# Klaviyo vs Loops Source: https://wraps.dev/versus/klaviyo-vs-loops One assumes your customer buys things. The other assumes they subscribe to something. Almost every disagreement between these two products traces back to that single assumption about how you make money. Both of these price on contacts and both let a non-engineer build a sequence, which is enough surface similarity to put them on one list. Underneath, each was built around a different idea of a customer. Klaviyo's customer places orders, so the product is organised around carts, catalogues and revenue per campaign. Loops' customer subscribes, so the product is organised around signup, onboarding, activation and the monthly update. Neither adapts gracefully to the other's world, and that is the decision. ## At a glance |   | Klaviyo | Loops | | --- | --- | --- | | What it is | Ecommerce marketing automation | Product + marketing email for SaaS, priced per contact | | Published pricing | $30/mo at 1,000 profiles, $100 at 5,000, $150 at 10,000, $720 at 50,000, and $1,380 at 100,000 — an effective $0.014–0.030 per profile per month. | Free at 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends/mo. Paid plans price on subscribed contacts with unlimited sends — $49/mo in the 1K–5K band, $99/mo in the 5K–10K band, rising from there. | | Best for | Ecommerce, especially Shopify, where per-campaign revenue attribution is the metric. | SaaS teams who want lifecycle and transactional in one tool and never want to count sends again. | | Watch out for | Bills all active profiles since February 2025 and auto-upgrades without ever auto-downgrading. Volume is capped at ten times your profile count and sends halt past it. | You pay for contacts, not sends, so a large dormant free list stays on the bill. It is a product rather than a primitive, with less low-level control than an email API. | Prices are each vendor's published list prices, verified August 2026. Check the vendor's own page before you sign anything. ## Where they actually differ ### The transaction each product assumes Klaviyo A purchase. Klaviyo's entire data model orbits the order: what was viewed, what was added to a cart, what was bought, how much it was worth, how long since the last one. Everything valuable in the product is downstream of that event stream arriving automatically from a store platform, and a business with no orders is left holding a general-purpose email tool at a specialist price. Loops A subscription. Loops assumes people sign up, get onboarded, activate or do not, upgrade or churn, and receive product news along the way. The primitives are contacts with properties and events you send from your own application, which is the right shape when the meaningful moments happen inside software rather than at a checkout. ### Where the data arrives from Klaviyo Native commerce integrations, Shopify most deeply, syncing catalogue, customers and orders in both directions with no engineering involved. That depth is why a merchant's evaluation is often over before it starts, and it is also the thread that makes leaving expensive later, because the platform ends up holding product data as well as contacts. Loops Your application, through a compact API and SDKs: identify a contact, set properties, send events. Nothing is automatic and nothing is guessed, which means a week of integration work and then a data model that matches your product exactly rather than an ecommerce schema you are bending. ### How the invoice behaves Klaviyo Billed on active profiles with a sending allowance pinned at a multiple of that count, and the plan steps up automatically as profiles grow without ever stepping back down. The second half of that sentence is the one that surprises people: pruning your list is a billing action as well as a hygiene one, and nobody does it until the invoice prompts them. Loops Billed on subscribed contacts with sending unlimited. You stop counting messages entirely, which changes team behaviour — nobody debates whether an extra send is worth it. The cost is symmetric to the other side's: a large dormant free-tier list sits on the bill permanently whether or not you ever mail it. ### Proving the channel did something Klaviyo Revenue attribution is the actual product. Orders are tied back to the message that preceded them, reported per campaign and per flow, and that number is what justifies the subscription to whoever signs it. The attribution windows are configurable and generous, so read the figure as directional rather than as a controlled experiment. Loops Opens, clicks and the events you send back in. If you want to know whether the onboarding sequence improved activation, you define activation, send that event, and compare — which is more honest than a default attribution window and considerably more work. There is no equivalent of revenue per email here, because for most subscription businesses there is no equivalent revenue event. ### How much logic a sequence can carry Klaviyo Flows branch on profile attributes and store behaviour with waits and splits, and the commerce-specific ones — abandoned cart, browse abandonment, back in stock, post-purchase — arrive as working templates. A merchant can assemble a genuinely effective sequence in an afternoon, which is the specific capability being bought. Loops Loops are triggered by events and filtered on properties, with the depth a SaaS lifecycle usually needs: on a trial, has not finished setup, upgraded last week. It stops short of deeply nested behavioural branching, and the ceiling arrives at a predictable size, which is an argument for choosing it deliberately as a stage rather than as a permanent answer. ### Transactional mail and where it lives Klaviyo Klaviyo is a marketing platform and its transactional story is thin. Order confirmations and shipping notices come from the store platform or a separate sending vendor, so Klaviyo adds to your stack rather than consolidating it, and your customer's message history is split across at least two systems. Loops Transactional sends and lifecycle campaigns share the same tool and the same contact record, which is the consolidation that makes Loops attractive to a small team: one vendor, one list, one view of what a person has received. The flip side is that your password resets now depend on your marketing tool. ### Growing the list in the first place Klaviyo Sign-up forms and pop-ups with targeting rules are part of the product, and collected data lands straight into the profile with no glue. For a store that is a real saving in both time and integration surface, and it is another thread tying you to the platform. Loops Signup happens in your product, because your contacts are your users. There is no form builder and there does not need to be one — the moment somebody creates an account is the moment they become a contact, and the integration you already wrote handles it. ### Who has it open day to day Klaviyo A marketer or a merchant, frequently supported by an agency. The interface assumes ecommerce fluency and rewards somebody who works in it regularly, and the depth on offer is wasted on a team that sends four campaigns a year. Loops Anybody on a small team. The concepts are few, the interface is modern, and a founder can build and send something without a walkthrough. That accessibility is the main reason small software teams pick it, and it is a real saving when nobody's job title contains the word email. ### What the ceiling looks like on each side Klaviyo You outgrow Klaviyo when you need messaging in channels it does not orchestrate, or when the profile-based bill outpaces the revenue the channel is attributed. The sending cap pinned to profile count is the other wall, and it is a hard stop mid-campaign rather than an overage charge. Loops You outgrow Loops when your messaging needs conditions a filter cannot express, when you need per-tenant sending isolation, or when a legacy system needs somewhere to relay SMTP. Those are real ceilings arriving at a predictable size, and knowing where they are is more useful than pretending they are not there. ### What a template is allowed to contain Klaviyo Catalogue-aware blocks. A Klaviyo template can pull real products into the message — the exact items left in a cart, recommendations drawn from browsing, the thing that just came back into stock — because the platform already holds the catalogue. That capability is unusual and it is most of why the commerce flows convert as well as they do. Loops Copy, structure and variables from your contact record. The editor is clean and the constraint is that there is no product feed behind it, which for a subscription business is not a constraint at all: the message is usually a sentence and a link into the product, not a grid of merchandise with prices on it. ### Compliance, consent and who is on the list Klaviyo Ecommerce lists grow from checkouts, pop-ups and imports, which is the environment where consent gets muddled fastest and where complaint rates do the most damage. Klaviyo watches accounts closely for that reason and will restrict one that misbehaves, and its guidance to merchants tends to be practical rather than legalistic: prune, segment on engagement, stop mailing people who have ignored you for a year. Loops Contacts are your users, so consent is usually unambiguous — somebody created an account and agreed to your terms — and the harder question is the one between product notices and marketing. Keep the distinction explicit in the contact record rather than implicit in which campaign you happen to be sending, because somebody unsubscribing from a monthly update should not stop receiving a security notice. ## Pros and cons, side by side ### Klaviyo Strengths - Everything a shop knows about a shopper reaches the profile without anybody writing tracking code, which takes an entire instrumentation project off the plan. - Its reporting speaks the language a merchant is already measured in, so nobody has to translate the channel's performance into somebody else's vocabulary first. - Sending is included up to a generous multiple of the list, so a shop planning a heavy promotional calendar is not counting messages while it plans one. - Forms, flows and the catalogue all belong to one system, so a merchant with no engineer available can operate the whole programme without assistance. Trade-offs - Predictive fields need a pattern of repeat purchases to compute at all, so on a subscription business they stay empty and unusable indefinitely. - Every active profile is billed and the plan climbs bands by itself, so the cost of holding a list grows independently of whether the list is doing anything. - Reviews, the customer-data product and additional channels are separate subscriptions, so the demonstration and the quote describe different amounts of product. - Order confirmations come from somewhere else entirely, so a customer's message history is split across at least two systems from the very first day. ### Loops Strengths - A contact is a user your product already knows about, so the segmentation you need exists the moment you connect it rather than after a data project has landed. - Transactional mail is a distinct type that deliberately ignores subscription state, which is the correct behaviour and one fewer rule for somebody to get wrong. - The interface is small enough that whoever has time can operate it, which on a team where nobody's title contains the word email is the entire proposition. - One place answers what this person has been sent, because the receipt and the announcement both left through the same system against the same record. Trade-offs - There is no catalogue behind the editor, so a message cannot contain merchandise and any commerce ambition reduces to a sentence and a link. - Nothing computes revenue per message, so proving the channel paid for itself needs an outcome you define and a comparison somebody has to run. - Audience filters stop where a nested behavioural rule begins, and that ceiling arrives at a size you can predict and cannot postpone. - There is no form builder, no popup targeting and no on-site behaviour to trigger from, because the assumption is that people sign up inside your product. ## Pick in thirty seconds ### Choose Klaviyo if - You sell products and the highest-value emails you send are about carts, catalogues and past orders. - Revenue per campaign is the number that justifies the spend, and you want the platform to calculate it. - Forms and pop-ups being part of the same tool is worth paying for. - A merchant or an agency, not an engineer, will own the programme day to day. ### Choose Loops if - You sell a subscription and the moments that matter happen inside your product rather than at a checkout. - You want lifecycle campaigns and transactional sends against one contact record in one tool. - Not counting sends matters more to you than not paying for contacts you never mail. - The team is small and the tool has to be usable by whoever has time, without training. ## What actually moves when you switch In roughly the order you would do it. The expensive parts of an email migration are never the send call. 1. Check whether the predictive fields being demonstrated to you would ever populate. Expected date of next order, predicted lifetime value and churn risk are derived from a pattern of repeat purchases across a meaningful history, and a business whose customers subscribe rather than buy again and again gives that model nothing to work from. The fields then sit permanently empty in the segment builder, which is an expensive way to discover that the specialism you are paying for does not apply to you. 2. Work out what the store integration was writing that nothing else in your company writes. It synchronises the catalogue, the customers and the orders in both directions, and it quietly populates the fields several of your segments depend on. When it stops, those segments do not fail — they match fewer and fewer people as the underlying data goes stale, which is far harder to notice. Decide in advance which you will rebuild from your own database and which you are simply retiring. 3. Decide which of your messages are allowed to ignore an opt-out, then confirm the destination models that distinction at all. One side treats a transactional send as a separate type that deliberately bypasses subscription state; the other is a marketing platform where nearly everything honours it. Getting this wrong in one direction withholds a receipt somebody is entitled to, and in the other it sends a promotion to somebody who asked you to stop. Only one of those is merely embarrassing. 4. Price the add-ons apart from the platform, because on one side reviews, a customer-data product and the extra channels are each their own subscription. A figure assembled from the headline profile band describes less product than the demonstration did, and the capabilities people remember most vividly from a demonstration are disproportionately the ones sold separately. Ask which line items are inside the number before setting it beside anything else. 5. Plan to re-author the templates rather than to move them, because the markup does not travel usefully in either direction. A builder emits HTML shaped around its own components and a cleaner editor will not accept it without a fight. That makes this a design conversation rather than an engineering one, and a team treating it as a copy-and-paste exercise ships a message that looks correct in the editor and falls apart in a phone client. 6. Settle whether the messaging tool is permitted to be a system of record, because these two invite opposite answers. On one side profiles arrive from a store platform and accumulate history nothing else holds; on the other contacts are your users and your own database already knows everything worth knowing about them. A business that lets a marketing platform become the only home for certain facts has created an export problem, and the moment to notice is before it has held them for three years. 7. Recompute the cost against whatever your business actually counts. A per-person bill is comparable between two platforms and tells you very little about whether the channel deserves to exist. Divide it by the outcome you care about — an order, an activation, a retained subscription — and the two candidates frequently swap places, because the expensive one is expensive precisely where those outcomes are dense and cheap where they are sparse. 8. Agree who will open the reporting afterwards and what they will be looking for. A merchant asks which campaign produced orders; a product team asks whether the sequence moved activation. Those are different reports assembled from different data, and whichever question your platform leads with is the question your organisation will end up managing by. Choosing a tool whose default question is not yours is how a team spends two years optimising something nobody asked about. ## Questions to ask before you sign Put these to a sales rep, or find the answer in the documentation before anyone quotes you a number. 1. Do our customers buy repeatedly, and would a prediction about their next order ever have data to compute from? 2. Which of our segments depend on data only the store integration writes, and what becomes of them when it stops? 3. Which of our messages must still reach somebody who unsubscribed, and does the tool we are choosing model that difference? 4. Which parts of the demonstration were add-ons, and is the quote in front of us for all of them or only some? 5. Who would re-author our templates, and have they looked at the current ones on a phone rather than in the editor? 6. Does our messaging platform hold any fact that no other system in the company holds a copy of? 7. What is the cost per outcome we actually care about, rather than the cost per person we happen to be storing? ## Common questions ### Can I use Klaviyo for a SaaS product? You can, and a number of companies do, and you should understand what you are paying for. The parts of Klaviyo that justify its price — order attribution, catalogue-aware templates, abandoned cart, back in stock — have no analogue in a subscription business. What remains is a competent, expensive general marketing tool with a profile-based bill. If you are drawn to it because the integrations list is long and the brand is familiar, price the features you would actually use before committing. ### What happens when I hit Klaviyo's send limit? Sending stops. The allowance is a multiple of your profile count and past it the sends halt rather than costing extra, which is a materially different failure mode from an overage line on an invoice. It rarely bites a normal monthly cadence and it bites exactly one profile: a small, highly engaged list mailed frequently. Run the arithmetic against your real cadence before you commit, because discovering the ceiling mid-campaign is not a good afternoon. ### Is unlimited sending on Loops genuinely unlimited? Within a fair-use posture, yes, and the honest framing is that the constraint moved rather than vanished. You are metered on how many people are on the list instead of how many messages you send. That changes behaviour for the better — teams that stop counting run more experiments — and it makes the wrong-shaped customer, one with an enormous list they rarely mail, pay handsomely for the privilege of not counting. ### How do I measure whether lifecycle email is working without revenue attribution? Define the outcome you care about as an event and compare cohorts who received a sequence against those who did not. For a subscription product that is usually activation, second-week retention or upgrade rate rather than an order. The discipline this forces is a genuine advantage: an attribution window that credits an email for a purchase made six days later is convenient and generous, whereas a holdout group tells you what the sequence actually caused. ### What does migrating between them involve? Contacts and consent status export from both, and everything else is rebuilt by hand. Flows and campaigns cross no paradigm boundary, templates likewise, and attribution history stays behind so your year-on-year comparisons break at the migration date. Moving away from Klaviyo has an extra thread: the native store integration means it holds catalogue and order data that has to be re-established wherever you land. Export a full contact snapshot including opt-in timestamps before you start — when somebody consented is the one record you cannot reconstruct afterwards. ### Will the predictive fields work for a subscription business? Almost certainly not, and it is worth establishing that before the fields appear in a demonstration and start doing persuasive work. Predicted lifetime value, expected date of next order and churn risk are computed from a pattern of repeat purchases with enough volume and enough elapsed time for a model to find rhythm in. A business where somebody signs up once and then pays the same amount on the same day every month presents no such pattern — the model has either nothing to predict or something so trivially predictable that a query against your own billing table answers it better. The practical outcome is that those fields exist in the segment builder, remain empty, and quietly become part of what you are paying a specialist price for and never using. Ask during the trial how many orders per profile the model needs before it produces anything, and then check your own numbers against that answer. ### What happens to my segments if the store integration goes away? They keep working and slowly stop being true, which is worse than failing. A segment built on orders in the last ninety days, or on products viewed, is a rule evaluated against data the integration is continuously supplying. Remove the supply and the rule still evaluates — against a snapshot that gets older every day — so the segment shrinks gradually rather than erroring, and the campaign that goes to nine hundred people instead of nine thousand looks like a deliverability problem rather than a data one. Before disconnecting anything, list the segments that depend on synced fields, decide which will be rebuilt from your own database and which are simply being retired, and take a dated count of each population so you can tell afterwards whether a difference is expected or a mistake. The ones you rebuild need a refresh schedule with an owner, because a property pushed once is a snapshot pretending to be a signal. ### Do transactional emails respect an unsubscribe? They should not, and whether the tool understands that is a real difference between these two. A receipt, a password reset, a security notice and a service announcement are mail somebody is entitled to receive whether or not they want your newsletter, and treating an unsubscribe as global is how a customer stops getting their invoices. A product that models a transactional send as a distinct type that deliberately bypasses subscription state gets this right by construction. A marketing platform where nearly every send honours the flag makes it your problem to get right, usually by keeping receipts somewhere else entirely. The failure runs in both directions and only one of them is funny: sending a promotion to somebody who opted out is embarrassing and recoverable, while silently withholding a document a customer needs is a support case and, depending on what the document was, a legal one. ### Can I move my templates between these two? Not usefully, and trying is generally a worse use of a day than starting again. Both products let you export something that looks like HTML, and in both cases that markup is shaped around the editor that produced it: nested tables with the builder's own class names and inline styles, or a clean typographic layout that assumes the other product's defaults. Paste one into the other and you get something that renders acceptably in the editor's preview and then behaves badly in a real client, which is the failure nobody catches because nobody re-tests a template they believe they have merely copied. Treat the migration as a chance to re-author the four or five messages that actually matter, decide the variable names deliberately while you are in there, and send each one to a real device before anybody outside the company sees it.