ActiveCampaign Vs. Mailchimp (2024 Comparison) – Forbes Advisor – Technologist

Mailchimp is a beginner-friendly email software option that offers a variety of affordable plans perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses with modest email marketing needs.

ActiveCampaign costs more than Mailchimp, but businesses with more advanced email marketing needs will appreciate that ActiveCampaign is somewhat more challenging to use, primarily due to its advanced features, including a full-fledged CRM and over 850 automation recipes.

*Mailchimp offers the first month free for its Essentials and Standard plans.

User Seats

Before selecting email marketing software for your business, you need to consider how many software users there will be on your team. Most software providers limit the number of users allowed on each plan.

The free Mailchimp plan comes with one user seat, while the Essentials plan includes three, the Standard plan includes five and the Premium plan allows unlimited user seats. The ActiveCampaign Lite plan includes one user seat, the Plus plan includes three, the Professional includes five and the Enterprise plan starts with only 10 user seats.

Email Send Limits

Email send capacity is another feature that varies by email software provider. Be sure to select a plan that will accommodate your email capacity needs. Most email marketing solutions, including Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, establish email send limits relative to the total number of contacts you manage through the platform.

With Mailchimp’s free plan, you can only send 1,000 emails per month. The Mailchimp Essentials plan allows you to send up to ten times your plan’s total contacts, while the Standard allows for 12 times and the Premium allows 15 times your total contact base. ActiveCampaign lets you send up to 10 times your plan’s total contacts for the Lite and Plus plans, 12 times for the Professional plan and 15 times for the Enterprise plan.

Email Design

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to create polished, professional email designs. Mailchimp offers more than 100 design templates, while ActiveCampaign has more than 150.

Emails developed with the Mailchimp free plan include Mailchimp branding, but you can remove that branding on paid plans. You can create dynamic email content with Mailchimp using merge tags stored in your audience profiles. Conditional content is available on every ActiveCampaign plan except Lite.

Social Marketing

All paid Mailchimp plans allow you to post on various social channels—including Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter)—from within the Mailchimp platform. ActiveCampaign does not allow you to post directly to social marketing channels from within the platform, but you can set up social posting by integrating with a third-party app.

Marketing Automation

Every Mailchimp plan includes access to a Classic Automations Builder that allows users to create simple automated email sequences, such as a multi-contact welcome email series or a pre-event or post-event email series.

Mailchimp also offers a more sophisticated automated Customer Journey Builder for paid plan users. Essentials plan users can use the Customer Journey Builder to create basic automated workflows that send relevant messages based on how customers interact with the brand. Standard and Premium plan users have access to the enhanced Customer Journey Builder that includes branching points for creating more complex automated personalized customer journeys.

While Mailchimp’s automation tools are adequate for those with basic needs, ActiveCampaign shines when it comes to creating more complex marketing automations. With ActiveCampaign’s advanced tools, you can personalize and tailor marketing messaging and email workflows to optimize the experience for your users and drive sales for your business.

ActiveCampaign has a drag-and-drop automations builder that lets users define more than 20 triggers for email marketing automations. The platform has more than 850 proven automation recipes—such as abandoned cart reminders, webinar reminders and post-meeting follow-ups—that simplify your marketing workflows for you. Set up if/else statements, timed and conditional wait actions and dynamic yes/no paths based on relevant contact interactions.

With ActiveCampaign, you can customize your automations based on your business needs and goals, automating each stage of your customer life cycle. This high degree of customization comes with a steep learning curve, which makes ActiveCampaign a better choice for seasoned email marketers with strong technical skills.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Mailchimp offers audience segmentation tools that will help you target your emails effectively. You can track where your contacts come from, tag your contacts for targeted messaging and reach out to contacts based on how they interact with various emails you send.

Mailchimp automatically ranks your contacts based on a five-star rating system; those rated five are the most engaged, and those rated one are the least engaged. That’s about the extent of Mailchimp’s CRM capabilities.

ActiveCampaign offers a full-fledged CRM for managing relationships with your contacts. With ActiveCampaign, you can create sales pipelines, set up and manage user permissions for your sales team, create sales tasks and save notes about contact interactions. ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Automation lets you fully automate your sales process so you can engage, nurture and educate your contacts, and close sales.