The Great Migration: Why Smart Ecommerce Brands Are Ditching Attentive for Klaviyo

TL;DR: We're witnessing a massive exodus from Attentive to Klaviyo, and it's not just about price. Klaviyo is eating Attentive's lunch with better data, smarter automation, and actually caring about ROI. Here's why the migration is happening and why Klaviyo is the undisputed heavyweight champ of ecommerce marketing.

The Numbers Don't Lie: Klaviyo Is Dominating

Let's start with some cold, hard facts that'll make Attentive's executives sweat:

Klaviyo now serves over 100,000 businesses globally and just reported a significant year-over-year revenue growth of 34.29%, surpassing analyst expectations. Meanwhile, Klaviyo has market share of 9.88% in marketing-automation market, making it the second-largest player behind only Mailchimp.

But here's the kicker: Over 3.8 billion emails are sent through Klaviyo each month and businesses using Klaviyo's platform have seen a 29% increase in revenue from personalized marketing.

That's not marketing fluff—that's real money hitting real bank accounts.

Why Brands Are Running From Attentive (And It's Not Pretty)

The "Swiss Army Knife vs. Butter Knife" Problem

Attentive built their entire identity around being the "SMS specialists," but here's the reality check: being really good at one thing doesn't cut it anymore when your competition does that thing almost as well PLUS everything else.

Attentive is the more specialized SMS solution for larger companies, but specialization becomes a liability when you need to manage email, SMS, push notifications, reviews, and web forms all in one place.

Think about it: You're paying premium prices for Attentive's SMS while also paying for Klaviyo (or another platform) for email. That's two bills, two dashboards, two sets of data that don't talk to each other properly.

The Data Disaster

Here's where things get ugly for Attentive users. Although Attentive syncs well to Klaviyo, sync only happens every 24 hours, which makes some data irrelevant.

In 2025, 24-hour-old data might as well be from the Stone Age. While you're waiting for your systems to sync, your customers are already three purchase decisions down the road.

Even worse: Because they are different platforms, they have different reporting time frames, which leads to duplicate attribution, or the order attributed to the option used to send the SMS. This can lead to both platforms attributing the same purchase to their platform.

Translation: You're getting lied to by your own analytics. How do you make smart business decisions when you can't trust your numbers?

The Support Reality Check

Yeah, Attentive talks a big game about "white-glove support," but smaller customers report slower response times and a more transactional support experience because big spenders get white-glove treatment; SMBs get standard support.

Meanwhile, Klaviyo's approach is different: they build software that's so intuitive you don't need a dedicated success manager holding your hand every step of the way.

Why Klaviyo Is the Undisputed Champion

The Unified Data Powerhouse

Klaviyo enables a unified view of customer behavior across email, SMS, mobile app, service, and reviews, so you can deliver more targeted, more personalized experiences.

This isn't just marketing speak. When Everything Man Jack (remember them from our last blog?) gets 12.4% of their Klaviyo revenue driven by predictive insights, that's because all their data lives in one place, creating a complete customer picture.

The AI That Actually Works

While Attentive is still figuring out how to bolt AI onto their SMS-first platform, Klaviyo built AI into the foundation. Klaviyo AI brings advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to Klaviyo B2C CRM, including generative AI and machine learning (ML).

The result? Features like Smart Send Time that automatically optimize when each individual customer receives messages, and Segments AI that builds complex audience segments in seconds instead of hours.

The Integration Game-Changer

Klaviyo's seamless integration with Shopify is one of the key reasons for its success, followed by WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce. But it's not just about having integrations—it's about having integrations that actually work.

Klaviyo's partnership with WooCommerce as the preferred marketing automation partner isn't just a nice press release. It's a competitive moat that makes switching away from Klaviyo increasingly painful for competitors.

The Cost Reality

Here's something Attentive doesn't want you to know: Klaviyo is month to month and only charges for profiles that messages are sent to, which allows users to market more freely without having to worry about a big unexpected bill at the end of the month.

Compare that to Attentive's pricing is hidden and changes based on the customer. That platform also often locks companies into 6 or 12 month contracts and charges for individual messages.

Look, here's the truth: Anyone who needs a contract to keep their customers doesn't believe in their product. When Attentive forces you into 6-12 month contracts, they're basically admitting they know you'll want to leave once you see what else is out there.

Klaviyo? Month-to-month. No contracts. No lock-ins. They keep customers because their platform actually delivers results, not because legal paperwork makes it expensive to escape.

When you're scaling fast, the last thing you want is to get slammed with surprise bills or locked into contracts that don't make sense six months later.

The Migration Stories We're Hearing

"The Reporting Nightmare"

One beauty brand told us they were spending 4 hours every week just trying to reconcile data between Attentive and their email platform. With Klaviyo, they get unified reporting that shows the complete customer journey from first touch to purchase.

"The Integration Hell"

An apparel company said their biggest pain point was trying to get Attentive to play nice with their loyalty program. Every workaround created another problem. After switching to Klaviyo, everything just worked because the data lived in one ecosystem.

"The Scale Problem"

A fast-growing supplement brand hit Attentive's pricing wall hard. As their list grew, Attentive's per-message pricing became unsustainable. Klaviyo's pricing scaled with their business instead of punishing growth.

"The Speed Disaster"

Here's a real story that'll blow your mind: One of our current clients spent 7 months trying to get properly set up on Attentive. Seven. Months. Between the "white-glove onboarding," the custom integrations that kept breaking, and the back-and-forth with their account rep, they burned through almost two quarters just trying to get their basic flows running.

When they finally said "screw this" and came to us for a Klaviyo migration, we had them fully live and sending optimized campaigns in under 2 weeks. Same business, same goals, same complexity—but a platform that actually works and a team that knows what they're doing.

That's the difference between a platform built for specialists and a platform built for results.

What's Driving The 2025 Migration Wave

The Omnichannel Reality

Klaviyo has the edge when it comes to email marketing and versatility. Its email marketing tools are more polished and robust than Attentive's. It also offers tools that Attentive doesn't have, like mobile push notifications, reviews, and web forms.

Customers don't live in single channels anymore. They see your Instagram ad, visit your website, abandon their cart, get an email, click through, buy something, and then want to review it. Managing all those touchpoints across multiple platforms is a nightmare.

The AI Arms Race

In 2023, over 60% of Klaviyo users integrated SMS into their marketing strategy, proving that Klaviyo's "email-first, everything else second" approach actually works better than Attentive's "SMS-first, email grudgingly" strategy.

When you lead with data and AI, adding channels becomes natural. When you lead with a single channel, bolting on intelligence feels forced.

The Community Effect

Klaviyo's 36,000-member Klaviyo Community Facebook group versus Attentive's Facebook page with 1.2K followers tells the whole story.

Where do you think you'll get better advice, faster solutions, and more creative ideas?

The Migration Process (It's Easier Than You Think)

Here's the thing most brands don't realize: when migrating from Attentive, you can upload your existing list of SMS subscribers to Klaviyo to start building out your SMS marketing strategy right away.

Klaviyo even built specific tools to make the migration seamless. Before you start the import process, you must enable SMS in Klaviyo and set up your sending numbers for all countries you want to send to.

The hardest part? Attentive requires that you reach out to your account representative to receive an export of your SMS subscribers as a CSV file. It is not currently possible to export the file yourself.

That alone should tell you everything you need to know about which platform actually wants to help you succeed.

The 2025 Verdict: Klaviyo Wins, It's Not Even Close

Let's be real: Attentive had a good run when SMS was the shiny new toy and businesses needed specialists to figure it out. But the world moved on.

Email marketing boasts an impressive ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most effective marketing channels, and automated flows (like abandoned cart or post purchase messages) generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient than campaigns.

The brands winning in 2025 aren't the ones with the best SMS strategy—they're the ones with the best unified customer experience strategy.

Klaviyo delivers that. Attentive doesn't.

The migration isn't just happening—it's accelerating. And honestly? It's about time.

Ready to Join the Migration?

Look, we get it. Switching platforms feels like a huge pain in the ass. But staying on a platform that's limiting your growth? That's a bigger pain in your bank account.

What you get when you make the switch with Bylders:

• Seamless migration from Attentive without losing a single subscriber

• Complete Klaviyo setup optimized for your specific business model

• Unified email and SMS flows that actually work together

• AI-powered segmentation that makes Attentive's targeting look prehistoric

• Reporting that doesn't require a PhD in data science to understand

Starting at $4,999/month — which pays for itself in the first month when you see what proper automation and data unification can do for your revenue.

The bottom line: Every day you stay on Attentive is money left on the table and opportunities missed. The migration wave is happening whether you join it or not.

Ready to stop fighting your marketing stack and start winning? Let's talk about how to make the switch without missing a beat.