If you’re still using Mailchimp for your email marketing, you’re probably paying more than you should for results that are worse than they need to be.

Mailchimp made sense a decade or more ago. It was easy. It was cheap. Everyone was doing it.

But if you’re running a real business now? One with revenue targets, repeat customers, and marketing goals beyond “just send a newsletter”? You’ve already outgrown it; you just didn’t know it.

What Mailchimp Was—and What It’s Become

Mailchimp was built for small businesses that needed simple emails fast. And in the early 2000s, it was good at that. Actually, the best.

But then they just kind of stopped. They decided to focus on landing page builders, website builders, and a whole bunch of other stuff that people didn’t even want. In the meantime, other competitors showed up and showed out, surpassing the existing capabilities of MailChimp and easily surpassing them.

Fast forward quite a few years later and they were acquired by Intuit, which brought price hikes and feature removals. Because now they’re publicly traded and profits are king.

Today, Mailchimp is still an overly buggy software wrapped in an outdated interface, held together by a confused automation system that barely competes with tools half its age.

Klaviyo: Built for Growth from Day One

During MailChimp’s experimental college phase, that’s when Klaviyo arrived. It was built for e-commerce businesses that care about customer data, lifetime value, and scalable automations from Day 1.

It launched doing one thing and one thing only: email marketing.

• Its email builder rivaled MailChimp’s but with a faster interface
• Its segment builder was way more sophisticated and faster at the same time
• The e-commerce integrations were (and are) so in-depth that you can trigger off products, collections, categories, prices, or any combination of them all

And unlike Mailchimp, Klaviyo gives you all their features for free. You only have to pay once you’ve reached a certain number of contacts. You don’t have to upgrade three times just to use basic features for very small lists.

Why People are Migrating from MailChimp to Klaviyo

If it wasn’t pretty obvious already, here are some more specific reasons why people are migrating from MailChimp to Klaviyo.

1. Mailchimp keeps raising prices and removing features

They’ve gutted automations from lower-tier plans. Most recently, they’ve discontinued their “Classic Automation” builder for people still on the free plan, which was arguably still better than the Customer Journey Builder, 5 years after launch.

What Klaviyo does better: You pay based on your list size and usage. Every plan includes full access to powerful automations, real-time data, and revenue reporting. You won’t get the bait and switch. (Of course, they do raise prices as market dictates, but they don’t remove features.)

2. The interface is slow and buggy

Click. Wait. Click again. Wait longer.

Can’t remember which conditional branch you just added? Repeat clicking and waiting.

And just when you’re ready to publish a campaign, the system times out. Before MailChimp had our Facebook user group shut down (the largest on all of Facebook), this was a complaint we’d see weekly.

What Klaviyo does better: The UI is also a drag-and-drop builder like MailChimp, but doesn’t take forever and a decade to load. In all the years and all the clients I’ve worked with, I’ve never had the interface crash and make me start over.

3. People regularly have login issues

Search X (“Twitter”). Ask around. “Why can’t I log into Mailchimp today?”. It’s a real thing.

What Klaviyo does better: Simple access. No random timeouts. Multi-user management that meets 21st Century standards.

4. The Customer Journey builder isn’t what they want you to think it is

It looks pretty. It sounds great. They claim it’s “new and innovative”, but it’s not even as good as Klaviyo’s flow builder when it was first launched.

On top of that, it’s missing basic logic like removing a customer from a journey after they convert. Instead you have to add conditional logic branches before each “next step” to see if the user has taken the action you want. Ironically, the more conditional logic branches you add, the slower the interface. The more advanced you want your Customer Journeys, the more complicated and number of workarounds you need.

What Klaviyo does better: Visual Flows that allow:

• Goal exits
• Conditional splits
• Multi-step logic based on real behavior
• Re-entry rules and smart suppression

No duct tape required.

5. It doesn’t collect or use enough data

Up until recently, if you used Woocommerce as your e-commerce platform, you weren’t able to target or use “product category” with Mailchimp. Want to target specific abandoned carts by cart value? Items in the cart? If the person was a repeat buyer or new customer?

No.

Want to send a targeted campaign to high-LTV customers who bought twice but didn’t come back in 60 days? You need to know the platform inside and out to get this to work.

What Klaviyo does better: Real-time sync with your eComm store. Custom properties. Predictive analytics. You can segment down to “has viewed this product more than three times but hasn’t purchased.”

That’s actual marketing power. (And we’re not even talking about their B2C CRM add-on.)

The Migration: What It Takes—and Why It’s Worth It

Switching platforms isn’t fun. But it doesn’t have to be painful.

Here’s exactly how I handle the migration: cleanup all your zombie contacts so you stop paying for them, rebuild existing automations, warm-up your new domain, replace form integrations, then add new automations or upgrade the existing ones.

The entry level “Vintage” package is basically 1:1 swap, but even that is a full system upgrade by way of faster interface. Ready for “Remastered”? I hope you like making money.

The Bottom Line: it’s time to migrate to Klaviyo

If you’re reading this, you probably already know: Mailchimp isn’t built for the kind of online business you deserve. If you’re using Mailchimp today and not generating at least 30% of your total revenue from email, you’re leaving money on the table. You just didn’t know it until now.

If you’re serious about retention, personalization, and turning email into an actual revenue machine, it’s time to migrate.

And if you want to switch without losing your mind? That’s where I come in.

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Related Reading:

• How I use Klaviyo to increase email-driven revenue
• See the full process I use to fix broken marketing systems
• The RevOps approach that ties it all together