Running a growing Shopify store takes more work than it initially appears. 

There are orders to fill, customers to help, products to ship, and revenue to make. Since everything takes a portion of your time, it’s important to use dedicated tools that help save time on other revenue-driving aspects of your business. One of those is email marketing.

Omnisend and Klaviyo are two of the most popular choices for Shopify stores. You can use either one to send emails, text messages, and build automations that engage your customers. They do, however, have different advantages and disadvantages you need to be aware of.

We’ll look at which platform is more convenient and efficient for medium-to-large businesses. You’ll find comparisons of setup speeds, automation builders, email campaign capabilities, and what migration options each one offers.

Quick Comparison Of Setup And Launch Times

If you’re managing a growing Shopify store, you most likely don’t have the luxury of spending hours setting up a new tool and then another week learning how it works. You need speed, efficiency, and quality at the same time.

Omnisend makes starting very fast. All you need to do is install the app from the Shopify store, connect it to your account, and the integration part is finished. There’s no need to work with code or invent complex solutions to make the two platforms communicate successfully.

Klaviyo connects seamlessly to Shopify as well, though the setup wizard often requires a few more configuration steps before you’re fully up and running. While you no longer need to work with code snippets, you may need to manually enable the “Klaviyo App Embed” in the Shopify Theme Editor to fully activate onsite tracking.

If you’re still using a Vintage theme, however, you’ll still need to work with code snippets to integrate Klaviyo with your Shopify store.

Both Omnisend and Klaviyo have simple integrations, but Omnisend offers a more frictionless start by removing the need to manually toggle app embeds or theme settings.

How Fast Can You Import Your Brand Assets?

It’s important to keep your brand assets linear across your communications channels to maintain a professional look. That includes your logo, colors, and fonts. Setting it up usually takes some time since you have to find the right Hex codes for your colours, upload image files for your logo, and more. If you’re not that organized, it could become a rather time-consuming task

Omnisend does all the heavy lifting for you and solves this with a click of a button. When you connect your store, it scans your website, finds your logo, your brand colors, and your fonts. 

Then, all you need to do is find the “Brand Assets” option in the settings, click “Import my Brand Assets”, and it automatically sets up your email templates to match those design elements. 

After installing Omnisend, you can nearly immediately go on to building automations and creating campaigns.

Klaviyo also allows you to add your brand assets to the platform, but you have to do it the manual, time-intensive way. You need to upload your logo files and pick the fonts yourself. The same applies to color codes – you need to find the Hex codes and type them in the settings page. It’s not difficult to do, but it takes time that could be more valuable elsewhere.

Omnisend removes these steps entirely, which allows you to immediately focus on building automations that will generate passive income instead of playing with design settings.

Adding Products To Your Emails

The goal of your emails is to sell products, and to do that, you need a convenient and efficient way to add live products to your campaigns.

Omnisend has a feature called the “Product Picker”, which is a powerful and efficient way to add whatever you sell to the email without entering any data yourself. Once you add the “Product Listing” block to your campaign in the email editor, you can click  “Pick products from store” and choose the ones you want to add.

Then, Omnisend pulls the image, the name, the description, and the price of the product, and adds a CTA button with the link automatically. As a result, you have several items uploaded to your email campaign with a click of a button. If you want to, you can customize everything as well.

You can even choose to add dynamic products, where you don’t need to do anything at all, except select which products the recipient will see. There are three options to choose from: best-selling products, recently added items, or most viewed products. 

You won’t be able to view the items in your editor, but once the campaign goes live, the recipient will see one of the three types of product categories you chose in the setup.

Klaviyo allows you to add products quickly, too, but it’s a bit more technical. You need to use a product block that pulls data from a product feed. To create said product feed, you need to define the products you want to include, which can be based on specific collections or categories.

It also has a dynamic product recommender just like Omnisend does, even more, actually, but this might be one of those cases where less is more. Dynamic content is usually confusing to work with in itself, especially for business owners who don’t want to hire an email marketing team, so adding more options may only add to the confusion.

Omnisend keeps its platform growth-focused without the unnecessary steps and options that are less than likely to provide extra value.

Automation Workflows And Templates

While selling products via campaigns is a great way to make more money, there’s also a better way: automations. If you can set up a few automations that run 24/7 without your additional input, they will make even more money in the long term than most manual campaigns.

Omnisend comes with a huge library of pre-built workflows that include automation logic, sending delays, and even pre-written copy for each email. You can enable a welcome automation or an abandoned cart flow in minutes. And, since your brand assets are already there, you won’t even need to check if your logo, colors, and fonts are as they should be.

You can customize the logic and the copy if you want to, but if you don’t have the time for it yet, you can launch it immediately and then adjust the content later.

Not to say that Omnisend only allows for basic automation. You can use the drag-and-drop workflow interface to add conditional branching, SMS messages, A/B testing, and more. You can also use trigger and audience filters to define who should receive what emails. It allows you to intuitively build complex and personalized automations without excessive settings and unnecessary clutter.

Klaviyo is known for its powerful flows, advanced segmentation, and complex conditional branching in flows. You can build very complicated paths for your customers, but this power comes with a cost in terms of money, time, and expertise.

Building these flows from scratch takes a long time, and you have to decide on every trigger and every split. If you make a single mistake, the entire flow can break. To be fair, these automations are only beneficial to enterprises that focus on hyper-personalized content. But even if we talked about basic or semi-advanced automations, Omnisend still wins because it provides the same functionality as Klaviyo, but at a much more affordable and scalable price.

To sum up, Omnisend gives you the same power in terms of what most businesses need without being clunky or excessive. You can split your audience, send different messages, and use advanced triggers, but the interface is cleaner and less punishing. That’s why Omnisend is good for any business, regardless of its size.

How Is Migration Handled?

Switching platforms can be a daunting task, and you may decide it’s better to stick with a no-longer-suitable provider than worry about losing your contacts and breaking your automations during the migration process.

Most tools, including Klaviyo, give you a guide and tell you to do it yourself, or offer paid migration services, including third-party agency partners that charge their own fees. It’s a resource-heavy process that will either take weeks for you to manage everything or a hefty amount of money to pay for the service.

Omnisend, on the other hand, offers a different solution called the Kickstart service. If you’re on any paid plan (even the cheapest one), the migration service is completely free. They give you a dedicated person who moves your contacts, segments, automations, templates, and more.

Also, they don’t treat it as a standard “if it’s free, you can wait” service. They finish the process in just 3-5 business days, so you can migrate and get started in less than a week. It’s a huge bonus for growing brands that don’t have a spare team member to manage a migration.

Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Verdict

Both platforms are strong choices, but Klaviyo’s true potential only shines when you can use its full capabilities, which often require specific niche situations, only realistically used in enterprise-grade businesses.

Most businesses, regardless of size, have similar standard-to-advanced email marketing needs, and both platforms can meet them. However, Omnisend provides more intuitive ways to reach the same results, and it also comes at a more affordable monthly price than Klaviyo.

As such, it makes Omnisend the more convenient option for businesses of all sizes, especially medium-to-large ones.