ActiveCampaign Review (2026)
Pricing climbs with contact count and the add-ons (CRM, SMS, extra seats) stack up fast — the sticker Starter price is not what a serious automation setup actually costs. Powerful, but budget for the tier (Plus and up) you'll really use. Throughout this review we weigh it against Mailchimp.
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 5 Sep 2026
No free plan, trial only. There are four tiers. Starter is from $15/mo with 1 user, limited segmentation and 5 actions per automation. Plus is from $49/mo with 1 user, standard segmentation, unlimited automation actions and landing pages. Pro is from $79/mo with 3 users, advanced segmentation, predictive and conditional content and attribution tracking. Enterprise is from $145/mo with 5 users, premium segmentation, SSO, custom objects and a dedicated account team.
Your email send allowance is a multiple of your contact count — 10x on Starter and Plus, 12x on Pro, 15x on Enterprise. The bill then scales with list size: the per-contact ladder only renders after you select a contact count, which is why we could not re-verify our earlier reading of about $189/mo for Plus at 10,000 contacts on this pass. CRM pipelines, SMS and extra users remain paid add-ons. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Correction after re-checking: (re-verified 2026-07-23) ActiveCampaign's own pricing page shows no figures at all: every tier renders as "Starts at --/mo" alongside "Customize your plan"/"Request Pricing". So every dollar amount in this review comes from third-party pages, and none of it can be checked against the vendor. Both of those third parties are interested parties: sendx.io is a competing email marketing tool that positions itself as the cheaper alternative, and prospeo.io is a B2B data vendor. Their figures were re-fetched and quoted accurately on 2026-07-23, but they are not vendor-confirmed. Separately: on accounts created on or after 3 November 2025, unsubscribed, unconfirmed and bounced contacts count toward the billed contact limit, while accounts created before that date stay on the old active-contacts-only rule (SendX). That makes older "you only pay for active contacts" guidance wrong for new accounts. SendX states this change was not publicly announced and it does not appear on the vendor pricing page.
ActiveCampaign’s pricing page, as we read it
What ActiveCampaign does
Marketing automation and lifecycle email with a light CRM attached. Priced by contact count from about $15/month on Starter, with CRM pipelines, SMS and extra seats sold as add-ons — the sticker price sits well below what a real automation setup costs.
What buyers report about ActiveCampaign
Recurring themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run ActiveCampaign ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • The automation builder is still the deepest in its price range, and that is what keeps reviewers on it despite everything below.
- • CRM and email in one place, with a low entry price.
- • Accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 are billed for all contacts — including unsubscribed, bounced and unconfirmed. That is the single most important thing to know here: your bill grows with a list you are not mailing. Older accounts should check which basis theirs is on.
- • Crossing a contact tier re-prices the whole plan, not just the excess. Reviewers describe renewal jumps they had not budgeted for.
- • Charges after a confirmed cancellation, unauthorised charges after closing an account, and difficult refunds are all recurring.
- • Support leans on AI chat and reviewers report struggling to reach a person.
- • Mobile rendering is inconsistent and you cannot design a separate mobile layout.
- • TrustRadius is where the day-to-day friction gets named, and in July 2026 a seven-year user listed it precisely: a minimum five-minute wait on every automation condition, a confusing split between archiving, deleting and excluding contacts, merging two addresses for one contact not merging their lists, double opt-in that cannot be triggered from external tools such as webinar platforms, and a new mail designer they say never works.
- • The same platform carries the other 2026 complaint: too much AI in the interface, with AI messages covering information and taking up space, and AI recommendations that ignore what you already did.
- • Even the positive reviews say it plainly: this is not a tool for beginners.
Where the ratings disagree. Trustpilot has sat between 2.8 and 3.0 across roughly 1,300-1,400 reviews through 2026 — low for this category — while the software directories rate it well. The directories are rating the automation; Trustpilot is rating the invoice.
When the paid plan is worth it
There is no free plan: after the 14-day trial (no credit card required) you pay, and ActiveCampaign backs that with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Judge the tiers on the feature grid rather than the price list, because the price list is rendered client-side and only appears in a real browser. Every tier on activecampaign.com/pricing does carry a figure, but a plain fetch retrieves none of them — and neither does our own monthly capture of that page.
If a comparison site tells you ActiveCampaign does not publish its prices, that is what it is looking at. On the published grid the sharpest break is automation depth: Starter is listed at 5 actions per automation, while Plus, Pro and Enterprise are listed as unlimited automation actions. That is the concrete thing you buy by leaving Starter. What you do not buy is a seat: Starter and Plus are both 1 user, Pro is 3 and Enterprise 5.
And you do not buy a CRM either. Pipelines and Sales Engagement are separately priced add-ons, listed by Prospeo at $49 and $85 per month on top of your plan. Sending headroom moves slowly as well: the monthly send cap is 10x your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12x on Pro and 15x on Enterprise. Billing is per contact regardless of how little you send, so a broadcast-only list gets expensive on volume alone.
At 1,000 contacts on annual billing SendX lists Starter at $15, Plus at $49, Pro at $79 and Enterprise at $145 per month; Prospeo lists Starter at $19 per month if you pay month-to-month. At 10,000 contacts SendX puts Starter alone at $149 per month on annual billing.
How to actually use ActiveCampaign
First value is a campaign, not an automation: import a list, pick a template, send. That is a same-day job. Before your first real send, authenticate your sending domain in ActiveCampaign's settings and add the DNS records it gives you at your DNS host. If you are migrating in, ActiveCampaign says its free migration service moves lists, tags and custom fields, email templates and forms, and up to 10 automations, and that it includes account setup help; the page names no plan-tier or paid condition.
Treat that as the vendor's own description of its own service and check it against your setup before you rely on it — the list stops at 10 automations and says nothing about third-party integrations. For the builder itself, ActiveCampaign says it ships 950+ automation recipes, which is a cheaper starting point than a blank canvas; that count is also the vendor's, not an independent one. Check your contact count early.
SendX reports that on accounts created on or after 3 November 2025, unsubscribed, unconfirmed and bounced contacts all count toward the limit you are billed for, while accounts created before that date are grandfathered onto the old rule and pay for active contacts only. SendX also says the change was never publicly announced, and ActiveCampaign's pricing page does not state it, so confirm which rule applies to you against your own invoice.
Distilled from https://www.activecampaign.com/blog/does-activecampaign-have-a-steep-learning-curve
ActiveCampaign vs Brevo, side by side
Both columns come from the same place: each vendor’s own published pricing, read on the date shown in the sources at the foot of this page. We do not average them into a score.
Both names above are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. Neither changes what this table says: both columns come straight from the vendors’ own pricing pages.
The natural comparison is Mailchimp or Brevo — simpler, cheaper email tools. Weigh it against Mailchimp on the job you actually need done.
More on ActiveCampaign
Everything we publish about ActiveCampaign links back here — the review stays the honest hub:
The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does ActiveCampaign remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges?
Frequently asked questions
What does ActiveCampaign cost?
On annual billing the published starting points are $15 for Starter, $49 for Plus, $79 for Pro and $145 for Enterprise a month, read on 17 August 2026. Those are floors: the real figure depends on your contact count, and the page only shows it after you choose one. There is no free plan.
Which tier do I need, and what actually separates them?
Three things rather than a long feature list: how many users (1, 1, 3 and 5), how deep the segmentation goes (limited, standard, advanced, premium) and how many emails you may send — a multiple of your contacts, 10x on Starter and Plus, 12x on Pro, 15x on Enterprise. The one hard wall low down is Starter's cap of five actions per automation, which rules out anything beyond a simple sequence.
What should I check before committing?
Two things reviewers keep getting caught by. First, which side of a date your account falls on: the billing rule that counts unsubscribed, bounced and unconfirmed contacts is written for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025, so ask whether an older account on the same plan is counted the same way before you assume a quoted figure applies to you. Second, what happens at a tier boundary — crossing a contact tier re-prices the whole plan rather than just the excess, which is the renewal jump people describe. Ask both questions before you import a list.
What should I weigh before buying Growth & Revenue software?
It depends on whether you have the bottleneck it solves. Small teams get the most out of this category when one clear problem is already costing real hours or revenue; buying ahead of that just adds cost and another login. Price it against the hours or lost deals it removes, not against its feature list, and start on the smallest plan that covers the job.
Is this a hands-on review of ActiveCampaign?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on Capterra, Trustpilot, TrustRadius and independent testing write-ups, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 2026-08-17 in the browser; the figures below are the 'starts at' prices on annual billing, before you pick a contact count.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
Others in this category
The growth & revenue tools closest to ActiveCampaign that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match:
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