ActiveCampaign Review: The Whole Price List Is Published, and Almost None of It Is Shown

ActiveCampaign publishes its entire price list and shows you almost none of it. That is not an accusation of hiding anything. The full catalogue is sent to your browser every time you open the pricing page, and a second copy sits on the vendor's own servers with no password on it at all. The page simply does not display it.

We read both. Here is what the difference amounts to.

OUR TAKE: This is a deep, well-documented product with the largest integration catalogue we have counted anywhere, and it scores 3.49 on our scale. What the pricing page shows you is the cheapest corner of it: a figure that is always the annual rate, at the first of up to forty-nine contact bands, for one of three products, with six add-ons named and none priced. The software is not the problem. The arithmetic you cannot do from the page is.

What you are actually buying

ActiveCampaign is an email and marketing automation platform with a contact database attached, sold in four tiers and metered on how many people are in that database^[2].

The breadth is real and it is verifiable rather than claimed, because the vendor's billing system lists every capability as a named entitlement. There are seventy-nine of them on the top tier, seventy-one on the one below, fifty-six on the middle one and eleven on the entry plan^[3]. Across them: multi-step automation with unlimited actions and more than nine hundred prebuilt recipes, campaign and automation A/B testing, landing pages, site messages, four kinds of form, preference centres, contact and deal scoring, segment logic that combines conditions, custom objects, custom event tracking, revenue attribution, conversion tracking, an automations map, database sync, a custom mailserver domain, single sign-on, and ecommerce from abandoned cart through product catalogue and coupons to recurring payments.

Three more channels are sold as products in their own right rather than as features. WhatsApp has its own three tiers and its own contact ladder. SMS is an add-on with its own credit pool. Transactional sending runs through Postmark, which the same catalogue prices separately.

What is not in the platform is the CRM, and that matters more than it sounds. Pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring are each marked "Included in add-on" on every tier that offers them^[2]. So the entry tiers advertise "Standard CRM & ecommerce integrations", which means integrations with other people's CRMs, not a pipeline of your own.

## The number on the card is the annual rate

Every one of the four plan cards reads "Starts at" a figure, then a slash and the letters m-o. Underneath, in smaller type, it says "Billed annually"^[2].

That label is doing a lot of work. The catalogue carries both billing terms for every tier and every band, and here is the entry band side by side.

Plan	Month to month, $/mo	Billed annually, $/mo	Charged once a year, $	Seats	Sends a month
Starter	19	15	180	1	10,000
Plus	59	49	588	1	10,000
Professional	99	79	948	3	12,000
Enterprise	179	145	1,740	5	15,000

The annual saving is consistent: across thirty-two tier-and-band combinations we measured, it runs between 16.9% and 21.6%, with a median of 20.1%^[3]. So paying monthly costs about a fifth more than the page suggests.

There is no toggle. A visitor cannot see the monthly figure anywhere on the pricing page, in any tier, at any band. There is also a third term the page never mentions at all: a commit-annually, pay-monthly option worth "up to 10% off", which is published only inside the help-centre article about how to cancel your account^[7].

The price has three dimensions and the page shows one

What determines an ActiveCampaign invoice is the product, the tier and the contact band. The cards show the first band of one tier of one product, which is why each one says "Starts at".

The selector on the page offers twelve contact bands, from one thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand. The catalogue carries forty-eight on the middle tiers and forty-nine on Enterprise, reaching thirty million contacts^[3]. Here is what the second honest row looks like, at ten thousand contacts.

Plan	Month to month, $/mo	Billed annually, $/mo	Charged once a year, $
Starter	189	149	1,788
Plus	239	189	2,268
Professional	469	375	4,500
Enterprise	739	589	7,068

A business with ten thousand contacts on the Professional tier is paying four and a half thousand dollars a year for a product whose card says $79. Nothing about that is deceptive. It is simply not on the page.

## The entry tier is a different product, not a smaller one

Eleven entitlements against fifty-six is the largest single step in the ladder, and it sits at the bottom of it^[3].

What arrives at Plus: landing pages, site messages, modal and preference-centre forms, contact scoring, segment logic that combines conditions with and-or groups, the AI brand kit, AI content and image generation, custom branding, custom user permissions, database sync, ecommerce coupons and product catalogue, and the named integrations for Slack, Calendly, Eventbrite, Google Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok and Facebook. On Starter none of those exist.

Two of Starter's limits are fixed ceilings rather than bands, which is a distinction worth learning. The catalogue records five lists and five actions per automation with maximum units equal to included units^[3]. No amount of money raises either. The seat cap is the same shape: one seat included, two maximum, where every tier above allows nine hundred and ninety-nine.

That two-seat ceiling is the hardest wall on the entry plan. A second seat costs ten dollars a month, or ninety-six dollars for the year, and then the plan is full.

Where the cheapest tier becomes the expensive one

Starter sells eight contact bands and stops at twenty-five thousand. Watch what happens on the way there.

Contacts	Starter, $/mo annual	Plus, $/mo annual	Difference, $/mo
1,000	15	49	34 cheaper
5,000	79	145	66 cheaper
10,000	149	189	40 cheaper
25,000	391	389	2 dearer

At the last band Starter sells, it costs more than Plus charges for the same contacts, and Plus carries forty-six more entitlements^[3]. The capability crossing happens even earlier: Starter at five thousand contacts costs the same as Professional at one thousand.

The vendor's own FAQ addresses contact growth and is worth quoting in full, because it is true and it is not the whole mechanism. "If your contact list grows beyond your current plan's limit, ActiveCampaign makes it easy to upgrade to the next contact band or plan without penalties or losing access to features. You'll never be locked out of your account or forced to pay unexpected fees"^[2]. No penalty, correct. The next band also stops existing at twenty-five thousand.

## Hitting the limit stops the sending; it does not raise the bill

This is the part ActiveCampaign gets right, and we say so because the last product we measured in this family did the opposite.

The vendor publishes it plainly: "We do not automatically increase your contact limit unless you have enabled auto-upgrade in your account"^[10]. What happens instead is a stop. "Once you reach your contact limit, you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9]. Automations keep triggering and contacts keep moving through them, but the send steps are skipped. Contacts can still arrive over the limit through the API, through integrations and through your own forms.

Auto-upgrade exists and the vendor recommends it, and if you switch it on the terms say your fees "will increase immediately according to usage"^[5]. The difference from an automatic overage is that you chose it in advance. That is the distinction that matters.

One asymmetry survives. Going up is self-service; coming down is not. "If you need to decrease your contact limit, please contact our Customer Experience team"^[10].

And the question most contact-metered vendors leave unanswered has a dedicated article here: "All contacts, regardless of their list status, count towards your contact limit"^[11]. Unsubscribed and bounced records count, for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025. That is the expensive answer, and publishing it counts for something.

◆Our scorecard

3.4/5

AI 3.2/5

The widest published AI surface we have measured, and a third of it is metered at zero included. On the capability side the pricing page's own matrix lists an Active Intelligence workspace, an AI-powered automation builder, an AI campaign builder and follow-up, spam checking, AI-suggested segments, suggested actions, AI brand kits, AI content and image generation, an AI campaign calendar, account and industry-based send times, and — on the top two tiers — predictive sending and predictive content. The integrations list names Claude and ChatGPT over MCP, which no other product in our set publishes. Three deductions. The workspace itself is 'Limited access' on Starter and Plus, which is half the ladder. AI translations and AI actions are marked 'Available add-on' on all four tiers including Enterprise, and the billing catalogue carries the matching Activities meter with zero included units on every tier and a ladder starting at a dollar a month for two hundred — so the AI that acts, rather than the AI that suggests, is bought by the unit at a price the pricing page never states. And the reviews are hostile to it: AI is a theme in 33% of the one and two-star reviews in our corpus against 15% of the four and five-star ones, the second-largest gap after the exit themes, with reviewers describing an interface replaced by a text box.

Value for money 3.1/5

The cheapest entry we have measured in any category, on a ladder that climbs faster than the page suggests. Fifteen dollars a month is real and it buys a working product: a thousand contacts, ten thousand sends a month, marketing automation and the standard ecommerce and CRM integrations. Two corrections follow immediately. That figure is the annual rate, and the month-to-month rate for the same band is nineteen dollars, between 16.9% and 21.6% more across every tier and band, with no toggle on the page to show it. And the entry tier is a narrow room: one seat included and two maximum, five lists that cannot be raised, five actions per automation that cannot be raised, and a contact ladder that stops at 25,000 — where it costs $391 a month against the $389 Plus charges for the same contacts. Above that the climb is steep: Professional at ten thousand contacts is $375 a month billed annually, which is $4,500 a year for a product whose card says $79. Set against all of that, three things are genuinely good value and are unusual enough to name. The sending allowance scales with the contact limit rather than being sold separately, at ten to fifteen times the contacts. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts count toward the limit, which is the expensive answer, and the vendor publishes it in a dedicated article instead of leaving it open. And the WhatsApp add-on costs 36% less than the same WhatsApp bought on its own, which is a real bundle rather than a presentational one. What holds this axis down below three is not the price of the software. It is that pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring sit in two add-ons whose price is published nowhere, so a buyer comparing this against a CRM cannot complete the sum.

Capability & depth 4.0/5

Genuinely deep, and the depth is verifiable rather than claimed. The vendor's own billing catalogue lists 79 entitlements on the Enterprise tier, 71 on Professional and 56 on Plus, each one a named capability rather than a marketing phrase. Across them: multi-step automation with unlimited actions and 950 published recipes, campaign and automation A/B testing, landing pages, site messages, four kinds of form, preference centres, contact and deal scoring, AND/OR segment logic, custom objects with schemas on Enterprise, custom events, revenue attribution, conversion tracking, an automations map, split automations, database sync, a custom mailserver domain, a custom account domain, single sign-on, HIPAA support, and ecommerce from abandoned cart through product catalogue and coupons to recurring payments. Three channels beyond email are sold as products in their own right: WhatsApp with its own three tiers, SMS, and transactional sending through Postmark. Two deductions, both material. The CRM is not in the platform: pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring are each marked 'Included in add-on' on every tier that offers them, so the thing that would make this a CRM competitor is an extra. And the entry tier is not a smaller version of this product, it is a different one — eleven entitlements against fifty-six, which is the largest single step in the ladder and sits at the bottom of it.

Ease of use 2.9/5

The third-party scores are respectable and our own corpus is not. Software Advice publishes an Ease of Use sub-score of 4.2 against a Functionality sub-score of 4.5, which is the normal shape for a deep product: people rate what it does above how it does it. Our cross-tabulation is harsher and more specific. Interface is a theme in 21% of the one and two-star reviews in the corpus and in 0% of the four and five-star ones — a twenty-one point gap and a clean zero at the top, with reviewers describing a dashboard that changes often enough to need relearning. What keeps this axis near three rather than below it is the other half of the same measurement: complexity is flat across the distribution, 10% below against 12% above, and hitting the contact limit actually runs the other way, 4% below against 12% above. So the complaint is not that the product is too complicated or that the meter bites. It is about the surface, and specifically about the surface changing.

Integrations 4.2/5

The largest integration catalogue we have counted, by an order of magnitude. The vendor's own marketplace renders the number as a filter result rather than as a claim: 'Showing 1-30 of 1,056 Apps & Integrations'. For comparison, the last CRM we measured counted 88. The marketplace classifies each entry by who built it — ActiveCampaign, a connector, a middleware partner — and by sync direction, which is more than most vendors publish. Native API and webhooks are on every tier including the entry one, as is the Pipedrive integration, and the integrations list names Claude and ChatGPT over MCP. Three deductions. The integrations that matter most to a large buyer are tier-gated: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk appear only on Enterprise in the billing catalogue, and the premium ecommerce connectors for BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus only from Professional. The marketplace publishes a plan filter, but the server returns the same total for every plan, so how many of the 1,056 a given tier can actually use is not obtainable from the page and is not claimed here. And one entry is simply inconsistent between the vendor's two sources: Zapier is an entitlement on the Plus tier and on no other, while the pricing page lists it with no tier marked at all.

User sentiment 2.8/5

A 1.9-point spread between platforms, and the shape inside one platform matters more than the spread. Trustpilot displays 2.7 from 1,446 reviews while the distribution table on the same page — 641 five-star, 229 four, 104 three, 114 two and 358 one — averages 3.47. Both numbers are the platform's; the gap is its recency weighting, on a profile it itself flags as not having invited customers recently. The Gartner Digital Markets pool shows 4.6 from 2,570 reviews, counted once across Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice because it is one pool. TrustRadius shows 8.6 out of 10 from 946 ratings, and prints a second count of 702 on the same page. What the corpus says is more useful than any of those numbers. Among the 84 English-language reviews we read, cancellation is a theme in 38% of the bottom of the distribution against 4% of the top, and contract in 29% against 0%. Billing is 17% against 0%. Support is the most frequent theme at both ends, 65% below and 58% above, so it does not separate them. The complaints that differentiate this product are about the commercial relationship, not the software — and the corpus runs 46.5% one-star against the platform's own 24.8%, so these are shares of what we read, not of all reviews.

Docs & learning resources 3.6/5

The best documentation we have measured, with three defects that keep it off four. What is good is specific and unusual. The help centre publishes the numbers other vendors leave to a sales call: the overage rate of half a cent an email, the shutoff at three times the limit, the in-app warnings at 75, 90 and 100 per cent, the reset day for monthly and annual plans, the pause limits of three months once every twelve, the exported CSV columns, the seven-day validity of the download link, and what a shared automation leaves behind. Every article carries a last-updated date and most are within weeks; the account-review article was updated the day before this was assembled. One article exists purely to answer whether unsubscribed and bounced contacts count, and answers yes. Against that, three real faults. The terms of service and the help centre describe different consequences for the same event — the terms say sending stops at the limit, the help centre says it bills an overage and stops at three times the limit — and neither document mentions the other. A single article carries two different cutoff dates for the same November 2025 policy change, so an account created on 3 November falls in two bands at once. And the anti-spam policy that governs suspension is stamped September 2021, five years older than the terms beside it.

Support & reliability 2.9/5

Widely discussed and not a differentiator, which is a specific finding rather than a shrug. Support is the most frequent theme at both ends of our corpus: 65% of the one and two-star reviews and 58% of the four and five-star ones, a gap of seven points where cancellation's gap is thirty-four. People talk about support here whether they are happy or not. The published offer is tiered and honest about it: 'Email & chat support' marked Priority on Enterprise and Professional and Basic on Plus and Starter, the same split on onboarding and migration support, a dedicated account team and an uptime SLA on Enterprise only. Software Advice's customer support sub-score is 4.4, the highest of its four sub-scores. Two deductions. No telephone support is named on any tier. And the support experience is where the commercial friction lands: cancelling a commit-annually plan, downgrading a tier, lowering a contact limit and removing an add-on all require contacting the same team, and a cancellation may require scheduling a session with it first.

Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →

## What sending actually costs, and the rule nobody can settle

The sending allowance is published as a multiple of the contact limit rather than as a separate number: fifteen times on Enterprise, twelve on Professional, ten on Plus and ten on Starter^[2]. This is a genuinely good design. It scales with what you are already paying for.

Then there are two published rules for what happens when you pass it, and they contradict each other.

The terms of service say sending stops: "If you reach your monthly send limit, you will not be able to send any more messages to your Contacts, including any messages scheduled for sending at a future date, until the start of the next calendar month"^[5]. The help centre says the opposite: "We won't disrupt your service if your total email sends exceeds your monthly limit. Instead, you are charged an overage fee for that month", at half a cent per email, with sending switched off only once "the overage value of sends reaches three times your limit"^[8].

One document promises an interruption at the limit. The other promises an unbudgeted charge up to three times it. The terms were last updated in December 2025 and the help article in September 2026, and neither mentions the other. The two documents also name different reset days, the calendar month against the billing cycle.

Get the answer in writing before you commit to a volume.

## The six add-ons nobody prices

The pricing page names a Pipelines enhanced CRM add-on, a Sales Engagement enhanced CRM add-on, a Custom Reporting add-on, an SMS add-on, an AI Activities add-on and a WhatsApp Messaging add-on. Every appearance of every one of them is the phrase "Available add-on" or "Included in add-on". Not one carries a figure^[2].

The same page's FAQ says "There are no setup costs or hidden fees when you start with ActiveCampaign", and separately that "ActiveCampaign's modular approach means you choose the plan and add-ons that fit your current needs"^[2]. Choosing an add-on requires knowing what it costs.

The catalogue prices some of them. SMS runs twenty-one dollars a month for a thousand included credits, which do not roll over. Postmark runs fifteen dollars a month for ten thousand emails. The WhatsApp add-on has a full ladder. The two CRM add-ons carry empty price ladders on all three tiers that offer them^[3], so even the billing system does not state their price. The help centre, asked directly, points back at the pricing page: "For specific information on costs and what features are included, please visit our pricing page." The pricing page does not carry them.

The AI is in the same position. Active Intelligence is the first row of the feature matrix, with unlimited access on the top two tiers and limited access on the lower two. But AI translations and AI actions are marked "Available add-on" on all four tiers including Enterprise, and the catalogue carries a matching Activities meter with zero included units on every tier, priced from a dollar a month for two hundred^[3]. The AI that suggests is included. The AI that acts is bought by the unit, at a price the page never states.

The exit

There are no refunds. "As a policy, our company does not provide partial or full refunds"^[6]. No window, no guarantee period, no exception. Consulting services are separately non-cancellable and non-refundable, and terminated accounts "will not receive partial credit". The vendor's own answer to this is the trial, and the refund policy says so: "To ensure that our software will meet your needs, you should try it out first."

Cancelling is self-service and, unusually, may be done by email. The terms grant it plainly and name an address^[5]. Three cases then take it back: a commit-annually plan, any downgrade, and an account held through a service provider all require contacting the Customer Experience team^[7]. Before a cancellation completes, "Depending on your plan, we may need you to schedule a free 1:1 session with a member of our Success team." Whatever happens, the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period, and on an annual term that is the end of the year.

Pausing exists as a middle path, bounded and published: three months maximum, once every twelve months, monthly plans only^[12]. The commit-annually plan cannot be paused either.

The hardest line is about the data. The terms say the service "does not serve as a repository for Contact Data" and that backing it up is your responsibility, on a system "entirely independent" of ActiveCampaign. And then: "Upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data"^[5].

The export is real, free and self-service: contacts to CSV with custom fields, lead scores, deal scores and tags, on a download link valid for seven days^[13]. Two things do not come with it. "Contact notes cannot be exported." And automations have no file export at all — the only published way to take one out is a share link, which the vendor states carries none of the campaigns, lists, scores, deals, pipelines, events or whitelisted domains the automation references^[14].

Run that export while the subscription is still alive.

## What the reviews argue about

The platforms disagree by nearly two points, and the shape inside one of them says more than the spread.

Trustpilot displays 2.7 from 1,446 reviews. The distribution table on the same page gives 641 five-star, 229 four, 104 three, 114 two and 358 one-star, and those counts average 3.47^[17]. Both numbers belong to the platform; the gap is its recency weighting, on a profile it itself flags with the notice that the company "hasn't invited customers recently, so reviews may not be representative". The Gartner Digital Markets pool shows 4.6 from 2,570 reviews, which we count once because Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice are one pool^[18]. TrustRadius shows 8.6 out of ten from 946 ratings, and prints a second count of 702 on the same page.

What people actually say is more useful. We read the ninety-nine reviews our connector returned, took the eighty-four in English, and cross-tabulated themes against star rating.

Theme	Share of 1-2 star	Share of 4-5 star	Gap, points
Cancellation	38%	4%	+34
Contract	29%	0%	+29
Interface	21%	0%	+21
AI	33%	15%	+18
Billing	17%	0%	+17
Support	65%	58%	+7
Complexity	10%	12%	-2
Hitting the contact limit	4%	12%	-8

Read the bottom two rows first. Complexity is flat and hitting the contact limit actually runs the other way. The complaints that differentiate this product are not that the software is hard or that the meter bites. They are about the commercial relationship: cancelling, the contract, the billing. Support is the most frequent theme at both ends, which means people talk about it whether they are happy or not, so it separates nothing.

One caution on these numbers. That corpus runs 46.5% one-star against the platform's own 24.8%, so it over-represents the unhappy end by about a factor of two. These are shares of what we read, with the counts beside them, not shares of all reviews.

## Who should buy it, and who should look twice

Buy it if you need automation depth and you will use it. Nine hundred prebuilt recipes, segment logic that actually composes, revenue attribution and conversion tracking, and 1,056 apps and integrations counted in the vendor's own marketplace^[16] is a serious platform, and the documentation is the best we have measured — the help centre publishes the overage rate, the warning thresholds, the reset day, the export columns and the answer about unsubscribed contacts, each article dated.

Look twice in three cases. If you are a two-person team on Starter, map your growth: that plan runs out of seats at two and contacts at twenty-five thousand, where it is already dearer than the tier above. If what you want is a CRM, price the add-ons first, because the pipeline is not in the platform and the add-on price is published nowhere. And if you are choosing a billing term, remember that the cheaper one is the one that cannot be paused and cannot be cancelled without a phone call.

Written as "active campaign" in two words, the search demand splits: the one-word spelling carries between two and six times more on every commercial query we measured^[2]. If you are researching this product, search it the way the vendor spells it.