I first used ActiveCampaign in 2012 when it was one of the first email marketing tools to offer visual marketing automation.
Since then, we’ve rolled it out across eight portfolio companies. I also collected ~2,000 survey responses from ActiveCampaign users on what they like and dislike about it via MarketingAutomationInsider.com.
In this ActiveCampaign review, I’ll explain where ActiveCampaign performs well, where it doesn’t, and why I’m personally no longer using it.
Review Summary
The reason ActiveCampaign makes most marketing teams’ shortlist is down to its marketing automation offering, which is second-to-none.
If you’re looking to save time building automated email and SMS workflows, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an easier-to-use and more powerful tool out there. ActiveCampaign has its own CRM, enabling you to trigger emails based on where a deal is in your pipeline, set up appointments, tailor product recommendations and much more based on a deal or contact’s behaviour. I’ll unpack this in more detail later in the review.
ActiveCampaign also gets the basics right. Everything from deliverability, compliance, integrations, security, email testing, to user support is industry-leading. Again, we’ll cover these in detail later.
But this comes at a cost. ActiveCampaign is more expensive than the simpler email marketing tools. ActiveCampaign may also be too powerful for your needs. If you’re just looking to send email newsletters to your audience, there are more affordable options out there.
That said, ActiveCampaign recently made a move to back its platform with a Results Guarantee (new customers get a full refund within their first month if they don’t see improved performance). This is a nice little risk-mitigator for customers switching platforms.
Plans & Pricing
ActiveCampaign has four tiers – you can work out which tier is best using this side-by-side comparison, but as a general overview:
- Starter Plan - Core email marketing and basic automation for getting started. Includes 1 user seat (with the option to add more) and pricing that scales by contact tier, starting at $15/month.
- Plus Plan - Adds stronger automation, landing pages, and AI tools, with more channels and add-ons available (like SMS and CRM). Includes 1 user seat (with the option to add more), starting at $49/month.
- Pro Plan - Built for advanced, omnichannel automation with deeper analytics and optimisation features (like predictive sending and attribution). Includes 3 user seats (with the option to add more), starting at $79/month.
- Enterprise Plan - Best for larger teams needing advanced security, compliance, premium integrations, and dedicated support. Includes 5 user seats (with the option to add more) starting at $145/month.
The best way to find out how much you’ll pay is to use this pricing calculator. For a deeper dive into ROI, calculate your potential email performance using ActiveCampaign here. Below, we’ve also broken down the pricing below for different list sizes for just the marketing automation features.
| Starter | Plus | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 contacts | $15 | $49 | $79 | $145 |
| 2,500 contacts | $39 | $95 | $149 | $255 |
| 5,000 contacts | $79 | $145 | $205 | $375 |
| 10,000 contacts | $149 | $189 | $375 | $589 |
| 25,000 contacts | $319 | $389 | $629 | $879 |
| 50,000 contacts | NA | $609 | $969 | $1,169 |
| 75,000 contacts | NA | $879 | $1,375 | Custom |
ActiveCampaign’s pricing isn’t the cheapest for marketing automation, but given the range of features offered the pricing is fair and reasonable – especially when compared against similarly advanced tools.
Pros & Cons
As part of our annual email marketing software research we survey thousands of email marketing software users every year. The pros and cons below summarise the five most commonly highlighted pros and three cons based on 2,000+ ActiveCampaign user responses.
Of those, we also asked 56 former ActiveCampaign users for the main reason why they decided to leave the platform.
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Powerful automation - ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is one of the best we’ve used. It’s easy to use, has 135+ triggers and actions, as well as 500+ pre-built automation recipes to fast-track automating your marketing and sales.
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High deliverability - ActiveCampaign’s deliverability rates are among the highest in the industry, thanks to a wide range of list warming/cleansing and spam testing features.
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Flexible integrations - ActiveCampaign offers 900+ integrations, including deep native integrations with most CRM and eCommerce platforms like Salesforce and Shopify.
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Easy to use - As you’ll see in the next section, ActiveCampaign is easy to use and takes very little time or training to use.
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Great testing features - ActiveCampaign’s split testing and predictive optimisation tools mean you can ‘set and forget’ your email marketing to self-optimise over time.
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AI-powered Active Intelligence - ActiveCampaign’s AI tools help optimise campaigns, predict customer behaviour, and automate insights to improve marketing performance.
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Free migration - As part of their 22 customer success guarantees ActiveCampaign offers free migration from any email marketing or CRM software.
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Basic CRM - ActiveCampaign’s CRM is fine for small sales teams, but it is lacking in functionality for larger or more complex use cases.
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Complex pricing - Recent changes have made it harder to work out which plan to choose, which I’ll touch on in more detail in the next section.
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Short free trial - ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, which is relatively short compared to similar tools.
Detailed Platform Review
We meticulously tested ten areas of ActiveCampaign’s product to help answer this and help you gain a feel for the product.
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- CRM
- AI features
- Cross-Channel Automation & Optimisation
- Reporting
- Landing Pages
- Forms
- Support
- Deliverability
01Marketing Automation
With 135+ triggers and actions to build your automation sequences from, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds beyond those offered by competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp.
It’s also the easiest automation builder we’ve used. In fact, new staff have been able to use ActiveCampaign in their first week with no training or onboarding needed. This is largely down to the flowchart style automation builder that’s visually self-explanatory.
If you’re just getting started, ActiveCampaign has over 500 pre-built automation recipes. These are particularly good for eCommerce businesses, as you can integrate your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce) and use automation sequences that run when someone buys a product, abandons a checkout, or uses a discount code.
Triggers and actions
You can trigger an automation to start when almost anything changes to a contact or deal. While not exhaustive, these include when:
- A contact submits a form, joins a list, visits a web page, opens/clicks an email, achieves a goal, has a tag added/removed, a field change or lead score updated.
- A deal in the CRM changes status, deal stage, value, owner or has a task added.
- A conversion occurs, or a person abandons a cart.
- A date arrives (useful for birthdays, contract renewals, and holiday promotions).
You can then build out your automation workflows with a combination of conditions and actions. Conditions tend to comprise mostly of “If/Else” rules, waits, and go-to’s, while actions broadly fall into three channels for communicating with your contacts – email, SMS, and site messages (notifications that appear on your website).
Here’s an example of a SaaS onboarding sequence we built showing each of these steps. This sequence is triggered when a contact subscribes to a list. We then have a condition to wait until the time is 2pm on a weekday (when we have the highest open rates). We then send a series of educational emails on how to use the software.
Split testing
While email split testing is nothing new, few marketing automation tools allow you to split test paths of an automation sequence. ActiveCampaign was among the first to do this, and in my opinion it’s one of the best features in its platform.
This is because you can test hypotheses like “Does sending 10 emails vs. 5 emails, sending the emails over a week vs. a month, or combining SMS and email vs. just email improve your conversion rate?”
This also means that your automated email sequences can improve over time because you can set up unlimited split tests to refine your automation sequences while you focus elsewhere.
By running all of our emails as split tests, we’ve been able to increase the open rates of some of our key email campaigns by up to 300%.
02Email Marketing
ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the few we’ve used that’s as good for beginners as it is for advanced marketers. It’s drag and drop, auto-saving, and it just works. Or, you can simply use the conversation window to prompt AI (Active Intelligence) to describe the type of email you want (campaign details, audience, offers, etc.).
The capabilities are not simplistic. You can edit the HTML, insert content blocks that would usually require a developer (e.g. countdown timers, videos and eCommerce products), create and organise a brand kit, and split test almost anything you can think of.
One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is the ability to optimise your marketing with personalisation and split testing.
For example, you can create conditional content to display different content to contacts based on any field (saving you from sending out lots of variations of the same email). For critical emails, you can even create variations of the content and let ActiveCampaign’s predictive content algorithm show the most-likely to convert content to each contact for you.
When it comes to templates, there are several options. You can choose from the 200+ pre-designed templates, use a basic template (i.e. a layout with no design), a past campaign, or start from scratch. For those looking to send emails that look personal, you can also choose between plain text and HTML. Or, you can prompt Active Intelligence to generate whatever you need - just describe it.
To help you improve deliverability, ActiveCampaign has a handy range of checks for spam filters, email client compatibility and you can preview how your email appears on different devices.
When it comes to sending emails, one feature I like about ActiveCampaign is that you can segment who your email is sent to based not only on a contact’s list but on any condition – from whether they’ve visited a certain page on your website, to their geography, or based on company information.
The segmentation options will of course depend on what information you collect about your contacts – which brings us onto the next part of ActiveCampaign’s platform.
03CRM
Combining your email marketing software and CRM is one of the best decisions you can make when choosing a tool, as your CRM is generally the source of truth when it comes to information about your contacts.
This provides invaluable opportunities to trigger emails when your leads change statuses, buy products, or take actions on your website. This is all achievable with ActiveCampaign’s CRM, which is built around an intuitive deal pipeline.
When you click into any deal on your pipeline you can see the information about that company and the associated contacts. If you’ve installed site tracking, you’ll see every action they’ve taken on your website, as well as a history of interactions made with your email campaigns and automation sequences.
Contacts (i.e. people) has a similar view, though with more emphasis on the specific information you’ve captured about that person. It’s here that you can also see which lists, automations, and tags are applied to that contact.
Around here is also here where you’ll find lead scoring. This is one of those features that can make or break your entire sales process. When it’s set up correctly, it creates clarity around which leads your people should focus on and how good a job your marketing team is doing at nurturing cold leads into warm leads.
For one of our ventures, we use lead scoring to determine whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.
- Cold lead (has a lead score below 7 points)
- MQL (has a lead score between 7-14 points) – We apply points when people register for our webinars, visit key pages on our site, and engage with our emails. The purpose of this is to separate engaged leads from unengaged leads.
- SQL (has a lead score above 14 points) – We use the BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) methodology for this. Once we know all four of these criteria and they’re above our agreed thresholds, the lead is considered sales qualified.
Setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign doesn’t take long and makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales. You can also identify whether the % of leads that you’re converting into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is increasing or decreasing over time and more.
While the CRM is great for small teams, our experience with ActiveCampaign’s CRM has been that it tends to get a little bit cumbersome when you have a large number of deals and contacts. Where we’ve tried to collaborate with larger sales teams, they’ve often ended up using Salesforce instead and integrating this with ActiveCampaign to manage the automations in ActiveCampaign.
On the whole though, this is more of a cautionary tale to set clear guidelines with your team on how to use tags, custom fields and other CRM data, rather than a specific critique of ActiveCampaign’s CRM.
04AI Features
ActiveCampaign’s AI features have evolved well beyond basic subject line suggestions. Unlike most email automation tools, AI embedded throughout the platform, not just bolted on as an afterthought. ActiveCampaign refers to its suite of AI features as Active Intelligence.
Some examples of how this works: You can start with a plain-English goal (e.g. promote a webinar, drive repeat purchases, reduce churn) and have Active Intelligence assist with assembling the pieces—drafting email/SMS content, recommending audience segments, and helping activate cross-channel delivery. Over time, the optimisation capabilities kick in. Active Intelligence learns from engagement data and can suggest improvements to timing, targeting, and messaging so you’re not stuck in a constant “build → send → guess → rebuild” loop.
A few AI features worth calling out:
- AI that builds: You can just ask it to build you a full 14-day drip series and it’ll generate the whole thing (including email designs and content). You’ll inevitably need to make some tweaks, but this cuts down the time (and mental energy) of building complex email sequences down considerably.
- Goal-to-campaign generation: Turn a simple objective into draft campaigns (email + SMS), with content and structure suggested automatically.
- Smarter segmentation suggestions: Use engagement and behaviour signals to surface who’s most likely to convert (or churn), then act on it quickly.
- Predictive optimisation: Features like predictive sending/optimisation help improve performance by adjusting timing and recommendations based on what your audience actually responds to, and it optimises send times 1:1, not just an average send time used for the whole list.
- Brand-aware content generation: AI-assisted content creation designed to keep campaigns consistent with your brand styling and assets, so you’re not re-formatting every send from scratch.
- AI-assisted sales/CRM insights (where relevant): AI can also support pipeline work (for example, analysing signals in CRM activity) so marketing and sales stay aligned.
- AI Translations: ActiveCampaign detects each contact’s preferred language and translates your entire campaign automatically — no duplicate campaigns, no manual localisation work. If you’re marketing to a multilingual audience, this quietly removes a lot of friction.
- MCP Server and AI connectors: In June 2025, ActiveCampaign released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server that lets AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor connect directly to your ActiveCampaign account. This means you can manage contacts, trigger automations, and pull campaign data from within AI-powered development or writing tools. In November 2025, they followed up with a dedicated Claude connector — making ActiveCampaign one of the first marketing platforms to integrate natively with external AI agents. If you’re already using AI tools in your workflow, this is a genuinely useful bridge.
05Cross-Channel Automation & Optimisation
ActiveCampaign really shines when you use it for cross-channel marketing, not just an email tool. Instead of managing campaigns in silos, you can coordinate email, SMS, and channels like WhatsApp from one place—so your messaging stays consistent and your team isn’t constantly copying segments or rebuilding workflows.
You can also shift channels based on behaviour: follow up with an SMS if an email goes unopened, or use WhatsApp for time-sensitive updates and more conversational nudges. That makes it easier to build journeys that feel timely and personal—without adding a ton of manual work.
- One workflow across channels: Orchestrate email + SMS + WhatsApp in a single automation. See them all, including how they connect and work together, from a single automation map.
- Behaviour-based branching: Switch follow-ups based on opens, clicks, purchases, site visits, or form fills.
- SMS/WhatsApp for high-intent moments: Great for reminders, order updates, webinar nudges, and re-engagement. You can deploy cross-channel automations from a single automation builder; there’s no need to switch to multiple different (often siloed) tools.
- Shared personalisation data: Use the same tags, fields, and segmentation everywhere.
- Optimise the journey, not just the message: Improve timing, channel mix, and sequence logic over time.
WhatsApp and SMS expansion
In April 2025, ActiveCampaign acquired Hilos, a WhatsApp automation platform. The acquisition added native WhatsApp messaging to ActiveCampaign’s offering — including a no-code workflow builder, a shared team inbox, broadcast messaging, and automated sequences. WhatsApp went live inside ActiveCampaign in July 2025, with a two-way SMS inbox following in September 2025.
SMS is available as an add-on on Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans. Credits are consumed per message sent, with the cost varying by destination country (1 credit per SMS in the US, up to 11 in some European countries). Unused credits do not roll over.
| SMS Credits | Monthly Cost | Cost per Credit |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $16.83 | $0.017 |
| 2,500 | $36.83 | $0.015 |
| 5,000 | $52.83 | $0.011 |
| 10,000 | $88.83 | $0.009 |
| 25,000 | $176.83 | $0.007 |
| 50,000 | $336.83 | $0.007 |
06Reporting
ActiveCampaign’s reports have always been a little too reminiscent of a dull powerpoint presentation for my liking, and there’s a lot of room to improve the data organisation and visualisation.
With that said, reporting should be judged on whether or not it provides answers to questions, and how actionable the insights are. To be fair to ActiveCampaign, the data is actionable and insightful – thanks to Goals, integrations, and attribution.
Goals
One action I didn’t cover in the section on marketing automation is goals.
In essence, you can trigger a goal being achieved in ActiveCampaign when a contact does something – whether that’s buying a product, completing an automation sequence, or opening an email.
This enables the goal and conversion attribution report, which shows who’s achieved the goal, the conversion rate, touchpoints and, my favourite – time-to-completion. This means you can track how long, on average, it takes to get a lead to convert, buy a product, or anything else. This is a great metric to then try and reduce.
One habit I recommend is ensuring every automation sequence you build has a goal. This allows you to see how all of your automation sequences are performing at a glance.
eCommerce revenue reporting
For eCommerce users, ActiveCampaign is able to integrate with your store and work out how much revenue is generated from your campaigns and automation sequences, enabling you to assign a clear ROI to every email campaign and automation.
ActiveCampaign currently offers deep data integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square.
Campaign reporting
ActiveCampaign also offer all of the standard reports for tracking campaign performance including list growth tracking, open/click through rate tracking, as well as reports to identify when your open rates are highest and how they vary by different mail clients.
Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s reporting
ActiveCampaign’s reporting can be summed up as function over form. You’ll find everything you need to optimise your email marketing, but just don’t expect them to look great.
07Landing Pages
If you’re after a simple landing page builder to webinar, event or simple one-page microsite landing pages, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder will do the trick. But if your needs are more complex then you’ll likely be better off using dedicated landing page software.
While the landing page builder itself is easy and intuitive to use, it lacks any kind of advanced functionality for personalising your pages. I’d say this is a missed opportunity for ActiveCampaign given they have an in-built CRM, but I’m not convinced that ActiveCampaign users are likely using this feature to build dozens of PPC landing pages or run their websites from here (as is sometimes the case with HubSpot users).
Instead, this area of ActiveCampaign is little more than a lightweight page builder for publishing simple landing pages without the need of a developer.
08Forms
Forms play a crucial role in capturing leads to build your list. ActiveCampaign offers four types of forms – inline, floating bars, modals, and floating boxes.
ActiveCampaign’s form builder is easy to use and offers a variety of ways to share and embed your forms – with the CSS and HTML fully editable to ensure it matches your website.
One handy feature when designing forms is the ability to load a preview of the website URL the form is going to display on, so that you can match colours and ensure it looks good in situ.
Finally, If you use Zapier, you can also connect your ActiveCampaign forms to your other tools easily to ensure that your contact data gets piped to the right place.
09Customer Support
In 14 years as a user, I’ve had to contact ActiveCampaign’s support a total of three times. Each time, someone based in the US has responded within 24 hours – with a solution.
That is to say, while ActiveCampaign’s support is good – you probably won’t need to use it because they put so much emphasis on prevention and over cure. For example, you get access to:
- ActiveCampaign University - a series of videos and guides to get started
- Free 1-to-1 strategy sessions
- A free migration service
- In-person events and workshops
- An active community forum, Slack community and Facebook group
- A help center with a huge range of how-to guides
But if you do run into an issue, they do have phone, email and live chat support.
10Deliverability
Deliverability is arguably the most important factor when choosing an email marketing tool — if your emails don’t reach the inbox, nothing else matters. ActiveCampaign consistently ranks among the best in independent deliverability testing.
According ActiveCampaign, the platform achieves a 94.2% inbox placement rate — placing it ahead of most competitors in independent testing. The industry average sits around 83%, meaning roughly 1 in 6 emails sent by the average platform never reaches the inbox. ActiveCampaign’s infrastructure is specifically designed to close that gap.
ActiveCampaign achieves this through a combination of infrastructure and features that help you stay out of spam folders:
- Authentication: SPF and DKIM are required before sending, with a setup wizard to walk you through it. DMARC is encouraged.
- Dedicated IPs: Available on Enterprise plans for high-volume senders, pre-warmed to avoid cold-start reputation issues.
- Automatic list hygiene: Inactive addresses are flagged and cleaned, and contacts who mark you as spam are auto-suppressed.
- Spam check tool: Pre-send analysis that assesses how likely your email is to be filtered.
- Predictive sending: ML-based send-time optimisation that delivers emails when each individual contact is most likely to engage — not just an average best time for the whole list.
- Campaign preview: Cross-browser, cross-inbox, and cross-device testing before you hit send.
It’s worth noting that deliverability results can vary depending on test methodology and sending conditions. Different independent tests produce different numbers. Either way, ActiveCampaign’s deliverability infrastructure is among the most comprehensive available, and in our experience over 14 years the platform has consistently landed emails where they need to go.
Rating Details
I’ve rated ActiveCampaign across each of the ten areas covered in this review.
Marketing Automation
★★★★★
5.0 / 5
ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds ahead of competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp, with 135+ triggers and actions, 500+ pre-built recipes, and the ability to split test entire automation paths. New employees were able to use it in their first week with no training.
Email Marketing
★★★★★
4.5 / 5
The drag-and-drop email builder is genuinely good for beginners and advanced marketers alike. 200+ templates, conditional content, predictive content, and AI-assisted generation via Active Intelligence. Loses half a star for a limited selection of content blocks — it would be great to see more interactive elements like countdown timers natively.
CRM
★★★★
2.5 / 5
The CRM is good enough as a backbone for your automation, but it’s pretty basic. It gets cumbersome with large contact volumes, and bigger teams have often ended up pairing ActiveCampaign with something like Salesforce or Pipedrive instead.
AI Features
★★★★★
4.5 / 5
Active Intelligence is surprisingly good and will save you days if not weeks of mundane campaign building work (or at least save you copying and pasting content between GPT/Claude and ActiveCampaign.
Cross-Channel
★★★★★
4.0 / 5
Email, SMS, and WhatsApp all coordinate from a single automation builder. The 2025 Hilos acquisition brought native WhatsApp support, and the two-way SMS inbox launched in September 2025. Still relatively new capabilities — expect this rating to improve as WhatsApp features mature.
Reporting
★★★★★
3.0 / 5
Function over form. The data is actionable — goals, eCommerce revenue attribution, and time-to-completion metrics are useful. But the data visualisation feels dated and there’s a lot of room for improvement in how reports are organised and presented.
Landing Pages
★★★★★
3.0 / 5
A basic page builder that’s fine for simple landing pages, webinar registrations, and microsites. But it lacks advanced personalisation features, which feels like a missed opportunity given ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM with rich contact data. Not a replacement for dedicated landing page software.
Forms
★★★★★
3.5 / 5
Four form types (inline, floating bars, modals, floating boxes), fully editable CSS/HTML, and a handy feature that previews the form on your actual website URL. Solid but nothing exceptional — does the job without standing out.
Customer Support
★★★★★
4.5 / 5
In 14 years, I’ve contacted support three times — each resolved within 24 hours by US-based staff. The emphasis on prevention (ActiveCampaign University, 1-to-1 strategy sessions, free migration, community forums) means you’ll rarely need to ask for help. Phone, email, and live chat are available when you do.
Deliverability
★★★★★
4.5 / 5
Achieves a 94.2% inbox placement rate according to ActiveCampaign’s deliverability study, well above the ~83% industry average. Strong authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), automatic list hygiene, spam checking, and dedicated IPs on Enterprise. Results vary by test methodology, but the deliverability infrastructure is among the most comprehensive available.
If we sum these stars (39) and divide by ten we get a 3.9/5 star rating.
Why I’m moving away from ActiveCampaign
I mentioned at the start of this review that I’ve decided to personally move away from ActiveCampaign. For me, it comes down to where I am right now — not where ActiveCampaign is as a product.
Firstly, ActiveCampaign has become more expensive. In 2024, they restructured their pricing and many existing users saw significant increases. For businesses with meaningful revenue and growing lists, the pricing is still reasonable for what you get. But for my send volume, it didn’t really make sense.
The bigger reason is that most of my current projects are early-stage and pre-revenue. At that scale, I don’t need sophisticated automation, split testing, or a built-in CRM — I need simple transactional emails and basic sequences. An API-based tool like Resend does the job at a fraction of the cost. The ventures I originally built on ActiveCampaign have either been sold or sunsetted, so I’m essentially starting fresh.
ActiveCampaign makes the most sense when you have a growing list, a meaningful number of contacts, and revenue to optimise. If you’re at that stage it’s probably the best email marketing and automation tool available. I’d migrate back to it in a heartbeat the moment one of my projects reaches the scale where I need what it offers.
What are the best alternatives to ActiveCampaign?
When friends and family have asked which email automation platform I’d recommend, there are only three instances where I’ve recommend a different tool to ActiveCampaign:
- If you’re an eCommerce business you may want to consider Omnisend, which is dedicated solely to eCommerce email marketing.
- If you’re a B2B service business with high-value leads (and a decent budget) you may want to consider HubSpot.
- If you’re a coach, trainer or educator looking to build out sales funnels with a membership site or gated content you may want to consider Clickfunnels.
As mentioned at the start of this review, ActiveCampaign is unique in that it’s easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable. Most of ActiveCampaign’s competitors make a trade-off in at least one of these areas that make it difficult to wholeheartedly recommend.
Here’s a quick side-by-side to help you compare. For a deeper analysis, see our full email marketing software comparison.
| ActiveCampaign | HubSpot | Mailchimp | Omnisend | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $15/mo | $20/mo | $13/mo | $16/mo |
| Free plan | No (14-day trial) | Limited free tools | Yes (250 contacts) | Yes (250 contacts) |
| At 10K contacts | ~$189/mo | ~$890/mo | ~$110/mo | ~$132/mo |
| Built-in CRM | Yes (Plus+) | Yes (native) | No | No |
| Automation depth | Advanced (135+ triggers) | Advanced (expensive) | Basic-intermediate | Advanced (ecommerce) |
| Integrations | 1,000+ | 1,700+ | 300+ | 130+ |
| Best for | SMBs needing automation | B2B with big budgets | Beginners, newsletters | Ecommerce (Shopify) |
| Key weakness | Pricing complexity | Cost escalation | Limited automation | Weak outside ecommerce |
If you have any questions about ActiveCampaign that we haven’t covered in this review feel free to drop them in the comments below, otherwise you can start an ActiveCampaign trial for free here.
11 Reader Comments
Thanks Marcus for this extensive review. Lot of value here! In the beginning however I read who it is not suited just now in one of the comments I learned that it is better to use other software for e-commerce or SaaS. Are there any other examples of use cases in which it is not a good fit?
This was super helpful!
Thank you Marcus!
Hi Marcus,
Thank you for this excellent article with so many detailed ideas about how one could use ActiveCampaigns.
Reading it, I realized that you have a quite large staff. We are a 2 person online business. A consultant friend has told us we need to implement marketing automation to get users and to scale.
Can a small home-based business such as ours handle something as complex (though intuitive) as ActiveCampaigns?
Would appreciate hearing your thoughts.
Thank you,
Linda
Hey Linda,
On the contrary, my team is currently six people. However, I feel like we'd be a 50 person company if it wasn't for all the automation ????
I would say that absolutely ActiveCampaign is right for a small team size. I started using ActiveCampaign when it was just myself and have grown with it. Compared to other good tools out there (such as Hubspot, Autopilot etc), the benefit with ActiveCampaign is that it remains quite affordable as you grow and has a good balance of power/ease of use/affordability.
Most other tools only have two of those three ingredients. That doesn't make them less good, it just makes them less suitable for all use cases, whereas ActiveCampaign is universally a very 'safe' tool regardless of use case.
The only exception I'd say is perhaps for SaaS or eCommerce tools, where something like Autopilot/Omnisend would be a better fit.
Thank you Marcus for putting this together.
Learnt quite a lot
Marcus, thank you for this detailed review of Active Campaign.
You've shared a lot of value here.
In particular, I enjoyed reading about your ideas for automating business functions outside of sales and marketing e.g. recruitment/hiring and accounts receivable.
It's clear that automation can be extremely valuable.
I can't wait to start applying some of the tactics you've shared here.
Thanks again!
Dan Hodgins
Great, thanks Dan ????
Thank you very much for your very helpful article.
I really like your way of structuring and automating whole marketing and sales process.
One thing I am not sure, how do you exactly setup the scoring for cold lead, MQL and SQL.
Would you mind sharing your insights on how you approach the scoring itself from strategic point of view?
Thank you very much.
Hi Ladislav,
From a strategic point of view, we just created a list of all of the criteria that we felt increase or decrease a lead's propensity to convert across two axes: engagement and fit. The point system is weighted, so for example opening an email may add 1 point to their engagement score, whereas visiting our pricing page may add 3 points.
From there, we set thresholds (e.g. if the fit score ever goes above 7 points, we consider that lead a 'good fit' and add a tag).
This way, all leads fall into one of four quadrants:
- Good Fit Engaged (put into sales funnel)
- Good fit Not engaged (put into nurturing funnel)
- Bad fit engaged (disqualify remove from lists)
- Bad fit not engaged (remove from lists)
At a tactical level, this is all configured with tags and lead scoring inside ActiveCampaign and is 100% automated.
Hope that helps!
Marcus - I know you wrote this a while back, but it's still great. Appreciate you taking the time.
Anytime ????
Thanks Rebecca