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 | UpViral | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $15 | From $79 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Everything, in an open format |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Email Marketing & Automation | Giveaways & Referrals, 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.
Referral contests that pay out in prizes
UpViral runs the kind of campaign where entrants earn points for sharing a link and the leaderboard decides who wins, which is the fastest way to turn a small list into a larger one. Landing pages, emails and fraud checks all come with it. The trial costs a dollar rather than nothing, and the plans are priced for a business running launches rather than for a one-off giveaway.
Our note
The trial costs a dollar, which is worth knowing before comparing this against the free trials elsewhere in this category. The refund promise is the real risk reversal here, and it is worth reading the terms of before relying on 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.