ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse: Same Entry Price, Opposite Sending Models

These two products cost almost exactly the same at the door and meter the one thing that matters most completely differently.

ActiveCampaign Starter is $19 a month paid monthly, or $15 on an annual term. GetResponse Starter is nineteen dollars a month paid monthly, or fifteen dollars fifty-eight on an annual term^[21]. Both figures buy one thousand contacts.

Then ActiveCampaign gives you ten thousand emails a month and GetResponse gives you unlimited monthly sends.

OUR TAKE: At the entry band this is close to a straight choice between a capped send allowance with a deeper platform behind it, and uncapped sending with a simpler one. The price difference is noise. The metering difference is not.

The entry band, side by side

Read from both vendors' own pages on the same day.

Plan	Monthly, $/mo	Annual, $/mo	Metered on	Sending
ActiveCampaign Starter	19	15.00	contacts, 1,000 band	10x contacts
ActiveCampaign Plus	59	49.00	contacts, 1,000 band	10x contacts
GetResponse Starter	19	15.58	list size, 1,000 band	unlimited
GetResponse Marketer	59	48.38	list size, 1,000 band	unlimited

The symmetry is almost comic. Two vendors, four plans, two prices.

## One difference you can see on the page, and one you cannot

GetResponse displays both billing terms at once. Its cards show the monthly figure struck through beside the annual one, with the annual saving named in dollars per year^[21].

ActiveCampaign displays only the annual figure and labels it "Billed annually" in smaller type beneath^[2]. The monthly rates exist in the vendor's own billing catalogue — $19, $59, $99 and $179 at the entry band — and on no page a visitor can reach^[3].

Neither approach is wrong. One of them is simply harder to price from.

The sending question

This is the comparison. GetResponse publishes "Unlimited monthly email sends" on all three of its plans and repeats it in its own FAQ: "Monthly payment plans are bracketed by list size, starting at $19 per month for unlimited messages to 1,000 subscribers"^[21].

ActiveCampaign publishes a multiple instead: ten times the contact limit on Starter and Plus, twelve on Professional, fifteen on Enterprise^[2]. At a thousand contacts that is ten thousand emails a month.

Which is better depends entirely on your sending pattern. Ten times your list is generous for a weekly newsletter and tight for a daily one, and it is tight for anyone running heavy automation, because automated campaigns count toward the limit while one-to-one and transactional mail does not^[8].

And ActiveCampaign's limit has an edge it has not resolved. The terms of service say sending stops until the next calendar month^[5]. The help centre says you are charged half a cent an email, with sending switched off only at three times the limit, and the reset tied to your billing cycle^[8]. If you are choosing ActiveCampaign partly on the send allowance, get that in writing.

## Bands and ceilings

GetResponse publishes seven list sizes: one thousand, two and a half, five, ten, twenty-five, fifty and a hundred thousand^[21].

ActiveCampaign's selector shows twelve bands and its catalogue carries forty-eight on the middle tiers and forty-nine on Enterprise, reaching thirty million^[3]. The Starter tier is the exception: eight bands, ending at twenty-five thousand contacts, where it already costs more per month than Plus charges for the same number.

Contacts	AC Starter, $/mo	AC Plus, $/mo
1,000	15	49
5,000	79	145
10,000	149	189
25,000	391	389

All annual rates. The last row is the one to notice.

Seats

ActiveCampaign includes one seat on Starter and caps that tier at two, against nine hundred and ninety-nine on every tier above^[3]. A second seat is ten dollars a month.

We have not measured GetResponse's seat model, and we are not going to assert one. It is on the list for that product's own measurement.

## Capability, with the boundary marked

We have ActiveCampaign's full capability list from its vendor's billing catalogue: seventy-nine named entitlements on Enterprise down to eleven on Starter^[3]. The entry tier is the narrow one by a long way — landing pages, site messages, contact scoring, combined segment logic, custom branding, database sync and AI content generation all begin at Plus.

For GetResponse we have read the pricing page and nothing more. Its cards name AI-powered content generation and position the third plan, Creator, around courses and monetisation, which is a product shape ActiveCampaign does not have at all.

That is as far as we will go. GetResponse's own cluster is coming, and this comparison will be rewritten with equal depth on both sides when it is.

The rest of ActiveCampaign's price surface

The entry comparison is clean. The rest of the ladder is where a buyer needs the catalogue, and this is what it says.

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

Those are the entry band. At ten thousand contacts the same four tiers are one hundred and forty-nine, one hundred and eighty-nine, three hundred and seventy-five and five hundred and eighty-nine dollars a month on annual terms. The tier matters less than the band on the lower half of the ladder, which is the opposite of how the page is laid out.

Fourteen separately metered entitlements sit underneath that across the vendor's eighteen products^[3]. Most buyers touch three or four, but the card shows the floor of a multi-meter bill rather than the bill.

## The add-ons that carry the features

Six are named on ActiveCampaign's pricing page and none is priced there^[2]: Pipelines enhanced CRM, Sales Engagement enhanced CRM, Custom Reporting, SMS, AI Activities and WhatsApp Messaging.

Two of those carry the sales pipeline. Pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring are each marked "Included in add-on" on every tier that offers them, and their entitlements carry empty price ladders in the vendor's own billing catalogue^[3]. So if the reason you are comparing these two products is that you want one system for marketing and sales, the price of the sales half is not published anywhere.

The AI meter is the same pattern with a visible number. The catalogue's Activities entitlement has zero included units on all four tiers and starts at a dollar a month for two hundred, while the page marks AI translations and AI actions "Available add-on" even on Enterprise^[3].

What ActiveCampaign publishes about its own mechanics

Worth a section, because it is the thing that made this measurement possible at all.

The help centre publishes the overage rate, the shutoff threshold at three times the limit, in-app warnings at 75, 90 and 100 per cent of capacity, the reset day for monthly and annual plans, the columns in a contact export, the seven-day validity of the download link, the pause rules, the trial's hundred-send ceiling, and a dedicated article on whether unsubscribed and bounced contacts count^[8]. Every article is dated and most are current within weeks.

That is more published mechanics than any product we have measured in any category. It sits alongside a pricing page that publishes no monthly rate and no add-on price, which is a strange combination and a real one.

## What the reviews argue about

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, 358 one — averages 3.47^[17]. The Gartner Digital Markets pool shows 4.6 from 2,570, counted once because Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice share it. TrustRadius shows 8.6 out of ten from 946 ratings and prints a second count of 702 on the same page^[19].

The shape is more useful than the scores. Among the eighty-four English reviews we read, cancellation is a theme in 38% of the one and two-star reviews against 4% of the four and five-star ones. Contract runs 29% against zero. Billing runs 17% against zero. Meanwhile complexity is flat at 10% against 12%, and hitting the contact limit actually runs the other way, 4% against 12%.

Read that last pair carefully, because it says something specific. People do not complain that this product is hard or that its meter bites. They complain about the commercial relationship.

Integrations

ActiveCampaign's marketplace counts 1,056 apps and integrations, rendered as a filter result rather than claimed in copy^[16]. That is the largest number we have counted in any category. The API and webhooks are on every tier including Starter.

The caveat we found while counting: the marketplace offers a filter by plan, but the server returns the same total for every plan, so the number of those 1,056 available to a given tier cannot be read off the page. Check the specific connectors you need against the tier.

Leaving

ActiveCampaign publishes no refunds of any kind^[6], cancellation that takes effect at the end of the current period, and three cases where cancelling requires contacting support rather than clicking^[7]. Its terms state that "upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data"^[5], so the export happens before the exit. The export itself is free, covers contacts with custom fields, scores and tags, and excludes contact notes^[13].

We have not read GetResponse's refund or cancellation terms, so there is no comparison to draw here yet.

Which one to pick

If your sending volume is high relative to your list — daily mail, heavy automation, large campaign counts, GetResponse's unlimited sending removes a variable that ActiveCampaign leaves in, and does it at the same price at the entry band.

If what you want is the automation engine, ActiveCampaign is the deeper product by a margin we can demonstrate rather than assert, and its documentation is the best we have measured. Just price it properly: the figure on the card is annual, the entry tier holds two people and stops at twenty-five thousand contacts, and the sales pipeline is an add-on whose price is published nowhere.

And if you are torn, the tiebreaker is the one neither page answers. Both products will stop your sending if your list quality slips, and ActiveCampaign's trial allows a hundred sends, which will not tell you anything about deliverability either way^[14].

Before you commit to either

Five questions, in the order they will cost you money.

What is your real contact band? On ActiveCampaign it is the single biggest lever on the invoice, and the page shows twelve of the forty-eight the catalogue carries^[3]. On GetResponse there are seven published list sizes, so the question is simpler and still worth answering before you compare headline prices.

Which billing term are you being quoted? ActiveCampaign's page shows only the annual one. GetResponse shows both. If you are budgeting monthly, build ActiveCampaign's figure yourself from the catalogue rather than from the card.

How many people need logins? ActiveCampaign's entry tier holds two and then stops^[3]. That ceiling catches more small teams than the contact band does.

Do you need a sales pipeline? On ActiveCampaign that is an add-on with no published price, on either the pricing page or in the vendor's own billing catalogue^[2].

And what happens if you want out? ActiveCampaign publishes no refunds at all, a cancellation that lands at the end of the current period, and a line stating that access to contact data ends at cancellation^[6]. Export in month one, keep the file, and treat the fourteen-day trial as the only risk-free window you get.

## What we measured, and what we did not

We think this belongs in the article rather than in a footnote.

On ActiveCampaign we read the pricing page as served, the vendor's billing product catalogue of eighteen products, the static fallback price file, the terms of service in full, fifteen help-centre articles, the app marketplace, three review platforms and ninety-nine reviews. Every quotation in this article was checked against the text the vendor served before it was written.

On GetResponse we read one page, its pricing page, rendered from the United States on the same day. Everything we say about GetResponse comes from there and is dated accordingly.

That asymmetry is the honest state of our measurement today, and GetResponse's own cluster is in the queue. When it is done, this article gets rewritten with equal depth on both sides rather than quietly left as it is.