Omnisend review: the store platform that prices its SMS

Omnisend is an email and SMS platform built specifically for online stores, priced by contacts, starting at $16 a month for 500 contacts on its Standard plan. Its most useful distinguishing feature for a store doing the sums is that it publishes an SMS rate, which most of its competitors do not.

Its least useful feature is that its pricing page loads with a discount already applied, so the first number a visitor sees is not the monthly rate. That is worth walking through before anything else, because it changes every comparison built from a casual glance.

The pricing page opens on a discount

Load omnisend.com/pricing and the control marked "Pay 3 months upfront (save 30%)" is already switched on. Standard shows $11.20 a month and Pro shows $41.30, each captioned "After 3 months, you will be billed monthly".

Switch that control off and the rates become $16.00 and $59.00, captioned "Billed monthly". Omnisend's own arithmetic is internally consistent — three months of Standard at $16 is $48, less thirty per cent is $33.60, which divides to $11.20 a month — so nothing here is wrong, exactly. It is simply that a store comparing Omnisend's opening figure against a rival's ordinary monthly rate is comparing a prepayment against a subscription.

Every Omnisend figure on this site is the monthly rate with that toggle switched off.

What it costs as the list grows

Omnisend monthly rates with the three-month prepay switched off, read at omnisend.com/pricing on 24 September 2026, in US dollars.

The Standard email allowance is exactly twelve times the contact count at every step — 6,000 at 500 contacts, 120,000 at 10,000. Omnisend prints the allowance on each plan card rather than the ratio, but the ratio holds throughout, and it is the same twelve-times figure Mailchimp and Sender attach to their own mid plans.

That collapse is the practical finding. Below about 1,500 contacts, Pro costs roughly three times Standard and is hard to justify. At 2,500 it costs $15 more, and at 5,000 just $9 more, for unlimited sending and SMS credits described as matching your monthly bill. A store approaching 2,500 contacts should look at Pro rather than assuming the cheaper plan stays the sensible one.

SMS, and why it counts for more than it looks

Omnisend advertises SMS from $0.007 a message. Its own United States estimator shows $50 buying 5,882 messages, and prints the resulting volume rate as $0.0085 each — a figure that divides correctly from the two numbers beside it.

That is a modest thing to publish and almost nobody else in this category does it. Klaviyo does not publish a per-message rate on its pricing page or its SMS page. Brevo says only that price depends on volume and destination. Sender bundles ten dollars of SMS into its Professional plan without a rate card. A store that intends to run SMS seriously can actually budget against Omnisend's figures, and cannot against most of the others.

The comparison claim on its own homepage

Omnisend's pricing page carries the line "Same power as Klaviyo. Up to 35% less." Its own footnote is more specific than the headline: the comparison is "based on publicly available standard rates as of May 2026, comparing Omnisend's Standard plan to Klaviyo's Marketing plan (Email). Excludes SMS, and add-ons."

In other words the claim measures Omnisend's middle tier against Klaviyo's upper one. That is not dishonest — the footnote is right there — but it is a specific comparison presented as a general one, and a store should know which two plans are being weighed before treating the number as a discount it will receive.

The same page carries "Make an average $79 for every $1 you spend", footnoted as Omnisend's internal analysis of its own paying merchants in 2025, with the caveat that results vary. That is a vendor's own unaudited figure about its own customers. This site prints no return-on-spend figure of its own and treats that one as an illustration of how such claims are constructed rather than as evidence about your store.

What the free plan covers

Omnisend's free tier is 250 contacts, 500 emails a month and 500 web-push notifications. That is enough to build and test a cart flow and not enough to run a store on. Sender's free plan, by comparison, covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month with automation included, which is a materially different proposition for a business with no budget.

Omnisend also advertises free migration of automations, forms, segments and templates in up to five days. No other platform in this comparison publishes an equivalent offer on its pricing page.

What Omnisend does not publish

Two things are absent from the pricing page, and both matter more than the page's own emphasis suggests.

The first is what happens at the ceiling. Standard's allowance is twelve times your contact count and Pro's is described as unlimited monthly emails, but the page does not state what occurs if a Standard account exceeds its allowance in a busy month — whether sending pauses, overage is charged, or the account is moved up a tier. Mailchimp states its equivalent consequence explicitly on its own page. Omnisend does not, so no consequence is described here.

The second is the Pro plan's SMS inclusion. The page says Pro customers receive "bonus SMS credits equal to your monthly bill", which is a clear enough formula, but it sits in a FAQ answer rather than on the plan card and is not restated in the plan comparison table. A store choosing Pro largely for that inclusion should confirm the terms before signing up, because a figure that appears in one place on a pricing page and not in the other two is the kind of thing that changes quietly.

Neither absence is disqualifying. Both are the sort of detail worth having in writing before a busy November.

Where Omnisend sits against the other six platforms, at two realistic store sizes, is set out in the main comparison.

Its closest head-to-head is with the platform it names on its own pricing page.