ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp — Which One Should You Choose For Better Emails?

Both platforms have great services that will give you optimal marketing results in your campaigns.

Let's take a look at some pros and cons to help you make the right choice.

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp mention that affiliate marketing goes against their Terms of Use.

If you were looking for an email service provider for affiliate marketing, then skip to the end of this post to learn about — systeme.io.

This powerful free alternative lets you promote affiliate products to your email list without worrying about getting banned.

To see if either ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp has what you’re looking for in an email marketing platform, we’ll compare the following features:

Keep reading to learn more about them in detail.

Creating and customizing emails based on your marketing needs are some of the most essential features you’ll need to run successful marketing campaigns.

Both platforms have great email marketing features, but you’ll see below that there are big differences between them.

ActiveCampaign makes managing your contacts and creating emails for your email marketing campaigns an easy task.

Now, let’s take a look at Mailchimp’s email marketing features to see if they can match ActiveCampaign's.

Placing the same contact on different lists will count as 2 contacts, which can be a problem because Mailchimp charges per subscriber, so the more contacts you have, the more you’ll pay each month.

If you’re a marketer that manages the contact lists of many different companies and you want to keep them separated, then you won’t have a problem with Mailchimp, but it can quickly become expensive if you’re a business owner.

Winner: ActiveCampaign — for offering more tools to improve email design and deliverability with its “Revert back” option and spam checker.

If you want to be able to scale, you’ll need to pick the best email marketing software with advanced automation capabilities.

This feature will reduce your workload and optimize your sales process by setting up automation workflows that will manage your contacts and campaigns without your intervention.

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp have great marketing automation features, but the latter is more limited.

Keep reading to find out why.

ActiveCampaign’s advantage over Mailchimp is that you can combine as many automated triggers as you want, see exactly how they work and then select the one with better results.

Lastly, ActiveCampaign’s automation tool has more room to scale and it lets you set up automated SMS marketing campaigns on top of email marketing campaigns.

Now, let's see what Mailchimp can do for you.

Also, you won’t get automated SMS marketing tools from Mailchimp, so you can’t scale in that area.

Winner: ActiveCampaign easily wins by offering better marketing automation features compared to Mailchimp.

Both tools offer excellent analytics and comparative reporting for you to improve your email marketing campaigns.

With either platform, you’ll be able to track data about:

The only distinction is that, with Mailchimp, you’ll get data more focused on ecommerce, while ActiveCampaign gives you report deals and funnels overview.

It’s in their CRMs where you’ll see some important differences.

And because ActiveCampaign’s CRM software can integrate with its automation tools, you’ll be able to automate your sales process and notify your sales team of customers’ behavior.

This way you can study your target audience and prepare strategies to improve your future campaigns.

This feature is available on Mailchimp’s Free plan, but to get more advanced data you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Winner: ActiveCampaign beats Mailchimp once again by offering advanced features that allow for better data analysis of customer behavior.

ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are very popular tools that have many integration possibilities you can take advantage of, so if you feel that there is something missing, you can always combine it with other platforms.

We recommend doing some research before integrating any plugins or you’ll risk getting some technical headaches if they don’t work as you expected them to.

And more!

With all the available integrations you can optimize certain features, like your form builder, landing page builder, automation, and many others.

Winner: It’s a tie! Both email marketing software have numerous integration options to complement and improve all their features.

If you’re new to these platforms or to email marketing in general, then you’ll probably want some help setting everything up.

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp offer customer support, but users have some strong opinions about their support team.

With ActiveCampaign, you’ll get:

These guides will teach everything you need to know about the platform, email marketing, automation, and more.

These resources will guide you through the essentials and teach you how to get started, but if you want to contact the support team you’ll need to be on a paid plan.

The Essentials plan will get you to email support and the Premium plan offers phone support.

Users also mentioned having long waiting hours to get a response and when answered, you’ll probably just be redirected to Mailchimp’s help pages.

Winner: For getting help from the support team without having to pay extra for an expected service, ActiveCampaign is the best option.

Now that we’ve covered the features you’ll get with these platforms, it’s time to take a look at their pricing plans to see which one is lighter on your budget.

Keep in mind that ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp both charge you based on the features and number of contacts you have.

With ActiveCampaign, you get to choose 4 pricing plans:

For the Enterprise plan you’ll have to contact their sales team to determine a cost that’s best for you according to your needs.

Each plan will give you different features based on your business type, which could be:

For example, the B2C business type gives you a Marketing Suite with the following benefits:

Now, let’s see how much Mailchimp costs.

Mailchimp offers 4 pricing plans:

Every plan has a limit for the number of contacts you can have and if you pass it you’ll be billed for overages, but your campaigns won’t be stopped.

If you aren’t going to send emails on a regular basis, this is an option worth considering.

Winner: ActiveCampaign wins again. Not only are they cheaper, but they also offer unlimited email sends compared to Mailchimp.

If ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp don’t have the features you need or the price exceeds your budget, we offer a powerful free alternative to easily set up and launch your automated email marketing campaigns.

Our email marketing tools, will give you:

You can get all this and more for just a fraction of Mailchimp’s and ActiveCampaign’s price.

Speaking of price, let’s take a look at our pricing plans.

Each of our 4 pricing plans come with unlimited email sends:

All plans offer 24/7 email support, so feel free to contact us and we’ll answer your questions in under 2 hours.

Sign up for our Free plan, test our tools and upgrade to a paid plan once you’re ready.

We’ll be waiting for you!

Before we wrap this up, let's answer some frequently asked questions to clear some of the most common inquiries ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp users have.

ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are very popular email marketing software that a lot of people recommend.

ActiveCampaign is aimed at experienced marketers that want to optimize their strategies, whereas Mailchimp makes it easy to get started and has an easy-to-navigate interface.

Unfortunately, it lacks the flexibility you’ll need to scale, and it can easily become expensive if your audience is growing fast.

If you’re looking for a powerful ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp alternative that you can use for free to build your email marketing business — then systeme.io is the platform for you.

Our Free plan will give you access to all of our features (except webinars) and remember — it’s a Free plan and not a Free trial, so you can take your time testing our tools and migrate to us when you’re ready.

Sign up for free and skyrocket your business!