Klaviyo vs Mailchimp for ecommerce, with the real prices

If you sell on Shopify and want email to be a real sales channel, Klaviyo is the better of the two. It segments on purchase data in real time, ships the ecommerce flows ready to use and predicts what each customer will do next. Mailchimp is cheaper on list price and good enough if what you send is mostly a newsletter. The price gap is smaller than it looks, because the two do not count contacts the same way.

A note before we start: we are a Klaviyo partner and it is the platform we use in most of the accounts we run. That is why every price and feature below comes from each brand's own pages, checked on October 5, 2026, and linked at the end.

What each one costs at your list size

Monthly list prices in US dollars, which is how both bill. For Mailchimp we use Standard, the cheapest plan with full automations, and show Essentials for reference.

Up to 5,000 contacts they cost the same. Past that, Mailchimp Standard is cheaper and the gap grows with the list: $90 a month at 25,000 contacts, $270 at 50,000.

Mailchimp also advertises 15% off for the first 12 months. We leave it out of the table because it is temporary: when you choose a platform, what matters is what you pay in year two.

To see your exact Klaviyo tier for your profile count, use our Klaviyo pricing calculator, which lists every tier.

Which contacts each one bills you for

This is the half of the comparison almost nobody makes.

Mailchimp counts everything in your audience. Its own help centre says subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count towards your plan. Only archived, cleaned and deleted contacts stop counting. And a contact who sits in two audiences counts twice.

Klaviyo counts active profiles, which it defines as any profile that can be messaged. Suppressed, unsubscribed and deleted profiles do not count.

An example: a store with 25,000 contacts, 5,000 of whom have unsubscribed or never opted in.

The gap drops from $90 to $65 a month. Mailchimp is still cheaper, but only if you archive unsubscribes by hand. If you do not, you pay for them every month.

Automations, where they really split

In ecommerce the money in email sits in the flows. Welcome, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout and post-purchase are the four we build from day one in every account. This is where the two plans behave very differently.

Both now have the triggers that matter on a Shopify store: abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment and back in stock. The difference is not whether they have them but what you can do with the data inside the flow.

Segmentation and prediction

Both segment on purchase history: products bought, total spent, number of orders, average order value. Day to day, the difference is elsewhere.

Klaviyo predicts per profile. For each customer it estimates predicted lifetime value over 365 days, the expected date of their next order and their churn risk. It needs some history first: at least 500 customers with an order, 180 days of data and orders in the last 30 days.

Mailchimp predicts per group. It sorts customers into high, medium or low value and high, medium or low purchase likelihood. It needs the Standard plan and does not publish a data threshold.

In practice, with Klaviyo you can write to each customer a few days before their next order is expected. With Mailchimp you can write to "the high likelihood group". For a brand whose products get replenished (food, beauty, pet care), the first one is worth far more.

Shopify integration

Both have an official app in the Shopify App Store and both sync customers, orders and browsing behaviour. Mailchimp includes the integration in every plan, the free one too.

The difference is what each does with that data, which is what the last two sections are about. Klaviyo was built for ecommerce and its whole data model revolves around orders and products. Mailchimp was built for newsletters and added ecommerce later. You notice it in how many clicks it takes to build a segment like "bought twice, last time more than 90 days ago, never bought category X".

SMS

Klaviyo includes $5 a month of mobile messages even on the free plan, and SMS runs inside the same flows as email.

In Mailchimp, SMS is a paid add-on for Essentials and above. You buy credits separately and have to apply before using it, with an approval of 2 to 5 business days.

Which one we pick, and when

Pick Klaviyo if:

• you sell on Shopify and your customers buy again;
• you want email to be one of your main sales channels, not a bulletin;
• you will run multi-step flows and behaviour-based segments.

Pick Mailchimp if:

• you mostly send a content newsletter and the store is secondary;
• your list is over 25,000 contacts, margins are tight and you will not use prediction;
• you need little more than a welcome email and the odd campaign.

The sum we do with clients is simple. With a $65 average order, a gap of $65 to $90 a month on a 25,000-contact list is one or two orders. If a well-built abandoned cart does not recover that, the platform is not the problem.

Sources

Checked on October 5, 2026.

• Mailchimp pricing and which contacts count
• Klaviyo pricing and what an active profile is
• Mailchimp automation flows and available triggers
• Klaviyo predictive analytics
• Mailchimp purchase likelihood and lifetime value
• SMS in Mailchimp
• Mailchimp's Shopify app
• Klaviyo tiers: those in our calculator, checked against klaviyo.com on September 2, 2026.