Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: A Feature by Feature Showdown – Who Wins?
When looking at starting or upgrading your email marketing for your eCommerce business, you’ll most likely be comparing two of the top email service providers (ESPs): Omnisend and Klaviyo.
I’ll give you the shock ending now: Omnisend and Klaviyo have a lot of feature parity, so on paper, their features are roughly equal. However, a list of features in a technical sense isn’t everything that matters.
Which is easier to use or to get started with?
Which is more flexible?
Which is more effective?
Which ESP provides better customer support when something goes wrong or you can’t figure a feature out?
And, for many, a crucial question: which gives you a better value for money?
In my analysis today (and with all due respect to Einstein), I won’t do a lot of relativity and “it all depends” but will come to a conclusion.
A conclusion where there is one clear winner.
So, just read through the sections not just to see which email service provider is the winner in the Omnisend vs. Klaviyo standoff but also to understand why it is so.
I will walk you through this comparison using these sections one by one:
Table of Contents
Email builder showdown
Winner: Omnisend
No surprises here: the core of an email marketing provider is the email builder or editor they’re using. It’s how you build your emails and actualize the vision in your head.
If this fails in any way, you’ll find it pretty hard to create email campaigns — which is the bread and butter of your email marketing strategy.
Omnisend and Klaviyo both offer a drag-and-drop builder that makes it easier to create emails.
In Klaviyo’s builder, you can add basic customizable text, images, columns, buttons, and tables. You can also add products directly from your store, which is a time-saver.
Some of the eCommerce-related additions will need to be done manually, such as creating unique discount codes (so that customers can’t share them).
Omnisend’s builder, on the other hand, has a lot more customization options. Besides the same basics listed above, you can also add products directly to your email with the Product Listing feature.
It also has more eCommerce-friendly features, such as unique discount codes, gift boxes and scratch cards that can engage and activate your customers.
| Email Builder Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
|---|---|---|
| Drag and Drop Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Email templates | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile responsive | Yes | Yes |
| A/B Testing | Yes | Yes |
| Saveable content blocks | Yes | Yes |
| Product recommendations | For certain categories | Yes |
| Discount codes | Yes | Yes |
| Gamification | No | Yes |
Building your email list
Winner: Omnisend
Email marketing would be pretty pointless if you didn’t have a subscriber list. Capturing subscribers is crucial, and good ESPs will have email capture & lead magnet features.
Both Klaviyo and Omnisend have features to help you build your list from visitors on your site. Both have targeted popup options so that you can define specifically on which pages your popups should appear, the delay or scroll depth, and so on.
However, that’s where Klaviyo’s powers stop.
Omnisend goes further, offering landing pages that are shown to convert more than other types of signup forms.
Omnisend also has the gamified Wheel of Fortune signup form that offers visitors a fun way to sign up.
For these reasons, Omnisend is the clear winner.
| Email List Building Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
|---|---|---|
| Popups (immediate, exit-intent, on specific URL) | Yes | Yes |
| Landing Pages | No | Yes |
| Gamified Popups | No | Yes |
Segmentation and targeting
Winner: Both; A tie.
You can’t send the same message to your entire audience; instead, segmenting them into subgroups means you can send more targeted emails.
Both Klaviyo and Omnisend offer robust segmentation, allowing you to slice and dice your contact list based on profile data, campaign activity or shopping behavior.
They also have the ability to sync your segments with Facebook Custom Audiences so that you can identify audiences similar to your segments. So, for example, if you’re looking to show your ads to people who are more likely to buy from you, you can use a segment of your best existing customers.
However, only Omnisend offers the same syncing options for Google retargeting ads without the use of third-party tools.
| Segmentation Features | Klaviyo | Omnisend |
|---|---|---|
| Profile data | Yes | Yes |
| Campaign activity | Yes | Yes |
| Shopping behavior | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Properties (tags) | Yes | Yes |
| Facebook Audiences | Yes | Yes |
| Google Retargeting Ads | Yes (with third-party tools) | Yes |
Automation workflows
Winner: Omnisend (more channels, better-abandoned cart triggers)
Omnisend and Klaviyo have similar automation workflow capabilities. The most visible difference, however, is in the way they structure those workflows.
Klaviyo offers up a powerful, user-friendly automation workflow builder. You can create workflows with splits and triggers to build very complex workflows.
Omnisend’s builder is equally as powerful, although it comes with the added benefit of being able to add in different channels, such as SMS and even push notifications.
That way you can reach your customers in various ways, and you can build pretty complex workflows to find better ways to engage and activate your customers.
One crucial difference is the way that Klaviyo and Omnisend track cart abandonment. Omnisued uses cookie-based tracking (for Shopify stores), which means that it’s able to identify shoppers earlier on, when they’ve added products to their cart.
Klaviyo only identifies users later at the checkout. That means Klaviyo tracks fewer abandoned carts, since fewer people get to checkout compared to those that add products to their carts.
That means that Omnisend’s cart abandonment triggers are more likely to result in better win-back rates. Because of that, and having more channels available to use in workflows, Omnisend beats Klaviyo decisively.
Customer support
Winner: Omnisend, by a mile
Klaviyo’s customer support is widely known to be lacking.
In fact, their customer support is limited to a smaller portion of their paying customers.
Even worse, Klaviyo customers have limited access to support during weekends and holidays (when customers really need fast support, such as on Black Friday). Klaviyo customer support works only from 6am-10pm on weekdays, and 10am-4pm on weekends. Klaviyo has also shut down their live chat for weeks at a time due to an “upgrade.”
Customers looking for support are often told to watch their tutorials or read their knowledge base articles.
Klaviyo customers have complained that, even with dedicated Customer Success Managers (CSMs) that start at $2,000/month, they’re limited to meeting only twice per quarter.
Omnisend, on the other hand, has possibly the best customer support in the industry. They have a 4.7 /5 rating on Shopify’s app store, with nearly 4,000 5-star reviews.
Even better, Omnisend support is 24/7, meaning they don’t take breaks on weekends or holidays, when customers really need help.
Omnisend CSMs are available for customers paying at least $400/month, and they have unlimited access to their CSMs who proactively provide reporting insights and regular business reviews.
Pricing
Winner: Omnisend
Klaviyo recently announced that they’d be increasing their pricing by up to 60% for some of their customers. This is even worse when considering that the global macroeconomic situation is steadily worsening.
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer three plans: a free version, a standard paid and a premium one.
The standard offering is for those businesses focusing only on email, while the premium plan is optimized for both email and SMS.
Because the pricing plans are so similar, it’s easier to do a price comparison. However, there are two important things to consider:
- Omnisend’s SMS are global, so you can text subscribers in any country. Klaviyo only allows you to text to four countries: the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
- With Omnisend, you get a CSM if you pay at least $400/month. On Klaviyo, that threshold is a whopping $2,000
Let’s look at some different scenarios based on your contact size.
Note: Klaviyo’s premium plan has a separate pricing option for SMS. To keep it consistent, I kept both the number of contacts and monthly SMS the same for premium plans.
| Contact size | Klaviyo Email | Omnisend Standard | Klaviyo Email and SMS | Omnisend Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $45 15,000 emails 150 free SMS | $20 12,000 emails 60 free SMS | $60 15,000 emails 1,250 SMS | $59 Unlimited email 3,900 SMS |
| 10,000 | $175 105,000 emails 150 free SMS | $115 120,000 emails 60 free SMS | $265 105,000 emails 10,000 SMS | $150 Unlimited emails 10,000 SMS |
| 50,000 | $790 550,000 emails 150 free SMS | $330 600,000 emails 60 free SMS | $1,150 550,000 emails 40,000 SMS | $650 Unlimited emails 43,000 SMS |
| 100,000 | $1,440 1,050,000 emails 150 free SMS | $720 1,200,000 emails 60 free SMS | $2,115 1,050,000 emails 75,000 SMS | $1,150 Unlimited emails 76,000 SMS |
As you can see, Klaviyo is consistently more expensive compared to Omnisend. In fact, the bigger the contact size, the bigger the difference gets.
For 100,000 contacts, you’re spending double on Klaviyo to get less email and SMS.
All Pro plans on Omnisend have unlimited email, so Omnisend’s Pro plan will always beat Klaviyo’s.
By the way, this is the pricing before Klaviyo is set to increase pricing. The winner is clear here.
Conclusion: Omnisend vs. Klaviyo
As I said above, there’s no “it depends” here.
Here are the section-wise winners:
- Email Builder Showdown: Omnisend
- Building Email Lists: Omnisend
- Segmentation & Targeting: Tie
- Automation Workflows: Omnisend
- Customer Support: Omnisend
- Pricing: Omnisend
The winner is clear: Omnisend beats Klaviyo on the features.
But, more importantly, Omnisend beats Klaviyo in terms of their support (which is poor on Klaviyo) and, for some, the most important aspect: being consistently cheaper than Klaviyo for pretty much every contact size.
When deciding on something as critical to your eCommerce success as email marketing, you’ll probably want something that’s strong, flexible, effective, and won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
And that’s Omnisend.