ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Which should you use? [2025]

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There’s a myth that email marketing is spam. In truth, spam emails are spam, and genuine emails continue to generate sales and ROI.

But gone are the days when people used generic email marketing methods to nurture leads. Now, you need a specialized automation tool to maintain contact with clients over time.

Yet, with so many possibilities, picking the best one may be difficult. Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign: which one should you choose?

Answering this question heavily depends on your business type and marketing needs. Despite being the most known tool, Mailchimp may not be what’s best for you, and ActiveCampaign is a pretty viable competitor.

Mailchimp is easy to use and suitable for small businesses, whereas ActiveCampaign is robust and best suited for growing enterprises and experienced marketers. 

This post compares Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign, giving you an in-depth look at each tool’s features, usability, customer service, pricing plans, and more.

Let’s get into it!

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Quick comparison 

This ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp comparison table briefly summarizes the differences between these two equally reliable tools.

	Mailchimp	ActiveCampaign
Email marketing	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simple tool for small businesses and beginners	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Robust and more complex, perfect for experienced marketers
Marketing automation	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Basic automation features like workflows and A/B testing	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced automation with lead scoring and win probability
Email list building	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Easy drag-and-drop landing page builder	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Customizable landing pages with performance tracking
Segmentation	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Basic, by interests and behavior	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced for targeted personalization
Analytics and reporting	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced campaign reports and audience tracking	⭐⭐⭐⭐ In-depth reports, including lead overview
Pricing	⭐⭐⭐ Free plan available; paid plans start at $13/month	⭐⭐No free plan; paid plans start at $15/month
Customer support	⭐⭐⭐⭐ 24/7 chat & email (limited on free plan), phone support on premium	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 24/7 chat & email (all plans),  one-on-one training available

If you’re looking for an ActiveCampaign alternative and are considering Mailchimp or just want a comparison, these next sections go into more details. 

Here’s a list of topics to expect in this post. You can jump to the relevant section if you’re looking for something specific:

• Email campaigns
• Marketing automation
• Email list building
• Segmentation
• Analytics and reporting
• Pricing
• Customer support
• ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Wrap up

For more information, use our email pricing calculator below to quickly compare costs and features with those of other top platforms. Input your desired number of contacts, choose up to two other email marketing providers from the list, and see how Omnisend stacks up against them.

Email campaigns

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp can help you create successful email campaigns.

Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of each platform, specifically what they offer in terms of email marketing.

We found that both tools have important features like landing page builders and templates, marketing automation, segmentation, and more. The difference is that Mailchimp makes these features easier to use, tailoring them more toward the needs of small businesses. 

Besides operations and other functions, small business owners also have to manage their own marketing. With Mailchimp, they can enjoy all the fundamental benefits of an email marketing tool without needing any form of training.

With ActiveCampaign, there’s a learning curve, which makes it suitable for seasoned marketers. And that is why ActiveCampaign reviews would advise it suits larger businesses in need of advanced marketing and sales automation features better.

Here’s a case in point:

Mailchimp’s interface is easy to navigate, with a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to build stunning emails.

The downside is that Mailchimp’s free plan only has generic email templates. With paid plans, however, you’ll have access to over 100 pre-designed email templates you can edit for just about any subject.

ActiveCampaign has a larger email template library with over 250 ready-to-use customizable templates. In our experience, its email editor was also easy enough to master.

However, its automation settings were somewhat difficult to navigate. This Mailchimp alternative has more powerful email marketing automation features, including email triggers you can use to send emails to clients based on their activity on your website or with your business.

This allows you to create more personalized email campaigns to get more conversions.

Overall, we found ActiveCampaign more rewarding if you’re willing to take some time and master how to use it. Luckily, its website has helpful resources and tutorials to get you started.

Mailchimp was easier to master, but its features aren’t as advanced, so a large enterprise with extensive email marketing needs may need more features. The one you choose as your email marketing tool should depend on your business’s unique requirements.

Winner: With its simplicity and ease of use, Mailchimp wins this round for small businesses and beginners. While ActiveCampaign has more advanced features, it has a steeper learning curve.

Marketing automation

Despite having powerful email automation features, Mailchimp’s capabilities do not compare to those of ActiveCampaign. 

This is not meant to take away from Mailchimp’s marketing automation capabilities, which are powerful and sufficient for most small businesses. ActiveCampaign just does more.

For one, we were able to build sophisticated workflows for email circulation, lead generation, data segmentation, etc., by combining triggers and conditions. 

We could even export a list of subscribers who have clicked on certain links, which helps with remarketing.

In addition to email, ActiveCampaign offers an SMS marketing channel that you can use in your automated campaigns and website messages. 

Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers basic trigger automation options like opened email triggers, abandoned cart triggers, etc. We didn’t find its automation editor quite as flexible, as we couldn’t set our automation triggers to go down different paths.

Mailchimp offers SMS marketing too, but you’d need a third-party tool to include SMS in your automation journey.

Both tools offer A/B testing capabilities to help marketers assess the performance of their email marketing campaigns. However, Mailchimp’s split tests are limited, as you can only test your automation campaigns based on the number of contacts. 

Meanwhile, we discovered a helpful ActiveCampaign feature called Automations Map. This is a visualization tool that helps users track their automation and view how they interact with each other. This feature is available on the Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans.

We found it useful in helping get the most out of automation. The map shows how an automation workflow is connected, whether through your goals, deals, tags, or more. This way, you know the impact each automation workflow has on your business. 

Winner: In this section of the ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp comparison, ActiveCampaign takes the lead. It’s simpler and has more automation options.

Email list building

Building a sizable newsletter email list is vital to any effective email marketing strategy. Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp offer powerful tools that help marketers expand their subscriber bases.

Let’s look at each tool’s list-building tools in detail.

Mailchimp’s landing page builder is available with its free plan. We found it fairly easy to use. The landing pages contain built-in forms that are flexible and can easily integrate with your website.

The tool also provides a few landing page templates to help you get started if you’re unable to design them from scratch.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign comes with landing pages as an additional paid feature with their paid plans. 

It also allowed us to create forms more easily than Mailchimp. Regardless of the landing page template you choose, ActiveCampaign offers mobile-friendly and responsive forms.

In our experience, Mailchimp’s forms weren’t as easy to work with as their themes aren’t as responsive. We had to be extra careful with size to make them suitable for different devices.

ActiveCampaign has an innovative lead-scoring function that further bolsters its list-building capabilities. We used it to rank our prospects by their likelihood of conversion, leaving us with a more quality mailing list. With this feature, you can focus your efforts on the leads with the highest potential for conversion.

Winner: ActiveCampaign emerges as the clear winner. While Mailchimp’s free landing pages are user-friendly, ActiveCampaign’s mobile-friendly forms and lead scoring elevate its list-building capabilities.

Audience segmentation

When sending emails to your contact list, you want them to land in the relevant inbox. A solid email marketing tool should let you segment your audience by factors, such as user behavior, location, demographics, etc.

Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer various email segmentation options to make your email campaigns more targeted. Let’s start with how ActiveCampaign makes this possible.

The platform allowed us to categorize our email contacts by lists, segments, and custom fields for broader or more targeted email marketing campaigns.

Lists are the broadest way of categorizing your contacts. We were able to add our contacts to lists based on the type of messages we intended to send, for instance, announcement emails, promotions, networking, etc.

Tags were more targeted. We could add or remove them to create smaller contact groups for specific email campaigns.

Custom fields are the most targeted segmentation option on ActiveCampaign. You use custom fields to store information on individual contacts on your email list. These include details like names, phone numbers, birthdays, etc. 

We discovered that you could either fill in the information found in these fields directly or collect it when the customer fills in newsletter forms, landing page forms, etc.

All in all, we found the segmentation process with ActiveCampaign to be straightforward, just like Mailchimp’s simple one-condition segmentation process.

Creating multiple-condition segments with Mailchimp, however, was a little complex. Its listing options were also limited.

You can only include an email contact in one list in an email campaign. When you’re segmenting your mailing list, including a contact twice in a campaign would mean paying for it twice. This is because Mailchimp charges per subscriber.

This feature puts Mailchimp at a disadvantage against ActiveCampaign. The latter allows you to run the same campaigns with different lists, even those with similar contacts. The overall usability of its segmentation tool, including the tags, is pretty easy too.

Winner: This round goes to ActiveCampaign. It offers more ways to segment your audience (lists, tags, custom fields) and allows running campaigns with different lists, making it more flexible and cost-effective.

Analytics and reporting

You can’t talk about ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp without discussing their reporting capabilities. Reports let you monitor email marketing trends, track your performance, and create better marketing campaigns.

Here’s how these two tools stack up.

Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign have powerful reporting and analytics features that help improve your campaign performance. 

They both have performance measurement capabilities to track email marketing metrics like click-through rates, bounce rates, social sharing, open rates, opt-out rates, etc.

With Mailchimp, we could monitor our performance by number of sent emails, open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, click per unique opens, revenue, and more. The statistics are represented in percentages as shown below.

The engagement reports section summarizes the metrics you want to compare against each other into a visually appealing graph.

We noticed a few drawbacks to Mailchimp’s email reporting and analytics feature. One is that you’ll need to turn on these settings first to see your open and click-through rates in your reports.  

Another is that it lacks real-time reporting and analytics features that users need to understand their audiences better.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, also had data campaign reports like the ones mentioned above. We could also access automation reports that tracked our audience’s interactions with our automated emails.

Additionally, we could access our contact data reports to see how the contacts interact with our newsletters. These reports help you identify the best times to send your emails, where your contacts are located, and so forth.

ActiveCampaign goes beyond these essential reporting features with its Deal Overview Reports. Here, you’ll be able to track the performance of your sales team, including deals won and lost over time. 

The Deals Funnel Report also shows you how many deals are in your sales or marketing pipeline.

Mailchimp provides ecommerce reporting for more platforms than ActiveCampaign. However, if you’re looking for a specialized email marketing tool, then neither is optimal.

Winner: ActiveCampaign takes the lead on this one too, with more to offer in terms of reports and analytics.

Pricing

You’d think ActiveCampaign would be much more expensive than Mailchimp as it offers more features. However, depending on the plan and considering the value you get for your money, this isn’t exactly true, as you’ll learn later in this section.

Mailchimp has the upper hand here as it offers a free plan along with a free 30-day trial of two of its paid plans. This free plan includes 500 contacts, lets you send 1,000 emails monthly, and has pre-built email templates.

ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan but instead offers a 14-day free trial to help customers make a decision.

Most of Mailchimp’s essential features come with the Essentials package — except for comparative reporting, multivariate testing, unlimited support, and a few other additional functions, which are included in its Premium plan. 

This package costs $13 a month. This makes Mailchimp’s Premium package seem overpriced, since for these few additional features, the pricing starts at $350 monthly.

Note: The prices listed above for Mailchimp are just starting prices for when your email list has 500 subscribers for the basic plan, and 10,000 subscribers for the Premium plan. As the number of your subscribers increases, the Mailchimp pricing increases.

Paid plans start from $15 on ActiveCampaign for transactional emails. If you want email marketing automation features, the pricing plans start from $39/month when billed monthly.

ActiveCampaign’s plans have a contact email send limit that’s a multiple of the number of marketing contacts included in each plan. 

For instance, the Lite and Plus plans have a 10 times contact email send limit. The Professional and Enterprise plans have a limit of 12 and 15 times the contact list, respectively.

You get the most essential email marketing features on ActiveCampaign with their second-tier plan, Plus. This ActiveCampaign plan includes an SMS add-on, landing pages, ecommerce integrations, lead scoring, and Automations Map.

There’s a price jump in the next plan, the Professional plan, mainly because it includes CRM and sales automation features. 

Some features that ActiveCampaign’s plans come with, which Mailchimp lacks, include multiple automated journey maps, Microsoft Dynamics integrations, and the ability to send messages to your customers through your website.

Winner: Here, the ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp verdict is that, for the most fundamental features, Mailchimp pricing is budget-friendly and preferable over ActiveCampaign. However, for enterprises looking for more advanced sales and marketing features and functions, ActiveCampaign gives you more bang for your buck.

For more information, use our email pricing calculator below to quickly compare costs and features with those of other top platforms. Input your desired number of contacts, choose up to two other email marketing providers from the list, and see how Omnisend stacks up against them.

Customer support

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: which one offers better customer support? 

First, we found both tools had fairly responsive customer support and offered similar contact options for customers depending on their needs. Besides direct contact options like email, chat, and phone support, each tool was well-equipped with resource centers for further reading and practice.

ActiveCampaign offers 24/7 chat and email support. You can also request a demo to see how the tool works before getting started. Also, since it has a steeper learning curve, we appreciated the option for one-on-one training. 

For self-help options, ActiveCampaign offers resources for both customers and developers. These include a resource center that contains guides and tutorials explaining every feature.

There’s also a community where you can:

• Join a forum and converse with fellow users
• Find product help documents and resource material
• Join ActiveCampaign University and enhance your knowledge of the platform
• Become a partner with ActiveCampaign and have an additional source of revenue

Mailchimp also offers 24/7 chat and email support with all plans. However, customers on the free plan get email support for only 30 days. The premium package comes with a phone and a priority customer support option.

There are numerous other self-help resources to guide customers. We liked that Mailchimp 101 contains guides on how to use the tool overall. You’ll get email design guides, landing page optimization guides, and more. 

The help center has popular Mailchimp tutorials, webinars, guides, and more. We were able to easily search for what we wanted by topic. The tool also offers articles about marketing inspiration to help you build your business.

In terms of getting escalated support, the ActiveCampaign team was decidedly easier to deal with, even when we were new to the site. By clicking on the help prompt at the bottom right corner of the website, we got all the help we needed.

Lastly, we established that both websites have an AI chatbot that’s easy to access and can be sufficient for basic customer support queries.

Winner: ActiveCampaign wins because of its more comprehensive and personalized customer support, which includes one-on-one training. While Mailchimp has good resources too, it limits its free plan’s email and chat support and only offers phone support in higher-tier plans.

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Wrap up

Ultimately, the tool you choose depends on your business’ marketing needs. 

While Mailchimp is more popular because of its ease of use, ActiveCampaign better suits larger businesses in need of advanced marketing and sales automation features. 

Mailchimp has a way of fitting most email marketing essentials into a straightforward, affordable package. This makes it suitable for small businesses.

ActiveCampaign costs more on the lower tiers as it has more features, but you get a lot more value for your money. For large enterprises, this is ideal.

However, if you have an ecommerce business and are looking for a specialized email and SMS marketing automation tool, it’s worth trying Omnisend. 

Check out detailed Omnisend vs. ActiveCampaign or Omnisend vs. Mailchimp comparisons.

Omnisend has an easy-to-use email editor and pre-built custom email automation workflows and other channels. It also has amazing, 24/7, award-winning customer support.