Klaviyo vs HubSpot for a Shopify brand: which one fits how you sell

Ask who closes the sale, then pick the tool

Here's the quick version. If your revenue comes through a checkout, with no human involved, Klaviyo fits the way you sell. If it comes through people, with quotes, calls and a pipeline, HubSpot does.

Most Shopify brands are firmly in the first camp. Some aren't. The ones with a trade arm, a wholesale team or big corporate orders often live in both, and that's where this question gets interesting.

We're a Klaviyo partner, so weigh this accordingly

We're an official Klaviyo partner. We benefit when brands pick it, and you should read every line below knowing that.

So here's the bit that costs us something. HubSpot is a very good product. For a business that sells through a sales team, it's the better choice, and we'd tell you that on a call. We just don't think most direct to consumer brands are that business.

A deal pipeline on one side, a shop's event stream on the other

Start with what each one was made to hold. HubSpot started as inbound marketing and grew into a full CRM: contacts, companies, deals, a sales pipeline and a service desk. Klaviyo started with online shops, and everything in it hangs off a profile and the events attached to it.

Both are honest descriptions. The trouble starts when a shop picks the tool built for a pipeline, then spends a year trying to make it think like a till.

What actually arrives in HubSpot from your Shopify store

HubSpot's own Shopify app is decent. According to HubSpot's Shopify integration guide, customers, products and companies sync both ways, while orders and abandoned checkouts come across from Shopify as order and cart records.

• Product variants don't sync, so a segment on size or colour needs a workaround
• Shopify metafields aren't supported by the sync app
• Custom field mapping needs a paid Data Hub tier
• Changes can take a few minutes to arrive, which is fine for a pipeline and slow for a cart email
• Product browsing isn't part of the sync at all

That last one matters most. HubSpot's tracking code records page views, and you can build on that. But the data a shop lives on is which product someone looked at, what it cost and what they did next. Klaviyo's Shopify data reference lists checkouts, orders, ordered products and fulfilments, with product views tracked on site on top.

Flows that react to what somebody just did in your shop

This is where the gap shows. A browse email, a cart reminder, a replenishment nudge and a winback all hang off something a customer did, or stopped doing. In Klaviyo each of those is a trigger you pick from a menu.

Every row there runs off a shop event: a sign up, a checkout, a viewed product, a fulfilment, an order. You can build some of it in HubSpot. You'll be building it by hand, and maintaining it by hand, and that's what most brands underestimate. The flow library is the full set we'd expect a shop to run.

Where HubSpot is honestly the better buy

We get it, some of you aren't pure direct to consumer. If any of these sound like your week, HubSpot earns its place.

• A sales team that works leads, books calls and sends quotes
• Trade or wholesale accounts where the buyer is a company, not a person
• Long buying cycles with several people signing off
• A service desk that needs the same record as sales
• Content and lead forms doing more work than the checkout

None of that is Klaviyo's job, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. A brand with a real B2B side that forces it all through an ecommerce email tool ends up with deals in a spreadsheet. That's worse.

Both charge for people, just counted differently

No prices here, they change too often. The shape matters more. HubSpot bills on marketing contacts, the ones you've flagged to market to, and you can store everyone else without paying for them.

Klaviyo bills on active profiles, anyone you're able to email, and suppressed profiles drop out of the count. Either way, a list full of people who never open costs you money. Clean it before you compare quotes.

When the answer is both, and how they talk to each other

Plenty of brands with a trade side end up here. HubSpot runs the pipeline, Klaviyo runs the shop email. Partner-built apps on HubSpot's marketplace pass contacts and deal changes into Klaviyo, and email engagement back onto the HubSpot record.

1. Decide which system owns the customer record, and write it down
2. Send consumer marketing from Klaviyo only, so nobody gets emailed twice
3. Keep trade buyers out of consumer flows with one clear property
4. Pass purchases to HubSpot so sales can see them before a call
5. Check the sync monthly, because a sync can break without telling anyone

Two tools is more to look after. But it beats one tool doing a job it was never built for. If you want a hand with the Klaviyo side, here's what we do inside Klaviyo.