In a crowded market of middling or "good enough" email marketing software, ActiveCampaign punches above its weight class by offering the sophisticated, logic-based automation found in enterprise suites, but with the agility and pricing of a mid-market tool. Its visual automation builder is one of the best I've seen in the category, and its high-tier machine learning supplies useful, AI-powered data analysis. That said, the platform has a steep learning curve that can be overwhelming for beginners, and it gets pricey as your contact list grows. Overall, ActiveCampaign is a good purchase for businesses that have outgrown basic newsletters and need a platform that reacts to user behavior in real time, but companies looking to save money should go with Brevo, an Editors' Choice winner for inexpensive email marketing software. Businesses looking for a robust customer relationship management system should check out HubSpot Marketing Hub, an Editors' Choice winner with a strong CRM.

Plans and Pricing: Scalable, Feature-Rich Email Tools

ActiveCampaign has four pricing tiers. Starter supplies a single user with email marketing tools, basic automation, 1,000 contacts, and more than 900 integrations for $19 per month ($15 per month when billed annually). Moving up the ladder, the Plus plan adds landing pages, standard segmentation, and revenue reporting for a single user for $59 per month ($49 per month when billed annually). Professional steps things up with predictive sending, advanced segmentation, and conditional content for three users for $89 per month ($79 per month when billed annually). Enterprise is the highest tier and provides premium segmentation, premium CRM integrations, HIPAA compliance, custom reporting, and custom objects for more precise automations for $159 per month ($145 per month when billed annually).

(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

The prices scale upward based on the size of your contact list. For example, Starter's price increases to $49 per month if you have 2,500 contacts. Each plan also has monthly send limits based on your contact count. For Starter and Plus, your limit is 10x your contact list. So a 1,000 contact list limits you to 10,000 emails per month. For Professional, this climbs to 12x; for Enterprise, it climbs to 15x. ActiveCampaign sends a notification as you approach your monthly send limit and charges $0.005 per email send once you exceed it. Note: ActiveCampaign locks your ability to send email until the next month if the overage exceeds three times your limit. In a nice touch, ActiveCampaign includes a free migration service that lets you import contacts from another email marketing platform.

ActiveCampaign's plans are a bit pricier than those of entry-level tools like Brevo (starts at $9 per month) and Mailchimp (starts at $13 per month) because it has excellent automation tools, even with its most basic starter plan (I'll touch on that in a bit). However, it only accommodates a single user on these lower tiers, whereas Mailchimp gives you three seats right from the start. At scale, ActiveCampaign costs a fraction of what enterprise-level tools cost (HubSpot Marketing Hub's Professional plan costs a hefty $890 per month), making it a fine budget choice for high-level logic. ActiveCampaign sits comfortably between the two extremes: it's more robust than entry-level tools, with a price point to match.

Getting Started: AI-Powered Building

ActiveCampaign is a very AI-forward email marketing tool, featuring a prominent prompt text box in the center of the dashboard upon login. As I got started, it prompted me to import my brand by entering my website URL. The AI is pleasantly adept at pulling key information from any website you enter: I tested PCMag.com and other established websites on a whim and was impressed by how the AI identified and saved logos and branding, and gleaned information about the business.

(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

With PCMag, for example, ActiveCampaign provided a selection of suggested actions after the branding details were finalized, including creating a monthly newsletter for subscribers, a tech insights welcome series, a win-back automation for tech enthusiasts who may have fallen off in readership, or an automated tech event reminder series. Even if you don't use the AI to create these for you, the suggestions are surprisingly intelligent, and served as a handy reference for future tasks as I explored ActiveCampaign’s robust toolset. 

As mentioned, you don’t need to use the AI features to do these tasks if you're averse to the technology. You can manually enter your branding, as well as create whatever email or newsletter you want with the platform’s core tools. However, even when using the AI tools, you should still go in and fine-tune whatever the AI produces to your liking. With the newsletter example, I edited the newsletter's layout using one of the dozen other templates. It defaulted to the Callouts layout, but the others included Central Focus, Countdown, Image Grid, Simple, and Sale. I made further edits in the campaign designer, which offered the convenient drag-and-drop functionality seen in other established email marketing tools like Brevo, Mailchimp, and HubSpot. Using it, I replaced the stock images in these templates with images of my choosing, and rephrased or removed unwanted text in the email. 

Contacts and Segmentation: Accurate, Real-Time Targeting

In simple terms, segmentation is the act of dividing your sprawling email list into smaller, targeted groups based on what they actually like or do. It ensures you only send content that fits the recipient's specific stage in the customer journey. I know I’m not the only one who gets blasted by belligerent senders: Blanket emails are highly unwelcome and a surefire way to get recipients to unsubscribe. ActiveCampaign makes segmentation even more effective by including behavioral data, alongside basic demographics.

(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

After I created a segment for people who clicked a link in my last email blast over the last 30 days, ActiveCampaign generated a saved search, and not just a snapshot of whoever took that action today. So if someone clicks that link tomorrow, they are automatically added to that segment without me lifting a finger. This works in reverse, too. Using that same example, a contact will automatically drop out of that segment on day 31 if they don't satisfy the conditions. This greatly streamlines the segmentation process, but it's not entirely hands-off, either: you need to tell ActiveCampaign exactly what you value and want from your contact lists. 

This sort of behavioral segmentation is not unique to ActiveCampaign. HubSpot and Klaviyo, for example, both provide behavioral data and behavioral events to track contact preferences. However, ActiveCampaign is fairly accessible, letting me build complex "If/Then" logic using behavioral triggers without developer assistance. Also, Klaviyo is more e-commerce focused, while HubSpot is better suited for enterprise-sized companies. ActiveCampaign hits a sweet spot with both accessibility and affordability when compared with either option. 

ActiveCampaign CRM: The Bridge Between Marketing and Sales

ActiveCampaign's CRM supports highly granular, conditional-branching logic (if/then statements based on site visits or lead scores), which is significantly more complex than the template-based automations found in Brevo and Mailchimp. It has a high degree of automation, sending emails based on a deal's pipeline stage without additional input from me.

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(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

It also includes a built-in, AI-driven lead scoring system that uses predictive AI to remove the manual tedium and guesswork of conventional lead scoring. Conventional lead scoring assigns a point value to actions that might lead to a sale, like clicking a link or visiting a pricing page. When a threshold is reached, sales steps in.

This is a valuable tool, but it has its share of flaws. For example, a lead can accrue hundreds of points just by being a digital window shopper, with no intention to buy. With predictive lead scoring, AI automatically analyzes past customer data to identify patterns that may lead to conversion. There is no guesswork or assumptions like in conventional lead scoring: predictive scoring uses machine learning to identify what actually drives sales. This is an especially powerful tool, similar to HubSpot’s "Likelihood to Close" and Salesforce's "Einstein AI." However, it is only available with ActiveCampaign's Professional and Enterprise plans.

ActiveCampaign has a steeper learning curve as a result, since it is designed for multi-layered workflows rather than simple contact management. The CRM also integrates a sales pipeline tool that bridges marketing actions with sales tasks, adding another layer of complexity. When you factor hundreds of integrations and pre-built automation "recipes," the result is a beefy CRM that can easily intimidate non-technical newbies.

On the flipside, ActiveCampaign is less complex than the services offered by the enterprise-level HubSpot Marketing Hub because, while the former has robust email-centric management, the latter provides advanced sales operations tools that underpin the platform, such as forecasting, sales playbooks, and complex lead rotation. HubSpot also has built-in social media management tools that ActiveCampaign lacks. HubSpot is a business-wide platform with workflows for all departments, not just marketing, unlike ActiveCampaign.

Goal Tracking and Automation: Focusing Your Campaign

ActiveCampaign lets you set specific goals across a multi-step journey using the Goal Tracking tool. If your mission is to get your contact to purchase an item, for example, ActiveCampaign tracks that goal and bumps that contact up along the journey once that happens. I appreciate this feature because it prevents redundant emails from getting sent to that contact. After all, I wouldn't want the automation to remind my contact to buy something they've already purchased. ActiveCampaign lets you see exactly what percentage of contacts are achieving your goals and where they’re falling off, so you can better refine your funnel.

(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

Prebuilt automation templates are nothing new in email marketing. ActiveCampaign has more than 900 prebuilt integrations (or "recipes"), providing instant access to templates for tasks (think abandoned cart recovery or event reminders). These can be highly complex, setting ActiveCampaign’s recipes apart from the simpler, more linear A-to-B logic found in Brevo and Mailchimp’s templates. Admittedly, 900 recipes sound impressive, but there is a lot of overlap. Many recipes are variations of one another, such as abandoned cart solutions for Shopify and WooCommerce. 

ActiveCampaign’s recipes include those created by developers and agencies, meaning you’re getting strategies from marketers who have tested them in the field. Better still, many of these recipes include those goal nodes mentioned earlier, letting contacts skip irrelevant email chains if they take the desired action early. This means you're almost never going to have to create a logic flow from scratch. Though you can if you so choose.  

(Credit: ActiveCampaign/PCMag)

Keep in mind that some recipes leverage ActiveCampaign's more than 1,000 third-party integrations. For example, a Shopify abandoned cart recipe doesn't help much if you don't have a Shopify store connected to your account. 

Reporting Tools: Robust Options Presented in a Dull Way

ActiveCampaign's reporting provides rich insights into its automation and goals, but it is also a bit dry in how it presents this data. It uses a tabular, spreadsheet-style layout that prioritizes precision over aesthetics. You can click Reports, navigate the sidebar, and open the report you want to see. They include automations, sales engagement, contacts, campaigns, website, and deals. I saw raw, actionable data. ActiveCampaign tracks how contacts move through an entire lifecycle, connecting email engagement directly to sales pipeline stages. It provides specific reports on how automated workflows are performing, helping me identify where contacts get stuck. From a data analytics perspective, ActiveCampaign has most everything you could want as an SMB. 

Admittedly, this presentation is pretty unengaging compared with Mailchimp, which keeps most send-related data on a single scrolling page. Mailchimp also uses high-contrast graphics, oversized callouts, and color-coded indicators (like green check marks for high open rates). It's designed to tell you if a campaign was a success or failure as soon as you open the page. In its defense, ActiveCampaign goes the extra mile to show you why a campaign soared or flopped. That said, some narrative summaries and colorful graphics would go a long way toward spicing up these reports.