ActiveCampaign Pricing: How Do I Get My Money’s Worth?

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It’s no secret that ActiveCampaign is one of our favorite email marketing tools. We’ve had great experiences with their support, reports, and their automations are hard to beat.

But with plans ranging from the affordable Starter plan to the fully-featured Enterprise offering, the question is: which would we recommend for you? And how much do add-ons like its CRM and SMS packages cost?

Finally, will their product scale well if you increase your subscribers (as the result of a successful long term email marketing strategy)?

Let’s break down ActiveCampaign’s plans and prices below to find out.

ActiveCampaign Pricing: What Do I Get?

While ActiveCampaign’s premium prices used to place it at the higher end of the email service provider (ESP) market, the recent introduction of its Starter plan has changed all that.

Users can now enjoy a selection of ActiveCampaign’s automation features, site tracking capabilities, and ecommerce integrations (e.g. Shopify, WooCommerce) from just $19/month. Prices go up incrementally once you have more than 1,000 subscribers.

But what if you find yourself outgrowing the limits of the Starter plan?

• To access additional features, such as advanced automation triggers, a landing page builder, generative AI, retargeting ads and revenue reporting, you’ll need to upgrade to the Plus plan, which starts at $49/month.
• The Pro plan unlocks features such as conditional content, conversion attribution, priority support and ecommerce integrations with BigCommerce, Magento, & Shopify Plus. This starts at $79/month.
• There’s also an Enterprise plan starting at $145/month if you need integrations with CRMs like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, custom objects, and a dedicated account team.

Not included are ActiveCampaign’s advanced CRM products ("Pipelines" and "Sales Engagement"), SMS or transactional emails – although these can be purchased as add-ons from the Plus plan onwards (more on that below).

It’s worth noting that, unlike most of the ESPs we review on this site, they do not offer a free plan. However, you can still give it a test drive for 14 days without paying anything (and send up to 100 emails during this time). Once you commit to a paid plan, you can even take advantage of their free migrations offer.

Discounts of up to 20% are also available if you choose to commit to an annual plan.

To decide which plan is the right one for you, have a look at our complete breakdown below.

Marketing Prices and Plans in Detail (Month-to-Month Commitments)

CRM Pricing in Detail

ActiveCampaign’s CRM (customer relationship management) products are available as a separate add-on for users of the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans. The two CRM add-ons are:

• Pipelines - This package is targeted at B2C businesses. It includes pipeline management features, deal records, account records and lead scoring
• Sales Engagement - This CRM package is ideal for B2B organizations. It includes the ability to send automated 1:1 emails, as well as AI-powered tools such as win probability and sentiment analysis

Both packages also allow you to incorporate sales-related triggers and actions within your automations, such as updating deal status or stage, and adjusting deal scores.

However, the pricing can get a little confusing as it varies depending on which paid plan you’re on, and how many users you have. What’s more, there are discounts of up to 10-20% if you opt for a yearly commitment.

Here’s the pricing for ActiveCampaign’s CRM plans on a month-to-month commitment:

Example calculation for CRM plans

Let's give you two concrete examples:

Professional plan (1,000 contacts) with the Pipelines CRM add-on:

Monthly Plan: $89 (Professional) + $77 (CRM add-on) = $166 / month

Annual Plan: $1,764 / year (includes 20% discount)

Enterprise plan (10,000 contacts) with the Sales Engagement CRM add-on (5 users):

Monthly plan: $665 (Enterprise) + $179 (CRM add-on) + $284 (4 additional users) = $1,128 / month

Annual plan: $12,000 / year (includes 20%  discount)

ActiveCampaign Add-Ons: What’s Not Included in Your Plans

Aside from the CRM products, there are a few other add-ons that you can also purchase. These include:

SMS

Available on the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans, this feature lets contacts subscribe to your list via SMS, and also allows you to send SMS messages within your automations. It’s $21/month to use this add-on, but you’ll also need to purchase credits to send messages. Here’s a breakdown of how much they cost:

Transactional email

Postmark is ActiveCampaign’s transactional email service. It lets you send triggered emails such as purchase receipts, shipping confirmations, email verifications, and password resets (which are not possible to send through ActiveCampaign).

While Postmark offers a free plan of up to 100 transactional emails per month, its paid plans are expensive compared to other transactional email providers, starting from $15 per month for up to 10,000 emails. Learn more about how Postmark fares against other transactional email services.

Custom reports

Custom reports let you build your own advanced reports based on contacts, deals, automations, campaigns, and ecommerce data. For example, you could generate a report on the average commitment time of a contact who unsubscribed for a particular campaign or automation.

Starting at $159/month and increasing once your subscriber numbers hit 300k contacts, this add-on feels a little pricey for the small-to-medium business audience. However, it is included for free on the Enterprise tier.

Dedicated IP

If you have over 100,000 contacts and need a dedicated IP for your email marketing, you can purchase one for ActiveCampaign for $750. While most other email marketing providers charge you on a monthly or yearly basis, ActiveCampaign charges this as a one-time cost, which can save you a great deal of money in the long run. However, it’s only available to Enterprise plan users.

Are There Any Hidden Costs Associated with ActiveCampaign?

As we’ve seen, ActiveCampaign charges based on the number of active contacts you have in your account (unsubscribes + bounced contacts not being counted). When you surpass your contact limit, you won’t automatically get bumped up to the next contact tier. Instead, your campaigns and automations will be paused, and you won’t be able to add new contacts to your account.

To avoid this, make sure you manually adjust your contact limit within the Billing section of your account.

Now that ActiveCampaign no longer offers unlimited email sends, it may also charge overages if you exceed your email sending limit (which is between 10-15x your contact limit, depending on the plan you’re on).

Again, this can be avoided by adding additional email sends to your plan via the Billing section. This will cost you around $5 per additional 5,000 email sends per month.

How Does ActiveCampaign's Pricing Compare to Other ESPs?

ActiveCampaign's feature set is one of the most extensive we've seen, which makes it a little hard to do a direct price comparison with other email marketing services. But if you want to run through the numbers, let's take a quick look at how much ActiveCampaign charges for a list of 1,000 subscribers, and a list of 10,000 subscribers, on its cheapest plan (Starter):

Now, let's compare that to some of the other popular tools in the market:

There's no doubt that ActiveCampaign's prices are at the premium end for small-to-medium businesses, but to understand why, let's take a look at how it compares with its closest competitors.

ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse

In our view, GetResponse is the most similar to ActiveCampaign in that both offer all-in-one platforms with a heavy emphasis on marketing automation. However, while ActiveCampaign includes automations in all its pricing plans, GetResponse excludes them from its most affordable plan, meaning you'll need to pay at least $59/month to access this critical feature.

If you only need basic features, GetResponse is a more affordable option (and even offers a free plan). However, if you're looking for robust marketing automation, ActiveCampaign provides better value and ends up being more cost-effective in the long run.

Read more in our GetResponse vs ActiveCampaign comparison.

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp

While Mailchimp is the better known of the two, its popularity has waned it recent years due to price hikes and an increasingly complicated feature set. In fact, for a list of less than 1,000 subscribers, ActiveCampaign's Starter plan ($19 a month) is actually cheaper than Mailchimp's equivalent plan (Essentials), which costs $26.50 per month. ActiveCampaign's 20% discount for annual plans can also help make it a more cost-effective option than Mailchimp.

We've heard many users complain that Mailchimp's free plan is much more restrictive than it used to be, with reduced sending allowances and the removal of automations. So although Mailchimp can be useful for users with more basic needs, there's no doubt that ActiveCampaign offers much more value for money. You can read more about ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp in our comparison.

ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo

Shopify-owned email marketing platform Klaviyo is popular with ecommerce owners, offering advanced automation and segmentation features. Unlike ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo offers the full range of email marketing features on all plans, with options to upgrade if you need SMS or priority support. Klaviyo's free plan supports up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, while paid plans begin at $20/month for 500 contacts and 5,000 emails.

This makes ActiveCampaign the more affordable option for businesses with smaller lists. Once you hit the 10k subscriber mark, however, Klaviyo's prices work out cheaper. It's also worth remembering that with ActiveCampaign, ecommerce integrations are only available on the Plus plan and above, meaning that Klaviyo is generally a more cost-effective option for online store owners.

Overall however, ActiveCampaign offers a more extensive range of automations, segmentation filters, reports, and integrations. Learn more in our ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo comparison.

ActiveCampaign Pricing: Conclusion

ActiveCampaign’s email marketing plans start at $19 a month for the Starter plan. There is no free version, plus the free trial is limited to only two weeks and 100 email sends - which is enough to put some people off ActiveCampaign.

There’s no doubt that you can find cheaper options, especially if you only need to send very basic newsletters. Email marketing newbies might also be a bit nervous about the advanced features, although these don’t necessarily make ActiveCampaign harder to use (in fact, we've even prepared an ActiveCampaign tutorial to help get you started!).

But if you are indeed serious about email marketing, we would definitely recommend ActiveCampaign. Their offer scales reasonably well, and larger organizations will benefit from its comprehensive tools, 24/7 support, and personal training. And they are also very efficient in the way they count their subscribers, so you can easily segment and delete inactive subscribers without worrying about reaching your user limit.

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