4 Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives – In-Depth Feature and Pricing Comparison

Welcome to my honest comparison on 4 Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives you will know in-depth feature and pricing comparison before making decision which email marketing platform is better for your business.

So you used ActiveCampaign and you didn't really like it.

Maybe it was its high price, unresponsive customer support, or even its not-so-intuitive user interface.

Some reviewers also mentioned that setting up automation can be complex and time-consuming.

We get it - no tool is perfect.

Luckily, after researching and testing different ActiveCampaign alternatives, we believe we've found a few worthy challengers.

Below, we'll go over the following tools:

1. ActiveCampaign
2. GetResponse
3. Sendinblue
4. HubSpot
5. Mailchimp

Additionally, these are the criteria by which we’ll judge them:

We’ll judge them based on the following criteria:

• Ease of Use — how easy it is to onboard and use the software.
• Email Deliverability
• Customer Support — speed and efficiency.
• Feature Score — how feature-rich the platform is compared to the other AWeber alternatives from this list.
• Pricing — how affordable and cost-effective the tool is for what it does.

Short on time?

Here’s a TL DR:

1. Choose GetResponse if you’re looking for an all-in-one marketing automation solution for building funnels, sending emails, and making your life easier with automation at a cost-effective price.
2. Choose Sendinblue if you’re looking for a reliable, cost-effective ActiveCampaign alternative with amazing customer support.
3. Choose Mailchimp if you’re looking for a budget-friendly, easy-to-use, ActiveCampaign alternative that offers plenty of documentation, and automation capabilities.
4. Choose HubSpot if you know you’re going to utilize its CRM, sales features, and advanced reporting capabilities to take your enterprise to the next level.
5. If you took your time to examine these, stay tuned — this article goes in-depth.

Table of Content on 4 Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives

• ActiveCampaign — overview
• ActiveCampaign alternative #1: GetResponse
• ActiveCampaign alternative #2 – Sendinblue
• ActiveCampaign alternative #3 – HubSpot
• ActiveCampaign alternative #4 – Mailchimp
• Feature comparison table of the 4 best ActiveCampaign alternatives
• So what tool should you choose?

ActiveCampaign — overview

ActiveCampaign is a one-stop customer experience automation (CXA) platform that offers everything from email marketing and automation to CRM tools that help you track your valuable customers and deliver a great experience to them. unbelievable.

ActiveCampaign helps over 130,000 businesses in over 150 countries to meaningfully engage with their customers.

The beauty of its approach goes beyond simple email campaigns and helps you nurture the customer relationship at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

What we liked about ActiveCampaign

• Advanced marketing automation – Their marketing automation is praised for being simple and easy. You can create automated workflows in no time with their drag-and-drop automation builder.
• CRM capabilities – ActiveCampaign's CRM was designed to complement their email marketing software. Operation is easy and straightforward, and the price makes it even more desirable.
• Great deliverability – 91%, in fact, according to Email Tool Tester’s March 2021 testing.

What we didn’t like about ActiveCampaign

• Overwhelming dashboard and UI – This isn’t very intuitive, and if you are not experienced in email marketing and automation, it can take you some time to get used to it. Another thing that makes the learning process even harder is that you have to make everything from scratch. There are no shortcuts and pre-built features.
• Somewhat more expensive than its alternatives – Other alternatives offer similar functionalities at a far lesser price. Sendinblue and GetResponse come to mind.
• CRM is not as advanced and robust as other standalone solutions – If you’re looking for advanced functionality, you’re better off with standalone solutions like SalesForce, HubSpot, or something else.

ActiveCampaign pricing

ActiveCampaign starts at $15 per month, but realistically you'll likely have over 500 contacts, and the features you find appealing will be in their "Plus" package (and beyond), making it less profitable.

Either way, ActiveCampaign isn't too expensive, but there are definitely more affordable solutions out there, which we'll explore.

ActiveCampaign alternative #1: GetResponse

GetResponse is one of the best ActiveCampaign alternatives, and we are constantly working to make it even better. We'll do our best to provide you with a 100% unbiased review and comparison (true pros and cons).Let's get back to basics.

GetResponse is the all-in-one marketing solution for small, medium and large businesses (yes, businesses of all sizes).

It includes website builder, email marketing, funnel management, paid ads, signup forms, and more with just one plan of your choice. All of this combined makes it an ideal solution for experienced marketers who want to use their entire automation stack for a single monthly subscription.

Cool, right? Now let's explore the pros and cons of GetResponse.

Reasons to choose GetResponse

• It’s very intuitive to use – starting is child's play. And, if you're switching from another platform, you'll quickly get used to the new UI and start rocking your email campaigns and designing perfect funnels and landing pages.
• Unlimited emails – What do we mean by that? GetResponse will not charge you based on the number of emails you send, but on the number of contacts you have on your list. In terms of price, it doesn't matter if you send everyone just one email in 3 months or 2 emails a day.
• Stellar customer support – in fact, you’ll usually receive a reply within a minute or two.

• Cost-effectiveness – GetResponse starts at $15 per month for up to 1000 contacts, yet ActiveCampaign’s plans start at $29 per month ($15 per month available but with up to 500 contacts). Even by choosing packages with higher pricing, you’ll likely save money in the process and get many features you can use. 
• Create perfect websites, conversion funnels, and landing pages – similar to ClickFunnels, GetResponse makes it easy for you to create successful funnels even if you've never created them before and close more sales than ever. Specifically, you can use webinar funnels, sales funnels, and even prospecting funnels.

Reasons not to choose GetResponse

• Somewhat difficult to use for enterprises – GetResponse will help you increase sales, build audiences, funnels, build multiple lists, but the user interface can get a bit cluttered and confusing. Luckily, our Customer Success Team is always here to help, and if you opt for the MAX account, you'll enjoy a dedicated account manager at your disposal.
• Fewer integration options – despite having a lot of features out of the box, you'll probably want to integrate GetResponse with external platforms. Compared to an ActiveCampaign alternative like Mailchimp, it offers fewer integrations (around 150), but you can still connect with major providers using the API or special tools like Zapier or PieSynch. Nothing to worry about!
• Limited automation options in the basic plan – automation capabilities are limited in the most affordable plan at $15 per month. Still, if you can make real use of it, going for a more expensive plan will prove to be cost-effective and smart in the long run.

GetResponse pricing

Paid plans start at $15 per month for up to 1000 subscribers and go up to $99 per month for the e-commerce marketing plan.

GetResponse also offers a free plan for up to 500 contacts.

Each larger package will provide all the features of the previous plan, plus additional features to further help you crush your email campaigns.

To see how much you'll save, let's put it into perspective. Let's say you have 25,000 contacts that you need to send emails to. ActiveCampaign will cost you $599 per month, while GetResponse will cost $255 per month, saving you almost $250 per month.

Read more: GetResponse vs. ActiveCampaign in-depth comparison

ActiveCampaign alternative #2 – Sendinblue

Sendinblue is another full-featured ActiveCampaign alternative focused on small and medium-sized businesses. It provides marketing automation and email marketing features to help you get the most out of email and SMS to engage with your audience.

It shines by helping you manage your marketing and transactional emails from a single platform.

But, let's explore deeper.

Reasons to choose Sendinblue

• It’s more affordable than ActiveCampaign – If you don't want to send more than 300 emails per day to your contacts, you can always take advantage of Sendinblue's free plan. A useful free plan is always a plus in our book.
• Many email templates available – It's no surprise that Sendinblue provides over 60 high-quality email templates optimized for various use cases. All of these email templates are fully customizable and ready to use at your fingertips.
• Great for transactional emails – If your company often uses urgent transactional emails (like password resets, order updates, etc.), you will be able to send them through Sendinblue's dedicated SMTP server.
  

ActiveCampaign does not have a transactional email server. Meaning, if you heavily rely on transactional emails, you’ll have to spend an extra $$$ for another service.

• Easy to use – Starting a campaign has never been easier. Give your campaign a name, email addresses with names and subject lines, import contacts and you're good to go. You can play around with more advanced settings and further personalize your emails with custom fields.

Reasons not to choose Sendinblue

• Fewer automation functionalities compared to ActiveCampaign – ActiveCampaign enables you to send an unlimited number of contacts through automation workflows, while Sendinblue limits you to 2,000 contacts.
• Fewer 3rd party integrations – Although it offers over 50 integrations, it still doesn't come close to other ActiveCampaign alternatives that offer over 100 integrations. It's worth checking if your tools integrate with ActiveCampaign so you can get the most out of the benefits.
• Lacks more personalization features – While it’s easy to use, it also lacks the depth that ActiveCampaign or other alternatives intended for enterprise businesses. On the other hand, many people will utilize it for quick experimentation because it’s easy to use.

Sendinblue pricing

Unlike GetResponse, for example, this ActiveCampaign alternative prices its plans based on the number of emails sent as opposed to the number of contacts on your email list.

You can start with their free plan with up to 300 emails per day. As your business scales, you'll upgrade to paid plans that offer a ton of additional features that you'll appreciate and use to generate greater ROI.

Essentially, for $25 per month, you can:

• Send up to 10,000 emails per month
• Send as many emails daily as you want (as long as it doesn’t cross the monthly limit)
• A/B test
• Use email support
• Use advanced statistics
• Remove brand logo

Premium packages offer additional features and increase the upper limit to how many emails you can send per month.

This cost-effective monthly pricing throughout all packages is what makes it an excellent ActiveCampaign alternative with many of ActiveCampaign’s features built-in.

Related: GetResponse vs. Sendinblue review

Read more related content:

1. Best alternatives to ClickFunnels

2. Best email marketing services out there

ActiveCampaign alternative #3 – HubSpot

HubSpot can be confusing at times. What are they doing exactly? It seems like they do everything related to digital marketing.

But HubSpot's email marketing solution has three main aspects:

• Email marketing capabilities – from sending emails to creating landing pages. It covers everything you need to handle email marketing.
• CRM – HubSpot’s CRM functionality is included for free in every paid plan.
• HubSpot Sales – from making calls to keeping track of leads and using its scoring system, everything sales-focused, you’ll find here.

Let's explore a few reasons why you would (or wouldn't) choose this ActiveCampaign alternative.
Reasons to choose HubSpot

• HubSpot’s CRM Platform – HubSpot’s CRM is excellent since it connects all the data points to allow you to provide great customer experience, as well as support and encouragement to your whole team.
• Email Marketing – Even though ActiveCampaign is primarily an email marketing tool, HubSpot is designed to help marketers connect and tell stories to their audience. HubSpot's email marketing tool offers global CRM customization and dynamic send times, unlike ActiveCampaign.
• Growth – HubSpot is great if you want something more than just an email marketing automation tool. It helps you manage websites, SEO, social media, chatbots and many more. They also provide you with various tools like a help desk, customer feedback, and knowledge base tools.
• Advanced reporting features – Compared to ActiveCampaign, its reporting capabilities are much more robust. While ActiveCampaign provides basic reports on its automation, goal stats, and campaigns, with HubSpot users can create custom reports based on source data, event analytics, contacts, pages, etc

Reasons not to choose HubSpot

• Advanced Segmentation – HubSpot doesn’t have tagging, which allows you to group your customers and then send them content based on their interest and life cycle.
• Split Testing – HubSpot doesn’t allow you to split test one automation workflow against another to see what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t support that feature natively, so you’ll have to find creative workarounds.
• Predictive Content – HubSpot doesn’t allow you to create different content pieces and automate sending them to users who are most likely to like and want to see them.

HubSpot pricing

ActiveCampaign alternative #4 – Mailchimp

As you already know, Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing and automation providers in the world.

Although it is primarily geared towards SMBs and many believe it to be a beginner's tool, we increasingly appreciate its broad usefulness.

This ActiveCampaign alternative is more user-friendly and is used by marketers of all experience levels, while ActiveCampaign is more suitable for more experienced and technically savvy marketers who have used different tools before.

Anyway, here are the pros and cons.

Reasons to choose Mailchimp

• Decent range of automation options – while ActiveCampaign offers plenty of automation capabilities with fantastic depth, Mailchimp doesn't lag too far behind. It offers customer journeys, transactional emails (similar to ActiveCampaign), behavior-based triggers, date-based automation, postcards, and more.
• 200+ integrations – With 200+ integrations available, it’s easy to integrate your Mailchimp account into your existing workflows and start using it right away.
• Decent pricing – compared to many of its competitors, it continues to be one of the most cost-effective email marketing solutions on the market.

But, keep in mind that their automation options, in general, are not as robust and feature-rich as ActiveCampaign.

Reasons not to choose Mailchimp

• Strict email sending limit – Mailchimp limits the number of subscribers you can have in your lists, and that’s okay. However, it also limits the number of emails you can send per month. Within the basic plan, you can send only up to 10 emails per subscriber.
• Slow customer service – It took over two days to get a customer support reply for our issue while testing.
• Slightly outdated email designs – Mailchimp’s free email designs and templates aren’t all modern. You might find it hard to match your branding, and if you want to custom-code it, you’ll need to buy the Standard package.
  

Mailchimp pricing

Mailchimp offers a free plan that allows you to have 2,000 users on your list and send up to 10,000 emails per month.

If you're not sure about Mailchimp or want to try it out before making your first payment, you can take advantage of its free plan first. Although the free plan is pretty basic – and like all other plans require you to accept your listings twice – it's great for people just starting out.

The minimum pricing plan starts at $9.99 per month for up to 500 contacts.

If you start with the free plan, have 2000 contacts, and subscribe to the basic plan, expect to start paying $30.99 per month.

The Standard plan, up to 25,000 contacts, costs $230 per month. This plan is primarily used by businesses with a bigger list, greater momentum, and who can afford that extra monthly business expense.

Read more: Mailchimp alternatives and competitors

Feature comparison table of the 4 best ActiveCampaign alternatives

So what marketing platform should you choose?

We know you're bored of hearing the "it depends on your needs" type of response, so we've decided to summarize the main takeaways from this article so that you can make up your mind more easily.

Choose Sendinblue If: You don't want to worry about the length of your contact list and want a cost-effective ActiveCampaign alternative that's better suited for most businesses.

Choose Mailchimp If: You're working on a tighter budget, but ease of use and beautiful email designs are your priority. Mailchimp will be ideal for you. With its huge community and documentation, it won't be difficult to find a quick fix to your obstacles.

Choose HubSpot If: You're looking for an enterprise solution and you can use HubSpot's entire feature ecosystem. Keep in mind that HubSpot is built around its CRM, while ActiveCampaign is built around email marketing, so your current needs will determine whether this change is right for you.

Choose GetResponse If: Looking for an all-in-one marketing automation solution that allows you to create professional looking websites without code, sales funnels that convert, get subscribers and create various automated email campaigns or ordinary ones, then GetResponse is the ideal solution for you.

Author's note: This comparison is accurate as of January 2, 2022. We do our best to keep it as accurate as possible, and we check it regularly, however, if you want to familiarize yourself with what our competitors are offering, you should check it on their official website or contact their representatives.