Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: the same $100, counted two different ways

Klaviyo and Mailchimp both cost $100 a month for a five-thousand-person list, and almost nothing else about them is comparable. Klaviyo bills by active profiles and is built around what a store's customers do; Mailchimp bills by contacts with a send allowance attached, halves its price for the first year, and serves a much broader set of businesses than online stores.

Neither of them pays this site anything, which is worth stating before the first figure rather than after the last one. Every price here was read at the two companies' own pricing pages on 24 September 2026, in a browser configured for the United States, with every toggle opened individually.

The short answer

Choose Klaviyo if the store's revenue already depends on segmentation — what someone browsed, what they bought last, how likely they are to buy again — and you are prepared to pay for every recently-active profile whether you mail them or not. Choose Mailchimp if you want a broad marketing tool at a predictable contact price and can live with the rate doubling after twelve months.

If the answer to both is "neither, quite", the platforms that bill by emails sent are a genuinely different shape of deal, and they are compared alongside these two on the main comparison.

What each one counts

This is the whole difference, and every price consequence follows from it.

Klaviyo's meter is active profiles: people who have engaged with your store recently. A profile that goes quiet eventually stops being billable, which sounds generous until you notice the corollary — a seasonal store whose customers all became active in November is paying November's price. Mailchimp's meter is contacts, a flat count of the list, with a monthly send allowance attached to each tier: ten times the contact count on Essentials, twelve times on Standard, fifteen times on Premium, according to Mailchimp's own feature table.

So Klaviyo asks how lively your audience is and Mailchimp asks how big your list is. Two stores with identical revenue can land on opposite sides of that question.

Price, side by side

Klaviyo and Mailchimp at matched list sizes, read at klaviyo.com/pricing and mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing on 24 September 2026, in US dollars. Mailchimp's introductory rate runs for twelve months; the list rate is what follows.

The crossing is the interesting part. Up to 5,000 people the two platforms charge the same list price. At 10,000 Mailchimp is $80 a month more; at 25,000 it is $60 a month less. Neither is simply the expensive one, and a comparison that says otherwise has picked a single list size and stopped.

The offers on both pages, and what they hide

Both companies headline a number that is not the ongoing rate, in opposite ways.

Mailchimp's is straightforward once seen: every card reads "$X/mo for 12 months" with "then, starts at $Y" underneath, and at every tier read here, Y was exactly twice X. A store budgeting from the headline is budgeting for half of its second year.

Klaviyo's is shorter and easier to miss. At 500 profiles the Email card headlines $1 against a struck-through $20, flagged $19 OFF, with a footnote describing $19 off the first month. There is also a gap the page does not resolve: the same $19 OFF flag appears on the Marketing card at $59 against $78, while the footnote beneath it says the offer applies to "the $20 email plan". Both numbers are printed here as they were read, and this page does not choose between them.

What you get for the money

On features the comparison is less even than the prices suggest, and it runs in Klaviyo's favour for stores specifically.

• Klaviyo publishes predictive analytics, onsite personalisation, product recommendations, loyalty rewards, order tracking and a customer self-service hub on its Marketing plan, plus 350+ integrations and A/B testing from the Email plan up.
• Mailchimp publishes up to 200 automation flows on Standard and Premium against four flow steps on Essentials, generative AI features at no extra cost on the upper two tiers, custom-coded templates, and 300+ integrations across all paid tiers.
• Seats differ sharply: Mailchimp gives three on Essentials, five on Standard and unlimited on Premium. Klaviyo does not tier seats on the plans read here.
• Mailchimp offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities, requested after signup — the only such published discount among the platforms this site covers.

Mailchimp is the broader marketing tool; Klaviyo is the deeper store tool. That is a genuine difference in kind rather than a scoreline, which is part of why this site publishes no scores.

What happens when you go over

Mailchimp states the consequence plainly on its pricing page and it is worth knowing before a busy month: "Overages apply if contact or email send limit is exceeded" on the paid tiers, and on the free plan, "Sending will be paused if contact or email send limit is exceeded". A store that sends more than twelve emails per contact in December on Standard is into overage territory.

Klaviyo's Email plan lists a monthly send allowance on the plan card — 5,000 emails a month at 500 profiles — and its free tier is 250 profiles and 500 emails. The consequence of exceeding it is not stated on the pricing page, so this site does not describe one.

If neither fits

Both of these are worth measuring against the cheaper contact-metered platforms before committing, because at 5,000 people the same store costs $39 a month on Sender and $48 on Moosend against $100 on either of these two — and against $65 on Brevo, which counts emails rather than people.

The Klaviyo alternatives worth considering, and the Klaviyo–Omnisend head-to-head specifically, are set out separately.