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
Metadata.io
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Based in San Francisco, Metadata.io is a Demand Generation and ABM platform designed to execute thousands of B2B campaigns in a matter of hours, automatically optimizing campaigns for pipeline impact at a high velocity.
$24,000
per year
Pricing
ActiveCampaign
Metadata.io
Editions & Modules
Starter
$15
per month
Plus
$49
per month
Pro
$79
per month
Enterprise
$145
per month
MetaMatch
$295
per month per installation
Web Personalization
$24,000
per year
Audience Targeting
$24,000
per year
Metadata Base Platform
$60,000
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ActiveCampaign
Metadata.io
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$2,500 one-time fee per installation
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
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.
Metadata is well suited when you have a really large ad budget (>50k per month at least). This is because the power of metadata lies in the ability to quickly set up and run a large number of experiments (combinations of channel, audience, creative, and conversion assets). To evaluate these variations, all of them need a large number of impressions, clicks, and conversions to be statistically relevant. If your budget is smaller, you will either have a very small number of experiments (not fully utilizing the power of metadata), or your experiments will not have enough clicks to make informed decisions. We had expected a better explanation of this from metadata before signing up.
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
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.
If you don't have a large budget and audience it's hard to meaningfully optimize. If I have 4 ad creatives, to 2 audience groups on FB and LinkedIn, that creates 16 experiments, each of which needs an ample enough budget, say $40/day, that's now $640 per day or $19K per month.
Limited ability to edit ads after they've been launched. You usually have to stop the ad, clone it, and launch a new campaign.
Can't add new ads to existing campaigns which limits the ability to optimize. If I start an MD campaign with 4 ads, and in a few weeks we see that one is working well and the other 2 are not performing, I can pause those (or it can autopause by rules), but I can't add 2 more new creatives to the mix against the high performer. I'd have to either stop the high performer, and recreate it in a new campaign (losing likes and comments), OR - leave the high performer in the first campaign, and create. a second campaign with the new ones, which will only optimize against each other.
Limited to a single conversion event on a landing page. I'm not able to choose either a Demo Request OR a Sign-Up conversion, I can only choose one.
Google search ads are doable but aren't necessarily more feature-rich or easy-to use than native, so there's no value added to doing it through Metadata in my opinion aside from unifying ad reporting.
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.
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.
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.
We chose [Metadata.io] because it was a smaller company and could get more personalized attention. The price was better and they seemed more eager to support us. The feature set was what we were looking for and not more - it was exactly as robust as we needed it to be. Didn't want to pay for features we weren't going to use.
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!
Huge decrease in CPLs, CPMQL and Cost Per Opportunity
Big improvement in MQL to SQL rates
90%+ of our leads from paid social now have valid business emails, before it was like 30%
Saving us hundreds of hours over the course of the next year doing daily manual optimization and budget management tasks for us so we can focus on strategy and testing new things
