When it comes to email marketing and customer data platforms, Klaviyo and Braze stand out as two of the top solutions available today. Both platforms aim to help e-commerce brands maximize sales through targeted messaging and campaigns, but they differ in their specific approaches.
Choosing the right platform is critical for business owners who want to grow their customer base, drive repeat sales, and gain valuable insights from customer data. In this comprehensive Klaviyo vs Braze comparison guide, we will evaluate both platforms across several key criteria to help you determine the best choice for your business.
We will look in-depth at market position, ease of use, customization options, e-commerce, SEO and integrations, performance metrics like speed and uptime, the quality of customer support, pricing models, reviews and reputation, and more. Our goal is to provide an unbiased assessment of strengths and weaknesses so you can confidently invest in the email marketing platform that aligns closest with your business needs and budget.
1. Understanding the Basics
Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. It quickly became one of the most popular email marketing and automation platforms designed specifically for e-commerce companies. With over $200 million in funding and a current valuation of over $9.5 billion, Klaviyo now powers email and SMS campaigns for over 100,000 online businesses.
Braze (formerly Appboy), was launched in 2011 by Jon Hyman, Bill Magnuson, and Mark Gally. Backed by over $175 million in funding, Braze works with more than 1,000 global brands, and its current market valuation is estimated above $5 billion.
Both platforms have leading market share and tens of thousands of customers across a wide range of industries. Klaviyo seems to have captured more of the mid-market and Shopify-focused segment, while Braze leans more toward enterprise.
Klaviyo and Braze have extremely engaged social communities. Popular Facebook groups like Klaviyo Email Marketing Community have over 36,000 members, while Braze’s SMS + Email Marketing group has just 200 followers. These groups allow e-commerce marketers to share best practices and get community support.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a robust suite of automation tools and predefined workflows that help e-commerce brands customize complex triggers and sequences. You can create automated campaigns through an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, with flexibility around schedules, segmentation, and actions.
Some key automation features include welcome campaigns, browse abandonment flows, win-back sequences, and more. Klaviyo makes it simple to set up time-based automation like cart or browse abandonment – just pick your trigger event, schedule delays if needed, define audience segments, and build campaign content with any combination of emails, SMS, push notifications, and web messages.
You can also leverage Klaviyo’s proprietary metrics like Predictive Churn to power highly targeted, personalized automation. For example, send win-back incentives only to customers that the algorithm flags as a high likelihood to churn. Their platform seamlessly handles real-time data syncing across all connected sales channels to update customer profiles as they interact with your brand.
Braze
Braze also provides robust automation, though the initial setup requires more hands-on coding and IT resources compared to Klaviyo. The tool is extremely customizable – you build detailed rules and define precise parameters for every single action, trigger, filter, and schedule. This allows advanced users to create truly tailored, omni-channel sequences.
Some of Braze’s automation strengths include progressive re-engagement campaigns, intelligent segmentation, and cross-channel orchestration. You can configure precise timing and cascading sequences across email, Android mobile push, web push, SMS, and more based on customer behavior and attributes.
For example, you can create a browsing sequence that starts with an email, triggers an SMS if no purchase after 24 hours, and finally sends a mobile push notification with a coupon code if there is no response to the first two.
Braze also makes it easy to leverage lifecycle stage, past purchases, app usage frequency, customer persona, geographic, and other advanced filters to personalize your messages within each campaign. Their “Canvas” tool provides a central dashboard to build and visualize your omni-channel automation strategy.
Winner: Klaviyo
While Braze offers incredibly robust and customizable automation, Klaviyo wins in the ease-of-use category for rapidly setting up conversions-driving sequences even if you don’t have advanced technical resources. Their simplified drag-and-drop workflow builder is more intuitive and allows e-commerce marketers to build sophisticated triggered email campaigns with just a few clicks.
Powerful data integrations also make it simple to leverage Klaviyo’s proprietary metrics to drive segmentation and personalization without complex coding.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers hundreds of professionally designed, mobile-optimized email templates to choose from in their template gallery. You can browse based on categories like “Welcome Series”, “Cart Abandonment”, holidays like “Valentine’s Day” and more to find a niche, relevant options. While the layouts look polished, they are also highly customizable.
Email editors can easily tweak template colors, fonts, content, and images, and add social icons, dividers, buttons, and QT codes without restrictive brand style limitations. Klaviyo offers a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG builder, as well as HTML access for coding custom emails from scratch – useful for brands wanting consistent templates across campaigns and channels.
Dynamic content insertion allows marketers to automatically pull in customer data like first name, browsing history, purchase history, and more to hyper-personalize messages in bulk campaigns. Overall, excellent balance on stock templates that still can be tailored to your brand style needs.
Braze
Braze Canvas email templates leverage a simple drag-and-drop editor with pre-built layouts like coupon promos, order confirmations, win-back series, browse abandonment, and more. You can easily change colors, swap images, and input your branding like logo and styles through point-and-click controls for the differentiated look you want.
Unlike Klaviyo, the ability to customize fonts, text formatting options, and certain email sections can be more limited depending on the complexity of the starting template you choose. This supports design consistency for all your messages. But less flexibility to make templates truly your own or optimize for opens/clicks using best practices like personalized subject lines or preview text insertion.
For brands that do higher email volume, Braze allows you to save Template Variants. So once you customize a base template’s content modules, images, colors, etc. – you can generate numerous versions for A/B testing while keeping modules consistent. Useful for simplifying campaign creation and performance optimization.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for having an exceptional balance of beautiful templates that are easy to tweak and optimize as needed – with both structured WYSIWYG builders plus custom HTML access.
Their dynamic content and theme customization abilities allow you to take any template and transform it into your own branded look and feel, supporting that hyper-personalized email experience. And with hundreds of niche, always up-to-date templates for the latest promotions or buying behaviors, less need to design something totally from scratch unless you want to.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo enables highly advanced behavioral and custom segmentation powered by their automated data tracking and profiles. You can leverage 300+ niche filters to target users by criteria like email engagement metrics, current cart contents, last order date, lifetime value, acceptance into A/B test groups, and more.
Easily create dynamic or static customer groups on the fly right within campaign builders. Complex Boolean logic lets you string endless combinations of filters to hyper-target. For example, target high lifetime value customers who added items to the cart but did not purchase in the last 7 days.
Klaviyo also makes it simple to sync segment lists from other platforms like paid ads, and chat tools, and even import CSVs. As a bonus, their predictive segmentation tools (like Predictive Churn) automatically detect trends in your customer data to call out accounts likely to churn, or primed to reactivate with the right message.
Braze
Braze offers an incredibly sophisticated segmentation builder to filter your audiences based on personalized attributes and event history across every integrated channel – email, mobile, web, SMS, and more. You can target by criteria like user IDs, device type, gender, app usage frequency, purchase recency, vs inactive users, and endless combinations.
Their tool also makes it easy to test and optimize segments over time with built-in A/B testing capabilities. Braze Canvas gives you a single visual interface to see your segments, messaging schedules, and responses in one place for simplifying complex orchestrated campaigns.
However, segmentation in Braze does require upfront technical work to capture the event data needed. You must pass all tracking parameters via API calls for the filters to work accurately. So benefit is directly correlated with dev resources invested into integration and setup.
Winner: Klaviyo
For rapidly building targeted segments and seeing them instantly update campaigns in real time, Klaviyo takes the lead. Their automated tracking of on-site behaviors through JS snippets or integrations enables even non-technical users quick access to 300+ filters – no IT help needed.
The flexibility to instantly create new segments directly inside campaign builders makes Klaviyo’s segmentation capabilities extremely user-friendly.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo enables deep analytics across your email and SMS campaigns, website traffic, and customer behaviors. Their dashboards display high-level engagement metrics and trends while also allowing you to dig deeper into granular performance insights.
You get email reporting on opens, clicks, conversions, and unsubscribes -broken down by campaign, Demographic filters reveal insights like your most engaged customer segments, revenue by traffic source, and product categories driving sales. All standardized metrics make A/B testing and optimization easy.
Klaviyo also makes it simple to connect offline purchase events or CRM data through API integrations, giving cross-channel visibility from ad spend to inventory. Their proprietary metric, Predictive Churn, uses machine learning to analyze behaviors and surface insights like which customers are likely to abandon their cart or which are ready to reactivate after periods of inactivity.
Braze
As a full-scale customer engagement platform, Braze offers marketers a 360-degree view of campaign analytics across channels. You can view engagement rates, clicks to open %, purchases, and churn risk – with breakouts by channel, campaign creative, schedule, audience segment, and more. This unified set of cross-channel analytics reduces the complexity of running omni-channel campaigns.
However, app and web analytics require passing Braze tracking parameters on all app screens and site pages consistently so the data shows up accurately. For all custom events or values you wish to analyze, dev resources are needed to set Braze SDK tracking properly.
Their visual Journey Builder does make analysis simple for non-technical users. See every step customers take across devices and channels before converting so you can optimize paths. However, analytics insights are still directly correlated with event-tracking implementation complexity.
Winner: Tie
Klaviyo and Braze offer excellent analytics. For purely email and SMS, Klaviyo provides exceptional integrated reporting without needing IT resources. Braze unlocks powerful customer journey insights but requires upfront dev work to capture full cross-channel visibility for marketers. For most ecommerce brands, their analytics capabilities would be quite complementary.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
Some of Klaviyo’s standout unique features include something called a Global Control Switch, which lets you pause or throttle all emails, SMS, and automation for compliance needs, testing, or emergencies. They also have Predictive Scores powered by proprietary algorithms that automatically detect customer propensity to take high-value actions like abandoning a cart or unsubscribing just based on behaviors.
Klaviyo also drives customer loyalty with its built-in Upgrade Paths, which are multi-tiered programs with automatic enrollment and reward triggers when customers take certain actions.
Driving performance optimization is very easy with Klaviyo’s robust A/B Testing capabilities that allow easy subject line tests, preview text variants, layout changes, content modifications, timing shifts, and clear reporting to analyze performance.
Another differentiation is Klaviyo’s seamless SMS and MMS messaging tightly integrated for powerful automations alongside email. Lastly, Klaviyo offers some excellent website personalization features like embedded signup forms, exit intent surveys, and customer feedback widgets that can be dropped anywhere needed on your site.
Braze
In contrast, some of Braze’s most unique capabilities leverage include Intelligent Timing, which allows sending messages only at the optimal times for each user based on analyzing past behaviors and tendencies.
Powerful localization features tap into customer geography and context to deploy hyper-targeted campaigns. Braze also offers Predictive Churn, similar to Klaviyo, analyzing user likelihood to disengage so you can target reactivation campaigns.
For social-sourced traffic and activations, Braze provides deep social integration to connect campaign reach and analytics from social posts. A simplified campaign setup is Braze’s Audience Templates, which let you quickly reuse filtered segments. And for advanced customization, Braze has a highly extensible SDK framework so engineers can build custom features on the platform itself.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and Braze have innovative, differentiating features that make them category leaders. Klaviyo’s predictive models and simplicity maximizing email & SMS perfectly complement Braze’s powerful localization tools, cross-channel orchestration capabilities, and intelligent timing.
Most brands would benefit greatly from both platforms. Their unique features are too complementary to declare one an outright winner.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is designed to provide an excellent user experience for small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses, especially those with limited technical resources. Their intuitive drag-and-drop interface, landing page builder, and Wizard-style walkthroughs make it easy to set up and start sending email campaigns with customized automation.
Advanced features like customer segments, predictive metrics and flowcharts to visualize automation logic can be learned progressively without hindering beginners. Klaviyo’s onboarding resources like webinars and video tutorials offer hands-on guidance for first-time users.
Overall, if your focus is building high-converting email and SMS campaigns, the interface feels instantly familiar and navigable. Enriching customer data with website behavior tracking and Klaviyo’s automation platform is also simple to gradually customize for more sophistication over time.
Braze
Unlike Klaviyo, Braze targets enterprises with technical teams or system integrators focused on complex multi-channel campaigns. While the platform is extremely customizable, the user interface has a steeper learning curve for non-technical marketers.
Initial setup requires early involvement from engineers to implement their SDKs and API infrastructure for accurate data and campaign visibility. Building omnichannel workflows can feel overwhelming for first-time Braze users given the vast capabilities. Most companies will want to gradually ramp up sophistication.
The tradeoff is flexibility to create truly customized experiences per channel, user needs, and business objectives. Marketing and tech teams willing to invest can unlock amazing capabilities through a more challenging onboarding experience compared to Klaviyo.
Winner: Klaviyo
While Braze unlocks sophisticated cross-channel marketing, its user interface and capabilities focus mainly on enterprise and technical users. For most early-stage e-commerce companies, Klaviyo will provide an easier learning curve and faster time to value to build high-converting email campaigns thanks to a very intuitive interface and automation flows that provide great structure for beginners.
Unless cross-channel personalization is a core need from the start, Klaviyo is likely the far easier platform to onboard and use effectively.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
Klaviyo prioritizes keeping customers off spam lists and inbox placement through advanced email deliverability features. Their dedicated Deliverability Team proactively optimizes sender reputation across major ISPs. Klaviyo also provides deliverability monitoring and tools right inside the platform.
You can enable Sender Authentication like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify your domain and IP. Email infrastructure checks confirm DNS setup while their Global Suppression List automatically excludes spam-flagged addresses. Email authentication levels allow granular blocking for risky domains.
Klaviyo also offers Preview Text and inbox rendering to guarantee consistency across clients. Their Email Deliverability Grader provides an instant spam rating score so you can continually optimize campaign content. Finally, their “Klaviyo Deliverability Shield”, offers an added SPAM Assassin filter layer for an extra cost.
Braze
For enterprise-level needs, Braze partners directly with Postmaster customers, giving access to an expert Delivery Team for personal guidance, protecting sender scores, and resolving blacklist issues quickly. Customers also get access to predictive inbox placement testing tools within the Braze platform.
However, some onboarding services like IP Warming must be purchased separately – an additional cost. Deliverability monitoring does provide useful email engagement and spam trap analytics but lacks Klaviyo’s grader and guidance capabilities for continual optimization.
Braze also lacks native Integrations with authentication tools like SPF/DKIM so IT resources are required to properly configure and maintain DNS, domain, and IP settings outside the platform for ideal deliverability.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo’s real-time Deliverability Grader, authentication support, and automatic spam list avoidance make it easier for non-technical users to proactively maximize email deliverability. Their inbox render previews also guarantee consistency across email clients.
Unless you require managed services, Braze’s deliverability capabilities often need separate configurations and lack guidance tools for continual optimization. For ease of setup and use, Klaviyo provides the best self-service email deliverability.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers email support with fairly fast responses, comprehensive self-service documentation, and detailed community forums—though no live rep. All plans include setup assistance and unlimited 1:1 expert training sessions for strategic account guidance on deliverability, automation optimization, and more to help you manage your account.
The software also hosts a regular educational series called Klaviyo Hacks including live webinars, expert fireside chats, and video tutorials to fuel communications and continuous learning. Their blog resources and robust Klaviyo University courses offer further DIY skills building for new email marketers.
For peer connections, official Klaviyo groups on Facebook such as Klaviyo Pros with over 13,000 members provide active spaces for developers, agencies, and marketing pros to engage around real-life e-commerce email strategies and solution guidance.
Braze
Braze prioritizes high-touch enterprise customer support and expert services, providing 24/7 live chat, email, phone assistance, deployment engineers, and technical account management. But most of these premium services required upgrading to premium or fully managed packages that have minimum monthly spends between $2,500 to $10,000—quite an upcharge for most small brands.
Braze hosts a thriving online community forum for informal peer knowledge sharing and an annual conference called Session for networking opportunities and strategic sessions across verticals. Some active discussion groups like SMS + Email Marketing exist on Facebook as well.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo strikes the right balance offering guided setup assistance, unlimited 1:1 training, and continually updated community forum discussions, documentation resources, and webinars—all without forcing brands into expensive premium support packages. Unless you require managed services or extremely advanced use cases, Klaviyo provides exceptional self-serve customer support capabilities.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo shines when it comes to third-party integrations – with over 250+ partnerships adding valuable data enrichment, automation triggers, customer relationships, connected content, and more workflow opportunities.
For core platforms, Klaviyo seamlessly connects Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Square, Salesforce CRM, and all major payment processors. You also expand personalization with behavioral data from chat tools like Drift or Intercom, user-generated content apps like Yotpo reviews, Facebook campaigns, or loyalty programs like Smile.io points and referrals.
Klaviyo even partners with leading data enrichment tools like Seer Interactive, Privy, Rebel, and more – helping build 360-degree customer profiles to boost your leads by automatically appending useful demographic, firmographic, and predictive buying information. This powers hyper-segmentation.
Braze
Given Braze’s positioning as a customer engagement platform, its key integrations focus on extending campaign reach across channels – with social ads, in-app messaging channels, and offline tools for connecting IoT devices, digital signs, or POS systems. So brands can truly orchestrate unified experiences across touchpoints based on integrated data flows.
You also get deep support for leading e-commerce platforms, CRM/datasets like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, developer tools, attribution analytics, location data providers, and more. Though most connections require custom dev work – not turnkey like Klaviyo.
This custom integration flexibility offers infinite options but demands upfront IT investment and ongoing maintenance of data flow through Braze APIs. Klaviyo’s integrations feel far simpler in most cases.
Winner: Klaviyo
The sheer breadth of Klaviyo’s 250+ strategic partnerships creates so much frictionless opportunity to share data, automate workflows, and maximize the impact of each contact with customers across channels. And their turnkey e-commerce platform connections make setup painless. Braze offers extreme customization possibilities but at the cost of heavy dev resources so Klaviyo is the clear winner.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo pricing is based on the number of contacts, email, and SMS volume sent monthly, and additional features like forms and metrics accessed. There’s a free plan and the basic “Essentials” plan starts at $45/month including up to 1,500k contacts. Volume plans to scale in tiers up to “Enterprise” at custom quotes, which makes it a good choice for growing companies compared to similar products.
Each plan has common features like email A/B testing, drag-and-drop templates, visual workflow builder, screenshots, etc. But higher plans gain more predictive metrics, advanced authentication tools, text message capabilities, custom reporting, and faster deliverability through added ISP warming routes.
Overall, Klaviyo is very affordable for early-stage brands while still providing enterprise-focused capabilities through transparent, scalable pricing. And they require no long-term contracts.
Braze
Similar to Klaviyo, Braze pricing has a basic tier that scales rates based on data points tracked, messaging channels activated, and team member access controls. You can get in touch with support to get a custom quote for your business.
Winner: Klaviyo
Braze provides extremely customized capabilities to enterprise brands but its pricing often puts robust features out of reach for early-stage e-commerce. Klaviyo’s transparent, affordable scaling plans unlock powerful email marketing tools for any sized company.
Unless cross-channel coordination is an immediate priority, Klaviyo provides the best value and approachable entry pricing for growing e-commerce brands.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo earns outstanding reviews from industry analysts and customer testimonials. G2 scores Klaviyo 4.7/5 stars based on 650+ verified user reviews praising the platform’s ease of use, automation capabilities, and excellent customer support.
Users of Klaviyo compare Braze and have positive feedback highlighting intuitive email campaign builders and workflows, detailed analytics, and valuable e-commerce integrations that provide actionable insights even for non-technical users.
Ecommerce marketers also appreciate Klaviyo’s transparent, flexible pricing and key features catering equally to early-stage or established enterprise brands.
Some negatives cite learning curves around advanced configuration, occasional deliverability hiccups, and wanting more template options. But overall, Klaviyo reviews confirm its positioning as a top email marketing platform.
Braze
With 900+ verified reviews on G2, Braze averages 4.5 out of 5 stars – reflecting its power to grant brands seamless coordination and improve customer experiences through contextualized cross-channel messaging.
Praise centers around robust segmentation tools, intelligent orchestration, strong analytics, and excellent enterprise-grade support services. Customers validate Braze as an invaluable platform for centralizing data flows to enable personalized interactions across the full stack – email, mobile, web, SMS, ads, and more.
Constructive feedback covers Braze’s very steep learning curve, fragmented advanced features, and dramatically more complex onboarding vs competition. But ultimately most reviews reaffirm Braze as a leader for brands who can invest in omni-channel messaging. Visit G2 to learn more.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and Braze earn outstanding reviews that align with their differentiated positioning. Klaviyo gets validation as the simpler, more intuitive platform maximizing email and SMS specifically. Braze is recognized for enabling seamlessly coordinated messaging but with far greater configuration needs and pricing. Each platform shines depending on the e-commerce brand’s needs and resources.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- What types of email campaigns can I create in Klaviyo?
Klaviyo is optimized for transactional emails like abandoned carts or order confirmations and marketing automation like browsing flows, welcome series, and retention campaigns sent via both email and SMS. - Does Klaviyo offer live chat support?
No, Klaviyo does not offer direct live chat. However, they have fast email responses, unlimited 1:1 expert training, and active online community forums for questions. - What native e-commerce platforms does Klaviyo integrate with?
Out-of-the-box, Klaviyo connects with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Square online stores. - Can I create customer journeys across channels in Klaviyo?
Klaviyo specializes in email and SMS workflows. You cannot orchestrate full customer journeys with mobile push or ads for example. Braze offers deeper cross-channel coordination.
Braze FAQs
- Does Braze offer pre-built templates and automation?
No – Braze requires more technical expertise to set up custom templates and build automation rulesets based on your goals. - What support options are included with Braze pricing tiers?
Most premium support like chat, phone assistance, or deployment engineers require upgrading to higher-cost managed services packages. - Can my marketing team start using Braze without involving engineers?
Likely not – you need developer help to implement Braze SDKs for tracking and integrating other systems like your e-commerce platform, even for initial basic features. - Is Braze affordable for early-stage ecommerce brands?
Often not – advanced capabilities and support access require large minimum spends. Klaviyo can offer better entry-level pricing.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo if…
Klaviyo is the ideal choice if you want a powerful yet intuitive email and SMS marketing platform purpose-built for e-commerce companies. It shines through easy automation, deep analytics, and tremendous value helping growing brands maximize the impact of every customer touchpoint via targeted campaigns – without high complexity or budget requirements early on.
Alternatively, you may also want to read about some alternatives to Klaviyo if this platform doesn’t sound like a good option for you.
Choose Braze if…
Braze offers unmatched capabilities coordinating contextualized messaging across channels like email, mobile push, in-app, web browsers, and ads. While focused on enterprise needs, Braze is the perfect customer engagement platform for brands committed to crafting seamless experiences by centralizing data flows to customize interactions on customers’ preferred devices and contexts.
Choosing the right email and customer engagement platform is critical for crafting campaigns that create lasting connections with your customers across their journey. We urge you to consider your budget, resources, and capabilities needed to drive growth for your specific business.