ActiveCampaign
Your business is a store plus something else: services, courses, B2B, or leads followed up by hand.
Klaviyo
The business is a store and nothing else, and SMS matters to how you sell.
Small free tier, then priced on contacts and sends
Rounds won
| Round | ActiveCampaign | Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Contacts, with ecommerce as an integration | Products, orders and catalogue built inWins |
| Segmenting on purchases | Possible, more manual | Native and fastWins |
| Revenue per flow | Attribution on Pro | On the dashboardWins |
| Journeys beyond the store | StrongWins | Workable, not the focus |
| Lead scoring and CRM | YesWins | No real equivalent |
| SMS | Add-on from Plus, credits do not roll over | A core productWins |
| Price at the same list size | Usually cheaperWins | Contacts and sends add up |
If the business is a store and nothing else, Klaviyo. Its data model understands products, variants, purchase history and predicted lifetime value natively, and the revenue reporting is the thing you will actually use daily. ActiveCampaign wins for a mixed business — a store plus a service, a store plus a course, a store with a B2B side — because it treats the purchase as one signal among many rather than the centre of the universe.
ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo: best for ecommerce?
Klaviyo is built around a product catalogue and purchase history. ActiveCampaign is built around a contact. For a pure store, that difference decides it.
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Klaviyo is built around a product catalogue. ActiveCampaign is built around a contact. That is not a feature difference, it is a difference in what each product thinks the world is made of, and it decides this comparison more reliably than any price or feature table.
For a store, thinking in products is correct. For a business that is a store and something else, thinking in contacts is.
ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo at a glance
| What you are comparing | ActiveCampaign | Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Contacts, with ecommerce as an integration | Contacts, products, orders, catalogue |
| Segmenting on purchase history | Possible, more manual | Native and fast |
| Revenue attribution per flow | Attribution on Pro | Built in, the headline number |
| Predictive analytics | Predictive sending on Pro | Predicted next order date and lifetime value |
| Non-ecommerce journeys | Strong | Workable, not the focus |
| Lead scoring and sales follow-up | Yes | No real equivalent |
| SMS | Add-on, Plus and above | Core product, tightly integrated |
| Free tier | None | Yes, small |
| Pricing basis | Contacts, with a send allowance | Contacts and sends |
What Klaviyo's data model actually buys you
Concretely: "customers who bought from the running category at least twice, whose last order was more than 90 days ago, who have not opened the last three emails, excluding anyone who bought in the sale." In Klaviyo that is a segment builder exercise. In ActiveCampaign it is achievable and involves tags, custom fields and more thought.
The same applies to the flows a store runs constantly — abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, winback. Klaviyo ships them as templates that already understand your catalogue, pull in the actual product the customer looked at, and report revenue per flow on the dashboard.
That last part is the one store owners get attached to. Klaviyo tells you that the abandoned-cart flow produced a specific amount of revenue this month. ActiveCampaign can do attribution on Pro and it is not the same daily-use instrument.
Where ActiveCampaign is the better buy
The moment the business is not only a store.
A store that also sells a course. A product company with a B2B wholesale side. A practice that sells services and a few physical items. A membership with a shop attached. In all of those, half the marketing is not about products at all — it is enquiries, bookings, onboarding, renewals and follow-up — and Klaviyo's model has nothing to say about it.
ActiveCampaign treats a purchase as one signal among many. The same automation can branch on whether somebody bought, filled in a form, attended a webinar or crossed a lead score, which is the shape most mixed businesses actually need.
The CRM matters here too. If somebody in your business follows up wholesale enquiries by hand, ActiveCampaign has lead scoring and a contact record built for that, and Klaviyo does not attempt it.
Price, honestly
ActiveCampaign is usually cheaper at the same contact count. It prices on contacts with a monthly send allowance of 10× your limit on Plus; Klaviyo prices on contacts and sends together, which gets expensive for a store emailing frequently.
Klaviyo has a small free tier and ActiveCampaign has none, which matters at the very start. Past that, a store with 10,000 contacts emailing several times a week will generally pay Klaviyo more.
Whether that saving is real depends on revenue per email. If Klaviyo's catalogue-aware flows produce more revenue than ActiveCampaign's — and for a pure store they usually do — paying more for it is the correct decision. This is one of the few software comparisons where the expensive option can be the cheaper one.
Watch ActiveCampaign's contact-counting rule if you are coming from a store with years of customers: accounts created from 3 November 2025 count every contact including unsubscribed and bounced, and an ecommerce database accumulates both. Our pricing breakdown covers it.
Integration depth, which is not the same as integration count
ActiveCampaign lists more than 1,000 integrations. Klaviyo lists fewer and goes deeper on the ones a store needs — its Shopify integration in particular syncs catalogue, orders, customers and on-site behaviour in a way that drives segmentation directly.
"Integration exists" is not the same as "the field you need syncs in the direction you need it". That is the thing to test during a trial rather than assume from a logo grid, and it is the single most useful way to spend the 14 days ActiveCampaign gives you.
Which should you pick?
- Shopify or WooCommerce store, that is the whole business. Klaviyo. The catalogue model and revenue reporting are the product.
- Store plus services, courses or B2B. ActiveCampaign. One platform covering all of it beats two tools that each cover half.
- Somebody follows up leads by hand. ActiveCampaign, for the CRM and lead scoring.
- SMS is central to your marketing. Klaviyo, where it is a core product rather than an add-on with non-rolling credits.
- You are small and need free. Klaviyo's free tier, since ActiveCampaign has none.
- Mostly newsletters with a small shop. Neither — see ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp.
SMS, which ecommerce increasingly runs on
For a store, text messaging is no longer a side channel, and the two platforms treat it very differently.
Klaviyo built SMS into the core product. It shares the same segments, the same flows and the same reporting as email, so an abandoned-cart flow can send an email at one hour and a text at four without being two separate things.
ActiveCampaign sells SMS as an add-on, requires Plus or above to use it, and the credits refresh monthly without rolling over — so a quiet month wastes whatever you bought. It works, and the packaging is clearly secondary.
If SMS is a meaningful part of how you sell, that difference is larger than most of the feature comparison above. If it is something you might try once, ActiveCampaign's add-on is adequate and you will not be delighted by it.
Reporting, and the number you check every morning
Klaviyo puts revenue per flow and per campaign on the dashboard. Open a store's Klaviyo account and the first thing visible is how much money the abandoned-cart flow made this month.
ActiveCampaign does attribution on Pro, and it is a report you go and look at rather than the thing the product is organised around. For a marketer that is a small difference; for a store owner checking the business on a phone, it is the difference between using the tool and not.
The honest counterweight is that revenue attribution flatters email in both tools. A customer who would have returned anyway still gets attributed to the winback flow that happened to arrive first. Treat the number as directional rather than exact, whichever platform shows it to you.
If ActiveCampaign is the answer, our ecommerce guide covers how to get the store data in properly, and the full review is the wider verdict.
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Tom Kessler
Senior Editor, Software & Automation · The Comparer
Ten years covering business software, most of it spent inside admin dashboards nobody else wanted to open. Still uses a spreadsheet to track his own subscriptions.
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