AC| Starting price | $15 per month billed annually (Starter, 1,000 contacts, 1 user); $19 monthly |
|---|---|
| Free plan | No — 14-day free trial, no card; 30-day money-back guarantee |
| Upper tiers | Plus $49 · Pro $79 · Enterprise $145 per month at 1,000 contacts (annual); prices rise with contacts |
| Best for | Marketing-led small businesses, creators, ecommerce and course sellers who live in automations |
| Not ideal for | Sales teams that need a pipeline for many reps; plans include 1–5 users and full pipelines are an add-on |
| Standout feature | The visual automation builder and behaviour-based segmentation |
| Biggest drawback | Priced by contacts and users, with the sales layer sold separately |
The Short Verdict
ActiveCampaign is the best automation builder we cover at its starting price. For $15 a month a solo business gets 1,000 contacts, unlimited email sends within fair-use limits, a drag-and-drop automation canvas, forms, site tracking and a contact record that remembers every click. Move up to Plus or Pro and the caps come off: unlimited automation actions, conditional content, lead scoring, split testing of whole automations, and three users at Pro.
The catch is in the word "CRM". ActiveCampaign sells itself as a customer experience platform, and every plan does include basic deal records. But the full sales layer — multiple pipelines, task automation for reps and sales engagement — is sold as an "Enhanced CRM" add-on, and plans ship with only 1 to 5 users. A marketing-led business barely notices. A six-person sales team notices immediately, and should read our HubSpot and Pipedrive reviews first.
Bottom line: if email sequences and segmented campaigns are how you sell, ActiveCampaign is the right engine and Plus at $49 is the tier to budget for. If a pipeline of deals is how you sell, buy a CRM and connect ActiveCampaign to it later.
Who ActiveCampaign Is (and Isn't) For
A strong fit if you…
- Run a business where nurture emails, webinars, launches or abandoned-cart flows create most of the revenue — coaches, course creators, ecommerce stores, agencies selling retainers
- Want one contact record that combines email behaviour, website visits and purchase data, then acts on it automatically
- Have one to five people who need to log in, with most of the work done by automations rather than by reps
- Already use Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe, Calendly or a webinar tool and want the CRM to react to events in those apps
Look elsewhere if you…
- Need a free plan that lasts (see HubSpot, Zoho CRM or Freshsales)
- Have a team of reps who need a visual pipeline, call logging and forecasting every day (see Pipedrive)
- Want per-seat pricing that does not move when your list grows (see Zoho CRM at $14 per user)
- Need a support desk or ticketing in the same system (see HubSpot or Salesforce)
ActiveCampaign as a CRM
Search for "ActiveCampaign CRM" and you will find two different products described with one name. Here is how they split in 2026.
What every plan includes
Contacts with custom fields, tags and lists; a timeline of every email open, link click, page view and form fill; lead and contact scoring rules; basic deal records you can attach to a contact; tasks; and the automation builder that acts on all of it. For a marketing-led business that is most of what a CRM is for: you know who each person is, what they have looked at, and the system follows up for you.
What sits in the Enhanced CRM add-ons
ActiveCampaign packages the sales layer as two add-ons. Pipelines unlocks multiple deal pipelines with custom stages, deal-level automation and pipeline reporting. Sales Engagement adds one-to-one sales email sequences, task queues and rep-facing tools. ActiveCampaign does not publish prices for either; third-party trackers put Pipelines at about $68 a month and Sales Engagement at about $111 a month as of August 2026. Treat those as directional and get a quote in writing.
The user limit is the real constraint
Starter and Plus include one user. Pro includes three, Enterprise five, and each additional user is $12 a month. That is cheap per seat, but it tells you what the product expects: a small team that lets automations do the volume. A ten-rep sales floor would pay for seven extra users plus the Pipelines add-on, and would still have a lighter pipeline than Pipedrive Lite at $14 a seat. We score ActiveCampaign as a CRM for marketing-led teams, not as a sales-floor CRM, and its 4.1 reflects that framing.
Rule of thumb: if the phrase "move the deal to the next stage" describes your day, you need the add-on or a different tool. If "send them the sequence" describes your day, the base plan is your CRM.
Pricing: Starter vs Plus vs Pro vs Enterprise
ActiveCampaign prices by contact count first and by plan second. The figures below are for 1,000 contacts. The vendor's pricing page shows annual rates; monthly rates are from third-party pricing trackers dated August 2026, since ActiveCampaign does not display a monthly toggle before checkout.
| Plan (1,000 contacts) | Per month, annual | Per month, monthly | Users | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $15 | $19 | 1 | Email campaigns, forms, site tracking, automations capped at 5 actions each, limited segmentation, basic deals |
| Plus | $49 | $59 | 1 | Unlimited automation actions, standard segmentation, conditional content, landing pages, lead scoring |
| Pro | $79 | $99 | 3 | Advanced segmentation, predictive sending, split automations, attribution reporting, 3 users |
| Enterprise | $145 | $179 | 5 | Premium segmentation, single sign-on, custom objects, dedicated account team, 5 users |
USD prices per activecampaign.com (annual) and third-party trackers (monthly), September 2026. Additional users $12 per month each. 14-day free trial with Pro features, 100 contacts and 100 sends; 30-day money-back guarantee.
How the price moves with your list
This is the table most reviews skip. Every figure is monthly billing; annual billing is about a fifth less at the 1,000-contact tier.
| Contacts | Starter | Plus | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $19 | $59 | $99 | $179 |
| 2,500 | $49 | $119 | $189 | $319 |
| 5,000 | $99 | $179 | $259 | $469 |
| 10,000 | $189 | $239 | $469 | $739 |
| 25,000 | Not offered at this size | $489 | $789 | $1,099 |
Two patterns matter. First, Starter has no volume discount, so it grows fastest: at 10,000 contacts Starter ($189) is within $50 of Plus ($239), and by 25,000 contacts Starter costs more than Plus. Second, the gap between Plus and Pro widens with size, so the three Pro users cost you far more at 10,000 contacts than at 1,000.
Add-ons
ActiveCampaign does not publish add-on prices. Third-party trackers, August 2026, list: Enhanced CRM Pipelines about $68 a month; Enhanced CRM Sales Engagement about $111 a month; SMS from about $16.83 a month per 1,000 credits; Custom Reporting $159 a month for 50 reports and 25 dashboards; Postmark transactional email from $15 a month per 10,000 emails. WhatsApp is sold as separate Core, Advanced and Premium plans with prices not published. Confirm every add-on with sales before you budget.
What a real bill looks like
- Solo coach, 1,000 contacts, Starter annual: $15 a month, or $180 a year. Email, forms, tracking and five-step automations. This is the cheapest serious automation tool we cover.
- Two-person ecommerce brand, 5,000 contacts, Plus monthly: $179 a month plus $12 for the second user, about $191 a month or roughly $2,290 a year. Unlimited automation steps and abandoned-cart flows with Shopify.
- Five-person agency, 1,000 contacts, Pro annual plus Pipelines: $79 plus two extra users at $24 plus about $68 for Pipelines, about $171 a month. Compare that with five HubSpot Starter seats at $45 a month, which include a pipeline but far less automation.
Which tier should you actually buy?
Starter is enough to test whether automation changes your numbers, but the five-action cap bites within weeks. Most businesses that stay end up on Plus, which is where the product becomes the ActiveCampaign people talk about. Pro earns its price when you have three people who need logins, run split tests on whole automations, or need attribution reporting. Enterprise is about single sign-on, custom objects and a dedicated team rather than new marketing capability.
Watch out for: contact count includes every contact in the account, not just subscribed ones, so clean your list before you import. Users are capped at 1 to 5 per plan and $12 each after that. The pipeline layer is an add-on. If you compare with HubSpot, compare Plus at 1,000 contacts ($49) against HubSpot Starter ($9 per seat), then add HubSpot Marketing Hub for the email side to make the match fair.
Features Walkthrough
Automation builder
The canvas is the product. Triggers include a form fill, a tag added, a page visited, a deal stage changed, a purchase in a connected store or a date reached. Actions include sending email, waiting for a condition, splitting on behaviour, adjusting a score, creating a deal, notifying a person or calling a webhook. Starter caps each automation at five actions; Plus and above remove the cap. There is a large library of prebuilt recipes for welcome series, cart recovery and re-engagement.
Email marketing and segmentation
Campaigns, broadcasts and a template editor with conditional content blocks from Plus. Segmentation is where the tiers differ: Starter offers a limited set of conditions, Plus standard segments on tags, fields and behaviour, Pro advanced segments across site and event data, and Enterprise premium segmentation with custom objects. Predictive sending, which picks the send time per contact, arrives at Pro.
Site and event tracking
A tracking script logs page views to the contact record, and event tracking lets your app or store send custom events. Together they power the "visited pricing page twice, send the case study" automations that justify the price.
Lead scoring
Contact scoring and deal scoring rules add or subtract points on behaviour and fields. Scores can trigger automations and route hot contacts to a person. Available from Plus.
Deals and pipelines
Base plans include deal records tied to contacts with a simple pipeline view. Multiple pipelines, deal-stage automation and pipeline reports move into the Enhanced CRM Pipelines add-on. The interface is a Kanban board that will feel familiar if you have used Pipedrive, but with fewer rep-facing conveniences.
Sales engagement
One-to-one email sequences, task management for reps and a sales inbox view are part of the Sales Engagement add-on. Without it, sales email is limited to what you can build as marketing automations.
SMS and WhatsApp
SMS is credit-based and sold as an add-on; WhatsApp is a separate plan family with multiple lines and users per tier. Both plug into the same automation canvas, which is the point.
AI
ActiveCampaign's AI features generate email copy and subject lines, suggest automations from a plain-language brief and, on higher tiers, run "AI Actions" inside automations. They are helpful assistants rather than agents that work unsupervised.
Forms and landing pages
Inline, floating and modal forms are on every plan. Landing pages with a drag-and-drop builder arrive at Plus. Both feed tags and automations directly.
Reporting
Campaign and automation reports are standard. Attribution and goal reporting are Pro features. Deep custom dashboards need the Custom Reporting add-on.
Ease of Use and Setup
We score ease of use 3.9. Connecting a domain, importing a list, building a form and publishing a five-step welcome automation took us an afternoon, and the automation canvas is the most readable of any tool we have used. What costs points is everything around the canvas. Tags, lists, fields, scores and segments overlap in ways that take time to learn, and a busy account can accumulate hundreds of tags with no naming discipline. Plan your tag scheme before you import, and expect the second month to be smoother than the first.
Integrations
Integrations score 4.6, ActiveCampaign's highest mark. The app directory lists hundreds of native connections, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe, PayPal, Calendly, Zapier, Slack, Facebook Lead Ads, Google Ads, Typeform, Zoom and the major webinar platforms, plus a documented API and webhooks in every automation. It also connects to dedicated CRMs — Salesforce and Pipedrive among them — which is how many sales-led companies run it: ActiveCampaign nurtures, the CRM closes.
Support
Support scores 4.0. Every plan gets email and chat support, a large help centre and free one-on-one onboarding sessions on paid plans. Enterprise adds a dedicated account team. Response times in our experience were good; the gap is that complex automation questions are often answered with articles rather than a fix. The community and the number of agencies who know the product make it easy to hire help.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The deepest automation builder at its price point
- Behaviour-based segmentation from site, email and store data
- Starter at $15 is a cheap way in for a solo business
- Hundreds of integrations and a well-documented API
- Scales to large lists without changing tools
- Free 14-day trial with Pro features and a 30-day guarantee
Cons
- No free plan
- Priced by contact count, so growth raises the bill
- Only 1–5 users included; $12 per extra user
- Full pipelines and sales engagement are paid add-ons
- Add-on prices are not published
- Tags and lists become messy without discipline
ActiveCampaign vs the Alternatives
| Tool | Starting price | Free plan | Choose it over ActiveCampaign when… |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot CRM | Free; $9 per seat | Yes (2 users) | You want a real CRM first and marketing second, or need to start free |
| Pipedrive | $14 per user | No | A team of reps works a pipeline every day; connect ActiveCampaign for nurture if needed |
| Brevo | Free; from $9 | Yes | You want cheap email plus a light CRM and your list is small |
| Mailchimp | Free; from $13 | Yes (500 contacts) | You mostly send newsletters and want the simplest editor |
| Klaviyo | Free; from $20 | Yes (250 contacts) | You run an ecommerce store and want revenue-first email and SMS |
Head-to-head breakdowns: ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot and ActiveCampaign vs Pipedrive. For the wider field, see our ranked ActiveCampaign alternatives, and for a shortlist across every category, our guide to the best CRM software.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does ActiveCampaign cost?
At 1,000 contacts billed annually: Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79, Enterprise $145 a month. Monthly billing is $19, $59, $99 and $179. Prices rise with contacts — at 5,000 contacts on monthly billing the plans are $99, $179, $259 and $469. Extra users are $12 a month each.
Does ActiveCampaign have a free plan?
No. There is a 14-day free trial with Pro features, 100 contacts and 100 sends, no card required, and a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans. The cheapest ongoing plan is Starter at $15 a month billed annually. If you need a permanent free tier, see our best free CRM guide.
Is ActiveCampaign a CRM or an email tool?
A marketing automation platform first. Every plan includes contact records, tags, tracking, automations and basic deals, which is enough CRM for a marketing-led business. Multiple pipelines and sales engagement are Enhanced CRM add-ons, so a sales-first team should compare a dedicated CRM such as HubSpot or Pipedrive.
Is ActiveCampaign good for small business?
Yes, for a small business that grows through email, sequences and segmented campaigns; Starter covers a solo owner with 1,000 contacts for $15. It is a weaker fit for a team of reps, because plans include 1 to 5 users and the pipeline layer costs extra. See our best CRM for small business guide for the alternatives.
What is the difference between ActiveCampaign Starter and Plus?
Starter caps each automation at 5 actions and has limited segmentation; Plus removes the cap and adds standard segmentation, conditional content, landing pages and lead scoring. Both include 1 user. Starter has no volume discount, so at 25,000 contacts it costs more than Plus.
ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot — which is better?
HubSpot is the better CRM: free for 2 users, pipeline on every tier. ActiveCampaign is the better automation engine for a marketing-led business. If reps will live in the tool, HubSpot; if email drives revenue, ActiveCampaign. See the full comparison.
Final Verdict
ActiveCampaign earns its 4.1 by doing one hard thing very well: turning behaviour into timed, personal follow-up without a person in the loop. Its weaknesses are the ones its pricing model creates — a bill that grows with your list, a handful of included users and a sales layer sold separately. If your revenue comes from what people click, start the trial, budget for Plus, and give your tags a naming scheme on day one. If your revenue comes from what reps do in a pipeline, choose a CRM and let ActiveCampaign feed it.
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