Klaviyo vs Mailchimp automations

The same series, a different object

A welcome email, a cart reminder, and a note after the purchase are not unique to either product. Mailchimp’s automation-flow help and its Shopify triggers cover a signup, an abandoned cart, an abandoned checkout, an abandoned browse, and a purchase. Klaviyo’s flow library covers the same moments with welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post-purchase templates. Once a store is connected and the message is turned on, both products can send the reminder.

The difference that changes a review is what the automation is made of. In Klaviyo a flow is a trigger plus filters, and each message has its own status. In Mailchimp an automation flow is a map of triggers, rules, and actions, and the map has one status. A draft you have not activated sends nothing in both. This page is about those automations. It leaves out prices for either platform, because the price does not tell you whether the second cart email still sends after the person has ordered.

What puts someone into the automation

Klaviyo starts a flow from a metric, a list, or a segment. The store events are metrics. Checkout is Started Checkout in the current abandoned-cart article and Checkout Started in the Shopify data reference. A product view is Viewed Product. A purchase is Placed Order. A welcome series starts when someone is added to the list you selected. A sunset starts when someone is added to a segment. The metric has to be the one the account is receiving. A flow pointed at an idle metric looks finished and sends nothing.

Mailchimp starts an automation flow from a trigger. The article is specific: triggers apply only to actions or events that happen after the flow is activated. A cart abandoned last month does not walk into a map you turn on today. On Standard or higher you can add up to 3 triggers, with up to 5 filters on a trigger. An abandoned-cart trigger cannot be combined with another trigger. Someone who abandons a cart and someone who buys a product are two maps, not two doors into one map. In Klaviyo those are also two flows, and a profile filter keeps a buyer out of the cart series.

Mailchimp’s Shopify triggers, on the current integration, include abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, abandoned browse, product views, adds to cart, and checkout actions. Browse abandonment is a Mailchimp trigger as well as a Klaviyo metric. Mailchimp also lists predictive triggers, including customer churn risk and the time until a predicted purchase. Klaviyo’s winback article uses prediction more narrowly: if the account qualifies, you export Average Time Between Orders and set the first delay from that number. A store on either product can start from a browse, a cart, or a purchase. The setup you have to open is the trigger that is actually receiving people.

What stops the next email after they buy

Klaviyo’s abandoned-cart filter is Placed Order zero times since starting this flow. Profile filters are checked when the person enters and again before each email or SMS. Trigger filters on a metric flow are checked at entry and are not checked again at send time. A person who fails a profile filter stays in the flow and moves to the next step, where the filter is checked again. For this filter, a buyer keeps failing it, so the later emails are skipped. Klaviyo says a large skipped count for failing profile filters is expected on this flow. Browse uses the same idea for Started Checkout, and winback uses it for a newer Placed Order.

Mailchimp’s abandoned-cart article states a different default. Any contact who abandons a cart can receive the abandoned-cart email or SMS. If you add further Send email or Send SMS steps, only subscribed contacts receive those. Unsubscribed or non-subscribed contacts continue through the flow and do not get the later messages. That is a consent rule on later steps. It is not the same rule as “skip the rest because they placed the order.” A purchase can be an exit condition or a filter you add on the map. The abandoned-cart article does not install “placed an order since starting” the way Klaviyo’s cart article does. Open the exit condition before you treat the two series as equivalent.

Separate triggers also do not, by themselves, cancel one series when the person moves to the next step. Mailchimp keeps abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, and abandoned browse as different Shopify triggers. Klaviyo keeps Added to Cart, the checkout metric, and Viewed Product as different flows. In both products, a person can qualify for two of them unless the flow you are looking at says they should not. On the Klaviyo side that sentence is a profile filter. On the Mailchimp side it is a filter, a wait, or an exit you have to find on that map.

One status for the map, or a status on each message

Mailchimp shows one label for the automation flow. Draft has not started. Active is live, and contacts move as they meet the conditions. Paused adds nobody, and people already in the flow do not move until you set it active again. The article says that to edit an active flow, you pause it first. A pause stops the whole map, including someone who was waiting on a delay.

Klaviyo does not use one switch. Each message is draft, manual, or live. Draft schedules nobody. If every message is draft, nobody enters until at least one is live or manual. Manual holds that send for a person to review. A later live message can still go out while the manual one sits in Needs Review. Live sends when the delay is up. Setting one message back to draft skips it, and the person continues. They do not appear in that draft message’s analytics. Review and turn on, or Update status, can set the configured actions live together. Unconfigured actions stay draft. The change applies when you save.

You can fix one Klaviyo email while the messages you have already approved keep sending. You can also leave a draft in the middle of a series that looks live from the list of flows. An audit that does not open every message card will miss it. A Mailchimp flow that is paused is silent on every step, including the people who were already waiting. A Klaviyo flow that is “on” can still be silent on the one email you care about.

How long the series is allowed to be

Mailchimp’s automation-flow article ties length and branching to the plan. You can add up to 4 steps on Essentials or higher, and up to 200 steps on Standard or higher. A conditional split, which sends people down one of two paths based on up to 5 conditions, is on Standard or higher. A percentage split is on Standard or higher. A flow can include up to 10 wait-for-trigger rules. A webhook action is on Standard or higher. SMS is an add-on on Standard or higher, and the flow needs an approved SMS program. Those numbers limit the map you are allowed to build. They are not a recommendation for how many cart emails to send.

Klaviyo’s published recommendation is short even where the builder will accept more messages. The frequency chart marks one browse email, at 2 hours. It marks two cart emails, at 4 hours and 1 day, while the cart article says 2 or 3 messages perform best and gives a first delay of about 2 to 4 hours and a second 20 to 48 hours later. The welcome chart marks two sends, immediately and at 4 days, while the welcome article’s pre-built series is three emails: immediately, 3 days later, and 4 days after that. Post-purchase is marked immediately, at 3 days, and at 1 week. Winback is marked at 2 months and 3 months, while the winback article recommends three emails and a first delay a little longer than the buying cycle. Sunset is marked at 1 day, 1 week, and 2 weeks, and the sunset article says 1 to 3 emails and not more than 3.

A longer Klaviyo flow is a choice you make in the builder, not a plan upgrade from four steps to two hundred. The control Klaviyo puts on frequency inside the message is Smart Sending. Email defaults to 16 hours. SMS and push default to 24 hours. The windows are separate. A message skipped for Smart Sending is not rescheduled when the window ends. Some pre-built flows turn that skip off on a particular message, so the checkbox has to be read on the message you are auditing.

The product in the email

Klaviyo’s pre-built cart email repeats once per item from the triggering event. For Shopify, the link back to that checkout is {{ event.extra.checkout_url }}. The browse email is a different block. It is static, and it is filled from the Viewed Product event: the image from event.ImageURL, the name from {{ event.Name }}, the price from {{ event.Price }}, and the product page from {{ event.URL }}. Copying the cart block into the browse flow is a known way to wipe the tags, because changing the block from dynamic to static clears them. Preview against a real event from the account. If the preview lists no events, the metric has no payload yet. Create one before you approve the template.

Mailchimp’s abandoned-cart article says the email builder adds a cart content block, and a button to that contact’s cart, for you. That is the same job, done with Mailchimp’s block, on a connected store. The blocks do not share tags. A Klaviyo tag pasted into a Mailchimp email will not render, and a Mailchimp cart block is not event.extra.line_items. Rebuild the block in the product that will send it, and preview it there. Klaviyo’s item tags are not even stable across Klaviyo’s own articles: one shows {{ event.extra.line_items.0.title }}, another shows {{ event.extra.line_items.0.product.name }}. Use the tag the preview resolves.

People who already qualified

Mailchimp’s trigger rule means the map does not pick up events from before it was activated. Turning on an abandoned-cart flow today does not email last year’s checkouts. The article also does not describe a control that places historical buyers onto the delay they would have occupied.

Klaviyo can add past profiles. On a metric flow they are placed by when the event happened, which requires at least one time delay, and only live or manual actions are queued. Draft messages are not. Re-entry rules are not checked for that add. People who already skipped a message are not scheduled for that same message again, but they can be scheduled for a message you added later. On a sunset segment, people already in the segment do not enter until you add them. Adding them throughout the flow can skip the earlier emails. The control is how a new series reaches people who qualified before it existed. It is also how an unfinished message becomes a send to a whole list or a year of checkouts. Finish the filter and set the status you intend before you use it.

What you can compare from a Klaviyo account

On a Mailchimp account, the check is the flow’s single status, whether the cart trigger sits alone on the map, whether a purchase is an exit, and whether the plan’s step limit cut the series short. Classic automations, if the account still has them, are a second list on the same automations page. KlavyFlow does not connect to Mailchimp, and it cannot show that map.

On a Klaviyo account, the same questions are the metric or list, the filter, the delay, and which messages are live. KlavyFlow reads the account after a Klaviyo connection and places the messages on a day-by-day timeline with the creative. It does not edit the flow or send the mail. Flow performance stays a separate view, for 7, 30, or 90 complete account-local days, and a missing observation stays unavailable. The timeline shows whether the delays published for these templates are the delays in that client workspace. One brand’s campaign totals are not a stand-in for another brand’s flow.