Gist Comparison with

Klaviyo

• Intercom
• MailChimp
• Zendesk
• Hubspot
• Keap (Formerly Infusionsoft)
• ActiveCampaign
• FreshWorks
• Klaviyo
• ConvertKit
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• Drip
• Drift
• Olark
• Calendly

Email Marketing

Klaviyo is primarily an email marketing tool that is heavily geared towards e-commerce marketers.

Particularly Shopify store owners.

Every feature they have is made to compliment their email tool and help e-commerce shops better segment and sell to their email lists.

This subset, niche market makes it difficult to directly compare Klaviyo with Gist.

Klaviyo even targets themselves as a “Marketing Automation & Email Platform for Ecommerce”.

Gist’s target market is open to businesses of all types and sizes who want to automate the marketing and sales process while also having support options to encompass the full spectrum of business services.

In terms of the email product itself (automation is another category), Klaviyo caters well to visual emails.

Emails with colorful backgrounds and great images are easy to create with Klaviyo and, frankly, and advantage over Gist.

Of course, the majority of businesses prefer plain text emails to their lists and customers.

They’re better for spam filters and relay a more personalized attitude.

That said, for e-commerce shops (especially on Shopify), Klaviyo is a solid solution for email.

The ability to track sales based on email is a cool feature that can be used by anyone who sells online.

Winner: Gist (Barely)

If you’re only looking for email and have a shopify store, it’s Klaviyo all the way. But for most other businesses, Gist offers way more for a better price.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a broad topic that ranges from the ability to trigger an email campaign for new users all the way to trigger ad campaigns and notifications to visitors on your website.

Gist’s marketing automations are heavily based on email marketing, as are Klaviyo’s.

Where Klaviyo takes the advantage are their automations based on sold goods. It’s a really intricate system that allows users to target based on the price of a good, abandoned carts and other e-commerce type use cases.

Gist offers many of the same abilities, but doesn’t have the capability for these sales-specific options yet. That said, we are working to release automations like these very soon.

Winner: Klaviyo

If you sell things online, especially e-commerce shops, Klaviyo has the better automation tool.

Chat

Having live chat on your business site is fast-becoming a non-negotiable sales and marketing tool for businesses. Having multiple channels for those conversations to continue is also important.

This is why live chat and email are both features in our all-in-one solution.

Gist’s Live Chat can also help business owners:

• Collect contact data, like emails
• Get more leads on the phone (with our meeting tool)
• Turn client problems around with little to no time

Klaviyo doesn’t offer live chat as one of their services.

Winner: Gist

Without a comparable tool from Klaviyo, the win for this category of our comparison goes to Gist.

Help Desk

In addition to marketing and sales, the support a company offers is an integral part of retaining customers and even the growth of a company.

Gist’s Help Desk allows our users to:

• Communicate with customers
• Organize team members
• Handle customer tickets quickly

There is no similar function available from Klaviyo to help your current customers with their support issues.

Winner: Gist

Without a comparable tool from Klaviyo, the win for this category of our comparison goes to Gist.

Knowledge Base

For those who get similar questions from their users and customers, a knowledge base is a great way to reduce the support burden.

Having a knowledge base helps businesses;

• Relay complex features or processes using text, video and images
• Create a library of common issues your customers have to help them find a solution quickly
• Enable support reps to quickly direct customers to the right article and fix their problem

Gist’s Knowledge Base tools allows anyone to create a beautiful, searchable database of content.

Klaviyo does not offer a knowledge base solution.

Winner: Gist

Without a comparable tool from Klaviyo, the win for this category of our comparison goes to Gist.

Chat Bots

Chat bots are a growing tool in marketing, sales and support. It’s also really simple using Gist’s bot creation tool.

Nights and weekends, when you and your team isn’t at work, bots:

• Collect data to grow your list
• Asking questions to see if visitors could be potential customers
• Explain commonly asked questions in an interactive style

Creating bots with Gist is easy (no coding required).

Klaviyo does not offer a chat bot tool.

Winner: Gist

Without a comparable tool from Klaviyo, the win for this category of our comparison goes to Gist.

Meetings

A Meeting Scheduler allows you to hook up your online calendar (in Gist’s case, we sync with Google Calendar). Then, set your availability and get a custom link to send to prospects and book meetings.

These links can be distributed anywhere from emails, to live chats and bots. Schedulers help:

• Book more sales calls with leads
• Get demos setup
• Schedule calls visitors

Klaviyo does not offer a meeting tool.

Winner: Gist

Without a comparable tool from Klaviyo, the win for this category of our comparison goes to Gist.

Event Tracking

Klaviyo does offer some forms of event tracking, that are geared towards e-commerce shops.

You can augment these events to a degree.

That said, Gist offers a robust event tracking tool that allows users to:

• Create custom events based on a number of different interactions with your site/app/emails
• See the full history of all of your site visitors
• Use these events to trigger automations and workflows

Again, if you’re only looking for an email and automation tool for e-commerce (with no support or direct sales options), Klaviyo would be a decent option.

Winner: Gist

Going to give the event tracking to Gist. Our tool is geared toward more site owners and a bit more comprehensive.

Forms

Gist offers a lightweight form creator with 6 pre-set types of forms.

Klaviyo has a highly visual and customizable form creator that allows users to publish just about any “look” they desire to collect contact data.

These options give Klaviyo a good-sized advantage over Gist’s form creator.

Gist does win a little back with our display conditions.

There are multiple types of conditions you can set.

• Visitors from certain locations (either geographic or from specific URLs)
• Timing (either in seconds or percentage of page)
• Specific pages (like a particular blog or the pricing page)

Winner: Klaviyo

Klaviyo has the better form creator and wins this section of the comparison.

Pricing

Klaviyo and Gist both strive for simplistic pricing in a sea of confusing cost models in the marketing and sales software space.

Klaviyo is strictly based on list size and they even have a free plan (for up to 250 on the list). While you (seemingly) have all of the features, you can only send up to 500 emails.

Also, Klaviyo’s branding is on the email and double opt-in is required.

For a list up to 2500, it’s $70/mo and at 3,000 subscribers it bumps up to $100/mo.

Gist’s pricing is based mainly on feature distribution and a bit on subscriber count.

Free

Our free plan rivals many paid plans from competitors. Really. Here’s what you get:

• Live Chat
• Email Marketing (up to 500 contacts)
• Forms
• Meeting Scheduler
• Unlimited Pages, Chats and Visits
• Customization
• Drip Campaigns
• And up to 2 Users!

Free forever.

Growth (starts at $24.99/mo)

Growth gets you everything in the free plan and up to 1000 contacts. It also opens up our marketing automation and visual workflows.

In addition to all the free features, the Growth Plan includes:

• 1000 Contacts
• Automation Rules
• Workflow Builder
• Behavioral Emails
• Event Tracking
• Re-Send to Unopens
• Email Scheduling
• Reporting

Support ($9/mo per user)

This plan also includes everything in the free version. In addition to those free tools, you’ll also get:

• Knowledge Base
• Chat bots (and snippets
• Insert those KB articles into chat
• Team Inboxes for Chat
• Routing Rules
• Office Hours
• Reporting

The All-in-One (Based on number of contacts and number of users)

With our “All-in-One Plan”, you get everything. And the pricing is $9 per user plus the Growth Plan price, based on the number of contacts you have.

So, if you have fewer than 1000 contacts and 2 users, the price would be $24.99 + $18 = 42.99.

It’s really some of the most affordable pricing on the market. The power of 8 tools for the price of 1 (with more coming soon).

Winner: Gist

When you add the support and sales tools and take a look at the pricing, it’s clear Gist is the better value.

Summary

Klaviyo is a popular and powerful email and automation tool for e-commerce stores — particularly Shopify store owners.

Gist is an all-in-one platform for the marketing, sales and support processes. Our tools encompass more capabilities for a broader set of businesses.

Winner: Gist

The overall win goes to Gist for the number of products we have and the price when compared with Klaviyo.

Interested in switching from Klaviyo to Gist? Here’s a guide for migrating specifically from Klaviyo.