ActiveCampaign vs Encharge Comparison 2026
Both cover email marketing & automation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Email automation with a CRM underneath it
Behaviour-driven email built on a flow editor
At a glance
- ActiveCampaign starts cheaper, at $15.
- Neither has a free tier.
- ActiveCampaign bills annually only, so there is no month to try it for.
Side by side
ActiveCampaign | Encharge | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $15 | From $79 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free trial, then paid |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing (they differ) | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 14 days |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
ActiveCampaign
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.
Encharge
Behaviour-driven email built on a flow editor
Encharge builds email around what somebody did in the product rather than which list they landed on, and the flow editor is where that happens: a visual canvas with branching, waits and conditions instead of a linear sequence. It reads events from the product and from the CRM, which is what makes the branching worth having. Email verification is included rather than billed. This is aimed at a software product with a funnel, so a writer with a subscriber list is paying for machinery they will never open.
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.