Klaviyo vs Omnisend: which is better in 2026?

Klaviyo and Omnisend are the two most direct competitors in this category: both are built for ecommerce stores, both price on contact count, and both publish their tier tables, which means every number below comes from a live pricing page read in August 2026 rather than a sales call. We reviewed each separately — the full teardowns are in our Klaviyo review (Lab Score 7.4) and our Omnisend review (8.3).

The short version: Omnisend wins on price at every tier we checked, on free-plan honesty, on support, and by a wide margin on consumer review scores. Klaviyo wins on channel breadth and analytics depth, and its included email volume is the most generous in the category. Neither is a clean buy. Klaviyo has billed on total active profiles since February 18, 2025, whether you email them or not, and its ladder has a 50 percent price cliff just above 10,000 profiles. Omnisend restructured SMS on May 4, 2026, stripping the bundled credits that used to be half its pitch. The winner is the tool whose gotcha costs you less, and for most stores that is Omnisend.

Pricing and real cost at scale

Klaviyo prices on active profiles — every contact in your account you could email — and includes monthly sends equal to 10 times your profile count, so send volume is effectively never the constraint. The ladder we read off the live klaviyo.com/pricing calculator: $20 at 251–500 profiles, $45 at 1,500, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, $225 at 11,500, $300 at 13,000, $400 at 25,000, and $1,495 at 110,000. Note the step just past 10,000: crossing to 11,500 profiles is a 50 percent price increase for a 15 percent larger list. When your count crosses a boundary, the plan upgrades automatically at the next billing cycle; moving back down only happens if you switch on an opt-in auto-downgrade preference available to credit-card customers.

Omnisend prices on billable contacts across two paid plans. Standard runs $16 at 500 contacts, $132 at 10,000, and tops out at $1,508 per month at the 150,001-contact tier; Pro runs $59 at 2,500 contacts, $150 at 10,000, and $1,940 at 150,001. The published table goes all the way to 150,000 contacts, so you can price three years of growth without talking to sales, and the curve is steady rather than punishing — there is no equivalent of Klaviyo’s 11,500-profile step.

Two structural facts apply to both vendors and surprise most buyers. First, neither offers annual billing. Klaviyo is month-to-month by credit card with no advertised annual discount at all; Omnisend’s advertised 30 percent discount is a three-month prepay promo — $11.20 per month on Standard’s entry tier, $41.30 on Pro — after which you revert to full list price. There is no rate lock on either platform, which matters more on Klaviyo, whose customers lived through a billing-model change in February 2025 that was applied to existing accounts automatically.

Second, both headline prices exclude SMS entirely. The comparison table above is email-only on both sides; the SMS section below adds the texting line item back in. To model your own list size and growth rate against both ladders, use our real cost calculator.

Who counts as a billable contact

This is where both vendors make their real money, and the mechanisms differ enough to change which one hurts you.

Klaviyo bills on total active profiles and, since February 18, 2025, requires every account to sit on a plan matching that count. If a third of your list has not opened an email in a year, you still pay full rate to store those contacts. The billing machinery is asymmetric by design: the vendor FAQ states plans will automatically upgrade to the next tier when profiles exceed it, while auto-downgrade exists only as an opt-in billing preference. A good month of list growth raises your bill before you have sent the new subscribers anything.

Omnisend’s definition is broader in a different direction. A billable contact is anyone who has received an automated message — including abandoned-cart visitors who never joined your list, purchasers who never opted in to marketing, and imported contacts without opt-in dates. Only unsubscribed contacts are excluded. An ecommerce store’s billable count can therefore sit meaningfully above its marketing list, and pruning stale non-subscribers becomes a recurring chore with a direct line to your invoice.

Call this section a draw on principle and an Omnisend win on consequences. Both models tax lazy list hygiene, but Klaviyo’s tier cliffs make the tax steeper: a store drifting from 10,000 to 13,000 profiles doubles its Klaviyo bill, from $150 to $300, while the same drift on Omnisend’s published curve moves you a few gentle steps.

Email volume and send caps

Klaviyo’s send allowance is the most generous in the category: every email tier includes monthly sends equal to 10 times your profile count — 100,000 emails per month at the 10,000-profile tier. Most brands emailing a 10,000-contact list twice a week will never touch the ceiling, so Klaviyo’s variable cost pressure comes entirely from list growth, never from sending.

Omnisend’s Standard plan caps emails at 12 times your list size — 120,000 per month at 10,000 contacts — which is nominally higher than Klaviyo’s multiplier but fails much less gracefully. There is no overage option: exceed the cap mid-cycle and Omnisend drops contacts from automation workflows — the help center’s word is canceled — until your cycle renews or you upgrade. For a store, that means abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows silently stop firing during your busiest sending period, which is exactly when you hit the cap. Pro’s unlimited email is actually a fair-use ceiling of 60 times your list size, disclosed in a pricing-page tooltip — 600,000 emails a month at 10,000 contacts, which few stores will hit.

If you run heavy automation on a budget plan, this is a genuine Klaviyo advantage: its allowance removes a whole category of overage anxiety, while Omnisend Standard’s 12x limit is a hard architectural constraint. The $18 monthly gap between Omnisend Standard and Pro at 10,000 contacts is small enough that many stores should take Pro for the higher ceiling alone.

SMS: extra on both, for different reasons

Neither platform includes SMS in the price you see quoted, and both have recent history worth knowing.

Klaviyo has never bundled meaningful SMS. The combined Email + SMS entry plan is $35 per month and includes just 150 SMS/MMS credits; beyond that, US toll-free SMS runs $0.01 plus carrier fees per send, billed by volume and destination. The vendor’s own calculator priced 2,900 monthly sends at roughly $40 per month. On the upside, SMS is available on any plan, and email and SMS tiers upgrade independently, so a brand heavy on one channel is not forced to over-buy the other.

Omnisend used to be the bundled-SMS bargain, and on May 4, 2026 it stopped. Standard lost SMS entirely for new subscribers. New Pro subscribers pay per send from prepaid credits: a US SMS costs $0.009 on the smallest credit purchase, $0.0085 at $50 or more, $0.008 at $1,000, and $0.007 only at $10,000 credit buys. One campaign to 10,000 US numbers adds roughly $85 to $90 to that month’s bill, putting a Pro subscriber at about $240 all-in — still competitive, but around 60 percent above the sticker price. Legacy Pro users who signed up before the cutoff keep monthly credits equal to their plan price, but forfeit any accumulated balance permanently if they downgrade or cancel, which is a quiet lock-in.

The verdict depends on your texting volume. Occasional senders do fine on Omnisend’s pay-as-you-go credits, and its per-message rates undercut Klaviyo’s $0.01-plus-carrier-fees. Structural SMS programs should note that Omnisend now gates the channel behind Pro for new accounts, while Klaviyo sells it on any tier — and that a brand sending multiple texts per contact per month should price dedicated SMS platforms against both.

Free plans and support

Both free plans cover 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month, and the resemblance ends there.

Klaviyo’s free tier adds $5 of mobile message credit and 10,000 Composer AI credits, with no expiry on the plan itself — but human email support ends after your first 60 days, after which you are on your own until you pay. The paid add-ons also deserve a budgeting note: Composer AI lists at $157 per month (intro price $110), Social at $50 at 10,000 profiles (intro $38 through 09/30/2026), and Reviews at $25 at 250 orders per month. Budget on the list price, not the launch price.

Omnisend’s free plan is the most credible on-ramp in the ecommerce ESP market: every feature of the paid plans is unlocked — automation workflows, segmentation, signup forms, web push, reporting — and the limits are purely volume limits, plus Powered by Omnisend branding and no credit card required. Live chat and email support run 24/7 on every plan including Free, review comments across all three ratings platforms repeatedly single out support quality, and accounts spending over $400 per month get a named customer success manager. Switchers also get a free white-glove migration: Omnisend rebuilds contacts, segments, and automations from your previous platform within five days at no cost.

This section is not close. Omnisend gives a $0 account more support access than Klaviyo gives a free one after day 60.

Integrations, channels, and analytics: where Klaviyo earns its price

The reason Klaviyo can charge more and still claim over 170,000 businesses on its G2 profile is that the paid product is one of the most complete B2C marketing platforms available. It covers email, SMS/MMS, RCS, WhatsApp, push notifications, social, and reviews in a single tool, advertises more than 350 integrations with the ecommerce core — Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento — being its strongest territory, and ships revenue attribution, predictive analytics, and real-time segmentation on paid plans. That last cluster is the actual pitch: knowing which flow, campaign, and segment produced which dollars.

Omnisend covers the ecommerce essentials well — automation workflows, segmentation, forms, reporting — and includes unlimited web push on both paid plans, a free-to-send re-engagement channel that competitors charge for or skip. Pro adds AI personalization. What it does not have is Klaviyo’s channel breadth or its predictive machinery.

The honest framing: if each subscriber is worth dollars per year and you will actually act on attribution and prediction data, Klaviyo’s extra depth is worth its extra cost. If your program is campaigns plus cart-recovery flows — which describes most stores under 50,000 contacts — you are paying Klaviyo prices for machinery you will not open.

Independent ratings

On the software marketplaces, where buyers and practitioners review products, the two are nearly level: Klaviyo scores 4.6/5 on G2 across 1,361 reviews and 4.6/5 on Capterra across 537; Omnisend scores 4.6/5 on G2 across 1,185 reviews and 4.7/5 on Capterra across 836.

Trustpilot, where anyone can post, is where they diverge sharply. Omnisend holds 4.4/5 across 504 reviews. Klaviyo sits at 1.7/5 across 367 reviews, 57 percent of them one star. Our reading, laid out in the full Klaviyo review, is that the product earns its marketplace scores while the billing and account experience — the February 2025 forced move to active-profile billing, the automatic tier upgrades — generates the Trustpilot anger. Both signals are real, and the contrast with Omnisend’s consistency across all three platforms is one of the clearest data points in this comparison. Omnisend’s ratings agree with each other; Klaviyo’s do not.

Who should choose Klaviyo

Ecommerce brands with meaningful revenue per contact are the clear fit. If your store runs on Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, your program is flows-and-campaigns driven, and each subscriber is worth dollars per year rather than cents, $150 per month at 10,000 profiles buys attribution, prediction, and segmentation depth Omnisend does not match. The 10x included send volume also removes overage risk entirely, and brands that want email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, and push under one roof — with email and SMS billed independently — have no equivalent option here.

Go in with discipline: budget the tier your list will occupy twelve months from now, not today’s tier; prune aggressively, since a lean 9,500-profile list pays $150 while a lazy 13,000-profile list with the same engaged core pays $300; and model SMS as a second subscription. Klaviyo at 7.4 is a strong product you should only buy with a spreadsheet open.

Who should choose Omnisend

Ecommerce stores with 2,500 to 50,000 contacts are the center of the target. At 10,000 contacts, $132 to $150 per month for full automation, segmentation, and unlimited web push undercuts Klaviyo at the same size, the published table runs to 150,000 contacts so your three-year cost is visible up front, and 24/7 support on every tier removes the main risk of buying cheap. Klaviyo switchers have the cleanest case of all: Omnisend advertises up to 35 percent smaller invoices for merchants leaving Klaviyo, the arithmetic held up at the tiers we checked, and the free five-day migration means the switching cost is mostly the decision itself.

New stores should simply start on the free plan and build their automation stack before paying anything. The buyers who should hesitate are SMS-heavy operations — post-May 2026, texting is Pro-only and metered — and heavy automation senders on Standard, who should treat the 12x email cap as a hard constraint or budget for Pro. If you publish newsletters rather than run a store, neither tool is the answer; our Omnisend review and Klaviyo review both point that reader to MailerLite (9.2) instead.

FAQ

Which is cheaper at 10,000 contacts, Klaviyo or Omnisend?

Omnisend. Its Standard plan costs $132 per month at 10,000 contacts versus Klaviyo’s $150 email-only, per both vendors’ live pricing pages in August 2026. The gap widens just above that size: 11,500 profiles on Klaviyo costs $225 and 13,000 costs $300, while Omnisend’s published curve climbs gradually to $1,508 at 150,001 contacts. Neither vendor offers annual billing or an annual discount.

Does either platform include SMS in the base price?

Not for new customers. Klaviyo has always billed SMS separately — $35 per month for the combined entry plan with 150 credits, then $0.01 plus carrier fees per US toll-free send. Omnisend removed bundled SMS on May 4, 2026: Standard has no SMS for new subscribers, and Pro bills per send from prepaid credits at $0.007 to $0.009 per US message. A blast to 10,000 US numbers costs roughly $85 to $90 on Omnisend.

Which has the better free plan?

Omnisend, and it is not close. Both cover 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, but Omnisend unlocks every paid feature, includes 500 web push sends, requires no credit card, and provides 24/7 live chat and email support. Klaviyo’s free plan includes $5 of mobile credit and 10,000 Composer AI credits, but email support ends after your first 60 days.

Why does Klaviyo score lower if its features are deeper?

Because we score real cost, not capability alone. Klaviyo’s 7.4 reflects active-profile billing that charges for contacts you never email, automatic tier upgrades with opt-in-only downgrades, a 50 percent price cliff just above 10,000 profiles, and a 1.7/5 Trustpilot score across 367 reviews. Omnisend’s 8.3 reflects lower prices at every tier we checked, consistent ratings across G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot, and a post-2026 SMS model that costs occasional texters little.

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