Klaviyo vs Keap (2026)

TL;DR

• Klaviyo wins on segmentation for stores with transactional data. Free to 250 active profiles, then roughly $20/month at 500, $100 at 5,000, $720 at 50,000, $2,300 at 250,000. SMS metered separately.
• Keap wins on breadth for owner-operated service businesses. One plan at $299/month billed annually ($2,988/year) including two user licences, $39 per extra seat, required implementation quoted case by case.
• Both bill on database size, which means both punish businesses carrying a large dead list. Klaviyo charges on active profiles regardless of whether you email them; Keap's quote moves with contact volume.
• The dividing line is whether you have purchase history. Klaviyo's entire premium rests on it.

What each one is actually built to do

Klaviyo is a customer platform for direct-to-consumer brands. Its native connections to Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix and 350+ other apps feed a segmentation engine that knows what each customer bought, browsed, and is predicted to be worth. Omnichannel workflows span email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and push from one builder, with AI handling subject lines, send-time optimization, and predicted lifetime value.

Keap — formerly Infusionsoft — is aimed at businesses with roughly 1 to 25 employees, and it replaces four tools rather than perfecting one. Contact management, a visual automation canvas with 52+ templates, email and SMS campaigns, a sales pipeline, appointment booking, order forms and shopping carts, and native invoicing and payment processing all sit in the same subscription. Tag-based segmentation with behavioral triggers is the backbone.

Put crudely: Klaviyo is the better marketer, Keap is the better operator.

Two different ways to charge for your database

Klaviyo changed its billing definition in February 2025 and it reshaped everyone's costs. Pricing now counts active profiles — everyone in the database — rather than the contacts you actually email. A store holding 100,000 profiles while marketing to 30,000 engaged subscribers used to pay on 30,000 and now pays on 100,000. Scaling is continuous rather than tiered, so there's no plan to settle onto; every profile added by a pop-up or an abandoned checkout moves the bill. The upside is that list hygiene now has a direct financial payoff, and pruning helps deliverability anyway.

Keap has a contact selector that recalculates the plan price and, past a certain volume, stops showing a number and routes you to sales. A business carrying 40,000 records from a decade of trade shows pays materially more than one with 3,000 engaged buyers, even if only the second is running campaigns. Clean the list before you get quoted.

Seats work differently again. Klaviyo does not charge per user at all. Keap includes two licences and adds $39 per person, which is cheap: ten users is $299 plus eight seats, or $611 a month — about $61 a head for a stack that includes email, scheduling, and payments.

The costs that don't appear in the headline

Klaviyo's SMS is a separate meter. The Email + SMS bundle starts around $35/month at 251–500 profiles with 1,250 credits included; beyond that, messages bill by usage with rates varying by destination country. It behaves like a usage line — spiky around campaigns, capable of exceeding the email subscription in a heavy promotional month. Budget it independently from the profile-driven email cost.

Keap's equivalent surprise is implementation. It's described as required, covers strategy sessions, done-for-you automation builds, and data migration, and no fixed fee is published anymore. Keap's own sales process invites negotiation on it, which tells you there's room. Get the number and the scope in writing before signing. Keap's SMS also steps beyond the included Tier 1 allowance of 500 messages: $24 for 1,000, $39 for 2,500, $79 for 5,000, up to $279 for 25,000.

Evaluating them is not equally easy

Klaviyo's free tier gives you 250 profiles, 500 monthly sends, templates, reporting, and basic segmentation. That's a real evaluation — connect a store, build flows, watch the purchase data drive segments. The catch is that email support stops after 60 days, so treat it as a generous trial rather than a permanent home.

Keap's trial is more constrained in a way that matters: 25 email sends and payment processing disabled. Those are two of the three things people buy Keap for. Use the trial to judge the automation builder and the data model, then rely on a demo or a short paid month for deliverability and payments.

Who should pick what

• Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce stores past the early stage → Klaviyo. Segments like "bought category X twice, dormant 90 days, high predicted LTV" are a few clicks here and a data project elsewhere.
• Coaches, clinics, agencies, home services, franchise operators running lead magnet → nurture → appointment → invoice → follow-up → Keap. One subscription covers all five steps.
• Businesses with no transactional data — B2B newsletters, content sites → not Klaviyo. You'd be paying ecommerce prices for a model you can't feed.
• Two-person shops that just want a pipeline and reminders → neither. $2,988 a year buys automation infrastructure you won't build, and Klaviyo without purchase data is overkill in the other direction.
• Large dormant lists on a small team → clean the database first, then get quoted. Both vendors charge you for records that generate nothing.

Bottom line

These two rarely compete head-to-head, and when they do it's usually an ecommerce operator deciding whether to run marketing out of a store-connected platform or out of a business-operations platform. If revenue comes from repeat purchase behavior and you can attribute it, Klaviyo's segmentation is worth its premium and the profile-billing discipline is manageable. If revenue comes from booked appointments and invoiced services, Keap's bundle removes three subscriptions and its low marginal seat cost keeps it sensible as the team grows.

Klaviyo scales continuously, so check your exact active profile count against klaviyo.com/pricing. Keap's number is contact-dependent and quoted, so treat your written quote as the authority.