Sendlane vs. Klaviyo: Which email platform is better?

Can’t decide between Sendlane and Klaviyo? This comparison will highlight their features of both email platforms, so you can decide which is best for business.

Choosing the right email marketing tool is challenging. Two options are Sendlane and Klaviyo. While Sendlne excels in streamlining communication, Klaviyo boasts advanced segmentation capabilities.

Our comparison of Sendlane vs. Klaviyo answers questions so you decide which platform best fits your needs.

Let’s dive deeper into their features and benefits.

Sendlane vs. Klaviyo: At a Glance

Criteria	Klaviyo	Sendlane	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	9.4/10	8.3/10	Klaviyo
Marketing Automation Capabilities	Powerful, but simpler	Advanced automation features	Klaviyo
Email Builder	Intuitive, efficient	Drag-and-drop editor	Sendlane
Personalization & Customization	Highly Targeted	Highly customizable emails	Klaviyo
Campaign Performance Tracking	Comprehensive insights	Detailed performance metrics	Tie
Email Deliverability	✅	✅	Tie
List Management	Easy-to-use tools	Powerful list management	Klaviyo
A/B Testing	✅	✅	Klaviyo
Advanced Reporting & Insights	Actionable reports	Advanced analytics and insights	Klaviyo
Compliance & Security	✅	✅	Klaviyo
User Experience and User Interface	Sleek design	Smooth user experience	Klaviyo
Integrations and Compatibility	350+ integrations	Extensive integration options	Klaviyo
Customer Support	Dependable assistance	Responsive support team	Sendlane
Pricing	Free – $2,315/mo	$600/mo – $18,000/mo	Klaviyo
Scalability	✅	✅	Tie

Sendlane: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Sendlane is known for its robust marketing automation capabilities, designed to streamline communication and enhance customer engagement.

Key features include marketing automation, email builder, high email deliverability rates, real-time analytics, and 24/7 customer support.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Sendlane doesn’t have clear-cut pricing plans. You’re charged based on the number of monthly emails and SMS credits you want. At a minimum, you’ll have a plan with 500,000 monthly emails and no SMS credits, which will cost you $600/month on monthly plans and $500/month with annual billing.

Klaviyo: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Klaviyo is renowned for its powerful email marketing platform tailored for e-commerce businesses. Key features include advanced automation, personalization and customization, detailed performance metrics, integration capabilities, and scalability.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Pricing is based on the number of active profiles in your account. There are no “plans” to speak of, but there’s a free option for up to 250 profiles.

Pricing ranges from $0 to $2,315/month. Once you hit 250,001, custom pricing kicks in.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Both platforms offer strong marketing automation capabilities. They excel in creating intricate workflows with branching logic and conditional actions.

Klaviyo’s visual workflow builder may be easier to use than Sendlane’s less intuitive interface.

Both support user behavior, time-based, and external event triggers, making them versatile for diverse automation needs.

Both platforms also support email and text messaging marketing, making both great for cross-channel capabilities.

Klaviyo stands out with its detailed personalization options based on various recipient attributes and behaviors. Sendlane also offers strong personalization features, which aren’t as extensive as Klaviyo’s.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Email Builder

Both Klaviyo and Sendlane offer high-quality pre-designed templates. Klaviyo’s selection is slightly more limited but adheres to best practices. Both have user-friendly editors with drag-and-drop customization.

Klaviyo’s editor has more flexibility in brand customization.

Both tools ensure their emails are optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience across all platforms. You can create custom HTML templates in either tool, for full control over your email designs.

Both offer preview and spam testing features to optimize deliverability and appearance across devices and email clients.

✅ Winner: Sendlane

Personalization & Customization

Both Klaviyo and Sendlane excel in supporting dynamic content insertion based on recipient attributes, behaviors, or segmentation criteria, so you will always have highly personalized email campaigns.

Both platforms offer a versatile set of merge tags that enhance email relevance by including recipient-specific information.

Both tools provide deep and flexible segmentation options. Klaviyo stands out with its extensive e-commerce-focused criteria, while Sendlane excels in dynamic and continuously updated segments.

Personalization tokens are also easy to use, streamlining the process of adding dynamic recipient details. Both support personalized messaging based on specific user behaviors, ensuring timely and relevant communication.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Campaign Performance Tracking

Both tools offer robust tracking capabilities for essential email marketing metrics, so you’ll always know what’s going on with open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI.

You’ll get real-time reporting dashboards with both, allowing you to monitor campaign performance and make timely adjustments.

Klaviyo and Sendlane have goal setting features that allow you to track progress and make timely adjustments. 

Both also offer split-testing and integration with third-party analytics, which I cover in more detail later on.

✅ Winner: Tie

Email Deliverability

Sendlane does have a slight advantage here because it has dedicated spam testing tools so that you can proactively identify and resolve potential issues that may cause your emails to be marked as spam.

But, Klaviyo can help you optimize deliverability with its detailed analytics and reporting tools. 

I give it a tie here because both platforms offer tools for monitoring your sender reputation, which plays a major role in email deliverability. And both tools have high deliverability rates.

✅ Winner: Tie

List Management

Both tools offer deep and flexible segmentation options. Klaviyo is noted for highly granular and detailed segmentation, while Sendlane provides dynamic updates to segments for ongoing accuracy and effectiveness. 

Both also make it easy to manage subscriber preferences, with tools for opt-in/opt-out and subscription preferences. Klaviy allows you to create custom subscription forms, while Sendlane focuses on dynamic content insertion and personlized merge tags.

Sendlane offers List Hygiene, which though not available for SMS engagement, can be set to run automatically to remove contacts from specified lists after a period of email inactivity.

Ultimately, this boosts deliverability and engagement because you’re only sending messages to people who have shown they want to hear from you.

Klaviyo doesn’t do automatic list cleaning – you’ll have to create a segment of people (using filters) to exclude from your mailing list. But, it does have an edge in that you can use this approach with SMS marketing, too.

That’s why I called it the winner here.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

A/B Testing

Both offer A/B testing features so you can test variations of your messages. The built-in tools are fairly easy to use, and can offer great insights into what’s resonating with your audience.

You’ll get reports on their effectiveness so you can decide which elements to add consistently to your next test. Klaviyo is the winner here because the tool is a bit easier to understand from the beginning, but it’s a close match.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Advanced Reporting & Insights

Both platforms offer advanced segmentation and tracking. Both provide detailed analysis and real-time performance tracking, and integrate with Google Analytics to provide a more holistic view of how your email marketing campaigns influence your website traffic, purchases, etc.

You can easily track and attribute conversions to evaluate how well your campaigns are working. You can set and track campaign goals and monitor them in the reports.

Klaviyo stands out with its AI-powered predictive analytics, allowing you to better forecast user behavior and optimize campaigns for retention and conversions.

Sendlane uses machine learning to enhance send times and deliverability for better campaign performance based on historical data.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Compliance and Security

Both platforms are GDPR compliant to ensure you’re in compliance too. But you’ll need to make sure you select forms that are identified as GDPR compliant.

Klaviyo offers security features like multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on, and just-in-time (JIT) provisioning for security.

Data is stored on Amazon Web Server services running in AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and uses shared AWS resources to optimize performance, reliability, and cost efficiency. Sendlane offers 2FA, but I couldn’t find any information on where the data is stored.

Both tools do a great job with permission-based marketing because they offer dynamic segmentation, personalization, and opt-in management tools to make sure emails are only sent to those who have explicitly opted in to receive them.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

User Interface and User Experience

Klaviyo offers simple onboarding with guided setup, though beginners may find the interface a bit overwhelming. All you have to do is connect business platforms, turn on your website tracking and import your contacts.

You have various options to create sign-up forms, email flows, and monitoring sales recovery. These options can be quite complex, but offer extensive functionality.

Sendlane was a bit more of a pain because of initial set up issues I ran into that required me to reach out to customer support.

Like Klaviyo, it could be a little overwhelming for a beginner, but there are customizable dashboards for quick access to easy functions.

Klaviyo wins here for the simple fact that I didn’t have to reach out to customer service to resolve an issue before I could even start using my account.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Integrations and Compatibility

Both platforms offer integrations with common CRMs, e-commerce platforms, and analytics tools. Klaviyo has more overall integration options than Sendlane, which is why it’s the winner, but both offer APIs for custom integrations.

Neither have mobile apps available, but are accessible from the web and responsive to any device.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Customer Support

Both offer email and live chat support. Klaviyo only offers email support for 60 days if you’re on the free plan. There are extensive knowledge bases to help you answer questions on your own, and Klaviyo offers a community forum.

Both allow you to book live demos. Sendlane wins because they offer 24/7 customer support.

✅ Winner: Sendlane

Pricing

Neither Klaviyo nor Sendlane are cheap. Klaviyo has a free plan for up to 250 active profiles, but could go as high as $2,315 a month without needing to speak to someone for a customized plan.

Sendlane on the other hand, offers a limited use plan for 60 days, with pricing starting at $500 a month on the smallest annual subscription (up to 500,000 emails!) and could cost you as much as $99,000 a month.

✅ Winner: Klaviyo

Scalability

Both platforms can support a high volume of subscribers and pricing goes up as your customer base grows.

✅ Winner: Tie

Standout Features of Sendlane

Detailed customer journey mapping

Sendlane provides tools to create detailed customer journey maps, visualizing every step of the user’s interaction with your brand.

This helps you understand and optimize things at every stage, so you can see drop-off points and opportunities for deeper personalization.

Standout Features of Klaviyo

Predictive analytics for customer lifetime value

Predictive analytics forecast the future behavior of customers, focusing on lifetime value. You can use the probability data to identify high-value customers and tailor your marketing efforts to better retain them.

You can prioritize resources on segments that promise higher value, for more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.

Sendlane vs. Klaviyo: SMB Guide’s Verdict

Both are powerful marketing automation platforms with unique strengths. Klaviyo is the winner because of its more comprehensive e-commerce integrations, better overall user experience in testing, advanced revenue tracking, predictive analytics, and built-in lead generation tools. 

Klaviyo is best for e-commerce businesses of all sizes that want to use a unified platform for email and SMS marketing for more personalized marketing efforts. 

Sendlane, while still a great tool, is better suited for larger enterprises or businesses with substantial email marketing needs that require advanced behavioral-based automation.

The extensive customization optimizations cater well to data-driven marketers managing large scale campaigns. 

Give them both a try to see what you think.