11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types

Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for scaling mid-sized businesses and enterprise brands

These tools support most or all of Klaviyo’s features while also offering capabilities for other channels and use cases. They’re a good choice if you’re looking to:

• Run coordinated email and SMS campaigns with advanced features for automation and personalization (e.g., dynamic product recommendations, behavioral triggers, and send time optimization).
• Expand your campaigns and automations to other channels like push notifications, WhatsApp, and online ads.
• Consolidate your customer data into a single database and use it as a foundation for effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.

1. Insider

Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for channels like email, SMS, push notifications, on-site, WhatsApp, online ads, and more.

Over 1200 brands use Insider to generate more conversions and revenue by aggregating their customer data in one place and personalizing every customer touchpoint. For example:

• Remix used our email product to create a personalized onboarding sequence for new email subscribers, which increased their first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.
• LEGO used our lead generation and email automation capabilities to grow their subscriber base by 361% and reach a 30.8% open rate for their emails.
• NA-KD used our email, SMS, and web push capabilities to achieve a 25% uplift in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x return on investment (ROI) in the first 12 months of using Insider.

As a comprehensive marketing and engagement solution, Insider supports all of Klaviyo’s channels—email, SMS, and mobile push—and adds lots of advanced functionality for personalizing website and mobile app experiences, automating campaigns across other channels like WhatsApp, web push, Google Search and social media ads, and much more. Plus, Insider’s pricing is based on the volume of sent emails or SMS messages, unlike Klaviyo’s which scales with the number of contacts in your base.

Thanks to Insider’s versatility, our solution has been ranked as a leading customer data platform (CDP), personalization software, and mobile marketing software by G2.

Below, we’ll discuss how Insider can help you replace all of Klaviyo’s core functionality and do a lot more to improve your conversions, revenue, and lifetime value (LTV).

Build personalized email and SMS campaigns (including AMP emails)

Insider makes it easy to build high-converting, personalized email and SMS messages.As you can see below, you can do this by using a drag-and-drop editor, by editing the HTML direction, or by using one of our many proven email templates.

When using the drag-and-drop editor, it’s very easy to add all kinds of dynamic content, including:

• The recipient’s name.
• Their last browsed category.
• The products they abandoned in their cart.
• A relevant product recommendation based on their behaviors, interests, and preferences, and much more.

You can also build website-like experiences right in the email using our no-code AMP blocks. This lets you provide customers with an interactive experience where they can browse products, mix and match different items, submit survey answers, and much more—all without leaving the email.

This is a great way to turn your emails into revenue generators, instead of just using them to redirect people to your website or mobile app.

For example, you can use AMP emails to:

• Send post-purchase surveys to gauge how customers felt about a product or service they purchase from your brand.
• Send carousels of products that go well together in an outfit, like a white shirt, black jeans, and white sneakers. 
• Send promo emails that let customers reserve a date and time for your service without going to a site or app.

Building personalized SMS messages is just as easy as creating emails. Just open the editor and start choosing from the list of dynamic attributes, like names, last purchased products, abandoned items, and so on.

Insider also prevents you from overwhelming your subscribers with too many emails or SMS messages, which is essential with today’s constant promo messages and overflowing inboxes. Our frequency capping settings limit the number of messages that subscribers can receive per day, week, or month, so you don’t lose their interest.

Insider also makes it easy to build and automate coordinate campaigns across both email and SMS. 

Thanks to Architect—our cross-channel journey builder—you can create personalized email and SMS campaigns with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.

For example, you can start a journey via email and continue to SMS only if customers don’t respond in a certain amount of time (or vice versa).

Or, you can build simpler journeys for common business flows. For example, you can have Insider send transactional emails immediately after a user completes a successful purchase or after their order has been shipped from your warehouse.

If you’re not sure which channel to try, our built-in A/B testing can help you compare how each channel performed.

You also don’t need to interpret the results of your tests and change the journey based on them. With our Winner Autoselection feature, Insider does that for you based on a metric you’ve chosen—whether that’s deliverability, open rate, clicks, conversions, revenue, and so on.

Overall, Architect is an essential tool for many of our customers. In fact, one of our users managed to reach a 99.94% improvement in email delivery rates and an 8.17% boost in average clickthrough rates (CTR) using Architect:

“Using this tool (Architect), we managed to deliver personalized pages to different users at their most preferred channel, be it through Email, WhatsApp, or SMS, and get a unified customer view on a single dashboard. The results were remarkable, with a staggering 99.49% improvement in Email delivery rates and an average CTR increase of 8.17%.”

Finally, you can analyze the success of your email and SMS campaigns right in your Architect workflows or in Insider’s dedicated analytics dashboards.

Engage your website and mobile app users and grow your subscriber base with gamification

Besides sending personalized email and SMS messages, Insider also helps you grow your contact list with targeted lead-generation campaigns. 

For example, you can create an email or SMS opt-in campaign for:

• Visitors browsing your site for a certain amount of time.
• Visitors browsing a certain category on your site.
• Users opening your mobile app for the first time.

Any other segment of potential or current customers.

And while you can use standard pop-ups, Insider offers lots of ways to make the sign-up experience fun and engaging for your users. 

For example, you can use our gamification templates to let visitors spin a wheel or scratch a coupon to win a prize in exchange for their email. Note: Mac Cosmetics used the Wheel of Fortune template shown below and added over 53,000 subscribers to their lead database in two days.

Or, you can simply offer a mystery gift in exchange for visitors’ phone numbers and emails.

All templates are easily customizable, so you can add your brand’s name, logo, and colors within minutes.

Aggregate your customer data and create highly-targeted segments with the help of AI

Customer data is the fuel for successful marketing campaigns. But today, many brands find themselves in the position of having tons of data scattered around disconnected systems including:

• Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Email and SMS marketing tools like Klaviyo or Attentive.
• Customer service software like Zendesk or Intercom.
• Content management systems (CMSs), APIs, and so on.

This prevents brands from using their data to get an accurate view of their customers’ journeys. 

That’s why when you use Insider’s email or SMS products, you also get our Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) for free.

Our CDP can aggregate customer data from any online or offline source into a single database. This gives you an accurate, 360-degree view of all your customers, including their names, contact info, behaviors on your site or app, channel reachability, and much more.

Note: If you haven’t worked with CDPs before, we highly recommend checking out our guide to the top 7 CDPs.

Additionally, our platform automatically creates valuable audiences that you can use in your campaigns. These include audiences of users who:

• Abandoned their carts.
• Abandoned your site while browsing a product page.
• Interacted with your brand on a specific channel like email, SMS, or WhatsApp.
• Installed or uninstalled your mobile app within a specific period of time, and more.

You can further enrich these segments with standard characteristics like users’ devices, operating systems, locations, and so on. 

Lastly, Insider also uses the power of AI to help make your segments even more precise. Thanks to our AI-powered intent engine, you can target audiences of customers (or even anonymous visitors) who:

• Have a high discount affinity.
• Have a high likelihood of buying or churning.
• Have the potential to spend lots of money with your brand, and others shown below.

Put simply, Insider’s CDP places all the marketing data you need at your fingertips, while the standard and predictive audiences help you transform that data into highly-targeted segments for your digital marketing campaigns.

Maximize your marketing efforts and budget with on-site and in-app personalization

While personalizing your email and SMS campaigns is important, it’s not enough to ensure a truly consistent customer experience.

Most users don’t buy a product directly after an email or SMS message. Instead, they visit your website or mobile app, browse around for a bit, and only then make a buying decision. 

If the website or in-app experience isn’t personalized based on what they saw in your emails or SMS messages (and how they reacted to it), you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to:

• Generate more revenue. 
• Improve your conversion rates.
• Maximize your marketing spend.

This is an area where Klaviyo can’t help, as it doesn’t have features for on-site or in-app personalization.

Conversely, Insider can tailor every element of your site or app to each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferences. 

This can provide a massive boost to your conversion rates, ensuring you’re making the most out of every customer interaction and maximizing your marketing budget.

For example, here are some of the website elements that you can personalize with Insider:

• Categories. Samsung used our Category Optimizer to drive a 10% conversion rate boost during the launch campaign for the Galaxy Note 9.

• Banners. Yves Rocher used this capability to show personalized banners to frequent shoppers and first-time visitors, leading to a 5% increase in conversion rates.

• Product recommendations. Chow Sang Sang used our AI-powered Smart Recommendations and built-in A/B testing to reach a 10.5% uplift in website conversions.

• Stories. Media Prima used InStory — our tool for delivering bite-sized, Instagram-like stories — to get a huge 525.71% uplift in average duration per session. 

In short, with Insider, there’s no limit to what you can personalize during the customer journey—from the content users see on your website or mobile app to the messages they receive on channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp and the ads they’re shown on Google Search and social media (Facebook, and TikTok).

Note: For more details on the importance of personalization, check out our guide to the top 15 personalization software tools.

Build and automate personalized marketing campaigns across all customer touchpoints

As we said earlier, Insider’s journey builder lets you create and automate personalized email and SMS campaigns. 

At the same time, you can also use it for all other touchpoints customers have with your brand—from your website and mobile app to channels like WhatsApp, web push, and more. 

Here’s how the process works:

First, you can choose to trigger each user journey by:

• Events, which can be any actions on your site or app, such as page visits, add-to cart-events, or completed purchases.
• Attribute changes, like a non-regular customer suddenly visiting a product three times a week.
• Price drops, and more.  

You then decide how the journey unfolds, e.g., via emails, WhatsApp messages, push notifications, or any other touchpoints. This is as simple as choosing the channel from a drop-down menu and setting rules for when a message should be triggered, e.g., 24 hours after a user visited your site.

If you’re not sure which channel to try, you can use our AI-powered next-best channel predictions. This feature automatically decides which touchpoint to test next based on each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferences.

You can also rely on the power of our AI-powered algorithms to:

• Send each message at the moment users are most likely to engage with it (thanks to our Send Time Optimization feature).
• Include the most relevant product recommendations for each customer, depending on when they open your message (thanks to our Smart Recommender).

For more examples of the power of Architect, check out our guides:

• 8 proven eCommerce marketing automation strategies and tools
• How to use omnichannel marketing automation (with examples)

Bonus: Quick setup, ease of use, and experienced support team

Our team of experts will help you take full advantage of Insider by:

• Helping you set up the platform and guiding you through its key capabilities (without charging extra for the setup). 
• Analyzing your site and analytics before our first kick-off meeting. That way, we can give you ideas for creating high-converting campaigns across email, SMS, and any other channel that’s relevant to your brand.

As a result, customers have consistently ranked Insider at the top of categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.

Finally, our extensive template library also massively reduces the time it takes to see value from Insider. The library includes templates for tons of use cases across all our channels—including abandoned cart emails, web push product upsells, SMS replenishment reminders, and much more.

To see Insider in action and learn how it can help you create high-converting, personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns, book a live demo with our team.

2. Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud combines a set of personalization, content management, data aggregation, and automation tools. In terms of replacing Klaviyo, the most relevant of these are:

• Adobe Campaign, which helps brands build and manage cross-channel campaigns (including email and SMS).
• Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, which unifies B2B and B2C data from various systems into a single place.
• Adobe Target, which is an AI-powered A/B testing and automation solution.
• Marketo Engage, which is an automation tool for marketing and sales teams.

3. Ortto

Alt text: Ortto homepage

Ortto is a CDP and marketing automation platform. It supports a range of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, live chat, and in-app messaging. Ortto also offers some auxiliary tools like a popup and form builder and a lead scoring solution.

4. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo is a platform that helps manage customer relationships on channels like email, SMS, live chat, web push, and WhatsApp. While it doesn’t have a CDP for aggregating customer data like the previous platforms, it’s a bit more flexible as it can be used by both marketing and sales teams at different types of businesses (though it’s not as enterprise-oriented as the previous solutions). It also has features for building landing pages and running retargeting Facebook ads.

Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for smaller businesses and individual creators

These solutions center around email as a marketing channel, with some also supporting SMS and web push notifications.

Some—like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, and SmartrMail—are good options if you’re looking for a simpler email marketing tool than Klaviyo, with better customer support for cheaper pricing plans.

Others—like Drip and Omnisend—can help you go beyond email marketing software and try beginner versions of on-site personalization, web push notifications, and other features that Klaviyo doesn’t support.

5. Drip

Drip is a marketing automation tool for eCommerce stores. It has a simple email builder that makes it easy to create and automate email campaigns. And while it doesn’t support SMS or mobile push notifications like Klaviyo does, it’s got an advantage in the on-site personalization department by letting brands add different elements to their sites, like dynamic messages, sidebars, sticky bars, and more.

6. Omnisend

Like Drip, Omnisend is a specialized automation platform for eCommerce businesses. It’s perhaps the most versatile solution in this category, as it supports email, SMS, and web push notifications. Besides that, Omnisend also has features for building popups and forms, as well as for syncing audiences with Facebook and Google Ads.

7. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the go-to email marketing solution for small businesses and creators getting started with email marketing. It doesn’t support any channels besides email and doesn’t offer some of Klaviyo’s other premium features, but it comes with everything you need to run email campaigns—including email list management, advanced segmentation, automated workflows, basic personalization, and so on. It also has an AI assistant that helps generate email subject lines and body copy.

8. Mailerlite

Mailerlite started as a simple, cost-effective email marketing solution. And while email is still the core offering (and the only supported channel), the platform has expanded to other use cases like:

• Building websites or individual landing pages.
• Creating blogs and managing their content.
• Creating signup forms.

9. SmartrMail

SmartrMail is an email and SMS eCommerce marketing tool. It’s ideal for smaller online stores that want to build their flows with proven tactics, like emails for cart abandoners, new leads, and more. The tool also has native integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and other popular eCommerce platforms.

10. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing platform for individuals and companies looking to grow their newsletters. It comes with features for email marketing automation and for building forms and landing pages. ConvertKit also helps creators and online businesses monetize their newsletters by selling memberships, eBooks, coaching sessions, webinars, and more.  

11. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign brings together email marketing, automation, and CRM tools. Like some of the other tools in this category, it doesn’t support SMS and mobile push notifications. However, it compensates by offering features for both marketing and sales teams, including a CRM, a lead scoring tool, a win probability calculator, and more. 

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

Insider is the best Klaviyo alternative for scaling mid-sized businesses and enterprise brands looking to maximize their marketing spend and efforts.

Our platform can:

• Help you coordinate and personalize every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys—from email and SMS to on-site, push notifications, WhatsApp, and much more.
• Aggregate all your customer data in one place so you can overcome data silos and get a clear view of each customer’s journey.
• Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or churn.

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