Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign

Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign both send marketing email, but they’re built around different jobs. Klaviyo is priced by how many customer profiles you’re marketing to and leans on Shopify and WooCommerce order data to decide what to send; ActiveCampaign is priced by contact-list size across four named plans and bundles a sales CRM and pipeline into every one of them, including the cheapest. Every figure below comes from Klaviyo’s and ActiveCampaign’s own pricing pages, checked on 26 September 2026 and 27 September 2026.

Which one costs less at your contact count?

At the same size the two plans land close together, but the billing terms behind each number aren’t the same. At 1,000 contacts, Klaviyo’s Email plan costs $30 a month, billed monthly with no annual option anywhere on its pricing page. ActiveCampaign’s Starter plan at the same 1,000 contacts costs $15 a month, but that rate is only available billed annually; ActiveCampaign’s own Help Center confirms a Monthly billing cadence exists once you’re a customer, but its price has never appeared on a public page. So the real choice at this size isn’t just which number is smaller, it’s whether you’d rather pay Klaviyo’s higher figure month to month with no commitment, or pay less on paper for ActiveCampaign in exchange for a year’s commitment upfront. At 10,000 contacts the two plans are within a dollar of each other, $150 for Klaviyo against $149 for ActiveCampaign’s Starter, still billed annually. Past 10,000 contacts, the comparison stops being about contact count alone. A growing Klaviyo account can be pushed onto a pricier tier by email volume: sending around twelve campaigns a month to a 50,000-profile list adds up to roughly 600,000 sends, above the 50,000-profile tier’s 500,000-email allowance, so the real bill lands at $860 on the 60,000-profile tier rather than the $720 the raw contact count would suggest. A comparably sized ActiveCampaign account needs the Plus plan rather than Starter, since Starter’s contacts cap out at 25,000; that puts the bill at $609 a month, though whether Plus’s own “email sends: 10x contacts” allowance would force a further upgrade isn’t something ActiveCampaign’s pricing page explains.

Do you need a sales pipeline, or a store’s order data?

The two products solve different problems before you even get to price. ActiveCampaign ships a CRM and sales pipeline on every plan, including Starter, so a lead can move through a pipeline’s stages inside the same account that sends the email, instead of in a separate CRM. Its Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans add further CRM tools, Pipelines and Sales Engagement, on top, though neither has a published price. Klaviyo doesn’t have a pipeline at all. It describes itself as a “B2C CRM,” but that means unified customer profiles built from email, SMS and order and browsing history pulled directly from Shopify or WooCommerce, not a place to track a deal through stages. Klaviyo’s Reviews add-on, $25 a month for up to 250 orders, is priced specifically around that order data; ActiveCampaign has nothing comparable, despite listing Shopify and WooCommerce among its 1,000+ integrations. A business managing leads through a sales process gets a tool built for that from ActiveCampaign that Klaviyo simply doesn’t have. A store that only needs to message existing customers based on what they already bought doesn’t need a pipeline, and Klaviyo’s profile-based targeting does that job without one.

What’s billed on top of the plan you signed up for?

Both companies’ base prices are only part of the story. Klaviyo publishes a figure for nearly everything it sells beyond the Email plan: Composer, its AI marketing-agent add-on, is $20 a month flat, with overage at $10 per extra 1,000 AI credits; Customer Hub and Social Marketing add $20 and $38 a month at the tiers we checked, though both are time-limited introductory prices; and Reviews is $25 a month. None is required to send email, but a Klaviyo account using all of them is paying five separate line items, not one bundled fee. ActiveCampaign lists just as many extras but prices none of them in advance: Pipelines, Sales Engagement, SMS credits, Custom Reports and extra user seats beyond a plan’s included count all exist and are confirmed in ActiveCampaign’s own Help Center, but none has a public price; you only see the cost after signing in and starting to buy one. Setup itself is free on both, as far as either publishes: ActiveCampaign’s pricing FAQ states there are no setup costs or hidden fees on any plan, and Klaviyo’s own FAQ says it charges no hidden fees either, offering paid professional services only for larger implementations.

Where most advice gets this wrong

Most head-to-head write-ups quote ActiveCampaign’s cheapest number, $15 a month, next to Klaviyo’s monthly rate and call ActiveCampaign the budget option. That comparison is quietly apples-to-oranges: Klaviyo’s figure is a real month-to-month price you can cancel at any time, while ActiveCampaign’s $15 only exists if you pay for a full year upfront, and the genuinely monthly rate its own Help Center admits exists has never been published anywhere a prospective customer can check. A buyer who assumes they can sign up and pay $15 every month, the way the number is usually presented, can’t actually do that on ActiveCampaign’s self-serve checkout. The other place advice goes wrong is treating both tools as competing “email marketing platforms” and picking whichever has more features. They’re not really competing for the same buyer. ActiveCampaign is a CRM and automation platform that happens to send email, used across professional services, agencies and software sales teams that need to track a pipeline. Klaviyo is a customer-data platform built on ecommerce order history that happens to send email, aimed squarely at stores selling a product catalog. A feature checklist that scores them against each other misses that most readers only actually need one half of what’s being compared.

What can you try before paying, and can you get out?

Klaviyo doesn’t run a time-limited trial of a paid plan; its free-forever plan, capped at 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month, stands in for one, so you can use the real product indefinitely before paying anything. ActiveCampaign has no free plan at all: its only no-cost option is a 14-day trial that runs on Professional-plan features and doesn’t require a card to start, and neither its pricing page nor its Help Center says what happens to the account once those 14 days pass. The two also differ on what happens if you want out. ActiveCampaign’s pricing page promises a 30-day money-back guarantee on every paid plan. Klaviyo states no equivalent guarantee; its help articles are specific that cancelling immediately, rather than at the end of the billing cycle, forfeits whatever’s left of the month you already paid for. A buyer who wants a stated way to reverse a paid commitment has one, in writing, on ActiveCampaign; a buyer who’d rather never enter a paid commitment until they’re sure can do that indefinitely on Klaviyo’s free plan instead.