ActiveCampaign vs. Birdeye

I've been using ActiveCampaign since around 2018-2019 and I've always been satisfied with the software. It's simple to use, connects with the other tools I use and makes it easy for me to duplicate automations, email templates and workflows as I need to. On top of that, any time I've had an issue (which I think is around twice in the past 5/6 years), the customer service has always been super helpful and my issue has been resolved quickly.

Incentivized

For businesses that have customers or clients or patients with several different locations, Birdeye is essential to help with the reviews and messages received through Google and other platforms. For businesses with only 1 single location, Birdeye could still be useful but wouldn't be as essential as it would be for other businesses.

• Collects and filters emails from various lead magnets exceptionally well (especially if a user wants to re-sign up to the same lead magnet and go through it again, they can)
• Super easy to use email creation that is aesthetically pleasing and user friendly
• Easy email sequences and user classification from a large range of opt in trigger options

Incentivized

• Their customer service is always very helpful and ready to give you the personal attention that you require.
• They connect many different sources and funnel them straight to you so you can easily capitalize on multiple platforms and information streams.
• They are constantly innovating and improving their systems with real-time feedback from their customers.

Incentivized

• It took me a while to get to understand where to find things, and I used a free online course from a consultant who specialises in AC to help me get the foundations set up more easily. That said, there were lots of onboarding workshops, which were good. It just felt like it required a lot of different angles of learning to just get started.
• The customer support took longer than other software to get back to me via email, though once I found the chat option for my most recent query, that was fast.
• I've ended up switching to another programme where more software is more naturally integrated, and the AC equivalent is included in the price, along with many other types of software. However, design-wise, ActiveCampaign is much better.
• I also had a problem with a form used on my WordPress website, which has a BuddyBoss platform - the colours on the form would be overridden by colour choices for the website, so they were hard to read (pink text on purple background instead of the gold text it was meant to be)
• I couldn't always find the templates I was looking for or how to access them for automation-based emails. I think when I used it, there was a new type of template for newsletters that weren't available for automations, so I had to recreate it, which added time.

Incentivized

• The sentiment feature is just okay. It requires custom adjustments and time to understand where it is working well and where it is not in order to get the most out of it, while other features require very little user input.
• Social listening needs work. I often receive notifications for unrelated terms because of their similarity in spelling to my organization's name, so I don't use this feature.
• Birdeye could have more built-in features to create digital content from the reviews.
• Birdeye could also have additional reputation tools to strengthen GMB listings and to combat negative press. Review listings and rich snippets in search are great, but having a tool that measures and helps to improve overall brand health/search results would be amazing. My CEO isn’t looking at what is going right. He looks at what is going wrong. We may have thousands of positive reviews on Google, but the bad article with false information is still showing up on page one of search results. That makes for an unhappy CEO.

Incentivized

I am committed at the moment. Rebuilding the automations I have would be a huge time drain. Plus the cost of learning a new system and the risk to deliverability of porting a 6,000 person list to a new platform. Also, AC offers everything I need ast a reasonable (but a little high) price. So, why not a 10? Because, early 2023, AC dropped a massive 2x price hike on long-term customers. They knew few would shift, so this feels like a cynical cash grab and left a bad taste, If they do something like this again, this camel will have a broken back.

Incentivized

I think it is a good tool overall, there are some hiccups but what program doesn't have them. I think we should be notified of more things, specifically broken integrations. There have been instances where I don't notice for MONTHS a client it's having requests sent out because they are organically still getting reviews.

Incentivized

ActiveCampaign has been the easiest marketing automation software we have ever used. They provide tips throughout the entire process of anything you are building. Their support team through LIVE CHAT has been extremely fast and helpful. The monthly meetings provided with the enablement team has helped us through several large and urgent needs.

I think it is very easy to figure out very quickly by just playing around in the dashboard. If you have a question you can reach out to our contacts and they do a very good job of figuring out if or what is the problem and getting back to us fast.

I haven't experienced application errors or unplanned outages at all. Active Campaign is ultra reliable and I would not be using them if that were the case. Also, the helpful emails they send are welcomed and informative, and present very practical tips and guidance for using the platform. They're always demonstrating new features and I'm thankful for that.

Incentivized

Oh my gosh, Active Campaign's performance gets an A+++ in my book. The pages load quickly and so do the reports. I haven't noticed any slowdowns when it's integrating with other programs and it performs excellently on all levels.

Incentivized

This might be the best part. The chat support lady offered to make a video to help me solve my problem. I worked in customer service for years and I've never done that, lol. So, if they're offering things like that, I can only imagine that they'd be able to handle most any issue you throw at them.

Incentivized

Support is really responsive for the most part. I don't feel like they explain it the best for people who aren't as tech-savvy. I have recently had trouble with a more difficult integration and it is hard to pinpoint who I need to reach out to.

Incentivized

Very satisfied with our implementation in our professional medical practice, allowing us to be on top of client service, and not miss out on crucial information and insights. Marketing is often neglected in professional practices and ActiveCampaign solved this problem with aplomb.

Incentivized

Let Birdeye do what they do

Incentivized

I moved to ActiveCampaign from Mailchimp. Admittedly, I was using the free version of Mailchimp, but I had numerous episodes of subscriber data NOT being added to Mailchimp, despite using API to integrate with my mailing list. Obviously, I couldn't pay for clicks and not capture subscriber data, so I had to find something else. ActiveCampaign has been 100% reliable in testing.

Incentivized

Our choice of reputation management platform came down to two contenders, Birdeye and Listen360. Ultimately we chose Birdeye because of their ethical review gathering process. Listen360 had review-gating built in as part of their process, which is against Google's terms of service. We wanted to be very careful to gather reviews in an ethical way, and Birdeye was better for our needs.

Incentivized

My web designer told me about Active Campaign and although I don't recall which platform I had before, I LOVE Active Campaign and its user friendliness. The transition was seamless and I've never had a problem with functionality or server failure.

Active Campaign provides so many features, and makes it easy for non-techies to maneuver around the site with ease. They capture information and put it in an easy-to-read format.

At this point, I don't think I'd ever use any other platform!

Incentivized

• I haven't monetized my list yet so no clear ROI but great from a list-building perspective
• The software is not cheap so at times I feel like I may not be getting the most out of the product because I'm not using all of the features

Incentivized

• SEO has increased due to online rep increasing
• Review count has come up significantly due to having a platform that helps
• The system puts reviews and where they are coming from into perspective to try and obtain more in other ways

Incentivized