Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover email marketing & automation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| ActiveCampaign | ClickFunnels | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $97 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Free trial, then paid |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Email Marketing & Automation | Landing Pages & Funnels, Courses & Coaching, Email Marketing & Automation |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Email automation with a CRM underneath it
ActiveCampaign is what people move to when the sequences outgrow a newsletter tool, and its conditional logic goes deeper than anything at this price. The CRM underneath means a sponsor conversation and a subscriber record are the same object. It takes a weekend to learn, and the cheapest plan caps automations at five actions, which is not enough to try the thing it is good at.
Our note
Budget for Plus rather than Starter. The five-action cap on the cheapest plan blocks exactly the branching logic that justifies choosing ActiveCampaign over a newsletter tool, and discovering that after migrating a list is a bad afternoon.
Funnels, courses and email in one subscription
ClickFunnels sells the whole sequence rather than the page: opt-in, offer, upsell, email follow-up and a course to deliver what you sold. Everything lives in one account, which is the argument for it and also the argument against, since leaving means moving five things at once. The community around it is a large part of what people pay for.
Our note
The maths only works if you would otherwise be paying for a page builder, an email tool and a course platform separately. If you already have two of the three, Unbounce or Leadpages will do the pages for a quarter of the money.
Only on this side
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.