ActiveCampaign Review: Tested with 8 companies & 124K emails

I first used ActiveCampaign in 2012, when it was one of the first email marketing tools to offer visual marketing automation.

Since then, we’ve rolled it out across eight portfolio companies and sent over 124,000 emails. I also collected ~2,000 survey responses from ActiveCampaign users on what they like and dislike about it via MarketingAutomationInsider.com.

In this ActiveCampaign review, I’ll explain where ActiveCampaign performs well, where it doesn’t, and why I’m personally no longer using it.

How much does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign has four tiers – you can work out which tier is best using this side-by-side comparison, but as a general overview:

1. Starter Plan - Core email marketing and basic automation for getting started. Includes 1 user seat (with the option to add more) and pricing that scales by contact tier, starting at $15/month.
2. Plus Plan - Adds stronger automation, landing pages, and AI tools, with more channels and add-ons available (like SMS and CRM). Includes 1 user seat (with the option to add more), starting at $49/month.
3. Pro Plan - Built for advanced, omnichannel automation with deeper analytics and optimisation features (like predictive sending and attribution). Includes 3 user seats (with the option to add more), starting at $79/month.
4. Enterprise Plan - Best for larger teams needing advanced security, compliance, premium integrations, and dedicated support. Includes 5 user seats (with the option to add more) starting at $145/month.

The best way to find out how much you’ll pay is to use this pricing calculator. For a deeper dive into ROI, calculate your potential email performance using ActiveCampaign here. Below, we’ve also broken down the pricing below for different list sizes for just the marketing automation features.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing isn’t the cheapest for marketing automation, but given the range of features offered the pricing is fair and reasonable – especially when compared against similarly advanced tools.

Does ActiveCampaign have a free plan?

No — ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan. There’s a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) which gives you access to most features. After that, the cheapest entry point is the Starter plan at $15/month for 1,000 contacts on annual billing.

What are ActiveCampaign’s pros and cons?

The pros and cons below combine our own hands-on experience using ActiveCampaign with the responses we collected from ~2,000 ActiveCampaign users via our annual email marketing software research.

01Is ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation any good?

With 135+ triggers and actions to build your automation sequences from, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds beyond those offered by competitors.

It’s also the easiest automation builder we’ve used, largely thanks to the flowchart-style canvas that’s visually self-explanatory — non-technical team members pick it up without needing a walkthrough.

If you’re just getting started, ActiveCampaign has over 500 pre-built automation recipes. These are particularly good for eCommerce businesses, as you can integrate your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce) and use automation sequences that run when someone buys a product, abandons a checkout, or uses a discount code.

Triggers and actions

You can trigger an automation to start when almost anything changes to a contact or deal. While not exhaustive, these include when:

• A contact submits a form, joins a list, visits a web page, opens/clicks an email, achieves a goal, has a tag added/removed, a field change or lead score updated.
• A deal in the CRM changes status, deal stage, value, owner or has a task added.
• A conversion occurs, or a person abandons a cart.
• A date arrives (useful for birthdays, contract renewals, and holiday promotions).

You can then build out your automation workflows with a combination of conditions and actions. Conditions are mostly “If/Else” rules, waits, and go-to’s, while actions broadly fall into three channels for communicating with your contacts – email, SMS, and site messages (notifications that appear on your website).

Here’s an example of a SaaS onboarding sequence we built showing each of these steps. This sequence is triggered when a contact subscribes to a list. We then have a condition to wait until the time is 2pm on a weekday (when we have the highest open rates). We then send a series of educational emails on how to use the software.

Split testing

While email split testing is nothing new, few marketing automation tools allow you to split test paths of an automation sequence. ActiveCampaign was among the first to do this, and in my opinion it’s one of the best features in its platform.

This is because you can test hypotheses like “Does sending 10 emails vs. 5 emails, sending the emails over a week vs. a month, or combining SMS and email vs. just email improve your conversion rate?”

This also means that your automated email sequences can improve over time because you can set up unlimited split tests to refine your automation sequences while you focus elsewhere.

By running all of our emails as split tests, we’ve seen 4-5× uplifts in open rates on some of our most-tested automation sequences — and the downstream clicks that follow them.

02What’s ActiveCampaign’s email marketing like?

Across our accounts we sit at an account-wide open rate of 39.62% and click rate of 1.34% — well above industry benchmarks of ~21% open and ~2% click for marketing emails (our click rate reflects a broad lifecycle mix; nurture sequences typically run higher).

ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the few we’ve used that’s as good for beginners as it is for advanced marketers. It’s drag-and-drop, auto-saving, and it just works. Or, you can simply prompt AI (Active Intelligence) to describe the type of email you want (campaign details, audience, offers, etc.).

You can edit the HTML, insert content blocks that would usually require a developer (e.g. countdown timers, videos and eCommerce products), create and organise a brand kit, and split test almost anything you can think of.

One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is the ability to optimise your marketing with personalisation and split testing.

For example, you can create conditional content to display different content to contacts based on any field (saving you from sending out lots of variations of the same email). For critical emails, you can even create variations of the content and let ActiveCampaign’s predictive content algorithm show the most-likely to convert content to each contact for you.

When it comes to templates, there are several options. You can choose from the 200+ pre-designed templates, use a basic template (i.e. a layout with no design), a past campaign, or start from scratch. For those looking to send emails that look personal, you can also choose between plain text and HTML. Or, you can prompt Active Intelligence to generate whatever you need - just describe it.

To help you improve deliverability, ActiveCampaign has a handy range of checks for spam filters, email client compatibility and you can preview how your email appears on different devices.

When it comes to sending emails, you can segment who your email is sent to based not only on a contact’s list but on any condition – from whether they’ve visited a certain page on your website, to their geography, or based on company information.

You can also build segments in ActiveCampaign using natural language by asking Active Intelligence for the segment you’d like.

The segmentation options will of course depend on what information you collect about your contacts – which brings us onto the next part of ActiveCampaign’s platform.

03Is ActiveCampaign a good CRM?

Combining your email marketing software and CRM makes a lot of sense, as your CRM is generally the source of truth when it comes to information about your contacts.

This provides invaluable opportunities to trigger emails when your leads change statuses, buy products, or take actions on your website. This is all achievable with ActiveCampaign’s CRM, which is built around an intuitive deal pipeline.

When you click into any deal on your pipeline you can see the information about that company and the associated contacts. If you’ve installed site tracking, you’ll see every action they’ve taken on your website, as well as a history of interactions made with your email campaigns and automation sequences.

Contacts (i.e. people) has a similar view, though with more emphasis on the specific information you’ve captured about that person. It’s here that you can also see which lists, automations, and tags are applied to that contact.

Around here is also here where you’ll find lead scoring. This is one of those features that can make or break your entire sales process. When it’s set up correctly, it creates clarity around which leads your people should focus on and how good a job your marketing team is doing at nurturing cold leads into warm leads.

For one of our ventures, we use lead scoring to determine whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.

• Cold lead (has a lead score below 7 points)
• MQL (has a lead score between 7-14 points) – We apply points when people register for our webinars, visit key pages on our site, and engage with our emails. The purpose of this is to separate engaged leads from unengaged leads.
• SQL (has a lead score above 14 points) – We use the BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) methodology for this. Once we know all four of these criteria and they’re above our agreed thresholds, the lead is considered sales qualified.

Setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign doesn’t take long and makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales. You can also identify whether the % of leads that you’re converting into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is increasing or decreasing over time and more.

Honestly though — we’ve had the CRM enabled but rarely used it as a primary sales tool. It works fine as a backbone for automation triggers and lifecycle stages, but it’s not where you’d want to actually run a sales team.

The platform tends to get cumbersome with a large number of deals and contacts, and larger sales teams typically end up running something like Salesforce/Pipedrive and integrating it with ActiveCampaign to manage the automations there. So my honest take: ActiveCampaign’s CRM is fine if you’re a smaller team running marketing-led growth where the “CRM” is really a contacts and lifecycle layer feeding your automations. If you have a real sales team running actual deals, pair ActiveCampaign with a dedicated CRM.

04Does ActiveCampaign have AI features?

ActiveCampaign’s AI features — collectively branded Active Intelligence — have evolved well beyond basic subject-line suggestions. AI is embedded throughout the platform, and it’s refreshing just how often I go to do a task and then remember I can just ask Active Intelligence to do the work for me.

1. Building entire sequences from a brief. I’ve used Active Intelligence to generate full 14-day drip sequences from a plain-English description (campaign goal, audience, offer). It produces the email designs, copy and sequencing — and while I always tweak before sending, it cuts the build time on a complex sequence from a day to under an hour.
2. Critiquing existing sequences and surfacing split-test variations. This is where it’s quietly become indispensable. I’ll point Active Intelligence at an automation we already have running, ask it to critique the sequence and produce a list of optimisations, then manually pick which ones I want it to implement as split-test variations. That’s massively sped up our split-test cadence.

Beyond those, the wider Active Intelligence feature set covers:

• Goal-to-campaign generation: Turn a simple objective (“promote a webinar”, “reduce churn”) into draft campaigns across email and SMS, with content and structure suggested automatically.
• Smarter segmentation suggestions: Engagement and behaviour signals are surfaced to identify who’s most likely to convert (or churn), with one-click actions to act on them.
• Predictive sending. Send-time optimisation runs at the individual contact level rather than picking a global “best time” for the whole list — small thing, meaningful uplift on engagement.

• Brand-aware content generation: AI-assisted content creation that respects your brand styling and assets, so you’re not re-formatting every send.
• AI-assisted CRM insights: Pipeline-level analysis surfacing signals in CRM activity so marketing and sales stay aligned.
• AI Translations: ActiveCampaign detects each contact’s preferred language and translates entire campaigns automatically — no duplicate campaigns, no manual localisation work.
• MCP Server and Claude connector: In June 2025 ActiveCampaign released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server that lets AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor connect directly to your ActiveCampaign account — managing contacts, triggering automations and pulling campaign data from within AI-powered tooling. A dedicated Claude connector followed in November 2025, making ActiveCampaign one of the first marketing platforms to integrate natively with external AI agents.

05Can ActiveCampaign send SMS and WhatsApp?

Instead of managing campaigns in silos, ActiveCampaign allows you to coordinate email, SMS, and WhatsApp from one place—so your messaging stays consistent and your team isn’t constantly rebuilding workflows.

It’s not an area of ActiveCampaign we’ve heavily used outside of some basic SMS reminders, but the ability to shift channels based on behaviour is pretty seamless. You can follow up with an SMS if an email goes unopened, or use WhatsApp for time-sensitive updates and more conversational nudges.

WhatsApp and SMS expansion

In April 2025, ActiveCampaign acquired Hilos, a WhatsApp automation platform. The acquisition added native WhatsApp messaging to ActiveCampaign’s offering — including a no-code workflow builder, a shared team inbox, broadcast messaging, and automated sequences. WhatsApp went live inside ActiveCampaign in July 2025, with a two-way SMS inbox following in September 2025.

SMS is available as an add-on on Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans. Credits are consumed per message sent, with the cost varying by destination country (1 credit per SMS in the US, up to 11 in some European countries). Unused credits do not roll over.

06How good is ActiveCampaign’s reporting?

ActiveCampaign’s reports have always been a little too reminiscent of a dull powerpoint presentation for my liking, and there’s a lot of room to improve the data organisation and visualisation.

With that said, reporting should be judged on whether or not it provides answers to questions, and how actionable the insights are. To be fair to ActiveCampaign, the data is actionable – thanks to Goals, integrations, and attribution.

Goals

One action I didn’t cover in the section on marketing automation is goals.

You can trigger a goal being achieved in ActiveCampaign when a contact does something – whether that’s buying a product, completing an automation sequence, or opening an email.

This enables the goal and conversion attribution report, which shows who’s achieved the goal, the conversion rate, touchpoints and, my favourite – time-to-completion. This means you can track how long, on average, it takes to get a lead to convert, buy a product, or anything else. This is a great metric to then try and reduce.

One habit I recommend is ensuring every automation sequence you build has a goal. This allows you to see how all of your automation sequences are performing at a glance.

eCommerce revenue reporting

For eCommerce users, ActiveCampaign is able to integrate with your store and work out how much revenue is generated from your campaigns and automation sequences, enabling you to assign a clear ROI to every email campaign and automation.

ActiveCampaign currently offers deep data integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square.

Campaign reporting

ActiveCampaign also offer all of the standard reports for tracking campaign performance including list growth tracking, open/click through rate tracking, as well as reports to identify when your open rates are highest and how they vary by different mail clients.

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reporting can be summed up as function over form. You’ll find everything you need to optimise your email marketing, but just don’t expect them to look great.

07Can you build landing pages in ActiveCampaign?

If you’re after a simple landing page builder for webinars, events or one-page microsites, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder will do the trick. If your needs are more complex you’ll likely be better off using dedicated landing page software.

While the landing page builder itself is easy and intuitive to use, it lacks any kind of advanced functionality for personalising your pages. That’s a real miss given the CRM and rich contact data sitting right next to it — though most ActiveCampaign users probably aren’t trying to run dozens of PPC landing pages or their full website from here (the way some HubSpot users do).

Instead, this area of ActiveCampaign is little more than a lightweight page builder for publishing simple landing pages without the need of a developer.

08What forms does ActiveCampaign offer?

ActiveCampaign offers four types of forms – inline, floating bars, modals, and floating boxes. They’re nothing special, but they do the job.

One nice feature with the addition of Active Intelligence is that you can now just ask AI to build forms for you rather than mindlessly dragging blocks.

As already mentioned, ActiveCampaign’s integration ecosystem is very extensive so connecting these forms into third-party tools is rarely an issue. If you do happen to be using something a little niche, the Zapier integration is a good fallback.

09What’s ActiveCampaign’s customer support like?

In all our use of ActiveCampaign, I’ve only had to contact support a handful of times — usually around minor things integrating ActiveCampaign with our SaaS products and pushing app event data over the API. Each one has been resolved within 24 hours by a US-based support agent.

That is to say, while ActiveCampaign’s support is good – you probably won’t need to use it because they put so much emphasis on prevention over cure. For example, you get access to:

• ActiveCampaign University - a series of videos and guides to get started
• Free 1-to-1 strategy sessions
• A free migration service
• In-person events and workshops
• An active community forum, Slack community and Facebook group
• A help center with a huge range of how-to guides

But if you run into an issue, they have phone, email and live chat support.

10Does ActiveCampaign have good email deliverability?

Deliverability is arguably the most important factor when choosing an email marketing tool — if your emails don’t reach the inbox, nothing else matters.

Across our own ActiveCampaign accounts we’ve seen a 99.4% deliverability rate with a 2.74% unsubscribe rate. For supporting context, ActiveCampaign reports a 94.2% inbox placement rate in independent testing against an industry average of ~83% — so roughly 1 in 6 emails sent by the average platform never reaches the inbox. ActiveCampaign’s infrastructure is specifically designed to close that gap.

ActiveCampaign achieves this through a combination of infrastructure and features that help you stay out of spam folders:

• Authentication: SPF and DKIM are required before sending, with a setup wizard to walk you through it. DMARC is encouraged.
• Dedicated IPs: Available on Enterprise plans for high-volume senders, pre-warmed to avoid cold-start reputation issues.
• Automatic list hygiene: Inactive addresses are flagged and cleaned, and contacts who mark you as spam are auto-suppressed.
• Spam check tool: Pre-send analysis that assesses how likely your email is to be filtered.
• Predictive sending: ML-based send-time optimisation that delivers emails when each individual contact is most likely to engage — not just an average best time for the whole list.
• Campaign preview: Cross-browser, cross-inbox, and cross-device testing before you hit send.

It’s worth noting that deliverability results can vary depending on test methodology and sending conditions. Different independent tests produce different numbers. Either way, ActiveCampaign’s deliverability infrastructure is among the most comprehensive available, and in our experience the platform has consistently landed emails where they need to go.

Rating Details

I’ve rated ActiveCampaign across each of the ten areas covered in this review.

Marketing Automation

★★★★★

5.0 / 5

The automation builder is the strongest in the category. 135+ triggers and actions, 500+ pre-built recipes, and the ability to split-test entire automation paths — not just emails — puts it well clear of HubSpot and Mailchimp on depth.

Email Marketing

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

The drag-and-drop email builder is genuinely good for beginners and advanced marketers alike. 200+ templates, conditional content, predictive content, and AI-assisted generation via Active Intelligence. Loses half a star for a limited selection of content blocks — it would be great to see more interactive elements like countdown timers natively.

CRM

★★★★

2.5 / 5

The CRM is good enough as a backbone for your automation, but it’s pretty basic. It gets cumbersome with large contact volumes, and bigger teams have often ended up pairing ActiveCampaign with something like Salesforce or Pipedrive instead.

AI Features

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

Active Intelligence is surprisingly good and will save you days of mundane campaign building work (or at least save you copying and pasting content between Claude and ActiveCampaign).

Cross-Channel

★★★★★

4.0 / 5

Email, SMS, and WhatsApp all coordinate from a single automation builder. The 2025 Hilos acquisition brought native WhatsApp support, and the two-way SMS inbox launched in September 2025. Still relatively new capabilities — expect this rating to improve as WhatsApp features mature.

Reporting

★★★★★

3.0 / 5

Function over form. The data is actionable — goals, eCommerce revenue attribution, and time-to-completion metrics are useful. But the data visualisation feels dated and there’s a lot of room for improvement in how reports are organised and presented.

Landing Pages

★★★★★

3.0 / 5

A basic page builder that’s fine for simple landing pages, webinar registrations, and microsites. But it lacks advanced personalisation features, which feels like a missed opportunity given ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM with rich contact data. Not a replacement for dedicated landing page software.

Forms

★★★★★

3.5 / 5

Four form types (inline, floating bars, modals, floating boxes), fully editable CSS/HTML, and a handy feature that previews the form on your actual website URL. Solid but nothing exceptional — does the job without standing out.

Customer Support

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

A handful of support tickets across our ventures, each resolved within 24 hours by US-based staff. The emphasis on prevention (ActiveCampaign University, 1-to-1 strategy sessions, free migration, community forums) means you’ll rarely need to ask for help. Phone, email, and live chat are available when you do.

Deliverability

★★★★★

4.5 / 5

Achieves a 94.2% inbox placement rate according to ActiveCampaign’s deliverability study, well above the ~83% industry average. Strong authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), automatic list hygiene, spam checking, and dedicated IPs on Enterprise. Results vary by test methodology, but the deliverability infrastructure is among the most comprehensive available.

If we sum these stars (39) and divide by ten we get a 3.9/5 star rating.

Why I moved away from ActiveCampaign

Last year we decided to move away from ActiveCampaign. It came down to where we are right now — not where ActiveCampaign is as a product.

Most of our current ventures are early-stage. We don’t need automation depth, split testing or a built-in CRM — just simple transactional emails and basic sequences.

The ventures I originally built on ActiveCampaign have either been acquired or sunsetted, so I’m essentially starting fresh. ActiveCampaign also became meaningfully more expensive after the 2024 pricing restructure — fine if you have a growing list and revenue to optimise against, less easy to justify when you’re still pre-revenue.

The moment one of our ventures has a list with meaningful revenue attached, I’d migrate back to ActiveCampaign in a heartbeat. It’s still the best email marketing and automation tool for that stage — and when the moment comes I’d rather know the platform inside-out than be evaluating alternatives while growth is the only thing that matters.

Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. Here’s my take by business type.

What are the best ActiveCampaign alternatives?

When friends ask which email automation platform I’d recommend, there are only three instances where I’ve suggested a different tool to ActiveCampaign:

1. If you’re an eCommerce business you may want to consider Omnisend, which is dedicated solely to eCommerce email marketing.
2. If you’re a B2B service business with high-value leads (and a decent budget) you may want to consider HubSpot.
3. If you’re a coach, trainer or educator looking to build out sales funnels with a membership site or gated content you may want to consider Clickfunnels.

As mentioned at the start of this review, ActiveCampaign is unique in that it’s easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable. Most of ActiveCampaign’s competitors make a trade-off in at least one of these areas, which makes them difficult to wholeheartedly recommend.

Here’s a quick side-by-side to help you compare. For a deeper analysis, see our full email marketing software comparison.

If this review has answered your main questions, you can start an ActiveCampaign trial for free here.

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