20 January 2022

Klaviyo VS ActiveCampaign: Which Is Better For You?

Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign are big names in the e-commerce industry. But are these platforms really the one for you? Let’s dive deeper to find out which is better for e-commerce businesses!

Faye Chong

Content Marketing Lead

Reading time: 6 minutes

Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign are both well-known names in the e-commerce space. They both offer email and SMS marketing solutions to keep your customers engaged, grow your business, and ultimately drive more sales to your business.

So, between Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign, which is better for your business? 🥲

To help you in your decision-making process, we’ll look at these two software in detail to help you reach a verdict. Let’s dive right in!

What is Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is a customer growth platform that automates SMS and email marketing for e-commerce businesses.

Klaviyo is a customer growth platform that automates SMS and email marketing to help e-commerce businesses deliver more personalized experiences for their customers.

It is one of the biggest names in the e-commerce space, with several big brands using Klaviyo to support their email and SMS marketing efforts.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform. Source: Octoboard

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based software that provides marketing and sales automation. It is also known as a customer experience automation (CXA) platform with solutions such as email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM.

Using this software, you can create more personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.

Klaviyo VS ActiveCampaign

Although both of these platforms have similar features and functionality, there are still differences that set them apart. Here are factors that we took into consideration when comparing between the two:

Ease of use: If it is easy to use and doesn’t take a long time to set up
E-commerce viability: If it works well to support your e-commerce store
Integration options: If it integrates with other tools to support your business processes
Email marketing features: If it has a full suite of features to support email marketing activities.
SMS marketing features: If it has a full suite of features to support SMS marketing activities.
A/B testing: If it lets you do split testing and conduct spam checks before sending content.
Reporting: If it provides advanced analytics to help you monitor trends and performance metrics
Value: If it gives you more value for the features provided at the price paid

Ease of use

Ease-of-use is arguably one of the most important factors you should look for when finding software for your e-commerce business.

You don’t want to be spending too much time setting up, learning how to use it, or worse — even hiring someone to help you fix it because it’s too complex. 😩

Although both software aren’t overly complicated, Klaviyo’s interface is simple to use. All the features and functions are clearly divided into various tabs and can be seen at a glance. Furthermore, there are simple instructions to guide you through.

Although some user reviews have stated that Klaviyo has a steep learning curve for its email and editing tools, it’s the more user-friendly one out of the two.

Some ActiveCampaign features run co-dependently, meaning that you’d have to set up a feature before the other can function. For less tech-savvy users, this can hinder productivity and slow down your tasks.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

E-commerce viability

When comparing software for e-commerce businesses, we’d definitely have to touch on e-commerce viability.

As Klaviyo is a software built specifically for e-commerce businesses, its features are more suitable and useful for e-commerce. For example, its dashboard shows an overview of the revenue you’re earning for each email sequence and campaign.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign is just like any other email marketing platform, where it shows advanced metrics such as active contacts and interaction rates.

For e-commerce business owners, finding out how much sales you’re making from your email campaigns would be more useful.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

Integration options

The ideal platform should integrate with several other tools to help you to automate sales processes and reduce your reps’ workload.

Klaviyo has an extensive list of integration options, with many being e-commerce platforms and tools. Some software it integrates with include:

Shopify
Magento
WooCommerce
Yotpo
Salesforce Commerce
Facebook

ActiveCampaign is integrated with over 860 platforms, such as:

Shopify
Salesforce
WordPress
Google Analytics
Typeform
Facebook

Undoubtedly, both software offer so many integration options that it’d be a challenge to find a tool they don’t integrate with. However, we’d have to give it to Klaviyo again because of the type of integrations offered.

ActiveCampaign’s integrations are more holistic and all-rounded — giving you options for lead generation, payments, project management, and more. Klaviyo’s integration options are focused on e-commerce services, hence it would make more sense for e-commerce businesses to use Klaviyo.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

Email marketing features

As marketing automation platforms with email marketing features, of course, this should be a factor to be discussed!

Both software have robust email marketing features such as drag and drop email editors, customer segmentation, and contact tagging.

However, ActiveCampaign’s main functionality is in email automation and marketing. That’s why they have more advanced features like automation split testing, contact scoring, automation maps, and email triggers.

That said, when it comes to email marketing, ActiveCampaign is the better choice for its email marketing features.

✏️ Which is better: ActiveCampaign

SMS marketing features

Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign both offer SMS marketing automation that allow you to increase engagement through text messaging.

Both solutions have SMS automation, meaning you can send text messages such as welcome messages, order confirmations, shipping alerts, and abandoned cart reminders at a scheduled time.

However when comparing the two, Klaviyo is more superior in its SMS functionality with features like dynamic images, A/B testing for SMS, and default SMS quiet hours.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

A/B testing

Even when you’re following email or SMS guides or message templates, finding the perfect content and timing to send a message is tough. After all, it’s different for every business and customer base.

That’s why A/B testing is so important because you can test out 2 different campaigns with slightly different content, messaging, and timings to see what has the most open or reply rates.

Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign both offer A/B testing for their email marketing solution that allows you to test everything from the subject lines to call-to-action buttons. However, only Klaviyo offers SMS split testing, which is equally as important as email A/B testing.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

Reporting

With Klaviyo, you can design a custom dashboard based on the data you want to see as well as your preferred viewing style.

As we mentioned earlier, Klaviyo was built for e-commerce businesses, hence the data collected presents useful revenue data essential for business growth. You can find reports such as revenue, order information, revenue per recipient, and conversions.

This is not to say ActiveCampaign’s reporting is bad, though. ActiveCampaign presents more reporting based on customer activity, and less on revenue growth — which is more important for an e-commerce business. Think data like open rates, subscriptions, and click rates.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

Value

Let’s compare and contrast the two pricing models.

At a glance, Klaviyo is more slightly expensive than ActiveCampaign, but let’s take a closer look at the value they provide before coming to a conclusion at face value.

At 500 contacts, the lowest price you can pay for Klaviyo is $20 every month with unlimited emails. For the same number of contacts, ActiveCampaign charges $15 per month with unlimited emails.

Both platforms also offer 14-day free trials, and even at the lowest tier or price paid, you still get to enjoy unlimited emails, automation, segmentation, and other powerful features.

However, one thing to note is that ActiveCampaign has a tiering of features — meaning the more you pay, the more you get. While for Klaviyo, you only have to pay based on the number of contacts you have.

✏️ Which is better: Klaviyo

So which is better?

In this Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign debate, which software emerged as the winner?

Deciding between these two platforms is challenging. They’re both superior in the e-commerce space and provide powerful email and SMS marketing features to support your e-commerce business.

Although there’s a clear winner when it comes down to the factors we discussed earlier, it still heavily depends on your business needs and how each software can fulfill those requirements.

If you’re pumping more budget into email marketing for e-commerce, ActiveCampaign still makes a viable option with its email functionality when compared to the other. Its full-fledged email marketing features, it can definitely support your email efforts, though it might take some time for things to take off.

On the other hand, if you’re more focused on SMS marketing, Klaviyo takes the cake with this one because its SMS features are unmatched. They also offer SMS A/B testing, which is something ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer.

Whichever platform you decide to choose, take advantage of their free trials to test them out to truly find the better fit for your e-commerce business.