ActiveCampaignvs
AWeber


AWeber: Email marketing and automation for small business

CRM, marketing automation, and sales platform
As of 30 August 2026, ActiveCampaign is free to use. ActiveCampaign is an integrated platform that combines CRM, marketing automation, sales automation, and customer service. Softwr lists it under Email Marketing. ActiveCampaign is launched in 2003, available on Web.
Overview
ActiveCampaign is an integrated platform that combines CRM, marketing automation, sales automation, and customer service. It helps businesses build and maintain customer relationships at scale.
The honest half
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about ActiveCampaign.
Cross-shopped
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.


AWeber: Email marketing and automation for small business


Brevo: Email, SMS, and CRM in one platform


EmailOctopus: Affordable email marketing


Flodesk: Email marketing built for creators and small business
Capabilities
Contact management
Sales pipeline
Marketing automation
Email marketing
Customer service
Reporting
Automation
Zapier
Integration with Zapier
Slack
Integration with Slack
Salesforce
Integration with Salesforce
Shopify
Integration with Shopify
WordPress
Integration with WordPress
Answered, with sources
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Yes, ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial that requires only an email address for sign-up. No credit card is needed and setup is instant.
SourcePricing is custom and based on your contact volume, which ranges from fewer than 500 to more than 250,000 contacts. ActiveCampaign states they will put together a pricing package specific to your needs after you submit the pricing request form.
SourceNo, the 14-day free trial provides full access to the autonomous marketing platform without requiring sales contact. After the trial ends, you must complete a pricing request form to move forward.
SourceBehind it
Keep looking
Australian marketing automation with a customer data platform and analytics included rather than sold separately
UK-listed email and cross-channel marketing platform with deep Adobe Commerce and Dynamics connectors
Cold email outreach platform with AI, lead sourcing, and mailbox rotation
All-in-one email marketing, automation and landing pages
Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that ships as a single Go binary
Low-cost email marketing from 9 US dollars a month, owned by Sitecore since 2021
Australian marketing automation with a customer data platform and analytics included rather than sold separately
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for ActiveCampaign, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
What people switch to, and what they give up
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Email marketing tool with a genuine free tier, priced by contact count once paid
Per month by contact tier once on a paid planEmail marketing platform priced by contact tier, with unlimited sends only from the mid tier up
Per month by contact tier and plan levelRaw transactional email infrastructure priced per thousand messages, with no campaign UI at all
Per 1,000 emails sent, tiered by volume, no campaign features includedSelf-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that ships as a single Go binary
Open source, no licence feeLow-cost email marketing from 9 US dollars a month, owned by Sitecore since 2021
Per month by contact countAGPL newsletter tool from Germany, self-hostable or hosted in the EU with no free plan
Per month by emails sentSelf-hosted newsletter app bought once for $69 that sends through your own Amazon SES account
One-time purchase