When it comes to choosing the right software for your online business, Klaviyo and ClickFunnels are two of the most popular options on the market. But what exactly are these platforms, and why is selecting the best one so critical for entrepreneurs and marketers?
Klaviyo is an advanced email marketing and automation platform, while ClickFunnels specializes in simplified website building and the creation of high-converting sales pages. Both tools aim to help businesses drive more leads and revenue online. However, they achieve these goals through different features and approaches.
In this comprehensive Klaviyo vs ClickFunnels comparison, we will evaluate how the two email marketing platforms stack up across key criteria like ease of use, customization options, built-in features, performance, customer support, pricing, and overall reputation. Our goal is to provide you with the information they need to confidently choose the best platform for your unique needs and budget.
1. Understanding the Basics
Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. It is a fast-growing email marketing and automation platform used by over 90,000 businesses. Klaviyo has a strong market position and is continuing to gain popularity due to its powerful segmentation and targeting capabilities.
ClickFunnels launched in 2014 and was created by renowned online entrepreneur Russell Brunson. With over 158,000 active users as of late 2022, ClickFunnels leads the industry in simplified funnel building and landing page design.
Both companies have engaged social media followings and online communities:
The large user bases and established reputations of both Klaviyo and ClickFunnels demonstrate that they are trusted solutions for critical online marketing needs like email campaigns and high-converting sales funnels. Their years in business also mean extensive real-world testing and optimization of their platforms.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers powerful email marketing automation through workflows and sequences. Marketers can set up triggers based on user behaviors, delays, schedules, and more to send targeted follow-up messages.
Complex conditional logic and custom criteria can be configured to deploy highly personalized and segmented campaigns. Emails can also be automated through API calls and platform integrations.
Overall, Klaviyo provides advanced options for tailored, automated marketing campaigns.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels specializes more in sales funnel automation rather than email. Users can set up automated email sequences to nurture leads through purchase funnel steps. However, the email capabilities are not as advanced as dedicated providers like Klaviyo.
Where ClickFunnels excels is automation around dynamic funnel configuration and optimization through its platform called Etison Editor. Triggers and splits can be used to customize the buyer journey based on user actions.
For multi-channel marketing automation, Klaviyo offers more robust functionality specifically for email campaigns.
Winner: Klaviyo
With its dedicated focus on email marketing automation powered by segmentation and advanced trigger logic, Klaviyo takes the lead over ClickFunnels for this particular criteria. ClickFunnels does provide automation of sales funnels themselves, but cannot match the complexity of Klaviyo’s email-specific workflows.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers both pre-designed and customizable email templates that users can configure for their campaigns. Drag-and-drop builders, code editors, and template variables allow for flexibility. Images, content, and layouts can all be tailored to create targeted, branded emails.
Klaviyo also provides dedicated mobile designs so emails render well across devices. Overall, their templates are highly customizable for email marketers.
ClickFunnels
As ClickFunnels specializes in funnels, landing pages, and highly optimized checkout pages rather than dedicated email, its email templates may not provide the full customization that marketers need. Their templates are likely better optimized for integrating into the pre-built funnels.
Standalone email design and testing functionality is probably more limited compared to specialized software like Klaviyo. But templates can sync with funnel performance.
Winner: Klaviyo
With its focus directly on email marketing, Klaviyo likely provides superior templates tailored to email content, segmentation, testing, and metrics. The needs are different from funnel page design, so ClickFunnels templates probably cater more to journeys than one-off email campaigns.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers powerful behavioral segmentation tools to group users based on interests, engagement, demographics, platforms, and other real-time analytics. Marketers can highly personalize campaigns by combining triggers, filters, score profiles, and other granular criteria.
The easy-to-use visual editor allows users to define segments with drag-and-drop functionality. For example, you could target mobile users in a certain geography who abandoned carts over $50 in the last week.
Dynamic lists update in real-time alongside identified behaviors, while predictive models help project budget impact and ROI of crafted segments. These are then easily integrated across customer journeys, landing pages, and highly targeted email campaigns.
Compared to other email marketing platforms, Klaviyo’s combination of behavioral events data, predictive modeling, and powerful customization sets it apart on flexible yet precise audience segmentation abilities for emails.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels aims more to personalize the sales funnel journey rather than individual email campaigns with segments. Users can set up basic opt-in lists and integrate some email customization into the funnel steps.
However, granular email-focused segmentation around multiple behavioral triggers, custom traits and filters, predictive analytics, and real-time dynamic grouping are likely not feasible. The focus rests on funnel conversion rather than standalone, highly tailored email targeting and messaging.
Integrating email with ClickFunnels allows some personalization, but lacks the precise segmentation power of dedicated platforms like Klaviyo. Within funnel journeys, there is decent flexibility around offers, upsells, order bumps, etc based on user actions. But this works differently than external email campaigns.
So for targeted and optimized email marketing leveraging multiple types of audience segmentation simultaneously, Klaviyo is undoubtedly the winner here.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo’s superiority in customizable segmentation powered by real-time behavioral data is the winning difference from ClickFunnels. While useful for basic email integration into sales funnels, ClickFunnels does not compare dynamic and multi-layered email targeting abilities.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo stands out for its robust email marketing analytics integrated natively into the platform. Users get access to detailed metrics on opens, clicks, conversions, deliverability, subscriber engagement and churn, campaign ROI, and more.
Flexible segmentation allows you to slice and dice data in real time based on schedules, demographics, behaviors, and other email parameters. Customizable dashboards with visualizations provide visibility into the performance of every campaign.
Comparatively, Klaviyo outpaces the analytics of most other dedicated email services. The ability to track email metrics and then tie directly to audience insights for segmentation and targeting optimization is a key differentiator.
This connects email send performance to the targeting for future messaging in a closed feedback loop within Klaviyo. So marketers can continually refine based on hard email analytics numbers – beyond vanity metrics like open rates.
ClickFunnels
As ClickFunnels specializes in sales funnels over email, its core analytics focus on conversion performance, drop-off rates, and testing for the funnel journeys. Users can assess page-level or ad interactions that impact funnel success.
Email data would require integration with external providers like Klaviyo to segment and optimize in connection with broader funnel metrics. ClickFunnels would showcase the conversion performance, while another service monitors the email metrics specifically.
The cohesion of a marketer viewing holistic campaign analytics – from email sends to landing page success – in one unified platform is not feasible currently with ClickFunnels’ limitations around online email insights.
Winner: Klaviyo
For deeply integrated, customizable email campaign analytics tied directly to audience segmentation and future send optimization, Klaviyo is undoubtedly the winner over ClickFunnels.
While ClickFunnels provides critical funnel performance reporting, it does not have the same real-time connection to email metrics, subscribers’ engagement, deliverability tracking, and overall campaign analytics that sets Klaviyo apart as a premium email marketing analytics solution.
The layered, segmented, actionable email data within Klaviyo simply outclasses what ClickFunnels can provide natively without additional integrations.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
Klaviyo sets itself apart through advanced predictive models powered by machine learning algorithms. Its platform analyzes historical performance metrics and behavioral trends to forecast the outcomes – positive and negative – for potential email campaigns.
Marketers receive guidance on the projected impact on metrics like revenue, unsubscribes, spam complaints, etc. This enables optimization of budget, send times, and audience targeting to maximize ROI. Competitors lack this level of predictive email campaign modeling.
Additionally, Klaviyo offers a custom extensions framework. Developers can build specialized apps for niche use cases that plug right into Klaviyo workflows. For example, tailored Shopify notifications, targeted SMS messaging based on cart statuses, customized order confirmations, and more.
These apps extend the platform’s capabilities for end-to-end personalization across channels. Competitors charge premiums for basic app integration, while Klaviyo’s framework enables businesses to stretch its tools to match unique needs.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels delivers differentiated value through its Etison Editor and a suite of specialty funnel-building functionalities. The Etison Editor provides a visual programming interface to design complex conditional logic, special offers, tailored sequences, and more.
Beyond standardized templates and editors, Etison enables extreme customization aligned closely to products, use cases, and business models. It essentially serves as an easy funnel coding tool.
One Click Upsells and Order Bumps also allow further sales funnel personalization as users pass through journeys. Additional packages and offers can be presented based on interests, past purchases, and behaviors right within the flows.
These capabilities empower small businesses to craft buying experiences that feel tailored and dynamic versus one-size-fits-all out-of-box templates.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and ClickFunnels showcase platform exclusives that demonstrate compelling innovation unmatched by competitors. Klaviyo’s predictive models and extensions enable email personalization. ClickFunnels delivers advanced and customizable journey-building tools for Sales.
With standout features on both sides, I would still declare this a tie without additional insight into their direct performance and business lift to pick an ultimate winner. But both showcase leadership through their respective unique capabilities.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
As an email marketing-focused platform, Klaviyo streamlines all its tools and dashboards for creating campaigns, sending messages, and analyzing performance. The intuitive workflows allow both new and experienced users to build emails, drive automation, and deploy segments without extensive training.
The visual drag-and-drop editor simplifies template design and customization. Straightforward metric dashboards provide visibility into campaign analytics without complex configurations. The audience tools make segmenting and targeting lists easy through behavior tracking and profile filtering.
While more advanced options around predictive modeling, custom scripts, and app integrations may have a steeper learning curve, most core email marketing capabilities should be simple for onboarding users. Especially compared to tools chasing broader functions.
ClickFunnels
As ClickFunnels tackles website building, shopping carts, funnel design, and more – its interface inherently carries higher complexity to tie all the capabilities together. Moving beyond pre-built templates into custom journey building, integration setups, and analytics dashboards starts introducing more moderate learning curves.
For users who strictly leverage the standardized templates as-is, the initial onboarding is likely smooth. But to customize funnels with specialized offers, tailored conditional logic, and layered analytic reporting requires ramping up on more advanced platform knowledge.
The breadth of features outside core funnel templates can overwhelm newer users compared to more streamlined tools like Klaviyo. But for those focused strictly on baseline preset builds, usability may be on par.
Winner: Klaviyo
With its tight focus specifically on email campaign execution and performance optimization, Klaviyo likely delivers an easier onboarding and working experience for most marketing users compared to the wider suite of digital sales tools offered in ClickFunnels. Less complexity in platform purpose enables more intuitive usability.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
As an email-first platform, Klaviyo offers robust inbox placement tools natively to maximize email deliverability. Senders get access to real-time metrics on spam test rates, inbox rates, ISP reputation monitoring, bounce management, and more to continually optimize campaigns.
Automated feedback loops allow the platform to learn from delivery performance and inform optimization of target audiences, content, send cadences, and other factors that impact email deliverability over time.
Granular analytics even assess the impact of factors like subject lines, preview text, images, and calls-to-action on inbox placement success. Further customization can A/B test and refine based on tangible deliverability metrics.
ClickFunnels
Since ClickFunnels specializes more in funnel and landing page building rather than dedicated email marketing, its native capabilities around optimizing email deliverability are likely minimal.
Users would have to integrate external email providers, assess performance outside the platform, and rely on third parties to inform email send tactics. Without real-time inbox placement analytics or segmentation based on email metrics, using ClickFunnels alone poses deliverability challenges.
Sending high-volume, quality email campaigns through ClickFunnels would require supplementation from specialist email platforms like Klaviyo to enable targeting, testing, and optimization focused squarely on maximizing email deliverability.
Winner: Klaviyo
With native, integrated tools to directly monitor, assess, and continually optimize email delivery rates alongside granular analytics on subscriber engagement, Klaviyo easily delivers superior email deliverability capabilities compared to ClickFunnels’ inherent limitations.
Without dedicated email performance data or segmentation, ClickFunnels cannot optimize inbox placement alone. Klaviyo specializes in and thus excels at this vital email marketing capability.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
Klaviyo prides itself on providing best-in-class customer support through channels like email, chat, phone, and ticket requests. As a market-leading email marketing platform, knowledgeable representatives are available to troubleshoot platform issues, provide guidance on deliverability questions, assist with integration setups, and more.
Klaviyo also cultivates an engaged community forum where over 15,000 users share best practices, ask peer questions, and participate in broader platform discussions. Popular conversations cover topics like automation workflows, analytics approaches, email copywriting, and subscriber engagement tactics. Users report high response rates and quality answers from both official Klaviyo staff and knowledgeable peers.
An active 130,000-member Facebook group also connects Klaviyo subscribers for deeper informal information exchange beyond the official community forums.
ClickFunnels
As one of the largest funnel-building and sales platforms, ClickFunnels provides helpful customer support resources common among industry leaders. Users can access email support, community wikis, screencast tutorials, and searchable help docs covering platform capabilities, troubleshooting errors, and how-to guides.
An engaged Funnel Builders Facebook community with over 250,000 members also facilitates peer sharing around sales funnel approaches, website optimization, and lead conversion strategies tailored to ClickFunnels tools and workflows. The large group provides crowdsourced guidance beyond official materials for customized business use cases.
Together these resources aim to solve issues and empower users to effectively leverage ClickFunnels for their sales needs, though likely with more funnel focus over one-to-one support interactions.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and ClickFunnels appear to offer standard premium-tier customer service and established user communities fitting their respective categories. Without deeper visibility into comparative response times, issue resolution, community quality, and more, this seems like an overall tie currently based on available information.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo shines when it comes to deep integrations with other email marketing, CRM, and analytics tools used by online businesses.
For example, prebuilt connectors make it easy to sync email subscriber data with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, HubSpot, Salesforce, and dozens more. Workflows instantly share insights across these systems to align messaging with website interactions. Klaviyo also offers webhooks, REST APIs, and Zapier templates to integrate with niche apps.
Together this eliminates chaotic manual exporting and uploading of databases between systems that should seamlessly communicate with other services online. Klaviyo ensures core platforms speak natively to provide complete visibility into subscriber engagement beyond just email.
ClickFunnels
Where ClickFunnels specializes is integration with sales-focused software leveraged by e-commerce brands selling online courses, subscriptions, info products, and more.
ClickFunnels integrates with third-party services to simplify lead generation and help you capture leads effectively. Your ClickFunnels account also syncs key data with payment processors like Stripe and PayPal, webinar platforms, membership tools, SMS, and voice messaging apps. ClickFunnels also offers a marketplace with over 40 specialized funnel-focused plugins.
While it does enable basic email marketing platform connections, ClickFunnel’s core strength is expanding its sales funnel reach into complementary conversion tools for calls-to-action beyond website journeys. This drives holistic sales growth.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and ClickFunnels focus on integration support in their respective email marketing and funnel building/sales wheelhouses. Klaviyo’s strength is data syncing and causal analysis; ClickFunnels drives funnel optimization leveraging sales tool APIs. Both play critical roles with neither superior holistically. I would still declare this a tie.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo employs a usage-based pricing model for email marketing plans. Small businesses can start for as little as $45 a month supporting under 1,500 contacts. From there, pricing scales linearly based on number of subscribers.
There are also undisclosed enterprise pricing plans for extremely high email volume – likely with capped costs after certain thresholds.
Ultimately with Klaviyo, you directly pay for the size of your audience and email deployment. This allows bootstrapped small businesses to manage costs by controlling subscriber growth and messaging frequency. Each additional email costs marginally more.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels plans start around $127/month for the Basic plan which gives you 1 website, 20 funnels, and 10K contacts. Expanded plans support up to 3 custom domains.
The upper-tier Funnel Hacker plan costs $208/month and offers access to advanced features like Affiliate Management, Backpack, and Actionetics. Addons for email marketing, membership site hosting, and other tools cost extra based on subscriber counts.
So ClickFunnels pricing works best for established mid-size businesses ready to invest more fixed costs to support extensive funnel infrastructure scalability and performance monitoring/testing capabilities. The focus is less directly user-based like Klaviyo.
Winner: Tie
Both platforms take different approaches to scalable pricing reflective of their respective industries. Without detailed publicly published pricing info, neither seems distinctly “better” than the other – just tailored for different business models based on email volume vs funnel/page needs. I’d still call this a tie.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Given Klaviyo’s market-leading position for email marketing automation, the platform enjoys overwhelmingly positive user reviews focused on configurable and high-performing campaigns, intuitive workflow builders, and quality support.
The vast majority of feedback praises the ability to quickly create targeted, responsive email content and appreciate real-time analytics to optimize subscriber engagement. Reviews also highlight excellent deliverability and inbox placement rates.
Common constructive feedback cites a steep learning curve to leverage advanced predictive modeling, custom scripts, and rankings analysis. But most agree core email functions meet ease-of-use and deliverability goals.
See Klaviyo’s reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius.
ClickFunnels
As a dominant sales funnel builder, ClickFunnels garners very positive reviews around pre-built funnel templates that facilitate lead capture and conversions without technical expertise.
Praise centers on accessing high-quality shapes without code or design experience. Criticism tends to come from technically adept users hoping to deeply customize journeys beyond base templates through open APIs or visual funnel editors.
But for most small businesses seeking an easy webpage structure to support goal-based selling, reviews confirm ClickFunnels delivers on fast, customizable funnel building with standard integrations to accelerate online revenue growth.
See Clickfunnels Reviews on G2
Winner: Tie
Based on market positioning, Klaviyo, and ClickFunnels enjoy strong reputations around configurable email marketing campaigns and sales funnel templating respectively. Both facilitate robust functionality for their disciplines with the most common user complaints stemming from limitations standard among category leaders. This likely makes for an equal tie.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- How do I see the impact of emails on revenue?
Klaviyo’s predictive modeling and attribution tools provide email revenue insights. - What integrations are available?
Klaviyo connects with common platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, and HubSpot. - Is Klaviyo easy to use for beginners?
The dashboard is intuitive but advanced capabilities have learning curves.
ClickFunnels FAQs
- Do I need coding skills for building funnels?
Most template building is drag-and-drop based but custom scripts might require coding skills. - How do I split-test my funnel designs?
ClickFunnel has split-testing and analytics abilities built into the platform. - Is ClickFunnels an all-in-one business solution?
While robust, additional tools may be needed for email marketing automation and mobile optimization, Clickfunnels is the ideal solution for ecommerce businesses.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo if…
With advanced email marketing and powerful automated workflows from flexible segmentation tools, Klaviyo is an excellent choice for e-commerce brands focused on customized digital engagement and retention campaigns.
The ability to tie real-time user behaviors into triggered multi-channel flows makes Klaviyo the perfect platform for marketers to boost repeat purchase rates and loyalty through behavioral targeting and intelligent email list building informed by open/click analytics.
And, if you don’t think Klaviyo is the ideal choice for you, you can also refer to my Klaviyo alternatives article to find one better suited for your email marketing needs.
Choose ClickFunnels if…
ClickFunnels simplifies the process of architecting sales funnels and high-converting landing pages/websites tailored to user actions.
If you’re a small business owner whose priority is fast customizable webpage building focused on selling products, membership sites, services, or events – then ClickFunnels delivers the templates and journey optimization capabilities necessary to quickly grow your customer base and revenue without technical complexity.
Ultimately the ideal platform depends heavily on your business’s core priorities and needs between sophisticated email marketing vs more accessible funnel construction. Assessing your use case, resources and goals is vital before committing. Please ask any questions below or reach out if we can further clarify differences or assist in evaluating the best choice!