Marketing automation means letting software send the follow-up you would otherwise forget to send. An abandoned cart email, a welcome sequence, a review request two weeks after delivery. For a small team that is the difference between a list that earns money and a list that sits there.
The tools below are split by what they are actually good at. If you run a small online store, the shortlist is shorter than the full list suggests, so there is a section further down that answers that directly.
How we picked these
Every product here was opened and checked in a browser before it went on the list. Pricing was read off the vendor's own pricing page rather than quoted from another roundup, because these prices move constantly and stale numbers are the most common error in lists like this one.
We prioritised three things: whether the tool has real ecommerce integrations rather than a generic API, what the entry price is once you have a few thousand contacts, and whether the automation builder can handle a branching workflow instead of a single linear sequence.
Two products commonly listed in this category are not reviewed as separate entries. G2 is a review directory, not a marketing automation tool, and it appears in these lists purely as filler. Zapier is a connector that moves data between the tools below rather than a marketing automation platform in its own right, though it is genuinely useful alongside any of them.
The tools at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Ecommerce integrations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Omnisend | Small online stores | Free tier, then from about $16/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix |
| Klaviyo | Store data and segmentation | Free to 250 contacts, then from about $20/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce |
| Brevo | Tight budgets | Free tier, then from about $9/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop |
| ActiveCampaign | All-in-one with a CRM | From about $15/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce |
| Shopify automations | Stores already on Shopify | Included in your plan | Native |
| Mailchimp | Getting started quickly | Free tier, then from about $13/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix |
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | Premium all-in-one | Free tier, paid from about $20/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce |
| Drip | Stores that outgrew Mailchimp | From about $39/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento |
| Customer.io | Behaviour-triggered workflows | From about $100/mo | API and data pipeline led |
| GetResponse | Webinars and funnels | From about $19/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop |
| Keap | Service businesses with sales follow-up | From about $299/mo | Limited, CRM led |
| Ortto | Analytics next to automation | From about $509/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce |
| Zoho Marketing Automation | Existing Zoho users | From about $19/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce |
| Constant Contact | Events and simple email | From about $12/mo | Shopify, WooCommerce |
Prices are entry tiers checked at the time of writing and nearly all of them scale with contact count, so treat them as a starting point rather than what you will pay in a year.
1. Omnisend, best for small online stores
Omnisend is built for ecommerce and nothing else, which is exactly why it wins this category for small stores. Email, SMS and web push sit in one place, and the prebuilt automations for abandoned cart, browse abandonment and post-purchase follow-up work out of the box rather than needing to be assembled.
Revenue attribution is the part that matters most. You can see what each automation earned rather than just open rates, which is the number that tells you whether to keep it running.
Pricing: a free tier covering a small contact list, with paid plans from roughly $16 a month and rising with contacts.
Where it falls short: it is deliberately narrow. If you need a CRM, a sales pipeline or anything B2B, you are buying the wrong tool.
2. Klaviyo, best for store data and segmentation
Klaviyo pulls far more from your store than most competitors and turns it into segments you can actually use. Customers who bought once and never returned, customers who only buy on discount, customers whose usual reorder window has passed.
The automation builder is strong and the reporting is genuinely useful. For a store with enough order history to find patterns in, this is where the money is.
Pricing: free up to 250 contacts, then from around $20 a month, climbing steeply as your list grows.
Where it falls short: the price. Klaviyo gets expensive faster than almost anything else here, and stores with big lists and low order values often find the maths stops working.
3. Brevo, best on a tight budget
Brevo, previously Sendinblue, prices on emails sent rather than contacts stored. If you have a large list you email occasionally, that pricing model alone can cut your bill by more than half.
You get email, SMS, a basic CRM and automation workflows in one account, plus transactional email, which is normally a separate purchase.
Pricing: a free tier with a daily send limit, then paid plans from roughly $9 a month.
Where it falls short: the automation builder is more basic than ActiveCampaign's or Klaviyo's, and deliverability on the cheapest shared tiers is less consistent than the premium options.
4. ActiveCampaign, best all-in-one with a CRM
ActiveCampaign has the most capable automation builder of anything at this price. Conditional branches, split tests inside a workflow, lead scoring and a sales CRM that the marketing side can actually see.
It suits businesses that sell in more than one way, for example a store that also takes wholesale enquiries by email.
Pricing: from around $15 a month for the entry marketing plan, with CRM features on higher tiers.
Where it falls short: the power comes with a learning curve, and features are spread across tiers in a way that means the plan you want is usually one step above the plan you priced.
5. Shopify built-in automations, best if you are already on Shopify
If your store runs on Shopify, you already have automation included. Shopify Flow handles triggers and actions inside the store, and Shopify Email covers basic campaigns and a handful of prebuilt sequences.
For a store doing modest volume this is often enough, and it costs nothing extra. Start here before you pay for anything, because it sets the baseline you are asking a paid tool to beat.
Pricing: included with your Shopify plan.
Where it falls short: the email side is basic, segmentation is limited compared with Klaviyo or Omnisend, and it only knows about Shopify.
6. Mailchimp, best for getting started quickly
Mailchimp remains the easiest way to go from no email marketing to a working welcome sequence in an afternoon. The templates are good, the editor is forgiving, and almost every other tool integrates with it.
Pricing: a limited free tier, with paid plans from roughly $13 a month.
Where it falls short: it has grown expensive relative to what it does, and pricing counts unsubscribed contacts on some plans. Stores that grow tend to move off it, which is why Drip and Klaviyo both position against it directly.
7. HubSpot Marketing Hub, best premium all-in-one
HubSpot is the most complete platform here. Marketing, CRM, forms, landing pages and reporting are genuinely one system rather than several products sharing a login.
The free tier is unusually generous and is a reasonable place to run a small operation for a long time.
Pricing: free tier available, paid Marketing Hub from around $20 a month per seat, rising sharply for the tiers most people end up on.
Where it falls short: cost and commitment. Onboarding fees on higher tiers and annual contracts are normal, and the price gap between the starter and professional tiers is large.
8. Drip, best for stores that outgrew Mailchimp
Drip sits between Mailchimp's simplicity and Klaviyo's depth, aimed squarely at ecommerce. The workflow builder is visual and clear, and the onsite behaviour tracking is better than the price suggests.
Pricing: from about $39 a month, scaling with contacts.
Where it falls short: no free tier, and it has a smaller integration ecosystem than the bigger names, so check your stack before committing.
9. Customer.io, best for behaviour-triggered workflows
Customer.io is built for triggering on product events rather than on marketing lists. If you want an email to fire when someone used a feature twice but never finished setup, this handles it properly.
Pricing: from roughly $100 a month.
Where it falls short: it expects clean event data, which usually means developer time before you send anything. It is not a tool a non-technical owner can set up alone.
10. GetResponse, best for webinars and funnels
GetResponse bundles email automation with landing pages, funnels and a built-in webinar tool. If webinars are part of how you sell, having them in the same system as the follow-up sequence removes a whole integration.
Pricing: from around $19 a month, with webinar features on higher tiers.
Where it falls short: each individual piece is beaten by a specialist. You are buying convenience rather than best in class.
11. Keap, best for service businesses with sales follow-up
Keap is a CRM first and a marketing tool second, aimed at businesses that quote, book and chase. Appointments, invoices, pipelines and follow-up automation in one place.
Pricing: from roughly $299 a month, which reflects that it replaces several tools.
Where it falls short: the price is a serious commitment for a small business, and it is a poor fit for a product store.
12. Ortto, best for analytics next to automation
Ortto puts customer data, automation and product analytics in one interface, so you can see a cohort and message it without exporting anything.
Pricing: from around $509 a month on current plans.
Where it falls short: the entry price puts it out of reach for most genuinely small businesses, despite how often it appears on small business lists.
13. Zoho Marketing Automation, best if you already run Zoho
If you already use Zoho CRM or Zoho Books, the marketing automation product is cheap and the integration is immediate. On its own merits it is competent rather than exciting.
Pricing: from about $19 a month.
Where it falls short: outside the Zoho ecosystem there is little reason to pick it, and the interface shows its age next to newer tools.
14. Constant Contact, best for events and simple email
Constant Contact is straightforward email marketing with decent event and registration handling attached. For a business running classes, workshops or local events it does a specific job well.
Pricing: from around $12 a month.
Where it falls short: automation is shallow compared with everything above it on this list. It is an email tool with automation features rather than an automation platform.
If you run a small online store, pick from these four
Most of the list above is aimed at small businesses generally. If you specifically run a small online store, the decision is narrower.
- Already on Shopify and doing modest volume: use the built-in automations first. They cost nothing and they establish what a paid tool has to beat.
- Ready to pay for something proper: Omnisend. It is built for stores, the ecommerce automations work immediately, and the pricing stays sane at small list sizes.
- You have real order history and want to segment it: Klaviyo, as long as you have checked what it costs at your list size.
- Large list, infrequent sends, tight budget: Brevo, because paying per email sent rather than per contact stored changes the maths completely.
Set up three automations before anything else: an abandoned cart sequence, a welcome sequence for new subscribers, and a post-purchase follow-up that asks for a review. Those three cover most of the revenue automation will earn you in year one. Everything after that is refinement.
What marketing automation does not fix
Automation acts on people who already found you. It sends better emails to your list, recovers carts from people already in checkout, and follows up leads already in your pipeline. It does not create any of them.
That is the gap most small businesses hit around month three. The automations are running, the sequences are converting at a reasonable rate, and revenue is still flat because the number of people entering at the top has not moved. That month-three gap is usually a demand problem rather than a tooling one, and our guide to digital marketing for small businesses covers what fills the top of the funnel.
Filling that gap is a different category of work: search visibility, content, and the links that make either of them rank. That is the part Distribb handles, and for store owners there is a Shopify-specific setup that publishes straight to the storefront. Being straight about the boundary though: Distribb does not send email, run SMS or manage carts, so it sits alongside a tool from this list rather than replacing one.
If you want to go deeper on the pieces around this, we have guides to AI marketing automation, email marketing automation for small business, and what your lead generation cost should look like before you scale any of it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best marketing automation tool for a small online store?
Omnisend for most small stores, because it is built specifically for ecommerce and its prebuilt cart and post-purchase automations work without configuration. Klaviyo is the better pick once you have enough order history to segment on, provided you have checked the cost at your list size.
Is free marketing automation good enough to start?
For a while, yes. Shopify's built-in automations, and the free tiers on Brevo, Mailchimp, HubSpot and Klaviyo, are all enough to run a welcome sequence and an abandoned cart flow. Free tiers usually cap contacts or sends rather than crippling the features.
How much should a small business expect to pay?
Most small businesses land between $20 and $60 a month in the first year. The cost is driven by contact count on nearly every platform, so a growing list raises the bill even if you send nothing more. Whether that spend pays back is a different calculation, and our guide to marketing automation ROI sets out how to run it.
What is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation?
Email marketing sends a message to a list at a time you choose. Marketing automation sends a message when a person does something, such as abandoning a cart or hitting a reorder date. Most tools here do both, and the automation side is where the revenue difference shows up. Where AI sits inside that distinction is covered separately in our roundup of AI powered marketing tools.
Which automations should I build first?
Abandoned cart, welcome sequence, post-purchase follow-up. In that order for a store. For a service business, replace abandoned cart with a lead follow-up sequence and a quote chase.
Do I need a separate SMS tool?
No. Omnisend, Klaviyo, Brevo and ActiveCampaign all include SMS. Check the per-message cost in your country before you plan around it, because SMS pricing varies far more by region than email does.
Can I switch platforms later?
Yes, and most businesses do at least once. Your contact list and its consent records export cleanly almost everywhere. What does not move is your automation workflows and your historical performance data, so expect to rebuild both.
Choosing without over-thinking it
Pick the cheapest tool that covers the three automations listed above and integrates with what you already run. Give it a full quarter before you judge it, because a cart sequence needs volume before its numbers mean anything.
The most expensive mistake here is not choosing wrong. It is spending six weeks comparing platforms while no automated email goes out at all.