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 | Sendy | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $69 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | One-time purchase |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Annual only | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Email Marketing & Automation | Newsletter & Email, Email Marketing & Automation |
| 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.
Self hosted sending on top of Amazon SES
Sendy is a PHP application you install on your own server, which then sends through Amazon SES at Amazon's rates rather than at a newsletter platform's. You buy the software once. At a list size where a hosted platform starts charging hundreds a month, the arithmetic is what people come for, and the cost is that hosting, deliverability and upgrades are now yours.
Our note
The arithmetic only works above roughly ten thousand subscribers, and below that a hosted platform is cheaper once your time is counted. Check the Amazon SES sending limits before buying, because a new SES account starts in a sandbox that will not send to the public.
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.