After Klaviyo's February 2025 billing change, thousands of stores are overpaying. Here's the honest breakdown — feature by feature, pound by pound — and when the free alternative beats them both.
Most comparison articles between Klaviyo and GetResponse are written by people who haven't used either for a real Shopify store — or were written before Klaviyo's billing changed in February 2025. This one is different.
In February 2025, Klaviyo changed how it counts billable contacts. Previously, only emailed contacts counted toward your plan limit. Now, all active profiles — including customers who have never opened an email, anyone who placed an order, and anyone who abandoned a cart — count toward your monthly bill. For most stores, this added 20–40% to their Klaviyo invoice overnight without a single new subscriber.
That billing change is the reason this comparison matters in 2026. The question is no longer "Klaviyo vs GetResponse on features" — it's "does Klaviyo's genuine advantage over GetResponse justify the new price gap, for your specific store?"
Before comparing features, let's establish what each platform actually costs at common Shopify store sizes. The numbers below use each platform's published pricing as of March 2026.
| Contacts | Klaviyo/mo | GetResponse/mo | Annual gap | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 250 / 500 sends | 500 contacts | — | GetResponse |
| 1,000 | $45 | $19 | $312/yr saved | GetResponse |
| 5,000 | $100 | $29 | $852/yr saved | GetResponse |
| 10,000 | $150 | $54 | $1,152/yr saved | GetResponse |
| 25,000 | $230 | $79 | $1,812/yr saved | GetResponse |
| 50,000 | $375 | $139 | $2,832/yr saved | GetResponse |
| 100,000 | $700 | $174 | $6,312/yr saved | GetResponse |
Klaviyo pricing post February 2025 billing change. GetResponse Email Marketing plan. Prices correct March 2026 — verify at each provider before purchasing.
If your Klaviyo bill increased unexpectedly in early 2025, this is why. All active profiles now count toward your plan limit, not just contacts you actively email. If you've been running Shopify for more than a year, your "active profile" count is almost certainly significantly higher than your engaged subscriber count. Check your Klaviyo billing page — the number there is likely not what you expect.
GetResponse is cheaper at every tier — significantly so. The $852 annual saving at 5,000 contacts is enough to fund an AdCreative.ai subscription for seven months, or absorb a significant increase in your Meta ad spend. The cost gap alone is a legitimate reason to evaluate switching.
But price is not the whole story. Klaviyo charges more because it does more — in certain specific categories. The question is whether those categories matter for your store.
Rather than listing every checkbox, this comparison focuses on the features that actually affect revenue for a Shopify DTC operator running Meta and Google ads, trying to grow their email list, and managing 500–50,000 contacts.
| Feature | Klaviyo | GetResponse | Systeme.io | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Predictive CLV / churn | ✓ Native | ✗ | ✗ | Klaviyo |
| Browse abandonment | ✓ Pixel-based | ✗ | ✗ | Klaviyo |
| Product-level segmentation | ✓ Deep | Partial | Basic | Klaviyo |
| Customer Hub | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Klaviyo |
| Abandoned cart email | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Tie |
| Welcome series | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Tie |
| Post-purchase flow | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Tie |
| Win-back sequences | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Tie |
| Visual flow builder | ✓ Advanced | ✓ Good | ✓ Basic | Klaviyo edge |
| AI email copy | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Built-in | ✗ | Tie |
| A/B testing | ✓ Advanced | ✓ Good | Basic | Klaviyo edge |
| SMS marketing | ✓ Native | ✓ Native | ✗ | Tie |
| Landing pages | Basic | ✓ Full builder | ✓ Full builder | GetResponse |
| Webinar hosting | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | GetResponse |
| Sales funnels | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Full | GetResponse / Systeme |
| Affiliate management | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | Systeme |
| Course hosting | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | Systeme |
| CRM | Email-focused | Basic | ✓ Full CRM | Systeme |
Feature assessment based on published capabilities March 2026. Verify specific plan inclusions before purchasing.
The four features where Klaviyo genuinely leads — predictive analytics, browse abandonment, deep product segmentation, and Customer Hub — are all high-value for stores with complex product ranges and high order volumes. For stores under £100k/month GMV, these features often go unused entirely, meaning those stores are paying a significant premium for capabilities that don't affect their revenue.
Klaviyo's native Shopify integration is genuinely more sophisticated than GetResponse's. This is not marketing — it is a real technical advantage that affects certain use cases meaningfully.
Klaviyo's pixel tracks on-site behaviour — what products a visitor viewed, what they added to cart, what they browsed across multiple sessions. This powers browse abandonment flows: automated emails sent when someone views a product page but doesn't purchase. For stores where browse abandonment is a material revenue driver, this is Klaviyo's single most defensible advantage.
Klaviyo also pulls SKU-level order data into its segmentation engine natively. You can create a segment of "customers who bought product X but not product Y in the last 90 days" and target them with a cross-sell flow. GetResponse connects to Shopify but its segmentation operates at the order level, not the product level.
GetResponse connects to Shopify via its native integration and captures: order placed, order paid, order fulfilled, customer created, and cart abandoned. These triggers power the core email automations that drive the majority of eCommerce email revenue — welcome sequences, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase flows, and win-back sequences.
For most stores under £150k/month GMV, cart abandonment recovery, post-purchase sequences, and welcome flows account for over 80% of email-attributed revenue. All of these work in GetResponse. The gap between Klaviyo and GetResponse's integrations is real — but it only materially affects stores sophisticated enough to be actively using browse abandonment and product-level segmentation.
If your Klaviyo account shows browse abandonment flows generating more than £2,000/month in attributed revenue — stay on Klaviyo. If your browse abandonment flow is either disabled, unconfigured, or generating under £500/month, you are paying a premium for a feature you're not extracting value from. GetResponse covers everything else you're using.
Email automation accounts for the majority of revenue attributed to email marketing in DTC eCommerce. The three flows that typically drive 70–85% of email revenue are: abandoned cart recovery, welcome series (first purchase incentive), and post-purchase sequences.
Both Klaviyo and GetResponse support multi-step abandoned cart sequences triggered by Shopify's checkout abandonment webhook. The typical high-performing sequence is: email 1 at 1 hour (reminder + social proof), email 2 at 24 hours (overcome objections), email 3 at 72 hours (urgency or discount). Both platforms support this structure and both allow conditional splits based on cart value.
Klaviyo's advantage here is product-level personalisation within the cart email — showing the exact product image and details from the abandoned cart with one-click Shopify integration. GetResponse requires a manual Liquid template or a third-party connection to achieve the same. For most stores, the revenue impact of this difference is minimal; the send timing and subject line matter far more than the template sophistication.
Both platforms deliver strong welcome series functionality. The typical high-performing welcome sequence (brand story, social proof, first purchase incentive, FAQ/objection handling) works identically in both builders. GetResponse's visual workflow builder is genuinely good — less sophisticated than Klaviyo's but sufficient for all welcome series use cases in stores under £500k/month GMV.
Post-purchase flows — review request, upsell/cross-sell, loyalty prompt — work identically in both platforms. The trigger (order fulfilled) fires from Shopify to both systems reliably. GetResponse's conditional logic handles standard post-purchase branching without limitation.
Win-back flows targeting lapsed purchasers work in both platforms. Klaviyo's predictive analytics can predict which customers are likely to churn before they lapse, allowing earlier intervention. GetResponse uses standard time-based triggers. For most stores, the time-based approach performs adequately — the predictive advantage is meaningful only when you have sufficient data volume (typically 10,000+ historical orders).
Run the free audit first — find exactly what you're paying for before deciding.
Klaviyo is not overpriced for the stores it is built for. The premium is justified — but only for a specific profile of Shopify operation.
GetResponse is not a compromise. For the majority of Shopify stores, it is a better fit than Klaviyo — not just cheaper, but better aligned to what those stores actually need from an email platform.
There is a third option that most comparison articles never mention: Systeme.io's permanently free plan, which supports 2,000 contacts and unlimited email sends. For a significant proportion of Shopify stores, this is the correct answer — not Klaviyo, not GetResponse.
Systeme.io is not a stripped-down trial. The free plan includes: 2,000 contacts, unlimited email sends, full automation workflows (welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase), sales funnels, a CRM, course hosting, and affiliate programme management. It has been free since 2018 and continues to be the most feature-complete free plan in the email marketing space.
Every "free Klaviyo alternative" article recommends Omnisend (250 contacts), Mailchimp (500 contacts, send-limited), or Brevo (300 emails/day cap). None of these are genuinely functional for a Shopify store with any real email volume. Systeme.io provides 2,000 contacts and unlimited sends permanently — covering the full email marketing needs of any store under that contact threshold. If you have under 2,000 active contacts, you should not be paying for email marketing at all. See the full Klaviyo replacement guide.
The migration process is the same whether you're moving to GetResponse or Systeme.io. It requires roughly 2–4 hours depending on the number of automation flows you're running.
In Klaviyo: Analytics → Profiles → Export → Select All Properties. Export as CSV. Include suppressed contacts in a separate export if you want to maintain an unsubscribe list.
Screenshot or export the logic of each active automation in Klaviyo — the triggers, conditions, wait times, and email content. Priority order: abandoned cart → welcome series → post-purchase → win-back.
Connect Shopify to your new platform via the native integration. Rebuild your automation flows in the new workflow builder — start with abandoned cart, then welcome series, then post-purchase. Test each flow with a test order before going live.
Keep Klaviyo active but pause its automations. Run the new platform's flows. After 14 days of confirmed delivery and tracking, cancel your Klaviyo subscription. Do not cancel until you have verified your new automations are firing correctly.
The most common migration mistake is cancelling Klaviyo before verifying the new platform's automations are firing. Run both in parallel for at minimum 2 weeks and confirm you're seeing abandoned cart emails, welcome emails, and post-purchase emails in your new platform's delivery logs before cancelling.
Including Systeme.io workflow screenshots, field mapping reference, and abandoned cart setup — all on the free plan.
There is no single correct answer to "Klaviyo vs GetResponse" — the right choice depends on your specific store's size, sophistication, and which features you're actually using.
| Store profile | GMV / month | Recommended | Monthly cost | Annual saving vs Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early stage, under 2k contacts | Under £20k | Systeme.io free | $0 | Full Klaviyo cost saved |
| Growth stage, no browse abandonment | £20k–£100k | GetResponse | $29–$79 | $852–$1,812/yr |
| Growth stage, with browse abandonment | £50k–£150k | Klaviyo | $100–$230 | — |
| Scale stage, advanced segmentation active | £150k+ | Klaviyo | $230–$700+ | — |
| Content / affiliate operator (not a store) | Any | GetResponse | $19–$79 | Best affiliate terms |
Klaviyo is the best email platform for Shopify when you're actively using its advanced features. It is expensive for what most stores use it for. GetResponse delivers 80–90% of Klaviyo's practical value at 30–40% of the cost. Systeme.io delivers the core flows at $0 for stores under 2,000 contacts. The correct answer for your store is probably one tier below whatever you're currently paying for.
For stores not actively using Klaviyo's predictive segmentation or browse abandonment, GetResponse delivers equivalent email automation at 60–70% lower cost. GetResponse starts at $19/month; Klaviyo charges $100/month at 5,000 contacts. For stores under 2,000 contacts willing to go fully free, Systeme.io replaces both at $0/month.
After Klaviyo's February 2025 billing change, all active contacts are charged regardless of email activity. At 5,000 contacts: approximately $100/month. At 15,000 contacts: approximately $175/month. At 50,000 contacts: approximately $375–$400/month. Contact counts have effectively increased 20–40% for most stores due to the new active profile definition.
Yes. Export your Klaviyo contacts as CSV with all custom properties, import into GetResponse, and rebuild your automation sequences using GetResponse's visual workflow builder. The core flows — welcome sequence, abandoned cart, post-purchase — are all supported. The migration takes 2–4 hours. Run both platforms in parallel for 2 weeks before cancelling Klaviyo.
Klaviyo's genuine advantages: predictive CLV and churn probability analytics, browse abandonment flows (requires Klaviyo's on-site pixel), deep Shopify native integration with product-level segmentation, and the Customer Hub for post-purchase retention. For stores spending £100k+/month GMV where these features actively generate revenue, Klaviyo's cost is justifiable.
Yes. GetResponse has a native Shopify integration that captures: order placed, order paid, order fulfilled, customer created, and cart abandoned events. This covers all core eCommerce email automation triggers. The integration does not support browse abandonment (which requires Klaviyo's on-site pixel) or SKU-level product segmentation.
Yes — permanently free, not a time-limited trial. Systeme.io's free plan supports 2,000 contacts with unlimited email sends, full automation workflows, sales funnels, a CRM, and affiliate programme management. It has been free since 2018. See the full Klaviyo replacement guide for the migration walkthrough.