ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a platform for intelligent marketing automation. It provides email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools that help businesses to create incredible customer experiences.
$19
per month
Bullhorn ATS & CRM
Score 6.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Bullhorn Recruitment CRM is a SaaS based solution that offers a suite of features typical of applicant tracking systems: a mobile app, batch or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels, instantaneous posting to multiple job boards, resume parsing, and data and document uploading.
ActiveCampaign is brilliant for small businesses wanting a secure, reliable and user friendly email capture software that filters users emails into the appropriate category/tags and have endless options when it comes to having different lead magnets and ways users may sign up. It's been super handy for my small business to send regular emails and be able to analyse the success rates and open rates of emails and the ability to resend them with a different subject line. It's made email marketing really easy peasy.
Bullhorn served as a very reliable and thorough tracking system for contacts, discovering prospects, and maintaining track of all relevant data. There are many customization options, strong search results, and sensible workflows. Excellent reporting tool. When we needed to find new resumes but all we could find were talents who had previously been discovered, it was less appropriate. Job Boards outperformed Bull Horn in terms of speed and quality.
It provides the contact details of a candidate relevant to the job. All details are with a user-friendly interface that anyone can use the application.
The specific details given by Bullhorn ATS & CRM are unbelievable. One place and you can make a decision about hiring or not hiring.
The messaging automation feature again helps to save our time.
The email designing part could be easier to use. There are certain simple shortcuts that don't work, for example, adding links is more complicated than it should be, moving blocks around is hard, etc.
There's no good way to filter by 'active' and 'inactive' subscribers when editing en-mass.
Reporting: out of the box reporting is not very detailed or easy to navigate. In order to get better detailed and specific reports, you either need their Canvas product or pay for a 3rd party vendor.
Customization: will get better with NOVO Experience update, but many users still don't have it. Right now many fields and order are not customizable
Many features Bullhorn can do are not apparent to the user, often times you have to call in the figure things out.
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.
We have about 2 years left on our current contract; It would take a major change in the ATS marketplace for us to strongly consider opting out of renewal given the time and effort we have dedicated to building our our Bullhorn system. I will take the time to revisit with some of the competition down the road, but Bullhorn acquired our runner up, MaxHire, about a year back and continues to offer a solid product suite for our current and future needs.
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.
It isn't the best ATS out there. It lacks on both the recruitment and sales side. There is no way to differentiate between prospects, candidates, and clients. There isn't a way to merge accounts and names, so there are many duplicates. Too may paid add ons. I had a much longer review written up and the page just deleted it, but I wouldn't recommend Bullhorn first or even third. It feels like it hasn't been fully realized yet. There are certainly some good things about the product, but more areas where they can improve.
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.
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.
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.
It's been a nightmare experience. The initial sales team were brilliant, and the customer service is great from the tech team - they get in touch with you quickly. However; I was often finding workarounds myself, or being advised workarounds instead of having issues resolved (example - The DPA/Non DPA issue - an Excel spreadsheet can do this, yet a CRM cannot?). I was debited on the incorrect date & then when I requested they refund until the due date, I was re-debited again on the correct date. The communication was poor - their billing team are based in the US and there was no acknowledgement of the mistake. My initial consultant chased them down for me, and advised me of their error. Lucky. The product was oversold. For example; I was advised their 'merge docs' feature would allow me to pull data directly from the 'Overview,' 'Work Histories' which later proved to be false. Finally, when I requested to end my contract & transfer my data (I advised a specific date I needed it, when my CRM would be ready) they advised it would take 15 business days & I was to put no further data in my system during that 15 days, and then gave me my data after 3. I now have no CRM for 4 weeks
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.
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.
Breathe is a great tool for smaller internal recruitment teams and I have previously used an in-house built system similar however Bullhorn is something you can use across larger businesses and growing SME's it works well for international businesses as everything is updated in real-time. The support function is excellent and the training tools for new starters are super helpful for our L&D team. Your account manager is also great for assisting in personalising sections to make them more business specific.
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!
Bullhorn has helped with the standardization of data which allows us to track our high, low and in between individuals. It allows for corporate bench marks to be tracked. It also allows for a closer look at all of the data points to make decisions versus making decisions based on perceptions. The data has definitely helped us make better business decisions because of the reporting capabilities.
Bullhorn has some great marketplace partners and additional products like VMS Access that help with your VMS clients. This is a real time saver.
