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 | Drip | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $39 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Free trial, then paid |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 14 days |
| 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 | Email Marketing & Automation, Digital Products & Storefronts |
| 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.
Ecommerce email priced on active people
Drip is an ecommerce marketing platform that bills on how many people are active in your account and how much you send, rather than on a feature ladder. Everybody gets everything, which removes the usual argument about which tier has automations. It is aimed at stores, so a writer with a plain newsletter is paying for behaviour tracking they will never wire up.
Our note
Single-plan pricing is the appeal and the risk: nothing is withheld, and the bill moves on its own as the list grows. Model it at twice your current list size before committing, because that is the number that will arrive.
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.