Constant Contact 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.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedConstant Contact compared with Klaviyo
Klaviyo is built for stores and reports in revenue: live segments over order history and browsing behavior, prebuilt abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows, and per-flow attribution that survives a budget conversation. It is expensive at scale, roughly $720 a month at 50,000 profiles, bills by active profile with a send allowance of about ten times that count, and has nothing resembling Constant Contact's event registration or phone support. If you run a store on Shopify or WooCommerce, Klaviyo pays for itself and Constant Contact does not. If your list is members, donors, or event attendees rather than shoppers, the reverse holds.
Klaviyo compared with Constant Contact
Constant Contact sells support and events; Klaviyo sells the data model. Native event registration with ticketing and payments has no equivalent in Klaviyo, and a real phone line matters to owners who want to be taught rather than documented at. What Constant Contact does not have is automation worth the name, since branching paths are Premium-only and shallow, and it has no live segmentation over order history or predicted values. It is also expensive, at $120 for 10,000 contacts. Ecommerce brands whose revenue depends on abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows should take Klaviyo; nonprofits and event-driven organisations should take Constant Contact.
Choose Constant Contact if
Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact.
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 | Constant Contact | Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial) | $0 (free up to 250 profiles), then roughly $30/mo at 1,000 active profiles |
| Pricing model | Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message. | 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 fixed-length trial; the free tier up to 250 profiles is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact. | 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 | An afternoon to import a list, authenticate a domain, and send a first campaign. The template library and brand kit mean the design step is fast, which is deliberate given the audience. | 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 lowest in this category, by design. Everything is arranged around a marketing calendar and the terminology avoids jargon. The tradeoff is that the ceiling is low: once you want conditional automation or expressive segmentation, the simplicity becomes a constraint. | 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, REST API, Webhooks | Web application, iOS and Android apps for reporting, Mobile SDKs for push, Onsite JavaScript library |
| Compliance | GDPR with a data processing agreement, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA, SOC 2 | SOC 2, GDPR with a data processing agreement, CCPA |
| Founded | 1995 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Ownership | Privately held, majority-owned by Clearlake Capital Group | Publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker KVYO |
Strengths and limitations
Constant Contact
Strengths
- Native event registration with ticketing and payments, which no other mainstream email platform does properly and which alone justifies the price for organisations that run events.
- Real phone support with US hours, plus local seminars, a partner network, and paid done-for-you services, aimed at owners who want to be taught rather than documented at.
- Unsubscribed contacts are excluded from billing, so list churn does not quietly inflate the invoice.
- Automated and triggered emails are excluded from the monthly send multiplier entirely, which is more generous than it first appears when designing flows.
Limitations
- Expensive. At $120 for 10,000 contacts on the entry tier it costs several times what MailerLite, Brevo, EmailOctopus, or Sender charge for comparable or better email functionality.
- Automation is the weakest part of the product: Lite offers a single welcome email, Standard offers templates, and real branching paths are Premium-only and still shallow next to ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo.
- Bounced addresses count toward your contact limit even though they cannot receive mail, so poor list hygiene costs money directly.
- No free plan at all, only a 14-day trial, in a category where permanent free tiers are now standard.
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
Constant Contact
Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message.
- Lite$12 at 500 contacts
- Standard$35 at 500 contacts
- Premium$80 at 500 contacts
- Above 50,000 contactsCustom
Modelled at this directory's three reference points: 1,000 contacts costs $30 on Lite, $55 on Standard, or $110 on Premium. Ten thousand contacts costs $120, $160, or $275. Fifty thousand contacts costs $430, $460, or $575. Those are among the highest prices in this category for the email functionality delivered. MailerLite, EmailOctopus, Sender, and Brevo all cost a fraction of it at the same list sizes and several of them automate better. The defence is that you are not buying email alone. Event registration with ticketing, social posting and ads, SMS, landing pages, a phone support line, local training, and a partner network are all in the price, and if you genuinely run events or genuinely need to be taught how to do this, the alternative is buying three subscriptions and still having nobody to call. The nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent shifts the arithmetic further. If you are only sending a newsletter, you are overpaying substantially and should look elsewhere.
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
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is the most expensive way to send a newsletter in this category and the best way to run a small organisation's marketing if you are not a marketer. Those two statements are both true and they resolve into a simple test. If you run events, sell tickets, manage social and ads alongside email, and want a phone number to call when something breaks, the bundle is worth the money and the nonprofit discount of up to 30 percent makes it genuinely competitive. If you are sending a monthly newsletter to 10,000 people, you are paying $120 for what MailerLite or Sender will do better for a fraction of it, and you should leave. The billing is fairer than most, with unsubscribes excluded and contacts counted once across the account, though bounced addresses still count and the send multiplier caps frequency on the lower tiers. The automation is the real ceiling: shallow at every tier and barely present below Premium. Buy it for events, for the support line, and for the fact that the owner will actually use it. Do not buy it as an email platform on the merits of the email.
Read the full Constant Contact 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 profileConstant Contact 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.
The best in Email Service Providers
22 trackedEmail service providers are the platforms that store an audience and send it email at scale: list management, campaign editors, automation, and the sending infrastructure underneath.
Still the default small-business ESP, with the broadest template, integration, and education ecosystem in email marketing.
The most generous free tier in email marketing, from a bootstrapped Lithuanian team that undercuts everyone above it.
Made monetization the product and became the platform serious newsletters migrate to.
Rebuilt email sending around developer experience and React components, making the transactional API something engineers actually enjoy.
Under an hour from signup to a published newsletter, with no domain authentication, no templates, and no deliverability setup exposed to the writer.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Constant Contact and Klaviyo?
Klaviyo is built for stores and reports in revenue: live segments over order history and browsing behavior, prebuilt abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows, and per-flow attribution that survives a budget conversation. It is expensive at scale, roughly $720 a month at 50,000 profiles, bills by active profile with a send allowance of about ten times that count, and has nothing resembling Constant Contact's event registration or phone support. If you run a store on Shopify or WooCommerce, Klaviyo pays for itself and Constant Contact does not. If your list is members, donors, or event attendees rather than shoppers, the reverse holds.
Is Constant Contact or Klaviyo cheaper?
Constant Contact starts at $12 a month (Lite, up to 500 contacts) (14 days trial). Klaviyo starts at $0 (free up to 250 profiles), then roughly $30/mo at 1,000 active profiles. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Constant Contact pricing model: Contact-based subscription across three tiers, billed on active contacts, with a monthly send allowance set as a multiple of contact count and excess emails charged per message. Klaviyo pricing model: 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.
Does Constant Contact or Klaviyo have a free plan?
Constant Contact has no free plan. Trial terms: 14 days. Klaviyo has a free plan. 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. Trial terms: No fixed-length trial; the free tier up to 250 profiles is the evaluation path.
Who should choose Constant Contact?
Non-technical small business owners, nonprofits, membership organisations, and anyone who runs events, especially buyers who value a phone support line and local training over feature depth or price per contact.
Who should choose Klaviyo?
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.
What are the best alternatives to Constant Contact and Klaviyo?
SaaSTracker profiles 22 products in Email Service Providers. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Mailchimp (Category Leader), Sender (Best Value), beehiiv (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
