So, you’re ready to take your email marketing to the next level. You’ve heard of Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign, but which do you choose?
Without testing the tools yourself, it can be tricky to tell which is right for your business. That’s exactly why we’ve tested and reviewed them for you.
In this side-by-side ActiveCampaign Vs Klaviyo comparison, we cover most important features like email design, automation, and audience segmentation. We also examine pricing, customer support, and the pros and cons of each. By the end, you’ll know which platform aligns with your marketing goals.
Note: These platforms update and upgrade their features and functionality all the time. Our email agency is ESP-agnostic. We don’t resell any tools or ESPs. The comparison presented below is based on my experience.
ActiveCampaign Vs Klaviyo: Pros & Cons
In this section, we’ll examine the main pros and cons of each platform.
ActiveCampaign
Pros
- Can be integrated with more than 900 third-party apps.
- Gives you access to predictive analytics.
- Has an advanced segmentation feature that allows you to use tags to segment your audience and trigger workflows.
- Comes with more than 250 highly customizable email templates, so designing emails is a breeze.
- Comes with pre-designed automation templates for things like abandoned cart recovery emails.
Cons
- It doesn’t have a free plan.
- The interface is less user-friendly than Klaviyo.
Klaviyo
Pros
- Gives you access to predictive analytics so you can view metrics like churn risk and customer lifetime value.
- The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.
- Klaviyo is great for creating email forms and it makes form customization really straightforward.
- Although it has fewer integrations than ActiveCampaign, it still has over 300.
- Unlike ActiveCampaign, it has a free plan that gives you access to the majority of its core features.
Cons
- The segmentation feature is relatively limited compared to ActiveCampaign.
- You only get 100+ email templates.
- Its automation tool doesn’t allow you to set multiple triggers for each workflow.
Who Should Choose ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is most suited to people who run eCommerce businesses and need access to a very powerful email marketing platform.
It’s a particularly good choice if you want to focus on segmenting your audience and automating your workflows. Although you can use Klaviyo for this as well, ActiveCampaign’s email marketing automation and segmentation features are more advanced.
It’s also the ideal tool for you if you’re looking for email marketing software with a huge number of integrations. Trust us – there aren’t many email marketing platforms out there that can seamlessly integrate with over 900 third-party apps!
The only downside to ActiveCampaign is that its interface can be hard to navigate. Additionally, with so many features to get to grips with, the learning curve can be pretty steep for beginners. So, if you’re totally new to email marketing, it might not be the best choice.
Who Should Choose Klaviyo?
Klaviyo is a more advanced eCommerce email marketing solution than many other options on the market. Yet, the majority of its core features, like automation and segmentation, are more basic than those offered by ActiveCampaign.
It’s still a great option if you run an online store and want to create an email marketing campaign that’ll grow your subscriber list and increase revenue. It’s a great tool for designing emails, analyzing performance, and building email forms. It’s also good for automating workflows, segmenting your audience, and integrating with third-party apps.
The learning curve for Klaviyo is slightly gentler than it is for ActiveCampaign. As a result, it might be a better option if you don’t have much email marketing experience.
If you’d rather avoid the hassle altogether, our Klaviyo Agency can build an effective Klaviyo email marketing campaign for you.
ActiveCampaign Vs Klaviyo: Features Comparison
Whenever you assess a piece of email marketing software, the first and most important thing you need to evaluate is its features. These are the tools that’ll help you create an effective campaign, and you need to ensure the platform has all the features your business needs.
In this section, we provide a side-by-side comparison of the main ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo features. You can then decide which has the best features for your specific marketing goals.
Or, you can take advantage of InboxArmy’s ESP vendor evaluation and migration services. This will save you the time and effort of assessing various ESPs yourself. Instead, we’ll do the hard work for you and ensure you’re matched with the perfect ESP for your business.
Email design
Designing emails is the foundation of any effective email marketing campaign. So, it’s vital for an email marketing tool to get this right. Overall, we’d say both platforms have done well on this front.
ActiveCampaign gives you access to over 250 email templates that are highly customizable using its email editor. If you’d rather design your emails from scratch, you have the option to use custom HTML code or plain layouts.
If you’re an eCommerce business owner, you can use the templates in its “sell a product” category to design emails quickly to target potential eCommerce customers.
In terms of the number of email templates, Klaviyo is a bit more limited. With its paid plans, you get access to just over 100 templates. Yet, this doesn’t mean Klaviyo falls behind ActiveCampaign in this area.
Klaviyo’s email form design feature is truly excellent. The form templates are great and easily customizable with images and text. You can also choose between four different form styles: full page, popup, flyout, and embed.
Winner: If you value having templates that make it quick and easy to design emails, then ActiveCampaign is probably the best option for you. If, however, you want to design customized email forms that can increase engagement and conversions, Klaviyo will fit the bill.
Score: Activecampaign 1, Klaviyo 1
User-friendliness
No matter how good a piece of email marketing software is, if its interface is complex and confusing, it’s barely worth using. Fortunately, neither ActiveCampaign nor Klaviyo have that problem.
Klaviyo’s interface is fairly minimal (in a good way) and you can access specific features via user-friendly dropdown menus. For such an advanced email marketing tool, it’s fairly easy to navigate and its feature set is satisfyingly streamlined.
ActiveCampaign’s interface is also easy to use but the navigation is a little clunkier, so beginners might struggle to get used to it.
Let’s say you select a main feature from the left sidebar within the platform, for example, like “Automation”. A secondary sidebar then opens up with the settings for that feature, such as “Pages”.
Winner: This may seem like a very minor point – but it can really slow you down when using the tool. Plus, the sheer number of features in the interface makes ActiveCampaign a bit daunting at first, especially if you’re not used to email marketing.
Score: Activecampaign 1, Klaviyo 2
If you’re struggling to get used to both platforms, you might want to try one with a really simple interface and a very gentle learning curve, like Mailchimp. To see how it compares to ActiveCampaign, take a look at our ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp comparison.
Marketing Automation
One of the primary reasons to invest in an email marketing platform is so that you can create automated workflows. Whether you run an eCommerce store, an SEO blog, or anything else, email marketing automation is an essential part of your marketing strategy.
When it comes to automation, ActiveCampaign wins in this comparison. Why? Because it allows you to automate a wide array of different automation workflows. Plus, it makes it super easy to create automations with its pre-designed templates called “automation recipes”.
These “recipes” include templates for:
- Automated abandoned cart emails
- Automated welcome emails
- Automated opt-in incentive emails
- Automated drip campaigns (a sequence of emails sent out over 7 days)
- Automated targeted product follow-up emails
- Automated after-purchase follow-up emails
Most of these automations are designed for eCommerce businesses. However, these templates aren’t just useful for eCommerce stores. For instance, there’s a template for automated emails that send out new blog posts from your RSS feed to subscribers. You can also set up multiple triggers for each of your automations.
Klaviyo’s automation feature isn’t quite as advanced. There aren’t as many templates and, unlike ActiveCampaign, you can’t set multiple triggers for each workflow.
Winner: If you need an eCommerce email marketing solution that enables advanced automation, we’d recommend choosing ActiveCampaign over Klaviyo.
Score: Activecampaign 2, Klaviyo 2
Integrations 
If you run an eCommerce business, both tools integrate with major eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento.
In terms of integration numbers, however, ActiveCampaign is a clear winner. While Klaviyo has more than 300 integrations, ActiveCampaign boasts over 900. We can’t list them all here, but some of its best integrations include:
- Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
- Postmark
- Zapier
- ClickFunnels
- BulkSMS
- CallRail
- DocuSign
- eBay
- Facebook Lead Ads
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
While Klaviyo offers fewer integrations, there is a workaround for this. Let’s say you have an app in your tech stack that currently can’t integrate with Klaviyo. Thankfully, Klaviyo does integrate with Zapier. Therefore, if your app is supported by Zapier (highly likely as it supports over 5,000 apps), you can use Zapier to connect the app to Klaviyo.
Winner: By the way, Klaviyo’s 300+ integrations still mean it outperforms many other email marketing platforms out there.
Score: Activecampaign 3, Klaviyo 2
Check out our Omnisend vs Klaviyo review to see how the two platforms’ integrations compare.
Analytics
One of the best things about Klaviyo is its predictive analytics feature. This is particularly beneficial if you run an online store.
This feature uses a mix of machine learning and AI to predict future customer behavior based on historical data. As a result, you get insights like churn risk prediction, customer lifetime value, and the expected date of the next order.
This helps eCommerce businesses create highly targeted email marketing campaigns, improve customer retention, and maximize revenue. Additionally, you can view more standard email marketing metrics like clicks, open rates, and bounce rates.
ActiveCampaign gives you access to predictive analytics, too. As with Klaviyo, this is really helpful if you run an eCommerce business, but it’s also great for content creators.
For example, ActiveCampaign’s predictive analytics help you evaluate audience interaction data. This gives you a window into user preferences and can be used to predict future content trends.
ActiveCampaign’s analytics feature also gives you detailed reports with stats for your:
- Automations
- Campaigns
- CRM
- Contacts
- eCommerce sales
And much more.
Winner: In this area, we’d say it’s pretty much a tie between the two platforms.
Score: Activecampaign 4, Klaviyo 3
In fact, these tools have better analytics than many other platforms on the market. Interested to see how their analytics compare to other platforms? Take a look at our ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot review or our Klaviyo & Sendinblue comparison.
Segmentation
Segmentation divides your subscribers into smaller, more specific groups, which you can then target with tailored email marketing campaigns. It’s a key component of all successful email marketing strategies. That’s why segmentation features are important to consider when choosing a platform.
Both ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo’s segmenting features are primarily aimed at eCommerce business owners. They allow you to easily pull data from your online store like revenue, product quantity, and product items. Plus, you can pull images of your products from your site and insert them into your emails. Both platforms also allow you to segment your subscriber lists using tags, lists, and custom fields.
The tagging system in Klaviyo is more limited than that of ActiveCampaign. For example, with Klaviyo, you can’t apply a tag to a user if they’ve already entered a workflow, and you can’t use tags to trigger a workflow.
This isn’t the case with ActiveCampaign. You can segment your audience using tags that will trigger specific workflows. For instance, you could use a “Webinar Registered” tag that will trigger a workflow to send webinar confirmation emails.
Winner: Segmentation is a vital feature for any good piece of email marketing software, and ActiveCampaign comes out on top here.
Score: Activecampaign 5, Klaviyo 3
Customer support
There isn’t much to split the two platforms when it comes to providing customer support. They both offer live chat support on weekdays and email support on weekday nights and weekends.
Winner: Additionally, Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign offer extensive knowledge databases where you can find informative tutorials. This helps flatten the learning curve and makes onboarding smoother for new customers.
Score: Activecampaign 5, Klaviyo 4
ActiveCampaign Vs Klaviyo: Pricing & Free Plans
Almost every email marketing software you’ll come across will have different pricing tiers. Simply put, the more you pay, the more features and contacts you get.
Unsurprisingly, this is the case for both Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign. However, ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan whereas Klaviyo does, and it’s reasonably generous.
Still, if you’re planning to build a successful email marketing campaign that boosts your revenue, you’ll probably need one of the paid plans. So, let’s see how the Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign pricing plans stack up against each other.
Note: The prices below are for users with up to 1,000 contacts. As you’d expect, the prices quickly increase the more contacts you have.
ActiveCampaign
- Plus Plan: $49 per month
- Pro Plan: $79 per month
- Enterprise Plan: $145 per month
Klaviyo
- Email: $30 per month
- Email and SMS: $45 per month
User Reviews
Reading expert reviews (like this one) is an excellent way to assess the quality of a platform. Yet, it’s also important to pay attention to what existing customers have to say about it.
That’s why we’ve taken a look at two of the best sources for user reviews, Trustpilot and Capterra, to get an idea of how customers view ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo.
ActiveCampaign user reviews
On Trustpilot, ActiveCampaign has a 3.6 out of 5 stars rating from 862 reviews. This indicates that, overall, customers perceive the platform to be average.
On Capterra, it has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars from 2,425 reviews. Based on our experience of using ActiveCampaign, we’d say this is a fairer rating.
We noticed that ActiveCampaign’s automation features are often positively reviewed by users. For example, take a look at this Capterra review from Saskia:
“We’ve seen significant efficiency gains thanks to ActiveCampaign. They have made it simple to set up automated email sequences, or “drip campaigns,” that will keep our subscribers and viewers interested. The ability to generate sales, set up reminders, and get rid of inactive contacts has all been aided by this.”
Klaviyo user reviews
Klaviyo has a lower rating than ActiveCampaign on Trustpilot with just 3.2 stars out of 5. However, it should be noted that there have only been 174 reviews at the time of writing. This means that it’s easy for the rating to be skewed by a handful of negative reviews.
Like ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo also has a 4.6 out of 5 rating on Capterra, but this is still only from 430 reviews.
The platform has particularly positive reviews from users who run eCommerce stores, as this Capterra review from Grant S. shows:
“It has been great! I’ve really enjoyed Klaviyo and think that it is the strongest ecom email platform on the market for Shopify merchants. The customization of emails is relatively easy, it has robust feature sets for additions like reviews and SMS, and their flows are a hugely important piece to generate passive income.”
ActiveCampaign Vs Klaviyo: The Final Word
In the end, the email marketing tool that’s right for you depends on the specific needs of your business. Both ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo are great options for eCommerce businesses. However, if you need more advanced automation and segmentation features for highly targeted campaigns, we’d recommend choosing ActiveCampaign.
If you’re closer to a beginner, you’ll probably prefer Klaviyo’s streamlined and user-friendly interface. In comparison, ActiveCampaign takes a bit more getting used to. Plus, unlike ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo offers a free plan which means it may be more suitable for inexperienced marketers on a tight budget.
It’s worth noting that ActiveCampaign does offer a 14-day free trial. So, if you’re unsure which one is right for you, try both of them for free before you make up your mind.
Klaviyo Vs ActiveCampaign FAQs
What email marketing metrics can you track with Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign?
Some of the metrics you can track with Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign include:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Open rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Receive/Delivery rate
- Likelihood of purchase
- Predicted date of next order
- Customer lifetime value predictions
Can I create landing pages with ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo?
You can use ActiveCampaign to create landing pages, but not Klaviyo. ActiveCampaign includes a feature called “Pages” which is a built-in landing page builder tool.
The tool has drag-and-drop functionality which makes it really easy to customize your landing page designs and add forms.
Can I use either platform to create SMS marketing campaigns?
Yes, both ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo support SMS marketing campaigns. ActiveCampaign allows for two-way SMS conversations with your subscribers. You can also automate and segment your SMS subscriber list as you would with your email list.
Klaviyo allows for automated and segmented SMS messaging too, but it doesn’t support two-way messaging.
