Klaviyo Crashed Braze's Party With SMS And Push

For most of a decade, Klaviyo and Braze did not really compete. Klaviyo lived inside Shopify stores, quietly recovering abandoned carts and sending birthday coupons. Braze lived inside apps at scale, orchestrating push notifications for streaming services and airlines. Different buyers, different budgets, different rooms. Then Klaviyo added SMS, then push, then started calling itself a B2C CRM. The rooms stopped being separate.

The reason this matters is narrower than the usual "cross-channel messaging" framing suggests. Braze serves a broad B2C-app base - banks, media companies, ride-hailing apps - and Klaviyo is not seriously chasing those. Where the two now collide is one specific vertical: ecommerce. And inside ecommerce, they are converging on one very particular customer - the direct-to-consumer brand that has outgrown a free plan but has no appetite for a six-figure enterprise contract.

The moat was boring, which is why it worked

Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, two engineers who had met at Applied Predictive Technologies. They bootstrapped for years, which is unusual for a company that would eventually go public at roughly an $11 billion valuation. The bootstrapping shaped the product. Instead of chasing enterprise logos, they built the deepest Shopify integration on the market and let the data do the selling: every email tied back to revenue, every flow measured against sales.

That integration became the moat. It was not glamorous. It was a set of connections most rivals never bothered to rebuild, because rebuilding it meant matching years of edge cases in how a Shopify store actually behaves. By 2025 Klaviyo powered more than 183,000 brands and crossed roughly $1.23 billion in revenue. The boring moat had become an engine.

Braze came at the problem from the opposite end

Braze started life as Appboy, born from a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon win in 2011 by Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman. It rebranded in 2017 and went public in 2021. Its whole design assumes a mobile app at the center of the relationship: real-time push, in-app messages, Content Cards, and journeys that span every channel at once. For a large brand running a serious app, that orchestration is genuinely hard to replicate, and Braze charges accordingly - contracts commonly start around $60,000 a year.

So the two companies grew up as mirror images. Klaviyo went bottom-up from email; Braze went top-down from the app. For years the gap between them was obvious to any buyer. The interesting thing is what happened to that gap.

Buyers describe outgrowing Klaviyo's email-and-web shape once push and in-app become core. Sacra, on Klaviyo's competitive position

The channels closed the gap

Klaviyo added SMS, and SMS turned out to be a natural fit for ecommerce - a shipping update, a flash sale, a back-in-stock alert all live comfortably in a text. Then in 2022 it launched mobile push notifications, and did something pointed: it folded push into its plans at no extra charge. Email, SMS and push, one workflow, one bill. For a DTC brand, that removed the main reason to graduate to a heavier platform.

Notice the strategy hiding in the pricing. Push notifications are a paid, premium capability in the enterprise world. Klaviyo made them a free feature and pointed them straight at the ecommerce customers Braze would otherwise expect to win as they scaled. It is a classic move: attack a competitor's paid feature by giving it away inside a product the customer already uses.

What a brand can actually do with either one

For a working operator, the abstract rivalry resolves into concrete jobs. On Klaviyo, a brand connects its store, and the platform starts building profiles from real behavior - what someone browsed, bought, returned, or left in a cart. From there it triggers flows: a welcome series when someone signs up, a text when an item drops back in stock, a push nudging a lapsed buyer, all measured against actual revenue rather than opens. Segmentation is the quiet workhorse; a brand can slice its list by predicted lifetime value or purchase frequency and send accordingly, without a data team.

On Braze, the center of gravity shifts to the app and to timing. A brand can build a single journey that decides, per person and in real time, whether the next message should be an email, a push, or an in-app card shown the moment they open the app. That orchestration is the point, and it is why large brands with millions of active app users pay for it. The trade is complexity: Braze rewards teams that have the people to design and maintain those journeys, where Klaviyo rewards teams that want defaults that already fit ecommerce.

The useful way to choose between them is to ask where your customer relationship actually lives. If it lives in a Shopify store and an inbox, Klaviyo's shape fits and its price is hard to argue with. If it lives inside an app people open every day, Braze's real-time engine earns its keep. The reason the two now overlap is that a growing number of ecommerce brands have a bit of both - a store, a list, and a small but real app - and that middle is exactly the ground both companies want.

Then Klaviyo renamed itself

In September 2025 Klaviyo stopped describing itself as an email and SMS tool and started calling itself a B2C CRM - a single system for customer data, email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, mobile push, analytics, and service automation. The framing is deliberate. Most CRMs were built for B2B: pipelines, leads, account managers. Klaviyo's pitch is that consumer brands need something else entirely, and that the company already sitting on their order and behavior data is the natural place to run the whole relationship.

Klaviyo positions itself as an autonomous B2C CRM that joins customer data, email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, mobile push, analytics, and service automation in one product. Klaviyo platform positioning, 2025

Braze has not stood still. In 2025 it acquired OfferFit to power an AI decisioning studio that personalizes offers one customer at a time, and it continues to push down-market with intelligent channel selection - letting the software decide whether a given customer is best reached by email, push or in-app. Both companies, in other words, are walking toward the same middle: Klaviyo climbing up from ecommerce email, Braze reaching down from enterprise engagement.

The account they are actually fighting over

Strip away the marketing and the contest comes down to one buyer. For an ecommerce brand somewhere between roughly $5M and $50M in revenue, Klaviyo is about an order of magnitude cheaper than Braze, and the cost gap only closes at large enterprise scale. That price difference is not a rounding error for a growing DTC brand; it is the difference between one line item and a budget committee.

The honest read is that most Shopify and DTC brands under about $100M pick Klaviyo, and they do it for two reasons that have nothing to do with a feature checklist: the ecommerce specificity is baked in, and the price is self-serve. Braze tends to win once the app becomes the center of the business - when real-time push, in-app messaging and scale stop being nice-to-haves and become the product itself. Klaviyo's whole expansion is a bet that it can keep brands on its side of that line for longer, and maybe move the line.

What makes it a real fight rather than two companies talking past each other is the phone. A shopper has one lock screen. Email, text and push all arrive there, and whoever controls that shopper's phone number and device token controls the relationship. Klaviyo spent a decade earning the email address. SMS and push are how it reaches for the rest.

There is a data argument underneath all of it, and it is the part that should make Braze pay attention. Klaviyo's original advantage was never the email editor. It was that the platform already held the brand's customer and order data, so every message could be smarter than a competitor's. Adding SMS and push to that same store of data is cheaper for Klaviyo than adding ecommerce data depth is for anyone starting from the messaging side. Owning the data first and adding channels second is a more defensible order than the reverse.

None of this guarantees the outcome. Braze's real-time orchestration and its AI decisioning are genuinely ahead for brands that live inside an app, and calling yourself a CRM is easier than replacing one. But the direction is not in doubt. A company that started by recovering abandoned carts now reaches shoppers by email, text and push from a single system, and it is aiming that system squarely at the ecommerce brands Braze once expected to inherit. The party is still going. It just has more guests than it used to.