The 11 best ActiveCampaign alternatives in 2024

ActiveCampaign is a seriously robust marketing automation platform. With CRM, pipeline management, email marketing, and automation features—just to name a few—there’s very little the platform can’t do. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the exact right tool for you. 

Maybe it offers more power than you really need. Or you can’t unlock its full potential because you’re still digging through FAQs on how to set up all the advanced features. Whatever the reason, you might be shopping for another option. 

Based on extensive testing done by the Zapier team, here’s our roundup of the best ActiveCampaign alternatives. 

The 11 best ActiveCampaign alternatives 

• Mailchimp for beginner email marketers 

• MailerLite for small brick-and-mortar businesses

• ConvertKit for solo creators looking to grow their audience 

• Flodesk for large lists and simple email drip campaigns 

• ClickFunnels for a complete suite of marketing tools 

• EngageBay for a free CRM 

• HubSpot for a CRM with generative AI features 

• Vtiger for an all-in-one CRM software for small businesses 

• tinyEmail for small eCommerce shops 

• Sierra Interactive for a CRM for real estate agents

• Zapier for building your own custom CRM 

The best ActiveCampaign alternatives at a glance 

---

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for beginner email marketers

Mailchimp

Mailchimp pros: 

• User-friendly interface with helpful tips and best practices 

• Includes customer journey mapping, list segmenting, and A/B testing  

Mailchimp cons: 

Where ActiveCampaign is a great option for advanced email marketing platform users, Mailchimp is better if you’re newer to email marketing. 

Mailchimp offers the same features ActiveCampaign does—for example, a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and A/B testing—but Mailchimp makes using these features simpler. And it provides helpful tips and best practices along the way. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length and emoji use.

ActiveCampaign makes no such effort to hold your hand. If you dig around ActiveCampaign’s site, you can find guides and video tutorials for basic features like importing contacts. But for more advanced features, you’ll have to click all the buttons or turn to Google to figure it out. 

If you want advanced features and are willing to do the work to figure out how to use them, ActiveCampaign is for you. But if you’re just starting out or trying to build simple emails, Mailchimp will get you where you need to be. 

Mailchimp also integrates with Zapier, allowing you to do things like automatically subscribe new form responders, leads, or spreadsheet entries to a Mailchimp list. Learn more about how to automate Mailchimp, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Mailchimp pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts and 1,000 sends per month; starts at $13/month for the Essentials plan, which includes limited automation journeys, A/B testing, and no Mailchimp branding.

For a deeper dive into how these two apps stack up, check out our app showdown: ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp. 

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for small businesses 

MailerLite 

MailerLite pros: 

MailerLite cons: 

If you run a small brick-and-mortar business and your budget is limited, your decision is about to get a lot easier. 

MailerLite offers one of the best free plans around—and it doesn’t come at the expense of practical features. For example, for zero dollars a month, you get up to 12,000 monthly email sends for up to 1,000 contacts, email automation, segmentation, landing pages, and pop-ups. 

ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan (only a free 14-day trial). After that, you’ll pay $15/month for 1,000 contacts on the entry-level Starter plan, which is missing many of ActiveCampaign’s most appealing features like conditional content, pop-up forms, lead scoring, and eCommerce integrations. To access those features, you’re looking at $66/month for the next level up. Meanwhile, MailerLite’s highest-priced Advanced plan tops out at just $27/month.  

Beyond the price tag, MailerLite is also much more straightforward and intuitive to use than ActiveCampaign. For example, MailerLite’s form builder uses one-click presets to help you choose between different form layouts and settings, while ActiveCampaign’s form designer requires more jumping between tabs and customization.

MailerLite also integrates with Zapier—meaning you can automate things like adding new MailerLite subscribers from spreadsheets and other sources. Here are more ideas for how to automate MailerLite, plus some pre-made workflows to get you started.

MailerLite pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month; from $13.50/month (billed annually) for unlimited emails, custom templates, and AI features. 

Learn more about how these two apps stack up: MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign.

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for solo creators looking to grow their audience 

ConvertKit

ConvertKit pros: 

ConvertKit cons: 

ConvertKit’s suite of tools is unlike what you’ll see in ActiveCampaign (or most other email marketing apps) because its focus is to help solo creators grow and monetize their audience. The first sign that things are different is the Creator profile, which looks a bit like Substack: it’s a simple site that explains who you are, allows people to subscribe to your newsletter, and includes an archive of past emails.  

ConvertKit also offers a powerful set of tools to monetize your audience:

• The ConvertKit Sponsor Network places ads in your newsletter.

• ConvertKit Commerce helps you sell and deliver digital products like eBooks and courses.

• Paid newsletter subscriptions let you charge subscribers in exchange for premium content.

• Tip jars give your audience a way to support you on a one-off basis.

• You can earn commissions for recommending other newsletters via Paid Recommendations.

With ActiveCampaign, you’re on your own when growing your list, and there aren’t any built-in monetization features. Your best bet is to use ActiveCampaign’s tagging and automation options to nurture subscribers toward a sale. 

ConvertKit also integrates with over 120 apps. But you can connect it to thousands more when you integrate ConvertKit with Zapier. Learn more about how to automate ConvertKit, or use these ready-made workflows to get started. 

ConvertKit pricing: Free for the newsletter plan, which includes up to 10,000 subscribers and basic features; Creator plan from $25/month (billed annually), which includes up to 1,000 subscribers, Paid Recommendations, and unlimited automations.  

To learn more about how ConvertKit stacks up against ActiveCampaign, read this comparison: ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign.

​​​​The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for large lists and simple email drip campaigns

Flodesk 

Flodesk pros: 

• Offers a range of form types: pop-up, inline, link in bio, and full landing page

• Large selection of fonts makes it easy to design more modern and stylish emails 

Flodesk cons: 

With ActiveCampaign, growing your subscriber list almost feels like a punishment—at least, to your wallet. Because the more contacts you add, the more you pay. To be fair, this is (generally) how other email marketing apps operate, too. Not Flodesk, though. 

For $35 per month, you can bring everyone and their cat into your Flodesk without worrying about limits. Simple, straightforward pricing lets you focus on segmentation, automation, and creating amazing offers for your audience. 

Flodesk won’t match ActiveCampaign’s powers—the range of triggers, conditions, and actions ActiveCampaign offers on the automation builder alone is miles ahead of Flodesk’s. But the lack of advanced features is what makes setting up a drip campaign in Flodesk so straightforward. There’s one start trigger, four drip templates (nurture, welcome, lead magnet, and sales sequence), and the list of actions you can take is only to help you segment your audience. 

Flodesk is solid in all other departments—analytics, for example, are simple, useful, and deep enough—and offers some cool extras of its own. In addition to managing your signup forms, you can also create landing pages to promote some of your best offers and see some stats about them right on their creation page.

You can make Flodesk more powerful by connecting it with Zapier. This way, you can do things like automatically send all your leads to Flodesk and get those drips started. Learn more about how to automate Flodesk, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows. 

Flodesk pricing: Email marketing plan for $35/month (billed annually) includes unlimited contacts.

For more options, check out the best email drip campaign software. ​​​

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for a complete suite of marketing tools  

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels pros: 

ClickFunnels cons: 

Comparing ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign isn’t straightforward. Both are powerful marketing tools, but they excel at different things. ActiveCampaign is better for email capture and email marketing, whereas ClickFunnels is better for marketing and sales. 

If you need a comprehensive suite of tools that not only drive leads but also convert them into paying customers, ClickFunnels is the way to go. 

The platform allows you to set up interconnected landing pages (called sales funnels) designed specifically to turn page visitors into email subscribers or customers. If you’re marketing and selling products, these funnels can perform a series of automated actions that move contacts from leads to sales. You can even add order bumps, one-click upsells, downsells, or other types of limited-time offers to your funnels. And you can A/B test every funnel page to optimize customer journeys. 

You won’t get any of these conversion features in ActiveCampaign (because it wasn’t designed for selling). The landing pages can only collect email addresses or payment. And you can’t connect them to move visitors from one stage to the next. On top of that, ActiveCampaign only offers landing pages on its Marketing Plus plan and upwards, which are quite expensive. 

ClickFunnels also offers over 100 native integrations. But you can unlock thousands more when you connect ClickFunnels with Zapier. From there, you can automate your most repetitive ClickFunnels tasks. Learn more about how to automate ClickFunnels, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

ClickFunnels pricing: Free 14-day trial; Startup plan for $81/month (billed annually) includes 3 seats and unlimited features, including funnels, courses, contacts, and pages. 

For a full breakdown of how these two apps stack up, check out Zapier’s app showdown: ClickFunnels vs. ActiveCampaign. ​​​

The best free alternative to ActiveCampaign for a CRM

EngageBay

EngageBay pros: 

EngageBay cons: 

If you’re not quite ready to pay for your CRM, you still have other options. Take EngageBay, for example. 

EngageBay is a CRM at heart, packed with sales, marketing, customer support, and chat features, all on a freemium plan. There is a drawback to this flexibility, though: you can add only 250 contacts to the platform on the free plan, so consider archiving inactive contacts to keep using it for longer. 

EngageBay also comes with all sorts of extras. There’s a full marketing suite, including lead scoring, landing pages, pop-ups, email templates, newsletters, and tools to capture new contacts; a service suite that lets your customers create support tickets and assigns them to your team automatically; and a basic live chat module you can integrate on your website, with stats to help you see first response time, chat duration, and total chats. It’s a lot—all for free.

You can also integrate EngageBay with Zapier. Learn more about how to automate EngageBay with Zapier, or take a look at these pre-made workflows.

EngageBay pricing: Free all-in-one plan includes 250 contacts and basic versions of all the other features; Basic plan from at $14/user/month (billed annually) includes 500 contacts and 1GB of file storage. 

For more options, check out the best free CRM. 

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for a CRM with generative AI features

HubSpot

HubSpot pros: 

HubSpot cons: 

If you’re in the market for a CRM alternative to ActiveCampaign, no doubt HubSpot has come up in your research. And for good reason: ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are both top-of-the-line CRM apps that offer a lot of similar features, such as strong automation capabilities, templates, and a built-in CMS (content management system). But feature by feature, many of HubSpot’s feel just a bit more user-friendly and tie together more seamlessly. 

One thing that stands out between the two apps is how they leverage AI. ActiveCampaign offers some unique AI features, including an AI automation builder and Predictive Content (you feed it a set of draft emails, and the AI chooses which email to send to each customer). 

HubSpot, on the other hand, offers integrated generative AI features that have more potential for a wider range of users. For example, you can use AI to generate copy for drip campaigns and automated sequences, create split-test iterations, alter tone for varying audience segments, and optimize text to improve performance.

When it comes down to it, you really can’t go wrong with either app. But if you want the ability to leverage AI in more parts of your workflows, HubSpot’s the way to go. 

HubSpot also integrates with Zapier, which means you can connect it to thousands of other apps to do things like automatically sync contacts across different apps, register contacts for events, or move contact details in and out of your lists. Learn more about how to automate HubSpot, or get started with any of these pre-made workflows.

HubSpot pricing: Free plans with basic features available for individuals and small teams; paid Marketing plans start at $15/month/seat. Most business plans also cost an additional one-time professional onboarding fee (starting at $1,500).  

For more details, check out Zapier’s app showdown: ActiveCampaign vs. HubSpot. 

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for an all-in-one CRM software for small businesses 

Vtiger 

Vtiger pros: 

Vtiger cons: 

Another CRM alternative to ActiveCampaign that’s suited towards small businesses is Vtiger. It’ll keep all your contacts and deals organized, bringing inventory, marketing, help desk, project management, and documents into the mix.

Oftentimes, all-in-one apps run the risk of having some great features and others that are just ok. Vtiger impresses on this front—here are some examples:

• Adding a new contact brings up a short form, so you can get it done quickly between calls or emails. Later, you can open up the main contact page, where you can add all the relevant info when you have time.

• The sales screen has a visual pipeline to help you keep track of your deals. Clicking on a deal lets you see the next task, along with all the detailed information about the data connected to it.

• As for inventory, you can keep track of products and services, invoices and purchase orders, and even manage product-related taxes.

The best part is that all these modules are connected. Just closed a deal? Click to convert it to a project. Want to add the most common products or services that a contact usually requests? You get the idea. In case there’s a critical feature that Vtiger doesn’t have, you can connect it to Zapier to extend its capabilities. Here are some examples of how that works.

Vtiger pricing: No free plan available (only a free trial); One Growth starts at $12/user/month (billed annually). When you grow, the higher plans offer two pricing tiers based on user privileges. For example, in the One Professional plan, users with access to all modules will pay $30/user/month, while access to a single module costs $20 instead.

For more options, check out the best CRMs for small businesses.

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for small eCommerce shops

tinyEmail

tinyEmail pros: 

tinyEmail cons: 

For small eCommerce shops, tinyEmail has a few key advantages that make it a solid alternative to ActiveCampaign: 

1. It’s easy to learn. 

2. It’s free for Shopify users and syncs tightly with Shopify customer data. (ActiveCampaign also has a native Shopify integration—but you’ll need to sign up for the $70/month Pro plan to access it.) 

3. It offers eCommerce email marketing features like promotional email templates, one-click email automations, pre-built segmentations, and AMP modules. 

AMP is a particularly interesting feature (and one that ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer). Here’s how it works: instead of sending static emails, you can embed elements that update dynamically. This way, you can do things like sync tinyEmail with Shopify to dynamically update prices within emails. You can also automatically update your call-to-action in promo emails after a sale expires. 

tinyEmail’s not without its limitations, though. For one, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are the only mainstream email clients that support AMP. For another, it offers only a handful of basic automation workflow templates—for example, abandoned cart and welcome emails—and you can’t design your own. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has an enormous selection of pre-built automation templates and you can create your own automation workflows. 

When you use Zapier to connect tinyEmail with your other apps, you can extend your automation capabilities and automate every step of your email marketing workflows. Here are a few Zap templates to get you started.

tinyEmail pricing: Free for up to 500 subscribers and includes forms, some premium email templates, and limited AI features; starts at $12/month (billed annually) for the Standard plan, which includes unlimited contacts, premium and AMP templates, and up to 5 custom segments. 

Learn more about how tinyEmail compares to ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign vs. tinyEmail.

The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for real estate agents 

Sierra Interactive 

Sierra Interactive pros: 

Sierra Interactive cons: 

If you work in real estate, a CRM is your prized possession. You could use ActiveCampaign, and it’d probably work fine—it has most of the key features you’d need, like lead capture, email marketing, and pipeline management. But you’d probably be better off using a purpose-built CRM like Sierra Interactive. The app includes features specifically beneficial for agents, such as an auto-dialer for efficient lead outreach, property tracking, and traditional drip campaigns (or “action plans,” as Sierra calls them). 

Sierra Interactive has a steep learning curve, but one of the app’s standout elements is its exceptional training and support. Agents frequently report positive experiences with helpful account managers and a streamlined onboarding process. 

It does come at a higher price tag than most, though. So if you’re looking to explore other options, check out our roundup of the best CRMs for real estate. 

By connecting Sierra Interactive with Zapier, you unlock the ability to automate your workflow, such as appointment reminders or seamlessly updating information across your tech stack. Here are a few examples to get you started. 

Sierra Interactive pricing: Core Package starts at $499.95/month for 5 users and includes 1,500 text message segments and dialer minutes and 250 ringless voicemails. 

​​​​The best alternative to ActiveCampaign for building your own CRM 

Zapier Interfaces 

Zapier pros: 

Zapier cons: 

If none of the ActiveCampaign alternatives listed above quite suit your CRM needs, you can also use Zapier to build your own custom solution. 

The Interfaces CRM template helps you kickstart the process by giving you a form to add new contacts and a sales pipeline view. Interfaces works in tandem with Tables to store your data, holding up to 2,500 records on the free plan. 

From there, customize it how you want. You can also add extra features by connecting it to your other existing apps for SMS, email marketing, analytics, or anything else—there are thousands of integrations to choose from. 

Zapier pricing: Free plan available; Premium Interfaces plan for $20/month (billed annually) includes 10 MB of file uploads and advanced features. 

Learn more about how to use Zapier Interfaces.

Which ActiveCampaign alternative should you use?

I’m going to give you the annoying answer no one likes to hear: it depends. If you’re just starting to grow your subscriber list and want to keep things simple, you can’t go wrong with tinyEmail or MailerLite’s free plans. On the other hand, if your subscriber count is going up with every browser refresh and there are no signs of slowing down, your budget line might be safer with Flodesk. 

Take some time to figure out what your key priorities and paint points are, and then try out the ones that offer the best package for your needs. 

Related reading: