Klaviyo Vs Omnisend: Which One Fits A Shopify Store

BLKDG is a Klaviyo partner, so weigh the verdict below with that in mind. The Klaviyo vs Omnisend decision for a Shopify store turns on what you plan to do with customer data, and the monthly bill at your current list size is the smaller part of it. Omnisend is the cheaper, simpler answer than Klaviyo for a store that sends campaigns and a handful of standard automations. Klaviyo earns its price over Omnisend when predictive fields, segmentation and flow branching run the program.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both connect to Shopify, both send email, SMS and push, and both bill on the size of your contact list. At the one list size where both vendors print a paid price, 500 contacts, Klaviyo’s Email plan is $20 a month (opens in new tab) and Omnisend’s Standard plan is $16 a month (opens in new tab). A $4 gap between Klaviyo and Omnisend doesn’t decide a platform.

Three differences between Klaviyo and Omnisend do. Klaviyo lets you segment and branch flows on predicted lifetime value, churn risk and expected next order date, and Omnisend doesn’t let you segment on its lifetime value figures at all. Omnisend’s Standard plan stops sending at its email limit, while Klaviyo’s default is to move you to a bigger plan. And a new Omnisend account gets SMS only on the Pro plan, where Klaviyo includes mobile messages from its free plan up.

If you’re searching for Klaviyo alternatives because of price, Omnisend is a reasonable one for a simple program. If you’re choosing Klaviyo or Omnisend for a store whose repeat purchases depend on timing and customer value, choose on predictive fields and flow branching.

Omnisend vs Klaviyo pricing looks different on the two pricing pages and works out close to the same in practice. Klaviyo’s paid prices come from a calculator on its pricing page, and Omnisend’s come from a list-size selector on its own (opens in new tab). Set both to your real contact count before you compare, and read the rest of this section before you trust either number.

Klaviyo’s and Omnisend’s free plans are nearly identical. Klaviyo’s covers up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month (opens in new tab), with $5 of mobile messages. Omnisend’s covers 500 emails a month to a maximum of 250 contacts (opens in new tab), plus 500 web push notifications. Either one gives you two sends per contact a month, which is enough to test the Shopify connection and not enough to run a program.

Omnisend’s pricing page leads with promotional prices. The $11.20 and $41.30 on its plan cards are 30% off for paying three months upfront, and the list prices behind them are $16 for Standard and $59 for Pro. The price increases when the promotion expires (opens in new tab). Compare Klaviyo’s list price to Omnisend’s list price, never to the promotional one.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both charge for people who never subscribed. In Klaviyo, any profile that can be emailed (opens in new tab) is an active profile regardless of consent status, which includes a shopper who typed an email at checkout and didn’t opt in. Omnisend bills subscribers and non-subscribers alike, and only contacts who’ve unsubscribed are excluded. On a Shopify store, where a shopper who enters an email at checkout becomes a contact whether or not they opt in, the billable count in Klaviyo or Omnisend runs ahead of the list you can market to.

Klaviyo raises the plan to match the count. Since February 18, 2025 (opens in new tab), customers who pay by credit card have to be on an email plan that matches or exceeds their active profile count, and a plan that falls short upgrades automatically at the next billing cycle. Klaviyo’s own example is an account with 64,000 active profiles on a 65,000-profile plan that grows to 69,000. It moves to the 70,000-profile plan unless 4,000 or more profiles are suppressed or deleted before the cycle ends.

Omnisend raises the tier the same way. Its billing tier adjusts automatically at the start of each billing cycle as your list grows or shrinks, with an email notice before an upgrade. Mid-cycle, a campaign addressed to more contacts than the tier allows prompts an upgrade you need to confirm, and that charge is prorated. Omnisend also applies a monthly contact reach limit, a cap on the unique contacts you can message in a cycle that’s separate from the email allowance.

List hygiene lowers the bill on Klaviyo and Omnisend alike. Klaviyo stops billing suppressed and unsubscribed profiles, and the active profile count can take up to 72 hours to refresh after you suppress or delete. Klaviyo also suppresses hard bounces automatically (opens in new tab), along with profiles that soft bounce more than 7 consecutive times. Suppress on a schedule, a few days before the billing date, and don’t suppress profiles that are still buying.

The send allowance is where Omnisend and Klaviyo pricing differ in kind. A paid Klaviyo email plan allows 10 times the maximum number of profiles in the plan, so the 500-profile plan sends up to 5,000 emails a cycle. Omnisend Standard allows 12 times the contact count, which is 6,000 emails at 500 contacts and 36,000 at 3,000. Omnisend Pro is unlimited under a fair use policy that Omnisend puts at up to 60 times the list.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both bill on 30-day cycles. Two campaigns a week to your full list uses about 8.6 sends per contact in a cycle. On a Klaviyo list at the top of its tier that leaves about 1.4 per contact for automations, and on Omnisend Standard about 3.4. Three campaigns a week comes to about 12.9 and exceeds both allowances before a single automated email goes out.

If you send to the whole list that often, price Omnisend Pro against a larger Klaviyo tier, not Standard against Klaviyo’s entry plan.

The behavior at the limit is the larger difference. On Omnisend Standard, a store that reaches its email limit can’t send campaigns, and contacts who trigger automations are removed from those workflows until the cycle renews or you upgrade. A shopper who abandons a cart in that window is removed from the cart workflow. An upgrade at the email limit isn’t charged until you confirm it.

Klaviyo gives you three choices at the send limit (opens in new tab): flex up to the next tier’s allowance for a one-time fee, upgrade, or stop sending. Auto-upgrade is on by default for its profile and email plans, and the account owner is alerted at 75% and 90% of a limit. Flexing is typically more expensive than upgrading. Klaviyo’s default protects the sends and raises the bill, and Omnisend Standard’s default protects the bill and stops the sends.

Klaviyo and Omnisend sell SMS on different terms. For any Omnisend plan started on or after May 4, 2026, SMS is available on Pro only (opens in new tab), through a separate SMS credits subscription, and it isn’t available on Free or Standard. A new 500-contact store that wants texting on Omnisend pays $59 a month for Pro, which is $43 more than Standard, before it buys a single message.

Omnisend publishes its US rates by monthly SMS spend (opens in new tab). It’s $0.009 per SMS from $10 to $49.99 a month, $0.0085 from $50 to $999.99, $0.008 from $1,000 to $9,999.99, and $0.007 at $10,000 and up, so the $0.007 in its headline is the top-volume rate. At those rates, 2,000 texts cost $18 and 10,000 cost $85.

Accounts that predate the change run on older terms. Free and Standard users who had an SMS subscription before May 4, 2026 can keep it, and Omnisend set October 26, 2026 as the date its legacy Pro plan, which bundled SMS credits equal to the subscription price, moves to the current model.

Klaviyo sells mobile messaging as a dollar-based monthly plan that burns down per message. It moved from credit-based tiers to dollar-based tiers (opens in new tab) on July 13, 2026 for new customers, and for existing paid accounts on the first billing cycle after August 13, 2026. Carrier fees are included in the rate, US and Canada pricing distinguishes toll-free from short code sending, and the larger the monthly plan, the lower the per-message price. Unused plan dollars don’t roll over (opens in new tab).

Klaviyo shows its US per-message rate inside the account, not on its pricing page. That makes Omnisend the easier of the two to budget before you sign up, and Klaviyo the one that includes mobile messages from the free plan up. A message over 160 characters, or over 70 with an emoji or special character, splits into billed segments in Klaviyo, so count segments when you compare a Klaviyo quote to Omnisend’s per-SMS rate.

Pricing is one part of the channel. Consent, opt-in collection and the first flows to launch are covered in our guide to SMS marketing for ecommerce. If you’d like both channels built as one program, BLKDG’s email and SMS marketing services cover flows, campaigns, segmentation and SMS as a single system.

Basic segmentation is close between Klaviyo and Omnisend. Klaviyo builds segments from conditions on profile properties, on metrics such as Placed Order and message engagement, on predictive metrics and on proximity to a location (opens in new tab). Omnisend filters on contact properties, engagement, products and orders, and custom events (opens in new tab). Klaviyo and Omnisend will each build an engaged-subscribers segment, a repeat-buyers segment and a lapsed-customers segment.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both update segments in real time, with one exception each. Klaviyo segments with relative time conditions update every 24 hours. Omnisend’s date-based segments update at midnight in the account’s time zone, and every Omnisend segment recalculates one minute before a campaign sends.

The gap between Klaviyo and Omnisend is predictive data. Klaviyo writes predicted lifetime value, churn risk, average time between orders and an expected date of next order (opens in new tab) onto each profile, retrains the model at least once a week, and lets you use those fields as segment conditions. A segment of customers whose expected next order date has passed, or whose predicted value is high and whose churn risk is rising, is a condition you can build.

Omnisend shows a predicted lifetime value on each contact (opens in new tab) next to historic revenue and orders. You can’t segment customers on those lifetime value statistics, and there’s no aggregate report of total or average lifetime value across customers.

Omnisend’s segmentable equivalent is the lifecycle stage. It sorts customers into eight stages (opens in new tab), from Champions and Loyalists to At risk and About to lose, using days since the last order, orders in the last 365 days and order value against the store’s average. Stages recalculate once an hour, and you can build a segment on the stage. For stores with at least 100 returning customers, Omnisend calculates personalized thresholds, and below that it applies fixed defaults.

Those stages are rules over past orders. They tell you a customer hasn’t bought in 90 days. Omnisend’s stages don’t tell you that this customer normally buys every 45 days and that one every 120, which is what Klaviyo’s expected next order date encodes.

Does every store get Klaviyo’s predictive fields? No. Klaviyo’s predictive analytics need at least 500 customers who’ve placed an order, at least 180 days of order history with recent orders, and some customers who’ve ordered three or more times. A store below that threshold doesn’t have predictive segmentation on either platform, and for that store the Klaviyo vs Omnisend segmentation comparison is close to even. Our guide to Klaviyo segmentation covers consent conditions, update timing and which segments feed which flows.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both cover the standard ecommerce automations. Omnisend counts more than 15 preset workflows (opens in new tab), including welcome, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, order and shipping confirmation, cross-sell, customer reactivation and a special occasions workflow that runs around a contact’s birthday. Klaviyo says it offers more than 60 pre-built flows (opens in new tab). Each vendor counts its own templates its own way, so the two figures don’t measure the same thing.

Our ranking of Klaviyo flows by revenue per recipient puts welcome and abandoned cart at the top, and both platforms ship those two. The timing and discount decisions inside an abandoned cart flow apply in Klaviyo and Omnisend alike.

Branching is where Klaviyo and Omnisend separate. Klaviyo has a single split action that routes profiles down up to 20 paths in one split (opens in new tab), on profile properties, activity, location and list membership, and on the trigger event in metric-triggered flows. A Klaviyo split can also branch on predictive analytics, which lets one post-purchase flow treat a high-value customer differently from a likely one-time buyer. Email, SMS and push can sit in the same flow.

Omnisend’s limits are counted per workflow. A workflow takes up to 20 conditional splits, up to 20 trigger filters and up to 4 exit conditions (opens in new tab). Klaviyo’s 20 is paths inside one split and Omnisend’s 20 is splits inside one workflow, so the two numbers aren’t a like-for-like comparison. Omnisend’s automation delays also run on the store’s time zone, not each contact’s.

Testing inside automations is narrower on Omnisend. An A/B test split (opens in new tab) supports two paths only, it doesn’t select and send a winner automatically, and you can’t add conditional splits inside its paths. If your plan is five standard automations that run untouched, none of that will limit you. If your plan is to branch a welcome series by product interest and then test offers inside each branch, you’ll reach Omnisend’s limits before Klaviyo’s.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both sync Shopify data continuously, on different schedules. Klaviyo syncs Shopify events as named metrics you can trigger flows and build segments on, including Checkout Started, Placed Order, Fulfilled Order, Refunded Order, Viewed Product, Added to Cart and Submitted Search (opens in new tab). On connection it syncs the last 90 days of Shopify data first and then the full history, which can take from a few minutes to several days. Metrics and profile properties sync in real time, and Shopify customer tags arrive as profile data.

Two Klaviyo behaviors affect how you build. Klaviyo doesn’t re-sync a metric after the initial event, so a tag added to an order later doesn’t arrive on that event. And profiles deleted in Shopify aren’t deleted in Klaviyo, so they keep counting toward the bill until you remove them there.

Omnisend’s sync runs on three clocks (opens in new tab): orders, cart updates and customer actions arrive within 3 minutes, profile updates within 1 hour, and tag changes within 24 hours. The initial sync completes within an hour for most stores. Tags can sync both ways, and the Omnisend-to-Shopify direction needs a toggle switched on, covers manually added tags only, and runs within 2 minutes.

Three Omnisend behaviors change how you run the account. Only explicit consent creates a subscriber, so everyone else arrives as non-subscribed and still billable. SMS subscription status doesn’t sync from Omnisend back to Shopify. And editing a customer’s email or phone number in Shopify creates a new Omnisend contact, which splits that customer’s purchase history across two records.

Push means a different channel in Klaviyo than in Omnisend. Klaviyo’s is mobile push (opens in new tab), sent through a mobile app.

Omnisend’s is browser push (opens in new tab), which works on Chrome, Firefox and Opera, on Edge for Windows and Android, and on Android mobile browsers. It doesn’t work on Safari or on an iPhone in any browser. For a Shopify store without an app, Omnisend’s push is the one you can turn on, and it won’t reach your iPhone shoppers.

Klaviyo also has a native WhatsApp channel (opens in new tab). Meta doesn’t currently support WhatsApp marketing messages to US phone numbers, so for a store selling to US customers it isn’t a reason to pick Klaviyo over Omnisend.

The revenue Klaviyo and Omnisend each attribute to their own messages isn’t comparable, because the default attribution windows differ. Klaviyo’s defaults for new accounts are 5 days for email clicks and opens, 5 days for text message clicks and 1 day for text message opens (opens in new tab). Omnisend’s defaults are 7 days for email, 24 hours for SMS and 24 hours for push (opens in new tab). Klaviyo and Omnisend both use a last-touch model, and both count an email open as engagement.

Omnisend includes Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens as engagement by default, with a setting to exclude them, and its window can start either when the message is sent or when the contact engages. Omnisend SMS counts a click only. Changing the settings recalculates historical reports on both platforms, and Klaviyo’s recalculation can take up to 36 hours to show.

If you trial both, or you’re reading a case for switching, set the same windows on each before comparing attributed revenue. An Omnisend email gets two more days than a Klaviyo email to claim the same order under the defaults.

Moving from Klaviyo to Omnisend is the direction with tooling. Omnisend has automated import tools for Klaviyo, Mailchimp and Yotpo (opens in new tab) that bring contacts across without a CSV export. Accounts with more than 250 contacts qualify for its free Kickstart migration service. Contact import typically takes 1 to 24 hours, and a full migration can take up to 5 business days.

Moving from Omnisend to Klaviyo is manual. Klaviyo’s built-in list sync (opens in new tab) covers Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so contacts from Omnisend come in by CSV import or the API. Bounces and unsubscribes are uploaded separately as suppressed profiles. Upload that file before the first send, so nobody who opted out gets an email from the new account.

Whichever way you move between Klaviyo and Omnisend, the automations don’t come with you. Omnisend’s migration tools cover contacts, and you recreate workflows by hand, move segments by export and import, and rebuild templates or import their HTML. Budget the switch as a rebuild of every flow you run, which makes the move from Klaviyo to Omnisend cheaper the simpler your program is.

A switch also moves your sending to a new platform, so the sending domain has to be authenticated there before the first campaign. Our guide to email deliverability covers authentication, sender reputation and list hygiene. For the order of operations, consent and suppression handling and warming, our Mailchimp-to-Klaviyo guide shows what moving an email platform involves, and most of it applies whichever platform you’re leaving.

Choose Omnisend if your program is a weekly campaign or two and the standard automations, your store has fewer than 500 customers who’ve ordered or under 180 days of order history, and you’d like a published price for every text. Omnisend is also the better fit if a hard stop at the send limit suits you more than an automatic upgrade. Go in knowing that Standard removes contacts from workflows when the email limit is reached, that the tier follows your contact count up at each billing cycle, and that SMS means Pro.

Choose Klaviyo if you’re past the predictive threshold and you’ll use it: segments on expected next order date, flows that branch on predicted value, win-back timing set per customer. Choose it too if you want SMS from the first plan and email, SMS and app push in one flow. Go in knowing that every emailable profile is billed, that the plan follows your profile count up automatically, and that the US SMS rate is something you read inside the account.

A store in between should decide Klaviyo vs Omnisend on the next twelve months, not on today’s list. If repeat purchase is the growth plan and you’re approaching 500 ordering customers, starting on Klaviyo avoids rebuilding every flow later. If the plan is acquisition and a lean campaign calendar, Omnisend will do the job for less.

If you land on Klaviyo, the account needs an owner for flows, segments, SMS setup, deliverability and attribution reporting. That’s the work our Klaviyo email marketing agency team does, and it starts with a free Growth Audit of your current account.