When it comes to choosing an email marketing and lead generation platform, Klaviyo and Privy are two top contenders. These powerful pieces of software help businesses drive more traffic, convert visitors into leads, increase sales, and build stronger customer relationships. Selecting the right platform is critical for long-term success.
In this comprehensive Klaviyo vs Privy comparison, we will evaluate the two email marketing platforms across several key criteria to help you determine the best choice for your business.
We will analyze market position, ease of use, design customization, features and functionality, performance, customer support, pricing models, reviews and reputation, and more. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each platform.
1. Understanding the Basics
Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Edward Hieatt. It quickly became one of the most popular email marketing and lead-generation platforms on the market. Klaviyo boasts over 100,000 customers including big names like Unilever, Sennheiser, and Twilio.
Privy was launched in 2013 by Ben Jabbawy. While smaller than Klaviyo, it still serves over 10,000 businesses of all sizes. Privy has established itself as a major player focused primarily on e-commerce stores.
Both platforms have leading market positions and large user bases. Klaviyo edges out Privy in terms of total customers and popularity. However, Privy punches above its weight with innovative features tailored to online shops.
If you want to connect with other users, here are links to their top Facebook groups:
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers powerful and customizable automation workflows to turn visitors into loyal customers. You can create sequences tailored to specific customer segments or trigger events. For example, send automated emails when someone abandons their shopping cart, on their birthday, after a purchase, or on a custom schedule.
Building complex automation is simple with an easy drag-and-drop workflow builder. Customize every aspect like templates, content personalization with merge tags, conditional logic, delays, and more. Automation supports email, SMS marketing, and push notifications. Refer to Klaviyo’s automation documentation for details on the SMS marketing platform and more.
You get the flexibility to combine triggers and conditions using Klaviyo’s workflow editor. Send the right message at the right time automatically with just a few clicks. Features like A/B testing and global frequency capping give the insight to optimize your automation. Access detailed analytics to measure performance too.
Privy
Privy focuses more on email-based cart abandonment sequences out-of-the-box. Build timed automation to recover abandoned checkouts via personalized emails. Easy point-and-click setup walks you through creating sequences, designing templates, and targeting customer data segments.
Expand beyond cart abandonment with Privy’s Visual Campaign Builder for multi-step automation using drag and drop. Workflows can combine emails, Facebook ads retargeting, SMS platform, and more. Refer to Privy’s features list for specifics.
Privy automations lack some of the advanced functionality Klaviyo offers without a complicated interface. You cannot create multi-conditional sequences for example. However, the platform nicely balances simplicity and customization for essential email marketing automation needs.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the winner for best automation capabilities based on the greater flexibility to create tailored, omnichannel sequences with robust targeting and analytics. The powerful workflow builder enables unlimited custom automation suited for broader use cases compared to Privy’s more specialized cart flows.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers hundreds of professionally designed, mobile-optimized email templates to choose from. Browse by category like abandoned cart, welcome series, promotions, holidays, and more. Customize any template with your images, colors, and branding easily.
The template editor makes updates a breeze with a drag-and-drop builder and intuitive formatting options. Place content blocks wherever you want and make text edits inline. Changes appear instantly in the live preview so you know exactly how your emails will look.
Get access to premium templates from Klaviyo like mailbox mockups, quizzes, multi-product catalogs, and other interactive email formats. Save templates to reuse or duplicate them to make tweaks for A/B testing experiments. Refer to their template documentation for more.
Privy
Privy offers templates optimized specifically for e-commerce stores and campaigns like abandoned cart recovery. The built-in editor makes it easy to customize things like colors, add products, and swap images.
The template options focus mainly on essential promotional and transactional email formats. Expect templates for cart abandonment, shipping updates, receipts, etc. Privy lacks the breadth of creative templates Klaviyo has, especially the Privy popups.
However, Privy provides all you need for basic storefront email communications without much extra. The templates load quickly and render well on mobile without hassle. However, creative online brands may desire more variety.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for best email templates thanks to the vast library of professionally designed options covering way more categories, styles, and interactive formats compared to Privy’s smaller store-focused selection. Klaviyo also makes customization smoother with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
Divide your audience into granular segments based on detailed attributes and behaviors in Klaviyo. Leverage turnkey integrations to automatically pull in signup data, custom properties, purchase history, page views, email engagement metrics, and more to segment on.
Easily build segments with an intuitive drag-and-drop workflow combining if/then logic, filters, and custom data. Access pre-built segments like abandoned cart shoppers, repeat customers who haven’t purchased lately, email engagement levels, and other groups you’ll want to target.
Klaviyo makes it simple to create dynamic, real-time segments that update automatically as new matching customers meet your defined criteria. Refer to their segmentation guide for more details.
Privy
Privy focuses segmentation primarily around recent site visitor actions, purchase history, or signup characteristics. Easily target customers who added to the cart but didn’t buy or segment by order count, average order value, or last order date for example.
Build segmented email lists using Privy’s point-and-click workflow to filter by attributes like email activity, tags, location data, or custom fields. Access some predefined segments as well. Refer to Privy’s features for specifics.
While Privy covers the basic segmentation small businesses need, Klaviyo enables more advanced, real-time segment building based on a wider range of data connected via turnkey integrations.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins the best segmentation thanks to the extensive behavioral, demographic, historical, and real-time data available to divide customers into hyper-targeted lists. The platform makes it easy to not only craft targeted email messages but also leverage rich integrated data plus website analytics to get extremely granular for things like abandoned cart messages and personalized emails. Privy’s simpler tools get the job done, but serious marketers need Klaviyo’s robust targeting.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo stands out by providing powerful email analytics at the list, segment, and individual subscriber levels. You can view key metrics like emails sent, open rates, clickthrough rates and unsubscribe rates over customizable date ranges to understand performance. Granular filtering and segmentation sheds light on differences across campaigns, groups, and channels.
Drill down into the factors driving email metrics by device, location, subject line, and other parameters. Klaviyo offers aggregated performance reporting plus visibility into individual subscriber profiles displaying historical engagement patterns. Integrate this data into your existing business intelligence stacks thanks to smooth connections with platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
Refer to their analytics documentation for more details on the robust email analytics capabilities Klaviyo provides.
Privy
Privy focuses its email analytics reporting on transactional e-commerce messaging and recovering abandoned shopping carts. Easily view key metrics like email send volume, open rates, and click rates for essential flows like post-purchase and cart abandonment sequences. Dashboards provide visibility into high-level performance but lack some of the deeper segmentation capabilities Klaviyo provides.
However, Privy does integrate well with many popular business intelligence solutions to help fuel data-driven decisions using email campaign analytics. You can get a solid overview of how your promotional and lifecycle messaging is performing. Learn more via Privy’s analytics features list.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the winner for best email marketing analytics thanks to very granular segmentation revealing micro-conversion trends plus the ability to create individual subscriber profiles showing engagement over time.
Smooth integration with data warehouses also provides serious e-commerce brands the robust reporting they need for growth. While Privy covers the basics fairly well, advanced marketers need access to Klaviyo’s richer dataset.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
Klaviyo packs many robust features beyond basic email marketing automation to drive business growth in innovative ways. For example, their in-platform referrals tool incentivizes customers to promote your brand to friends for rewards.
You also get access to their intuitive metric-based survey builder to easily create, send, and analyze NPS or customer satisfaction surveys right within Klaviyo. Dynamic forms help you quickly and securely capture website lead data for conversion rate optimization too.
Additionally, Klaviyo offers a faster alternative landing page creator focused on lead gen plus several integrations to Make dynamic gifs, create SMS campaigns, personalize onsite messaging, trigger web push notifications, and more. Explore the Klaviyo App and Extension Marketplace for even more capabilities.
Privy
Privy doesn’t have quite the same breadth of unique innovations as Klaviyo, instead focusing more exclusively on converting website visitors into email subscribers and recovering abandoned carts faster.
However, they do offer a NudgeTM feature to effectively grab visitor attention and incentivize them to join your email list or complete desired actions onsite. You also get quality lead magnet and assessment builder tools to boost conversions. Dynamic forms help capture subscriber data too.
Privy skips the extras concentrating on its core specialties – building email lists, sending targeted campaigns, and automatically recovering shopping cart abandonment using timed sequences. Check their features overview for specifics.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo takes the prize for the most unique features thanks to the diverse array of companion tools to not just grow your email list but convert subscribers into loyal brand advocates. From creating surveys to sending web push notifications to automated referral rewards, Klaviyo packs way more beyond basic email and automation power.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
Klaviyo shines when it comes to overall usability thanks to a modern, intuitive interface. The platform follows familiar design patterns so most users feel instantly comfortable navigating. Expect crisp menus, clear CTAs, sensical layouts, and responsive performance.
The dashboard nicely groups related tools and analytics based on marketing goals to simplify getting started. Setting up core building blocks like signup forms, email campaigns, and basic automation takes just a few clicks. But advanced functionality lives just below the surface when you’re ready.
While there may be a learning curve in fully leveraging Klaviyo’s robust segmentation and automation capabilities, the platform balances simplicity and customization nicely. Detailed support articles help ramp usage at your own pace without being overwhelmed.
Privy
Privy also offers a well-designed interface following conventional UX standards making the platform inviting for beginners. Menu navigation and page layouts make sense without much ramp-up needed. Expect easy point-and-click creation for opt-in forms, basic email campaigns, and recovering abandoned carts.
The tool surfaces the core features online merchants care about most upfront keeping things straightforward. Privy skips advanced controls in favor of maintaining simplicity guiding you through workflows using segmented suggestion prompts. Less technical users may find this more approachable.
Overall Privy emphasizes usability catering to e-commerce owners without a deep marketing background. However, marketers desiring more sophisticated capabilities may feel constrained to explore past the surface.
Winner: Tie
Klaviyo and Privy both provide excellent usability making email marketing, conversion, and automation accessible for small business owners without technical expertise. Klaviyo offers greater scalability for more advanced marketers but Privy keeps things simple if basic workflows meet your needs. We declare this category a tie since the ideal platform depends on your goals.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
Klaviyo emphasizes deliverability through advanced targeting, list hygiene, and ISP relationship building. Granular segmentation ensures emails only reach engaged subscribers likely to open and click. Automatic list cleansing removes inactive contacts over time.
Robust analytics provide visibility verifying emails hit inboxes. Klaviyo also optimizes sender reputations with major ISPs to avoid spam filters. Expect deliverability specialists to proactively monitor campaigns too so you can identify issues early.
Overall open and clickthrough rates tend to outperform industry benchmarks. But you also get deliverability guarantees documented in their service contract terms. Refer to Klaviyo’s deliverability guide for more information.
Privy
Privy focuses deliverability efforts primarily on the abandoned cart and browsing abandoned automation. The platform emphasizes proper list building, consent, and targeting to reach engaged users most likely to convert.
They advise sending promotional messaging and online sales sequences in moderation to avoid fatigue and spam complaints. Privy also suggests integrating with an external email verification provider as an added layer of protection against bounces.
Deliverability rates for cart recovery sequences often impress but limits on advanced targeting and sending strategy flexibility can constrain performance beyond that core use case. Connect with their support team for guidance.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins the best deliverability through dedicated inbox placement monitoring, deep targeting capabilities, and proactive sender reputation management. Privy hits the mark for recovering carts yet lacks robust controls to maintain engagement rates across customer lifecycles. Klaviyo also contracts deliverability guarantees meeting high volume sending needs.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
Klaviyo provides customer support via email and live chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all pricing plans. Customers can expect fast, knowledgeable responses from customer success representatives when issues come up. The Klaviyo team helps troubleshoot problems, answers how-to questions, and provides strategic coaching to help you get the most value from the platform.
Klaviyo also offers robust self-serve support resources including detailed documentation, educational workshop videos, comprehensive email marketing academy courses, and helpful tips displayed directly within the platform interface. Customers can leverage these materials to ramp up their skills on their timeline.
Additionally, Klaviyo has an active user community called the Klaviyo Community Facebook Group with over 25,000 members where peers share insights and best practices around email marketing, automation, and other topics.
Privy
Privy customers can get support via email ticketing during normal US business hours. Customers can expect fairly fast and personalized assistance from representatives related to getting started, integrating Privy with other platforms, building campaigns, and executing other core tasks.
For self-service support after hours, Privy provides an expansive knowledge base library with articles, tutorials, and videos that cover troubleshooting issues, how-to guidance, and feature explanations.
On the social front, Privy helps users through Users Facebook Group where community members and Privy staff have conversations about best practices and facilitate troubleshooting conversations.
However, compared to Klaviyo’s around-the-clock live support and more immersive community experience, most Privy users will need to lean more heavily on documentation and forums for assistance since live support access is limited.
Winner: Klaviyo
Due to Klaviyo’s 24/7 live chat availability, hands-on strategic coaching, and vibrant 25,000+ member user community promoting active peer learning, Klaviyo is the winner for best overall customer support and community experience. While Privy provides solid email ticketing during business hours, reliance on documentation and asynchronously conversing with 2,000 users trails Klaviyo’s level of care.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo truly stands out with an expansive integration marketplace linking the platform to hundreds of popular solutions. Expect seamless connections with leading CRMs, email services, membership software, surveys, webinar tools, life cycle automation platforms, and more.
Turnkey integrations automatically sync subscriber data, custom properties, and behavioral event tracking to feed complex automation. You can also use cross-sell displays. Klaviyo’s open API also allows developers to build custom connections supporting unique Martech stacks.
Refer to their integration directory covering support for all major tools small businesses leverage to get a sense of the abundant ecosystem.
Privy
Privy offers 50+ integrations focused primarily on integrating signup forms, syncing product catalogs, tracking commerce events, and enabling cart recovery from leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Wix, and BigCommerce.
You’ll also find support for basic email and chat platform interoperability, linking to analytics tools like Google and Heap plus some CRM connectivity such as HubSpot and MailChimp.
The scope caters well to online merchants but feels limiting compared to Klaviyo’s much more expansive options. Learn more via Privy’s integrations.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo easily wins our integration comparison for supporting connections to 10x more applications, especially tools strategically relevant to executing sophisticated marketing automation. Klaviyo plays well with all Martech across organizations, from surveys to webinars to loyalty programs. Privy narrowly focuses on immediate conversion optimization.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a free forever pricing tier for up to 500 contacts covering access to basic features like signup forms, email campaigns, and reporting. You also get tools to analyze data reports. For larger email marketing and automation needs, Klaviyo provides paid plans scaling up from a $45 per month Startup tier to enterprise-level custom pricing supporting unlimited contacts and emails.
Privy
Privy offers a free plan and 2 paid plans with no hidden fees. The Starter Plan costs $30/month and comes with all the basic features to create campaigns and send emails to up to 1,500 contacts.
The Growth Plan costs $45/month and includes conversion tools, SMS features, and advanced automation.
Core features across all tiers include email marketing, landing pages, SMS, workflows, and e-commerce. The higher tier plan adds capabilities like advanced metrics, priority support, and feature access control for teams.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins our pricing comparison by keeping core email marketing tools freely available while still supporting unlimited scalability into higher tiers cost-effectively. The flexible pay-as-you-go approach works for early-stage entrepreneurs through enterprise teams.
Privy focuses more exclusively on mid-market e-commerce players willing to pay a premium for abandonment automation capabilities suited for that level.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo earns outstanding reviews across evaluation platforms like G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. They hold high ratings specifically for ease of use, automation capabilities, and quality support. Users praise the platform’s versatility in meeting the needs of small businesses up to enterprise teams.
However, some customers feel Klaviyo’s robust toolset causes initial confusion. While onboarding resources help simplify the learning curve, less technical users seem challenged in determining where to start. Certain users also critique inaccuracies with analytics or deliverability issues caused by their misconfigurations flagged by Klaviyo’s stringent monitoring.
Privy
Privy also scores very positively across evaluation sites like G2, though with a narrower breadth of reviews to pull insights from. They excel specifically with the out-of-box ease in setting up customizable opt-in forms and crafting email flows to recover abandoned shopping carts. The intuitive interface receives praise.
Some users feel core campaign functionality works great but more advanced capabilities come up short. Certain customers wanted easier ways to track ROI or connect datasets across integrated platforms. Some also wanted more customization for templates, analytics dashboards, and segmentation workflows.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins based on consistently stellar ratings across hundreds of verified reviews highlighting the platform’s versatility, customization capabilities, quality support, and ability to scale. Some critique initial complexity but praise its power once mastered. Privy reviews show strengths albeit with a much smaller sample size of feedback available to make definitive assessments.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- What types of email campaigns can you create in Klaviyo?
You can create standard email blasts, automated workflows triggered by time delays, customer behaviors or custom events, SMS messages, web push notifications, direct mail postcards, and more. - Does Klaviyo integrate with Shopify, WooCommerce, and other platforms?
Yes, Klaviyo offers pre-built integrations with hundreds of popular tools including Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, WordPress, and more to track events, synchronize data, and power automation. - Is there a limit for contacts and emails sent each month?
Klaviyo offers a free forever plan supporting up to 500 contacts. Paid plans scale from startup level supporting 15k contacts and 125k monthly emails up through enterprise tiers with unlimited contacts and sends.
Privy FAQs
- What types of campaigns can you create in Privy?
Privy specializes in setting up email signup forms, welcome flows, browse abandonment automation, and cart abandonment sequences. Support for traditional email blasts or advanced workflows is more limited. - How does Privy integrate with shopping platforms?
Deep integrations automatically sync subscriber data, and product catalogs and track key commerce events with platforms like Shopify, Wix Online Stores, BigCommerce, and others. - Is Privy designed more for email experts or novices?
With an intuitive drag-and-drop builder focused on common e-commerce use cases, Privy aims to make robust email marketing automation accessible even for users without deep expertise.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo if…
You want a comprehensive email marketing and automation platform supporting sophisticated segmentation, workflows, and analytics. Klaviyo shines for e-commerce brands desiring deep customer intelligence to fuel targeted messaging improving customer retention and lifetime value.
While the robust toolset supports a wide variety of business sizes, the expertise required to leverage advanced capabilities suits mid-market companies and enterprises with dedicated marketing resources. If you seek an industry-leading Martech stack with ultimate scalability, choose Klaviyo.
Otherwise, I recommend checking out some Klaviyo alternatives to find a better option for your email marketing needs.
Choose Privy if…
You want straightforward email marketing automation catered specifically to e-commerce stores. With pre-built integrations and intuitive workflow, builders focused on converting site visitors, and recovering abandoned carts, less technical users can see success quickly.
Solopreneurs and small teams will appreciate the simplified approach to deploying opt-in forms, sending promotional blasts, and building basic retention automation without unnecessary complexity. For out-of-the-box cart recovery automation power, go with Privy.
When choosing the right email marketing and automation platform, make sure to honestly assess your capabilities and growth plans. While more tools and customization enable greater personalization, useless features waste money and time. We urge you to determine core needs so you can ask vendors the right questions and confidently decide on the best solution positioning your business for long-term success.