ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Constant Contact

Keap

SendGrid

GetResponse

Emma by Marigold

Compare ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp based on features, pricing, verified reviews, integrations & more on GetApp. Find out which software is best for your business in 2026.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a scalable, all-in-one platform for inbound marketing, combining content marketing, marketing automation, social media, analytics, and more, for marketing teams of all sizes to grow traffic, convert leads and track customers, all in one place

Step up to all-in-one sales & marketing solution designed for entrepreneurs, startups and larger teams. The platform organizes customer information and daily work in one place so teams have more time to focus on growing the business and delivering great service.

Constant Contact is a digital and email marketing platform that provides tools for creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns. The platform offers customizable email templates, AI writing assistance, and automation features to help businesses reach audience. Additionally, it includes social media marketing capabilities, SMS marketing, and multi-account solutions for organizations managing multiple locations or teams.

ActiveCampaign is the AI-first marketing platform built to transform how marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs work. Use Active Intelligence to power goal-aware automations and orchestrate personalized experiences across email, SMS, and WhatsApp. 

A/B Testing

Access Controls/Permissions

Activity Dashboard

Activity Tracking

Activity/News Feed

Alerts/Notifications

Appointment Scheduling

Archiving & Retention

Assignment Management

Autoresponders

Batch Processing

Calendar Management

Calendar/Reminder System

Call Logging

Campaign Analytics

Campaign Management

Campaign Planning

Campaign Scheduling

Campaign Segmentation

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Canned Responses

Channel Management

Chat/Messaging

Click Tracking

Client Management

Collaboration Tools

Commenting/Notes

Commission Management

Contact Database

Contact Management

Content Management

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Tracking

Customer Database

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Segmentation

Customer Surveys

Customizable Branding

Customizable CTAs

Customizable Fields

Customizable Forms

Customizable Reports

Customizable Templates

Data Import/Export

Data Recovery

Deal Management

Document Management

Document Storage

Drag & Drop

Drip Campaigns

Dynamic Content

Email Campaign Management

Email Distribution

Email Management

Email Marketing

Email Monitoring

Email Sequences

Email Templates

Email Tracking

Engagement Tracking

Event Marketing

Event Triggered Actions

Field Sales Management

File Sharing

For iPad Devices

For Sales Teams/Organizations

For Startups

Forecasting

Forms Management

GDPR Compliance

Generative AI

Goal Setting/Tracking

HTML Editor

Image Library

Inbox Management

Interaction Tracking

Kanban Board

Landing Pages/Web Forms

Lead Assignment

Lead Capture

Lead Distribution

Lead Generation

Lead Management

Lead Nurturing

Lead Qualification

Lead Segmentation

Lead Verification/Validation

List Management

Live Chat

Marketing Automation

Marketing Calendar

Mobile Access

Mobile App

Mobile Optimization

Monitoring

Multi-Campaign

Multi-Channel Communication

Multi-Channel Marketing

ActiveCampaign

Android

Linux

Web-based

Windows

iPad

iPhone

Founder

The team is great with helping you troubleshoot any problems and my team loves how easy it is to use.

I really love and appreciate the ease of use. It's super easy to throw together an email, assign tags, create lists, etc.

dietitian

I am so happy to have Active Campaign on board. It is just what I needed to help promote my online program.

Great training, support, sales, and customer success people. The training, the consulting sessions, and follow ups have all been very well managed and super professional, but also fun.

CEO & Founder

I like that it saved a lot of my time through automation. It also helped me get a better understanding of the success rate of my campaigns.

Owner

They offer great integration with my Wordpress sites, Facebook fan pages, and Zapier (automations integrated with Eventbrite.) Customer support has always been helpful and friendly.

English Coach

What I love most about Active Campaign is that it is wonderful to use for lead generation, automation, and building your email list.

Project Manager 

I love how I can look after my community with personalised emails, other features like tags and links with website are very useful for CRM.

Spiritual Fertility Coach

Hands down it has the most capabilities that I was looking for, with ability to really customize and tailor your automations and email sequences. It was easy to use and extremely reliable.

CEO 

Features seems comprehensive enough to suit my needs and I trust that my data will be protected. Set up support and training has been fantastic.

Trainer 

The customer service is amazing. I love that you can receive automations from people, you can customize everything.

Co-Partner

And that hurt our webinar registration for that week (which was a bummer) and we found out about this on the day of the webinar.

educator

ActiveCampaign has integrated easily and perfectly into my business so far - with great success for my first campaigns both in terms of open rates and engagement as well as revenue.

Everything works as it should, their support is great when you need them (which in my experience has been infrequently), and the price is great.

Director

The major problem is the lack of ability to copy an email to more than the recipient. The lack of this feature is putting the continued use of this product in doubt.

Music Business Strategist

I've a problem to pay for my upgrade plan due to an currency problem. The website automatically converts the price to my local currency.

Managing Director

AC provides the best combination of possibilities (features), user experience (ease of use), and pricing (it's affordable!).

I actually gave up on ActiveCampaign - discouraged by the lack of support.

ActiveCampaign screenshot

Freelancers

Large Enterprises

Mid Size Business

Non Profit

Public Administrations

Small Business

Account Executive

Can't Beat The Price:Features Ratio  

Tanner S.:                                             My name is Tanner. I'm a senior account executive. And we switched from MailChimp over to ActiveCampaign. And if you're looking for more reviews like this, you can click down below. Originally, we were using MailChimp as an automation platform for advertising campaigns. So when somebody would come in and request a free PDF or access to a webinar or something like that, then we deliver followup sequencing via MailChimp. And then over time, we were just looking for a more robust solution. So we switched over to something like ActiveCampaign that has just a few more features in terms of automation capabilities and things like that and user management. So primarily, we're using ActiveCampaign for that automated email followup as well as one-off email blast to email list for promotions and things like that.
			                                                       ActiveCampaign, I think, has more robust feature sets than MailChimp does. Especially when it comes to the automation workflows, you get a lot more functionality and capability in terms of setting up something that's a little more complex in terms of an automation campaign. You can have things fire off based on when people view pages. You can send out text messages. There's all sorts of ways that you can customize a campaign, so that the touchpoints that you make with your customer are concise and relevant. You're not just blasting people with automated emails. So it's one of the reasons we switched over to ActiveCampaign in the long run, just because it gave us that functionality that we needed to create well rounded automated campaigns.
			                                                       MailChimp themselves, they were great for the introductory marketer, someone who's just getting started in email automation and just needs a simple system to get some automated emails going out or one-off monthly emails to your newsletter. They have a free starter package that someone could use. And that's where MailChimp really shines is they keep it very simple and they have a very simple set of features. Of course, you can upgrade over time to get some more complexities. But in general, they do a good job at just basic email automation. Getting started with something like MailChimp is really easy. If we had a client come in who didn't have a CRM or an email system yet, we could just send them a link and they'd be up and running within five minutes or less through their free program or something like that.
			                                                       And importing an email list, really easy. There's even integration options that can do it automatically for you. And similarly for ActiveCampaign, there's a few more setup steps because you have to dedicate a URL, but even that's very basic and the system walks you right through it. So setup on ActiveCampaign was additionally easy. I'd give it a slightly higher rating in terms of technical skill. If you really want to take advantage of everything that ActiveCampaign has, they have their own tracking codes and a few other things that you can utilize to really take advantage of all the feature sets inside of ActiveCampaign. So if I was to rate easiness of set up from one to ten, MailChimp's a two, ActiveCampaign probably a four. And then if you want to get more complex, there's some more things you can do in there. But both fairly easy to get set up.
			                                                       So when we're looking at CRM softwares, a lot of what we're looking at is price point as well as contact limits. So a lot of these softwares limit or judge the pricing based on how many contacts you're going to have in the system. And then outside of that, we're also looking at just features and benefits essentially. What are you getting when you're paying for, say, a pro model of MailChimp versus a pro model of ActiveCampaign? What's going to suit your campaign best? Again, if you just need very basic email capabilities, MailChimp will get it done. But if you're trying to create a robust system that your company can work off of and scale in the long run, ActiveCampaign was the choice for us and for a lot of our clients. So really, price, contact limits, and features is what we're really looking at, at the end of the day.

Health Coach 

The best email marketing I've had 

Cora M.:                                               Hi, I'm Cora. I am a nutrition health coach. I was using MailChimp and I switched to use ActiveCampaign. For more reviews, click the link below. On a daily basis, I use these softwares in order to communicate with my following. My email following, I get to send out information, resources, and marketing materials so that they can learn about my business, me, and specifically, book away to work with me. ActiveCampaign is best for, in my opinion, its customer service.
			                                                       Sometimes sending these types of professional emails I want to send get a little complicated. But with ActiveCampaign, I can go onto their chat and talk to one of their employees within minutes, and they're always extremely kind, very patient and helpful, and they walk me through what the process from start to finish so that I can do what I want to do. MailChimp is best for someone who is really I think starting out with the email software type programming. They're very affordable and they have the basics.
			                                                       When you're really wanting to just get used to sending out mass type emails, they are a great place to start. I would say it was fairly easy to get started with MailChimp. Their functions are essentially pretty basic, so there's not a huge learning curve. They make it easy to just write an email and send it to a list and set up a system so that people can subscribe to your list. Because their customer service is not as approachable, there is a little more self-learning to be done. With ActiveCampaign, I found it very easy and simple to get started.
			                                                       Their system is very laid out in a user-friendly way. And when I did get stuck, I could easily go to their customer service to keep moving forward. I did find they were very user-friendly and easy to navigate. When looking for this type of software, I believe it's really important to consider what you are wanting to do with your business both right now and in the future, and are you wanting to have a large following, a large number on your email list. And if so, are you wanting to find ways so that you can segment this list?
			                                                       Are you going to want to send emails to just a part of your list and send different emails to a different part of your list? Are you wanting to attach landing pages, as we call it, to different places in order for people to sign up to your mail list easily? And how are you wanting to appear? How are you wanting your emails to actually physically come across and appear to your viewers? Do you really want to look simple and clean and professional?
			                                                       I think these are very important things to consider when you are a business owner in any sense or wanting to have marketing emails, how readable you want your emails to be or if you do want to segment your audience in different ways.

President

The besr way to stay connected with your leads

Rod:                                                   Hi, my name is Rod. I was a Mailchimp user, and I went to ActiveCampaign. And for more reviews, click below.
                                                       I was looking for an email solution so that we could not only email to our existing lists, but as we had new leads come in, we could funnel them in and we'd be able to instantly be able to email out to those people and communicate with them to establish connection. And I just found that of the two programs, ActiveCampaign was much more intuitive and much more responsive and easier to use.
                                                       ActiveCampaign is really, really good for lead follow up, not only with your existing leads, but also with any new leads that you come in with or you build. Their campaign manager is just awesome for putting together programs that help you bring people onboard quickly so they become part of your email community and help you connect with them and do business.
                                                       Mailchimp is a little less technical in that it's a little bit more plug and play than ActiveCampaign, which if you're not super techy might be easier to use. However, I find that it's a little bit more limited in terms of how you can customize it and how you can, with those customizations, be able to connect with the customer and give them a better experience.
                                                       On a scale of one to 10 for techy, I'm probably maybe a four or five, so I'm not super techy. Where Mailchimp is a little bit easier to start with in terms of plug and play, like I said, it's a little easier just to sort of drag and drop things. ActiveCampaign, once you get the hang of it, I find is much easier and much more intuitive in that it leads you down the right path when you're putting together campaigns. Whereas Mailchimp is set up so that if you have an idea in mind, you can go in and do it, but it doesn't really give you direction and help you with ideas along the way.
                                                       When you're looking for email software, at least when I was looking for email software, my biggest concern was being able to connect with people and stay connected with people. There's a lot of programs out there. And having looked at Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, as well as others I've looked at as well, I found that ActiveCampaign is really the best choice for really connecting with people and staying connected with them.

The best email autoresponder

Ashao:                                                 Hey, my name's Ashao. I'm a CEO. I was using MailChimp and I switched to ActiveCampaign. For more reviews, click below.
                                                       So, both these problems helped me with nurturing my list. So, that's an important piece of my business, which is getting leads, obviously capturing leads, but then nurturing them over time so that I build trust with them and then they want to join my program.
                                                       So, ActiveCampaign is fantastic for creating really specific automations so that when someone joins a specific list or takes a specific action, you have very fine details in terms of what kind of actions, what kind of emails they should receive, that you just have a lot of control over that aspect.
                                                       MailChimp is really good if you're just starting out because last I checked, they have a free plan. And so, if you really can't afford anything for an email service provider, then MailChimp is really the only way to go.
                                                       Starting up with MailChimp. They have a really good user interface. So, it's really quite easy to get started. ActiveCampaign, I also find easy to get started with. There is a lot more capabilities, so it can perhaps be a little bit more of a learning curve, but still in my opinion, still very easy to get started with.
                                                       For me, the top considerations when buying an email service provider and automation tool, it really came down to the capabilities it had in terms of automations and different things that I could trigger, and being able to tag is really important so that different people who come in from different areas can be tagged with tags, which allow you to segment your audience. And then also, the price of the automation software, which I thought ActiveCampaign had a fantastic mix of both, a lot of power and capabilities for a very reasonable price.

Affordable, comprehensive, and easy-to-use solution to  grow and engage audiences, create and sell courses, and turn ideas into income

SendGrid is a solution that provides a cloud-based email infrastructure to help relieve businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. It provides email delivery, scalability and real-time analytics along with APIs. The platform also offers SMTP service, email validation, deliverability insights, and dynamic templates, while supporting multiple programming languages including Node.js, Python, and Java.

Emma by Marigold is an email marketing platform which focuses on segmentation, automation, and an easy-to-use email builder for teams of all sizes to leverage their customer data, increase engagement, and drive more revenue from email. Users can create and collaborate on email campaign content.

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform that allows users to create, send & analyze email & ad campaigns, with email templates, landing pages, and a mobile app

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp Comparison (2026)

ActiveCampaign

Mailchimp

Overview

Video & Screenshots

Pricing

User reviews

Key features

Integrations

Alternatives