ActiveCampaign Review (2024)
Our Research
ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing platform with industry-leading advanced automation features, analytics and reporting. While it’s not the most beginner-friendly platform on the market, it is a good value for businesses with large email lists as its entry-level plan costs $29 per month (with annual billing) and includes unlimited email sends per month for up to 250,000 contacts. To help you decide if it’s the right solution for your unique needs, the experts at TopRatedTen.com put it to the test based on features and capabilities, pricing, customer support, and more with our hands-on ActiveCampaign review.
ActiveCampaign Pros & Cons
Pros
- All plans include unlimited email sends for up to 250,000 contacts
- Free contact migration service
- High deliverability rate
- Industry-leading automations
- Top-notch analytics and reporting
- Split test up to five emails at once
- SMS campaigns
- Free trial does not require a credit card
Cons
- No free plan
- Its free trial is very limited with a limit of 100 contacts and 100 emails
- It’s entry-level Lite plan offers very few integrations
- Its templates are fairly basic in terms of design
- It doesn’t have a built-in stock image library
ActiveCampaign at a Glance 9.5 Editor Score
Features & Integrations
9.5
Analytics & Reporting
9.5
Ease Of Use
9.5
Pricing & Packages
9.6
Customer Service
9.5
9.5 Editor Score
How do I know I can trust this ActiveCampaign Review?
TopRatedTen.com authors, contributors, and editors are serious about research. We combine our own experience with the services we recommend, with reviews that come from verified users–just like you! Together, with reviews from industry experts, we find the Top 10 best products and services to make sure you can choose with confidence and ease.
ActiveCampaign At a Glance
- ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and one of the oldest of its kind as it was founded in 2003.
- In addition to its email marketing platform, it also offers marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and sales engagement tools, giving users a comprehensive sales and marketing automation suite.
- It’s designed with a focus on advanced automations and analytics.
- Our experts ranked ActiveCampaign as the ninth-best email marketing platform in 2024 and the best email marketing platform for automations.
Pros
For businesses with large contact lists and high monthly email sends, ActiveCampaign is one of the best values in the market as all of its plans include unlimited monthly email sends for up to 250,000 contacts. For insight, most email marketing platforms have tiered pricing that is based on the number of contacts a user has and limits the number of emails they can send per month, making ActiveCampaign a very affordable solution.
Aside from price, ActiveCampaign is great for data-driven marketing teams that will take advantage of its advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, including website tracking and event tracking. It has industry-leading automations, giving users the ability to automate custom processes (or “workflows”) by segment. So, the experience for your contacts can be customized based on a variety of factors, such as how and when they subscribed, sales history, interests and actions.
Cons
Though ActiveCampaign is a robust email marketing platform, that’s not to say it’s the ideal solution for every business. To start, it doesn’t offer a free plan and its free trial is not only fairly short at just 14 days (shorter than most in the industry), but it’s also very limited in terms of functionality as users are limited to sending 100 emails to 100 contacts.
This hardly gives a new user enough time to become familiar with the platform, never mind learn all of its more advanced features. Speaking of which, it has a fairly steep learning curve compared to many of its competitors that are more beginner-friendly―although less feature-rich. So, while it offers a depth of useful features, these take time to learn and thus it’s not the email marketing platform for those that want the shortest learning curve possible.
How ActiveCampaign Works
ActiveCampaign is a SaaS platform that works to help users build workflows and automate email and SMS marketing campaigns although it’s a code-free platform. It has a drag-and-drop campaign builder where users can select and customize a prebuilt template, select an audience, configure options for email tracking and either set up the triggers or schedule the email for a specific date and time. It does a good job of walking users through the setup process so, no matter which type of campaign you are building, it remains pretty straightforward.
After deploying an email campaign, ActiveCampaign tracks data and provides its users with detailed analytics and reports. This helps businesses make more informed decisions and optimizations that more effectively connect with their audiences, drive conversions and build loyalty. In return, it’s not surprising that ActiveCampaign is a very high-value email marketing platform that, when used strategically, has the potential to provide a tremendous amount of value for price.
ActiveCampaign Core Features
As a comprehensive platform, ActiveCampaign offers a variety of core features centered on marketing, sales, and e-commerce. For example, it has robust automation features that enable businesses to easily create email campaigns, foster leads and drive conversions. In addition to its email marketing suite complete with a user-friendly editor, it also has advanced tracking, data collection and reporting capabilities as well as a customer relationship management (CRM) to help users stay connected with contacts, build relationships and drive more sales.
WYSIWYG Email Editor
ActiveCampaign uses a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) email editor that makes it easy to create numerous types of email marketing campaigns. Users can select a prebuilt template, which more realistically serves as a prebuilt layout. This is then customized in real time, making it easy for users to see how their email will look to its recipients.
For more advanced users, it also has the option to create text-only emails as well as custom HTML emails. This adds a good deal of flexibility for teams of varying skill and experience levels, while helping to ensure the result always appears professional.
Email and Marketing Automations
ActiveCampaigns enables users to employ automations and build workflows with advanced triggers. For example, this could be as simple as sending new subscribers a welcome email or sending an email automatically after a potential customer abandons their cart. But it can also entail more comprehensive workflows with conditional segmentation so that users are sent certain emails based on their interactions with previous emails, such as whether they opened the email, clicked a link or made a purchase.
Tracking, Data Collection and Reporting
ActiveCampaign is one of the best platforms of its kind for its tracking, data collection and reporting capabilities. Users have the option to track various aspects of their campaign’s performance well beyond the standard open rate or conversion rate. It can be set up so that it also tracks a user from your website, including the use of data from Google Analytics. In terms of reporting, it has a number of different reports that users can run, including campaign performance, email client trends, predictive content and open and read trends. Collectively, this gives users a good depth of information, which can be used strategically to develop top-performing campaigns.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Another key feature of ActiveCampaign is its built-in CRM. This can be a useful tool for businesses that don’t already have a CRM in place but want to be able to foster incoming leads more effectively as their contact list grows. Compared to the best CRMs in the market, ActiveCampaign’s CRM features are fairly lightweight, but it does enable users to build a custom pipeline, create and assign tasks, set up custom goals, forecast deals, and track progress. Overall, it’s a solid CRM for those who rely heavily on email marketing but do not yet have a CRM set up.
What Sets ActiveCampaign Apart
While users can expect that just about every email marketing platform will have some built-in data tracking, ActiveCampaign is far superior to most in the market. For those that haven’t used many email marketing platforms, most include basic tracking features, such as email open rates and conversions. However, ActiveCampaign gives users a breadth of insights with advanced tracking, data collection and analytics. For example, upon creating a standard email, users are prompted to select various tracking and analytics options, such as open and read tracking, link tracking, reply tracking and Google Analytics tracking for further insights in web analytics.
ActiveCampaign Pricing and Plans
| Lite | Plus | Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $29 per month | $49 per month | $149 per month |
| Maximum Number of Contacts | 250,000 | 250,000 | 250,000 |
| Maximum Monthly Email Sends | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Number of Users | One | Three | Five |
| Drag-and-Drop Email Editor | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Prebuilt Email Templates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email Automations | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reporting and Analytics | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Audience Segmentation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A/B Testing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Link and Event Tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Forms and Popups | Inline forms-only | Inline, pop-up and modal forms | Inline, pop-up and modal forms |
| Landing Pages | No | Yes, custom branded | Yes, custom branded |
| SMS Campaigns | No | Available as an add-on | Available as an add-on |
| vAbandoned Cart | No | Yes | Yes |
| Lead Scoring | No | Yes | Yes |
| Automations Mapping | No | Yes | Yes |
| Facebook Custom Audiences | No | Yes | Yes |
| Predictive Sending | No | No | Yes |
| Support | 24/7 support via live chat and email | 24/7 support via live chat and email | 24/7 support via live chat and email |
Lite Plan
ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan is its entry-level plan that costs $29 per month with annual billing. Unlike most email marketing plans, it does not have a limit on the number of monthly email sends and it includes up to 250,000 contacts. It also includes all core email marketing features, such as prebuilt email templates, a drag-and-drop editor, audience segmentation, automations, analytics and reporting and more. To help make the process of creating a new account easier, it uniquely includes a free contact list migration for those who are moving to Active Campaign from another email marketing platform.
This plan is a good option for data-driven businesses with high monthly email sends. However, it’s not geared toward ecommerce businesses as it lacks integrations with major ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, Square, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. It also does not include other ecommerce features that are available in other plans, such as a product catalog or abandoned cart.
Plus Plan
The Plus Plan costs $49 per month with annual billing and includes everything from the Lite plan, but with additional features―particularly ecommerce features. In addition to the inclusion of ecommerce integrations, it also includes helpful features for businesses that use Facebook Advertising, such as Facebook Custom Audiences and lead ads. This helps businesses better leverage social efforts and develop more strategic email campaigns that more effectively resonate with audiences and drive more sales.
Due to its inclusion of more advanced features, the Plus plan is ideal for businesses that have experience with email marketing and are looking to take their campaigns to the next level. Not only does ActiveCampaign have some of the most advanced automation tools, but it also has some of the most advanced analytics and reporting capabilities in the industry. For businesses that are looking to make data-driven decisions to optimize and build more effective campaigns, this is a good choice.
Professional Plan
ActiveCampaign’s Professional plan costs $149 per month with annual billing and is designed for marketing teams as it includes up to five users as opposed to the midtier Plus plan’s three-user limit. It includes everything from the Plus plan and, admittedly, doesn’t offer a large number of additional features―especially for being three times the price. For example, it includes site messages, split automations, predictive sending, tracking attribution and it integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
The split automations could be a very useful feature for businesses that want to test performance and optimize campaigns further based on insightful data. Granted, it is odd that predictive sending is not available on lower-level plans as it is generally a common feature on mid-tier email marketing plans as it’s not a particularly unique feature. However, it can be a very useful feature as it optimizes send time automatically for maximum engagement. This plan would be best suited for businesses that have outgrown the Plus plan and those who depend on Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 given its ability to integrate with them seamlessly.
Setup
New users will find the setup process to be quick and easy. To start, there are only a couple of simple steps to sign up for the 14-day free trial, which involves providing your email address, name, password and answering a couple of basic questions about your business, such as the number of contacts you have, number of employees and industry. The free trial does not require a credit card and ActiveCampaign offers a free contact migration service, which makes it very easy to transfer your contact list from another email marketing platform. Alternatively, users can simply import contact lists from a CSV file or copy and paste contacts into ActiveCampaign.
Ease Of Use
ActiveCampaign offers a vast number of advanced features, which can lend to a longer learning curve for those looking to take advantage of said features. However, it’s also very easy to use for those looking to build and deploy automated email campaigns. Compared to many competing email marketing platforms, it’s far more intuitive, making it easier to build automated campaigns with more advanced triggers and features.
The steps to create an email campaign with ActiveCampaign is very straightforward. To start, click the option from the dashboard to create a campaign. Then, create a name for your campaign and select the type of email campaign you wish to create, such as a standard, one-time email, an auto-responder to send after someone subscribes automatically, split testing to send multiple emails and discover which works best, RSS-triggered or based on a certain date. From there, users are prompted to select an audience, choose a template, customize it and determine when it sends.
Security
ActiveCampaign is committed to protecting user data and it takes a multipronged approach to data security. For example, all of its data is classified and restricted, it employs a secure software development lifecycle, its in-house team runs continuous penetration testing and more. Beyond its internal measures, it also gives users the ability to further protect and safeguard their data through multifactor authentication (MFA); session management, which logs inactive users out automatically; and single sign-on (SSO).
ActiveCampaign Customer Service and Support
Customer support is available 24/7 via live chat and email. While it’s not ideal that it does not offer phone support, its live chat support is quick, helpful and very personable as if you’re speaking to a colleague rather than someone in a random call center. This is not only my personal experience with ActiveCampaign’s support but a large majority of users note the same in hundreds of reviews as well.
The Fine Print
One thing to note is that its free trial does not give users access to the features in its paid plans. Although this is to be expected of free versions, usually free trials of paid plans give users access to the paid plan for a set period of time. So, while it’s the only way to familiarize yourself with ActiveCampaign without a financial investment, it does not exactly give users the complete picture of what it is capable of, which is a bit disappointing as it limits your ability to get to know whether it’s right for you.
ActiveCampaign Alternatives and How They Compare
| ActiveCampaign | Mailchimp | Zoho Campaigns | Brevo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ratings | ||||
| Starting Price | $29 per month (up to 250,000 contacts) | Free; $13 per month (up to 500 contacts) | Free (up to 2,000 contacts); $3 per month | Free; $25 per month (unlimited contacts) |
| Free Trial Length | 14 days | 30 days | 14 days | Not available |
| Drag and Drop Email Builder | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email Templates | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contact Management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Audience Segmentation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, although limited to 2,000 contacts on the Free and Starter plan |
| Signup Form Builder | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Landing Page Builder | Yes | Yes | Yes | Available with Business and Enterprise plans |
| Website Builder | No | Yes | Available via Zoho One | No |
ActiveCampaign vs. Zoho Campaigns
When comparing ActiveCampaign to Zoho Campaigns, there’s a glaring difference in terms of price and use case. Zoho Campaigns offers a robust free plan for up to 2,000 contacts, making it the obvious choice for budget-strapped businesses and those with a small email list looking for a beginner-friendly email marketing platform. Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign costs a lot more with a starting price of $249 per month with annual billing, but it’s more aligned with the needs of strategic marketing teams looking to build out more complex campaigns and acquire more meaningful data.
ActiveCampaign vs. Brevo
In the battle of ActiveCampaign versus Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), Brevo stands out for the inclusion of a free forever plan and unlimited contacts for $25 per month. Brevo also has more modern email templates, which can help those who are struggling to design an email come up with ideas faster. Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign’s templates are largely different layouts as opposed to email designs However, Brevo lacks the same depth of data tracking and collection, making ActiveCampaign the better choice for data-driven teams and businesses.
ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of ActiveCampaign’s biggest competitors with over 13 million users worldwide. It stands out for its beginner-friendly platform and more budget-friendly plans, including a free forever plan with up to 50 contacts and 1,000 email sends per month. However, ActiveCampaign is a far better value for price for those who have over 1,500 contacts as Mailchimp is on a tiered pricing model where the pricing increases based on the number of contacts a user has. Mailchimp’s pricing quickly skyrockets for those with more than 1,500 users, making ActiveCampaign the more affordable option for businesses with contact lists in the thousands as opposed to in the hundreds.
Who Is ActiveCampaign Best For?
ActiveCampaign is a good overall option for most small businesses thanks to its user-friendly interface, vast automation capabilities and in-depth performance insights. While it’s not the most affordable option for businesses with a small email list, it is one of the most affordable options in the market for businesses with a few thousand or more contacts or high monthly email sends due to its inclusion of unlimited monthly sends and up to 250,000 contacts with all plans. Pricing aside, and because of its industry-leading insights, it’s also a solid option for data-driven businesses looking to optimize their efforts and build very fine-tuned campaigns that operate at peak performance.
Bottom Line
In our expert opinion based on first-hand experience using ActiveCampaign, it is hands-down the best email marketing platform for advanced automations, data collection and reporting. On top of that, it has one of the largest number of automations and triggers available, making it very flexible for businesses that are looking to employ email automations from a number of angles. Overall, it’s a well-rounded, easy-to-use and highly versatile email marketing platform.
