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Every week someone asks me to settle mailchimp vs klaviyo with a feature chart, and every week I refuse. The klaviyo vs mailchimp question does not have one winner, it has a right answer per business, and the two things that decide it are your list size and what you actually sell.
So this post does that. No feature table. A decision rule, the free path first, the real cost math at list sizes you will actually hit, and the flows that make either platform pay for itself.
The short answer, before anything else
Read the line that matches you and stop.
- You sell physical products on Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce and you do more than roughly 3,000 to 5,000 dollars a month. Klaviyo. The revenue attribution and the product-level segmentation pay for the price gap.
- You sell physical products but you are under about 1,000 dollars a month in sales. Neither, yet. Use Shopify Email or MailerLite free and build the flows. Move to Klaviyo when email is worth real money.
- You sell services, coaching, courses, local work, or you are a newsletter or content business. Mailchimp, or honestly MailerLite or Brevo for less. You do not have a product catalog to segment against, so you are paying Klaviyo for machinery you will never run.
- You are B2B with a sales team and a CRM. Neither is the centre of gravity. Pick the one your CRM connects to cleanly and spend your energy there.
- You have a big list and low revenue per subscriber, like a media site or a free community. Mailchimp or a cheaper sender. Klaviyo prices on profiles, and a large unmonetised list gets expensive fast.
That is the whole decision. The rest of this explains why, and what to do today.
Do the free thing first, it is not a downgrade
Most stores do not have an email platform problem. They have a “no welcome flow and no abandoned checkout” problem. You can fix that this week for zero.
- Shopify Email. If you are on Shopify, you get 10,000 emails a month free, then it is about a dollar per additional 1,000. It sends campaigns, it does basic automations from the Shopify Flow side, and it already knows your products and customers. For a store doing under a few thousand a month, this is enough.
- MailerLite free. Around 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails, with automations included on the free tier. Good landing pages. The cleanest free builder of the bunch.
- Brevo free. Unlimited contacts, capped at roughly 300 emails a day. Odd shape, but if you have 20,000 contacts and only email a segment at a time, it is very cheap.
- Mailchimp free. Now sits around 500 contacts and 1,000 sends a month. It is a trial more than a plan. Fine for testing the interface, not for running a business.
- Klaviyo free. Around 250 profiles and 500 email sends a month, plus a small batch of SMS credits. Same story. Use it to build your flows and see the interface before you commit.
Here is the useful move. Build your flows inside Klaviyo’s free tier while your list is tiny. When you cross 250 profiles, you either pay with the flows already live and earning, or you export the copy and rebuild it somewhere cheaper. Either way you did the work that matters.
If you want the full order of operations for what to set up before you pay for anything, we laid it out in the Cheap Marketing Playbook, and the tools we actually run are listed on the Cheap Tech Stack page.
What Klaviyo actually does better, in money terms
People say Klaviyo is “built for ecommerce” and leave it there. Here is what that means on a Tuesday.
It tells you what each flow earned. Open the flows report and you see revenue per recipient for every message. That number tells you which email to rewrite and which to delete. Mailchimp reports revenue too, but the attribution in Klaviyo is tighter and the segment-level view is better. When you can see that email three of your abandoned checkout series earns 0.40 per recipient and email two earns 1.90, you know what to do.
It segments on product data, not just tags. “Bought category A twice, never bought category B, last order over 60 days ago, spent over 200 lifetime.” That is a two minute build in Klaviyo. In Mailchimp you end up writing that logic into tags manually and maintaining it forever.
Browse abandonment and back in stock work properly. Both rely on the platform tracking product views against a known profile. Klaviyo’s onsite tracking does this out of the box on Shopify. That is two revenue flows most stores never turn on.
Predictive fields on bigger lists. Once a customer has enough order history, Klaviyo estimates next order date and lifetime value. You can trigger a winback three days after the predicted date instead of guessing at 60 or 90 days.
None of that matters if you sell one 2,000 dollar service. There is no catalog, no repeat purchase cycle, no browse behaviour worth tracking. You are paying for a warehouse when you own a stall.
What Mailchimp still does better
Everything-in-one-place for non-ecommerce. Landing pages, forms, a basic site builder, social posting, appointment style content. For a consultant or a local business, Mailchimp is the whole marketing stack for the price of a lunch.
It is easier to hand to a non-marketer. Your ops person can build and send a campaign in Mailchimp without a call. Klaviyo’s interface assumes you know what a metric-triggered flow is.
Content and newsletter sending. If your business model is “publish, build audience, sell something occasionally,” Mailchimp is fine and Klaviyo is overkill. So is Beehiiv or MailerLite, at lower cost.
Price at large, low-value lists. Both charge on contacts, but the curve bends differently. A 40,000 person list that buys rarely costs meaningfully less on Mailchimp, and you can prune to a Standard plan without losing the features you use.
The cost math at list sizes you will actually hit
Prices move, so check both sites before you buy. Roughly, at the time of writing, on an annual or standard monthly plan:
- 500 contacts. Mailchimp Essentials sits around 13 a month, Standard around 20. Klaviyo email-only is around 20. Close enough that price is not the deciding factor. Decide on store type.
- 5,000 contacts. Mailchimp Standard is roughly 75 to 100 a month. Klaviyo is around 100. Still close. If you are ecommerce, take Klaviyo.
- 20,000 contacts. Mailchimp Standard runs a few hundred. Klaviyo runs a few hundred too, and higher if you add SMS. Now the gap is real money, and the question becomes revenue per subscriber.
Do this calculation instead of comparing plan pages. Take your monthly email revenue and divide by contacts. If you are earning more than about 0.50 per contact per month from email, the platform cost is noise and you should buy the better tool. If you are earning under 0.10, your problem is the emails, not the software, and you should stay free while you fix the emails.
The flows to build, whichever one you pick
Same five flows in both platforms. They do the majority of automated email revenue for most stores.
- Welcome, three emails. Immediately, 24 hours, 72 hours. Email one delivers the signup offer. Email two is the story and the proof. Email three handles the objection and repeats the offer with an expiry.
- Abandoned checkout, three emails. One hour, 22 hours, 48 hours. Keep discounts out of the first email. Most of the revenue in this flow is a reminder, not a bribe.
- Browse abandonment, one or two emails. Four hours and 24 hours, only for people who viewed a product twice or viewed and did not add to cart.
- Post purchase, two emails. Day two is a how-to-use-it email with no sell. Day fourteen is the cross sell or the review request.
- Winback, two emails. Trigger at roughly double your average repurchase interval. If people reorder every 45 days, start at 90.
Write these once. They will outlive whichever platform you chose. If you want them built and tuned rather than built by you, that is exactly what our Email and SMS Marketing work covers.
How to switch without tanking deliverability
Moving platforms is where people quietly kill their inbox placement. Do it in this order.
- Export your full list as CSV, including signup date, tags and order history fields.
- Import only people who opened or clicked in the last 180 days first. Park the rest.
- Set up domain authentication on day one. SPF, DKIM and a DMARC record. Both platforms give you the exact DNS entries.
- Send your first two weeks only to people engaged in the last 30 days. Then widen to 90 days, then 180.
- Rebuild and test every flow before you switch off the old ones. Run both live for 48 hours with the old flows paused, not deleted.
- Keep the old account open for 30 days so you can pull reports and copy you forgot.
If you are not sure whether your current setup is even worth migrating, get a free audit and we will tell you straight.
If you also run texts, booking and a sales pipeline, a third option is HighLevel. It bundles email with all of that and bills email per send. It has a 14 day free trial.
FAQ
Is Klaviyo worth it for a store doing 10,000 a month?
Yes. At that level, a properly built flow set typically returns a meaningful slice of total revenue, and 100 to 150 a month of software cost is trivial against it. The condition is that you actually build the flows. Klaviyo with no flows is just an expensive newsletter tool.
Can I run an ecommerce store on Mailchimp?
You can. Mailchimp has a store integration, product blocks and abandoned cart automation. It is less precise on segmentation and reporting, and browse abandonment is weaker. If you are under a few thousand a month and already know Mailchimp, stay put and spend your time on the emails themselves.
What is the best email platform if I have almost no budget?
MailerLite free for up to around 1,000 subscribers, or Shopify Email if you are on Shopify and mostly sending to buyers. Both let you build the five core flows. The best email platform is the one you actually set up, and a free tool with a working welcome sequence beats a paid one sitting empty.
The one line version
Ecommerce with real order volume, take Klaviyo. Services, content, or a large list that does not buy often, take Mailchimp or something cheaper. Under 1,000 a month in revenue, take free and go write the emails. Want someone to look at your numbers before you commit, book a call and bring your list size and last 90 days of email revenue.