Growing an audience
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Both cover email marketing & automation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| ActiveCampaign | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $20 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 14 days |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Not stated |
| Covers | Email Marketing & Automation | Email Marketing & Automation, Newsletter & Email |
| 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.
Email marketing with the longest integration list
Mailchimp is the default nobody gets fired for picking, and the reason is that whatever else you run already connects to it. The editor and the reporting are fine rather than good. Its pricing counts contacts rather than sends, so a large list you mail once a month costs the same as one you mail daily, which is the wrong shape for most creators.
Our note
Pick Mailchimp when integrations decide it, and only then. For a newsletter as the main product, beehiiv and Kit both cost less and were designed for the job rather than adapted to it.
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.