SMS marketing platforms in Australia

What SMS marketing is, and how a platform works

SMS marketing is the promotional and customer text messages a business sends to people who have agreed to receive them, planned and sent through a platform rather than typed one phone at a time. A platform sends on a schedule, on a trigger from your store or CRM, or on a keyword reply. ClickSend offers time-based automations for recurring sends and contact-based automations for new contacts. Mobile Message runs keyword automations, so a person who texts JOIN to a dedicated number is added to a list and sent a welcome, and it sends automatically from Shopify events while stating it does not support recurring messages. Cellcast says you can automate responses via keyword triggers. Kudosity connects to Shopify and ActiveCampaign. The consent of SMS marketing is the starting point, an agreement from each person before a single message is sent.

Bulk SMS is the sending underneath: one message to many numbers through a provider. A marketing platform adds the lists, scheduling, automation and opt-out handling on top. The site compares bulk SMS providers separately, on a page titled "Best bulk SMS providers in Australia".

The site's guide "SMS automation for Australian businesses" compares these automation features provider by provider. What each platform charges is the next thing to pin down.

What SMS marketing costs

SMS marketing costs the number of messages times the per-message rate, plus any platform plan fee. At 15,000 messages a month the Australian-dollar rates run from 3.10c at Cellcast to 8.90c at Vision6, each excluding GST.

• Kudosity. Publishes plan tiers in Australian dollars excluding GST, with pay-as-you-go at 7.90c a message, cheaper Growth and Scale tiers, and Enterprise on custom pricing.
• Vision6. Prices SMS per credit in Australian dollars excluding GST, 9.20c at 1,000 a month and 8.90c at 15,000, with quotes above one hundred thousand credits a month and a paid plan needed to buy credits.
• Klaviyo. Is replacing its legacy credit pricing with per-message dollar rates that are shown only inside a logged-in account.
• Bird and Omnisend. Publish their Australian prices in US cents and bill in US dollars, with Omnisend selling credits as an add-on to its Pro plan and Bird charging one flat rate.

Bird costs ≈ 4.85c AUD landed at 15,000 a month, billed as 3.25 US cents, converted at the RBA rate on 2 October 2026 plus a 3.5% card FX fee (median of the four major banks). Omnisend costs ≈ 5.08c AUD landed at 15,000 a month, billed as 3.40 US cents, converted at the RBA rate on 2 October 2026 plus a 3.5% card FX fee (median of the four major banks). A platform billed in US dollars costs more than its US figure suggests, because this site converts it at the Reserve Bank rate plus the median card foreign exchange fee of the four major Australian banks, and calls the result the landed cost. Attentive prices on enterprise quotes and publishes no Australian per-message rate.

Where these platforms meet your store is the next question.

Ecommerce platforms and your store

Klaviyo, Attentive and Omnisend sell SMS inside an ecommerce marketing product. Klaviyo lists Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix among its integrations. Klaviyo and Attentive publish no Australian per-message rate. Yotpo SMS, once an ecommerce SMS product, was decommissioned, and trade coverage said its customers were directed to Attentive and Omnisend.

The gateways that send alongside your store list their own connections. ClickSend lists Shopify, HubSpot and NetSuite. Mobile Message lists Shopify, HubSpot and Salesforce among others. MessageWorks lists Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce. Textmagic lists Shopify, WooCommerce and HubSpot. Kudosity lists Shopify and ActiveCampaign.

Choose your campaign workflow

Start by describing the campaign you intend to run. A one-off promotion and a recurring series make different demands on a platform. Turn that description into requirements and check each against the comparison.

• Automation type. Decide whether your campaign sends once, on a schedule, or in response to subscriber actions. Some providers support time-based recurring automations, some contact-entry automations, and some keyword or ecommerce event triggers. Scheduling alone does not prove support for every automation type.
• Store connection. If your campaign depends on purchase events, confirm your actual store connection and the particular event you want. An integration logo does not show which events it covers.
• Reply handling. A sender ID business name cannot receive replies. A campaign that asks for responses needs a receiving number and two-way SMS. Check that your plan includes both.
• Opt-out handling. Check how a recorded unsubscribe affects subsequent scheduled and automated messages. Do not assume every platform handles opt-outs the same way.

Match your requirements against the comparison. Before your first campaign, confirm the specific features in the provider's own documentation.

Before anything is sent, the rules that govern it come next.

Is SMS marketing legal in Australia?

SMS marketing is legal in Australia when the sender follows the Spam Act 2003: consent, identification of the sender that stays correct for at least 30 days after sending, and a working unsubscribe. ACMA says the duty and the proof of consent sit with the business that sends, and that inferred consent does not cover sending marketing messages to someone just because they bought something from the business. The unsubscribe in every commercial message must honour a request within 5 working days, must keep working for at least 30 days after the message was sent, must not charge a fee, and must not require a login or extra personal information, and ACMA gives "Reply STOP" as a clearly worded SMS unsubscribe. The site's guide "Australian SMS rules" covers each rule in full.

ACMA says automated welcome journeys are not exempt from the spam rules. ACMA's action on scams, spam and telemarketing found customers who unsubscribed from automated welcome journeys kept receiving the whole series, because the unsubscribe did not take effect until the sequence finished, which put the business in potential breach.

The name a message arrives under is the next thing to check.

Sender names, the register and replies

A sender ID is a business name of 2 to 11 characters and cannot receive replies. Since 1 July 2026 a sender ID not registered on the SMS Sender ID Register shows "Unverified" in place of the name, and the message is still delivered. A business registers its sender ID through each provider it sends with.

A campaign that asks people to reply needs a number that receives messages. Of the platforms compared here, 12 publish two-way SMS.

Pictures change the maths. One MMS costs several times an SMS at the same Australian provider, and the site compares them on a page titled "MMS vs SMS for Australian businesses". Example messages for common campaign types are on the site's page "SMS marketing campaign examples".