The 9 best ActiveCampaign alternatives in 2025

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 ActiveCampaign 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 best ActiveCampaign alternatives 

• HubSpot for an AI-powered CRM 

• Mailchimp for beginner email marketers 

• MailerLite for email marketing for small businesses

• Kit for creators

• Flodesk for large lists and simple email drip campaigns 

• EngageBay for a free CRM 

• Zapier for marketing automation  

• ClickFunnels for a complete suite of marketing tools 

• Omnisend for eCommerce

The best ActiveCampaign alternatives at a glance 

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for an AI-powered CRM 

HubSpot

HubSpot pros: 

• Integrated AI tools are more practical for a wider audience than ActiveCampaign's

• Highly customizable reports that you can integrate in your dashboard via widgets

HubSpot cons: 

• Automation builder is a little less intuitive 

• Pricing plans are confusing and can scale quickly

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 platforms that offer a lot of similar features, such as strong automation capabilities, templates, and a built-in CMS (content management system). But feature for feature, HubSpot feels a bit more cohesive. 

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). But HubSpot's AI, Breeze, is more widely useful and is built in across almost every HubSpot feature. For example, you can use Breeze Copilot to generate copy for drip campaigns or automated sequences, and you can use Breeze Agents to identify and prioritize quality leads in your CRM. 

Like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot 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 available for individuals and small teams; paid Marketing plans start at $15/month/seat (billed annually). Most business plans also cost an additional one-time professional onboarding fee (starting at $1,500). 

Read more: ActiveCampaign vs. HubSpot

The best ActiveCampaign alternative 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: 

• Relatively limited free plan compared to other apps  

• AI tools aren't as impressive as ActiveCampaign's

Where ActiveCampaign is a great option for advanced email marketers, Mailchimp is better if you're newer to email marketing. 

Mailchimp offers most of the same features ActiveCampaign does—for example, a landing page builder, 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—and it's much closer to a true CRM. 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 plan includes 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly email sends; paid plans start at $13/month (billed annually), which includes 3 users and 5,000 monthly email sends.

Read our app comparison: ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for email marketing for small businesses 

MailerLite 

MailerLite pros: 

• Great free plan

• 3x cheaper than ActiveCampaign's top plan 

• Simple to design and manage forms and landing pages

MailerLite cons: 

• Basic eCommerce integrations 

• Limited set of email automation templates 

If you run a small business and you want effective email marketing without the complexity, your decision is about to get a lot easier. 

MailerLite is an email marketing tool built for small businesses, and it comes with one of the best free plans around. For example, for zero dollars a month, you get up to 12,000 monthly email sends for up to 1,000 contacts, unlimited segmentation and email automation, and one free website. 

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 landing pages, generative AI, and pop-up forms. To access those features, you're looking at $49/month for the next level up. Meanwhile, for the same number of contacts and all the bells and whistles, including an AI writing assistant and AI-powered landing page builder (granted, less advanced than ActiveCampaign's AI), 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 plan includes 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly email sends; paid plans start at $9/month (billed annually), which includes 3 users and unlimited emails.

Read our app comparison: MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for creators 

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit pros: 

• Generous free plan

• Flexible tagging allows for easy search and segmentation

• Intuitive email editor that works like a web builder

Kit cons: 

• A/B testing limited to only subject lines 

• Emphasis on minimal, text-forward newsletters can be limiting

Kit'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 and small eCommerce businesses. The first sign that things are different is the Creator Network, 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.  

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

• The Sponsor Network places ads in your newsletter.

• Kit 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.

• Paid Recommendations let you earn commissions for recommending other newsletters.

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. 

When you integrate Kit with Zapier, you can connect it to all the other apps you use for your creator business. Learn more about how to automate Kit, or use these ready-made workflows to get started. 

Kit pricing: Free plan includes up to 10,000 subscribers and basic features; cost of paid plan depends on the number of subscribers but starts at $25/month (billed annually) for 2 users and includes free data migration and other advanced features.

Read our app comparison: Kit vs. ActiveCampaign

The best ActiveCampaign alternative 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: 

• Basic analytics

• Only one native third-party integration (Instagram), but you can access thousands more with Zapier 

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 actions you can take only help segment your audience. 

Flodesk is solid in all other departments—audience segmentation, for example, is simple and robust—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 customized checkout pages. And this is all part of the $35/month package—you'll never have to pay more. 

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: The best email drip campaign software 

The best free ActiveCampaign alternative for a CRM

EngageBay

EngageBay pros: 

• All-in-one CRM with lots of extras

• Automation is easy to set up  

EngageBay cons: 

• Free plan is limited to 250 contacts 

• Profitability analysis and integrated multi-channel analytics available only on paid plans

If you're looking for a CRM alternative to ActiveCampaign and affordability is your top priority, go with EngageBay. It tops Zapier's list for the best free CRM software specifically because of the CRM features it offers for free and because it 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.

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. The good news: even the plan with unlimited contacts is a fraction of the price of most of ActiveCampaign's plans.

You can also integrate EngageBay with Zapier to be sure your information is automatically flowing in and out of your CRM to your other apps. Learn more about how to automate EngageBay with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

EngageBay pricing: Free plan includes 250 contacts and basic versions of all the other features; paid plans start at $11.04/user/month.

For more options: The best free CRM software 

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for marketing automation

Zapier

Zapier pros: 

• Build a custom solution without code

• Automation-first mindset 

Zapier cons: 

• Lacks advanced CRM features  

• Free plan is limited to two-step automations

You're on the Zapier blog right now, so I can appreciate any skepticism you might have. But if none of the ActiveCampaign alternatives listed above quite suit your needs, you can use Zapier to build your own automation-focused solution. 

Zapier Interfaces lets you create forms and landing pages using templates and pre-made components like lead dashboards and contact lists. You can start with Zapier's simple CRM template, for example—it includes a form to enter client info, a Zapier Tables datasheet to store that info, a lead tracker, and automations that trigger when you update the information.

It's also highly customizable, so you can expand it with other customer-centric features (like a client portal) and create additional no-code automations that trigger when a lead's status changes. These could be as simple as notifying your team when new prospects are added or as robust as building AI-powered workflows that send lead info and data to other apps in your stack and trigger multiple client management events.

To add even more AI power to your solution, you can access the latest AI models with AI by Zapier, build AI agents with Zapier Agents, and create shareable chatbots with Zapier Chatbots. Learn more about how to automate your entire workflow using Zapier, or get started with one of these lead generation templates. 

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Lead Capture Template

Easily capture new leads and email them from within the connected table.

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Zapier pricing: Free plan includes 2 interfaces; paid plan starts at $20/month (billed annually). 

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for a complete suite of marketing tools  

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels pros: 

• Advanced landing page builder with multiple customization options 

• Ability to A/B test pages to optimize for conversion 

ClickFunnels cons: 

• Less intuitive user interface (but there's lots of training material to help) 

• Pricing plans start at more than six times that of ActiveCampaign's entry-level pricing

If you need a comprehensive suite of tools that not only drives and nurtures leads but also converts 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. 

You can unlock thousands of integrations when you connect ClickFunnels with Zapier to 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. 

Read our app comparison: ClickFunnels vs. ActiveCampaign ​​​

The best ActiveCampaign alternative for eCommerce 

Omnisend

Omnisend pros:

• Supports email, SMS, and push notification campaigns

• Tons of pre-built templates, automation flows, segments, and content blocks

Omnisend cons:

• Steep price scaling 

• Super limited subscriber and send allowances on the free plan 

If you're looking for an email marketing app to support your eCommerce business, ActiveCampaign offers more than enough functionality to get the job done. But if you're overwhelmed by all that it can do, especially since it's not just an email marketing platform, go with Omnisend—it was built from the ground up for eCommerce. 

The way Omnisend gets eCommerce is uncanny. It caters to your needs as an online retailer in a way ActiveCampaign doesn't. Here's an example: if you're having trouble with lead generation, Omnisend will help you set up cool campaigns, like a wheel of fortune spinner with different deals assigned to each slice, that you can then implement on your website. Your visitors can trade their email for a spin, which increases not only your list, but also the likelihood of a first sale. 

Omnisend also leverages the data from your eCommerce platform to identify abandoned carts, so you can send folks a friendly reminder and even suggest a couple of products that go well with what's already in the cart. It's another way Omnisend helps you create emails with dynamic content, taking personalization to the next level. 

When you connect Omnisend with Zapier, you can streamline even more of your eCommerce email marketing workflows. For example, you can automatically add new subscribers from other apps and send information from Omnisend to all the other apps you use. Learn more about how to automate Omnisend, or try one of these pre-made templates.

Omnisend pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $16/month for 500 subscribers. 

For more options: The best email drip campaign software 

Which ActiveCampaign alternative should you use?

I'm going to give you the annoying answer no one likes to hear: it depends. Do you want a CRM? Or an email marketing app? Decide that first and then figure out what your other key priorities and pain points are. Then try out the ActiveCampaign alternative that offers the best package for your needs. 

Ok, fine. Twist my arm. If you need a gentle nudge in one direction, here's what I'd suggest: if you're just starting to grow your subscriber list and want to keep things simple, you can't go wrong with MailerLite for email marketing or EngageBay for a CRM. 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 a tool like Flodesk. 

Related reading: 

• The best CRMs for small businesses

• CRM automation to boost your team's productivity

• The best email newsletter platforms and software

• B2B email marketing: Proven strategies and examples

This article was originally published in July 2024. The most recent update was published in March 2025.