Why This Comparison Matters
If you run a Shopify store, you already have an email tool. Shopify Email, now called Shopify Messaging, sits inside your Shopify admin and gives you 10,000 free emails every month. Klaviyo is the tool most growing Shopify stores move to next, and it costs real money from the first paid tier.
So the question is not which tool is better in general. Klaviyo does more. The question is whether what it does more is worth paying at least twice as much for your store, right now.
This guide answers that with the prices each company publishes. We checked Klaviyo's pricing calculator on klaviyo.com and Shopify's pricing pages in its help center in October 2026. Where a company does not publish something, we say so instead of guessing.
One naming note: Shopify Email is now called Shopify Messaging, and it also sends SMS and, since July 29, 2026, WhatsApp messages. Most people still search for Shopify Email, so we use both names here.
Pricing: How Each One Charges
The two tools charge for different things, which is why their prices are hard to compare at a glance.
Klaviyo charges by active profiles. An active profile is anyone you can email. You pay for your whole list every month, whether you email them once or ten times. Each tier also has a send limit of 10 times the profile count (5,000 profiles come with 50,000 emails a month). Prices are monthly; Klaviyo shows no annual discount.
Shopify Email charges by emails sent. The first 10,000 emails each month are free. After that you pay $1 per 1,000 emails, dropping to $0.65 per 1,000 above 300,000 and $0.55 above 750,000. Abandoned checkout emails are always free and don't count. Unused free emails don't carry over. You need a Shopify plan to use it (Basic and up; it is not on Starter), but you are paying for that anyway.
Here are Klaviyo's Email plan prices at common list sizes, from its calculator:
| Active profiles | Klaviyo Email plan (monthly) | Emails included per month |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | Free | 500 |
| 500 | $20 | 5,000 |
| 1,000 | $30 | 10,000 |
| 2,500 | $60 | 25,000 |
| 5,000 | $100 | 50,000 |
| 10,000 | $150 | 100,000 |
| 15,000 | $350 | 150,000 |
| 25,000 | $400 | 250,000 |
| 50,000 | $720 | 500,000 |
Watch the jump just above 10,000 profiles. Klaviyo's tiers go up in small steps here: 10,500 profiles is $175, 12,000 is $250 and 13,500 is $325. A list that grows from 10,000 to 12,000 subscribers adds $100 a month to the bill.
Klaviyo also sells a Marketing plan that adds Social marketing, Customer Hub (on-site personalization, loyalty rewards, order tracking) and predictive analytics to the Email plan. It costs $90/month at 500 profiles, $170 at 5,000 and $220 at 10,000. This guide compares Shopify Email with Klaviyo's Email plan, because that is the plan most stores start on.
What You Actually Pay: Worked Examples
To compare like for like, assume a store emails its whole list 8 times a month (about twice a week). Shopify Email's cost is the number of emails sent above 10,000, at $1 per 1,000. Klaviyo's cost is the tier for that list size. Both are monthly list prices for email only.
| Subscribers | Emails sent per month | Shopify Email | Klaviyo | Difference per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 8,000 | $0 | $30 | $360 |
| 2,500 | 20,000 | $10 | $60 | $600 |
| 5,000 | 40,000 | $30 | $100 | $840 |
| 10,000 | 80,000 | $70 | $150 | $960 |
| 25,000 | 200,000 | $190 | $400 | $2,520 |
Automations add to the Shopify Email count (except abandoned checkout), and they use up Klaviyo's send limit too. If you send more often, Shopify Email's cost rises with every send, while Klaviyo's stays flat until you hit the tier's send limit. At 10,000 subscribers you would need to send 16 emails a month to everyone before Shopify Email cost as much as Klaviyo, and by then you would also be past Klaviyo's 100,000-email limit.
The other side of this: Klaviyo charges for profiles you rarely email. Shopify Email charges nothing for a subscriber you leave alone. If you keep a large list but only email your engaged customers, Shopify Email gets even cheaper. Klaviyo recommends suppressing inactive profiles so you are not paying for them.
SMS Costs
Both tools sell text messages separately from email. At the same volume, Shopify Messaging is a little cheaper, but the gap is small.
| SMS to US customers per month | Shopify Messaging | Klaviyo SMS plan (carrier fees included) |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $12 + $2.15 number fee = $14.15 | $15 |
| 5,000 | $60 + $2.15 = $62.15 | $70 |
| 10,000 | $120 + $2.15 = $122.15 | $125 |
Shopify Messaging charges a flat $0.012 per US message plus $2.15 a month for each toll-free number in the US and Canada, and you pay only for what you send.
Klaviyo sells SMS as a prepaid monthly plan. Its calculator shows two numbers that can look like they disagree. The per-message rate ($0.011 at 1,000 texts a month, $0.009 at 5,000, $0.008 at 10,000) is shown "plus carrier fees". The monthly plan price ($15, $70 and $125) is what you actually pay, and Klaviyo's help center says carrier fees are bundled into it. All in, that works out to about $0.015, $0.014 and $0.0125 per message. Unused plan spend doesn't roll over to the next month. Klaviyo's free plan includes $5 of mobile messages a month.
Both tools also send WhatsApp messages. Klaviyo supports MMS, RCS and mobile app push as well. If you send texts internationally, check the destination: Shopify Messaging lists 12 countries for SMS, and its Spain sending was paused from September 15, 2026.
Automations and Flows
This is where the two tools differ most.
Shopify Email gives you automation templates for the common store moments: recover abandoned checkout, recover abandoned cart, convert abandoned product browse, and customer win-back, plus welcome emails. You pick a template, edit the email, set the delay and turn it on. The abandoned cart template skips anyone who got an abandoned cart, checkout or browse email in the last 30 days, so customers are not flooded. For anything custom, or an automation that involves another app, Shopify's help center sends you to Shopify Flow to build a workflow there.
Klaviyo is built around flows. You can trigger on almost any event from your store or other connected apps, split paths by what the customer has bought, browsed, or how they engaged, and mix email, SMS and other channels in one flow. That depth is the main reason stores switch: a win-back that treats a $500 lifetime customer differently from a one-time buyer, or a post-purchase series that depends on what was ordered.
If your plan is "welcome series, abandoned cart, win-back", Shopify Email covers it. If your plan is ten flows with branches by customer value, you will want Klaviyo.
Segmentation and Data
Shopify Email uses your Shopify customer lists and customer segments directly. There is nothing to sync, because the data already lives in Shopify.
Klaviyo builds a profile for every customer from the full history of what they bought, browsed and opened, and updates segments in real time. Personalized product recommendations inside emails are on every plan, including Free. The paid Email plan adds generative AI for content, images and segments. Predictive analytics (such as expected next order date and predicted lifetime value) needs the Marketing plan, which costs $70/month more than Email at 10,000 profiles. Klaviyo also connects to more than 350 other tools, so data from reviews, loyalty, support or ads can shape who gets what.
For a store with a few hundred orders a month, Shopify's segments are usually enough. Once you have thousands of customers and want to treat them differently, Klaviyo's data model pays off.
Templates, Editor and AI
Shopify Email's templates pull your logo, colours, products and prices straight from your store, which makes a product launch or sale email fast to put together. Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, writes on-brand copy and recommends a send time.
Klaviyo has a drag-and-drop editor and a template library on every plan, an AI subject line generator even on the free plan, and Composer, its AI marketing agent, which can build campaigns and flows and answer questions about your data. The free plan includes $5 of Composer usage a month; more costs $20/month.
Reporting
Shopify Email shows opens, clicks and sales from each campaign in the dashboard, which is enough to see what worked.
Klaviyo reports revenue by campaign and flow, engagement, list growth and peer benchmarks against similar stores. The Marketing plan adds predictive analytics and segment performance reports. If you need to prove what email is worth to the business, Klaviyo makes that much easier.
Support
Shopify Email support comes through Shopify's normal support channels, included in your Shopify plan.
Klaviyo's free plan includes email support for the first 60 days only. Paid plans include standard support, and faster professional support is a paid add-on.
When to Move From Shopify Email to Klaviyo
There is no fixed size, but these are the signs we would look for:
- Email is a big share of revenue and you are sure better targeting would lift it. Paying about $80 more a month at 10,000 subscribers is easy to win back if a smarter win-back flow brings in a few extra orders.
- You keep reaching for Shopify Flow to build automations that Klaviyo would handle in its own flow builder.
- You want to segment by behaviour, such as product category bought, browsing or engagement, not just by customer tags.
- You sell on more than Shopify. Shopify Email only works with a Shopify store. Klaviyo also connects to WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix and others.
And signs to stay put: you send a few campaigns a month, your automations are the standard ones, and your list is under a few thousand people. In that case Klaviyo's extra features would mostly sit unused.
How to Switch
Your subscribers and their marketing consent live in Shopify, so you don't lose them by changing tools. Install the Klaviyo app from the Shopify App Store, connect your store, and Klaviyo pulls in your customers and order history.
You will need to rebuild your automations and templates in Klaviyo. Start with the ones that bring in the most money, usually welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase, and turn off each Shopify Email automation as its Klaviyo version goes live so nobody gets two emails.
Klaviyo's free plan (250 active profiles, 500 emails a month) is enough to build and test flows before you pay. At the time of writing, Klaviyo also offers $19 off the first month of its 500-profile Email plan.
Ratings
Both apps are rated highly by Shopify merchants. On the Shopify App Store in October 2026, Shopify Messaging had 4.8 stars from 4,717 reviews and Klaviyo had 4.7 stars from 3,407 reviews. On G2, Klaviyo has 4.6 out of 5 from 1,369 reviews. Shopify Email is not listed on G2 as its own product.
Bottom Line
Shopify Email is the right starting point for most Shopify stores. It is free at small sizes, cheap at larger ones, and covers the automations most stores need.
Klaviyo is the better tool once email and SMS are a real sales channel and you are ready to invest in them. It costs at least twice as much for email and a little more for SMS, and gives you much deeper data, flows and reporting in return. If you are not sure, start a Klaviyo free account, rebuild your best automation there, and compare the results before you pay.
Marcus Williams
