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HubSpot usually isn’t the first platform that comes to mind when people think of ecommerce email platforms. Instead, this honor might go to Klaviyo, with its one-stop platform for engaging customers via marketing emails and SMS, and collecting product reviews.
That said, don’t write off HubSpot entirely if you need an email solution for your online store.
After nine rounds of comparison, I found that while Klaviyo does have the edge, HubSpot may be more ideal for certain ecommerce businesses.
Does your store fall within this category of businesses? Or is Klaviyo the better choice?
Read this Klaviyo vs HubSpot review to find out!
Klaviyo vs HubSpot: Summary
The main differences between Klaviyo and HubSpot are:
1. Pricing
Klaviyo’s pricing is simpler than that of HubSpot. I like how you get access to almost all of Klaviyo’s features on the free plan, too. With HubSpot, you’ll need a paid plan to integrate your store, set up omnichannel automations, and view certain advanced reports.
2. Template designs
Klaviyo’s email and form templates look much more appealing than HubSpot’s. Just swap out the placeholder images and text to get emails and forms that look like they were custom-created by a professional. Spiffing up your HubSpot emails and forms isn’t impossible, but will take more time and design skills.
3. Pipeline management
HubSpot is more suited for customer relationship management (CRM) than Klaviyo — or any other CRM software for that matter. (Case in point: HubSpot won our Best CRM for Small Businesses badge in 2023!) Apart from storing detailed contact profiles, HubSpot also offers a sales pipeline view for tracking your deals’ stages, which Klaviyo lacks.
Klaviyo vs HubSpot: Pros and Cons
Apart from comparing HubSpot vs Klaviyo, I also looked at each platform’s pros and cons:
Klaviyo
Klaviyo Pros:
- Use almost all its features for free
- Beautiful form and email template designs
- Detailed reporting
Klaviyo Cons:
- No deal pipeline view
- Free users enjoy support for only the first 60 days
HubSpot
HubSpot Pros:
- Extensive CRM features
- Integrates with more than 1,600 apps
HubSpot Cons:
- Pricing plans can be confusing and very expensive
- Plain-looking form and email templates
- Free users have no customer support access
Round 1: Ease of Use and Editor
Both Klaviyo and HubSpot do well in the ease-of-use department. They have clean, modern-looking interfaces, with all the main features being accessible from a left sidebar. You generally don’t need more than a few clicks to navigate to what you’re looking for.
This is how Klaviyo’s flows screen looks, for instance:
Call-to-actions for key features, like creating email campaigns or forms, are also prominently displayed at the top right of the screen. Let’s play a quick game: can you spot HubSpot’s “Create form” button below? It’s bright orange, so there’s no way you’ll miss it.
Klaviyo and HubSpot’s email editors also have plenty of functionality. Here is HubSpot’s:
Both platforms let you drag and drop various content blocks into your email. Editing your email’s fonts, text colors, padding, and so on are also possible.
As you design your email, you can preview it on either desktop or mobile. Alternatively, check how a specific email contact would see it. This is especially helpful if you want to show different email content to contacts with different characteristics.
Check out the email preview screen in Klaviyo:
If I have one criticism, it’s that certain HubSpot email editor features, like smart content rules for conditional content and the product content block, are available only if you’re on the Marketing Hub Professional plan or higher. Klaviyo doesn’t impose these kinds of restrictions.
Winner: Klaviyo and HubSpot are both generally easy to use and have full-featured email editors, so it’s a tie for the first round!
Klaviyo 1 – HubSpot 1
Round 2: Design and Flexibility
Not everyone’s a natural-born email designer, but that’s okay. Just pop in a predesigned email template and you’ll soon have a stunning email for capturing your contacts’ attention.
I’m highly impressed by Klaviyo’s template collection here. There’s a generous number of templates, and they’re all modern-looking and gorgeous. You can even filter the templates by email type, layout, and seasonal events to find the perfect one for your needs.
After selecting your template, customizing it in Klaviyo’s email editor is easy. You can flexibly add new sections and columns, or even swap out the template for a different one if you change your mind.
On the other hand, HubSpot offers much fewer email templates. They also look pretty plain. There’s a small collection of premium (and somewhat more attractive) templates, but you’ll need a paid plan for them.
Once you’ve loaded a template into HubSpot’s email editor, you can add more sections or columns (called “layouts”) to your email as you need. But if you want to change its template, you’ll need to start a new email from scratch.
Winner: There’s no contest here. Klaviyo wins for its wider range of more flexible templates!
Klaviyo 2 – HubSpot 1
Round 3: Customization and Pipeline Management
As contacts interact with your emails, both Klaviyo and HubSpot will keep track of their personal information and behavior — which is valuable data for sending personalized email campaigns.
In Klaviyo, you’ll get a dedicated report of each contact (or “profile”) that states info like their email address, details on how they found you, the lists and segments they’re in, and their email history.
HubSpot offers similar contact profiles, where you can view details on a contact’s email address, activity on your website, email history, and more. You can also send emails, call, or schedule a meeting with contacts directly from their profile, which is convenient.
Unlike Klaviyo, HubSpot provides a pipeline for visualizing your deals. Changing your deal’s sales cycle stage is as simple as dragging and dropping it to another column.
Klaviyo doesn’t have similar pipeline management features. You may not need them if you don’t have a high-touch sales process. But if you do, then HubSpot may be the better CRM with an email marketing tool combined.
Winner: HubSpot gets the point here for its comprehensive contact and pipeline management features!
Klaviyo 2 – HubSpot 2
Round 4: Sales and Marketing Automation
Set up automations to have your email platform instantly do things like sending a drip campaign or segmenting your contacts when certain events happen! It’ll take action faster than you ever can — plus, you don’t have to handle these tasks yourself.
Automations are called “flows” in Klaviyo, and you can build one either from scratch or by using a template. These templates cover common ecommerce situations like sending abandoned cart emails or out-of-stock product updates.
Customizing your flows in Klaviyo is straightforward, with most of the typical automation features, like conditional splits and profile property updates, being available. It’d be nice to set up multiple triggers for a single flow, though.
Klaviyo supports omnichannel automation, so you can send automated emails and SMSes to engage customers via multiple touchpoints. What’s more, you can do this even on the platform’s free plan!
Meanwhile, HubSpot limits free users to a very basic follow-up email automation after a user submits a form:
If you’re a paid user, you can create more advanced marketing automations (or “workflows”) using a template or from a blank canvas, and then customize their triggers, conditions, and actions in the workflow editor.
Omnichannel automation is available only on HubSpot’s very expensive Marketing Hub Professional plan.
Winner: Definitely Klaviyo, because you get access to all the platform’s automation features even on the free plan.
Klaviyo 3 – HubSpot 2
Round 5: Registration Forms
Klaviyo provides many visually appealing form templates for growing your email list. You can even create multi-page forms and teaser icons (icons at the corner of your website that display your form when clicked). Not many email service providers I’ve researched—including HubSpot—offer this functionality.
Edit your form by dragging and dropping content blocks into the form builder. You can set up your forms to display different content on desktop and mobile devices or appear to only users in a certain geographical location, among other targeted email marketing options.
Uniquely, you can A/B test your Klaviyo forms, too. I haven’t come across many platforms that offer form A/B testing — they usually support email A/B testing only.
HubSpot’s form features aren’t as impressive. The available form templates are bare boned and will need a lot of designing to look good. Doing this may be a struggle if you aren’t design-trained.
Once you get past that, though, you’ll find the usual features for customizing your forms with content blocks and displaying them to visitors who meet certain conditions. You can’t A/B test your forms unless you’ve set them up as landing pages and subscribed to the Marketing Hub Professional plan.
Winner: Klaviyo’s beautiful templates and extensive form functionality make it the winner of this round!
Klaviyo 4 – HubSpot 2
Round 6: Reporting
Data enthusiasts will love Klaviyo’s rich reporting features. Apart from checking email marketing KPIs like open rates, click rates, and revenue for individual campaigns, you can view your overall performance for these metrics and analyze them by cohort and geographical activity maps.
Measure your emails’ ability to reach inboxes with dedicated deliverability reports, or check your email marketing strategy’s effectiveness against benchmark data from industry peers.
There are also dashboards for displaying ready-made data cards or custom ones you’ve created.
HubSpot’s reporting features are similarly robust. You can monitor email metrics on a campaign or account level and compare them against benchmark data.
Alternatively, create dashboards showing your preferred reports. There are many reports to choose from, like reports on email engagement rates and average order by source.
Paid HubSpot users get an increased dashboard limit, custom reports, and more advanced email reports than free users.
Winner: Both platforms have extensive reporting features, so this round ends in a tie.
Klaviyo 5 – HubSpot 3
Round 7: Integrations and Extras
If you run an ecommerce store, your email marketing service obviously needs to be able to receive customer and purchase data from it. No issues here, because Klaviyo and HubSpot natively integrate with leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
But can the two platforms integrate with your other apps?
There’s a good chance HubSpot can because it supports over 1,600 app integrations!
In contrast, Klaviyo has 350+ integrations, but don’t let this smaller number put you off. Before committing to either HubSpot or Klaviyo, check if they integrate with your apps. That’s ultimately what’s most important, not the number of apps they support.
P.S. Even if the platform isn’t compatible with an app, chances are you can still connect the two using a third-party integration app like Zapier. The only downside is that Zapier integrations are usually more limited and take slightly more effort to set up.
Winner: HubSpot supports roughly 4.5X more apps than Klaviyo, making it this round’s clear winner.
Klaviyo 5 – HubSpot 4
Round 8: Support
Klaviyo and HubSpot offer the typical community forums and help article resources for self-service support. But if you’re a free user hoping to chat with a customer service rep, you might be out of luck.
HubSpot reserves dedicated support for paid users only, while Klaviyo offers free users email support for just the first 60 days of signup. After that, you’re on your own.
Paying customers enjoy email and live chat support on both platforms, with phone support also available for HubSpot users on any Enterprise plan.
HubSpot provides 24/7 support (excluding public holidays). This makes its coverage more extensive than Klaviyo’s, whose support team generally operates round the clock except on weekends.
That said, if you need live chat support on weekends, you can sign up for Klaviyo’s premium customer success packages. The Enterprise package also includes deliverability support.
HubSpot provides onboarding services to help you get the most from its platform. But with a starting price of $3,000, the service is not cheap. Signing up for it is also mandatory if you’re going with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Professional plan.
Here’s a summary of both platforms’ support offerings:
| Klaviyo | HubSpot | |
|---|---|---|
| Is customer support available on the free plan? | Only for the first 60 days | No |
| What types of support are available on the paid plans? |
|
|
| Other available support |
|
|
Winner: Klaviyo provides free users with a bit more support, while HubSpot gives paying users more coverage. So, I’m declaring this round a tie.
Klaviyo 6 – HubSpot 5
Round 9: Pricing
Finally, let’s talk about the dollars and cents.
Klaviyo’s pricing structure is super easy to understand. The free plan lets you send 500 emails to up to 250 active profiles every month and use almost all of the platform’s features (mobile push notifications are the exception).
Then, if you upgrade to paid, your pricing is determined by your email list size and the number of monthly email and SMS or MMS credits you need.
Klaviyo’s pricing isn’t the cheapest, but you might find it a steal compared to HubSpot’s pricing.
For one, you’ll need at least HubSpot’s $20/month Marketing Hub Starter plan to integrate your ecommerce store with the platform. The Starter plan also allows for only 10 form and email automated actions each.
If you need more automated actions or want to build omnichannel automations, you’ll have to sign up for the Marketing Hub Professional plan, whose price starts at $890/month excluding a mandatory $3,000 professional onboarding fee.
Last but not least, HubSpot’s pricing structure can be confusing, with the sheer number of products, pricing tiers, and bundles available. Pro tip: be sure to click the “For individuals & small teams” tab at the top of HubSpot’s pricing pages, because that’s where the platform displays its cheaper offerings.
Winner: Klaviyo takes this last round for its simpler and more value-for-money pricing.
Klaviyo 7 – HubSpot 5
Final Thoughts: Hubspot vs Klaviyo
Klaviyo has seven points versus HubSpot’s five, making Klaviyo the winner of our Klaviyo vs HubSpot comparison!
Although HubSpot ended up with five points, it outshone Klaviyo in only two rounds — customization and pipeline management, and integrations and extras. Klaviyo either beat it or tied with it for all the other rounds.
This makes Klaviyo the clearly stronger email marketing platform for online store owners. In fact, when we reviewed 12 email marketing platforms for ecommerce, Klaviyo was our second-favorite platform, losing only to Omnisend! (HubSpot was last on the list.)
With this in mind, I’d recommend using HubSpot only if you run huge sales operations on a substantial budget.
In this situation, you’ll be able to take advantage of not just the platform’s CRM and email marketing functionality, but also its sales and customer service features for marketing and selling to, and supporting more customers in one place.
Whichever platform you decide is more suitable for you, use these handy links to get started with it:
> Sign up for Klaviyo’s free plan
> Sign up for HubSpot’s free plan
(And if you’re curious why we ranked Omnisend ahead of Klaviyo, get the deets in our Omnisend vs Klaviyo review.)
Still have questions on which email platform you should choose? Leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you.
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