AI Agents in Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Iterable and Salesforce Compared
What Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Iterable and Salesforce document their AI agents doing, what a person must approve, and which plan, add-on or meter pays for each.
On this page
- Two kinds of agent, and only one of them waits for you
- The same four jobs, platform by platform
- What Klaviyo's Composer and Customer Agent do for a store
- Braze splits the work across three agents
- Iterable's Nova Agent asks before it acts
- Attentive has the least settled lineup
- Salesforce puts its campaign agent inside the edition price
- How we would choose
- Sources
The best email service provider AI agents for ecommerce brands, in a comparison that counts only what vendors have put in their documentation, are Klaviyo's for most stores and Braze's for teams that can write prompts and watch a credit meter. We read the help centers, pricing pages and release posts of Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Iterable and Salesforce on October 7, 2026, and sorted each agent by what it is documented to do, what a person must approve before a customer sees anything, and which plan, add-on or usage meter pays for it. Our position: the approval gate and the meter tell a buyer more than the feature list, because the five vendors publish similar feature lists and very different answers on those two points.
Two kinds of agent, and only one of them waits for you
The 2026 ecommerce ESP AI agents from Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Iterable and Salesforce Marketing Cloud come in two kinds. A builder agent drafts campaigns, flows, segments or reports inside the dashboard and stops for approval. A send-time agent makes a choice for each recipient while a message goes out or a shopper writes in, so nobody reviews an individual output before the customer does. The table keeps the two apart and quotes each vendor on status.
| Platform | Builder agent and its gate | Send-time or conversational agent | Plan or meter | Status as stated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Klaviyo | Composer drafts campaigns, flows and segments; nothing sends without sign-off | Customer Agent answers shoppers and escalates to a human | Composer: free allowance, then a $20 plan. Customer Agent: from $50 a month | Composer Credits "currently in public beta" |
| Braze | Operator drafts campaigns, Canvases and segments; approval per action by default | Braze Agents in Canvas steps; decisioning agents in Decisioning Studio | Message or Action Credits; Decisioning Studio through a customer success manager | No beta label on the pages we read |
| Iterable | Nova Agent drafts campaigns and experiments; explicit approval to start a test | Send Time, Frequency and Channel Decisioning | Core Nova layer included; some agents are add-ons | No beta label on the articles we read |
| Attentive | AI Campaigns recommends campaigns; you choose which to send | AI Journeys writes each triggered message in real time | No price found in the pages we read | Reporting Agent and MCP "both available in beta" |
| Salesforce | Agentforce Campaign Creation drafts a brief, then a campaign; the marketer confirms each stage | Agentforce Personalization Decisioning, a separate product | Editions from $1,500 per org per month | No beta label on the pricing page |
The same four jobs, platform by platform
ESP AI agent features for ecommerce email marketing in 2026 cluster around four jobs, so we marked every platform on the same four using only pages we opened. "Not found" means we found no statement in those pages; the feature may still exist.
| Job | Klaviyo | Braze | Iterable | Attentive | Salesforce |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Draft a campaign from a typed goal | Documented (Composer) | Documented (Operator) | Documented (Nova Agent) | Recommends campaigns (AI Campaigns) | Documented (Campaign Creation) |
| Build the audience | Documented | Documented | Blog post only | Identifies the subscribers | Documented |
| Decide per recipient at send time | Not found for Composer | Documented | Documented, separate features | Documented (AI Journeys) | Listed, separate product |
| Answer performance questions | Documented | Not found | Documented | Beta (Reporting Agent) | Documented |
No platform covers all four jobs inside a single documented agent, so the sections below spend more time on gates and meters than on capabilities.
What Klaviyo's Composer and Customer Agent do for a store
Klaviyo's AI agents for ecommerce in 2026 are Composer, which the help center calls "Klaviyo's AI marketing agent", and Customer Agent. The getting-started article from Klaviyo, updated October 7, 2026, says Composer creates email, SMS, MMS and push campaigns, flows and segments from a goal typed in plain language, and that "Composer does not send or publish campaigns, flows, or messages without your sign-off." Its release status is less settled than that sounds: the pricing page from Klaviyo describes Composer Credits as "a usage-based line item tied to Composer, currently in public beta", and the help center's site menu tags Composer with a Beta badge. An older article from Klaviyo, last updated October 28, 2025, still documents a "marketing agent" that builds four starter campaigns from your website, and we found no page explaining how it relates to Composer.
The meter deserves a worked example. Hypothetically, a store asks Composer for eight campaigns and four flow audits in a month. The plan article from Klaviyo gives $0.10 to $10.00 per campaign created and $0.10 to $4.50 per flow audit, so the month's Composer usage lands anywhere from $1.20 to $98.00, and the article warns that usage can exceed those ranges. The pricing page puts the free plan at $5 of Composer usage a month; the $20 plan has four times the free capacity, and overages arrive in $10 blocks.
What changes once the store is connected
Klaviyo AI agent features for ecommerce depend on the storefront connection. The Customer Agent guide from Klaviyo says the agent can track orders, recommend products, process returns and exchanges and manage subscriptions, and that order tracking turns on when Shopify is connected. The billing article from Klaviyo prices it by resolved shopper conversations, "starting at $50 per month for up to 75 conversations", and excludes conversations escalated to a human. The two pages disagree on WhatsApp: the guide lists it as a channel, while the billing article (updated March 25, 2026) says it is coming soon.
Braze splits the work across three agents
Braze's AI agents in 2026 come in three forms, and the AI decisioning agent is the one that learns from results. Operator, per Braze, is the dashboard assistant that drafts campaigns, Canvases, segments and content: "By default you review and approve each proposed action." An auto-approve setting removes that pause. Braze Agents, per Braze, are custom LLM helpers placed in a Canvas step to write copy or route a user, or in a catalog field to fill in product data. The documentation is blunt about their limit: "They don't learn from whether the output worked, so they don't improve on their own from outcomes." They require Message or Action Credits, default to 250,000 runs a day per agent (raisable to 1,000,000), and consume credits on timeouts.
Decisioning agents live in Decisioning Studio, where Braze says they "learn from outcomes across your population" by running experiments across offer, channel, timing and frequency. The self-serve Go tier optimizes for clicks and is compatible with Klaviyo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud as well as Braze; the Pro tier accepts any business metric and comes with a services team. Access starts with a customer success manager, and we found no price on the page.
Iterable's Nova Agent asks before it acts
Iterable's AI agent in 2026 is Nova Agent, and an ecommerce team should read it as an AI assistant inside the dashboard. The support article from Iterable says it can review, edit or create campaigns, templates, experiments and journeys, answer analytics questions about campaigns, and write Handlebars. The gate is in writing: "Starting a test, picking a winner, ending a test early, or deleting a test always needs your explicit approval; Nova won't complete these actions on its own." Analytics answers cover campaigns only, at most 31 days per query, and nothing before November 11, 2025.
Per-recipient choices sit in separate features that Iterable lists as Send Time, Frequency and Channel Decisioning. On packaging, an April 28, 2026 post on the blog of Iterable says "The core Nova Intelligence layer is included for all customers, with additional agents and advanced decisioning capabilities available as add-ons." We found no page naming which agents count as additional.
Attentive has the least settled lineup
Attentive's AI agents for ecommerce in 2026 are still taking shape, and the nearest thing to an AI marketing agent, AI Campaigns, is described as a recommender. The Q3 update that Attentive published on September 1, 2026 says AI Campaigns "identifies high-intent subscribers who aren't receiving many messages and recommends campaigns that fit your existing calendar. You choose which ones to send." A September 22, 2026 press release from Attentive says Reporting Agent and its MCP connection for outside AI tools are "both available in beta".
The agent already acting alone is older. A help article from Attentive, updated May 22, 2025, says AI Journeys helps determine when to send triggered messages, how many to send and what each one says, and that "Each message is created in real time so that it's truly unique, and it's trained to match your brand's tone and style."
Salesforce puts its campaign agent inside the edition price
The pricing page from Salesforce lists Agentforce Campaign Creation as a feature of both Marketing Cloud Next editions: Growth at $1,500 per org per month and Advanced at $3,250, each billed annually. Customers on Marketing Cloud Engagement reach Agentforce by renewing to a "+" edition. In the Trailhead walkthrough from Salesforce, a fictional marketer types a goal, confirms the brief the agent drafts, confirms again to create the campaign draft, and later asks the agent for a performance summary; the module adds that the agent can also create a segment. Per-recipient decisioning is a separate line: Agentforce Personalization Decisioning sits under Salesforce Personalization at $8,000 per org per month.
How we would choose
For a store choosing on agents alone, Klaviyo documents the most for the least commitment: a free allowance, published per-action ranges and a written no-send rule, with the caveat that Composer is a public beta. Braze is the pick when the goal is a decision per recipient, because it is the only one of the five where we found written run limits, credit rules and a testing recommendation (send part of the audience through an Agent step with Experiment Paths before scaling). Iterable's approval rule is the most specific. Attentive's builders are in beta or carry no price in the pages we read, and Salesforce's agent arrives inside an edition that starts at $1,500 a month.
Two cautions apply to all five. An approval gate does nothing for a send-time agent, so the review moves upstream to prompts, fallback values and a holdout group. In our view, easier campaign creation also invites more sends, which puts pressure on list quality; the rules of email deliverability stay the same whoever wrote the message. Agent meters sit on top of the platform fee covered in how much email marketing costs, and any lift should be judged against the baselines in our email marketing statistics.
Our lifecycle and demand generation team is there if you want a second opinion on a shortlist, and further resources are the email deliverability checker and the lifecycle email playbook. Before signing, ask each vendor for three links: the page that says what the agent cannot send without approval, the page that prices a unit of its work, and the page that states its release status. A vendor that can supply all three has shipped an agent you can plan around.
Sources
- Klaviyo: Getting started with Composer (updated October 7, 2026)
- Klaviyo: How your Composer plan works (updated September 9, 2026)
- Klaviyo: Klaviyo pricing
- Klaviyo: How to use the marketing agent (updated October 28, 2025)
- Klaviyo: Getting started with Customer Agent (updated January 27, 2026)
- Klaviyo: How Klaviyo billing works (updated March 25, 2026)
- Braze: BrazeAI Operator
- Braze: Braze Agents in Agent Console
- Braze: BrazeAI Decisioning Studio
- Iterable: Using Nova Agent
- Iterable: Nova Intelligence Overview
- Iterable: Nova Intelligence: The Strategic Engine for Goal-Driven Engagement (April 28, 2026)
- Attentive: What's New, Q3 2026 product updates (September 1, 2026)
- Attentive: press release on AI Pro and AI reporting (September 22, 2026)
- Attentive: Get started with Attentive AI (updated May 22, 2025)
- Salesforce: Marketing Cloud pricing
- Salesforce: Trailhead, Create and Customize a Marketing Campaign with Agentforce