The order matters less than the fit. A 3-SKU jewelry brand and a 10,000-SKU multi-warehouse seller want very different things. Below is a fast comparison, then nine deeper reviews with the pricing you will see at checkout (always reconfirm—contact tiers, SMS credits, and regional promos move the invoice).
See also: best email marketing tools, best email marketing tools for Shopify, and best free email marketing tools.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Best for | Free tier | Starting price (paid) | Rating |
|---|
| Klaviyo | Data-driven DTC at scale | Up to 250 contacts / 500 sends/mo | ~$20/mo at 500 contacts | 4.7 / 5 |
| Mailchimp | Small stores wanting a familiar UI | 250 contacts / 500 sends/mo | ~$13/mo (Essentials, 500) | 4.0 / 5 |
| Omnisend | Email + SMS + push in one | 250 contacts / 500 emails/mo | ~$16/mo (Standard) | 4.5 / 5 |
| Brevo | Big lists, occasional sends | Unlimited contacts; 300 sends/day | ~$9/mo (Starter) | 4.2 / 5 |
| ActiveCampaign | Stores that also need CRM | No forever-free marketing plan | ~$15/mo (Lite, 500) | 4.4 / 5 |
| Drip | Brand-led DTC + visual workflows | No free tier (trial) | ~$39/mo for 2,500 contacts | 4.3 / 5 |
| Sendinblue (now Brevo) | Same as Brevo above | See Brevo row | See Brevo row | 4.2 / 5 |
| GetResponse | Email + landing pages + AI store builder | ~500 contacts / 2,500 emails/mo | ~$19/mo (Email Marketing) | 3.9 / 5 |
| MailerLite | Lean budgets and clean creative | 500 subscribers / 12K emails/mo | ~$10/mo (Growing Business) | 4.4 / 5 |
Quick note: Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in 2023—if a tutorial or YouTube video says "Sendinblue," it is the same product. I have left both rows because people still search for the old name.
How I scored these
I cared about four things: how natively the tool ingests product, order, and event data; how good the abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows feel out of the box; how revenue attribution is reported (per-flow, per-campaign, with sane windows); and how painful pricing gets when your list is full of "ghosts" who bought once and ignored every email since.
1. Klaviyo
Rating: 4.7 / 5 — Best for: Serious DTC stores that want email and SMS to behave like performance channels.
Klaviyo is the default heavyweight in ecommerce email for good reason: catalog, orders, refunds, browse events, and customer properties all sync into segments without custom dev work, and predictive analytics (CLV, churn risk, expected next order) feed flows in ways that generic ESPs cannot match. I have launched flows in a fresh Klaviyo account in under an hour that took an afternoon of mapping in other tools. If you want a deeper Klaviyo-specific writeup later, our planned klaviyo-review will dig into deliverability and SMS bundles in detail.
Pricing: Free up to 250 contacts with 500 monthly sends, then paid often starts around $20/month at 500 contacts. Costs scale with list size fast—budget for cleanup, not just growth. (See our planned klaviyo-vs-mailchimp comparison for a side-by-side at common store sizes.)
Key features: Native ecommerce integrations, predictive analytics, benchmarks, SMS in-platform, reviews module, and prebuilt flow library mapped to ecommerce milestones.
Pros
- Deep, native data sync that makes segmentation feel like the store, not a spreadsheet.
- Revenue attribution per flow that founders actually trust in board updates.
- Strong SMS, reviews, and forms tightly coupled to the email engine.
Cons
- Pricing climbs sharply once you cross 5,000–10,000 contacts.
- You pay for depth—if you only send a monthly newsletter, this is overfunded.
- Onboarding rewards effort; lazy list hygiene gets expensive.
Verdict: If ecommerce email is a real revenue lever, I would start with Klaviyo and only talk myself out of it for budget reasons.
2. Mailchimp
Rating: 4.0 / 5 — Best for: Small stores and generalists who want a recognizable tool plus light marketing beyond email.
Mailchimp's official Shopify integration is back after a long hiatus, which matters because most non-marketers still learn email here first. For a sub-$10K/month store doing campaigns and a few simple automations, it is fine. Past that, depth is the gap—long branching journeys, granular product-level segmentation, and revenue-grade per-flow reporting all get harder than they should.
Pricing: Free is 250 contacts / 500 sends per month with a daily cap. Essentials commonly starts around $13/month at 500 contacts; Standard near $20/month. Watch how unsubscribed contacts still count in your audience size.
Key features: Customer journeys (Standard+), template library, basic ecommerce hooks, SMS as add-on, and ads/social in adjacent products.
Pros
- Familiar UI; freelancers and agencies know it cold.
- Decent for "campaigns plus a few automations" at small scale.
- Frequent intro promos soften year-one cost.
Cons
- Free tier is restrictive once you have a real list.
- Automation depth lags Klaviyo and Omnisend at the same price.
- Contact-based billing punishes messy hygiene.
Verdict: Choose Mailchimp for ecommerce if you are small, budget-conscious, and honest that you are not building a 40-node lifecycle program yet. Compare directly in Mailchimp vs ConvertKit if your store also has a content/audience side.
3. Omnisend
Rating: 4.5 / 5 — Best for: Mid-market ecommerce that wants email, SMS, and push under one invoice without bolting three vendors together.
Omnisend is built around carts, products, and repeat purchase prompts as first-class objects—abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and product blocks are right where you expect them. I have shipped a full welcome → abandoned cart → post-purchase → winback set in an afternoon for a Shopify store with 4,000 contacts. SMS sits in the same flows so you do not split attribution across two dashboards.
Pricing: Free up to 250 contacts / 500 emails per month. Standard often starts around $16/month; Pro near $59/month with bigger send and SMS bundles.
Key features: Email + SMS + web push in one builder, ecommerce-first templates, segmentation by purchase behavior, popups, and reporting tuned for store metrics.
Pros
- Ecommerce-first defaults shorten setup time noticeably.
- SMS and push reduce stack fragmentation as you grow.
- Reporting maps cleanly to revenue without being academic.
Cons
- Hardest-edge segmentation still loses to Klaviyo at the top end.
- SMS credits can blow up the invoice if you do not cap volume.
- Less useful if your business is half services / half products.
Verdict: I would shortlist Omnisend for any 1,000–50,000 contact store that wants omnichannel without a marketing-ops hire on day one.
4. Brevo
Rating: 4.2 / 5 — Best for: Stores with large dormant contact databases and infrequent send cadence, where contact-based billing elsewhere would feel punitive.
Brevo flips the pricing model: unlimited contacts, billed by sends. If you have 80,000 past buyers and you mail twice a month, the invoice math here can crush Klaviyo or Mailchimp. The Shopify and WooCommerce plugins handle fundamentals—newsletters, lighter automation, transactional via the same account—so you can consolidate your "transactional + marketing" stack if you want.
Pricing: Free with unlimited contacts and 300 sends per day (~9,000/month). Starter from around $9/month; Business from ~$18/month with automation and A/B testing.
Key features: Email + SMS + WhatsApp, transactional API, marketing automation on Business+, landing pages, and CRM-lite contacts.
Pros
- Best-in-class economics for big-list, low-cadence senders.
- Same account handles transactional and marketing.
- Strong international (EU/Latam) presence and language support.
Cons
- Shallower ecommerce-native segmentation than Klaviyo or Omnisend.
- Free daily cap pauses sends if you misjudge a campaign.
- UI density can overwhelm first-time users.
Verdict: Choose Brevo when your bottleneck is billing math, not automation depth. Compare it head-to-head in MailerLite vs Brevo before locking in.
5. ActiveCampaign
Rating: 4.4 / 5 — Best for: Hybrid ecommerce stores that also run wholesale, services, subscriptions, or B2B sales follow-up.
ActiveCampaign is not the most "Shopify-native" culturally, but its Deep Data integration pulls orders and carts into automations in a structured way, and its CRM module shines when "customer" means more than retail buyer. If you are a retail brand with a wholesale arm or a DTC company that also does brand consulting, this is the one place where email and sales pipelines live together cleanly.
Pricing: No forever-free marketing plan. Lite starts around $15/month at 500 contacts; Plus jumps quickly when you add CRM seats. Annual billing typically saves ~25%.
Key features: Best-in-class automation builder, deal pipelines (Plus+), site tracking, predictive content, and Deep Data for ecommerce.
Pros
- Most flexible automation builder in the mid-market.
- CRM-lite reduces tool sprawl for hybrid B2C/B2B.
- Strong fit when customer journeys cross more than one product line.
Cons
- More setup and field mapping than plug-and-play ESPs.
- Overkill if you only need basic abandoned cart + a newsletter.
- Pricing scales aggressively with contacts and seats.
Verdict: Pick ActiveCampaign when email is a system, not a channel. See ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp for a direct comparison.
6. Drip
Rating: 4.3 / 5 — Best for: DTC brands that want ecommerce-centric playbooks, on-brand creative, and a visual workflow editor marketers will actually open daily.
Drip leans hard on the marketer-as-storyteller persona. The workflow builder reads like a comic strip, not a flowchart, and product blocks pull from the catalog without ceremony. I keep recommending it to founder-led brands with strong creative and 5-figure monthly revenue who hated Klaviyo's density and outgrew Mailchimp.
Pricing: No free tier; commonly advertised entry around $39/month for up to 2,500 contacts, scaling on contacts. Try the trial with a real catalog before committing.
Key features: Visual workflow builder, ecommerce-tuned templates, onsite behavior triggers, product recommendations, and SMS as add-on.
Pros
- Excellent visual automation UX—marketers open it weekly without dread.
- Clear ecommerce positioning instead of generalist mush.
- Good fit for brand-led DTC with real content calendars.
Cons
- Entry price is a barrier for tiny stores.
- Smaller integration ecosystem than Klaviyo/Mailchimp.
- Validate big catalogs and variant strategies during trial.
Verdict: Drip is my pick when the marketing team is creative-led and revenue is past the "scrappy" stage.
7. Sendinblue (now Brevo)
Rating: 4.2 / 5 — Best for: Anyone Googling "Sendinblue" who has not heard about the rebrand.
Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in 2023. Same company, same product, same login, same pricing model—unlimited contacts, send-based billing. I am keeping a row here because old YouTube tutorials and blog posts still rank, and store owners get confused when the dashboard says "Brevo." Everything in section 4 above applies. If you are evaluating it for ecommerce, treat Brevo and Sendinblue as identical and use the Brevo section as your reference.
Verdict: Same as Brevo—great for big lists with low send cadence, weaker for high-frequency segment-driven ecommerce flows.
8. GetResponse
Rating: 3.9 / 5 — Best for: Stores that want email plus landing pages, popups, and an AI-assisted "store builder" without buying a separate funnel tool.
GetResponse keeps adding adjacent products—webinars, conversion funnels, an AI website / store builder—around a competent core ESP. For a small ecommerce site that wants list capture, autoresponders, and a basic funnel without paying for ClickFunnels or Webflow on top, the package is reasonable. Hard-edge ecommerce attribution and segmentation are still middle-of-the-road.
Pricing: Free with ~500 contacts / 2,500 emails per month. Email Marketing from around $19/month; Marketing Automation higher; Ecommerce Marketing with abandoned cart, transactional emails, and product recommendations is the relevant tier for stores.
Key features: Autoresponders, conversion funnels, web push, AI content tools, and ecommerce-specific tier with abandoned cart.
Pros
- Sandbox-friendly free tier.
- Bundling can replace 2–3 separate tools at small scale.
- AI content + builder shortcuts help solo founders ship faster.
Cons
- Interface can feel busy.
- Ecommerce features sit behind the higher tier, not the entry plan.
- Reporting is competent but not best-in-class for stores.
Verdict: GetResponse fits when "email + landing pages + a funnel" is the real ask, and you do not want to integrate three vendors.
9. MailerLite
Rating: 4.4 / 5 — Best for: Lean budgets, smaller catalogs, and operators who want polish without bloat.
MailerLite is the value pick I keep recommending to first-time store owners. The free tier is genuinely usable, the editor stays out of your way, and the WooCommerce / Shopify integrations cover the basics—abandoned cart, product blocks, segmentation by purchase—without the ceremony of bigger tools. It will not replace Klaviyo at scale, but for a bootstrapped store under ~5,000 contacts, the value-to-UX ratio is hard to beat.
Pricing: Free up to 500 subscribers / 12,000 emails per month. Growing Business starts around $10/month; Advanced around $20/month with smart sending and richer automation triggers.
Key features: Drag-and-drop editor, automation builder, ecommerce blocks, popups, websites, digital products, and a clean reporting view.
Pros
- Best-in-class value for small ecommerce.
- Clean UI cuts training time for hires and clients.
- Free plan is workable for real micro businesses, not a toy.
Cons
- Not the deepest segmentation at the high end.
- Some advanced deliverability tooling sits on higher tiers.
- Less recognized in enterprise procurement.
Verdict: If your store is under 5,000 contacts and you want the smartest dollar-per-feature pick, MailerLite is hard to beat.
How I would choose in one minute
- Brand-new store, under 500 contacts: MailerLite Free if you want clean UX, Brevo Free if your list is already huge but sends are rare.
- Shopify store, $10K–$100K/month: Omnisend for omnichannel without overbuilding; Klaviyo if you want depth and will pay for it. Cross-reference best email marketing tools for Shopify.
- DTC brand past $100K/month: Klaviyo is the default; Drip if creative-led; ActiveCampaign if you also have a sales team or wholesale.
- WooCommerce + budget-first: MailerLite or Brevo.
- Hybrid retail + services + B2B: ActiveCampaign.
FAQ
What is the best email marketing tool for a brand-new ecommerce store?
For most stores under 500 contacts, MailerLite Free or Omnisend Free are the smartest starting points. Both have native ecommerce features (abandoned cart, product blocks) without forcing you to pay before you have product-market fit.
Is Klaviyo really worth the price for a small store?
Honestly, no—until you cross roughly 2,000 active contacts and run more than just a welcome flow. Below that, Omnisend or MailerLite get you 80% of the value at a fraction of the cost. Once flows are paying for themselves, Klaviyo's depth pays its own bill.
How much should email contribute to ecommerce revenue?
For mature DTC, 20–30% of total revenue from email and SMS is a healthy benchmark. New stores often start in the single digits and climb as flows mature—abandoned cart, post-purchase, and winback usually carry most of that weight.
Do I need separate tools for email and SMS?
No. Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Brevo all run SMS in the same account, which keeps attribution and suppression lists clean. Splitting tools usually adds work without adding revenue.
What is the biggest hidden cost in ecommerce email?
Dirty data. Contact-based ESPs (Klaviyo, Mailchimp) bill on every address in your list, including unsubscribes and dead emails. Archiving stale contacts quarterly often saves more than switching tools.
More context: best email marketing tools, best email marketing tools for Shopify, ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp, MailerLite vs Brevo.