Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: A Side-by-Side Comparison to Pick the Right Email Platform

Is Mailchimp similar to Klaviyo? 

What is Klaviyo best known for?

You might have analyzed these questions to help you select the best email marketing software for your business. We’ll show you a side-by-side comparison of Klaviyo vs Mailchimp to help narrow your options.

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform focused on e-commerce stores. Users can store, analyze, and access transactional and behavioral data for targeted customer communication. With custom web tracking and data access from 300 integrations, users can segment audiences and create targeted campaigns based on customer data.

Mailchimp is one of the best-known email marketing platforms on the market, with tracking, custom reporting, and subscriber management features. Users can create custom templates or choose from their pre-made campaign templates. Mailchimp offers several integrations, web service choices, and a freemium solution for testing compatibility.

Although Klaviyo and Mailchimp provide similar features, their differences can make one platform a better fit for your use case. Let’s explore each app, and compare their strengths and weaknesses, pricing, and exclusive features to help you make an informed decision.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: An Overview of the Best Features

Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer overlapping features, including strategic email campaigns and automated customer communication. However, if you want exclusive features for the price point, you may find vast differences between the tools.

Feature 1: Email Deliverability 

Your email’s likelihood of successfully being delivered to recipient inboxes determines the overall ROI for your email campaigns. Klaviyo and Mailchimp take critical measures to ensure deliverability; let’s look at how they compare.

Although the numbers aren’t explicit, Klaviyo has a reputation for high deliverability rates. New users must warm up their dedicated IP domain, reputation, and clean their lists before syncing over existing email lists. 

Overall, Mailchimp has a 95.5% email deliverability rate, amongst which only 2.5% of emails end up in spam. The platform claims to deliver 1 million emails in 45 minutes, where major ISPs batch and postpone delivery to prevent spam.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Deliverability Features Compared

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
Deliverability rate	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
IP warm-up	Mandatory	Optional
List cleaning	Manual	Automatic

The verdict: Mailchimp clearly has a higher deliverability rate than Klaviyo.

Campaign Refinery has achieved the highest deliverability rate on the market through robust features and tools. Clients state a 600% increase in inbox placement after using the platform.

Feature 2: Ease of Use

Both platforms offer intuitive interfaces and user-friendly features, but you’ll still find a lot of differences between them.

Klaviyo’s email builder is pretty straightforward, with a left-hand menu showing tabs for campaigns, audience, content, and analytics. Tooltips and popups appear when browsing through the dashboard, alongside a ‘Get started’ section that shows the steps to set up the account.

Mailchimp is known for its user-friendly design and intuitive interface, making it suitable for beginners in email marketing. The platform has a drag-and-drop email builder, pre-designed templates, and simple campaign creation tools. You can also find a handy checklist that runs you through, from importing contacts to building your first email campaign. 

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Usability Features Compared

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
Ease of use	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Email editor	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐
Templates	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐

The verdict: Mailchimp has a broader range of email templates for non e-commerce businesses.

Campaign Refinery boasts a simple and clean dashboard design with quick access to campaign creation, subscriber management, and reporting. The intuitive workflow builder allows users to perform actions, usually with a click.

Feature 3: Exclusive Marketing Features

If you’re looking for unique features such as third-party integration, postcard creator, or multi-channel marketing opportunities, Klaviyo and Mailchimp provide them.

Klaviyo has released 130 new features in the last year alone. Their webhooks in ‘flows’ (a way to send information to third-party apps) allow users to connect to other tools in the tech stack. The platform offers newer API endpoints, Google Ads Integration, an advanced email template editor, built-in AI assistance, and virtual contact cards. The platform also provides a direct Shopify integration instead of a third-party application. 

Mailchimp offers a landing page builder and a postcard creator that you can use to print, stamp, and mail customizable postcards even outside the US. The software also provides AI tools such as predictive demographics, smart recommendations, and subject line helper. Users can also use the send time optimization tool to send emails across different time zones.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Marketing features, compared

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
API endpoints	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Landing page builder	⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Built-in AI assistance	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐

The verdict: Both platforms offer API endpoints and AI assistance, but Mailchimp provides extra features such as landing page builder and postcards, making it the clear winner.

Campaign Refinery’s exclusive features include Engagement Gamification, Integrated List Hygiene, advanced segmentation and automation, smart sequences, credit system, and Evergreen Flash Sales. We’ll look at them in detail in the below sections.

Feature 4: Customer Support

Klaviyo and Mailchimp have built-in self-help guides and tutorials, and they offer different contact options for users.

Klaviyo’s help center includes guides and tutorials and access to Klaviyo Academy, live training sessions, and community forums. Users can access support via virtual assistant and email. While email support is available 24/7, chat assistance is limited to business hours.

Mailchimp users on the paid plan get access to priority support, including access to dedicated support specialists. Support is also available through phone, email, or virtual assistance. Mailchimp offers tons of guidance on getting started on the platform through tutorials, checklists, and articles. However, Mailchimp may have limited support during non-business hours, especially via phone and chat. 

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Customer support side-by-side comparison

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
Built-in self-help guides	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Live training sessions	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Access to Academy	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐

The verdict: It’s a tie — both platforms offer 24/7 support and access to guides and tutorials. However, only Klaviyo offers access to academy.

Campaign Refinery’s customer support aims to provide its users with responsive assistance, personalized guidance, and extensive resources to help them succeed in their email marketing efforts. Our support team responds to client queries in under a few hours.

Feature 5: Segmentation

Email segmentation is an essential tool for sending personalized messages to your audience. Fortunately, both Klaviyo and Mailchimp make segmentation fairly easy.

Klaviyo groups contacts into audience segments that update in real-time. You can also access lists, segments, and customer profiles in the dashboard. The software also gives suggestions on how to segment your audiences based on their engagement levels and behavior and creates segments for SMS and email campaigns simultaneously. 

On the Mailchimp dashboard, you can assign tags, create sign-up forms, and filter contacts based on shared data. Beginners can use the pre-built segmentation or segmentation suggestions based on new subscriber activity, purchase behavior, and so on. Their AI feature predicts the demographics of your contacts and divides customers accordingly. However, Mailchimp does not support real-time behavior tracking and lacks predictive analytics support as well.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Segmentation feature comparison

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
Real-time updation	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pre-built segmentation	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Predictive behavior analysis	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐

The verdict: Klaviyo offers AI assistance and real-time behavior tracking, and is the winner.

Campaign Refinery offers segmentation at a granular level — users can use personalization tokens, advanced segmentation criteria, integrate with external data sources, and automate campaigns based on specific segmentation criteria.

Feature 6: Automation

Klaviyo and Mailchimp’s automation capabilities enable users to build personalized campaigns based on specific criteria.

With Klaviyo, you can send behavioral-trigger emails, create segments in real time, and get attribution. You can also integrate with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and Woocommerce to fuel your automation workflows based on customer data and purchase behavior. Klaviyo uses a flow builder to create an automation journey, allowing you to set up conditional splits and webhooks for customer journeys. However, setting up advanced automation can be challenging if you’re new to email marketing.

Mailchimp’s automation is pretty straightforward; you can build an automation flow from scratch or choose a pre-built customer journey flow. The platform offers four major types of automation flows: customer journey builder, transactional emails, retargeting ads, and integrations. You can also create event-based messages such as birthday wishes or welcome messages.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Automation feature compared

Feature	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
Real time segmentation	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pre-built customer journey	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Advanced triggers	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐

The verdict: It’s a tie — Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer robust automation functionality, including creating event-based messages.

With Campaign Refinery, users can automate pretty much anything — from email broadcasts to delivering super smart nurture campaigns. The automation rules are dead simple, including goal functions, lists, and tags that enable hyper-targeted customer communication.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Which Pricing Model is Right For You?

If your decision depends on the pricing, Mailchimp may be more affordable than Klaviyo, mainly for setting up drip campaigns and email sequences. 

Here’s a comprehensive view of Klaviyo’s pricing plans for 1000-1500 contacts.

Klaviyo Pricing Plan	Price	Features Included
Free	$0	‣ 500 monthly email sends ‣ 150 free SMS/MMS credits ‣ Email support for first 60 days
Email	Starting at $45 / month	‣ Depends on the number of contacts  ‣ Starting at 15,000 monthly email sends ‣ 150 free SMS/MMS credits ‣ Email and chat support
Email & SMS	$60 / month	‣ Depends on the number of contacts ‣ Starting at 15,000 monthly email sends ‣ Mobile push notifications ‣ Email and chat support

Mailchimp offers a free plan, but the pricing could change depending on the number of contacts. Below is the pricing for 5000 contacts.

Mailchimp Pricing Plan	Price	Features Included
Free	$0	‣ 1000 monthly email sends1 user1 audience ‣ Email support for the first 30 days ‣ Limited pre-built email templates ‣ Limited creative assistant and reporting and analytics
Essentials	Starts at $ 23.05 / month	‣ 50,000 monthly email sends ‣ 3 users ‣ 3 Audiences ‣ 24/7 Email and chat support ‣ Pre-built templates, integrations, analytics ‣ 4 automated journey points
Standard	Starts at $34.73 / month	‣ Generative AI features ‣ 60,000 monthly email sends ‣ 5 users ‣ 5 audiences ‣ 4 – role-based access ‣ Up to 200 journey points ‣ 1 personalized onboarding session
Premium	Starts at $137.75 / month	‣ All features of standard plan ‣ 150,000 monthly email sends ‣ Phone and priority support ‣ Premium migration services

The verdict: Overall, Mailchimp is cheaper, but you might have to pay extra for advanced features such as multivariate testing or access to a dedicated onboarding specialist.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Who’s the Winner?

If you’re looking for something simple and straightforward, Mailchimp is the right choice for the pricing. However, if your business needs advanced features or is already established in the e-commerce space, Klaviyo is the way to go.

Features	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
AI content creation	✅	✅
AB testing	✅	✅
Behavioral analytics	✅	✅
Landing page/web forms	✅	✅
SMS messaging	✅	❌
To-do list	❌	✅
Real-time reporting	✅	✅
Multivariate testing	✅	✅
Unsubscribe database	❌	✅

If you’re a non e-commerce business, Mailchimp is the better option. Mailchimp also provides social media analytics that Klaviyo doesn’t. However, if you need advanced features and integration with third-party tools, opt for Klaviyo.

If you want advanced features with higher email deliverability, Campaign Refinery is the best choice.