ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Two Contact Meters, Two Prices Neither Page Shows You

Both of these products charge you for the number of people in your database. Both of them stop your sending when you pass it. And neither one shows you, on its pricing page, the figure you will actually pay in your second year.

They get there by opposite routes, and that is the useful part of this comparison.

Both framings are legal. Neither is complete.

OUR TAKE: ActiveCampaign shows one honest number in a misleading frame: every price on its page is the annual rate, with no way to see the monthly one. Mailchimp shows a promotional number in a clear frame: every paid price is labelled "for 12 months", and what comes after is the question. If you are choosing today, the decision turns less on the headline and more on which unanswered number matters to you.

What each page actually displays

Read from the United States on the same day, both pages rendered rather than guessed.

	Displayed	Billing term shown	What is missing
ActiveCampaign Starter	$15/mo	Billed annually	the month-to-month rate
ActiveCampaign Plus	$49/mo	Billed annually	the month-to-month rate
ActiveCampaign Professional	$79/mo	Billed annually	the month-to-month rate
ActiveCampaign Enterprise	$145/mo	Billed annually	the month-to-month rate
Mailchimp Essentials	$13/mo	for 12 months	the rate after twelve months
Mailchimp Standard	$20/mo	for 12 months	the rate after twelve months
Mailchimp Premium	$350/mo	for 12 months	the rate after twelve months

Mailchimp also publishes a free plan, which ActiveCampaign does not. That matters. Its limit is stated on the page: two hundred and fifty contacts^[20].

## The ActiveCampaign side of the gap

ActiveCampaign's four figures are the annual rates. The vendor's own billing catalogue carries both terms, and the month-to-month rates at the same contact band are $19, $59, $99 and $179^[3]. Across the thirty-two tier-and-band combinations we measured, the annual term saves between 16.9% and 21.6%, median 20.1%.

So the page is accurate and the frame is incomplete. The number is real. The context is not. A buyer who wants to pay monthly — which is also the only way to keep the right to pause the account^[12] — has no way to learn the price from the page.

The Mailchimp side of the gap

Mailchimp's gap is in the other direction and it is signposted. Each paid card carries the words "for 12 months" and then the phrase "Then, starts at" followed by a figure.

In the markup served to a United States request, those post-promotional figures are present only in euros: €11.71, €18.01 and €315.20^[20]. The extracted text of the same page shows the dollar promotional price and an empty space where the follow-on number should be, because the figure is injected by script.

We report that as what it is. The promotional dollar price is displayed, the standard dollar price is not in the text we read, and the only standard figures present in the served page are in a different currency. If you are buying Mailchimp, that is the number to ask for in writing.

Ask in writing. A screenshot is not a quote.

## What happens when you reach the limit

Here the two products behave the same way, and both say so. That is worth noting.

Mailchimp's page carries the line "Sending will be paused if contact or email send limit is exceeded"^[20]. ActiveCampaign publishes the same shape in more detail: "Once you reach your contact limit, you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9], with automations continuing to run while their send steps are skipped, and contacts still arriving through the API, through integrations and through forms.

Neither product bills you automatically for going over, which is worth saying because some products in this family do. ActiveCampaign offers auto-upgrade as an opt-in, and the vendor recommends it; turn it on and fees "increase immediately according to usage"^[5].

ActiveCampaign also answers the question underneath this one, in a dedicated article: "All contacts, regardless of their list status, count towards your contact limit", for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025^[11]. That is the expensive answer and it is published. We have not measured Mailchimp's equivalent rule, and it is the first thing we would ask.

Sending allowance

ActiveCampaign states its allowance as a multiple of the contact limit: ten times on Starter and Plus, twelve on Professional, fifteen on Enterprise^[2]. At a thousand contacts that is ten thousand emails a month on the entry tier.

That design is good and we say so, because it scales with what you are already paying for rather than becoming a second negotiation. Few vendors do this.

The limit has an unresolved edge, though, and it is ActiveCampaign's own doing. The terms of service say sending stops at the limit until the next calendar month^[5]. The help centre says you are charged half a cent an email and sending stops only at three times the limit, with the reset tied to your billing cycle^[8]. Two vendor documents, one event, two answers.

## Seats

ActiveCampaign includes one seat on Starter and Plus, three on Professional and five on Enterprise, and caps Starter at two seats against nine hundred and ninety-nine elsewhere^[3]. An extra Starter seat is ten dollars a month. Then the tier is full.

That two-seat ceiling is the single most likely reason a small team outgrows the entry tier before it outgrows the contact band.

The pipeline question

If you are comparing these two as marketing tools, this section does not apply. If you are comparing them as a place to keep your sales process, it decides the answer.

ActiveCampaign's pricing page marks pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring as "Included in add-on" on every tier that offers them^[2], and the price of that add-on is published neither on the page nor in the vendor's own billing catalogue, where the relevant entitlements carry empty price ladders^[3].

So the honest statement is that ActiveCampaign's CRM exists, is good enough that the vendor sells it as two separate add-ons, and costs an amount you cannot find out until you are in a billing screen.

## What each one is deep at

This is where we can only speak confidently about one side, so we will mark the boundary clearly.

We have measured ActiveCampaign's capability from the vendor's own billing catalogue, which lists every entitlement by name: seventy-nine on Enterprise, seventy-one on Professional, fifty-six on Plus and eleven on Starter^[3]. The depth is real — automation with unlimited actions and more than nine hundred recipes, segment logic that composes conditions, revenue attribution, conversion tracking, custom objects, database sync, single sign-on — and the first step in that ladder is the steepest.

We have measured Mailchimp's pricing page and nothing else. Its full measurement is the next cluster we are doing in this category, and when it is published this comparison will be updated with the same depth on both sides. Until then, treat every claim here about Mailchimp as a claim about what its pricing page said on the day we read it.

Leaving

ActiveCampaign publishes a flat refusal: "As a policy, our company does not provide partial or full refunds"^[6], with no window and no exception. Cancellation is self-service and may be sent by email, except on a commit-annually plan, on any downgrade, or through a service provider, where you must contact the Customer Experience team^[7].

The hardest line is about data. "Upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data", alongside a statement that the service "does not serve as a repository for Contact Data" and that backing it up is your job^[5]. The export is free and self-service and excludes contact notes, and automations have no file export at all^[13].

Mailchimp's page states that you can "Cancel or downgrade to our Essentials or basic Free plans at any time"^[20], which is a different shape: a free floor to fall back to rather than an exit. We have not read Mailchimp's refund policy or its data-retention terms, so we are not comparing those.

## How ActiveCampaign's price is actually assembled

If you are comparing the two headline figures, this is the part that makes the comparison unfair to whichever one you have not looked inside.

An ActiveCampaign invoice is a function of three things: which product, which tier and which contact band. The pricing page shows the first band of one tier of one product, which is why every card is prefixed "Starts at". The selector offers twelve bands; the vendor's own catalogue carries forty-eight on the middle tiers and forty-nine on Enterprise, reaching thirty million contacts^[3].

Here is the same four-tier table one honest step along, 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

Underneath that sit fourteen separately metered entitlements across the vendor's eighteen products: user seats, contacts, email sends, activities, custom reports, inbox preview tests, CRM core, three WhatsApp meters, SMS and SMS credits, and two Postmark lines^[3]. Most buyers touch three or four of them. The point is that the card shows the floor of a multi-meter bill, not the bill.

The six add-ons, and why they matter here

ActiveCampaign's 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 each is the phrase "Available add-on" or "Included in add-on", and not one carries a figure^[2].

The catalogue fills in some of them: SMS at twenty-one dollars a month for a thousand credits that do not roll over, Postmark at fifteen dollars a month for ten thousand emails, and a full ladder for WhatsApp. The two CRM add-ons carry empty price ladders on every tier that offers them^[3].

The AI is the one most likely to catch a buyer out. Active Intelligence is the first row of the feature matrix, with unlimited access on the top two tiers. But AI translations and AI actions are marked "Available add-on" on all four tiers including Enterprise, and the catalogue's matching Activities meter has 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.

What each vendor publishes about itself

This is a comparison axis people skip, and it is one of the most useful.

ActiveCampaign's documentation is the best we have measured anywhere. Its help centre publishes the overage rate of half a cent an email, the shutoff 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 exported CSV columns, the seven-day validity of the download link, the pause limits, the trial's hundred-send ceiling, and a dedicated article answering whether unsubscribed and bounced contacts count. Every article carries a date and most are within weeks^[8].

It also contradicts itself in one place that matters, which we have already covered, and its anti-spam policy is five years older than the terms it sits beside.

We are not drawing a comparison here, because we have read one Mailchimp page and a great many ActiveCampaign ones. We mention it because when you do your own evaluation, the quality of a vendor's published mechanics is a signal in itself, and this one is strong.

What the reviews say about ActiveCampaign

Trustpilot displays 2.7 from 1,446 reviews while that platform's own distribution table averages 3.47^[17]. The Gartner Digital Markets pool shows 4.6 from 2,570, counted once. TrustRadius shows 8.6 out of ten from 946.

The useful number is not any of those. In the eighty-four English reviews we read and cross-tabulated, cancellation is a theme in 38% of the one and two-star reviews against 4% of the four and five-star ones, and contract runs 29% against zero. Complexity is flat and hitting the contact limit runs the other way. The argument about this product is commercial, not technical.

## Which one to pick

Pick ActiveCampaign if the automation is the point. The depth is verifiable, the integration catalogue is the largest we have counted at 1,056^[16], and the documentation publishes the numbers most vendors keep for a sales call. Go in knowing three things: the price you see is the annual one, the entry tier holds two people, and the CRM is an add-on with no published price.

Pick Mailchimp if a free floor matters, or if you want the promotional year and are comfortable asking what follows it. Its free plan is real and capped at two hundred and fifty contacts, and its paid cards are honest about being promotional in a way ActiveCampaign's are not about being annual.

And if the deciding factor is deliverability rather than price, neither page will tell you. ActiveCampaign's trial allows one hundred email sends^[14], which is enough to test the builder and not enough to test anything that matters about sending.