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 | Omnisend | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $11.20 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| 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.
Email and SMS for people selling products
Omnisend is built around a shop rather than a newsletter: abandoned-cart flows, product recommendations in the email, and SMS on the same automation. For a creator selling merch or digital products through Shopify it does the job that a general email tool leaves to plugins. The free plan is 500 emails a month, which is a test rather than a starting point.
Our note
The comparison the page invites is Klaviyo, and on price it wins that argument at small list sizes. The real question is whether your store is on a platform it integrates with, which decides how much of the automation actually fires.
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.