Emarsys vs Klaviyo: Similarities, differences, use cases & alternative

If you’re looking for a versatile marketing and automation platform, Emarsys and Klaviyo are likely near the top of your list. 

They’re both popular solutions that support channels like email and SMS, offer flexible automation capabilities, and have recently added AI marketing capabilities to their toolkits.

However, they also have big differences. 

For example, Emarsys is a more well-rounded and robust enterprise solution as it offers a wider range of channels and functionalities. Klaviyo is much more specialized in areas like email and SMS marketing for eCommerce businesses.

In this guide, we’ll explore these and other differences between Emarsys and Klaviyo, so you can understand where each platform shines. 

We’ll also show why Insider — our AI native personalization platform — can be an ideal alternative to Emarsys or Klaviyo, especially for enterprise businesses.

Emarsys vs Klaviyo: In-depth comparison

To give you a detailed understanding of the differences between Emarsys and Klaviyo, we’ll focus on four key areas:

1. Supported channels and key capabilities.
2. Ease of setup, use, and admin.
3. Customer support.
4. Pricing.

Before diving into that, we’ll do a quick overview of both companies’ histories and current states.

Emarsys and Klaviyo: Quick overview

Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform. It was founded all the way back in 2000 and later acquired by SAP in 2020. 

Today, the company has grown to over 750 employees and 12 offices, with its focus still being on helping midsized and enterprise businesses across different industries (e.g., retail, travel and hospitality, sports and entertainment, and media) deliver personalized omnichannel experiences.

Klaviyo is an SMS and email marketing platform founded much later, in 2012. The company has remained independent and even went public on the NYSE 2020. 

Unlike Emarsys, Klaviyo has had a long-standing focus on helping eCommerce businesses of all sizes (especially those using Shopify) create powerful SMS and email marketing campaigns. Klaviyo remains a leader in these fields, although it has expanded its scope to mobile push notifications, reviews, and web forms.

Supported channels and key capabilities

Emarsys supports email, SMS, web, mobile app, digital ads, conversational messaging (e.g., on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger), direct mail, and contact center as channels. This means you can use the platform to reach customers across those touchpoints with some type of personalized messaging.

Klaviyo, on the other hand, supports email, SMS, and mobile push as its main channels. It also offers auxiliary tools like Reviews and Web Forms, which let you add customer reviews to specific products and create mobile-friendly sign-up forms. 

While Klaviyo is more versatile than many traditional email marketing tools (like Mailchimp or Omnisend), Emarsys is the clear winner regarding the breadth of channels and capabilities. 

This makes it a better choice for larger teams looking to integrate their martech stack, access messaging channels that Klaviyo doesn’t support, or use more niche tools like Direct Mail or Mobile Wallet (for marketers relying on digital vouchers, coupons, tickets, and loyalty cards). Klaviyo is the more advanced solution for eCommerce marketers interested mainly in email and SMS. It offers pretty much everything you’d need to build high-converting email campaigns — from good deliverability to list management tools, email templates, automated workflows, and much more.

The company has been a leader in these categories since its inception, so it’s no surprise it outperforms Emarsys. 

Klaviyo also offers a freemium product and cheaper plans for small businesses that Emarsys doesn’t (although Klaviyo has become more expensive and unaffordable for some brands).

Ease of setup, use, and admin

Based on customer reviews, Klaviyo is easier to use, set up, and admin compared to Emarsys. The setup process is the area where Klaviyo has the biggest advantage, with administration being a close second, and ease of use being the closest between both platforms.

However, it has to be said that Emarsys is a more robust platform aimed at larger businesses. Most similar solutions are difficult to set up and navigate because they offer more functionality and serve more use cases. In that sense, having a lower ease of setup and use scores is to be expected.Still, many customers have pointed out that, as a standalone solution, Emarsys isn’t intuitive, with its naming conventions being a big source of confusion.

Customer support

When it comes to customer support, Emarsys and Klaviyo companies offer around the same level of service. Both companies are global with offices around the world (although Klaviyo has more than twice as many employees), so they can deliver a solid customer support experience in most cases.

However, Klaviyo’s support has been getting more negative reviews from smaller businesses over the last few years. 

The company also removed its email support for users on the free plan after the first 60 days. While both brands are still ranked roughly the same in this category, Emarsys might take the lead if Klaviyo’s issues continue.

Pricing

Emarsys doesn’t offer public pricing plans, so it’s difficult to compare its affordability to other solutions. The company doesn’t have a reputation for being overly expensive and seems to be priced competitively to other omnichannel platforms.Conversely, Klaviyo can get very expensive very quickly. Its pricing increases as the number of contacts in your base grows, which is one of the main complaints customers have with the platform.

If price is the biggest factor in your purchasing decision, Emarsys could easily turn out to be the more cost-effective solution. However, this will depend on the specific channels and features you’re interested in, so there’s no way to provide an exact comparison without reaching out to Emarsys’ team.

Insider: Ideal alternative to Emarsys and Klaviyo for enterprises

Insider is our AI-led platform for unifying customer data, segmenting and predicting future behaviors with AI, personalizing all customer touchpoints, and automating cross-channel campaigns. 

It supports key channels that Emarsys and Klaviyo offer (like email, SMS, mobile push, and WhatsApp) while providing additional features in areas like web personalization, eCommerce site search, customer data unification, and more. Insider also offers a much higher quality of customer support, as well as an easier setup and faster time-to-value.

Here’s a detailed look at five essential benefits of using Insider compared to Emarsys or Klaviyo (especially for midsized and enterprise businesses).

Access 12+ channels

Insider lets you use the key channels that Klaviyo and Emarsys offer — like email, SMS, and mobile push — while also giving you access to a plethora of other ones, including:

• Chatbots.
• Site search.
• Web and mobile apps.
• WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
• Online ads (across Facebook, Google, and TikTok).
• And more.

Put simply, you can use our platform to build and personalize campaigns across all these touchpoints from one place. This is a big plus for larger companies that want to unify their martech stacks because it lets them:

• Simplify campaign creation and management.
• Remove the need to constantly jump between point solutions.
• Make it easier to achieve cost-efficiency and ROI as there’s no need to negotiate with different vendors and keep track of multiple pricing plans.

At the same time, you don’t need to use Insider for all your channels from the start. Many of our clients begin with one or two channels and use cases (like website personalization) and expand to other ones over time, based on their needs and the ROI they see from Insider. 

For example, Allianz — one of the leading financial services companies in the world — used Insider’s segmentation, data unification, and push notification capabilities to achieve ROI within days. They’re now expanding to other use cases like WhatsApp Commerce to unlock new communication channels and engagement opportunities.

Unify and analyze your customer data

The backbone of our Insider’s personalization capabilities is our customer data platform (CDP). 

The CDP lets you unify customer data from all online and offline sources, including customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like Salesforce or HubSpot, analytics tools like Amplitude, customer service software like Freshdesk, social media platforms like Buffer, APIs, and more. 

Note: Check out our Integrations Hub to find over 100+ connectors for solutions across 20+ categories.

It then creates 360-degree customer views that contain key insights like demographics, previous interactions, last purchased and visited products, likelihood to purchase, and more. 

In short, our CDP aggregates all the data you need to understand your customers and build targeted campaigns for them. Customers rank it as the best CDP overall, as well as the easiest to use and admin.

Once your customer data is unified, you also have access to plenty of behavioral analytics tools to analyze it, like:

• Event-based funnels, which let you uncover how users navigate key goals, like purchases, lead collection, card applications, bookings, and more. Funnels can be incredibly useful in finding where users drop off in those flows, so you can focus on fixing the issues that are hurting your conversion rates.

• Retention cohorts, which help you understand the long-term value of different customer segments and find ways to keep customers engaged. You can build these cohorts for any user behavior, like page views, purchases, channel interactions, and more.

• Channel reachability and message frequency analytics, which show you which channels different customer segments prefer to use and how often they want to be contacted.

For a deeper dive into Insider’s analytics capabilities, check out our guide to the top customer journey analytics platforms.

Advanced web personalization for higher conversion rates and more revenue

One of Emarsys’ advantages over Klaviyo is that it offers web channel campaigns for use cases like personalizing web content and driving repeat purchases.However, Emarsys’ capabilities in this regard are severely limited. As a result, teams that want to use website personalization to its full potential can’t rely on the platform in most scenarios.

Insider, on the other hand, is one of the most advanced website personalization solutions on the market. You can use it to tailor all website elements to your customers and visitors, including product recommendations, banners, categories, site search results, and many more.

For example, you can use our AI-powered Smart Recommender to launch tailored product recommendation campaigns on your site. 

You can easily build these campaigns using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that lets you adjust title, subtitle, individual products, and properties like spacing, size, padding, and much more.

Our product recommendation engine also lets you choose from a variety of user-based and cookie-free recommendation strategies, including:

• Generic, like most popular items, best-sellers, highest discounted products, new arrivals, trending products, and most valuable products.
• Contextual, like viewed together, recently viewed, purchased together, location-based top sellers, checkout recommendation, purchased with last purchased, and more. 
• Collaborative, where product recommendations are based on behavioral patterns of similar users. This is done by taking into account product visits, purchases, and added-to-carts.

Plus, our automated recommendation algorithm can automatically test a combination of marketing strategies and determine which produces the highest conversion rates. 

Put simply, you’re in full control of how you want product recommendations to be delivered — you can let our engine do all the work or manually tweak specific recommendation campaigns based on your needs.For a real-life example, check out our case study with Adidas. They used our personalized product recommendations to increase conversion rates on their homepage by 13% and on their product pages by 7% in just one month.

Besides product recommendations, you can use Insider to personalize your website’s:

• Categories, with our Category Optimization tool, which rearranges how categories are presented to each user who browses your site or app. Adidas also used this tool to increase mobile conversion rates by over 50%.
• Site search results, with Eureka. Eureka is an AI-powered site search and merchandising tool that personalizes the search results for every shopper. This can help you drastically reduce bounce rates, generate more conversions, and improve your average order value (AOV).
• Mobile stories, with InStory. This tool lets you add interactive, Instagram-like stories to your site or app, so you can grab users’ attention and guide them to the best products for them in the shortest time. For example, Lexus used InStory to drive a 104.9% increase in lead collection.

Omnichannel engagement and personalization

Outside of personalizing your website, you can use Insider to reach, engage, and convert customers across plenty of other communication channels, including:Email. From including names, birthdays, and other milestones to adding relevant product recommendations — Insider lets you tailor each email to achieve maximum engagement and conversion rates. You can even use AMP emails to create a web-like experience that lets users answer surveys, make bookings, and browse products without leaving the email.

• Online ads. Our platform lets you create highly detailed segments of customers using standard (e.g., devices, platforms, locations), predefined (e.g., cart abandoners, mobile app users, loyal customers), and predictive (e.g., likelihood to purchase, predicted CLTV) characteristics. You can then target those segments using personalized digital ads across Facebook, Google, and TikTok. U.S. Polo Assn. used this strategy to achieve a 135% increase in return on ad spend.

• Messaging channels, like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. For example, you can send targeted price drop or back-in-stock alerts to people based on their product interests or reminders for upcoming events. Picniq used Insider’s WhatsApp capabilities to recover lost revenue from browser abandoners and drive more return customers, leading to a 5x ROI.

• Web and mobile app push notifications. Our platform offers a plethora of web and mobile push notification types — from cart reminders, price drops, and in-stock alerts to carousels, sliders, and discovery notifications. Amway used these different notification types to achieve a 10% increase in conversion rates, a 10% boost in open rates, and a 30% decrease in cart abandonments.

You can also build and automate campaigns across all these channels using Architect — our AI-powered customer journey builder and marketing automation platform. Architect lets you do that with a simple drag-and-drop editor where you can easily choose channels, wait times, automation triggers, and much more. Plus, you have access to a plethora of AI-based capabilities, like Next-Best Channel, Send-Time Optimization, and A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection.

For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our detailed guide on how to use a customer journey builder to boost revenue.

Overall, this combination of broad channel support, personalization, and automation capabilities lets our clients create high-converting customer experiences across all touchpoints from a single place. For example, one of our eCommerce clients achieved an ROI of over 100x by using Insider to personalize the experience for each of their customer segments.

Work with a best-in-class customer support team

Customer support is always an important consideration when purchasing any type of software. 

However, it’s absolutely critical when choosing an enterprise marketing platform since the implementation, management, and administration can be highly complex. Without a good customer support team to guide you, you can go through months of painful implementation and learning curve before seeing any return on your investment.

That’s why we’ve ensured Insider offers the best possible customer experience. As a result, customers rank Insider not only as the best solution in terms of support quality but also across categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and time-to-value.

First, our teams guide you through the implementation process (at no extra setup cost). 

This includes everything from ensuring you’re connected to other martech solutions and data sources to involving the right stakeholders in the process, and much more.

Second, they also look at your current analytics data to find valuable opportunities. 

Say our growth experts see that you’re losing many potential sales at a specific point in the customer journey. In that case, they’ll point you to the right Insider tools and templates that can resolve that issue as quickly as possible, so you can speed up your time-to-value and ROI.

Finally, you can count on quick responses and issue resolution, regardless of your location. 

We’re an enterprise solution provider with 1000+ employees across 6 continents. Our teams are also trained in-house, so you’ll always get assistance from someone with in-depth experience in the Insider platform.

Use Insider to build, automate, and personalize campaigns across all marketing channels

Insider can enable you to deliver a personalized customer experience across all touchpoints customers have with your brand — including email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. 

And, unlike Emarsys and Klaviyo, our platform offers advanced website personalization for higher conversion rates and better budget utilization, a best-in-class customer support experience, and more.

In a nutshell, you can use our enterprise marketing platform to:

• Unify customer data to overcome data silos and get a clear picture of your customers’ journeys.
• Make the most out of your digital marketing budget by tailoring every customer touchpoint — from your website and mobile app to channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
• Predict customer behaviors, automate tasks, work more efficiently, and have unstructured conversations with customers using a unique combination of predictive, generative, and conversational AI.
• Get started and reach your goals as quickly as possible thanks to our experienced global support team and proven templates for all channels and use cases (like generating leads, launching upsell campaigns, recovering abandoned carts, and more).

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.