Table of Contents

Weaknesses

Doesn’t issue refunds
Requires a third party for surveys
Has a minimum contact storage of 500

Strengths

Allows unlimited email sends
Provides useful tools at no cost
Delivers free migration assistance
Consolidates cross-channel messages

What Is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a cloud customer experience automation (CXA) platform. It can help you meaningfully engage with prospective and previous customers throughout their entire life-cycle.

Apparent across all four ActiveCampaign plans, the company focuses not just on automation, but also on personalization, orchestration, and segmentation.

ActiveCampaign supports omnichannel marketing, which aids customer journey mapping. With this platform, you can improve every interaction to transform your leads into loyal customers within the shortest period.

Likewise, it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to turn your data into smart insight. This way, you can identify leads that are likely to close. It will help you engage with them, among other things.

Since it entered the scene in 2003, ActiveCampaign’s technology and business have evolved significantly. Before relaunching as a complete software as a service (SaaS) platform in 2016, it started off as a consulting firm. Then it offered on-premise apps for small and midsize companies.

Now, it has an incredible user base of over 130,000 digital enterprises, business-to-business vendors, and online stores of all sizes. It has clients in 170 countries and territories.

There are multiple ActiveCampaign plans with flexible pricing. You can find a suitable package for your unique needs and pay only for the number of contacts you want to target.

ActiveCampaign’s own family grew as its business expanded internationally. It has at least 800 employees spread across its HQ in Chicago, Illinois, and global offices in Dublin, Ireland, and Sydney, Australia.

430 ActiveCampaign user reviews on Trustpilot have rated the platform with 4.5 stars. A staggering 91% of all clients have described it as either excellent or great.

Likewise, the brand is a darling of G2 reviewers. In the fall of 2020, it’s named as the overall leader in its space after topping the small business, mid-market, and enterprise categories.

Enterprises also agrees that ActiveCampaign was the easiest CXA platform to set up and the one that delivered the best result. In the mid-market category, it also earned the Best Relationship award.

No wonder why more than 97% of the thousands ActiveCampaign reviews on G2 gave the company either 5 or 4 stars.

The company doesn’t have accreditation from the Better Business Bureau. But the pro-consumer nonprofit has rated it A+ — the highest score any listed business could possibly get.

So, how good is the ActiveCampaign CXA platform?

How does it stack up against other heavyweights in this space like MailChimp or GetResponse?

Keep reading this ActiveCampaign review to find out!

ActiveCampaign Features

Since ActiveCampaign is a CXA platform that puts an emphasis on omnichannel marketing, it’s not surprising that you can do an insane amount of things with it.

Machine Learning

The company’s AI handles data analytics so that your team can focus on closing deals and retaining customers instead of spending time crunching numbers.

Machine learning means the bot only becomes smarter the more data you feed it. It’s the foundational technology on which intelligent ActiveCampaign email marketing automation are built.

It can determine the best time to send emails and the messages to use to boost the chances of them getting opened and read.

Likewise, it can measure deal in probability. This way, your closers would know which ones to prioritize.

Templates

Below are the kinds of templates the ActiveCampaign CXA platform has to offer.

Automation Templates

Also called recipes, ActiveCampaign automation templates are the easiest way to set repetitive tasks on autopilot.

You have around 250 recipes at your disposal. Available in the platform’s marketplace, these pre-built templates are easy to download, import into your account, set up, and customize.

With handy filters, you can search ActiveCampaign automation templates by:

  • industry
  • experience level
  • use case
  • feature
  • price
  • author
  • popularity
  • date added.

The marketplace has a powerful search engine, so you can also browse recipes by name if you’re looking for something app-specific. You may not have to automate every aspect of the customer experience. But automation templates perform better the more you use them.

Email Templates

With 25 professionally-made ActiveCampaign email templates to choose from, you can produce stunning emails that can wow recipients. They lend themselves to customization, so you can easily modify them to reinforce your brand.

Moreover, these ActiveCampaign email templates are mobile-responsive. Rest assured that your correspondence will look good on any screen.

Content Marketing Templates

You get seven free ActiveCampaign templates, containing proven ways or checklists to render processes such as:

  • keyword research
  • content editing
  • blog scanning
  • outreach a breeze.
Social Media Content Template

With this free social calendar template, you can keep your social marketing campaigns on schedule. It can help you plan things ahead, beat deadlines, nurture relationships, and grow your influence in your chosen social network sites.

ActiveCampaign CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Template

You can use ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM functionality without creating an account or buying a subscription.

This tool can turn Excel and Google Sheets into a workable CRM to predict your revenue, track your leads, and simplify your marketing and sales processes. It can give you an idea of how the platform can help you manage your ongoing conversations.

Also, this spreadsheet comes with a dashboard that aggregates all of the data you capture with the template.

You can find the overall potential value of your sales pipeline and the total number of contacts you’ve had on the Dashboard tab.

Landing Page Templates

To build arresting landing pages in minutes or see what high-converting ones look like, take advantage of these pre-made ActiveCampaign templates. Each design is striking and easily editable.

Buyer Persona Template

Coming with three winning examples, this buyer persona template can serve as an excellent guide to plan content marketing strategy with your ideal buyers in mind. This way, you can consistently use the kind of messages that can resonate with them.

Webinar Templates

Part of the free ActiveCampaign webinar package, you can download one slide deck template (plus instructions) as well as one script template to help prepare your webinars.

Email Campaigns

With this platform, you can launch campaigns and enjoy absolute control over the messages you send out. ActiveCampaign has a native drag-and-drop email builder with ample formatting and customization options.

Whether you adopt proven email layouts from templates or create drafts from the ground up, you can produce compelling content in no time. You can:

  • do email blasts
  • build newsletters
  • configure email funnels
  • set autoresponders
  • create triggered correspondence.

Of course, you can also use ActiveCampaign to schedule emails.

Multi-User Editing

ActiveCampaign is big on collaboration. That’s why everyone on the team can manage email campaigns together.

Revision History

This platform can remember edits, so can always access your revisions.

Subscription Forms

This platform can help you turn site visitors into contacts through the use of any of these forms:

  • inline form
  • floating box
  • modal pop-up
  • floating bar.

During ActiveCampaign newsletter signup, you can start segmenting contacts with custom fields. Customized forms are key to acquiring specific data you want to get from your leads.

With ActiveCampaign for WordPress or other similar integrations, you can seamlessly embed subscription forms onto your webpages.

Audience Segmentation

Like every useful email marketing platform, ActiveCampaign lets you automatically group contacts based on the pieces of information you collect. Examples include industry, site visit, personal interest, and date of subscription.

With proper contact segmentation, you can personalize your messages to help increase your open and conversion rates.

Contact Record Consolidation

ActiveCampaign lets you save all contact information in single records. This way, any member of your sales team will be able to quickly dig up what they need and update lead or customer details.

Also, you can make ActiveCampaign merge contacts automatically to have all of your leads in just one central database. This way, you can keep contacts from slipping through the cracks.

Geotracking

With this platform, you can collect location data from your contacts on autopilot. The information is essential in geo-targeted email campaigns.

You can set an action like creating a deal or getting a notification whenever a contact clicks on your email.

Free Image Hosting

ActiveCampaign lets you upload as many images as you want for your campaigns at no extra cost.

Conditional Content

Using tags, you can send multiple versions of emails built on similar ActiveCampaign newsletter templates to different contacts. You can tweak sections of text and/or images so that the recipients can see relevant, valuable information.

ActiveCampaign Landing Pages

ActiveCampaign has a built-in drag-and-drop designer that lets you create and publish stunning landing pages in minutes with no coding required.

A/B Testing

Called Split Testing, this feature allows you to test up to five email iterations simultaneously. To experiment with different message versions, you can modify:

  • the subject line
  • content
  • “from” information
  • Images
  • call to action.

Lead Scoring

The ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring functionality helps you figure out which prospective customers express the highest interest in your offerings.

You get to define your scoring system’s mechanics so that you can generate results that are consistent with your goals. You can decide the weight of the actions you intend to score, the rules of point addition and subtraction, and even set point expiration dates.

Task Assignment

You can assign individual tasks to teammates manually or automatically.

Automated Deal Update

You can set automatic updates on all things deals.

Note Creation

Using this ActiveCampaign CRM feature, any member of your sales team can leave a note within contact records and/deals so that everyone can find synergy.

Web Personalization

The platform lets you personalize your web pages. It works much like Conditional Content for emails.

In addition, you’ll be able to show the right message at the right time. You can also place product and service images in front of different visitors by capitalizing on each one’s unique historical purchase data.

Automation Map

This unique tool allows you to see the connection between your automation, so you can fine-tune them on the fly and discover opportunities.

You can use map pages, map links, and a map shelf to explore your automation, study their individual performance, edit them on the spot, and create new ones.

Split Action

It’s one of those ActiveCampaign features that enable you to identify your most effective workflow automation and your underperformers. You can achieve this by A/B-testing funnels against one another.

Automated Tasks

You can create tasks for your team members to swiftly respond to critical events.

Automated Workflows

You can implement meaningful outreach practices with the use of workflow automation based on triggers, actions, and logic.

Flexible Pipeline

ActiveCampaign renders marketing pipelines flexible enough to ensure that you can create stages and customer health metrics pertinent to your business.

Team Collaboration

You can help your support agents collaborate with one another by adding them into conversations.

ActiveCampaign Chrome Extension

This browser extension is key to managing your sales communications while on Gmail. As long as you’re logged into your ActiveCampaign account, you’ll be able to:

  • create tasks
  • save new deals
  • store new contacts
  • view your CRM data.

ActiveCampaign Conversations

This add-on enables you to engage with your contacts more easily.

It supports email, web chat, and Facebook Messenger. Conversations keeps all messages in a unified inbox, helping your customer service representatives to know the context of previous chats.

Moreover, you can use Conversations as a trigger for automation. You have more than 10 pre-made recipes at your disposal.

There are five ways to use Conversations:

  1. Activate it in your ActiveCampaign account.
  2. Copy and paste its code into the footer of your site.
  3. Use the ActiveCampaign WordPress plugin.
  4. Sync it and your company’s Facebook page.
  5. Download its dedicated ActiveCampaign mobile app.

To connect Conversations with your social media page, don’t use the ActiveCampaign Facebook integration. Instead, use the one for Facebook Messenger.

We found no native ActiveCampaign Gmail integration and, as far as we saw, there’s no ActiveCampaign Outlook integration. There’s one for Microsoft Office 365, but it’s only for updating and adding contacts, events, deals, and tags.

If you use any of the two email services, you may find the ActiveCampaign Zapier integration helpful. Zapier provides Gmail- and Microsoft Outlook-ActiveCampaign automation.

As an add-on, Conversations is sold as a separate subscription. You’ll learn about how much it costs shortly.

ActiveCampaign Automation

With the ActiveCampaign CXA platform, you can automate your marketing processes with a fresh, clean slate or thoughtfully designed recipe.

To get started, click the Automations tab on the ActiveCampaign dashboard. Then choose New Automation.

You can import a recipe to have an instant automation workflow in place or define your sequence of triggers and actions. If you choose the latter, ActiveCampaign will walk you through from start to finish.

Here are some of the things you can do:

ActiveCampaign Sales Automation

With sales automation, you can team can enjoy increased productivity. You can set up notifications to let your crew know about active deals, give priority to higher-value ones, and nurture leads.

ActiveCampaign Email Automatization

Automating your email campaigns enables you to send strategically crafted messages at optimal times on schedule after they sign up for your ActiveCampaign newsletter. It lets you generate triggered correspondence accordingly too.

Also, you’ll be able to start a welcome series with autoresponders and actively turn your site visitors into leads and ultimately into paying customers.

ActiveCampaign Facebook Custom Audiences Automation

With automation, you can target prospective customers based on 15 factors (at least) and add them to Facebook Custom Audiences with little effort. This way, you can find more leads with Facebook Ads.

ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation

Using this CXA platform, you’ll be able to send follow-up emails to your contacts. You can also notify your sales team about your most engaged leads.

Further, marketing automation enables you to link third-party apps to the platform with ActiveCampaign Shopify and ActiveCampaign WooCommerce integrations (and the like). This way set abandoned cart reminders and maximize your revenue per site visitor.

ActiveCampaign Site Message Automation

Automations that involve site messaging allow you to send perfectly-timed personalized content to your targeted contacts.

Automating site messages is great when greeting contacts by name, sharing company updates, qualifying leads, and posting strong calls to action at the most persuasive moment.

ActiveCampaign SMS Automation

Text campaigns are practically similar to email ones, except that they’re more likely to get your message across.

ActiveCampaign allows SMS marketing. You can send your contacts event reminders, order confirmations, delivery updates, and promotional announcements.

ActiveCampaign Chatbot Automation

Chatbot workflows enable you to create deals automatically when a contact reaches out and establish trust and build loyalty with timely engagement.

Likewise, you can also set up bots to collect valuable information live agents need to better serve your contacts. Machines can also provide helpful support 24/7 even when human reps are offline.

Chatbot automation can also be useful to update custom field data and deliver a personalized experience across different channels.

ActiveCampaign Webinar Automatization

If you plan to hold webinars on Demio, you can download pre-built automation to integrate the software with ActiveCampaign. This free recipe can automate the whole process of reminding registrants about your events and staying in touch with them afterward.

Tracking and Reporting

As follows are ActiveCampaign’s features for tracking customer data and generating reports.

Event Tracking

This feature records the online activity of your site visitors. Based on the actions you choose to track, you can find out what they do on your site or app chronologically.

You’ll be able to tell when they get distracted halfway through an action, finished a particular task but eventually bounced off your site, or completed an event. This data can be useful for segmentation, tagging, and automation.

Site Tracking

You can keep tabs on the content your site visitors like.

This way, you can use fresh statistics to make data-driven ActiveCampaign email marketing decisions. Ultimately, you’ll be able to send follow-up notifications and refine your conversion strategies.

Social Sharing

This platform can help you measure the performance of your email campaigns on social media. You can determine whether your content goes viral on the top social networking channels and study what makes it such a hit.

Goal Tracking

Using goal actions, you can move your targeted contacts to the next stage of the sales funnel. You’ll be able to see the performance of your goals. You can monitor the number of leads that have been heading toward conversion and those who haven’t taken the actions you set.

To maximize your sales, you can set up follow-up messages or notify your team to give your unconverted leads a little push. You can use historical data to upsell or cross-sell the items your customers are likely to buy based on their past purchases.

Attribution

This feature enables you to determine which channel brings the most leads and generates the most conversion.

Working hand in hand with ActiveCampaign features like Site Tracking, Attribution supports industry-standard UTM parameters to keep a record of visitor sources.

You can create reports to easily visualize the different paths your prospective customers take, measure the effectiveness of every touchpoint, and spot trends you may otherwise not see.

Sales Reporting

You can track and analyze the performance of your team and sales funnels with specific reports.

Advanced Marketing Reporting

Advanced reports let you see which marketing channels yield the best results. Leverage them to polish your strategies, convert more leads into customers much faster. That way you’ll accelerate the growth of your business.

ActiveCampaign Messaging

In terms of internal notifications, you can set up alerts when a contact subscribes and unsubscribes from your list. You can do this by either updating the List settings or creating a step in automation.

With ActiveCampaign Conversations, you can get alerts when there’s a new message in three ways: desktop, audio, and email notifications.

If you toggle desktop notifications on, ActiveCampaign will display new messages on your computer screen.

If you enable audio notifications, you’ll hear a sound when Conversations detects a new chat or email.

If you activate email notifications, ActiveCampaign will email you when an incoming message is left unread within two minutes.

Unlike the other two alert types, email notifications will work even if you don’t have Conversations open in a tab of your web browser.

ActiveCampaign for iOS or Android supports push notifications. You can enable them upon setup and toggle them on or off in Settings.

Task assignment triggers push notifications, so the tool will display a message on your mobile device.

Ease of Use and Interface

ActiveCampaign promises instant sign-up. But our experience was a bit different.

It encountered minor hiccups during registration. We couldn’t do it with a desktop-based browser, so we had to switch to mobile. That did the trick, but that version of the cloud ActiveCampaign dashboard wasn’t user-friendly.

Ultimately, we had to return to a personal computer. But it was smooth sailing from there.

Regarding the interface of the CXA platform, whether it be the cloud version or its mobile app, we had no complaints. It looked sleek and simplistic enough to navigate the wide array of features conveniently.

Since the ActiveCampaign Chrome extension and mobile app (as well as the Conversations app) have limited functionality by design, they’re much easier to use.

ActiveCampaign supports many languages. Its site’s content is in English by default, but it can translate it into Spanish, German, French, Italian, or Portuguese automatically – it detects your location.

The cloud ActiveCampaign dashboard even has more language options. Other than American English, you can choose from 20 others, including British English as well as two major Portuguese dialects, to manage your account in the alphabet and grammar you’re familiar with.

ActiveCampaign Integrations and Apps

At the time of writing this ActiveCampaign review, you can sync more than 850 apps (in 21 categories) and ActiveCampaign. Seven in 10 of the company’s user base rely on them to extend the functionality of the CXA platform with external tools they already use and are familiar with.

Only 38 ActiveCampaign integrations are native, so you can just imagine a large number of developers interested in partnering with the company.

Below are the most popular third-party apps in the ActiveCampaign ecosystem.

  • ClickFunnels
  • Google Analytics
  • Facebook
  • Pipedrive
  • Shopify
  • Unbounce
  • WooCommerce
  • WordPress
  • Zapier

The ActiveCampaign Zapier integration is noteworthy. Zapier can connect your ActiveCampaign account to 369 apps, unlocking a new world of automation possibilities.

ActiveCampaign also has mobile apps for iOS and Android. Here’s how it differs from the cloud CXA platform.

ActiveCampaign Mobile App

This mobile app (named Deals CRM, not Analytics Campaign) focuses on CRM data management only. In other words, you can just do things related to tasks, deals, contacts, and campaigns with it.

ActiveCampaign Conversations Mobile App

The Conversations mobile app is also not as feature-rich as its web-based counterpart. It displays assigned and unassigned conversations, and Filters is its only setting.

Compared to cloud Conversations, the current version of this mobile app offers no way to do the following:

  • Create a Welcome Message
  • Enable and disable the web chat widget
  • Change the web chat widget display rules
  • Implement and edit chatbot automation
  • Customize Conversations emails
  • Define the role of users

ActiveCampaign Support

Judging by ActiveCampaign user reviews, the company generally goes the extra mile for both users and non-users of its CXA platform.

First of all, you can request a demo to see ActiveCampaign in action. It covers the following:

  • Reaching out to new subscribers
  • Viewing contact information
  • Automating your marketing processes
  • Sending effective emails
  • Using its powerful CRM

When you purchase a subscription, the company can help you minimize any negative impact of changing marketing automation providers on your business.

With ActiveCampaign’s Expert Migration service, you won’t lose your subscribers or automation. Its specialists can import your contacts, lists, tags, and custom fields. It can also recreate your subscription forms, automation workflows, and email templates.

To help you get started, you can attend the ActiveCampaign University. A kind of ActiveCampaign knowledge base, the Education Center gives you access to training sessions like ActiveCampaign onboarding webinars and many insightful articles.

If you don’t have time to watch videos and read literature, you can book a 30-minute call to know the ins and outs of the platform. An ActiveCampaign expert can answer your burning questions live, walk you through the features, and share tips to build your brand of customer experience.

As a Professional or Enterprise subscriber, you’ll be entitled to three one-on-one training sessions a month.

In addition, you may join many discussions about different topics on ActiveCampaign’s forum, Slack Chat, and Facebook Group. Connecting with marketers in these vibrant communities can help you learn about their best practices and discover clever solutions to unusual problems.

If you have any suggestion, like a feature request, just go to ideas.activecampaign.com.

All paying ActiveCampaign users get email and chat support. If you have the Enterprise plan, you’ll be able to call the company for help.

But even if you just sign up for the ActiveCampaign free trial, you may consult a chatbot to scour the expansive ActiveCampaign knowledge base.

Or, you can submit a support ticket to directly email the company. In fact, it’s one of the first things we tried just to see how fast ActiveCampaign’s support team replies.

Our inquiry was about some slight sign-up difficulty. Despite our rather vague explanation, ActiveCampaign’s representative accurately guessed the possible challenges we were facing and offered a solution that worked. And all of this happened pretty fast.

Even if you don’t pay a dime, ActiveCampaign will provide you with free tools to aid your marketing efforts. Here’s what you can get:

Subject Line Generator

This free cloud ActiveCampaign headline generator can give you wonderful subject line ideas to persuade your contacts to open your emails.

All you need is to enter a keyword to start generating subject line suggestions that can pique the curiosity of email readers.

Black Friday Toolkit

This collection of free tools can increase your chances of meeting and exceeding your Black Friday goals.

Freelancer Starter Kit

This package of 12 downloadable free resources can help you deal with the hardest aspects of running a freelance business. To get your house in order, you can use ActiveCampaign’s checklists to handle objections, manage client relationships, organize your payments, and more.

This kit includes a bunch of ActiveCampaign templates for proposals, follow-up emails, meeting agenda, invoicing, and payment tracking. These sources pair well with Thinkific.

SaaS Homepage Audit Worksheet

If you manage a SaaS site, this worksheet can make you a more effective homepage auditor.

Based on the lessons from 115 SaaS sites, this free resource can help you maximize your homepage by concentrating on five areas:

Cart Abandonment Loss Calculator

With this web-based calculator, you’ll stay aware of your potential losses due to abandoned carts. It takes the average number of monthly site visitors, average product price, and conversion rate into account.

Also, it always assumes that 75% of your shoppers don’t proceed to checkout and complete their order. So it won’t give you an accurate lost revenue estimate unless three-fourths of your leads actually abandon their carts every month.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

The company offers four subscriptions (Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise). The higher the plan, the wider the feature set. Contact volume dictates the price too.

As it should be, the cost of your chosen plan decreases when you choose a higher contact bracket. Since there are two ActiveCampaign billing options, monthly and annually, you stand to save more money if you agree to pay 12 months in advance.

Fixed ActiveCampaign pricing across all subscriptions ends for a list of more than 100,000 contacts. If you need to store more leads and customers, you’ll need to request for a quote.

Just to give you an idea of how things look, the lowest plan is as follows:

1 to 500 contacts

  • Lite: $15/month or $108/year ($9/month)
  • Plus: $70/month or $588/year ($49/month)
  • Professional: $159/month or $1,548/year ($129/month)
  • Enterprise: $279/month or $2,748/year ($229/month)

Before you pay for a premium subscription, sign up for the 14-day ActiveCampaign free plan. It’s a separate package, so don’t expect it to provide full access to the feature set of a particular plan. Account creation is a prerequisite for it, but it requires no credit card information.

When it comes to Conversations, it costs $19 a month per user. This add-on also comes with its own 14-day ActiveCampaign free trial.

In terms of payment, you may only use a Visa, Mastercard, or American Express card.

ActiveCampaign doesn’t provide refunds, partial or full. So, make the most out of these free trials before you purchase.

Despite this, the company guarantees a two-year price lock. This means the cost of your subscription won’t be subject to any price adjustment for 24 months from the date of your sign-up.

You can enjoy this benefit as long as you remain in the same plan tier and contact limit. Price adjustment due to your use of ActiveCampaign’s interaction partners is an exception to this rule.

Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign

Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign have a lot in common.

Both automation providers support email marketing, contact segmentation, tagging, landing page building functionality, and conditional content.

Likewise, they have sign-up forms, templates, dozens of integrations, and guides and tutorials, use AI, provide a mobile app, and offer no refunds.

Mailchimp has a free plan. It includes storage of up to 2,000 contacts with daily and monthly email sending limits of 2,000 and 10,000, respectively.

In comparison, the free ActiveCampaign trial expires in 14 days and limits contact storage and email sending to 100 each.

Mailchimp also supports website building, survey creation, and postcard mailing. It also can facilitate the management of social media posts and ads.

Quite the contrary, you can only run Facebook ads through ActiveCampaign.

Compared to ActiveCampaign’s sole add-on, Mailchimp has a directory of third-party service providers and sells dedicated Internet Protocol addresses à la carte. It uses its network of partners to deliver to extend services it doesn’t offer.

Mailchimp accepts multiple currencies, whereas ActiveCampaign takes US dollars only.

Premium ActiveCampaign email marketing solutions have no sending limit. The company doesn’t bill you extra for transactional messages, which is something Mailchimp still does.

Mailchimp has no answer to ActiveCampaign’s migration assistance and Conversations. You may be able to get expert help when switching marketing automation providers and unifying your cross-channel messages through Mailchimp’s partners. But working with them can inflate your costs.

Unlike ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp has no native SMS marketing solutions. You’ll have to integrate it with third-party tools like Call Loop, SimpleTexting, or Text Marketer to be able to send text messages.

GetResponse vs ActiveCampaign

The only things those two have in common are the basics, such as:

  • Email and landing page builders
  • Tracking and reporting capabilities
  • Varied templates
  • Signup forms

The main difference lies in pricing.

GetResponse charges less across all three of its fixed-price subscriptions. Each company’s price starts at $15 a month. But GetResponse’s minimum contact storage is twice the size of ActiveCampaign’s (1,000 vs. 500).

In addition, GetResponse offers annual and biennial billing options. With ActiveCampaign, you may only choose between 30-day and 12-month plans.

Every fixed-price subscription from GetResponse comes with a 30-day free trial. At the moment, the best ActiveCampaign can do is a free plan that lasts for just 14 days.

Like Mailchimp, GetResponse supports surveys. It can help you manage Facebook and Instagram ads. It even has Social Ads creator, a mobile app that automates video and banner promotion.

As mentioned, ActiveCampaign limits its ads management capability to Facebook. At least you won’t need an ActiveCampaign Facebook integration for it.

Lastly, GetResponse enables you to launch webinars through its platform. This functionality isn’t surprising because of its affiliation with ClickMeeting.

Despite its unquestionable advantages, GetResponse may not necessarily give more bang for your buck.

ActiveCampaign extends migration support to all subscribers and waives the corresponding fees, which would normally set you back at least $1,150. GetResponse will help you set up your account only if you sign up for its quote-based Max plan.

Further, ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM, includes transactional emails to its subscriptions, offers more integrations, and can provide unlimited user seats.

GetResponse, on the other hand, claims to have a CRM, but says nothing about it on its feature sets. Its list of integrations is at least 82% shorter. The biggest team size that can access GetResponse is 10, whereas ActiveCampaign’s Enterprise plan has unlimited seating.

Although GetResponse now supports chats, it has no equivalent to ActiveCampaign’s Conversations.

ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit serves a niche market: online creators. So its list of features is unsurprisingly thinner than that of ActiveCampaign.

For starters, both platforms offer the fundamentals of marketing and automation. They support contact management, email and landing page building, sign-up form creation, and email sequence automation.

ConvertKit has its own version of ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring, Advanced Reporting, and Facebook Custom Audiences synchronization too. Irrespective of the size of your contact list, ConvertKit can also assist you with migration at no extra cost.

In its own ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign article, ConvertKit admits that it only has three extras ActiveCampaign doesn’t have. With it, you can:

  • resend unopened messages after email broadcasts
  • facilitate the delivery of opt-in incentives
  • allow the editing of autoresponders in a single window

ConvertKit lacks CRM functionality, has 91% fewer integrations, and offers nothing but landing page templates.

However, in our view, ConvertKit sold itself short in its own write-up. It didn’t highlight that it can serve as an ecommerce platform for online creators. It helps users sell digital products and subscriptions and run paid newsletters in exchange for a 3.5% cut.

ConvertKit has a $0 plan, which remains free as long as you need to store less than 1,000 email subscribers. Its two premium subscriptions (Creator and Creator Pro) come with a trial and are more affordable at all price points.

To put things into perspective, ConvertKit’s Creator Pro is 34.32% cheaper than ActiveCampaign’s Plus per month for 5,000 contacts.

Moreover, ConvertKit is so generous it also offers a money-back guarantee. If you want to cancel your plan within the first 30 days of your subscription, you may request a full refund.

Similar to GetResponse, ConvertKit’s initial price covers 1,000 contacts. You can also get a fixed price for up to 400,000 email subscribers. Custom ActiveCampaign pricing begins when contacts exceed 100,000.

ConvertKit also offers an annual subscription, which naturally costs less per 30 days than the monthly billing option. But it sweetens the pot by adding two months free to it. ActiveCampaign just provides discounted pricing for annual subscribers.

ActiveCampaign Review – Verdict

ActiveCampaign is an award-winning platform for a reason.

In fact, the minor criticisms we had weren’t even the subject of the very few not so good ActiveCampaign user reviews you can find on the internet. It indicates that you have to either nitpick or have bad luck to have something negative to say about this platform.

Sure, it would be nice if ActiveCampaign offers higher minimum contact storage, has native survey solutions, and provides refunds. But none of them could outweigh the positives it brings to the table.

The company’s unlimited email sends and free migration services are priceless. Its Conversations add-on is unique and unmatched. ActiveCampaign’s neat complementary tools are proof that you can benefit from it immensely without spending a penny on it.

It goes without saying that we like this platform. Try it now for free and see what we’re talking about!