ActiveCampaign vs. Constant Contact vs. Sailthru

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

Constant Contact is great when trying to target specific market segments. We typically like to segment our master list by region, but also have product segments, as well. They do provide pre-made segments to start you off too. We don't usually use their email builder, we find others to be more flexible, intuitive, and have more variety. We do prefer emailing from Constant Contact, however.

Sailthru is well suited for any company that is working with a large email subscriber list and needs to send campaigns on a daily basis. It is probably less appropriate for anyone with a small list, or an e-commerce brand. I think there are better ESPs out there for e-commerce brands.

Incentivized

• The graphic design is very good, especially fonts, colours and templates
• Flexibility of design and functionality
• Takes a little while to learn it, but generally user-friendly
• Looks very professional but doesn't cost much to get started
• There are masses of integrations for ActiveCampaign, and the ones I tried all worked well and didn't take long to figure out.

Incentivized

• Constant Contact allows the users to send unlimited emails and just pay per list size.
• The software does welcome emails pretty well and allows you to set up all sorts of automation.
• The branded templates and starter templates are very useful and look good.

Incentivized

• Personalized content based on user behavior and content consumption.
• Campaign workflow is very simple and allows for a large number of campaigns to be set up and managed in a short period of time.
• Sailthru has a great customer service team. Our account support with Sailthru was top-notch and is a testament to the culture there at the company.
• Sailthru focuses on email marketing. With all of the other "cloud" solutions out there trying to be everything to everyone, they lose focus on the importance of sending the email. This is where Sailthru shines.

Incentivized

• 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.
• I'd like more reporting data on one page.

Incentivized

• Sometimes some software provides outdated and useless features and functions, but this email marketing tool gives advanced kinds of functionalities with modern features.
• I like the ease of use of this platform also appreciate its professional customer support team.
• I am no longer desperate after getting this tool at my work.

Incentivized

• Lists are easy to create, but difficult to locate (can't sort by most recent created, etc.). They are always listed in alphabetical order.
• In order to improve their speed to market with features, they had a lot of tech debt to work through in the relatively recent past. This generally seems to have been corrected and their parent company appears to really be investing in their success.
• Their automated campaign feature is due for an upgrade. This is on their roadmap and they have been open about its need to provide more robust functionality.

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

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.

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.

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

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

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

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

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

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

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.

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

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

I transitioned from Mailchimp to ActiveCampaign because it was so much more user friendly and allowed me to do a lot more in regards to lead magnets than Mailchimp can. For example, ActiveCampaign allows users to sign up for a lead magnet as many times as they like to keep receiving it (in case they've lost or deleted the email with access to the lead magnet). Mailchimp was unable to do this. And the categorization of users and the trigger email sequencing was a lot easier in ActiveCampaign.

Incentivized

We selected Constant Contact due to pricing constraints. However, if the pricing were to increase, we may look at alternative products that offer more features. We are looking for a product that will allow us to stand out from other organizations like ours that are appealing to the same customers—a product that will set our company apart from the others.

Incentivized

Nothing offers the customization and control for power users like Sailthru. Other options we have used have been simply as backups in case of Sailthru outages during critical moments. We chose Sailthru at the beginning of our growth from sending email natively. We haven't had a need to switch although we have briefly evaluated the cost/benefit of switching to other providers. Unfortunately, the switching cost is usually to high as we are tightly integrated.

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

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• Automations free up time - once set up, email campaigns execute in seconds
• Emailing my newsletter is a second touch-point for my clients
• The flat rate for my subscription means that I reach my clients and prospects for fractions of a cent each month

Incentivized

• I can't report hard numbers, however, being able to execute sales and marketing campaigns led to a noticeable increase in brand awareness in our industry.
• We were able to offer white-labeled email communication services to clients, which is not something that other administrators typically offer. This helped us win and retain business.

• Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before.
• It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP.
• We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy.

Incentivized