ActiveCampaign Alternatives for SaaS in 2026

Prices checked 7 October 2026; each price links to the vendor page it came from.

Why SaaS teams leave ActiveCampaign

The headline on the ActiveCampaign pricing page is a set of starting prices at 1,000 email contacts: Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79 and Enterprise $145 a month, all billed annually. The contact selector shows how quickly those climb. At 10,000 contacts Starter reads $149, Plus $189, Pro $375 and Enterprise $589; at 25,000 contacts the four read $391, $389, $629 and $879. Between 1,000 and 10,000 contacts the Starter price multiplies by about ten, exactly as the list does. At 50,000 contacts Starter is no longer offered (the page says it is available only on plans with 25,000 contacts or fewer), and Plus reads $609, Pro $969 and Enterprise $1,169.

The plan cards decide what you can build at those prices. Starter allows one user, limited segmentation and 5 actions per automation. Plus lifts the action limit and adds standard segmentation and landing pages, still for one user. Pro raises the seat count to three and adds advanced segmentation, predictive and conditional content and attribution. Custom objects, SSO and a dedicated account team appear only under Enterprise. A SaaS team that wants to model accounts or workspaces as objects, instead of squeezing them into contact fields, is therefore looking at the most expensive card.

Add-ons and caps complete the picture. Email sends are capped at 10 times your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12 times on Pro and 15 times on Enterprise. Transactional email is sold as an add-on, and the CRM pipelines and sales engagement features are add-ons too. None of this is unusual for a marketing suite, but it explains the usual complaint from product teams: the sticker price describes a newsletter tool, and the tool that fits the product lands two plans higher.

The alternatives, one by one

1. Customer.io: where accounts become objects without an Enterprise bill

Customer.io's pricing page counts profiles, and a profile can be a person or an object such as a company. Essentials reads $100 a month at 5,000 profiles; $145 at 10,000; $235 at 20,000; and $325 at 30,000, billed monthly, with 2 object types, 1 million emails a month and transactional email on every plan; Premium starts at $1,000 a month billed yearly with 10 object types. Compare that with ActiveCampaign, where objects appear only on Enterprise at $589 for 10,000 contacts. The pricing page lists US and EU data centers, and a DPA is published.

Two cautions. A profile that exists at any point in a billing month counts toward that month's bill even if you delete it, so import in stages. And the work shifts from marketing to engineering: your application has to send the events. The ActiveCampaign vs Customer.io page goes through that trade in detail.

2. HubSpot: when the CRM is the real requirement

HubSpot's Marketing Hub page lists Free tools and paid Starter ($7), Professional ($800) and Enterprise ($3,600) a month, priced per seat. The limits that matter to an ActiveCampaign user are automation actions: 1 on Free, up to 10 on Starter and unlimited on Professional. Omni-channel automation is capped at up to 300 workflows on Professional and 1,000 on Enterprise, and the Enterprise column is the one that mentions behavioural events and predictive lead scoring.

The honest summary is that HubSpot costs more than ActiveCampaign once automation matters, and buys a full CRM with owners, deals and one record per company. If your trial users are worked by salespeople, that is the product. If they are not, you are paying for a pipeline nobody opens. A DPA is published; the hosting region is not stated on the pages we read.

3. Userlist: users inside companies, priced by tracked users

Userlist suits B2B products with workspaces. Its pricing page reads Basic $149 a month for up to 10,000 users with $10 per extra 1,000, and Professional $349 with $12 per extra 1,000; Basic shows $229 at 18,000 users and $369 at 32,000. Professional adds A/B split testing, conversion goals and advanced workflow features, and both plans include in-app messages and segments for users and companies. The $149 floor makes it dearer than ActiveCampaign Starter at 2,500 contacts ($39) and about even with it at 10,000 ($149).

There is no CRM and no lead scoring on its pricing page, so a sales-assisted motion needs a separate CRM. For a product-led company where the unit is "workspace with five people", that is a fair swap.

4. Loops: a short setup and a free plan

Loops's pricing page shows a free plan with all features included, unlimited contacts, up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30 days to the 1,000 newest contacts, and a 10-emails-per-second limit. Paid plans scale with subscribers: $48 at 4,788; $99 at 9,998; $198 at 24,339; and $249 at 49,989, with unlimited sends to subscribers, transactional sends included and no seat fees. Against ActiveCampaign, Loops at 9,998 subscribers is $50 below Starter ($149) and $276 below Pro ($375).

What is missing is the point: no CRM, no pipeline and no scoring appear on the page. A team that used ActiveCampaign as a newsletter-plus-automation tool, with a handful of onboarding flows, often finds it was paying for the rest. See the ActiveCampaign vs Loops comparison before you decide.

5. Encharge: flows tied to events, with two caps

Encharge prices by subscribers: Growth reads $99 a month at 2,000 subscribers ($79 billed yearly); $179 at 5,000; $249 at 10,000; and $389 at 25,000. Premium reads $159, $269, $399 and $649. Both include unlimited flows; Growth limits monthly sends to 10 times the subscriber limit and monthly events to 50 times, while Premium raises those to 12 times and 100 times and adds HubSpot, Salesforce and transactional email. Extra email costs $100 per 100,000.

Encharge is dearer than ActiveCampaign Starter at 10,000 ($249 against $149), so the case for it is the event model and visual flows, not the price. At 25,000 it is $389 against Starter's $391 and Plus's $389, which is the one place the bills coincide.

6. MailerLite: the budget exit for newsletter-shaped programmes

MailerLite's pricing page lists a free plan with up to 250 subscribers, 2 user seats and 2,500 emails a month. Comfort reads $19 a month at 1,000 subscribers; $49 at 5,000; $89 at 10,000; and $179 at 25,000; Power reads $39, $69, $129 and $239. Comfort sends 10 times the subscriber ceiling each month, and Power is unlimited. Billing yearly takes the 500-subscriber Comfort price from $12 to $10.80. The page also states EU data storage with an ISO 27001 certificate.

The trade is scope: the page says transactional email comes from MailerSend, a separate product. If your ActiveCampaign Starter account sends a welcome series and a monthly digest, MailerLite does the same for $89 against $149 at 10,000. If it relies on event tracking from the product, check that first.

7. Brevo: pay for volume, not for list size

Brevo's pricing page says the email volume you select sets the tier. Free is $0 with 300 emails a day, Starter starts at $9 a month, Standard at $18 and Professional at $499 for 150,000 to 10 million monthly sends. A company with 40,000 contacts that mails four times a year uses far fewer emails than a contact-priced plan assumes, which is where Brevo beats ActiveCampaign on cost. Mailing every contact weekly reverses that.

8. Klaviyo: only if the product behaves like a shop

Klaviyo reads $20 at 500 active profiles; $60 at 2,500; $100 at 5,000; $150 at 10,000; and $400 at 25,000 on the Email plan, with a free plan of 250 profiles and 500 emails a month. At 10,000 it costs $1 more than ActiveCampaign Starter ($149), so the reason to move is product-level revenue reporting for subscription boxes, memberships or anything with a catalogue. The compare page on Klaviyo vs Customer.io covers the other end of that decision.

9. Mailchimp: simpler, with automation limits on the cheap plan

Mailchimp's pricing page offers a free plan of 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, Essentials at $13 for the first 500 contacts and Standard at $20, rising to $100 for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts and $135 for 5,001 to 10,000. Essentials allows flows of up to 4 steps and three seats; Standard allows up to 200 flows and five seats. Overages are billed automatically when you pass your contact or send limit. It fits teams that have been using ActiveCampaign mostly for broadcasts and a couple of simple flows, not teams that rely on its deeper automation. Our Mailchimp alternatives page covers the reverse trip.

10. Drip: a lateral move for products with a store

Drip's slider reads $39 at 2,500 people; $89 at 5,000; $154 at 10,000; and $369 at 25,000, with unlimited sends at those stops and up to 50 workflows. That is $5 more than Starter at 10,000 ($149) but $22 below it at 25,000 ($391). It earns a place when the business sells goods beside the software. For a pure subscription product, the Drip alternatives page explains why teams leave it.

11. Intercom: when onboarding and support are one conversation

Intercom's pricing page is seat-based with usage on top: Advanced reads $85 per seat a month with 20 free Lite seats, Expert $132 with 50, Fin is $0.99 per outcome, and email campaigns are charged per bulk email sent. It suits a support-led team that wants proactive messages from the same inbox. It is not a cheaper list-based replacement, because you pay for agents rather than contacts.

12. Postmark, Resend and Mailgun: the transactional layer

ActiveCampaign sells transactional email as an add-on; these three sell it as the product. Postmark reads $15 at 10,000 emails and $55 at 50,000 on its pricing page. Resend reads Pro $20 at 50,000 and $35 at 100,000 emails on its page. Mailgun reads Basic $15, Foundation $35 and Scale $90 for 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 emails on its page, with a free plan of 100 a day. Pair one with Loops, Userlist or Customer.io if your chosen tool lacks transactional sending, or move receipts and resets there when you want them separated from campaigns. The Postmark vs SendGrid page compares two of the sender options head to head.

What it costs at 2,500, 10,000 and 25,000 contacts

ActiveCampaign publishes a contact selector, so the table uses its stops. Where another vendor has no stop at that size the cell shows what it does list. ActiveCampaign prices are billed annually; the others as noted on their pages.

The like-for-like row is ActiveCampaign Starter, but the page you are actually leaving may be Plus or Pro. At 10,000 contacts, replacing Pro ($375) with Customer.io Essentials ($145) saves $230 a month, or $2,760 a year; replacing Starter ($149) with Loops ($99) saves $50, or $600 a year. Whichever plan you hold, the saving shrinks as you go up, because at 25,000 the Starter and Plus cards ($391 and $389) land beside Encharge ($389) and Klaviyo ($400).

Remember what each unit means. ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo and MailerLite count contacts or subscribers, Customer.io counts profiles including objects, Userlist counts tracked users, and Mailchimp's bands are contact bands with a send allowance of 12 times contacts on Standard. A list that is mostly dormant is cheap on tools that bill active profiles and expensive on tools that bill everything stored, so clean it before you compare.

What the plan ladder costs over a year at 10,000 contacts

Annual arithmetic makes the tier decision concrete. Staying on Starter at $149 a month is $1,788 a year. If automations outgrow the 5-action limit and you move to Plus at $189, that is $2,268. Needing advanced segmentation puts you on Pro at $375, or $4,500 a year, and needing custom objects puts you on Enterprise at $589, or $7,068. Customer.io Essentials at $145 a month is $1,740 a year and includes 2 object types, so the Enterprise-versus-Customer.io gap is $5,328 a year, and the Pro-versus-Customer.io gap is $2,760. Loops at $99 is $1,188 a year, but it does not offer objects at all, so that comparison only holds if you do not need them.

Those figures compare list prices, not total cost. Moving costs engineering time to send events, a month or two of parallel running, and the rebuild of every automation. A rule of thumb that survives scrutiny is to move when you are already paying for Pro or Enterprise, or when you are about to upgrade to get one feature your product needs. If Starter does everything you use, the switch buys little.

When to stay on ActiveCampaign

Staying is reasonable in three cases. First, a sales team works trials inside the same tool: the pricing page lists Pipelines and sales engagement as CRM add-ons, and neither Loops's nor Userlist's pricing page lists a pipeline. Second, you send SMS or WhatsApp from the same automations, since both are sold as add-ons on the pricing page; confirm that the channel exists in your target tool before you move. Third, your volume is small and Starter suffices: $39 at 2,500 contacts is competitive with every alternative above. In those cases the better move is to tidy the account, archive dormant contacts to lower the contact band, and revisit when the next plan boundary arrives. ActiveCampaign also publishes a DPA template, which helps if your customers ask for one.

Which one for which situation

• Your journeys start from something the product did: Customer.io, and accept that engineering sends the events.
• Your journeys end in a call or a demo: HubSpot, with Professional in the budget if you need more than 10 automated actions.
• Your customer is a team with several users: Userlist or Customer.io objects, not another contact-based tool.
• You use Starter for broadcasts and a welcome sequence: MailerLite or Loops, at $89 or $99 for 10,000 against $149.
• Your list is large but you email it rarely: Brevo, where the volume you choose sets the price.
• You need a receipt and reset sender as well: a Postmark, Resend or Mailgun account, or a lifecycle tool that includes it.

Migrating off ActiveCampaign

An ActiveCampaign account holds contacts with custom fields, tags, lists, automations, forms, landing pages, site tracking and, if you use them, deals. Each one needs a decision before you export anything.

1. Count the automations that matter. Sort by revenue or retention impact. A Starter-plan automation is capped at 5 actions, so older flows may be chained together by tags; map the chain, not just the first trigger.
2. Turn tags into state. Decide whether each tag is an attribute (plan name), an event (trial started) or an audience (newsletter reader). Tag sprawl copied into a new tool is the common way migrations reproduce the old mess.
3. Handle deals separately. If you used the CRM add-ons, export deals and owners to a CRM, not to the email tool. HubSpot is the natural target; Customer.io, Loops and Userlist have no pipeline to receive them.
4. Export contacts and suppressions. Include unsubscribes and bounces as their own file, and load them first. Check how your target counts what you import, since Customer.io bills any profile that existed during the month.
5. Rebuild the landing pages and forms. They do not move with the list. Recreate sign-up forms and re-point your site embeds, then test that new sign-ups land in the new tool with the right fields.
6. Replace site and event tracking. ActiveCampaign's tracking script and any custom events it received need an equivalent source; for product events that usually means sending them from the application.
7. Authenticate the domain. Publish the new tool's DKIM records and fold its SPF include into the one record your domain already has; ActiveCampaign's entries stay until the account closes.
8. Run in parallel for a month. Start new sign-ups in the new tool while ActiveCampaign keeps nurturing existing contacts, compare unsubscribe and bounce rates, then move the rest in batches. Billing is annual on the cards shown, so check your renewal date before you plan a cut-over.

Our pick

For a SaaS team that has outgrown ActiveCampaign's contact model, Customer.io is the one to trial first: $145 at 10,000 profiles against $375 for Pro or $589 for Enterprise at 10,000 contacts, with account objects, transactional email and event-driven journeys on Essentials. Loops is the runner-up for a small team that mainly needs onboarding emails, at $99 for the same size. Choose HubSpot instead when a sales team, not the product, decides who gets which message.

Related reading: HubSpot vs Customer.io, HubSpot alternatives, email for B2B SaaS and email for product-led SaaS.