Klaviyo alternatives for SaaS and subscription businesses (2026)

Strengths

• Objects, not just people. Essentials includes two object types, so accounts, workspaces, and subscriptions are first-class records rather than custom properties bolted onto a shopper profile.
• Channel coverage holds up against what you had: email, SMS through Twilio, Sinch, Infobip, or Vonage since July 2026, mobile and web push, in-app, WhatsApp, and ad-audience sync to Meta and Google. The Agent works over the same surface, creating automations and drafting email with an approval step before it acts.
• If you have raised under $10M, the Startup Program is a full year free, which turns the per-profile meter into a next-year problem rather than a switching cost.

Watch-outs

• It bills per profile, exactly as Klaviyo does. Moving fixes the data model, not the meter: additional profiles run $0.009 each and extra email is $0.12 per thousand on top.
• No permanent free plan. The pricing page puts Essentials at $100/mo to start, and that buys 5,000 profiles and 1 million emails a month before the overage rates apply.
• Closed-source and cloud-only, in a US or EU region, and AI usage is metered on top of the plan: LLM actions bill at $10 per 100,000 credits.

Strengths

• Journeys triggered by what people do: first-party tracking, segments recomputed on every event, and a visual builder with 14 node types across email, SMS, in-app banners and modals and ad audiences, with web push built into the platform. Replies land on the contact's profile and can start a journey.
• Your own AI plugs in over MCP: 59 tools let Claude, Cursor or any MCP client create segments, journeys and templates and read analytics. No tool sends a message, and a journey your AI builds stays a draft until it is published.
• AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable on Postgres + Redis, free; fromHello Cloud publishes a price for every contact tier — you remain the data controller either way.

Watch-outs

• fromHello Cloud is in early access through the waitlist. Every other tool on this page is generally available, and that asymmetry is the main reason to pick one of them instead.
• Nothing here matches Klaviyo on ecommerce: no Shopify-grade order integration, no predicted lifetime value or churn-risk models, no cross-brand benchmarks.
• There are no sign-up forms and no landing pages, so the on-site capture Klaviyo runs needs another home. There is no WhatsApp channel either, and Customer.io, Brevo, and ActiveCampaign all carry one.

Strengths

• The meter changes shape. Brevo bills by monthly email volume rather than by contact, but each volume tier caps the contacts you can store — 500 on the $9 tier, 500,000 from the 20,000-email tier at $32/mo on Starter — so the dormant profiles that pushed your Klaviyo tier up are cheap to keep, not free.
• A real free tier at 300 emails per day, then $9/mo on Starter and $18/mo on Standard. That is the softest landing on this list for a team walking away from a per-profile bill.
• Native SMS to 180+ countries and native WhatsApp campaigns, so the two channels most likely to hold you on Klaviyo survive the move.

Watch-outs

• The ladder has a cliff. Standard is $18/mo and Professional is $499/mo, and features like AI segmentation and the plain-language data analyst sit on Professional and above.
• Brevo's predictive scores — churn risk, customer lifetime value, and purchase count, shipped May 2026 — require ecommerce data, so they do not fill the gap a SaaS leaves behind.
• SMS and WhatsApp are sold as separate credits priced by destination country, and push is gated by tier: web push volume scales with the plan and mobile push sits on Professional and above.

Strengths

• Branching logic goes deeper here than anywhere else on this list, and it ships with a light sales CRM, which matters when the purchase is a demo, a trial, and a signature rather than a checkout.
• Pricing is published rather than calculated: $15/mo at 1,000 contacts on annual billing, with the whole ladder published at that same band — Plus $49/mo, Professional $79/mo, Enterprise $145/mo.
• Ad-audience entitlements for Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok, and Active Intelligence, the AI layer, for content generation, suggested segments, and campaign reporting.

Watch-outs

• SMS and WhatsApp are metered add-ons rather than part of the contact price. If Klaviyo's SMS was load-bearing, this is a packaging downgrade even though the channels exist.
• There is no native push channel, so Klaviyo's mobile push has no ActiveCampaign equivalent without bringing in a separate vendor, and Site messages start at Plus.
• Billing is per contact band with seats layered on top — one seat on Starter and Plus, three on Professional. The unengaged-contact problem you left Klaviyo over arrives under a different name.

Strengths

• Billing counts subscribed contacts only. Someone who signs up, receives transactional email, and never opts into marketing is not on the bill, which is precisely the person Klaviyo's active-profile definition charges for.
• Free to 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends per 30 days, then $49/mo at 5,000 contacts, with sending not metered separately and team seats not charged.
• Goals attach a conversion target to a campaign — contacts whose plan changes to paid within 14 days, for instance — which is what revenue attribution looks like when there is no order to attribute to.

Watch-outs

• Email only: marketing and transactional, no SMS, no push, no in-app, no ad-audience sync. That is a deliberate scope rather than a roadmap gap, and it rules Loops out if any of those matter.
• No predictive scoring, no benchmarks, no ecommerce reporting. You are trading analytical depth for a smaller, faster tool.
• Its AI story points outward: an MCP server with an official Claude connector, a CLI, agent Skills, and content and campaign APIs, so your own agents can drive Loops.