Klaviyo Review for Shopify Stores

What is Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform built for ecommerce, and it carries a reputation for being the expensive option. The free plan is where that reputation gets tested, because its limits are ordinary: up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, the same contact ceiling Omnisend and Mailchimp publish. What sits inside the allowance is not. Klaviyo's pricing page states that the free plan lets you build automations, segmentation and reports, and it adds $5 a month of mobile messages and $5 of Composer usage on top of that, neither of which the other two include. Two numbers decide whether it fits: 500 sends against a 250-profile list is two campaigns a month, and the paid step is a $20 plan at 500 profiles that then moves with your active profile count.

Pros and cons

Free plan and pricing

Free plan

A permanent free plan rather than a trial: 250 active profiles, 500 email sends a month, automation and segmentation included, plus $5 a month each of mobile messages and Composer usage. No card is required. The binding constraint is the send allowance, not the feature list — 500 sends against a 250-profile list is two campaigns a month — and passing either limit stops sending until the cycle resets or you upgrade.

• 250 active profiles
• 500 email sends per month
• $5 of mobile messages per month, region and carrier dependent
• $5 of Composer usage per month
• Automation, segmentation and reporting included
• Web forms and the drag-and-drop editor included
• Email support for the first 60 days only
• Sending stops when either limit is passed, until the next cycle or an upgrade

We check every free plan on this site by opening its signup page and reading the form. See which ecommerce tool free plans actually work for the full set of results side by side.

Plans

Pricing in detail

Klaviyo does not print a price table. The pricing page pairs a slider for active profiles with a monthly total, and the email card states that your cost scales directly with the total number of active profiles in your account. Two published figures fix the bottom of the range. Klaviyo's promotion terms for the current first-month offer describe a paid $20 Klaviyo Email plan, and the banner ties that offer to the 500-profile plan; with $19 off, the total the page shows for that selection reads $1. Above 500 profiles the number moves with your list and you have to read it off the slider, so the cost is checkable but not quotable in advance. Two meters sit on top of the email plan. Composer, Klaviyo's AI assistant, is sold as a $20 a month product with $10 per 1,000 credits beyond its included usage, and unused credits do not carry into the next month. Mobile messages are bought as credits on top of the email plan, with carrier fees built into the rate. One definition matters more than the rest: an active profile is any contact in your database who can receive marketing, so the bill follows the profiles you keep mailable, not the rows you have imported.

Who should use Klaviyo?

• Shopify stores that want segmentation and revenue attribution from the first campaign
• Stores already running welcome and abandoned cart flows rather than one-off newsletters
• Sellers with fewer than 250 profiles who want automation without paying
• Merchants who want email and SMS billed from one platform

Who should avoid Klaviyo?

• Stores that mail a full list more than twice a month
• Sellers who need a price they can budget before signing up
• Stores that only send the occasional newsletter and do not need automation
• Anyone who needs support past the first 60 days on a free account

Alternatives

If Klaviyo is not the right fit, compare these alternatives:

• Omnisend
• Mailchimp

Final verdict

Klaviyo's reputation for being expensive is about the paid tiers, and even there the entry point is lower than the reputation suggests: a $20 a month plan at 500 profiles, not a sales call. What you pay above that is set by your active profile count, which is the number of contacts you keep mailable rather than the number you have imported — that is the one lever a store actually controls, because suppressing contacts who have not opened anything in a year lowers the bill without losing anyone who was reachable. The free plan is the part most often described wrongly. It is permanent, it includes automation, segmentation and reporting, and it carries $5 a month each of mobile messages and Composer usage. It is also smaller than the feature list makes it look: 500 sends against 250 profiles is two campaigns a month, so a weekly newsletter plus an abandoned cart flow will not fit inside it. Build the flows for free, and expect to be on the $20 tier once you are mailing a full list every week.

Frequently asked questions