When it comes to email marketing software, Klaviyo and Campaign Monitor are two of the most popular choices on the market. As an entrepreneur looking to grow your business, selecting the right email marketing platform is crucial for building meaningful connections with customers and driving sales.
In this comprehensive Klaviyo vs Campaign Monitor comparison guide, we will be evaluating Klaviyo and Campaign Monitor across several key criteria to help you determine which solution may be the best fit for your business needs and budget.
Specifically, we will be comparing features and functionality, ease of use, customization options, reliability and deliverability, customer support, pricing, and more. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each one so you can pick the best email marketing platform for your needs.
1. Understanding the Basics
Founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialeckin and Ed Hallen, Klaviyo is a rapidly growing email marketing and automation platform. With over $615 million in total funding, Klaviyo serves over 100,000 businesses worldwide. The company has established itself as an industry leader focused on empowering small e-commerce brands to grow.
You can connect with other Klaviyo users in the official Klaviyo Success Community Facebook group.
On the other hand, Campaign Monitor was founded in 2004 by Ben Richardson and Dave Greiner. It serves over 100,000 customers globally across a variety of industries. While Campaign Monitor has been around longer than Klaviyo, both platforms have a strong market presence.
Campaign Monitor focuses more heavily on design and campaigns. Check out the Campaign Monitor Community Facebook page to engage with over 13,000 other users.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers powerful automation through Floows, its visual workflow builder. You can create complex triggers and multi-step campaigns with conditional logic, custom metrics, and dynamic audience segmentation. For example, you can send behavior-based abandoned cart emails or customize journeys based on customer lifetime value.
Key automation features include welcome campaigns, flows, metrics, SMS, and platform integrations like email, webhooks, and Zapier. Klaviyo also offers dedicated tools for WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Everything is optimized for mobile apps as well.
Overall, Klaviyo provides extremely robust and customizable automation for e-commerce stores and SaaS companies. You can truly customize things to match your business needs.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor has its Automation Studio for creating triggered campaigns and sending automated emails. You can build customer journeys with basic if/then logic and timing-based triggers. For example, send a follow-up email 5 days after a customer downloads an ebook.
The platform supports welcome series, lifecycle campaigns, behavioral targeting, and integration with many popular e-commerce platforms. However, its automation capabilities are not quite as advanced compared to Klaviyo Flows. There is less flexibility for custom metrics and complex multi-channel flows.
That said, Campaign Monitor automation will still meet the needs of most small business use cases. It provides solid prebuilt templates and an easy drag-and-drop workflow builder.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the winner for best email marketing automation due to its remarkably robust and customizable feature set enabling highly advanced e-commerce journeys. Floows workflows provide unmatched flexibility tailored to data-driven brands.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers hundreds of professionally designed, customizable email templates for welcome series, promotions, announcements, newsletters, and more. Templates are mobile-optimized and you can preview them across different devices.
There are specific templates optimized for important e-commerce scenarios like abandoned carts, product launches, shipping updates, back-in-stock alerts, and personalized recommendations. All templates can be edited using the drag-and-drop editor.
While Klaviyo provides templates for every major email campaign type, advanced users have the flexibility to build custom HTML templates from scratch. You can also create Master Templates to manage global styling.
Overall, Klaviyo strikes a great balance between plug-and-play templates for quickly getting started while also offering customization capabilities to more advanced users.
Campaign Monitor
With over 600 mobile-ready email templates, Campaign Monitor is marketed as a leading email template provider. There are templates optimized for every major industry and campaign objective – promotions, newsletters, announcements, onboarding campaigns, and more.
While they provide basic e-commerce templates, Campaign Monitor’s strength lies more in traditional email marketing scenarios compared to specialized e-commerce sequences. But the drag-and-drop editor does make it easy to customize any template to match your brand.
Developers can also leverage the Android mobile app, as well as the Template Language to build custom email templates with dynamic content pulled from your website or database. There are also tools to manage global header, footer, and style changes.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and Campaign Monitor offer excellent curated galleries of professional email templates as well as customization capabilities to tailor emails to your brand. For most small business use cases, the out-of-the-box templates will suffice so this category results in a tie. However, Klaviyo provides more advanced ecommerce-specific templates.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers powerful segmentation tools to divide your customer database into highly targeted lists and subgroups. You can create segments based on detailed behavioral data, custom metrics, transaction history, lifetime value, product attributes, and more. Klaviyo automatically updates segments as your customers meet new criteria.
For example, easily segment customers by location, frequency of purchase, average order value, which links they clicked in your last email, how many times they’ve opened an email, days since their last visit to your site, whether they downloaded a file, and much more. You can also integrate Klaviyo with analytics tools like Google Analytics for even deeper insights.
With Klaviyo’s granular data and custom metrics, the segmentation possibilities are truly endless, enabling hyper-personalized messaging and promotions.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor enables you to segment your subscribers by location, email activity, links clicked, date subscribed, and basic purchase history so you can send timely transactional emails. It leverages data from your email campaigns as well as integrations with e-commerce platforms to update segments automatically.
However, without the ability to build segments based on more advanced omnichannel criteria and custom metrics, Campaign Monitor trails Klaviyo when it comes to detailed subscriber segmentation. But Campaign Monitor still provides enough basic segmentation capabilities for typical small business needs.
Winner: Klaviyo
With its unparalleled ability to track detailed customer behavior across channels and leverage custom metrics for segmentation, Klaviyo is the clear winner. Granular data combined with easy segment-building tools enable incredibly personalized, targeted messaging not possible in Campaign Monitor.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo enables deep analytics across your email campaigns and website with its metrics product. You get insights on email sends, delivery, open rates, clicks, bounce rates, uninstalls, spam complaints, and more. Metrics integrate revenue and order data to track ROI across acquisition channels.
You can view real-time dashboard reports on revenue, conversions, customer lifetime value, and subscriber engagement rates. Klaviyo also provides analysis on website traffic, popular site pages, landing pages, and UTM tagging. Everything syncs with your ecommerce platform. Advanced users can leverage the API and custom metrics for further analysis.
Overall, Klaviyo shines when it comes to detailed analytics and reporting to optimize your sales funnels.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor offers email campaign reporting on opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and more. You can view delivery and engagement rates over time to spot trends. It also integrates e-commerce data for basic ROI tracking based on purchases driven by each campaign.
However, Campaign Monitor lacks more advanced behavioral analytics and the ability to track website analytics in one unified interface. You would need to complement it with a dedicated analytics platform like Google Analytics for website traffic data and advanced insights.
Winner: Klaviyo
With its unified dashboard tracking every aspect of email and website performance plus the ability to incorporate custom metrics, Klaviyo wins when it comes to actionable analytics. It provides unmatched end-to-end visibility into your marketing funnel and subscriber engagement.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
A few unique benefits Klaviyo provides are advanced SMS marketing, dynamic forms and surveys, and its Reclaim tool.
Klaviyo’s SMS platform seamlessly integrates with your email and website data for unified messaging. You can build SMS workflows just like email automation.
Dynamic forms leverage customer data to customize signup, checkout, and survey forms on your website on a per-visitor basis. Reclaim helps you win back lost subscribers by rebuilding suppressed contact lists and reactivating inactive email addresses.
These specialized tools demonstrate Klaviyo’s commitment to offering a truly unified platform encompassing every channel to maximize customer data.
Campaign Monitor
Some of Campaign Monitor’s notable unique features include multi-language support and AB testing.
Campaign Monitor makes it easy to set up multi-language campaigns reaching subscribers in their native language. You can translate email content while optimizing for regional compliance needs. Their visual email designer also enables easy A/B testing so you can experiment with subject lines, content, and design to boost engagement.
While these capabilities demonstrate Campaign Monitor’s email-first focus, they do not expand capabilities across channels like Klaviyo’s unique tools.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins when it comes to unique innovations that unlock more ways to leverage customer data across channels. From SMS to surveys to web forms, Klaviyo focuses on unifying data for superior personalization and automation. These specialized tools expand your marketing capabilities beyond basic email.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is praised for its intuitive interface and ease of use right from the onboarding process. The dashboard neatly organizes your data and tools using simple, clean tabs like Email, SMS, Flows, Metrics, and Platform Apps.
Despite offering a deep set of capabilities, Klaviyo’s UI remains visually appealing and user-friendly. Core features for building emails, automation, and segments are designed to get beginners up and running quickly with little friction.
While there may be a learning curve to leverage Klaviyo’s more advanced tools, the platform scales well for users of any skill level. Detailed onboarding checklists and documentation also help smooth the adoption process.
Campaign Monitor
The Campaign Monitor dashboard focuses mainly on campaign creation, design templates, and reporting. The visual drag-and-drop builder makes it simple for beginners to quickly customize professional templates and launch email campaigns with no coding required.
However, those wanting to implement more complex triggered automation, customize metrics, sync integrations, and leverage API access may find Campaign Monitor less intuitive. It prioritizes simplicity over advanced customization in its interface.
The platform is very intuitive for basic email sending but lacks breadth across channels. The user experience remains streamlined as you scale usage over time.
Winner: Klaviyo
While both platforms aim to provide an intuitive first-use experience, Klaviyo’s superior transparency and organization of robust data tools give it the advantage for usability. The UI scales exceptionally well from beginner to advanced power user. Novice users also become experts faster with Klaviyo’s interlinked onboarding.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
Klaviyo prioritizes deliverability through advanced email infrastructure and strict compliance adherence. They achieve industry-leading inbox placement rates of over 99% across ISPs.
Features like predictive email intelligence, adaptive delivery technology, and dynamic content optimization help avoid spam filters. Granular analytics offer visibility into email reputation factors.
For example, Klaviyo adaptive delivery uses algorithmic monitoring of bounce rates, spam complaints, and engagement metrics to determine optimal send times on a per-subscriber basis. This optimizes delivery for each person.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor highlights its email deliverability as its core strength. Through dedicated IP addresses and automatic spam testing, they maintain excellent global deliverability rates around 98-99% on average.
Email previews detect potential issues before sending. Campaign Monitor also provides deliverability consulting services to implement best practices around list building, content personalization, and compliance needs in your niche.
While core deliverability capabilities are strong on both platforms, Klaviyo’s advanced personalized optimization gives it an edge. But most typical use cases will achieve great inbox placement with either tool.
Winner: Klaviyo
Thanks to features like predictive email intelligence and adaptive send-time algorithms, Klaviyo wins through its uniquely optimized approach to personalized email deliverability for each subscriber. Both are great options though.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers 24/7 email support, live chat, phone support, and an online knowledge base resource hub to help users. You can also get 1-on-1 onboarding and integration assistance. Paid plans include a dedicated account representative.
As an engaged, growing community, the official Klaviyo Facebook group shares tips and best practices with over 20K members. Klaviyo also hosts frequent complimentary masterclasses and an annual conference called Klaviyo: Reunite.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor provides 24/5 support over live chat and email. There are also community forums to exchange ideas as well as an online knowledge base with tutorials. Phone support requires upgraded paid plans.
Users can join the Campaign Monitor Community Facebook group of over 13,000 members to discuss email marketing strategies and share inspiration. The community is active in sharing templates, tips, and workshops.
Winner: Tie
Both platforms offer excellent customer support through a variety of convenient channels complemented by engaged user communities. The breadth of self-service content and direct assistance is strong in both Klaviyo and Campaign Monitor. For most use cases, users should have no problem finding solutions.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo integrates with all major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. It also connects with top marketing and analytics tools through Zapier and native app integrations.
For example, natively integrate platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Segment, Slack, Zendesk, and 1,000+ more. Or leverage Zapier to connect virtually any web app.
Klaviyo’s commitment to openness via API access also enables developers to build custom connections on top of the robust default offerings.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor easily integrates with popular email services, CRMs, e-commerce stores, and marketing platforms. Sync Campaign Monitor with solutions like Mailchimp, Zoho, ActiveCampaign, Shopify, and Marketo.
However, Klaviyo still supports 2X more apps natively while also offering more flexibility to configure triggers, automation, and custom reporting on top of each integration. Campaign Monitor focuses mostly on one-way data sharing.
So while Campaign Monitor covers the basics well, Klaviyo is superior in terms of deep integration capabilities.
Winner: Klaviyo
The Klaviyo Campaign Monitor comparison shows that Klaviyo is the clear winner. Thanks to strong native app support plus API extensibility, Klaviyo has the best platform integrations for successful email marketing campaigns. It enables more seamless connectivity across your martech stack to centralize data and maximize automation based on a wider range of customer touchpoints.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a free plan covering up to 10,000 contacts. Paid plans scale from $45/month up to custom enterprise pricing.
Key features like segmentation and email automation are available in all pricing tiers without subscriber limits. You pay primarily for contact volume. Bolt-on premium features like SMS, predictive tools, and Salesforce integration carry additional costs.
Klaviyo pricing remains straightforward and competitive for the robust platform offered across all plan levels. They support customers at any scale without overly complex modules or hidden fees.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor pricing plans depend on your number of email contacts and are designed to scale up to add more features like automation, reporting, and design services.
Here are some key pricing highlights for a list of 500 contacts:
- Lite Plan: $11/month. Access the platform’s core features and send up to 2,500 emails.
- Essentials: $19/month. Send unlimited emails and get advanced automation features, including engagement segments and time zone sending.
- Premier Plan: $149/month. Get advanced segmentation plus SMS marketing, and premier support.
For a list with 2,500 contacts, you can expect to pay $39, $59, and $149/month respectively for the same features. Volume discounts are available. Campaign Monitor provides a free trial to test drive their platform as well. Pricing is competitive for the robust capabilities provided.
Winner: Klaviyo
Thanks to transparent pricing, unlimited plan options, and stacked features offered even at entry-level plans, Klaviyo wins for best overall pricing model. The marketing automation software gives you access to the full-scope platform capabilities regardless of tier. Bolt-on premium tools let you pay only for the extras needed.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is highly rated across leading software review platforms. On G2, they earn a 96% positive customer satisfaction rating across hundreds of reviews.
Users praise the platform for its powerful email and automation capabilities, ease of use, excellent customer support, and helping grow e-commerce revenue. Negative feedback is scarce, though some enterprises feel the platform lacks proper account management.
On Capterra, Klaviyo rates 4.5/5 stars based on 600+ ratings. The main downsides called out are high pricing for advanced features and complexity for non-technical users.
See Klaviyo’s reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius.
Campaign Monitor
With a 4.7/5 average across 350+ Capterra reviews, Campaign Monitor by Marigold also earns stellar feedback for running targeted email campaigns. Users highlight email campaign design, deliverability, ease of use, and great customer support as advantages.
Less positive reviews wish the platform integrated better with more third-party apps. Some also feel the basic UI lacks more advanced configuration capabilities.
On G2, Campaign Monitor scores 95% in customer satisfaction across 400+ ratings. A common theme in lower reviews is desiring more detailed analytics and reporting for enhanced campaign performance.
Winner: Klaviyo
Both platforms earn outstanding reviews from customers. But with higher overall review ratings and praise for the platform’s breadth of capabilities, Klaviyo slightly edges out Campaign Monitor when it comes to public reputation. Consider both equally great options though.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- What types of businesses use Klaviyo?
Klaviyo is designed for e-commerce brands, online retailers, software companies, and service providers looking to grow through automated email and omnichannel marketing. - Does Klaviyo offer email templates?
Yes, Klaviyo provides hundreds of customizable, mobile-optimized email templates for key customer workflows like welcome series, promotions, announcements, shipping updates, and more. - How does Klaviyo pricing work?
Klaviyo offers a free plan of up to 10,000 contacts. Paid plans start at $45/month with segmentation, metrics, and automation included on all tiers. You pay primarily for a certain number of contacts. - Is Klaviyo GDPR compliant?
Yes, Klaviyo helps businesses follow GDPR standards around data privacy and protection through encrypted data infrastructure, consent collection, access requests, and more. - Can Klaviyo integrate with Shopify?
Yes, Klaviyo offers a direct Shopify integration to centralize store customer and order data into marketing workflows.
Campaign Monitor FAQs
- What is Campaign Monitor best for?
Campaign Monitor is an email-focused platform optimized for sending beautifully designed and responsive campaign emails like promotions, newsletters, and announcements. - Does Campaign Monitor work with WooCommerce?
Yes, Campaign Monitor integrates directly with the WooCommerce platform to track customer data and shopping behavior post-purchase. - How much does Campaign Monitor cost?
Pricing starts at $11/month for under 500 contacts. Volume-based pricing tiers extend up to $149/month for 150,000 contacts as you scale. - Can Campaign Monitor build email automation?
Yes, Campaign Monitor enables the creation of multi-stage email automation and customer journeys tailored to buyer lifecycles with basic conditional logic. - Is Campaign Monitor compatible with web and mobile apps?
While mainly web-based, Campaign Monitor also offers iOS and Android apps for creating emails on mobile devices conveniently.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo if…
Klaviyo is the best choice if you want a unified customer engagement platform that extends beyond basic email marketing. With advanced behavioral automation, scalable omnichannel data infrastructure, and customization flexibility, Klaviyo empowers sophisticated e-commerce marketers who leverage real-time insights to create targeted, personalized messaging driving repeat sales.
Klaviyo also makes sense for established DTC brands planning to scale into an enterprise through leveraging customer analytics.
On the other hand, if you feel that this platform isn’t the best option for you, check out my Klaviyo alternatives article for more options.
Choose Campaign Monitor if…
Choose Campaign Monitor if you want an intuitive email marketing toolkit that makes it easy to create beautiful, polished newsletters and promotions. The platform simplifies complex design functionality and deliverability best practices so small teams can build engaging emails that drive brand awareness and subscriber growth.
If you don’t require advanced automation or analytics, Campaign Monitor provides a streamlined solution to share updates with an audience without technical headaches.
Deciding on the right email and customer engagement platform is crucial for nurturing lasting customer relationships over time. Consider which solution best aligns with your business goals, resources, and growth trajectory before investing. Please leave any questions below so we can provide tailored advice!