Attentive vs Klaviyo: Benefits, limitations & an alternative solution

If you ever researched email and SMS marketing platforms, Attentive and Klaviyo were likely among the first names to come up.

It’s easy to assume they serve the same use cases, as both solutions are designed to help companies drive customer engagement and revenue via personalized email and SMS marketing.

But while Attentive and Klaviyo share many similarities, they also have some key differences. As a result, each platform is better suited for different teams and scenarios. In a nutshell:

• Attentive is the more specialized SMS solution for larger companies. It has enterprise-grade SMS capabilities and offers better customer support during the platform onboarding and management.
• Klaviyo has the edge when it comes to email marketing and versatility. Its email marketing tools are more polished and robust than Attentive’s. It also offers tools that Attentive doesn’t have, like mobile push notifications, reviews, and web forms.

In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into these differences and explore their implications for marketing teams. We’ll also discuss why Insider — our AI-native customer engagement platform — can be an ideal alternative to Attentive and Klaviyo for midsized and enterprise brands.

Klaviyo vs Attentive: Pros, cons, and use cases

Like we said, Attentive and Klaviyo are both solid email and SMS marketing solutions. They offer drag-and-drop builders, automation triggers, templates, and other features that teams expect from similar platforms.

The sections below focus mainly on the differences between both platforms, instead of on these similarities. That way, you can understand Attentive and Klaviyo’s best use cases and make an educated decision on which one is best for you.

Attentive’s strengths: Better SMS marketing tools for more industries and high-quality customer support  

Attentive is one of the most well-known SMS marketing platforms for large businesses. It was founded back in 2016 as an SMS solution and that has remained the company’s main focus since then.

This means Attentive has a lot of experience and expertise when it comes to building, automating, and optimizing SMS campaigns. As a result, its SMS and mobile marketing capabilities are more advanced and intuitive than Klaviyo’s.

Attentive also excels when it comes to customer service. The company’s customer success team is among the highest-rated in the industry thanks to its white glove onboarding, 24/7 availability, strategy development, and technical services.This, along with Attentive’s versatile templates and intuitive UI, is the reason why it outranks Klaviyo across categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality.

Overall, Attentive is the better choice for marketers looking to:

• Implement mobile-first strategies with a focus on SMS.
• Partner with some of the best customer success teams.
• Get started with and see value from their SMS marketing efforts as fast as possible.

Attentive’s limitations: Rudimentary email marketing capabilities and lack of additional channels

Attentive released their email marketing product back in 2022. While it has gotten better since then, it’s still not as advanced as other proven email marketing platforms like Klaviyo.

That’s why many Attentive customers have to integrate the platform with an advanced email solution provider which results in more complex marketing operations.

Additionally, Attentive doesn’t offer any channels besides email and SMS. It’s a point solution that teams have to integrate with their other tools for push notifications, WhatsApp marketing, website personalization, and so on.

This might not be an issue if you’re obly using email and SMS to reach your customers. However, large teams employing omnichannel strategies often require a unified marketing platform to build, analyze, and optimize campaigns from one place, instead of integrating and jumping between multiple solutions. 

Klaviyo’s strengths: Advanced email marketing tool, broader channel support, and public pricing

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing automation platform for eCommerce brands founded in 2012. Since then, the company has expanded its offering with tools like mobile push notifications, reviews, and forms. Its focus remains almost exclusively on the eCommerce sector (and especially on the Shopify ecosystem).

Compared to Attentive, Klaviyo has a clear edge in the email marketing department. Its tools are more polished and robust while the platform as a whole offers a range of advanced capabilities around segmentation, customer data integration, and analytics.

Klaviyo is also a more versatile platform as it offers channels and tools that Attentive doesn’t. These include:

• Mobile push notifications.
• Reviews for collecting positive customer feedback and showcasing it across key places.
• Web forms for getting email and SMS consent, announcing various initiatives, and more. 
• A customer data platform (CDP) for consolidating data, uncovering insights, and analyzing campaign performance.

Lastly, Klaviyo’s pricing model is public. You can visit their website and get an estimate of how much the platform will cost per month depending on factors like the number of active profiles, SMS credits, and more. In contrast, Attentive’s pricing isn’t listed on the company’s website. 

Due to these factors, Klaviyo is the better choice for:

• Marketers who require data unification and advanced email marketing capabilities like deep segmentation, deliverability insights, and customizable attribution.
• eCommerce brands looking to use one platform for different use cases outside of email and SMS, like adding reviews, sending mobile push notifications, and building web forms.
• Small businesses looking to start as fast as possible with an affordable (or even free) plan.

Klaviyo’s limitations: Inconsistent customer support and weaker SMS marketing features for enterprises

As we mentioned above, Attentive excels when it comes to customer support. Klaviyo can’t match that level of service, which in addition to the platform’s learning curve, is why it falls behind in categories like customer support, ease of setup, and ease of use.

Klaviyo’s customer support has also been inconsistent over the last few years. Additionally, users on the free plan have access to email support only for the first 60 days.

Lastly, since Klaviyo serves all kinds of eCommerce businesses, its enterprise SMS features don’t stack up to Attentive’s. According to Attentive’s website, Klaviyo uses fewer sending partners, offers rudimentary compliance tools, and isn’t built for high volume — all things that enterprise customers often require.

Insider: An omnichannel alternative to Attentive and Klaviyo

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 can be a perfect alternative to Attentive or Klaviyo for midsized and enterprise teams looking for a solution that:

• Enables them to unify their martech stack to optimize costs, work more efficiently, and overcome data silos.
• Offers access to channels besides email and SMS, like WhatsApp, push notifications, on-site and mobile app personalization, and more.
• Personalizes content, messages, and product recommendations across all customer touchpoints.
• Has user-friendly tools for building, personalizing, and automating campaigns quickly without any technical assistance.
• Provides the fastest return on investment (ROI) thanks to its experienced global support teams, premade templates, and intuitive tools.

Thanks to this versatility, Insider has been ranked as a top solution by G2, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC across categories like omnichannel marketing platforms, mobile marketing software, and customer data platforms.

Plus, Insider is a leader in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and time-to-value thanks to our:

• Experienced global support teams. We’re an enterprise-grade organization with 1000+ employees across six continents, which lets us deliver fast, high-quality customer support regardless of where you’re located. Our teams ensure you can see value from Insider as fast as possible by helping you deploy and use it in the best possible way for your business needs.

• Premade templates. Insider offers a plethora of proven templates for all channels and use cases — like generating leads via gamified sign-up forms and pop-ups, encouraging purchases with social proof and progress bars, upselling or cross-selling via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels, and many more. 

In the next sections, you’ll learn about Insider’s main advantages for large marketing teams compared to Attentive and Klaviyo. 

#1 Access 12+ channels from one platform

Insider is a unified marketing platform that lets you unlock a true omnichannel approach to your marketing. 

Instead of having to use different solutions for email, SMS, and other channels (like you would with Attentive or Klaviyo), Insider offers access to 12+ channels from one place. These include onsite, mobile apps, push notifications, online ads, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and others.

This is a massive benefit for large marketing teams that want to unify their martech stack, instead of using a bunch of disconnected point solutions because it lets them:

• Simplify operations by managing just one platform, which removes context switching.
• Overcome data silos by unifying all customer and product information into a central database (we’ll discuss this in more detail later).
• Lower the total cost of ownership and complexity of their martech stack, instead of dealing with different UIs, working with various customer success teams, and tracking various pricing plans and renewal periods.

#2 Easily personalize and automate campaigns across all touchpoints

Besides reaching users across 12+ channels, our platform ensures you maximize your marketing efforts with in-depth personalization based on customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.

For example, you can easily build high-converting emails by adding recipients’ names, birthdays, cart items, and other personalized elements with a simple drag-and-drop editor. You can even leverage our AI-powered Smart Recommender to deliver personalized product recommendations inside each email.

The same goes for SMS. Our platform lets you send all sorts of SMS messages and campaigns — from bulk text messages and transactional updates to highly targeted price drop updates and event reminders. Again, these can be personalized based on each customer’s needs, interests, and preferences thanks to our platform’s personalization engine.

Plus, you can use Insider to scale your efforts across other messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Instagram, and chatbots. Insider makes it easy to send relevant messages and even have automated, two-way conversions at scale — a set of functionalities we call Conversational CX.

Our platform also gives you the tools you can use to tailor all other touchpoints in the customer journey. For example, you can personalize all elements of your website, like:

• Product recommendations by leveraging different algorithms like new arrivals, location-based bestsellers, frequently purchased together, checkout recommendations, and many others. Chow Sang Sang used our product recommendations to achieve a 10.5% conversion rate uplift on their website and a 23.5% conversion rate boost for their email campaigns.

• Categories with our Category Optimizer tool that rearranges how categories are presented to each visitor. This is crucial on smaller viewports where purchase journeys must be as simple and streamlined as possible. Adidas used this technique to achieve a 50.3% conversion rate on their mobile site.

• Instagram-like stories with InStory — a tool that lets you add dynamic, personalized stories on your site or mobile app. These stories attract users’ attention, encourage product discovery, and drive more revenue. Dover Saddlery used InStory to generate $1.7 million in incremental revenue. 

For more details on how Insider can help you reach customers with personalized messaging across other marketing channels like web push or online ads, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.

Next, you can bring all your channels together and build tailored customer journeys with Architect — our marketing automation platform. 

Architect makes it easy to build everything from simple automated workflows to complex omnichannel campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you choose channels, wait times, and conditions. Leading brands in various industries use this journey builder to create:

• Cart recovery flows.
• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns.
• Automated message confirmations.
• A/B tests comparing headlines, body copy, images, channels, and journey flows.

Omnichannel marketing campaigns spanning email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and other touchpoints. Note: eCommerce brand NA-KD used Architect to create seamless journeys across five channels, which led to a 25% increase in customer lifetime value.

Architect has built-in journey analytics and AI-powered features that help you optimize campaigns for optimal performance. For example, you can use Next-Best Channel and Send-Time Optimization to automatically trigger each message in your campaigns on the channels and at the times recipients are most likely to engage,

Lastly, you can leverage use a unique combination of Predictive, Generative, and Conversational AI to:

• Create customer segments, journeys, images, and campaign copy using simple text prompts. 
• Predict key customer behaviors, such as likelihood to purchase, discount affinity, and lifetime value.
• Have two-way conversations with customers at scale based on your guidelines and unified data. For example, Renault used our AI virtual assistant to provide quick and accurate responses to customer questions 24/7, which helped the brand achieve a 93% decrease in customer service wait times.

#3 Unify your data and get 360-degree customer views

Most point solutions like Attentive can’t unify customer data from different sources. Instead, they rely on integrations with third-party CDPs that have already consolidated that data to serve as a foundation for various marketing campaigns.

While effective, this approach requires setting up, integrating, and managing a separate CDP. This approach drives up martech costs and increases complexity, making it more difficult to launch personalized campaigns quickly.

That’s why Insider comes with a built-in enterprise CDP that aggregates data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, analytics platforms, eCommerce platforms, customer service tools, and others. 

Our Integrations Hub has pre-built connectors for 100+ popular solutions. You can use those, as well as our flexible API, to ensure valuable data is always being shared between the different pieces of your tech stack in real time.

Once your data is unified, our CDP automatically creates 360-degree customer views containing valuable insights like:

• Top visited product categories.
• Channel preferences and reachability.
• Last visited, purchased, and abandoned products.
• Predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a channel, lifecycle stage, and more.
• And many others.

Our platform also offers deep segmentation capabilities based on standard, premade, and predictive characteristics. You can use those to easily create detailed audience segments for your campaigns, like:

• VIP customers interested in a specific product category and price range.
• Inactive customers with a high discount affinity who recently viewed a product on your site.
• First-time customers who are located in a specific region and have a high likelihood of engaging via email and SMS.

Put simply, Insider offers everything needed to power your marketing strategy with reliable data and target customers with precision across channels and lifecycle stages.

Make the most out of your marketing budget and efforts with Insider

Insider is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that offers access to 12+ channels, personalization tools, an automation platform, an enterprise CDP, and advanced customer journey analytics — all from one place.

This makes it an ideal alternative to Attentive and Klaviyo for midsized and enterprise teams looking to unify their martech stack, personalize the entire customer experience, and maximize their marketing spend.

Overall, Insider enables you to:

• Unify your customer data and get detailed 360-degree customer views.
• Segment your audiences using a combination of standard, predefined, and predictive characteristics for maximum accuracy.
• Optimize conversion rates across your website, mobile app, and communication channels by personalizing content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
• See a return on your investment as fast as possible thanks to a best-in-class customer support team and versatile templates for all channels and use cases.
• Build and automate campaigns across all channels, including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more using simple tools that don’t require technical assistance.
• Rely on the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, show personalized product recommendations, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers, and work more efficiently.
• Analyze campaigns, build custom reporting dashboards, and gain deep customer insights with tools like Funnels, Retention Cohorts, Message Frequency Analytics, and more.

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