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.
$15
per month
Adobe Marketo Engage
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
N/A
Pricing
ActiveCampaign
Adobe Marketo Engage
Editions & Modules
Starter
$15
per month
Plus
$49
per month
Pro
$79
per month
Enterprise
$145
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ActiveCampaign
Adobe Marketo Engage
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
No matter what plan you choose, our services are designed to help you get the most out of your investment — so you can focus on running your business.
ActiveCampaign services included in all plan tiers:
ActiveTraining
Community access
Contact migration
Customer enablement workshops
Video tutorials
Chat and ticket support
Knowledge base & help guides
The functionality is comparable but the price for ActiveCampaign is a lot better than most competitors, for the number of active contacts. It's pretty much as easy to use as HubSpot and while not a powerful as Marketo, it's got enough features to make it really useful for …
With ActiveCampaign, you can centralize a significant part of your marketing operations and give your customers a better overall experience than alternative technologies.The customer support staff is very efficient and their knowledge base is particularly informative and easy …
Active Campaign is 100x way better than Mailchimp. If you're using Mailchimp, you should switch asap. Mailchimp is fine if you're running a small business or family business, but an Active campaign is far more robust for startups and small-medium-sized businesses. Active …
ActiveCampaign has advanced automation features, but lacks advanced design, layout and testing features. ActiveCampaign has a great interface for creating new automations and forms to get them up and running quickly, but the design of the automated emails that goes out has many …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose ActiveCampaign
I preferred ActiveCampaign as it gave me the best bang for my buck. At the time, Mailchimp didn't do automation (now they do) but I prefer the interface of AC over them. Keap is a great tool but I find it too pricey for what I currently need. The fact that AC can integrate with …
ActiveCampaign is one of the most robust marketing automation platforms available today and allows us to integrate with virtually all other marketing tools in our tech stack. When vetting a marketing automation software to support our clients, we did not like that other larger …
ActiveCampaign really focuses on making the fundamental marketing automation functionality easy to use. It doesn't have as many enterprise features or customization, but that is clearly intentional. For small to mid-sized businesses, those enterprise features get in the way …
We use multiple "marketing automation" products, and each one has its pluses and minuses. For us, ActiveCampaign is perfect for smaller companies who want to start with marketing automation. Or want to have a good base. The other tools have a lot more options and …
We have selected ActiveCampaign because it has all the basic features in marketing automation we wanted. It is a cheap and effective Marketing Automation software when you are a small business. We simply wanted a tool powerful enough to help us increase the number of new leads …
ActiveCampaign is an awkward middle child between full fledged marketing automation (HubSpot, Marketo, Infusionsoft) and Email Service Providers (MailChimp, ConstantContact, CampaignMonitor). It's a step up from the ESPs with richer list management and branching logic without …
ActiveCampaign is the budget option, no doubt. There isn't a single other tool even near it in price that offers anywhere near the level of tools that ActiveCampaign offers.
However, just because it's really inexpensive, don't let that lead you to think its a "cheap" tool. They …
ActiveCampaign is more modern than most other solutions. The ease-of-use is on another playing field entirely. The automation builder is a marketers dream. Downfalls are the lack of landing page builder and general necessity of integrating through Zapier, not native.
ActiveCampaign is closest in proximity to Infusionsoft but falls short of in most every area except price. It is not in the same ballpark as Pardot, Marketo and HubSpot. To be fair, however, one also has to pay a great deal more for those solutions.
HubSpot and Marketo are designed for larger marketing teams, but Marketo has more marketing options whereas HubSpot can sometimes feel more like a content marketing tool. You can build mini-websites that you can use for A/B testing. You can also build and optimize content for …
ActiveCampaign has very limited customized reporting options as compared to Marketo. We were not able to achieve quality Email and ABM campaigns using Active Campaign which we achieved from Marketo. When using ActiveCampaign there was less visibility of marketing automation …
HubSpot, SharpSpring and ActiveCampaign are much better and a lot cheaper than Marketo all have [a] better user interface, UX, WYSIWYG editors. Their lead flow management [is] more intuitive. You will be able to pick them up and run with them in no time. Reporting and assigning …
Marketo provides email marketing services but does so much more. While Hubspot, SFMC, and ActiveCampaign have more automation, they do not come close to the customization that Marketo allows you to create.
Verified User
Manager
Chose Adobe Marketo Engage
Marketo is the most comprehensive and robust marketing automation platform that I've worked in. It has everything that an organization may need from your standard marketing functions (i.e. email campaigns, landing pages, forms) to automated workflows. One downside is that there …
Marketo would have to be the most powerful email marketing tool that I've used before for its extensive features and capabilities. It's fairly designed for both B2B and B2C use which other ESPs are not capable of. Compared with other platforms where you can only create regular …
If your organization uses Salesforce or even if you have Sales Groups or Divisions that don't use a CRM at all, Marketo is an extremely valuable software tool to communicate in a more effective, timely, and personalized way with prospects, clients/customers.
I did not select Marketo; it's an optional suggestion we make to the customer based on their needs. If I have to say overall: Marketo is behind most of the other tools out there: Price, looks, and outdated functions. For most clients, we suggest other tools. BUT if you want a …
Marketo is the most powerful of the platforms I demo'd. Many platforms promise a lot but don't deliver. For example, most platforms have odd restrictions on how you can define segmentation conditions. In many cases, I'd have to do a lot of setup or work outside the service to …
Overall, I think Marketo is overpriced, complex, and not user-friendly. Their customer service was atrocious, so thank goodness we had the robust Marketo community. Their turn over rates for the person managing our account was gone every, so we were constantly having to retrain …
Marketo was introduced to me as the end-all, be-all of the programs we'd explored as I was consulting. When dealing with the program itself, I could see why. It really is expansive and capable of nearly anything. I recommended Marketo because they were operating a team, one of …
Digital Marketing Automation and Operations Manager at Articulate
Chose Adobe Marketo Engage
- Marketo has more attractive pricing for smaller database size (it appears the break-even point between the offerings is usually around 500,000 active leads/contacts).
- Marketo's UI is a bit easier to user for people unfamiliar with marketing automation.
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.
I would definitely recommend Adobe Marketo Engage to other large or medium organisations such as ourselves, who have a number of users from different offices around the globe. It is well suited to those who have large email marketing contact databases and need to do sophisticated segmentation. It has a lot of functionality for integration with Salesforce and lead scoring models.
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.
Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there.
Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue.
Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better.
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.
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.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
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.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
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.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
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.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
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.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
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.
Marketo helps us to show our customers we understand them by delivering personalized content, delivered at the right time, every time. Also gives the sales and marketing teams the ability to create more coordinated journeys. From emails to landing pages, Marketo Engage uses in-depth, real-time behavioural and demographic data, and AI to personalize users experience, even for the anonymous visitors.
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!
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.