ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are very similar platforms. They both operate in the email marketing and automation areas, they’re experienced and popular, and they’ve been doing a pretty good job for years now.
However, similar doesn’t mean identical, and it does matter which one you choose. One may work perfectly for one entrepreneur, but not for you; the other may make your business flourish, but may not work well in a different context. Since your choice can affect your business positively or adversely, it’s important to make an informed decision and explore both platforms as thoroughly as possible before you make your decision.
In this ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp guide, we’ll examine these two platforms to see how they compare to each other. That said, our goal won’t be to declare a winner, but rather to see in what contexts they thrive and the areas where they underperform or perform averagely. So, let’s get this show on the road.
Pricing Plans
Pricing is the first thing we’ll examine in our ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp comparison. Let’s have a look at the ActiveCampaign pricing plans first.
ActiveCampaign
Overview
ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial and four paid pricing plans. You can choose between monthly and yearly billing. The price of a plan depends on the number of contacts. Usually, your costs increase every time your email list goes over one of the following thresholds: 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 75,000, and 100,000 contacts.
Pricing Plans
The ActiveCampaign pricing plans along with the starting prices (up to 500 contacts) and the top 10 features for each plan are as follows:
Lite
$15/month (monthly subscription) or $108/year (annual subscription, same as $9/month)
The Lite plan includes:
- Email marketing and automation
- Subscription and lead capture forms
- Segmentation
- Intuitive visual drag-and-drop email builder along with email templates
- Site and event tracking
- Campaign and automation reporting as well as customer analytics
- Three users
- Over 500 automation templates called recipes
- Email design testing
- E-commerce sales automation
Plus
$70/month (monthly subscription) or $588/year (annual subscription, same as $49/month)
With this plan, you get access to the following features:
- Facebook Custom Audiences
- 25 users
- Custom user permissions
- Customizable landing pages and sales pipelines
- Sales automation
- CRM
- SMS marketing
- Automations Map
- Conditional content
- Custom branded forms
Professional
$159/month (monthly subscription) or $1,548/year (annual subscription, same as $129/month)
With this plan, you can enjoy the following perks:
- Predictive sending (powered by machine learning, as are the following three features)
- Predictive content
- Win probability
- Sentiment analysis
- Split automation
- Site messages
- 50 users
- Conversion reporting
- Sales engagement automation
- Website personalization
Enterprise
$279/month (monthly subscription) or $2,748/year (annual subscription, same as $229/month)
The highest-tier ActiveCampaign pricing plan includes:
- Custom reporting
- Custom mailserver domain
- Custom domain
- Unlimited users
- Custom URL
- Custom branding
- Unlimited email testing
- HIPAA support
- Data enrichment
- Single sign-on
Is ActiveCampaign Affordable and Cost-effective?
Customers, entrepreneurs, and users all see ActiveCampaign as a highly affordable customer experience automation platform that is considerably cheaper than many of its renowned rivals, such as Pardot, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
In addition to this, there’s a general agreement that ActiveCampaign is extremely cost-effective. For the best-in-class automation tools you get and the service this platform provides, to say that the prices are fair is an understatement.
Mailchimp
Overview
Mailchimp offers two categories of plans called Marketing Platform and Websites & Commerce. The first category includes four pricing plans while the second has three. There’s no free trial, but Mailchimp has a free offering in both categories, which is surely one of the reasons this platform is so popular, especially among small business owners with a limited budget.
Mailchimp has only one type of billing – monthly. Just like with ActiveCampaign, the starting prices are for 500 contacts, but as you go all the way up to 200,000+ contacts, the fees increase depending on the pricing plan.
One thing you should keep in mind is that, on Mailchimp, if the same contact subscribes to different email lists, it’s registered as multiple contacts. This can be a significant drawback if you have many of these contacts in your lists because pricing in platforms like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign is based on the number of contacts. In contrast, ActiveCampaign treats every contact as one unique contact, regardless of the lists they subscribe to.
In addition to contacts, another variable that dictates your monthly fees is the number of sent emails.
Marketing Platform Plans
These are the prices and top features of the four Marketing Platform plans:
Free
$0/month
The Free plan includes the following features:
- Up to 2,000 contacts
- 10,000 email sends
- Email marketing automation
- CRM
- Landing pages
- Forms
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Website builder
- Creative Assistant (a design tool)
- Content studio (a files management tool)
Keep in mind that the upper limit for the Free plan is 2,000 contacts. If your email list exceeds this threshold, Mailchimp will stop sending your emails.
Essentials
$9.99/month
In addition to all the tools from the Free plan, this plan gives you access to the following features:
- 500 contacts
- 5,000 email sends
- Split testing
- Custom branding (remove the Mailchimp footer)
- Customer journey builder (for creating “dynamic automated marketing paths for contacts”)
Standard
$14.99/month
With the next in line Standard plan, Mailchimp offers the following features:
- 500 contacts
- 6,000 email sends
- Pre-built customer journeys
- Content and send time optimization
- Dynamic content
Premium
$299/month
The most expensive Premium plan includes the following features:
- Up to 10,000 contacts
- 150,000 email sends
- Advanced segmentation
- Multivariate testing
- Comparative reporting
Website & Commerce Plans
The three Website & Commerce plans are:
Free
$0/month
The Free Website & Commerce plan includes the following features:
- Website with unlimited pages
- Store with unlimited products
- 2% transaction fee
- Unlimited bandwidth
- SEO tools
- Site and store analytics
- Built-in payment processing (but only for US and UK sites/shops)
- Order and shipment management
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Free marketing tools like basic campaign reporting, basic email templates, basic segmentation, CRM, email automation, etc.
Core
$10/month
In addition to all the features from the Free plan, the Core plan includes the following features:
- 1.5% transaction fee
- three users (compared to only one with the Free plan)
- The possibility to connect a custom domain
Plus
$29/month
The Plus plan is essentially the same as the Core plan except for five users instead of three and a 0.5% transaction fee.
Is Mailchimp Affordable and Cost-effective?
Undoubtedly, Mailchimp’s pricing puts it into the category of highly affordable platforms. It can also be argued that it’s cost-effective – the prices match the quality and quantity of features it offers.
Conclusions
Clearly, despite both platforms being affordable, Mailchimp is cheaper than ActiveCampaign. Especially with the free offering in mind, this makes Mailchimp perfect for businesses that are starting out online on a shoestring. With both, though, the costs increase a lot once your business starts growing. However, for larger companies and those startups whose businesses have begun to take off, which platform would be more cost-effective and suitable?
Overall, ActiveCampaign offers more value for the money. Compared to ActiveCampaign, the number of features available on Mailchimp is noticeably smaller. In addition to the number, it’s the more-or-less basic nature of its features that makes Mailchimp lag behind ActiveCampaign as an option for long-term business projects.
However, it’s exactly the low prices together with the ease of use of Mailchimp that can be appealing to a ton of users. To some businesses, simplicity can be as important as the number of features and their complexity for other businesses. Plus, if you need a platform that allows you to build websites or e-commerce stores while offering email marketing for a low price, Mailchimp can be a good candidate.
More on Features
We already talked about some of the ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp features. In this section, we’ll expand further on the topic and explore more facets of these platforms’ tools.
ActiveCampaign
Personalized Approach
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform dedicated to a personalized approach. What we mean by this is that it provides you with all kinds of tools that help you approach your audience in a personalized manner.
The features based on machine learning (predictive sending, predictive content, sentiment analysis, etc.) allow you to communicate with your audience in a way that shows they’re all different individuals, not parts of an impersonal mass.
Powerful Automation
ActiveCampaign excels in the automation domain. In many users’ opinions, it’s one of the best customer marketing automation platforms. Mailchimp is decent, but it can’t compete with ActiveCampaign in this area. Compared to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign offers many more features that can help you build complex campaigns and powerful automation. Some of those are:
- A ton of trigger options that help you customize your automation workflows.
- The ability to create different automations for different occasions/events, unlike Mailchimp where you have the same sequence running over and over again.
- The possibility to use even split in your campaigns, in addition to a conditional split (Mailchimp only has conditional).
- The best email deliverability (according to stats from October 2021).
- A powerful visual automation builder.
- A host of automation templates for over 20 categories of use cases.
These, together with the other features we mentioned and the intuitive admin dashboard, definitely make ActiveCampaign one of the best marketing automation products currently on the market.
Mailchimp
Simplicity
It’s true that automation in Mailchimp is pretty basic and it comes down to a series of emails with some wait time in between, but for a regular email marketing platform (not primarily an automation platform), it’s still decent. It’s more suitable for inexperienced users than ActiveCampaign.
The platform is beginner-friendly, and it’s best for when you're starting out. Seemingly, these aspects are the strongest sides of Mailchimp.
Email Deliverability
One of the things that make Mailchimp appealing to beginners in the marketing field is definitely the Free marketing plan. However, there’s one caveat about this plan that you should be aware of.
As much as it sounds like a great idea for someone who’s just starting out, the Free marketing plan has one drawback. The drawback is that many spammers use it to send a ton of emails, often from multiple free accounts. Unfortunately, this does not damage just the reputation of Mailchimp; it also affects email deliverability, which must be one of the reasons why Mailchimp lags so far behind ActiveCampaign in this area.
Graphical Interface
On a brighter note, the Mailchimp dashboard as well as its email designer are very intuitive and look pretty good.
The email designer is very easy to use. It allows you to create emails from templates or start building them from scratch. In it, you can add new elements by dragging and dropping content blocks and then customizing them.
As for the admin dashboard, it’s very well-designed and refreshingly uncluttered.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign gives you access to 870+ integrations, regardless of your pricing plan.
Integrations are one of this platform’s strengths. The company shies away from being thought of as an all-in-one platform. ActiveCampaign believes that it’s better to give its customers the possibility to add as many integrations as they want rather than trying to cover all the important facets of today’s business in one place. The second approach can make for a bloated platform that tries to do everything, but in the end, does nothing as effectively as more specialized platforms.
As a result of this approach, ActiveCampaign puts a lot of emphasis on its large ecosystem of apps and integrations. It integrates pretty smoothly with some of the best and most prominent software on the market, such as:
- Google Analytics (analytics and reporting)
- Shopify (e-commerce)
- Unbounce (landing pages and forms)
- Salesforce (CRM)
- DropInBlog (CMS, content marketing, and blogging)
Mailchimp
Mailchimp fares pretty well in this area as well. There are about 300 integrations that you can add through your Mailchimp account. The types of integrations range from analytics, scheduling, and marketing to e-commerce, point of sale, and payments.
Some of the most widely known names found among the Mailchimp integrations are the following:
- Stripe (payment processing)
- BigCommerce (e-commerce)
- Leadpages (landing pages and marketing)
- Calendly (booking and scheduling)
- Square (point of sale)
Help, Support, and Customer Care
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign provides support through multiple channels:
- Chat and email (a ticketing system available to all subscribers, regardless of their pricing plan)
- Phone support (for Enterprise plan customers)
- Support center
The ActiveCampaign customer support is one of a kind. It’s one of the most highly praised aspects of the platform. The customer support staff make everything easier for the company’s clients; They are helpful, kind, friendly, responsive, and most importantly professional. Regardless of the obstacle you’re trying to overcome or conundrum you’re trying to solve, the ActiveCampaign customer support will have your back.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp provides support in multiple ways as well:
- Helpbot (available to all customers)
- Email (for all except the Free plans, where it’s limited only to the first 30 days after subscription)
- Live chat (all plans except the free plans)
- Phone support (only for Premium marketing plan subscribers)
- Guides and tutorials
As far as customer support quality, Mailchimp performs pretty well, but it doesn’t seem to be as good as ActiveCampaign.
Over and Out
In this ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp comparison, we took a look at these two platforms and discovered that, after all, they’re not that similar. Despite both of them revolving around email marketing, they have different strengths and drawbacks that make them more or less suitable for certain types of audiences.
With this in mind, choose wisely; it’s not always the one with more features that’s appropriate for your business situation or the one that’s more affordable that’s a better solution. Weigh things up, take some time kicking the tires of both platforms and see which one does the trick for you.