Brevo vs. Klaviyo: Which Marketing Automation Tool Is Right for Your Business?
Both Brevo and Klaviyo are serious contenders in the email and marketing automation space — but they serve very different audiences. Klaviyo is laser-focused on ecommerce, with deep Shopify integration and powerful predictive analytics. Brevo is a broader, budget-friendlier all-in-one platform that appeals to SMBs and teams that need omnichannel reach without a runaway bill. This comparison uses real pricing data and verified feature details to help you decide which tool deserves your money.
Pricing Comparison: Brevo vs. Klaviyo
Pricing is where these two platforms diverge most sharply — and where your decision may already be made for you.
Klaviyo Pricing Model
Klaviyo charges based on the number of active profiles in your account. As of February 18, 2025, Klaviyo enforces a new profile compliance policy that automatically upgrades your tier if your active profile count exceeds your current limit — meaning your bill can increase even if you haven't added new contacts to your lists. Initial price increases under this policy are capped at 25%.
- Free plan: 250 active profiles, 500 emails/month — email support for the first 60 days only
- Starter paid plan: From $20/month for up to 500 active profiles
- 10,000 contacts: $185/month for email only
- SMS is available as an add-on but only in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand
Brevo Pricing Model
Brevo charges based on the number of emails sent per month, not the size of your contact list. Contact storage is included at no extra cost.
- Free plan: 300 emails/day (9,000/month), up to 100,000 contacts stored, unlimited contact storage, always-on email support
- Starter plan: From $9/month for 5,000 emails/month
- Business/Professional plan: From $18/month, includes phone support, marketing automation, and A/B testing
Side-by-Side Pricing Table
| Plan Level | Brevo | Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | 9,000 emails/month, 100,000 contacts | 500 emails/month, 250 active profiles |
| Entry Paid Plan | From $9/month (5,000 emails) | From $20/month (500 profiles) |
| 10,000 Contacts/Profiles | ~$25/month (volume-based email plan) | $185/month |
| Pricing Metric | Emails sent per month | Active profiles (enforced since Feb 2025) |
| Free Support | Email support always included | Email support for first 60 days only |
| Phone Support | Yes (Professional plan and up) | Paid plans only |
The cost difference at scale is dramatic. At 10,000 contacts, Klaviyo users pay $185/month for email alone. Brevo users sending the same volume pay a fraction of that. For budget-conscious SMBs, Brevo's pricing model is structurally more predictable and more forgiving as your list grows.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Email Marketing
Both platforms offer a full-featured email marketing suite: drag-and-drop editors, pre-built templates, segmentation, A/B testing, and detailed analytics. Klaviyo's email reporting leans heavily toward revenue attribution — its dashboards prioritize how much money each campaign or flow generated. Brevo's reporting covers standard email KPIs (open rate, click rate, bounce rate) and is arguably more accessible to marketers who aren't exclusively focused on direct ecommerce revenue.
Automation Workflows
Both tools support behavior-based triggers, branching logic (if/then conditions), and pre-built workflow templates for common scenarios like welcome sequences, abandoned cart recovery, and post-purchase follow-ups. Brevo also supports omnichannel automation — you can combine email, SMS, and WhatsApp in a single workflow. Klaviyo's automation is tightly optimized for ecommerce events (product views, checkout abandonment, purchase history), which makes it exceptionally powerful for Shopify stores but less relevant for non-ecommerce use cases.
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Segmentation
Klaviyo's segmentation is best-in-class for ecommerce. It allows real-time dynamic segments based on purchase history, predicted customer lifetime value, browse behavior, and predictive analytics (e.g., predicted next order date, churn risk). Brevo offers solid segmentation based on contact attributes, engagement history, and custom fields — more than sufficient for most SMBs, but not as granular as Klaviyo on predictive ecommerce metrics.
SMS Marketing
Klaviyo's SMS is robust but geographically limited: it's only available in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Brevo's SMS offering supports international campaigns and integrates natively with its email and WhatsApp workflows for true omnichannel messaging.
Ecommerce Integrations
Klaviyo's deepest integration is with Shopify, and it also connects with WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and other major platforms. It offers product review collection (Shopify only), mobile push notifications (in beta), and a revenue-first analytics dashboard. Brevo offers an ecommerce dashboard with product performance stats, revenue analysis, and retention metrics. Both platforms sync customer data automatically from connected stores, but Klaviyo's data depth for Shopify users is unmatched.
Omnichannel Capabilities
Brevo supports email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, live chat, and CRM — all under one roof. This breadth makes it a genuine all-in-one platform for SMBs that want to centralize their customer communications. Klaviyo is primarily email and SMS, with mobile push in beta. If your business communicates across multiple channels beyond just email and text, Brevo has a structural advantage here that tools like ActiveCampaign and Drip also compete on.
Customer Support: A Clear Differentiator
Support quality is a real differentiator between these two platforms — and it's not close.
- Brevo: Email support is available to all users, including free plan users, with no time limit. Phone support is included on Professional plans and up. Support is available in six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian.
- Klaviyo: Free plan users only receive email support for the first 60 days. After that, you need a paid plan to get help. Customer reviews frequently cite poor onboarding support and slow response times as pain points.
For small businesses or solo operators who need help getting set up and troubleshooting campaigns, Brevo's always-available support model is a meaningful practical advantage.
Real User Sentiment
Verified user reviews paint a consistent picture for both platforms:
What Brevo Users Say
"What stands out is their customer support — even as a free account user, I received personalized, non-canned responses to my queries. This prompt and considerate support especially for minor issues is commendable."
"It's very helpful for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to easily interact with their customers even if they are on a small budget. It provides you with an all-in-one email and marketing platform."
"Brevo is truly one of the most amazing email automation platforms I've used so far in my organizations. The array of customizations, features, and a user-friendly dashboard saves a lot of time and effort."
The recurring themes in positive Brevo reviews are: affordability, ease of use, responsive support, and value for SMBs.
What Klaviyo Users Say
Klaviyo earns high marks from ecommerce operators for its revenue-focused analytics and deep Shopify integration. Users frequently praise the quality of its predictive segmentation and the ROI clarity it provides. However, common complaints include steep pricing at scale, poor support accessibility on lower tiers, and a steep learning curve for non-technical users. The February 2025 pricing policy change — which automatically upgrades tiers based on active profiles rather than list size — drew significant criticism from users who saw unexpected bill increases.
Scenarios: When Each Platform Wins
Choose Brevo If:
- You're an SMB or startup with a growing contact list and a limited budget — Brevo's email-volume pricing model means your costs scale with usage, not list size
- You need omnichannel automation across email, SMS, and WhatsApp in a single platform
- You run a non-ecommerce business (SaaS, services, B2B) where Klaviyo's ecommerce-centric features would go unused
- You want reliable customer support without paying premium plan prices
- You need international SMS reach beyond the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand
- You have a large contact list but send campaigns at moderate frequency — Brevo lets you store up to 100,000 contacts for free
Choose Klaviyo If:
- You run a Shopify store and want the deepest possible native integration with revenue-attributed analytics
- You rely heavily on predictive segmentation — predicting churn risk, next order date, and customer lifetime value out of the box
- Your business model is built around ecommerce email flows (abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase sequences) and you need best-in-class templates and triggers for these
- You have the budget to absorb $185+/month at 10,000 contacts and the ROI from ecommerce automation justifies it
- You need Shopify product reviews integrated into your marketing platform
If you're evaluating other options alongside these two, our reviews of Mailchimp and Drip are worth reading — both sit in a similar price and feature bracket and may suit specific use cases better than either Brevo or Klaviyo.
Verdict: Brevo Wins on Value, Klaviyo Wins on Ecommerce Depth
This comparison comes down to a straightforward split: what kind of business are you, and what's your budget?
Brevo is the stronger choice for most SMBs. Its free plan is genuinely useful (9,000 emails/month, 100,000 contacts), its pricing model rewards list growth without penalizing it, and it offers a broader set of channels — email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat — at a fraction of Klaviyo's cost. At 10,000 contacts, Brevo users pay roughly $25/month versus Klaviyo's $185/month. That's a gap that's hard to justify unless Klaviyo's ecommerce-specific features are generating measurable incremental revenue for you.
Klaviyo is the stronger choice for high-volume Shopify merchants. If your business lives and dies by ecommerce automation — abandoned cart flows, predictive LTV segmentation, revenue-attributed campaign reporting — Klaviyo's feature depth is genuinely superior and the higher cost can be justified by the ROI. But be prepared for the February 2025 pricing changes to hit harder than expected, particularly if your active profile count is higher than your mailing list size.
For businesses that are currently on Klaviyo and feeling the pricing pressure from the 2025 profile compliance changes, Brevo is the most direct comparable alternative — offering similar automation depth, better support, and a much more predictable cost structure as you scale. Read our full Brevo review and Klaviyo review for deeper breakdowns of each platform's full feature set.




