If you’re looking for a tool to help you collect and convert more leads for your business, you might have found yourself comparing ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign.
Both of these tools have an excellent reputation for improving conversions with automated email marketing. However, each tool comes with specific features to help it stand out to a specific audience.
For instance, ConvertKit promises to be the ultimate marketing tool for creators, with a host of valuable capabilities, like landing page and form creation, and the ability to create your own online profile where you can list social accounts.
Alternatively, ActiveCampaign specializes in omnichannel marketing, with built-in CRM technology, text messaging and chat, and connections to social media. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at what each of these platforms can do.
ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign: An Introduction
First of all, it’s worth noting ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit do have a lot in common. Both of these tools are excellent for email marketing automation, with a host of powerful templates to choose from, and visual workflow builders to help you connect with your audience.
Both solutions will also allow you to build pages where you can sell products, collect information about your leads, and track valuable analytics.
So, where do ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit differ?
ConvertKit is a “creator” marketing platform, with a host of valuable automation services designed to help you reach your online audience. There’s ecommerce functionality, form building, and a state-of-the-art email designer to explore, as well as plenty of great custom integrations.
ActiveCampaign is similar to ConvertKit, but it offers a much wider range of features. You can still build landing pages and email campaigns with ActiveCampaign, but you’ll also be able to create messaging and text advertising strategies, integrate chat into your website, and even track conversations across social media tools and WhatsApp.
ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign: Pros and Cons
If you’re struggling with making the choice between ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign, it may help to look at the specific areas where the two tools excel, and where they fall short. While these tools are both extremely effective for the right users, they have their advantages and disadvantages to consider.
ConvertKit Pros:
- Easy-to-use backend environment
- Great templates for building landing pages and forms
- Profiles for creators (to help you stand out online)
- Options for selling products and accepting online donations
- A/B testing to ensure your campaigns make an impact
- Automation funnels with a visual builder
- Integrations with various popular tools
ConvertKit Cons:
- Limited analytics
- No integrated omnichannel marketing
- No built-in CRM functionality
- Can be quite expensive compared to similar tools
ActiveCampaign Pros:
- Exceptional email marketing templates
- Excellent landing page and form creation
- Lots of options for selling online
- Automation funnels with visualization
- Machine learning and AI to improve your campaigns over time
- Built-in CRM functionality for segmentation
- Support for omnichannel sales, marketing and service
ActiveCampaign Cons:
- Can be complex for beginners to learn
- On-site chat features will cost more
- The app can be a little slow at times
ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign: Core Features
The features of ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign have a decent amount of overlap. After all, both tools were designed initially to support companies with their email marketing efforts. However, each solution has evolved in a slightly different direction. While ConvertKit offers a simple selection of features for boosting creator presence on the web, ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of digital tools for omnichannel selling, service, and advertising.
Landing Page Builders
Landing pages are an important part of any email marketing campaign. They’re a great way to collect contact information about your intended audience, so you can connect with them through a series of nurturing messages. Both ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign support landing page creation.
With ConvertKit, you get a powerful landing page builder where you can access a host of stunning templates, ready to customize however you choose. There’s even a selection of over 100,000 stock images you can use to bring your pages to life. Plus, ConvertKit guarantees your content will be responsive on all devices. While you don’t need coding knowledge to build a page with ConvertKit, CSS access is available if you want to use it.
The ConvertKit landing page builder also comes with various form options to help you collect information about your target audience. You can add an embedded form, pop-up, or slide-in form, and even choose to hide forms from return visitors. Plus, you can use the ConvertKit landing page builder to create one-page websites, subscription sites, or simple ecommerce pages for selling digital products too. This gives creators a host of options for getting online.
ActiveCampaign offers access to forms and landing pages through the “Pages” tool. This easy-to-use solution comes with access to a wide range of stunning templates organized by industry and purpose. There’s a drag-and-drop tool for customizing your pages too, so you don’t need any coding knowledge to adjust the appearance of your page to suit your needs.
Like with ConvertKit, you can connect your landing pages and forms on ActiveCampaign to your automation strategies, to ensure new subscribers get welcome emails, and end up on the right list. Plus, there’s an advanced dashboard for tracking information about how your pages perform.
ActiveCampaign even has machine learning tools you can leverage for tips on how to improve your page’s performance. When it comes to forms, you have all the options for adding forms to your pages you’d get with ConvertKit, as well as a “floating bar” option.
Email marketing and Automation
The second area you’re likely to compare when examining the benefits of ActiveCampaign against ConvertKit is the marketing and automation tools on offer. Both of these solutions allow you to create powerful funnels and automated campaigns to nurture and convert customers.
ConvertKit makes building your own email marketing strategy quick and simple. There’s a fantastic email designer to help you create professional emails, with various options to personalize your messages with dividers, buttons, code, and clickable CTAs. There’s also no limit to the number of templates you can create for your team to use.
ConvertKit’s visual automation builder is a delight to use too. You can build step-by-step strategies with specific triggers to determine exactly when and why customers will receive a message from your email address. You can also set up universal automation rules which immediately add and remove contacts to certain lists, or add tags to contacts when they perform a certain action.
ConvertKit also makes it easier to advertise yourself online with a “Creator Profile”. Here, users can list all of their social media information, previous newsletters, and other information to share with followers. However, it’s not exactly the same as having your own website. For full online marketing functionality, you might need to integrate with a website builder.
ActiveCampaign’s advertising solutions are much more advanced. Starting with email marketing, you’ll have access to over 250+ professional templates to help you design emails for a range of use cases, all of which are completely responsive. You can also work in HTML if you prefer.
The smart automation builder comes with templates to get you started if you need help building a welcome email series, or keeping customers informed about sales. You can track contact engagement with tags, analytics, and custom fields. Plus, you can pull information for your campaigns from every digital and offline channel. What really makes ActiveCampaign stand out from ConvertKit is its ability to extend your marketing strategy into new channels.
You can automate not just your email efforts, but also your SMS and messaging strategies, to connect with customers on different channels, including WhatsApp. There’s also attribution tracking and advanced reporting for the entire customer lifecycle, so you can see where your biggest wins come from. You can even implement your own live chat functionality into your website with Active Campaign’s chat tools.
Audience Management and Reporting
Audience management features and analytical tools are crucial for growing businesses and content creators alike. They allow you to gather useful information about your target audience, and optimize your strategy over time, to boost ROI.
ConvertKit allows you to organize your contacts with separate segments, sequences, and tags, to help personalize your message for each audience member.
However, there are no specific “lists” like you get with other email marketing tools. Unfortunately, the reporting functionality from ConvertKit is a little basic too. While you can track essential metrics like link clicks, open rates, and unsubscribes, the advanced insights are extremely limited.
While you can integrate sales reports and other analytical data from additional tools, this will mean leveraging the connections offered by ConvertKit, which can make things a little more complex.
Once again, ActiveCampaign takes a more advanced approach to managing customers and reports. There’s a fully-featured Sales CRM included within the ActiveCampaign ecosystem, where you can track customer profiles and arrange people into different segments. You can also access lead scoring, win probability, and custom pipelines for individual customers.
The analytical features are phenomenal too. Active Campaign has dedicated goal tracking solutions to help you measure your progress towards your targets. You can figure out which marketing campaigns get the best results with attribution scoring, and design custom reports from scratch.
On the plus side, both ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit do offer A/B testing, so you can examine the performance of different subject lines and content with each platform. They’re both great for bloggers looking for deliverability too, with insights into how your email templates are performing when it comes to reaching the inbox.
Ecommerce Features
Both ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign have evolved to offer much more than email automation in recent years. Aside from the opt-in and sign-up forms mentioned above, and the tools you can use to drip content to your email list, these providers also offer tools for small business selling.
Interestingly, however, ActiveCampaign doesn’t allow you to take payments straight from your landing pages. Instead, it integrates with tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and WordPress (WooCommerce) for sales.
ConvertKit, on the other hand, allows you to manage and take payments without a plugin within your landing pages. You can use your email sequences to guide customers and Facebook custom orders direct to your pages, then take payments in a host of different ways. For instance, there’s buy-now buttons, recurring subscriptions, and tip jars.
ActiveCampaign does have sales funnel and sales engagement tools, so you can track your conversion rates for your online business and gradually increase your sales. However, ConvertKit is the tool which allows you to sell your webinars, tutorials, and other digital assets directly.
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ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign: Pricing
Pricing is likely to be one of the main points you’ll consider when choosing a tool for email broadcasts and online marketing. Like many sales automation tools, ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign offer various plans to choose from.
ConvertKit’s email marketing service starts with a free plan, which allows for unlimited landing pages, and forms, the ability to sell digital products, and send emails to up to 1000 subscribers. However, you don’t get any customer support, so you’ll have to rely on knowledge base information and forums to learn about things like split testing.
The premium plans for this email marketing software are the Creator and Creator Pro plan. With the Creator plan, you pay $9 per month for up to 1000 subscribers, while the Pro plan costs you $25 per month for the same number of subscribers. Both of these prices are offered on an annual basis.
The Pro plan comes with a host of extra automation features, Facebook custom audiences, and additional tools for bloggers to connect with customers. As your subscriber list increases, you’ll need to pay more for every group of contacts you add to your list.
ActiveCampaign pricing follows a similar pattern to ConvertKit pricing. You’ll pay initially for the first 1000 subscribers, then more as your subscribers increase. There’s no free plan, just a selection of four paid options, including:
- The Lite plan: $29 per month: Marketing automation, unlimited email sending, segmentation, reporting, and site/event tracking.
- The Plus plan: $49 per month: Landing pages, contact scoring, SMS marketing, conditional content, and Facebook custom audiences.
- The Professional Plan: $149 per month: Website personalization, predictive sending, marketing attribution, split automations and site messages.
- Enterprise: Custom quote: Custom reporting, custom domain, free design services, social data enrichment, and unlimited design testing.
ActiveCampaign vs ConvertKit: Verdict
Both ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit have a lot in common, with advanced automation tools, excellent email marketing services, and a range of marketing features. However, ConvertKit definitely offers more ease of use, with a simpler selection of capabilities to explore, a robust email editor, and even free migration for some packages.
ActiveCampaign is a little more advanced, with omnichannel marketing, in-depth insights, and powerful tools to strengthen your connection with customers throughout the sales journey. You can even score your leads to determine which users you need to convert first.
Remember, there are also a host of other great email marketing tools you can consider too, like Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp, and many others. Make sure you look at all of your options before signing up for an annual plan.
