GetResponse vs. ActiveCampaign: Which Marketing Tool is Best for Your Business?

GetResponse’s worldwide reach extends to 183 countries, claiming to have more than 350,000 customers.

With a decent score of 4.1/5 on Capterra, let’s take a look at some of GetResponse users’ likes and dislikes towards the email marketing platform:

With a reach of more than 170 countries globally, ActiveCampaign boasts a user base larger than 150,000 people.

ActiveCampaign’s users have left more than 1,500 reviews on Capterra and gave it an overall rating of 4.6/5, making this a platform not to be reckoned with.

Here are some likes and dislikes mentioned by ActiveCampaign users:

To get an idea of how ActiveCampaign and GetResponse work, we’ll discuss their main features and how they can help you on your journey to build a prosperous online business.

Developing an effective email marketing plan allows you to engage and interact with your target audience in a personalized way while also increasing sales at a low cost.

Both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse offer you email marketing features to build solid email marketing campaigns — let’s take a look at how these tools perform!

With GetResponse, you can create effective emails and use advanced segmentation tools to make more of an impact.

GetResponse offers the following email marketing features:

All the tools in the email creator work together to drive traffic to your landing page, promote webinars or share your contact details.

GetResponse’s autoresponders allow you to maintain customer relationships and increase conversions by:

Additionally, GetResponse provides an email calendar where you can list and view all your scheduled emails.

GetResponse’s advanced analytics tools help you understand what’s working and what’s not working for your business.

These email analytics tools allow you to:

These actions, however, are only available with GetResponse’s paid plans — even though they include a “TRY IT FREE” call-to-action button on their website.

GetResponse includes an email list builder that helps you nurture your customer relationships by sending personalized emails.

The list builder allows you to:

You can only start fully benefiting from these features with GetResponse’s second-highest-paid plan.

You can use API (Application Programming Interfaces) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)-triggered transactional emails to send notifications and keep customers up-to-date with their purchases.

Another thing we think is worth mentioning is GetResponse’s deliverability rate.

On almost every web page, GetResponse states that its deliverability rate is currently at 99% — but after a thorough deliverability test, GetResponse scored a rate of only 82.9%.

ActiveCampaign’s email marketing features allow you to build newsletters, create email campaigns, and send effective emails to your audience.

ActiveCampaign offers the following email marketing features:

And more.

With ActiveCampaign’s list segmentation feature you can:

Different groups of people care about different things.

Using tags, custom fields, and data collected within ActiveCampaign lets you create as many groups as you want.

Personalize your emails using any available contact information.

Your emails will feel more personal if you send exactly what your contacts desire to see — and more people will start engaging with your emails.

With ActiveCampaign’s reporting and analytics tools, you can keep track of your campaigns’ performance by looking at:

You can also use split testing to get your emails more opened, which results in more clicks and sales.

ActiveCampaign allows you to set up autoresponders — Welcome emails, follow-up emails, cart abandonment emails, and more — to be automatically sent to your contacts.

Furthermore, you can set the exact day when those emails need to be sent out.

When a consumer initiates a transactional event, you must ensure that the email they expect is sent as soon as possible.

With ActiveCampaign, you can be confident that your transactional emails will appear in your contacts’ inboxes swiftly thanks to API, deliverability, and time to inbox (TTI).

ActiveCampaign’s deliverability rate scored exceptionally higher than GetResponse’s — scoring at 90.2%!

So which one is better for email marketing?

Although both platforms provide you with the tools to create your email marketing campaigns, the winner will have to be ActiveCampaign as their deliverability rate is exceptionally better than GetResponse’s.

GetResponse: 0 - Active Campaign: 1

Marketing automation is the process of automating marketing campaigns and activities across the whole buyer's journey, from initial customer interactions to post-sales support.

Here’s how ActiveCampaign and GetResponse stack up against each other.

None of these automation features are available with GetResponse’s Free plan — this definitely takes away some brownie points!

Additionally, ActiveCampaign provides an automation map that lets you see how automation steps connect to each other — and if you’re struggling to understand, ActiveCampaign provides automation training videos for you to watch.

All ActiveCampaign’s marketing features are included in its cheapest plan.

Both GetResponse and ActiveCampaign provide marketing automation which means it’s a tie.

GetResponse: 1 - Active Campaign: 2

A landing page is a web page that is focused on one goal — conversion.

Here are the landing page builders that ActiveCampaign and GetResponse offer.

The landing page creator is available on all GetResponse plans, however, with the Free plan you can create and host only 1 landing page with a monthly limit of 1,000 visits.

A snag here is the fact that this landing page creator is only offered on ActiveCampaign’s Plus plan.

Another tie: Both email marketing platforms have all the tools you need to build epic landing pages that will help you grow your audience, capture more leads, and drive more sales.

GetResponse: 2 - Active Campaign: 3

Reports and analytics help you measure and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Here’s how ActiveCampaign and GetResponse allow you to track and measure your email campaigns.

Additionally, you’re capable of running A/B tests and comparing your emails to find the best-performing ones.

If you want to make use of these features, you need to install a website tracking code, and GetResponse will do the rest.

Neither the split testing nor Google analytics tracking is available on the Free plan.

And more.

In addition to ActiveCampaign’s tracking features, you can also run A/B tests, or what they like to call “A/B/C/D/E tests”, as you can compare up to 5 features at a time.

Not only will you be able to test your email campaigns, but you can also run tests on your automated workflows.

So . . .

Both email marketing software offers reporting and analytics for you to come up with a winning formula for your email campaigns, however, the winner here is ActiveCampaign as it allows you to test up to 5 features at a time.

GetResponse: 2 - Active Campaign: 4

Affiliate programs can be very profitable and lucrative, however, it takes commitment and a good program to succeed.

Let’s see what ActiveCampaign and GetResponse’s affiliate programs offer.

The programs are best for:

The affiliate programs are free and you don’t have to be an existing GetResponse customer to join.

Additionally, if you join its affiliate program you receive ongoing support such as receiving the latest product updates and becoming a part of a community where you can share best practices and success stories.

Both marketing platforms offer attractive-looking affiliate programs, however, GetResponse offers more varieties than ActiveCampaign, and is, therefore, the winner of this section.

GetResponse: 3 - Active Campaign: 4

Both platforms offer features that the other doesn’t.

If any listed below are essential to your business's success, you might be swayed to choose one platform over the other.

Let’s compare additional ActiveCampaign vs. GetResponse features:

Pricing is important as it defines the value of the email marketing platform you plan on using.

Here’s what you pay for when using either ActiveCampaign or GetResponse:

If you’re just starting out, GetResponse’s forever-Free plan includes:

However, with the Free plan, your newsletters have GetResponse watermarks and you won’t be able to use automation responders.

Your costs rise as you add more subscribers to your list.

On the Basic, Plus, and Professional plans, you can anticipate paying $539, $599, or $699 per month with a list of up to 100,000 subscribers, respectively.

ActiveCampaign has no free plan — it does, however, offer a 14-day free trial.

The cheapest plan includes features such as:

And more.

If all you need is email marketing, the Lite plan, which costs $15/month as part of a monthly membership, will do — however, if you want CRM and marketing automation, you'll need to upgrade to a higher-tier subscription.

The clear winner here is GetResponse — not only do they offer a completely free plan, but all their prices are exceptionally less expensive than those of ActiveCampaign.

GetResponse: 5 - Active Campaign: 5

The score is even!

Each platform offers strong features in their own right, but if you’re looking for an email marketing platform that is both cost-efficient and feature-rich — check out systeme.io!

Not only is our Free plan free forever, but you also don’t need to insert any credit card details to get started.

Our forever-Free plan includes:

And so much more!

Once you feel like you need more, you can upgrade to one of our premium plans for an affordable price.

Systeme.io’s Startup plan includes all Free plan features (in greater amounts) and is essentially an upgrade for when your business starts to grow.

In our Webinar plan, you receive access to all features included in the Startup plan at a bigger scale, but you’ll also be capable of exploring our webinar features.

Finally, with our Unlimited plan, you get full access to the entire systeme.io platform’s features!

Before we end this article, let’s look at a list of some frequently asked questions we’ve gathered— just in case you also had one of them in mind.

It’s a tie!

If the primary goal of your business is to automate email marketing campaigns, ActiveCampaign is the way to go.

Getresponse, on the other hand, is a great alternative if you're looking for something geared exclusively toward bigger businesses.

Both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse offer advanced marketing features, however, with both these tools you’ll need to put in a bit of time due to steeper learning curves and perhaps spend a little more money.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a simpler way to create and maintain your email campaign — look no further — systeme.io is an all-in-one solution that combines both cost efficiency with advanced marketing features.

Curious to see what we can do?

Join systeme.io for free today!