As you start looking for a CRM with email and automation capabilities, there’s a good chance ActiveCampaign makes it onto your shortlist, along with HubSpot. When evaluating both platforms, decision-makers typically focus on things like pricing, features, ease of use, automation options, email marketing capabilities, integrations and reporting. To help you compare both tools and decide which one is the best option for you, we compared both platforms. Below is a deep dive into some key areas, with pros and cons, to help you choose the best fit for your organization.
Let’s start with pricing. The license is definitely a factor to take into account. But most companies put too much importance on this. Much more important than the cost of it, is the value it brings. That being said, let’s dive into the specifics.
You can get started on the free CRM with basic contact management, deal pipelines, chat, email marketing and forms. Paid tiers start at € 9 per user per month for the Sales Hub Starter, but features (reporting, team seats) rapidly add up as you scale.
Bundled marketing, sales and service Hubs require a 12-month commitment, and enterprise plans can exceed € 3,300/month for 10,000 contacts.
Another pricing related point to mention, is that you need onboarding services for Professional and Enterprise level Hubs. The cost of this varies depending on the parter you work with and what is required for your specific setup.
ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free tier, but the Starter plan begins at €15/month for up to 1,000 contacts (billed annually), including email marketing and basic automations. Mid-tier “Plus” (from €49/month for 1 user) adds CRM features as a paid add-on. “Professional” (from €79/month) unlocks predictive content, attribution and conversion reporting. Entreprise level pricing starts at €145/month for 1 user.
To give you a comprehensive overview here is a bit hard, because many features are add-ons you pay extra for.
A price comparison can be a bit tricky: what is included in 1 package may be a paying add-on in another package. Both platforms allow you to start at a low cost. HubSpot offers a free option with a very decent CRM and some basic marketing capabilities, but quickly gets expensive if you require enterprise level features. ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free package, offers a more predictable price per contact. Just beware that the devil is in the details: add-ons can make it much more expensive. Do your homework before deciding on anything.
HubSpot is a full ecosystem. At it’s core there is a powerful CRM. It has Sales, Marketing, Service, Content, Commerce and Operations Hubs all natively connected. You can use it as a true “single source of truth” for customer data.
With so many modules, onboarding can get complex. Teams often need dedicated admin resources or professional services. This can add up. On the other hand, they would probably pay higher onboarding fees other platforms that offer similar complexity and scale. This point is relative, but definitely to be taken into account. If you only need basic email marketing or a simple CRM, the breadth of features can feel like overkill.
ActiveCampaign combines email marketing and a lightweight CRM in one intuitive interface. This works well for email-centric sales & marketing teams. It offers a simpler data model makes it faster to set up and learn.
On the other hand ActiveCampaign doesn’t include full customer service or website/CMS functionality. You need third-party tools to fill those gaps. And though the CRM is simpler to set up, you do still need to set up most of the properties yourself, and for most of it there will not be any data validation. As you grow, you may outpace its built-in CRM capabilities and need to integrate a dedicated sales platform (which again will take an investment).
With HubSpot you get a powerful visual workflow builder that can span multiple hubs (e.g., trigger a support ticket when a lead reaches a score threshold). This means it automates a lot more than just marketing. It offers deep branching logic, if/then branches, and cross-tool actions (ads, chatbots, webhooks) that allows for sophisticated and refined workflows.
The number of options and dependencies across hubs can make workflows feel overwhelming for new users, so some training is definitely needed. HubSpot’s complex automations are very powerful, but may require training or reliance on templates to avoid mistakes. It’s why we include training in our onboardings by default.
ActiveCampaign offers an exceptionally intuitive drag-and-drop automation canvas focused on email and SMS journeys. With built-in “recipes” (or templates) and goal tracking it is simple to launch common campaigns quickly.
Without external integrations though, this platform is less suited for multi-channel orchestration beyond email/SMS. Furthermore, ActiveCampaign lacks some of the cross-tool triggers and actions that HubSpot workflows offer.
HubSpot offers a polished drag-and-drop editor with a rich library of responsive templates. It has advanced A/B and adaptive testing, personalization tokens and smart send times that allow for hyper-personalization.
That being said, HubSpot’s higher-tier are plans required for the most advanced testing and segmentation features. The template library can feel less extensive than other specialized email platforms. Making your own templates is fortunately quite easy to do without any coding.
ActiveCampaign is built with deliverability in mind. It has robust list hygiene tools and behavior-based segmentation. Dynamic content blocks adapt emails based on contact data or actions.
ActiveCampaign’s template design options are solid but they are not as visually polished as HubSpot’s, making it a slightly less user-friendly option. The A/B testing capabilities are more limited to subject lines and basic content splits.
The HubSpot app marketplace has over 1,900 native integrations, including deep, bi-directional syncs with Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk, and major ad platforms. The marketplace has partner-certified extensions and pre-built connector apps. On top of that, you can set up ‘private apps’. These are custom-built apps designed for a single HubSpot account, offering a secure way to integrate with the HubSpot API using access tokens.
Some of the advanced integrations or data-warehouse syncs require the premium Operations Hub (meaning additional licensing costs). It can be costly or complex to implement enterprise-grade connectors, which most SMBs probably won’t need right away.
ActiveCampaign counts nearly 1,000 integrations as well, including WordPress, WooCommerce, Zapier, and Facebook Custom Audiences. It’s open API makes custom integrations straightforward for developers.
With ActiveCampaign, many connectors rely on Zapier or third-party middleware rather than native apps, which makes them less robust. Enterprise-level data-sync features (e.g., delta sync, contact deduplication) are less mature than HubSpot’s.
HubSpot offers fully customizable dashboards, cross-hub attribution reporting and revenue analytics. It pulls in data from connected apps as well. It also offers calculated properties, forecast tools, funnel drop-off charts and custom report builder.
Some advanced reporting tools are only available in higher-tier plans. And for new users and non-analyst users, the HubSpot dashboards and reporting tools have a steep learning curve to build complex reports.
ActiveCampaign offers real-time campaign performance metrics and built-in attribution models on mid-tier plans. Its automation reports let you track goal completions and drop-off points.
The dashboards in ActiveCampaign are less flexible: customization is quite limited compared to HubSpot. For deep business intelligence, you’ll likely need to export data to an external BI tool.
The HubSpot knowledge base offers huge amount of support articles that help you do most of the practical things on the platform. There’s also the famous HubSpot academy with many courses on more than just the platform itself. And there is a community where many people share ideas and knowhow. Paid plans include email and in-app chat; higher tiers add phone support and optional onboarding services.
Free users have no direct support channels and have to rely on community help. Official onboarding packages can be expensive add-ons, and for all Professional and Enterprise Hubs, onboarding is mandatory and necessary.
ActiveCampaign has a 24/7 live chat support even on entry-level plans; phone support on Plus and above. There is free migration assistance and a robust self-help center on the platform.
ActiveCampaign unfortunately doesn’t come with dedicated onboarding consultants: implementation guidance comes via support reps rather than professional services. For more complex setups, that can be tough. It has a smaller community than HubSpot’s ecosystem of partners and agencies, so you might not find as many support topics on there.
HubSpot has an AI copilot for many common tasks like blog outlines, email drafts, social captions, quick lookups in the CRM, some basic research etc. There are also Breeze agents to help you do specific sales and marketing tasks, like enriching company and contact data. The platform also has predictive lead scoring, chatbots and social listening built into the core platform.
HubSpot’s Breeze AI comes at additional costs, and some of the AI features are still in beta.
ActiveCampaign’s “Predictive Sending” optimizes email send times based on individual behavior patterns, which increases the likelihood of people opening your email. The automated subject-line suggestions and predictive content for personalized campaigns make life easier for your marketing team.
However, ActiveCampaign’s AI capabilities are predominantly email-focused. If offers fewer cross-channel AI tools compared to HubSpot.
HubSpot offers Enterprise governance: single sign-on (SSO), custom objects, hierarchical teams and audit logs are just a few features that enterprise clients value. It also has SLA-backed uptime, HIPAA compliance (with add-on), and advanced security features. Increasing limits for your amount of contacts, reports, forms etc. is easy to do, but the Enterprise Hubs already offer generous limits.
The biggest downside is that enterprise plans come with hefty price tags that are often out of budget for smaller companies. It also often requires dedicated admin staff to manage everything.
ActiveCampaign grows comfortably with SMBs into the mid-market. The cost remains predictable by contacts. If has security and compliance (GDPR, SOC 2) baked into all plans so you don’t need to worry about any of that.
ActiveCampaign lacks some of the fine-grained access controls and governance tools large enterprises demand. For very large teams, reporting limits and API call caps can become serious constraints.
Go with HubSpot if:
Your organization needs a unified suite spanning marketing, sales, service and a CMS platform.
You demand best-in-class reporting, enterprise governance or deep cross-tool automations.
You have the resources to invest in onboarding and want a platform that can scale to a larger team of users and more complex corporate requirements.
Go with ActiveCampaign if:
You prioritize email/SMS automation first and foremost.
Your organization is looking for predictable, per-contact pricing and basic support from day one.
You’re a small-to-mid-sized team that needs rapid time-to-value without heavy professional services.
ActiveCampaign delivers great value and ease for pure play marketing automation. HubSpot shines when you require a robust, advanced CRM ecosystem that unifies every customer touchpoint. Choose based on whether you need breadth and scale (HubSpot) or focused automation and lower predictable costs (ActiveCampaign).
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