Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Which is a Better Choice in 2025?

Choosing the right tool for your e-commerce marketing strategy can greatly affect its outcome. That being said, selecting the tool that matches your business needs allows you to drive customer interactions seamlessly. 

Mailchimp and Klaviyo are a couple of excellent email marketing and automation tools that are built for online businesses, letting them optimize their marketing efforts to achieve better results. However, picking the correct platform requires going through its features, functionality, usage cost, and how it can help you hit your marketing goals.

Online businesses require robust marketing features to help them engage prospects across the customer journey and encourage them to take actions that could lead to conversions down the road.

With that said, in the detailed comparison, I will review both Klaviyo and Mailchimp, how they stack against each other in terms of capabilities, and which one is better suited for your online store.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: important elements 

Before I start comparing these two platforms in detail, let’s look at some of the key aspects of Klaviyo and Mailchimp:

Essential features within the free plan

In Klaviyo’s free package, you can access necessary email marketing functionality if you are a small business with a limited number of customers. For example, you can add up to 250 contacts and send 500 emails per month. On the other hand, Mailchimp's free plan lets you save up to 500 contacts and send 1000 emails/month or 500/day. 

Contact management

Managing customer data is an essential part of an effective e-commerce marketing strategy. Klaviyo excels in advanced contact management with behavior-based tagging and deep integration with e-commerce platforms. Plus, it allows you to track customer interactions in real-time and create highly personalized marketing campaigns. 

Mailchimp offers you a straightforward contact management system with audience segmentation, tags, and workflow automation, making it easy for new users to engage with their customers.

Ease of use

Klaviyo is a slightly more complex platform that comes with a highly customizable experience with advanced automation, segmentation, and data-driven insights, making it ideal for your r-commerce looking for deeper customer and sales engagement. 

Mailchimp is often praised for its beginner-friendly interface, offering a simple drag-and-drop email builder and pre-designed templates that make campaign creation quick and intuitive. It is a great option if you are for small business or a beginner using these kinds of tools.

Although Klaviyo and Mailchimp are both great options for your online business, you cannot use both of them at the same time. Also, the features offered by both of these platforms might not be a great fit for your unique e-commerce needs. This is why I will also compare Zixflow alongside these tools to give you one more option to select from. 

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp vs. Zixflow

All of these tools have their unique strengths and weaknesses ranging from email marketing to automating follow-ups. That being said, let’s start with the most important aspect of a marketing automation tool, email marketing. 

Email marketing capabilities

Klaviyo is one of the top email marketing automation solutions built with the sole purpose of helping e-commerce businesses kickstart their marketing initiatives with personalized emails that grab attention and get sales. 

Additionally, Klaviyo provides a robust email template builder to design customizable emails. Using its drag-and-drop functionality and custom HTML for advanced users, you can experiment with various designs and body content to run email marketing campaigns that actually drive results. 

Mailchimp also provides powerful email marketing features that come with a user-friendly interface to let you get started with your marketing efforts quickly. Being a beginner-friendly solution, you can effortlessly segment your audience into smaller, more personalized marketing lists to send tailored emails. 

Similar to Klavyio, Mailchimp seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce sites, such as Shopify or WooCommerce. This way, you can manage your e-commerce outreach for various use cases like abandoned carts, follow-ups, or exclusive offers from a single location without switching between multiple tools, resulting in increased sales efficiency.

Zixflow, unlike both Klaviyo and Mailchimp, includes multichannel promotional capabilities that go beyond just email marketing. With traditional and modern e-commerce marketing channels like WhatsApp, RCS, SMS, and email, Zixflow enables you to deliver an omnichannel customer experience across the complete customer journey. 

On top of being a multichannel platform, Zixflow gives you the capabilities to design your own marketing emails and messages. Using the no-code editor, you can create visually appealing messages with the purpose of engaging leads and converting them later. 

Marketing automation

Automating your outreach is crucial if you want to stay in touch with your customers throughout the sales funnel. Plus, by automating your messages, you can ensure valuable information is delivered on time, greatly increasing your chances of getting conversion. 

Klaviyo is known for its powerful data-driven automation and AI-powered systems, allowing e-commerce brands like yours to create highly personalized customer journeys based on their real-time behavior and purchase history. 

Moreover, due to its deep integration functionality, Klaviyo lets you set up custom triggers for your automated flows to send relevant messages at the right time. Messages like welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, post-purchase follow-ups, or retargeting campaigns can be completely automated. 

In contrast to Klaviyo, Mailchimp’s automation features let you streamline customer engagement with personalized emails across the stages of the sales pipeline, starting from initial interaction to post-purchase engagement. 

Mailchimp comes with 70+ ready-made marketing automation templates that you can customize according to your needs. Using these templates, you will be able to automate various aspects of your e-commerce marketing, all from a unified marketing solution. 

On top of usual marketing automation workflows, Zixflow allows you to automate repetitive e-commerce tasks like pulling data from external sources and organizing it automatically into lists for tailored segmentation. 

Furthermore, the drag and drop automation builder of Zixflow makes it super easy to set up flows for optimized e-commerce operations. Similar to Klaviyo, the workflow editor of Zixflow also lets you set up flows in such a way that you can respond to your customers’ actions. For example, if your customer sign up to your platform, you can send a sequence of personalized welcome messages, bringing new users up to speed about your offerings. 

Contact management

Running marketing campaigns requires not only robust marketing features but equally dynamic content management. That is why, the platform you choose had to have the required CRM functionality to let you handle your customer data from one place. 

Klaviyo, apart from its proactive marketing automation features, comes with advanced contact management with a focus on deep data integration and segmentation. 

The native CDP solution of Klaviyo allows you to not only manage data but also utilize the AI engine to design tailored customer journeys depending on their past behaviors, buying history, and browsing patterns. 

Although Mailchimp also includes a CRM, it is not as robust as Klaviyo or as customizable as Zixflow. The CRM is there for you to manage your contacts and segment them into lists for effective outreach. Also, you can micromanage your contacts using custom tags so that it would be easy for your team members to locate them quickly. 

Additionally, Mailchimp’s AI-driven platform helps you clean and manage your marketing lists, reducing duplicate contacts and improving deliverability. It also provides you with in-depth, predictive insights like customer lifetime value (CLV) and purchase likelihood to enable you to refine your e-commerce marketing strategies. 

As I said, Mailchimp’s contact management capabilities are as advanced as Klaviyo’s. However, it makes up for this fact by giving you the ability to link it with an external CRM solution. 

When it comes to managing contacts, Zixflow’s in-build CRM goes above and beyond simply saving customer information. The CRM is fully-customizable, meaning you can mould it to store various kinds of data and not just basic customer details. 

For example, you can create custom AI fields to enrich your data with the help of our AI system to generate tailored greetings which can be copied and sent to contacts within seconds. Plus, by leveraging the Email Finder and Validation features, you can find and verify the accuracy of the email addresses. 

Campaign analytics

You can measure sales and user interaction over emails using Klaviyo's analytics, which provides a comprehensive picture of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You can also generate reports with certain parameters and time periods using its analytics panel. 

What’s more, you may configure notifications to alert you of problems with your outreach, such as bounce rates or spam reports, allowing you to rectify the problem before it gets too big.

What makes Klaviyo stand apart from other e-commerce automation tools is its predictive analytics. This feature can forecast expected marketing costs and attrition as well as predict the dates of the next purchase by analyzing the revenue and customer data for your online business. 

Using this information, you can develop highly targeted advertising campaigns for users that best fit your ICP, enabling you to identify sales qualified leads early. 

Although Mailchimp has several great reporting and analytical dashboards, a lot of those are only available in its upper-tier pricing plans. The email reports, which include engagement metrics like delivery, click-though, and open rates along with the average order value are available to you even in the free account.

The ready-to-use connectivity with Google Analytics is one of Mailchimp's major benefits versus Klaviyo. You can obtain 50+ reports, consisting page views and user interaction, by integrating Google Analytics with the platform. This integration works both ways and lets you view your email marketing insights directly on your Google Analytics panel.

Zixflow’s reporting capabilities offer you comprehensive insights into your marketing initiatives, including delivery reports and customer engagement KPIs. The reporting dashboard lets you evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns with special emphasis on boosting your ROI.

The platform gives you real-time analytics on your messages across RCS, WhatsApp, SMS, and email. This kind of segmented analytics allows you to view your marketing on a granular level, clearly signaling which channel is working the best for your e-commerce store and what you can do to improve. 

Pricing

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp have a contact-based pricing structure, where you will be charged based on the number of contacts you save within the system or are included in your marketing lists. Here is a table with some of the pricing information depending on your contacts:

As I said, these are just a few examples of the costs that you could incur while using these platforms. The pricing is also influenced by your message volume or any other add ons you decide to get. 

In contrast to this contact-based pricing, Zixflow provides straightforward pricing plans. The platform is designed in a way that you are in control of the cost. For example, apart from the minimal subscription charges, the platform offers a pay-as-you-use wallet system, billing you only for the successfully delivered messages.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: which one to go for?

In terms of e-commerce functionality, Klaviyo offers more advanced features for overall business management. However, if you want more robust email marketing functionality, then Mailchimp comes out on top.

Depending on your business needs, you need to pick a solution that has all the necessary functionality to let you achieve your marketing and sales objectives. 

However, if you want a multichannel marketing automation and CRM software, then Zixflow is one of the platforms you should consider. With its dynamic multichannel approach, robust automation features, and a pay as you go pricing structure, it allows you to focus on growing your e-commerce business rather than managing the usage costs. Try out the platform with a 7-day free trial and see the difference yourself!