ActiveCampaign vs Ontraport 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
CRM, email and checkout in one subscription
At a glance
- ActiveCampaign starts cheaper, at $15.
- Neither has a free tier.
Side by side
ActiveCampaign | Ontraport | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $15 | From $83 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free trial, then paid |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Annual only | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
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.
Ontraport
CRM, email and checkout in one subscription
Ontraport replaces the usual stack of a CRM, an email tool, a page builder and a payment processor with one system, which is worth it precisely when the handoffs between those are where things break. Automations can move a contact, send a message, charge a card and open a task in the same sequence. Pricing is per plan rather than per contact at the entry tier. It is a large system to learn, and anybody who only needs to send a newsletter will spend weeks configuring something they did not need.
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.