Klaviyo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are popular options for engaging customers via emails and SMS messages. Now that Klaviyo has rebranded to a B2C customer relationship management (CRM) system, there’s even more overlap between what both companies do.
However, Klaviyo and Salesforce are still vastly different, even in areas where they overlap like email, SMS, and mobile push notifications. In a nutshell:
- Klaviyo is a better choice for smaller businesses looking for ease of setup, ease of use, and transparent pricing.
- Klaviyo’s main downside compared to Salesforce is its limited channel support (only email, SMS, and mobile push) and fewer tools for marketing, service, and sales teams.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a true enterprise-grade platform that offers flexibility, scalability, and integration opportunities. This makes it a better choice for enterprise marketing teams looking for an all-in-one solution or to work more closely with sales and service teams.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more expensive and complex to set up and use than Klaviyo. It also relies on third-party system integrators rather than in-house support teams.
In this guide, we’ll explore the differences between Klaviyo and Salesforce in detail and how they impact each platform’s use cases.
Additionally, we’ll discuss how Insider — our AI-native platform for individualized, omnichannel customer experiences — compares to Klaviyo and Salesforce in categories like channel support, personalization capabilities, customer service, and more.
Klaviyo vs Salesforce: Pros, cons, and use cases
Before we dive in, note that we won’t explore areas where both platforms offer similar functionalities, such as marketing automation for email and SMS. Instead, we’ll focus mainly on their differences, so you can understand which platform is better for scenarios and businesses.
Klaviyo pros: User-friendly, proven, and growing marketing automation platform
Klaviyo is a leading email marketing platform for eCommerce businesses, especially ones operating in the Shopify ecosystem. It was founded in 2012 and has kept a strong focus on the eCommerce industry since then.
The company went public in 2023, after becoming the recommended email solution partner for Shopify Plus and acquiring Napkin (a tool for building and deploying APIs).
As a result, Klaviyo is an industry-standard solution for email and SMS marketing, offering intuitive message builders, templates, and a huge community of users, agencies, and developers specialized in the platform.
The platform has also never stopped growing, adding features like Mobile Push, Product Reviews, and a customer data platform (CDP). In short, Klaviyo has evolved into a complete B2C CRM with features for eCommerce marketing and service teams.
That, in addition to its transparent pricing, makes it a good option for small businesses and midsized companies looking for a reliable platform that’s not as expensive or complex as Salesforce.
Klaviyo cons: More limited than Salesforce and more expensive than smaller competitors
Klaviyo doesn’t offer nearly the same breadth of features and channels that Salesforce does.
For example, teams can’t use Klaviyo to reach customers via web push notifications, WhatsApp, or personalized website engagement. And while it has added new tools to its arsenal, Klaviyo’s CDP and CRM offerings are still limited compared to established players in these categories, like Insider, Segment, Salesforce, or HubSpot.
Lastly, while it’s more cost-effective than Salesforce, Klaviyo can get quite expensive compared to other email solutions like Omnisend or Mailchimp due to its pricing structure. As a result, small teams are often forced to look for Klaviyo alternatives as their contacts lists grow.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud pros: True enterprise-grade platform for marketing, sales, and service teams
Salesforce is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It was founded back in 1999 with its flagship CRM products and has acquired a plethora of products focused on marketing, customer service, and sales use cases.
Today, Salesforce is an extremely versatile platform, including in the marketing space with tools for:
- Data unification.
- Marketing analytics.
- Landing page creation.
- Email and SMS marketing.
- Omnichannel journey orchestration.
- Personalization across different channels.
- Customer loyalty.
- And more.
In particular, its email marketing tool is one of the most advanced on the market and offers more versatility than Klaviyo.
The Salesforce platform is also built for handling the needs of enterprise architectures that handle millions of records. This makes it ideal for big organizations that work with large datasets and need scalability.
Lastly, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the better choice for teams that use other Salesforce products for their sales and service teams and want to deploy the platform across the entire enterprise.
For example, many organizations use products from Salesforce’s Marketing, Service, and Sales clouds in combination to keep their data in one ecosystem and simplify the management of their tech stack.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud cons: Expensive and reliant on technical assistance
Salesforce is well-known for its expensive price tag. That’s true for its CRM, as well as the products in its Marketing Cloud, making the platform unaffordable for small and (often) midsized businesses.
The pricing model can also be complex, as Salesforce charges extra for in-house customer success, advanced segmentation, and many other features. Many customers have said that these additional fees and expensive plans are the biggest downside of working with Salesforce.
Salesforce doesn’t also provide customer support via in-house teams unless you’re a large enterprise. Instead, they rely on third-party system integrators to help customers set up and use the platform.
That’s why there’s an entire ecosystem of agencies and consultants built around Salesforce. Organizations must often use their services to set up and manage Salesforce products, which adds another layer of complexity.The platform’s breadth of features and the necessity to use system integrators are the reasons why Klaviyo ranks higher categories like ease of setup, use, and admin.
Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.
Insider: Robust alternative to Klaviyo and Salesforce
Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform.
It brings together 12+ channels, advanced personalization and automation capabilities, and a best-in-class customer support experience.
This makes it an ideal alternative to Klaviyo and Salesforce for midsized and enterprise teams looking to maximize their marketing spend and efforts.
Insider is also a leader in terms of time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use. As a result, it has been ranked as a top solution by G2, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC across many categories that Klaviyo and Salesforce also participate in, like:
You can also see how customers rate Insider compared to Klaviyo and Salesforce below.
Leverage 12+ channels from one platform
Like we said, Klaviyo doesn’t support messaging channels (besides SMS) nor does it let you leverage website personalization to maximize conversion rates. Salesforce relies on integrations with third-party providers to send web push notifications and WhatsApp messages.
Insider, on the other hand, brings together 12+ channels under one roof — including web, mobile, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, social media and search ads, and others.
Our platform also comes with an AI-powered customer journey builder.
This tool lets you bring all channels together into a cohesive customer experience by building, automating, managing, A/B testing, and optimizing campaigns with a simple drag-and-drop editor.
Plus, you have access to tons of proven templates for different channels and use cases that you can leverage without any coding.
The combination of broad channel access and marketing automation capabilities make Insider an ideal solution for consolidating your martech stack.
Besides removing data silos, this process makes your teams more productive, streamlines workflows, and saves resources, as they don’t have to constantly jump between different solutions when creating and analyzing campaigns.For example, one eCommerce company managed to generate an ROI upwards of 100x by building personalized experiences across web, app, push notifications, and email with our platform.
Use advanced personalization to maximize engagement and conversions
Insider’s personalization engine lets you tailor your content, messaging, and product recommendations across all customer touchpoints. As a result, you can deliver relevant information and promotions to each customer based on their needs, preferences, and interests.
Here are some examples of how our customers use Insider to create individualized customer experiences:
- Product recommendations: Our platform lets you employ a variety of product recommendation strategies, like top sellers, frequently viewed items, products often purchased together, and many more. Chow Sang Sang used this strategy to show relevant products to each website visitor, resulting in a 10.5% uplift in conversions.
- Category personalization: Our Category Optimizer automatically changes your site’s categories depending on the visitor looking at them, which is essential for large sites with complex navigation. Adidas used category optimization to increase their mobile conversion rates by 50.3%.
- Email marketing campaigns: You can use Insider to deliver product recommendations across email. Plus, you can build all sorts of automated email campaigns, as well as leverage AMP emails to create interactive experiences for recipients. Remix used Insider’s email automation capabilities to increase first purchases by 104%.
- Messaging channel personalization: Insider natively supports messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE. You can send personalized reminders, price drop alerts, cart recovery prompts, and many other high-impact messages. Picniq used Insider to diversify its communications across WhatsApp, leading to an 80% open rate and 5x ROI.
For a deeper dive into how you can use Insider to personalize the entire customer experience, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.
Unify your customer data and understand the entire customer journey
Insider’s ability to deliver personalized and effective marketing messages is made possible by our platform’s ability to unify, analyze, and activate customer data. Thanks to our built-in enterprise CDP, Insider can;
- Aggregate customer data from any online and offline sources, including CRMs, CMSs, analytics software, customer service platforms, PoS devices, APIs, and many others.
- Automatically creates accurate, 360-degree views of each customer. These profiles contain all the details you need to run data-driven marketing campaigns, including customers’ locations, contact information, channel reachability, likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, and much more.
Note: Click here to learn more about Insider’s data management capabilities.
Lastly, like Klaviyo and Salesforce, Insider can integrate and share data with different kinds of solutions. Our platform has 100+ plug-and-play integrations for solutions across 20+ categories, including:
- CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Analytics and attribution platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and AppsFlyer.
- Point solutions like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
- Marketing automation tools like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
- And many others.
Plus, our flexible API can be used to connect to other systems and plug Insider seamlessly into your existing infrastructure and workflows.
For example, say your organization relies on Salesforce’s CRM or Commerce Cloud. You can easily connect these tools with our platform to ensure valuable data is always shared across your organization and can be used to deliver personalized experiences in real time.
Work with best-in-class global customer support teams
Klaviyo and Salesforce both have some gaps in the customer support department. Klaviyo has been known for its inconsistent support quality in some regions while Salesforce relies on third-party system integrators which can result in suboptimal customer service.
At the same time, setting up, managing, and optimizing an omnichannel marketing program is a big undertaking. A good customer support team can drastically reduce the time and effort required to get results.
That’s why we’ve focused on building the best possible customer support teams for Insider.
As an enterprise-grade solution provider with over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents, we deliver fast, high-quality support regardless of your location. Plus, all our teams are trained in-house, so you don’t have to rely on agencies or system integrators.
Our commitment to providing the best possible customer support has led to customers ranking Insider as the top solution provider in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and support quality, compared to other major solutions (not just Klaviyo and Salesforce).
Here are a few areas where our experts can help you achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently:
- Setup and implementation. Our experts will ensure you involve the right commercial and technical stakeholders, bring together the right customer data for your goals, integrate with other parts of the marketing stack, and much more. This comes at no extra setup cost to your business.
- Customer journey migration. If you already have customer journeys created in Klaviyo, Salesforce, or another solution, our team will migrate them to our customer journey builder for you.
- Platform utilization. Our team will ensure you know exactly which Insider tools you need and how to utilize them properly. They’ll also look at your website and analytics data to give you ideas for implementing marketing strategies that can drive quick results.
Maximize your marketing spend and efforts with Insider
Insider can help you overcome Klaviyo’s limitations without dealing with Salesforce’s expensive pricing and lack of in-house support.
Our platform gives you access to 12+ channels, advanced personalization, and an AI-powered customer journey builder for creating consistent omnichannel experiences — all from one place. It’s also an undisputed leader in categories like customer support quality, ease of setup, time-to-value, and ease of use.
In short, Insider can help you:
- Make the most out of your marketing efforts and budget.
- Work with experienced in-house support teams that ensure fast deployment and easy platform management.
- Improve key business metrics like conversion rates, revenue, acquisition costs average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
- Use advanced website personalization to maximize conversion rates by tailoring content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
- Access easy-to-use tools for building and automating campaigns across all channels, including on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
- Unlock the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, deliver personalized product recommendations, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers, and work more efficiently.
- Access a library of easily customizable templates for any channel or use case.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
