HubSpot Wants the Budget Klaviyo Built Its Empire On

For a decade the direct-to-consumer playbook had a quiet default. You ran your store on Shopify, you ran your customer relationships on a CRM, and when it came time to actually make money from email and text messages, you ran Klaviyo. That last part was rarely debated. It was closer to a reflex.

That reflex is now up for grabs. HubSpot, the company most DTC founders think of as the place their sales and service teams live, has been extending its Commerce Hub and its customer-facing triggers downstream - toward payments, subscriptions, and the kind of behavioral messaging that used to be Klaviyo's home turf. The pitch is simple and, for a stretched operator, seductive: you already log into HubSpot every day, so why bolt on a second system to talk to the same customers?

Klaviyo heard the footsteps. In February 2025 it stopped calling itself an email tool and announced what it described as "the only CRM built for B2C." The message was aimed squarely at the assumption that CRM is a HubSpot-and-Salesforce word. The result is a real decision facing thousands of brands: build inside one system of record, or bolt on the best tool for the job.

01Two companies that were never supposed to collide

On paper, HubSpot and Klaviyo were built for different rooms. HubSpot, founded in 2006, grew up around the idea of inbound marketing and a central CRM that treats the world as contacts, companies, and deals. Klaviyo, founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, started as a database obsessed with one thing that CRMs traditionally handled poorly: purchase behavior. Who browsed twice and bought once. Who is about to churn. Who is worth a discount and who is not.

Most comparison guides still hedge and say the two "aren't really direct competitors." That hedge is exactly why the overlap matters. When two products that supposedly serve different needs both start reaching for the same buyer's wallet, the reason is usually growth. Klaviyo's best new customers look a lot like HubSpot's. HubSpot's best expansion revenue increasingly comes from commerce features that graze Klaviyo's lane.

Read those two columns and the strategic difference becomes concrete. HubSpot models a customer as a deal moving through a pipeline. Klaviyo models a customer as a shopper moving through a lifecycle. Both are trying to convince you their model is the one that should own the whole relationship.

02The tell was in the pricing

If you want to know when a category is genuinely in play, watch what happens when the incumbent touches its own prices. On February 18, 2025, Klaviyo moved from billing based on the profiles you recently emailed to billing based on all active profiles in your account. Unlike earlier changes, this one applied automatically to existing and legacy customers.

The mechanics sound dry until you see the invoices. A store with 3,000 contacts that only emailed half of them used to pay for 1,500. After the change, it paid for 3,000. Users reported bills jumping from $39 to $200, and in one widely shared case from $625 to $2,765 in a single cycle. More than a year later, billing complaints still dominated Klaviyo's review pages.

Nothing markets a challenger better than an incumbent's surprise invoice. Brands that had never questioned the default started asking whether the tool they loved was worth what it now cost - and whether the CRM they already paid for could cover more of the job. That is the exact moment HubSpot wants to be standing in the doorway.

03Build inside, or bolt on

Strip away the logos and the real question is old and unglamorous: all-in-one versus best-of-breed. All-in-one promises fewer tools, one contract, one place where the data lives. Best-of-breed promises the sharpest instrument for the one job that makes you money. In DTC, the job that makes you money is repeat purchases driven by well-timed messages - which is precisely the thing Klaviyo built its 80-plus flows around.

The catch with all-in-one is that convenience and lock-in are the same feature seen from two angles. The tool that owns your customer data also owns your roadmap. Choosing HubSpot deeply is a bet that one worldview - deals and pipelines - can stretch to fit how you actually sell. Choosing Klaviyo deeply is a bet that carts and lifecycles deserve their own system of record, even if it means another login and another invoice.

For a brand running HubSpot as its CRM today, three honest questions decide it. How much of your revenue actually comes from lifecycle email and SMS? How advanced do your triggers need to be before HubSpot's version stops being "good enough"? And how much is one fewer tool worth to a team that is already drowning in tabs? There is no universal answer, which is the whole reason both companies are still spending to win the argument.

04Why this fight is bigger than email

Klaviyo's ambition is not subtle. Bialecki has framed the goal as becoming the system of record for B2C the way Salesforce became it for B2B sales teams. That is a claim on the entire consumer-brand stack, not just the send button. HubSpot's counter is to make its CRM the gravity well - close enough to commerce that leaving never feels worth the effort.

The market is large enough for both to keep growing for years. Klaviyo grew revenue about 32% year over year to roughly $1.2 billion and passed 193,000 customers. HubSpot added around 40,000 net customers in a single year, its largest-ever gain, to reach 288,706. Neither is losing. But their sharpest growth now comes from the other's backyard, and that is what turns a polite "not really competitors" into a genuine contest.

For founders, the takeaway is less about picking a winner and more about naming the trade honestly. You are not buying features. You are choosing which company gets to define your next three years of customer data. Pick the worldview that matches how you actually make money, and pay the switching cost with your eyes open.

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