Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Features, Pricing, and Free Plans Compared

Researching email marketing platforms to pick the one that works for you is more important than you may think. It’s not enough to just think that “it’ll do for now”, as switching platforms in the future may come with a lot of stress and budget drain. You need a platform that fits your exact current needs and anticipated future needs.

Many store owners compare Omnisend and Klaviyo because these two platforms lead the market. Both tools let you send emails and build automated messages to sell more products, increase retention, and more. You can use either one to achieve great results for businesses of any size. However, there is a catch: pricing. We’ll discuss that in detail later on.

Aside from pricing, the main difference also involves technical depth and learning curves. Some people assume that the most expensive platforms always work the best. We want to show a different picture.

Buying a 2-seat sports car to take your 3 kids to school is simply inefficient and inconvenient, even though it looks great. It’s the same with software. People often end up paying extra for features they don’t use when they could be achieving the same results and saving thousands of dollars every year for a similar tool.

Let’s look at how these two tools compare side by side. We will examine their core features, free plans, pricing models, and migration options.

Most valuable features

Email marketing platforms must have strong and reliable features to make your campaigns successful. Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer excellent tools to reach and convert your subscribers, but the approach is not the same.

Building automated workflows

Automations send emails to your subscribers based on their specific actions. You can set up a welcome email for new sign-ups, which greets them warmly and offers a starting discount. You can also send abandoned cart messages when a customer leaves items behind in their shopping cart. Order confirmation emails and shipping updates keep your buyers informed.

Omnisend provides a large library of pre-built workflow templates. You can use these templates to create a full automation instantly, and you don’t need to guess what works best as they’ve already built the optimal paths. If you want more customization, you can also use them as a starting base to build a larger workflow. You can even combine emails, SMS messages, and web push notifications into one single workflow for best results.

Klaviyo provides very strong automation features. You can build complex paths that change based on many different rules. This setup gives you a huge amount of control over the entire customer journey, but setting up these complex paths takes time and expertise that’s usually unnecessary for most online businesses. Many large companies that decide they need these niche capabilities, they often hire dedicated teams with specialized experience to handle these setups.

You might prefer a more intuitive platform if standard and advanced workflows completely cover your needs.

Adding products to emails

You use email marketing to sell your products, so the process of adding those products to your emails should naturally feel easy and fast. An intuitive email builder can save you hours of work every month.

Omnisend lets you add products directly from the email builder:

1. You select the product picker block.
2. A sidebar opens and connects directly to your online store.
3. You type the name of your product in the search bar.
4. You click on the product to add it to your email.
5. The builder automatically pulls the product name, image, description, price, and purchase link.

You can also use a dynamic product block, which automatically shows best-sellers, most viewed products, or new items to your recipients.

Klaviyo offers similar product features, but you need to create a product feed first:

1. You name the feed.
2. You select the catalog from a dropdown menu.
3. You decide the priority sequence of the shown products.
4. You configure fallback conditions.
5. You select additional filters to apply.
6. Then you create the product feed.

This process gives you more control, but it also requires more time and configuration. There’s also more options for dynamically-shown products. In short, Omnisend allows you to achieve the same result in half the time.

Segmenting your audience

Segmentation divides your customer list into smaller groups, so you can send specific messages to specific people. You might send a massive discount code to people who have not bought anything in two months. Alternatively, you can send a different email to your most loyal buyers.

Both platforms include fast AI segmentation tools. You type a simple text prompt, and the AI builds the exact segment in seconds. Omnisend handles standard and advanced segmentation needs perfectly: the platform works fast and keeps things organized. Klaviyo allows the same plus highly specific, data-heavy segment setups. Brands with extreme data requirements choose to pay a premium price for this exact control.

Free plans

Many stores start with a free plan to allow users to test the platform. A free plan lets you explore the dashboard and build your first campaigns to check if it works for you. Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer a free plan, but they handle feature access and customer support very differently.

Omnisend gives you unrestricted access to all features on the free plan. You can use the platform to its full potential without paying anything. You get full access to the AI tools, the automation builders, and the email templates. Customer support remains wide open, as well. You get 24/7 access to live chat and email support, so a real person can help you solve your problems at any time of day or night.

Klaviyo places tight limits on its free plan. Most of the AI tools sit behind a strict paywall, and Klaviyo restricts your customer support access severely. Free users only receive 60 days of email support, and you never get access to live chat unless you upgrade.

How pricing starts and changes

This is arguably the most important part of the review. By now, you may think “Well, so Omnisend is great but Klaviyo has deeper segmentation and automation capabilities, so I’ll go with this one just in case”. However, this “just in case” may cost you more than $400 of extra money every month, which adds up to thousands of dollars per year. Let’s see how the pricing scales for each platform:

Omnisend scales smoothly and keeps costs predictable. The cheapest base plan starts at $16 per month for 500 contacts. The plan price increases gradually based on the size of your contact list, and you can also switch the tier from Standard to Pro if you need global SMS messaging features. Otherwise, staying on the Standard plan is more than enough.

Klaviyo starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts. It unlocks AI features, predictive analytics, and removes the logo from your emails. Omnisend doesn’t, because their features were already available on the free plan.

While the difference may seem negligible now, let’s take a look at how the $4 difference changes as your store grows:

Contacts	Omnisend	Klaviyo
>500	$16/month	$20/month
>1,000	$20/month	$30/month
>2,500	$44/month	$60/month
>5,000	$81/month	$100/month
>10,000	$132/month	$150/month
>15,000	$207/month	$350/month
>20,000	$265/month	$375/month
>25,000	$282/month	$400/month
>30,000	$338/month	$500/month
>50,000	$413/month	$720/month
>75,000	$650/month	$1070/month
>100,000	$900/month	$1380/month
>150,000	$1456/month	$1955/month

The price differences extend beyond the base plans. Omnisend gives you a dedicated account expert when you reach $400 in monthly spending, and you maintain priority 24/7 live chat and email support.

Klaviyo limits live chat to business days on the Marketing (equivalent to Omnisend’s Standard) plan. Their email support team often takes one or two days to reply. If you want weekend support, you’ll need to purchase a higher-tier plan which is locked behind a sales call.

Also, if you wanted the extra power that comes with Klaviyo, you’d need to pay extra for that. More advanced analytics come at an additional $100-$587/month (based on contact count), and the advanced Klaviyo data platform costs additional $500+/month.

Migration services

Omnisend offers a free migration solution to help you move your store. You qualify for this service when you sign up for a plan of $250 per month or more. They assign an in-house specialist that handles your entire move and transfers your contacts, automations, segments, templates, and forms. The process takes 3-5 business days and you don’t have to lift a finger.

Klaviyo takes the traditional path and allows you to either do the migration yourself using their documentation, or refers you to agency partners that have their own prices.

Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Verdict

Both platforms offer strong choices for selling products online, but they cater to different business visions and technical needs. You can succeed with either tool if you use it correctly.

Klaviyo provides extremely deep data control, but brands that use it often employ dedicated data scientists and technical teams to handle it. You pay top dollar for complex segmentation and highly specific conditional automation branches. The steep learning curve and significantly higher pricing make Klaviyo an overkill choice for a standard ecommerce store.

Omnisend gives you massive power, speed, and efficiency at the same time. The platform works perfectly for 95% of ecommerce brands, and it scales for large, growing brands with international audiences in a more flexible way. If you don’t need niche features, then Omnisend delivers a high-quality user experience and saves you a significant amount of money as you grow.