ActiveCampaign Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you create targeted email campaigns, automate marketing tasks, and manage customer relationships.

Launched in 2003, the platform has been around for over 20 years. It comes with many great features (e.g., segmentation, customer behavior tracking) that have improved through the years.

The question is, does it truly live up to its expectations in 2024?

Continue reading as I explore the specifics to help you decide if ActiveCampaign is the right fit for you.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for ActiveCampaign

We rate ActiveCampaign 8.2 out of 10. It’s easy to use and has many strong automation features and templates. The reports are comprehensive and come in various types for different needs.

However, there are a couple of downsides. It doesn’t offer a free plan, and it lacks 24/7 support, which some other alternatives provide.

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
SMB Guide Rating	8.2
Pricing & Plans	7.5
Automation Templates	9
Visual Email Designer	8.5
Landing Pages	8
CRM	8
Reporting	8.5
Integrations	9
Customer Support	7

In this review of ActiveCampaign, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the marketing automation software.

Pricing & Plans

ActiveCampaign offers 4 pricing plans: Starter, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise. The cost of each plan varies depending on the number of contacts you manage.

You can take on their monthly plan with no contracts and extra setup fees.

Also, you can try ActiveCampaign with a free 14-day trial. While you won’t have access to all premium features, you can test most of its features.

Starter

Price

• $15/mo (for 1000 contacts)

Features

• Multi-step marketing automation
• 5 actions per automation
• 900+ automations
• Multiple triggers
• Marketing CRM
• RSS-triggered & date-based campaigns
• Drag & drop email designer
• Plain text & HTML editors
• 250+ pre-built templates
• A/B testing
• Spam check
• Gmail & Outlook integrations
• Autoresponder & reply templates
• Campaign reporting
• Link tracking

Who it’s for: those who are getting started with marketing campaigns

Plus

• $49/mo (for 1000 contacts)

Features

• Everything in Starter plan
• Unlimited actions per automation
• Generative AI
• Sales automation
• Sales reporting
• Revenue reporting
• Custom event tracking
• Landing pages
• AI content generation
• PayPal & Stripe integrations
• Custom user permissions
• Custom account domain
• Database sync

Who it’s for: those needing more automation capabilities and powerful customer insights

Pro

Price

• $79/mo (for 1000 contacts)

Features

• Everything in Plus plan
• Predictive sending
• Advanced contact management
• Branching & routing
• Conditional content
• Attribution tracking
• Conversion tracking
• Premium eCommerce integrations

Who it’s for: Marketers who’re looking for full omnichannel marketing automation

Enterprise

Price

• $145/mo (for 1000 contacts)

Features

• Everything in Pro plan
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Premium CRM integrations
• Dedicated account team
• Uptime SLA

Who it’s for: those who need to manage campaigns at scale with enterprise-level support

Add-ons

• SMS marketing automation
• Pipeline management
• Deal records
• Lead scoring
• Automated 1:1 email
• Sentiment analysis
• Transactional email

Automation Templates

ActiveCampaign does an amazing job putting together a huge collection of pre-built automation that is super easy to navigate. One of the best things about these templates is their versatility.

ActiveCampaign categorizes those templates by industry which includes eCommerce, media publishing, healthcare, consulting, and many more.

Plus, their templates are available in multiple languages besides English, which are German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.

So, whether you need a welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, customer service follow-up, or expired trial email automation workflow, you’ll definitely find a starting point that matches your needs.

With hundreds of templates available, finding the perfect one might feel overwhelming at first.

But to help you keep track of the ones you like, ActiveCampaign has a handy feature. You can “Favorite” templates by clicking on a little heart symbol next to them. These templates are then stored in a “Favorites” tab for quick access whenever you need a starting point.

Visual Email Designer

Now, ActiveCampaign email builder has a lot to offer. To begin with, you can either start from scratch or choose from templates. To keep things simple, I head over to templates—there are tens of to select.

Once you’ve chosen a template (I chose the “Make a Referral” template in the “Request Action” section), you’ll be taken to the template editor. This is where you can personalize your email’s look.

The editor has two main sections (on the left of the screen):

• Content settings: Here, you can design the main body of your email. You’ll find options to add different elements like images, videos, text, and buttons. Simply drag and drop these elements into your email to build its structure.
• Global settings: Here you can adjust the overall appearance of your email. You can change things like the width, spacing, fonts, colors, background, and many other things.

What else I like with the template editor is its mobile formatting settings where you get settings for mobile devices. Using this panel, you can adjust elements like content margins, button text sizes, heading sizes, and etc.

ActiveCampaign allows you to test your email’s compatibility across various popular email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Apple Mail.

This feature helps you ensure that your email will display correctly to the recipients, regardless of the email platform they use.

Landing Pages

ActiveCampaign offers a user-friendly landing page builder that requires minimal design expertise.

To start, select a pre-designed template from the provided library as a foundation for your page. This template will serve as a starting point for your customization.

The page builder’s drag-and-drop interface allows you to easily add and arrange content blocks. These blocks, which include elements like headers, text, images, forms, and more, are the building blocks of your page.

Simply drag and drop desired blocks from the available options onto your page layout. On the right side of the builder, you’ll find settings for both individual blocks and the overall page theme.

Block settings allow you to customize the content within each block, while theme settings enable you to adjust global design elements such as fonts, colors, and spacing.

You can even incorporate additional elements like countdown timers, navigation panels, or embed custom code for advanced functionalities.

CRM

Another great feature of ActiveCampaign is its built-in CRM. I’ve used quite a few CRMs in the past, and while ActiveCampaign isn’t as full-featured as some of the big names, it’s still really useful.

For example, you can easily create your own sales pipeline to track deals from start to finish. It’s flexible too, so you can set it up to look exactly how you want. And you can add details to each deal to help your team understand the opportunity better.

Below is what the “Deals” page looks like. You can create different sections on the board to represent different stages of a deal. For example, I made three: “To Contact,” “In Contact,” and “Follow Up.”

On each deal card, you can add details like the deal value, description, deal owner, and forecasted close date. You can also add notes, files, and emails to keep track of everything related to that deal.

To stay organized, you can create tasks for each deal. For example, you could add a task to call a customer next week. You can assign the task to a specific person and set a reminder so they don’t forget.

One thing I really like is how ActiveCampaign helps you figure out which leads are most likely to become customers. It gives each lead a score based on their actions, so you know who to focus on. You can even assign tasks to your sales team to follow up with these hot leads.

Plus, ActiveCampaign helps you figure out how valuable each potential customer is. It gives each deal a number based on things like how interested the customer seems and how much they might spend.

This helps you focus on the deals that are most likely to be successful. It’s like giving each deal a score, and the higher the score, the better the opportunity.

You see—there’s a lot you can do with the ActiveCampaign CRM, which is why I mentioned above that ActiveCampaign’s CRM is really helpful.

Reporting

ActiveCampaign has a ton of reports to help you see how everything is going.

Here’re a few you’ll find useful:

• Automation performance reports: Track the effectiveness of your automated email workflows. See how many contacts entered your automations, how many emails were sent, and how recipients interacted with them.
• Campaign performance reports: Evaluate the success of your email campaigns. Analyze open rates, click-through rates, and other key metrics to measure engagement.
• Forms performance reports: Want to see which forms are bringing in the most new contacts? This report shows you exactly that. You can also track how each form is doing over time.

Open/read trends reports: Understand when your audience is most active by analyzing email open rates based on day and time. This helps you optimize your email send times for maximum impact.

Integrations

ActiveCampaign has a massive library of applications—actually more than 950—you can integrate with. For example, in the eCommerce category alone, ActiveCampaign has integrations with 85+ apps, including WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Gumroad, and Podia.

Check out their integrations page, and you’ll see hundreds of options, broken down by different categories for easy navigation.

Plus, ActiveCampaign provides integration options through webhooks and APIs. Webhooks are different from regular integrations because they’re more flexible.

With regular integrations, you usually just click a button to connect two tools. But with webhooks, tech-savvy users can set up custom connections to share specific information between ActiveCampaign and other tools.

This means you can make ActiveCampaign integrate with almost any other application, even if there isn’t a pre-made integration for it.

Customer Support

From what I’ve observed, ActiveCampaign’s customer support isn’t available 24/7. They offer priority support, including email and chat, exclusively to Pro and Enterprise plan subscribers.

These higher-tier plans also come with onboarding and migration assistance. For those on the Enterprise plan, there’s an additional perk of having a dedicated account team at your disposal.

If you’re not on these premium plans, don’t worry. ActiveCampaign provides a range of self-help resources to assist you. You’ll find instructional videos, FAQs, guides, and other materials built to help you make the most of their platform. 

Plus, ActiveCampaign has its own dedicated community focused on discussing and sharing knowledge about their platform. It’s a great place to connect with ActiveCampaign users and get insights into maximizing the platform’s potential for your specific needs.

ActiveCampaign — Unique Features

Check out some of the standout features that ActiveCampaign brings to the table.

Predictive sending

I’ve discovered a useful feature in ActiveCampaign called predictive sending. It lets you send automated emails to your contacts at the times they’re most likely to open them. Here’s how it works.

ActiveCampaign tracks when each of your contacts usually opens your emails. When you set up an email in an automation, you can choose the “Send with predictive sending” option.

This tells the system to use that individual contact’s past behavior to figure out the best time to send them the email.

What I find especially useful is that the platform considers each contact’s time zone. It’ll send the email within 24 hours of when the contact reaches that step in your automation, but at the specific time when that person is most likely to open it.

Segmentation

I tried ActiveCampaign’s segmentation capabilities and I liked them. They let you create targeted groups based on things like website visits, purchases, and email activity.

This helps you send more personalized marketing messages, which gets better results.

The process is straightforward—you can make lists to group contacts broadly, and use tags for specific interests. You can also set up custom fields to collect detailed info and create groups based on how people act and what they like.

What the Users Say About ActiveCampaign

Take a look at what real users have to say about their experience with ActiveCampaign:

ActiveCampaign has been powering our marketing campaigns helping us to achieve great results from them It allows us to personalize our campaigns which help us achieve strategized campaigns that are audience targeted. The experience we have had with ActiveCampaign has been so productive.

Lars W., Sales and Strategic Partnership VP – Verified Capterra review

My overall experience with ActiveCampaign has been positive. It’s a comprehensive email marketing and automation platform that offers a wide range of features to help manage and grow customer relationships. The user interface is intuitive, making it easy to create and manage campaigns, automate workflows, and segment audiences effectively.

Prachi C., Developer – Verified Capterra review

ActiveCampaign Alternatives

If you’re uncertain if ActiveCampaign is right for you, here are three possible alternatives that might work perfectly for you.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing platform. It allows businesses to create, send, and manage email campaigns to their customers or subscribers. Mailchimp is known in the market due to its user-friendly interface along with robust features for email design and list management.

Mailchimp is popular among service-based businesses, start-ups, agencies, and eCommerce brands. Thanks to its free plan, freelancers also turn to Mailchimp for their email marketing needs.

I’ve used both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, and I’d say Mailchimp stands out for its simpler interface. While ActiveCampaign offers deeper automation, I found Mailchimp easier to learn and use quickly, especially for basic email campaigns.

Start your free trial of Mailchimp today

Kit

Kit is an email marketing platform designed for bloggers, course creators, marketers, and podcasters. It offers tools for email automation, subscriber management, and landing page creation. Users love Kit for its simplicity, its focus on serving content creators, and its powerful tagging system for organizing subscribers.

You’ll find Kit much simpler to use compared to ActiveCampaign. While ActiveCampaign offers more features in general, you can get campaigns up and running faster with Kit due to its streamlined interface.

Start your free trial of Kit today

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another email marketing platform mostly used by small businesses, agencies, and freelancers. Some of its main features include Pre-built automation templates, contact tagging, customized email journeys, list segmentation, and AI content recommendations.

I found Constant Contact’s email template library much more extensive than ActiveCampaign. This means you’ll have access to a wider variety of professional designs, so it’ll likely be much easier to find templates that fit your specific needs and aesthetic preferences.

Start your free trial of Constant Contact

Other options: Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives

Getting Started with ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign’s capabilities are extensive, especially its powerful automation features. I believe these features can meet every user’s needs, but you should expect to spend some time learning the tool.

Now, it’s your turn to test it out and discover how it can enhance your email marketing and automation efforts.

Start your free 14-day trial with email sign-up