Comparing ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign isn't straightforward. Both are powerful marketing tools, but they excel at different things.  

ClickFunnels is a sales and conversion platform that helps creators start and grow any online business. It includes tools like sales pages, funnels, and email marketing to capture and nurture leads and drive sales. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, is marketing automation software that helps existing businesses optimize their marketing and sales activities with automation, email marketing, and CRM features. Even from that short description, you can see the overlap: the platforms share some features, though they come at them from different angles.

I've spent a lot of time testing and writing about sales and marketing tools like these. For this article, I created accounts with both platforms and dove into each one, exploring their features and the important differences between them. Based on my experience and time testing them, here's my take on how they stack up. 

• ActiveCampaign is better for email marketing

• ActiveCampaign's marketing automation is more robust

• ClickFunnels is better for building landing pages

• ClickFunnels has more features for conversion

• ClickFunnels lacks entry-level pricing but has the edge beyond that

• Both apps integrate well with other tools

ClickFunnels vs. ActiveCampaign at a glance

Here's a quick overview of ClickFunnels' and ActiveCampaign's features to get you started. But keep reading for more details about each app and my experiences testing them.

ActiveCampaign is better for email capture and email marketing 

Both ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign offer email marketing—but in different capacities. While it's a core feature in ActiveCampaign, ClickFunnels slaps on email marketing as an add-on to its sales and marketing funnels. 

Here's what I mean: The first thing I noticed while testing ClickFunnels' email marketing feature is that it doesn't offer email subscription forms to add to an existing page. The only way to get a lead capture form in ClickFunnels is by creating a new landing page that comes with an embedded email signup form. While it's not a bad way of doing things, it just doesn't give you the flexibility to use different form types or customize your form. 

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, includes an email form builder for creating four types of forms: inline, floating bar, modal pop-up, and floating box.

The forms are really customizable: you can add custom fields and make changes to their background color, layout, text style, and CTA button to reflect your brand (and increase your chances of conversion).

After creating a form, you can quickly embed it into your website using a code snippet or ActiveCampaign's WordPress plugin. 

Once you're ready to run email campaigns, both platforms will give you powerful segmentation and tagging systems for managing subscribers. You'll also get a nice collection of customizable templates and easy-to-use email builders. But beyond that, ActiveCampaign offers a more effective email marketing service. 

For example, in ActiveCampaign, you get a variety of email campaign types for communicating with your subscribers. You can set up standard broadcast emails, autoresponders, automated sequences, RSS-triggered emails, or date-based emails to send to contacts on their birthday or anniversaries. All these campaigns are native to ActiveCampaign, and you can access them from your dashboard.

The situation is quite different in ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels only offers one-off broadcast emails out of the box. It's possible to create autoresponders, email sequences, and RSS-triggered emails, but you have to set them up manually via integrations and automated workflows.

As you send emails, ActiveCampaign lets you run comprehensive A/B tests to see which work best. Just select Split Testing as your campaign type, and choose the parts of the email you want to test (e.g., subject lines, from name, email content). You can test up to five email variants at the same time and then use the results to improve your campaign.

In ClickFunnels, A/B testing is possible, but only as part of an automation journey (more on that in a bit)—and you can only test two variants. 

ActiveCampaign's convenient A/B testing and multiple campaign types are clear indications of where its strengths lie.

ActiveCampaign's marketing automation is more robust

ActiveCampaign markets itself as an automation powerhouse, and rightly so, as it lets you build sophisticated automations to manage every aspect of your business.

To start, it provides pre-designed automation templates (called recipes) to help less tech-forward and even seasoned marketers get started easily. These templates cater to every marketing and sales function you can imagine, and there are options across industries and languages.

Inside the automation builder, ActiveCampaign holds your hand with clearly labeled steps and notes to guide you at every step. It even offers an AI builder that can build full automations using simple goal-based prompts. I found it worked pretty well—as much as AI tools do at this point.

You can kick off an automation in ActiveCampaign with multiple triggers (with over 30 options to start from). For example, if you're nurturing leads with the goal of selling them an online course, you could trigger an email automation with both "Contact subscribes to any list" and "Contact clicks a link in any email." 

From there, you can flesh out your automation using any of the 40+ actions on the platform. You might set an action to tag subscribers as they join your list and then email them accordingly. Then, you could use conditions and workflows like "wait," "if/else," and "go to" to send subscribers down different paths and email them based on how they interact with previous emails.

In any given automation, ActiveCampaign can use predictive sending to learn the times your contacts open their emails and automatically email them at those times to increase engagement and deliver a more personalized experience.

To top it off, ActiveCampaign doesn't limit its automation to emails alone. It lets you automate other tasks, like organizing deals in your CRM, collecting contacts from Facebook and segmenting them into custom audiences, running product market fit surveys—the list goes on.

Because ClickFunnels is focused on selling, its automation feature (called workflows) is limited to the marketing and sales activities inside your funnel. That's not to say it's not powerful—it is—but it's just not as robust as ActiveCampaign's automation features.

My main gripe with ClickFunnels' automation tools is the user experience. Navigating workflows is clunky. For example, after adding a "Send email" action to workflows, it'll state "No email set" until you click the little warning sign (⚠️) by the side to customize your email template and finish the setup. It didn't offer any clear instructions on this within the app, and it took me a lot of tinkering to figure it out. 

ClickFunnels also doesn't offer automation templates (you have to build every automation from scratch), has fewer trigger and action options compared to ActiveCampaign, and you can't start a workflow with multiple triggers like you can in ActiveCampaign.

ClickFunnels is better for building landing pages

Because ClickFunnels was built for conversion, it has a really great set of features to help with sales and marketing. The first is landing pages. 

In ClickFunnels, you get a nice collection of landing page templates you can easily customize to your heart's content. The landing page builder is sophisticated: it allows you to add animations, pop-ups, stacks, CTA stoppers, and fully-designed content sections (even those outside your template), among other things. If you have graphics or web design experience, you can get really granular with the design details and customize everything from style to borders, shadows, and colors. You can add custom attributes, reposition visuals, and set render conditions like reducing or increasing image quality in specific sections.

ActiveCampaign's landing page builder is pretty advanced, but it can't hold a candle to what ClickFunnels can do. It uses an interactive drag-and-drop interface but only offers basic customization, like adjusting navigation, spacing, colors, and fonts. You can add extra sections to your page, but those sections don't come ready to use—you have to design them yourself. 

On top of that, ActiveCampaign only offers landing pages on its Marketing Plus plan and upwards, which are quite expensive.

ClickFunnels has more features for conversion  

What ClickFunnels lacks in email marketing and automation, it makes up for with its sales funnels. 

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: collect email addresses from web visitors, send them a thank-you email, direct them to your product page, take payments for products, send order confirmation emails, and more.

You can even add order bumps, one-click upsells, downsells, or other types of limited-time offers to your funnels. ClickFunnels provides fully designed templates for this process, which you can easily customize for your business. You can A/B test every funnel page to discover which elements are better for conversions, then set up conditional split paths to optimize customer journeys and target them with better offers.

These conversion features are all notably lacking in ActiveCampaign. The landing pages you create on ActiveCampaign can only collect email addresses or payments, depending on their objective. You can't connect them to move visitors from one stage to the next, and the reason is obvious: the platform isn't designed for selling.

ClickFunnels lacks entry-level pricing but offers more value on its pricier plans

ActiveCampaign has a less expensive entry-level price: the Marketing Lite plan starts at $39/month. But keep in mind that this plan limits you to 1,000 email contacts and excludes important features you'll need for your business, including landing pages, eCommerce, conversions, SMS, and split automations. It also limits you to inline email forms.

To unlock more features on ActiveCampaign, you need to upgrade to the Sales Plus plan, which costs $70/month for 1,000 contacts. 

Meanwhile, ClickFunnels starts at $147/month—more than three times the entry-level ActiveCampaign price—but it gives you access to its entire suite of marketing and sales tools, including 10,000 email subscribers. You'd need to spend $229/month on ActiveCampaign to have 10,000 contacts and access the comparable features ClickFunnels offers on its starting plan. 

So it definitely comes down to your list size and plans for growth, but ClickFunnels offers more features at its lowest price.

Both ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels play well with other tools 

ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are both solidly integrated with other marketing and sales tools, so you can connect each of them to the rest of your tech stack. ActiveCampaign natively integrates with more tools than ClickFunnels (900+ vs. ClickFunnels' 100+), but both apps integrate with Zapier, which means you can connect them to thousands of other tools you use in your business. 

By connecting ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels to Zapier, you can do things like automatically add contacts based on lead form submissions, appointment bookings, or anything else. Learn more about how to automate ClickFunnels with Zapier and how to automate ActiveCampaign with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

ActiveCampaign vs. ClickFunnels: Which marketing platform should you choose?

Go for ClickFunnels if you're starting an online business and need a one-stop shop for lead generation and sales. Its sales funnels, landing pages, and email marketing tools will help you capture leads, nurture them, and convert them into business.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, is for more established businesses looking for an integrated sales and marketing platform (including a CRM) to automate processes, deliver better customer experiences, and scale their business.

Related reading:

• ClickFunnels vs. Leadpages: Which should you use?

• Create Salesforce leads from ClickFunnels contact activities

• ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp: Which should you use?

• The best marketing automation software