Email Marketing

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Full Comparison

Published October 7, 2026

Klaviyo and Mailchimp are both sold as email platforms, but one is a B2C customer database with email attached and the other is email software that grew outwards. The pricing pages tell you that before the feature lists do.

Put the two pricing pages side by side and the comparison is half finished before you read a feature list.

Mailchimp shows a plan table. Contact bands from 0-500 up to 1,000,000+, a free plan under 250 contacts, Essentials from $13/month, Standard from $20/month, Premium at $297.50 per month for 12 months and then from $350/month. Pick your band, read your price.

Klaviyo shows a free plan and a button that says Build a plan. The free tier is specified precisely: up to 250 active profiles, 500 email sends/month, $5 of mobile messages/month, $5 of Composer usage/month. Past that, the paid figure is not printed. You configure a plan across Marketing, Data and Analytics, Service and the AI agents, and the price is whatever that comes to.

Those are two different sales models, and they tell you which company thinks it is selling a product and which thinks it is selling a platform.

At a Glance

Klaviyo describes itself as a B2C CRM. The organising unit is a customer profile, not a mailing list, and revenue attribution for campaigns is in the free plan rather than reserved for a higher tier. Channels run wider than email: SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, mobile app messaging. There is a Helpdesk that shares the same profile as marketing, and Composer, an AI agent that builds campaigns and flows and answers questions about your data.

Mailchimp is email marketing software with automation and some adjacent tools. Its plans are built around contacts and sends, SMS and MMS are add-ons rather than channels, and the whole product is pitched at someone who wants to send a good campaign without learning a data model first. The pricing page offers to recommend a plan if you answer a few questions, which is a fair signal of who it expects to be reading.

Both are credible. They are credible for different businesses, and the gap is wider than the category name suggests.

Pricing Comparison

The Klaviyo column is thin because Klaviyo’s pricing page is thin on figures, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the research. If a published price is part of how you evaluate software, Mailchimp has already won this section and Klaviyo has decided it does not want to compete there.

Two footnotes worth reading before you budget either one. Mailchimp’s plan prices carry a dagger pointing at overage terms: exceed your contact or email send limit on a paid plan and overages apply, while on the free plan sending is paused instead. And the Premium figure of $297.50 per month is explicitly for 12 months, after which the plan starts at $350/month, so the second year is the real number.

On Klaviyo’s side, the free plan’s $5 allowances are the detail to notice. They are not a trial of SMS, they are a monthly budget, which means a small store can genuinely test text messaging and the AI agent before deciding anything. Few free plans in this category include a paid channel at all.

When to Choose Klaviyo

Choose Klaviyo when the email list is attached to a shop.

The reason is the data model. Klaviyo is organised around profiles that carry order history and site behaviour, which means a segment can be “bought twice, nothing in ninety days, browsed the new range last week” without an integration project. Flows trigger on what people did in the store. Campaign results come back as attributed revenue. None of that is exotic any more, but it is the difference between email as a broadcast channel and email as a revenue channel, and a store that treats it as the first is leaving money alone.

The multichannel case follows from the same model. Because the profile is the unit, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and app messages are channels against one record rather than separate tools with separate lists. For a B2C brand where a text outperforms an email on certain campaigns, running both from one platform with one view of consent and frequency is worth real money and real hours.

Klaviyo’s own free plan is also an unusually honest trial. 250 profiles will not run a business, but 500 email sends plus $5 of mobile messages and $5 of Composer usage per month is enough to build a real flow, send a real text and see attributed revenue before paying anything. Use it properly before you build a plan, because building the plan is where the cost appears.

The caveat is that Klaviyo is a more demanding product. It expects someone to think about segmentation and flow design. A store that signs up and sends monthly newsletters is paying platform prices for Mailchimp’s job.

When to Choose Mailchimp

Choose Mailchimp when the email is not selling products, or when the price has to be knowable.

The first case is more common than the ecommerce-centric coverage of this category suggests. A clinic sending appointment reminders, a consultancy sending a monthly note, a school, a restaurant with a mailing list, a newsletter writer: none of them have orders to attribute, which means most of what Klaviyo charges for would sit idle. Mailchimp does this work competently at Essentials from $13/month, and the learning curve is short enough that one person can own it alongside their actual job.

The second case is about procurement, not features. Mailchimp publishes contact bands and starting prices, so you can model next year before signing anything. For a small business where a surprise invoice is a genuine problem, a published table beats a plan builder regardless of which product is technically stronger.

Mailchimp’s upper tier deserves a note in its favour too. Premium includes unlimited contacts and priority support, so a large list on a simple sending pattern has a ceiling on cost in a way that profile-based pricing does not. If you have 400,000 contacts and send a weekly email, that is a very different shape of problem from 40,000 contacts and twelve behavioural flows, and Mailchimp is the better fit for the first.

Where They’re Genuinely Different

The deepest difference is what each platform thinks a contact is. To Mailchimp, a contact is an address in a band that sets your price. To Klaviyo, a profile is a record with a history that the platform reasons about. Everything else follows: why Klaviyo’s segmentation is stronger, why its reporting is in revenue, why it also sells a helpdesk, and why its price cannot be printed on a page.

The second difference is where the channels sit. Klaviyo’s free plan includes a mobile message allowance; Mailchimp sells SMS and MMS as an add-on to every tier. That is not a small distinction. A platform that treats text as a channel will give you consent handling, frequency rules and reporting across channels. A platform that treats it as an add-on will give you a way to send texts.

The third is the direction each product is growing. Klaviyo is adding AI agents, a data platform and a service desk, which means it is becoming the system of record for a B2C business. Mailchimp is staying close to campaigns and automations. If you want one place that knows everything about a customer, that argues for Klaviyo. If you want software that sends email well and does not grow into your stack, that argues for Mailchimp.

One practical warning on switching, since this comparison is usually read by someone already on one of them: moving a list is easy, and moving the automations is not. Flows, triggers, segment definitions and templates all have to be rebuilt by hand, and the deliverability of a newly warmed sending domain is its own project. Budget weeks, not an afternoon, and do not plan the migration for a quarter when the campaigns matter.

The Honest Verdict

If you run an ecommerce store with enough volume that email revenue is a line somebody watches, use Klaviyo. The profile model, the store integrations and revenue attribution on the free plan are the right foundation, and the platform will grow in the direction a B2C business grows. Build the plan early so the cost is a decision rather than a discovery.

If your email is not selling products, or if you need to know the price before you commit, use Mailchimp. Essentials from $13/month and Standard from $20/month cover an enormous amount of real-world email marketing, and the published bands mean nobody has to ask the vendor what next year costs.

The test that settles it: if someone asked you what last month’s email campaigns earned, would you want an answer in revenue or in open rate? If revenue, and you have the orders to attribute, Klaviyo is built for that question. If open rate is the honest answer because there is nothing to attribute, you are looking at the wrong half of this comparison and Mailchimp will serve you better for less.