7 best ActiveCampaign alternatives in 2024

Automation can be your marketing department’s secret weapon. That’s because manual processes make it difficult for your business to stay top of mind. Engaging your customers effectively requires consistency and vigilance in your marketing efforts — qualities that don’t come easy when you’re managing a large department.

Tools like ActiveCampaign help businesses create automation for different marketing jobs. ActiveCampaign provides prebuilt automation tools that combine email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for cross-channel orchestration, segmentation, and personalization.

Marketing platforms have evolved to include powerful features like those mentioned above. However, more email, marketing, and automation options emerge every year, which can make choosing the right one that much harder. In this post, we’re going to examine seven alternatives to ActiveCampaign, including

1. Mailchimp
2. Freshworks CRM
3. Constant Contact
4. Drip
5. Keap 
6. HubSpot Marketing Hub
7. Pardot

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp was originally a marketing email service created for small businesses as an alternative to oversized, expensive email software. Today it’s an all-in-one marketing platform geared toward small businesses. However, it still remains one of the most popular email marketing options because of its deep email roots.

Mailchimp offers many features to empower small businesses to grow. Its marketing features allow customers to send targeted emails, build engaging websites, and leverage automation to create compelling follow-up sequences.

Key benefits:

• Powerful email automation that keeps people engaged with your brand
• Access to Mailchimp’s insights and analytics tools
• Flexible content design tools and templates

Pricing: The basic plan is free. There are three paid tiers that go up to $350 per month. Prices scale based on the number of contacts you have.

2. Freshmarketer

Freshmarketer is a sales and marketing CRM from Freshworks that provides several marketing automation tools at an affordable price point. Its tools include conversion rate optimization, web forms, a visual email builder, marketing lists, segmentation, and more.

Freshmarketer integrates with a number of communication tools like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Chat. Additionally, Freshworks has a marketplace with over 500 apps, an API integration, and webhook capabilities for those who need more functionality.

Key benefits:

• Ability to create smart segments and target your audience based on demographics, geography, and behavior
• Intuitive drag-and-drop email builder.
• Powerful customizations to build customer journeys, automate email sequences, and set up autoresponders

Pricing: The basic plan is free, and there is an Enterprise plan at $15 per month, with 500 marketing contacts (when billed annually).

3. Constant Contact

Constant Contact began with the mission to help small businesses level the playing field against larger, more established rivals. It provides digital marketing tools that help drive sales, automate marketing communication, and help customers track progress.

Constant Contact offers list-building tools, marketing automation, social media marketing, event marketing, and surveys. Additionally, it has thousands of integrations that let customers keep working with some of their favorite tools.

Key benefits:

• Lead generation landing pages, text-to-join messaging list capabilities, and social ads
• Best-in-class delivery rate of 97 percent
• Simple interface for designing landing pages and plenty of premade design templates

Pricing: Plans start at $12 per month for the Lite plan for one user. The Standard plan costs $35 per month with 3 users and a storage of 10 GB. The Premium plan, which includes more advanced automation features and unlimited users, costs $80 per month. You can scale the plan based on the number of contacts you manage.

4. Drip

Drip specializes in email and SMS marketing for e-commerce businesses. Its mission is to provide personalization and automation capabilities for e-commerce businesses of all sizes to level the playing field.

Drip’s features include powerful reporting; data personalization; segmentation customization; customer behavior-based drip campaigns; split testing; and seamless engagement across many channels, including email, Facebook, and Instagram. It also integrates with hundreds of third-party SaaS apps.

Key benefits:

• Ability to leverage automated campaigns across email, SMS, social media, and onsite popups
• Pre-built playbooks to automate marketing for common use cases
• Seamless integration with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce

Pricing: Plans start at $39 per month for the Email plan with unlimited email sends. From there, you can scale your plan based on your needs and whether you want SMS services. You can try Drip with its 14-day free trial.

5. Keap

Keap is a CRM and marketing automation solution that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses create predictable and repeatable growth. It’s designed for easy setup and use, allowing users to get started with their first automation very quickly. Keap has over 20 years of experience building its business and supporting its customers.

Some of its core features include a powerful email/marketing campaign builder, landing page templates, email segmentation, built-in lead scoring, follow-up message templates, and the ability to send invoices and reminders within the platform.

Key benefits:

• Easy-to-use automation builder
• Integrations with over 2,500 apps natively or via Zapier 
• Entrepreneur- and SMB-focused 

Pricing: Plans start at $159 per month for the Pro version, which includes up to 1500 contacts and two users. You can scale up your plan based on users and contact needs.

6. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot has established itself as the leading inbound marketing CRM. Its Marketing Hub is designed to help companies attract visitors, start conversations, personalize experiences, and create reports that show the revenue impact of their marketing efforts.

The CRM is an all-in-one marketing platform with simple drag-and-drop features to facilitate most tasks. Some of HubSpot Marketing Hub’s key elements include a drag-and-drop landing page builder, custom email templates, ad integrations, signup forms, advanced tracking, and robust reporting and dashboard features.

Key benefits:

• Ability to easily leverage omnichannel content strategies
• Access to advanced personalization and follow-up automation
• Customizable reports that inform marketing decisions

Pricing: Plans start at $15 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. Businesses that want to take advantage of HubSpot’s more advanced features will need a professional plan, which starts at $792 per month.

7. Pardot

Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation product. One of the main advantages of using Pardot is that it integrates with the entire ecosystem of Salesforce products. It’s designed to help you engage buyers through personalization, close deals with advanced automation, and grow relationships by better understanding your customers.

Pardot’s features include streamlined lead management, Pardot Einstein (Salesforce’s AI bot), robust analytics dashboards and features, built-in landing pages, customizable signup forms, and social media tools. It leverages Salesforce’s underlying CRM technology to give users a powerful base.

Key benefits:

• Best integration with Salesforce
• Marketing automation that prioritizes closing deals
• Emphasis on lead generation and lead management

Pricing: Plans start at $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts. However, if you want to take advantage of Pardot’s artificial intelligence features, pricing starts at $4,400 per month. Salesforce also offers add-ons to power up your automation platform and better connect with the sales team.

Create marketing automation with powerful forms and integrations

Marketing automation is key to getting the most out of every interaction with your customers and prospects. These seven alternatives to ActiveCampaign are worth looking into if you want to automate processes and keep track of where prospects are in the buyer’s journey.

Smart forms are another powerful tool for automating your marketing. Jotform’s Form Builder can help you easily collect customer and prospect data while seamlessly integrating with many of your favorite CRMs. This automation reduces busywork and allows people to interact with your brand seamlessly.

Whether you need to create a product order form or register people for your latest course, Jotform has thousands of templates to choose from.