Choosing between email marketing tools is more than just comparing the features or pricing. You need to make sure the features fit your technical expertise, business needs, and are both powerful and convenient to use at the same time. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a tool that you cannot fully utilize.
Two most popular names in the email marketing field are Omnisend and Klaviyo. Both platforms allow you to send emails, build automations, and segment audiences to unlock more ways to reach your audience.
Let’s look at how they compare not only in terms of features, but also user experience.
Dashboard navigation and layout
It’s the first thing you see when you log in to your account. It’s important that this dashboard is clean, organized, and easy to navigate.
Omnisend gives you a clean and focused start. The design highlights the most important information right away: your sales performance and audience growth. The menu is made to be non-intrusive, which makes the dashboard even cleaner.
If you want to access other pages, the names and dropdowns only appear once you hover over them. It saves you from the initial information overload and allows you to navigate the platform at your own pace.
Klaviyo’s dashboard is completely different. It’s packed with data, which may be overwhelming at first. You can see total conversions and attributed conversions by date, top performing flows, recent campaigns, and more information. The menu is also a standard one: it shows everything at once. All in all, it’s more technical than Omnisend.
Having seen both dashboards at once, it’s safe to assume that Omnisend’s dashboard presents the most important data in a more user-friendly way, whereas Klaviyo focuses on metrics and technical details. You could say that Omnisend is growth-oriented, while Klaviyo is detail-oriented.
Creating campaigns
Sending campaigns is one of the main features for both Omnisend and Klaviyo, so it’s important to understand how it works, which platform offers a more intuitive way of sending emails, what templates they offer, and how convenient is the launch.
Both platforms have a similar drag-and-drop email builder where you can pick blocks to add to the email, and then customize them to your liking. Those said blocks, however, vary slightly.
Omnisend has a “Product Picker” block that allows you to add products from your store in 1 click. Once you drag-and-drop the block into your email builder, a sidebar appears where you can search for any product in your store, click on it, and it automatically adds the product to your email with the name, description, price, and a link to the product page.
If you don’t know which products to add, there are dynamic product options using the “Product Recommender” block where you can select best-selling products, recently added products, or most viewed products. Once the campaign is launched, these placeholders will automatically show the selected products to the recipient.
Klaviyo also has a similar block, but it works differently. You need to configure the product conditions via dynamic feeds, by selecting criteria such as specific collections or categories. Once that is done, you can also filter by stock status or price.
Additionally, if you want Klaviyo to automatically pick which products to show, you can select between several options, including best-selling products, most viewed products, products a customer recently viewed, and more.
While the extra choices are nice to have, they may also create additional confusion as to what actually works best. It aims at higher personalization, but in reality, true personalization lies in handpicked personalized automation, not automatically picked products that the customer may have accidentally viewed or added to cart.
Since we’re focusing on user experience, Omnisend takes the win because it offers the same functions but they’re more convenient and intuitive to use, especially the “Product Picker” feature.
Building automations
Setting up automations is arguably the best way to increase revenue flow via email marketing. You only need to do it once, and the workflow continues working without requiring your additional input.
Omnisend has a large library of pre-built automation templates that give you the finished product. It comes with suggested time delays between emails, conversion-focused copy, trigger filters, audience filters, and the entire logic built for you.
If you want to customize, add, or remove something, you can easily do so. If you want to use the template as a base and add more complexion to it via conditional splits or A/B tests, all you need to do is drag-and-drop the elements.
The interface is both powerful and comes without any unnecessarily complex elements that are usually present in automation interfaces.
Klaviyo provides stronger automation capabilities with more advanced conditional branching logic and audience segmentation. It does, however, mostly appeal to enterprise businesses who have the specific need for it, and budget. Most modern online businesses, regardless of size, only need standard workflows with the possibility to make them more complex for personalization.
You can still do that with Klaviyo, but it comes at a higher monthly price than Omnisend, so it’s only really worth it if you’re looking beyond your current needs and expect to require niche workflows in the future.
Segmenting subscribers
Both Klaviyo and Omnisend provide similar tools to segmenting your audience, the only difference for most modern businesses is the accessibility.
Omnisend allows you to test and use its segmentation features without restrictions. Regardless of your plan choice (free included), you can use the AI-based segmentation tool where you can enter a prompt like “VIP customers who haven’t bought in the last 90 days”, and it will generate the segment in seconds.
Klaviyo also has a similar tool, but it’s locked behind a paid tier. If you’re still a free user, you can only segment your subscribers the manual way by going to the dedicated page and entering filters there.
Additionally, Klaviyo provides more advanced segmentation capabilities, but that’s reserved for the most advanced and technical users, as a regular everyday marketer is unlikely to be able to reap all the benefits.
Migration support
Switching platforms is a headache for every party involved: the platform loses a customer to a competitor, and the customer is stuck with having to transfer all the data without losing anything.
Omnisend eliminates the pain by offering a unique migration service, called the Kickstart service. If, upon signing up to Omnisend, your monthly plan is $250 or more, they give you a dedicated in-house specialist who will migrate your contacts, automations, segments, templates, and more, from Klaviyo to Omnisend. It’s promised to happen between 3-5 business days, and is completely free of charge.
Klaviyo, on the other hand, offers either paid services or provides you with heavy documentation files so you can handle the migration yourself. If you don’t want to do that, they can also refer you to their agency partners who charge their own fees.
Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Verdict
Klaviyo is a platform for those who are looking to an extremely data-driven future with potential data science teams onboard. For standard-advanced features, the price is too high in comparison to Omnisend or most other competitors.
Omnisend is a go-to choice for brands of all sizes who want a convenient and powerful platform to reach their customers. It provides the same level of power in terms of most business needs, but does it without the overly technical and complex overhead.