Klaviyo vs HubSpot: which marketing platform should you use?

Short answer: pick Klaviyo if you sell directly to consumers, especially online, and want email, SMS and other mobile channels driven by shopping data from your store, with pricing based on how many people you can reach. Pick HubSpot if you need one platform for marketing, sales and customer service, with a free CRM, deal pipelines, a website and blog tools, and sales-led processes, priced mainly by seat. Klaviyo wins for ecommerce and retention marketing; HubSpot wins when marketing has to hand leads to a sales team.

You can find both on Unloc: Klaviyo and HubSpot. This comparison is based on Klaviyo's and HubSpot's official websites, pricing pages and HubSpot's knowledge base.

Quick verdict

What Klaviyo is

Klaviyo calls itself an "autonomous B2C CRM" and AI marketing platform. In its own words, it unifies customer data and automates email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and mobile push to run personalised campaigns. It is built for companies that sell to individual consumers, and its own guide to B2C CRMs draws the line clearly: B2B CRMs are tailored to account-based management and long sales cycles, while B2C CRMs focus on personalisation, high-volume messaging and marketing automation.

Around its marketing tools, Klaviyo now offers a helpdesk and an AI Customer Agent for service, a reviews product, a signed-in Customer Hub for shoppers, analytics and benchmarks, and the Klaviyo Data Platform, which brings behavioural, transactional and engagement data into one profile for each customer.

What HubSpot is

HubSpot describes itself as all of its marketing, sales and customer service software on "one agentic platform". Its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub, all sharing one CRM, so a contact's website visits, emails, deals and support tickets sit on the same record.

HubSpot's free CRM is the entry point. HubSpot says every free account includes essential marketing, sales and service tools, and you can upgrade later without migrating data. That breadth is HubSpot's main advantage: you can run email campaigns, a blog, landing pages, a sales pipeline and a help desk in one place. If you are weighing HubSpot against other CRMs or email tools, we also compare Attio vs HubSpot, Mailchimp vs HubSpot and Ramp vs HubSpot.

Email marketing and automation

Both tools cover the email basics well: a drag-and-drop editor, templates, segmentation, personalisation, automated workflows, A/B tests and reporting. The difference is the data each one is built to act on.

Klaviyo is designed around shopping behaviour. Its flows are triggered by what customers do in your store, such as browsing, adding to cart, buying or going quiet, and Klaviyo highlights pre-built flows for abandoned carts, welcome series, post-purchase messages, back-in-stock alerts and win-backs. Predictive analytics score each customer on lifetime value, churn risk and purchase patterns, and Klaviyo's AI can choose the send time and channel for each person.

HubSpot's email tools are built around CRM records and the lead journey. You personalise emails with contact details such as company, lifecycle stage and list membership, and trigger follow-ups based on opens, clicks and form fills. HubSpot's Professional tier adds advanced automation and a nurture agent that rewrites nurture emails for each contact, and HubSpot also offers multi-touch revenue attribution. That suits businesses that nurture leads towards a sales conversation rather than a checkout.

SMS, WhatsApp and other channels

This is one of the clearest gaps. SMS is a core Klaviyo channel, alongside RCS, WhatsApp and mobile push, all running from the same customer profile. Klaviyo says its SMS is available in many countries, collects marketing and transactional consent separately, and includes a Compliance Hub to help you keep up with messaging rules. Text messaging is billed separately from email, as committed spend that is used up as you send, with rates that vary by message type and country.

HubSpot also offers SMS, but its own product page says SMS for marketers is a paid add-on available only with certain plans, that messages can only be sent from US-based numbers, and that they can only go to numbers with a +1 country code, which covers the US and Canada. HubSpot also lets you connect WhatsApp to reach contacts. If text messaging outside North America matters to you, Klaviyo is the stronger fit today.

HubSpot is broader on the inbound side: forms, landing pages, a blog and website CMS, social publishing, ad management, live chat and chatbots, plus answer engine optimisation tools, currently in beta, that track how your brand shows up in AI search results.

Ecommerce and Shopify

Klaviyo is closely tied to Shopify. Its Shopify page says you can set up your first flows and campaigns inside Shopify Admin, sync customer, product and order data into Klaviyo, collect reviews by email and SMS, and add Customer Hub, a signed-in experience where shoppers can track orders and start returns, which Klaviyo says is in public beta for Shopify stores. Klaviyo also lists native integrations with WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Wix.

HubSpot connects to Shopify through its Shopify data sync app. HubSpot's knowledge base says it is available on all plans and keeps customers, companies, products, orders, abandoned checkouts and discount codes in sync, with some objects flowing only from Shopify to HubSpot and discount codes still in beta. You can then segment and report on that data in HubSpot. It works, but ecommerce is one use case among many for HubSpot, while it is the centre of Klaviyo's product.

CRM, sales and service

If you have a sales team, HubSpot is in a different league. Its CRM manages contacts, companies and deals, and its sales tools cover pipelines, quotes, meeting scheduling, calling, AI meeting recording and transcription, forecasting, an AI prospecting agent that watches for buying signals, and a Revenue Hub for quotes, billing and payments. HubSpot's own pages are full of deal stages and pipeline language, which tells you who it is built for.

Klaviyo does not try to be a sales pipeline tool. Its CRM is about consumer profiles: purchase history, browsing, engagement and predicted value. For service, both platforms now offer a help desk and an AI customer agent, and both say their agents can resolve a large share of routine questions. Klaviyo's Customer Agent focuses on shopper questions such as order tracking, while HubSpot's answers across chat, email, forms and calling using contact and contract history.

AI and agents

Both companies have moved hard into AI agents. Klaviyo's Composer is an AI marketing agent: you describe a goal, and it builds the audience, drafts the content and maps out the send plan for you to approve. Klaviyo says Composer can also run analyses and audits on a schedule. Customer Agent handles service conversations. Klaviyo also offers an MCP server, a Claude connector and a ChatGPT app so outside AI agents can work with your Klaviyo data.

HubSpot's AI is called Breeze. Breeze Assistant works across the platform, Agent Hub is where you manage agents, and agent builder lets you create custom agents from your own prompts and data. Ready-made agents include customer, prospecting, data, content and nurture agents. Many of these run on HubSpot Credits, which are included in paid plans and can be topped up, with spend controls you set. HubSpot also offers connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, which it says need a paid subscription to those assistants.

If you already use an AI assistant at work, both platforms can plug into it. You can browse Claude on Unloc, and see our list of the best AI marketing tools.

Pricing models

The two price in very different ways, and that often decides the choice.

Klaviyo has a free plan with limits on active profiles and email sends, plus a small monthly allowance for mobile messages and Composer. Paid plans are priced mainly by active profiles, meaning the people you can actually reach; Klaviyo says unsubscribed and suppressed contacts do not count. Each tier includes email send capacity, text messaging is a separate committed spend, and service, data and AI agent products are priced on their own. Billing options such as flexible sending and auto downgrade help with seasonal peaks and list clean-ups.

HubSpot has a free CRM with a cap on users, then Starter, Professional and Enterprise plans priced per seat, with higher tiers adding advanced automation, more AI features and admin controls. Paid plans include a monthly allowance of HubSpot Credits for AI agents and features. HubSpot says SMS for marketers is a paid add-on, and its pricing FAQ also covers onboarding, so check whether your plan needs it.

In practice, Klaviyo's cost grows with the size of your reachable audience and how much you text, while HubSpot's grows with the number of people on your team and the tier you need. Plans and prices change, so check the live Klaviyo pricing page and HubSpot pricing page before you decide.

Can you use Klaviyo and HubSpot together?

Yes. Some businesses run HubSpot as their main CRM for sales and Klaviyo for consumer email and SMS. HubSpot's App Marketplace lists a Klaviyo integration that syncs contacts both ways, sends HubSpot events such as deal-stage changes into Klaviyo flows, and shows Klaviyo email activity on the HubSpot contact timeline. The listing says it is built and maintained by KAV Labs, a Klaviyo partner, and needs a separate KAV Labs subscription as well as a Klaviyo plan.

Who should pick which

Pick Klaviyo if:

• You run an online store, especially on Shopify, and most of your marketing revenue comes from email and SMS.
• You want flows triggered by browsing, carts, purchases and predicted churn.
• You text customers outside the US and Canada, or want RCS, WhatsApp and push in the same tool.
• You would rather pay for the audience you reach than for every team member's seat.

Pick HubSpot if:

• You have a sales team working deals, and marketing needs to pass leads to it.
• You want marketing, sales, service, your website and your blog on one CRM.
• Your growth comes from content, forms, landing pages and inbound leads more than from repeat purchases.
• You want to start with a free CRM and add tools as you grow.

Still comparing marketing tools? See Klaviyo vs Mailchimp, Mailchimp vs HubSpot and Attio vs HubSpot, or browse Mailchimp and Attio on Unloc.

FAQ

Is Klaviyo better than HubSpot for ecommerce?

For most online stores, yes. Klaviyo is built around shopping data, with a deep Shopify integration, flows for carts, purchases and win-backs, predictive analytics, and SMS in many countries. HubSpot can sync Shopify data and is a strong choice if your store also has a sales team or B2B customers, but ecommerce is not its main focus.

Is Klaviyo a CRM?

Klaviyo calls itself a B2C CRM. It stores a profile for each customer with their purchases, browsing and engagement, and uses that data for marketing, service and analytics. It is not a sales CRM with deals and pipelines like HubSpot.

Does HubSpot have SMS marketing?

Yes, but HubSpot says SMS for marketers is a paid add-on available only with certain plans, sent from US-based numbers to numbers with a +1 country code. Klaviyo includes SMS as a core channel and supports it in many countries.

Which is cheaper, Klaviyo or HubSpot?

It depends on your business. Both have a free option. Klaviyo charges mainly by active profiles and text messaging spend, so a small team with a large customer list may pay more. HubSpot charges mainly per seat and plan tier, so a large team pays more. Check the live pricing pages for current plans.

Can I connect Klaviyo and HubSpot?

Yes. HubSpot's App Marketplace lists a Klaviyo integration, built by Klaviyo partner KAV Labs, that syncs contacts, events and email engagement between the two. It needs its own subscription on top of your Klaviyo plan.