The Ultimate Guide to the Best ESPs for 2024: Top Klaviyo Alternatives

• MAILCHIMP
• OMNISEND
• DRIP
• HUBSPOT
• ACTIVECAMPAIGN
• GETRESPONSE
• CAMPAIGN MONITOR
• SALESFORCE
• ITERABLE
• Braze
• Listrak
• Sailthru
• Shopify

Before We Begin, Here’s a Quick Rundown on Klaviyo

We’ve covered Klaviyo extensively in this article, but here’s a short recap of what you need to know about this marketing software powerhouse:

Klaviyo is not a CRM, but a subscription-based email marketing automation software designed for e-commerce companies. It's generally used by small to medium-sized companies, but it’s really well-suited to companies of all shapes and sizes due to the massive investments they’ve been making in improving their integrations, segmentation, and workflow tools.

As we mentioned in our article on Klaviyo pricing, they offer a free plan for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. However, this does mean that Klaviyo branding is imposed on all your email campaigns.

In general, Klaviyo is an amazing product that functions perfectly well. But the pricing can be a hurdle, especially if your business is just getting off the ground. With that in mind, here are our 10 best Klaviyo alternatives.

Best 2024 ESP marketing software and Klaviyo alternatives

MailChimp

Mailchimp is one of the best Klaviyo alternatives that boasts a super-duper intuitive interface. It’s so easy to get started on Mailchimp since it employs manageable functionalities and a visual editor that’s really easy to use. What’s more, they offer some unusual channel integrations, such as adding Instagram ads to the usual Facebook and Google ads we usually see with automation tools.

Their automations get the job done. However, we think that their workflows could have been a bit clearer in terms of editing and visualization, and their workflow setup abilities are definitely on the rigid side, with a lot of useful tools missing completely, like changing a customer's state once a workflow is completed.

Pros of choosing Mailchimp

Hefty data reporting: What’s great is that you’ll never second guess what is or isn’t working for your email marketing, because they provide all of the data you need to make clever marketing decisions. From engagement and growth reports to revenue reports and sales tracking, campaign stats are easy to monitor, even for the greenest of marketers.

It’s polite to your bank account: In case your company is extra budget-conscious, then we’re sure you’re gonna be a huge fan of their pricing because it’s one of the cheaper alternatives for really small businesses.

Cons of choosing Mailchimp

The biggest problem is that you can say goodbye to Shopify. Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms today and if you’re using it, and you want to connect the two accounts, then you’ll need to go through a third-party app, which means your possibilities might be hindered and costs will be higher.

Automation options are limited. If you’re looking for a muscular automation platform, then Mailchimp is definitely not going to be your go-to. There are some basic automation tools like product retargeting and abandoned cart, but if you’re on the prowl for a greater variety of automation like rules and workflows, combined with a wide variety of actions and triggers, then Mailchimp isn’t your ideal ESP sidekick.

Pricing

In addition to their free plan which allows up to 500 contacts and 1,000 email sends per month, Mailchimp offers additional tiers, like the standard package for $19 per month with 6,000 email sends per month. This goes all the way up to the Premium package, which starts at $333 per month with 150,000 email sends per month.

API Availability

Their API is designed to help you integrate with REST APIs or to create custom solutions. To authenticate your requests, the Mailchimp API supports both the OAuth2 and HTTP basic authentication methods.

Integrations Available

Here are a few integrations Mailchimp selected to help you bring your work together and stay connected: ShopSync, Canva, Zapier, WooCommerce, Slack, WordPress, SimpleTexting, and Lightspeed.

Omnisend

Omnisend is a powerful marketing automation platform developed for high-growth e-commerce businesses. With advanced automation workflows, a multitude of channels to reach your potential customers (via email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, push notifications, and more), and customer segmentation features, Omnisend can be seen as an all-in-one solution for e-commerce marketers. It offers diverse highlights to help you streamline and enhance your promotions, no matter what channel you use.

Pros of choosing Omnisend

Automate tasks easily: You can easily automate some tasks, as well as welcome emails, abandoned carts, and the like. Furthermore, the variety of signup forms can be really beneficial to help grow your subscriber list.

24/7 support: No matter the time of day, their support staff is ready to answer any questions you may have. They claim the average waiting time is only 5 minutes on average.

Cons of choosing Omnisend

Omnisend doesn’t allow for iOS or Android applications, and you can’t copy created automation workflows which means you end up building every version of something from scratch.

Pricing

They offer three plans that go up in price as your email list grows bigger:

Standard ($16/ a month), Pro ($59/month), and if you only have 250 contacts, you can opt for the free plan with up to 500 emails per month.

API Availability

You can integrate your store to Omnisend via the API, if you are using any of these e-commerce platforms: Magento, Woocommerce, OpenCart, and any other platform (including custom e-commerce platforms).

If you are using Omnisend on Bigcommerce or Shopify, there is no need for integration via API because all of the major parts of integration are covered automatically. Omnisend API documentation can be found here.

Integrations Available

You can Integrate your Omnisend account with e-commerce-specific tools and e-commerce platforms to grow your business. Whether it's an e-commerce platform or any other tool, they've got you covered. Their single-click integrations include Shopify, Shopify Plus, Bigcommerce, and Woocommerce, and there are many more integrations available such as Magento, Volusion, Open Cart, plus many others via API.

Drip

What is Drip and why would you choose it? Well, it’s an (ECRM) e-commerce Customer Relationship Management platform that gathers and organizes customer data and enables e-commerce retailers to use that curated data to create personalized omnichannel customer journeys at scale. Yup, that’s what makes it one of the best Klaviyo alternatives. Now, let’s jump to the cons and pros.

Pros of choosing Drip

Knock-your-socks-off automation: You’ll have some pretty sweet automation options if you choose Drip. Email campaigns, if-this-then-that rules, and workflows can be created to automatically move users along simple and unique adventures that adapt to what they actually do. Pretty cool, eh?

But wait, there’s more - rules and workflows can be as detailed and flexible as your business needs them to be. It also allows you to set goals inside of workflows to control the ultimate customer experience.

A point-and-click visual email developer: Drip gives you complete control of how your emails look and feel. Email sections are pretty easy to customize or organize, you can upload images in a jiffy, and what's more, you can even add GIFs! Nice! In case creating a visual email isn’t your jam, no worries at all, there’s a text/HTML builder on board, too.

Cons of choosing Drip

Way too much personalization: Drip really does understand that each customer is different from the next, and that’s truly amazing. We just love how marketing with heart is at the very core of their platform, but in case you’re looking to send generic, cold messages that don’t leave an impression on your potential customers, then you most definitely won’t find their on-point personalization features appealing. It’s not really a con, but hey, we had to pick something.

Pricing

As with many other Klaviyo alternatives, the pricing is purely based on the subscriber count, which could either be great news or terrible news depending on your list size. The plan starts at $39, or up to 2,500 subscribers, and pricing increases from there. They do offer a free 14-day trial, though.

API Availability

Drip has integrations galore. Devs rejoice! From Facebook Custom Audiences, Zapier, Magento, PayPal, and Facebook Lead Ads, to Salesforce, and even a fully revamped Shopify integration, there’s no lack of e-commerce resources. Just name the tool and the possibilities are very high that Drip integrates it.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. In their own words, “Marketing has evolved tremendously over the last decade due to changes in consumer behavior. HubSpot is the answer to those changes.”

Pros of choosing HubSpot

Effective and intricate workflows for handling prospects, leads, subscribers, and your customers. You'll have almost endless customization for implementing triggers and rules to target prospects, leads, and customers according to personas, behaviors, demographics, and the buyer's journey stage. HubSpot also offers very good segmentation, as well as list-building capabilities, and extensive reporting features and analytics to boot. Not too shabby!

The key to HubSpot's success? Flexible pricing structures that are based on your organization's size and specific needs. You can either use HubSpot's free tools or upgrade in order to unlock more features at incremental price increases. Isn't that enough already? Let's see if this cool Klaviyo alternative even has any cons.

Cons of choosing HubSpot

Onboarding fee: HubSpot's onboarding fee is one factor to be considered when weighing the platform's pros and cons, in addition to the regular monthly fee. The fee depends on the package, e.g. the Pro onboarding fee is $3,000. Not sure if you're ready for this but, yup, there's an enterprise onboarding fee (the most expensive) at $6,000.

Lots of configuration required: This system requires you to configure it to your business needs to get it working suitably. As an example, to automate your marketing to be the most efficient possible, you'll simply have to set up the appropriate workflows. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting your money.

Pricing

Well, HubSpot's pricing is competitive, but it arguably offers much more value than many other ESPs. Packages start with a free option that allows 2000 emails per month and goes up to $3,600 per month for Enterprise. Considering all of the flexible options that HubSpot provides, it's definitely one of the most affordable platforms of its kind.

API Availability

All of the HubSpot APIs are organized around REST - if you've previously interacted with a RESTful API, then we’re sure many of the concepts will be familiar to you. As they say, "All API calls to HubSpot should be made to the https://api.hubapi.com base domain." We’ve been around the block a few times and HubSpot’s API availability is definitely on the better end of the scale.

They're using many standard HTTP features, such as HTTP verbs that can be understood by lots of HTTP clients. The APIs are designed to have straightforward, predictable URLs, and to indicate API errors by using HTTP response codes.

HubSpot's APIs are subject to rate limiting. You can review some specific limits detailed in their full API guidelines.

Integrations Available

There are also quite a few integration options if you’re using other tools such as Mailchimp, Zapier, Jira Cloud, WordPress, Slack, Salesforce, and others.

ActiveCampaign

This amazing platform has been on the go since 2003. ActiveCampaign is mainly focused on email marketing and e-commerce as part of an overall digital marketing package that brings together intuitive real-time data analysis and automated CRM management.

Pros of choosing ActiveCampaign

Ease of use: ActiveCampaign was the first platform to pioneer the visual marketing automation builder. The first thing that you’ll notice while using ActiveCampaign is how intuitive and well-designed the user interface is. It’s one of those marketing automation tools that doesn’t require training to understand.

Automation split testing: Yes, you’ll be able to A/B test entire sequences against each other rather than just test individual emails. That's what most of the marketing automation tools offer. Honestly, this is a really cool (and rare) feature for an ESP, so it’s worth the callout.

Machine learning: In recent years, ActiveCampaign has built plenty of innovative ML-based features and predictive win-probability scoring of leads that will help you automate even more marketing and sales processes.

Cons of choosing ActiveCampaign

Well, their marketing automation is, we would say, particularly powerful because it has an in-built CRM system. This CRM, though, is not as good as some standalone platforms like Salesforce.

Despite providing insights on sales/goal conversions and being fairly comprehensive, ActiveCampaign’s reporting is quite crowded, so it may sometimes be difficult to navigate it. Although it’s a robust platform, that’s also its downfall - being so comprehensive, it isn’t always the most intuitive or easy to navigate.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing plan is based on the number of subscribers and features that you would like to use. Lite Plan is $29 a month but excludes add-ons like SMS. The Plus plan increases to $49/month, and then there’s the Professional plan that kicks up to $149/month. Please keep in mind that depending on the plan you choose, scaling will quickly become pretty expensive.

Integrations Available

Gmail, Leadformly, Outlook, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zapier integration, and many more. ActiveCampaign integrates with over 2,000 different tools via Zapier integration. You'll need a paid Zapier subscription to access certain integrations, as this is what enables you to connect ActiveCampaign to a huge variety of tools.

GetResponse

This compelling marketing software tool has been around since 1998. GetResponse focuses on email marketing and ties marketing automation, sales funnel, related landing page builder, and webinars into this. They're offering a wide variety of pre-designed responsive email templates to make designing your email campaigns much more straightforward.

Pros of choosing GetResponse

Okay, so what makes this one of the best Klaviyo alternatives? The discounts you'll receive when paying upfront for one or two years of service are extremely generous — you'll be hard-pressed to find similar discounts from key competitors. Their webinar functionality is a genuine USP. We’re pretty sure you won't come across this level of functionality on related products.

The 'Conversion Funnel' feature can be handy for folks who would like to manage all aspects of e-commerce activity and their sales funnels under one roof. Also, what is considered necessary is that custom DKIM is provided on each plan, and they provide support in a wide variety of languages.

Cons of choosing GetResponse

The current email creator is buggy and clunky. The new version of the email creator doesn't allow you to craft emails that can be used in automated workflows (although this functionality should be introduced soon). The drag-and-drop interface for the landing pages is a bit fiddly and needs improvement.

Although GetResponse's landing page feature allows you to use the Facebook pixel, you can't do so in a GDPR-compliant way.

Pricing

The cheapest of the cheap is $15.60/month for the basic package. It's not a bad package for startups since its main focus is to afford you the capacity to email people and have related (but basic) landing pages. Packages go all the way up to GetResponse MAX, starting at $999/month.

API Availability

GetResponse API gives you this set of actions: Manage your campaigns, newsletters, gather statistics, and more.

Integrations Available

You can browse and integrate applications that connect directly with GetResponse here.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a web application used for simultaneously capturing and managing data for an online mailing list, while also sending HTML e-newsletters. It's broadly used by businesses to program autoresponders, send out mass mailings, and analyze the results with a fine-toothed comb.

Pros of choosing Campaign Monitor

The reason why it's one of the best Klaviyo alternatives is that its interface is extremely easy to use. The templates are robust, wonderful, and faithfully reproduced in all major email clients. You’re not restricted to boring, web-friendly fonts because Campaign Monitor allows you to use other web fonts within their templates. The data segmentation options are excellent because you'll be able to exclude (or send to) multiple lists and segments in your campaigns.

The automation features are easy to use and comprehensive.

Cons of choosing Campaign Monitor

Too good to be true? Like all Klaviyo alternatives, this one has a few disadvantages as well. In comparison to its competitors, Campaign Monitor is very expensive, plus split testing is limited to only two variants. They don't offer a (proper) free trial. Their email-only support is not available for the most expensive plan. Can you believe it? Yeah, we can’t either.

Its reporting functionality is fairly basic, and analytics are also rather basic.

Pricing

• The Lite plan starts at $15 per month.
• The Essentials plan starts from $266 per month.
• The Premier plan starts at $199 per month.

It's important to mention that, like quite a few of the ESPs mentioned on this list, the cost of using Campaign Monitor goes up as your subscribers' list increases.

API Availability

With Campaign Monitor's robust API, you can connect all your core business apps to meet your unique email marketing and automation needs.

Integrations Available

Zapier can help by automatically adding leads to your Campaign Monitor account to start your campaigns faster. You can back up your data on Google Sheets to keep accurate records of who has unsubscribed and subscribed from your lists, and you can connect Campaign Monitor to 2,000+ apps.

Salesforce

These guys are the market leaders in customer relationship management software, so this is almost certainly going to be one of the Klaviyo alternatives that you should consider. It really is one great CRM platform, but it's not for every single business. So, our focus here is to help you decide whether Salesforce is the perfect CRM for you or not.

Pros of choosing Salesforce

Thanks to rich customization capabilities, You can choose the degree of tailoring your Salesforce solution. Depending on your needs, Salesforce configurations allow you to introduce custom objects, fields, and tabs for created objects, email templates, and a lot more. With customization (which implies custom development), you'll get rules for expected revenue or tax calculation, reports and dashboards with enhanced visibility, or automated mechanisms for sales and service tasks management.

This is not simply a sales CRM - it includes applications and key products to provide extensive support for marketing processes as well as customer service. Moreover, you can create your own portal or app for communication with your customers by using the Lightning Platform, or by creating a website with the Salesforce solution known as Site.com.

Cons of choosing Salesforce

It can be very expensive. You'll need to pay for add-ons to get the most out of their software. Setup and configuration are time-consuming and complex. Cluttered interfaces are what make simple tasks and navigation unnecessarily complex.

The learning curve never seems to end, and what's more, customer support has a poor reputation. The initial setup of the platform requires at least a month’s worth of development work for your custom Salesforce instance and, even then, the product is highly unintuitive.

Pricing

The Pro package starts at $1,250 per year, followed by the Corporate package which starts at $4,200 per year. The Enterprise package is priced according to the number of contacts you have and campaigns you send.

API Availability

'In the sea of Salesforce APIs, there's a key archipelago of commonly-used APIs that we focus on in this module. They are REST API, SOAP API, Bulk API, and Streaming API. Together they make up the Salesforce data APIs.' as they say.

Integrations Available

You can integrate Salesforce with the apps you're already using. From marketing and productivity to collaboration, and beyond. Connect it to the tools you need to run your business, such as Google Cloud, Slack, Quickbooks, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, DocuSign, Jira, Hello Sign, Code Science, Active Campaign, and Dropbox.

Iterable

Iterable empowers growth marketers to build world-class user engagement campaigns across all channels, throughout the full lifecycle. Marketers are segmenting users, automating touchpoints, and building workflows at scale without engineering support.

Pros of choosing Iterable

The main reasons why Iterable is on the list of the best Klaviyo alternatives are multiple segments, triggered campaigns, and personalized messages. You will be able to run your campaigns smoothly and create triggered campaigns or targeted blasts that can increase user engagement. Additionally, you can run campaigns on single or multiple segments with the same tool kit. The software sends emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to your clients as reminders of your company. Their platform will work without any hassle, regardless of what type of communication you’re using.

You can prepare your personalized messages and send them at your preferred time. And, even if you don’t have prior coding knowledge, you can create a complex workflow quickly. This means that, in case you or your sales team aren’t proficient in the field of programming, you can use it to create a process and leave your devs with the peace and quiet they so rarely receive.

Cons of choosing Iterable

Just like all the other Klaviyo alternatives, Iterable has some disadvantages, too. The heatmap is not working as it should be, which makes seeing how users interact with emails a manual process. And while working on more complex templates, it can become a bit slow and buggy. That said, given how relatively quickly Iterable resolves issues in its platform, this might not be an issue by the time you read this article.

Pricing

As with many other Klaviyo alternatives, pricing is based on the number of users and messages on their platform.

Integrations

Iterable integrates with quite a few big names like Google Analytics, Radar.io, SparkPost, Stitch, Census, Mixpanel, Woopra, Segment, and Magento. It also integrates with Zapier for even more opportunities, so the sky’s essentially the limit with this ESP.

 

 

Wrapping up

Sure, there’s no denying that Klaviyo is a powerful, highly advanced platform, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everybody. The digital marketing world is yours to explore, and that includes Klaviyo alternatives! If it’s not the perfect fit for your business, there are always other ESPs that may be better suited to your specific needs. It’s always great to keep all your options open and to stay informed.

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss your options in more detail.

*Pricing and features valid as of Oct 2023