ActiveCampaign vs Close Comparison

I've tried many other email marketing & automation platforms before and nothing else comes even close to competing with Active campaign.

I find the Conversations feature slightly limited. I have a few interconnected websites that I want to intigrate chat/support into, but it seems like I can't create different helpdesk for the different websites. I can only create settings that apply to all.

Love how easy it is to set up automations, tagging logic, and their extremely high deliverability rate.

Their contact limit / billing features are difficult to upgrade once you reach the limit or get close.

I can see which members did what and when. By seeing their location and time of action, it really helps me time my campaigns.

A bit clunky when renaming campaigns. After all is done, I still have to go back and refill the form, close it, and go forward again.

Hi Jonathan, Thank you so much for your review! We're happy to hear you're enjoying the platform. We appreciate any feedback we have from our users on what is (and isn't) working well for you. We're sorry to hear you find our campaigns to be clunky when it comes to renaming. Have you ever submitted this idea to our ideas page? That feedback will go directly to our teams internally. If you'd like, feel free to add it to ideas.activecampaign.com Thank you! Your friends at ActiveCampaign

I tried many others, and they were either too expensive, or cheap but not enough functionality. With A/C I get everything I need including CRM which reminds me to phone potential clients and close business!

Nothing really - love A/C. I guess if I said one thing, it could be a bit cheaper - cheaper always helps !

Easy to create custom email templates and make changes on the fly. Option to drag and drop text and image boxes save an incredible amount of time and was not available in previous programs we have used.

It freezes up more often than I'd like and I have to close down my browser and try again, or sometimes it takes clicking an option several times before it recognizes the command.

Great drip campaign and email automation functionality Compares to Infusionsoft for much less money Email builder is workable overall

Supposedly has CRM functionality but it comes nowhere close to meeting the needs of most companies Complicated and difficult to use at least in the beginning. I don't know how they could fix this though and still maintain the features available

Acticecampaign has a robust marketing automation system which is straight forward and very powerful. It's email marketing system is epic which have allowed us to setup drip campaigns to nurture our leads and close sales. It has simple to use automations and triggers to easily setup campaign. I track all the action my subscribers take.

The email marketing report system of Activecampaign is clucky

I love the tracking features. They're extremely helpful for our sales team, as well as our support team. Our sales team can use it to track engaged prospect's activities and follow up with them when they're the most likely to close. The support team can use these same metrics to reengage with current customers to reduce churn.

I haven't found a scenario that the automation feature within ActiveCampaign can't handle. If you're willing to put in the time on the front end, the functionality is limitless.

The Customer Service is stellar, especially for being chat-based. As a previous HubSpot user (which is prohibitively expensive), AC comes pretty close to delivering all the essential features and the ease of use between the two platforms is night and day. AC is, for the most part, pretty intuitive. They also have better onboarding/training.

There are some seemingly very basic features that are missing. That being said, I'm able to create 'workarounds' to get what I need, but the workarounds do cause unnecessary work. Specifically, I can't automate task assignment at the Contact or Account level so I have to create and organize wholly unnecessary Deals and Deal Pipelines to do what I need to do. The other (minor) frustration is not being...

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- The CRM features are great - the side panel of interactions is very nice, even though if you add a lot of custom fields, you'll be scrolling forever (but you can always toggle the sections close) - Data collection is amazing once set up properly - Lots of integrations! Lots of data points to collect into one central CRM

- Automations are a bit tricky to set up - The email editor isn't the best around town - I'll likely be looking into some custom HTML templates to really get custom

Generally easy to use. There are a few things hidden but overall it is easy to operate and you see results immediately.

My biggest complaint is pricing is determined by the number of contacts. Id prefer to pay a flat rate for a service. Plus the pricing tier jumps are pretty large so if you go over my 1 contact it costs you double or close to it.

The versatility of the software and the options given

You need to have experience in order to use it. Not for beginners

Most impactful features:- 1) Lead Management, Segmentation. 2) Automation. Workflow Creation. 3) Campaign Management, Template Management. 4) Deals Module. ActiveCampaign is easy to use and handle ( they provide step by step module by module tutorials for the users). Integrating ActiveCampaign was super easy for my existing business. Overall, I love ActiveCampaign for what they are doing for small business owners.

Missing features or and improment is, if they can allow to directly integrate with most of the apps that is very frequent in use by small business owners like - google sheet, wordpress, shopify etc. then it will save some more money of business owners and we don't need to buy third party tools like Zapier or intergromat. There is nothing in ActiveCampaign which I have found difficult to use. Integration with my existing business was super easy.

The deliverability of emails is crucial to me (and to most businesses). A simple user interface comes in a close second. ActiveCampaign delivers on both (and gives you a comprehensive tutorial series). I don't make full use of the automations. However, they're drag-and-drop which makes them dead simple to use. You can also create opt in forms using ActiveCampaign to collect emails. You can embed these forms into pages, or direct users to a link.

Sometimes it seems like ActiveCampaign goes down which is a problem. I've had people ask me why I sent them a broken link - but the real issue was that ActiveCampaign was down. I don't have any other big complaints. A small complaint is not being able to change an email's subject line without clicking a few times. It would be great if you could change the subject line inside of the email creator.

Ease of use, adaptability, integrations

Sometimes its a little slow to update

I used Active Campaign for 7 years mainly because I had not found another software that integrated email marketing & a CRM. Also, I gained alot of subscribers during this time and developed alot of automations, but I really feel like I could have done this with any other software, I attribute it more to my actions and not the software. The software itself was painful to use the entire time due to regular glitches in the email editor which is from the internet stone age.

Recently, the experience with customer service has gone downhill and my user experience has been less than acceptable for a company I pay over $100 a month to. The chat does not work, when I report problems, my emails are not answered. The emails are clunky to create and I just find myself avoiding writing emails (which is not like me) just because the interface and software itself does not provide...

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