of roughly ten times the profile count; SMS is sold as a higher Email plus SMS plan with its own message credits, and the newer data, service, and AI product lines meter separately. |
| Free plan | No | Up to 250 profiles, 500 emails per month, $5 of mobile messages per month, and 10,000 Composer credits, with email support limited to the first 60 days. |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee | No fixed-length trial; the free tier up to 250 profiles is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Small and mid-size businesses with a real sales process rather than a checkout: consultancies, agencies, coaches, B2B services, and course sellers who need behavioral automation, lead scoring, and deal pipelines in one system and will actually use the branching depth they are paying for. | Direct-to-consumer and ecommerce brands on Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce doing enough revenue that abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows pay for the subscription several times over, and who want segmentation driven by purchase behavior rather than by tags they maintain by hand. |
| Setup time | A day to send, two to four weeks to be using the product properly. Importing contacts and sending a campaign is straightforward. Designing a tag and custom-field taxonomy that will not need rebuilding in six months, installing site and event tracking, and constructing genuinely branching automations is the real project, and it is the work that determines whether the subscription is worth anything. | An afternoon for a Shopify store to be sending. The store connector installs in one click and backfills order history, the onsite snippet goes on automatically, and the prebuilt flows can be turned on with default content the same day. Getting the flows genuinely good, with branded templates and considered branching, is a two to four week project. |
| Learning curve | The steepest in this category, and unapologetically so. The automation canvas rewards people who think in flowcharts and frustrates everyone else. The specific traps are building an unstructured tag sprawl early, and not understanding that goals exist, which leads to people receiving nurture sequences for things they already bought. Budget real learning time or use an agency. | Moderate and front-loaded. The flow builder and campaign sending are approachable, but segment logic over event properties is where people get stuck, because it asks you to think in terms of events and their metadata rather than in terms of lists. Anyone who has only used tag-based ESPs will need a week to stop fighting the model. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, Site tracking script, Postmark for transactional sending | Web application, iOS and Android apps for reporting, Mobile SDKs for push, Onsite JavaScript library |
| Compliance | SOC 2 report available self-serve through the Trust Center, GDPR with a DPA, HIPAA with a standard BAA on the Enterprise plan only | SOC 2, GDPR with a data processing agreement, CCPA |
| Founded | 2003 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States | Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Ownership | Private, venture and growth-equity backed | Publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker KVYO |
Strengths and limitations
ActiveCampaign
Strengths
- The deepest automation builder available to a small business: conditional branching, five-way splits, wait-until conditions, goals, score arithmetic, and mid-flow webhooks on one canvas.
- Split testing entire automation sequences against each other, not just email variants, which almost nothing else at this price can express.
- Arbitrary custom event tracking makes lifecycle messaging genuinely behavioral, and is what lets a SaaS product drive onboarding from real product usage.
- Lead scoring feeding a built-in CRM with deal pipelines, where stage changes are themselves automation triggers, closes the marketing and sales loop in one system.
Limitations
- New accounts since 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed and bounced, a straight monetization tightening that makes an old list materially more expensive to bring across.
- The pricing page no longer publishes static prices, and extra seats, enhanced CRM, and most add-ons are genuinely unpublished, so total cost is hard to establish before committing.
- The Starter plan's five-action cap per automation makes it unusable for the thing the product is bought for, so the real entry price is Plus.
- Seat allocations are stingy: one seat on Starter and Plus, three on Pro, five on Enterprise, with unpublished pricing for more.
Klaviyo
Strengths
- The data model is the real product: live segments over order history, browsing behavior, and predicted values give you targeting no tag-based ESP can express.
- Revenue attribution per flow and campaign is credible because Klaviyo already holds the order events, which makes the subscription defensible to whoever signs off on spend.
- Suppressed profiles stop counting toward the bill, so unsubscribes and bounces reduce cost rather than becoming permanent dead weight.
- Prebuilt ecommerce flows mean a new store can have abandoned cart, welcome, browse abandonment, and post-purchase live in days rather than designing automation from a blank canvas.
Limitations
- Expensive at scale. Roughly $720 a month at 50,000 profiles is several times what Brevo, Omnisend, or MailerLite charge for comparable list sizes, and the per-profile rate does not improve as you grow.
- The send allowance of about ten times your profile count constrains high-frequency senders, so a daily-mailing brand can be forced into a higher band by volume rather than by list growth.
- No advertised annual discount on self-serve plans, removing a lever that almost every competitor offers.
- The email editor is functional rather than delightful; teams coming from MailerLite or Kit usually find it a step down aesthetically.
Pricing compared
ActiveCampaign
Self-serve tiers priced by contact count with a 14-day trial, where monthly sends are capped at a multiple of the contact count. Critically, accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed, unconfirmed, and bounced records; earlier accounts are grandfathered onto active contacts only. WhatsApp, SMS, transactional email, and deeper CRM capability are separately priced.
- StarterAbout $15 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $19 monthly), about $149 at 10,000
- PlusAbout $49 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $59 monthly), about $189 at 10,000, about $609 at 50,000
- ProAbout $79 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $99 monthly), about $375 at 10,000, about $969 at 50,000
- EnterpriseAbout $145 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $179 monthly), about $589 at 10,000, about $1,169 at 50,000
If you genuinely use the automation, ActiveCampaign is worth its price and there is nothing comparable at this level of the market. Split testing entire automation paths, wait-until conditions, goals, arbitrary event triggers, and lead scoring feeding a real pipeline is a combination that Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Brevo simply cannot match. The problem is that most buyers do not use it. A business that ends up sending broadcasts and one welcome sequence is paying roughly $189 a month at 10,000 contacts for capability it never touches, when MailerLite would charge a fraction of that. Two 2025 and 2026 changes have also degraded the value proposition: billing new accounts for unsubscribed contacts, and pulling deeper CRM capability out of the bundle into add-ons. Buy it deliberately, on the basis of specific workflows you have already sketched, and it earns its keep. Buy it because it appears near the top of comparison articles and you will overpay considerably.
Klaviyo
Self-serve tiers priced by active (marketable) profile count, with a monthly email send allowance of roughly ten times the profile count; SMS is sold as a higher Email plus SMS plan with its own message credits, and the newer data, service, and AI product lines meter separately.
- Free$0
- Email (1,000 profiles)Approximately $30
- Email (10,000 profiles)Approximately $150
- Email (50,000 profiles)Approximately $720
- Enterprise and additional product linesQuoted
For a store with real order volume, Klaviyo at 1,000 or 10,000 profiles is straightforwardly good value, because the four standard flows typically return several multiples of the subscription and the attribution report proves it in a currency the founder already thinks in. The suppression policy is a genuine and underrated saving, since you are not paying rent on people who left. Value collapses in two situations: a large list without commerce revenue behind it, where $720 a month at 50,000 profiles buys reporting you cannot monetize, and a business that lets the SMS, reviews, and data product lines accumulate until the email tool costs enterprise money. Judged strictly as ecommerce email, it is expensive and worth it; judged as a general-purpose ESP, it is the wrong shape at the wrong price.
Editorial verdict on each
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is the right answer to a narrow but real question: how does a small business get genuinely sophisticated behavioral automation without buying enterprise marketing software. The builder is the best in its class, custom event triggers make it properly behavioral, and lead scoring feeding a real deal pipeline closes a loop that most ESPs leave open. It is also the most commonly over-bought product in this category, because the depth that justifies the price is depth that most buyers never use, and two recent changes have made the deal worse rather than better: new accounts are now billed for unsubscribed contacts, and the deeper CRM capability was pulled out of the bundle into add-ons. Buy it if you can already name the branching workflows you intend to build and Plus or above is in budget. If your honest plan is broadcasts and one welcome sequence, buy MailerLite or Brevo and keep the difference.
Read the full ActiveCampaign profileKlaviyo
Klaviyo is the correct default for an ecommerce brand with enough order volume that automated flows are a revenue line rather than a nice-to-have. The customer database underneath, the live segmentation over purchase and browsing behavior, and the revenue attribution that makes the spend defensible are genuinely a class above what general-purpose ESPs offer, and billing only for marketable profiles is a fairer meter than most of the category uses. The costs are real: no annual discount, a send allowance tied to list size, a per-profile rate that never improves with scale, and a growing set of adjacent products that each want their own line on the invoice. Buy it if a checkout produces your revenue and you intend to run serious flows. Do not buy it for a newsletter, a service business, or a big list with thin margins, where you will pay ecommerce prices for reporting you cannot cash.
Read the full Klaviyo profileActiveCampaign profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Klaviyo last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.