Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives (After the Price Hike)

ActiveCampaign used to be the default answer for growing businesses that wanted serious automation without paying enterprise prices. Then came the restructure. Starting in mid-2024, the company migrated all legacy accounts to a new tier system—Starter, Plus, Professional, Enterprise—and many users found their bills jumping 30–40% overnight. Features that were bundled into older plans were quietly split into add-ons. A Plus plan that looks like $49/month on the homepage quickly becomes $150–$180/month once you add CRM pipelines and SMS.

The backlash has been significant. A long-running review at Venture Harbour runs under the headline “Why I’m moving after 14 years.” Forum threads on pricing surprises are common. If you are one of the users doing the math and thinking there must be a better deal out there, you are right—there usually is.

This guide covers the best ActiveCampaign alternatives in 2026, matched to different needs and budgets. None of them replicate ActiveCampaign exactly, but each one does something better than ActiveCampaign does at its current price.

Quick Picks

• Best overall alternative: MailerLite — strong automation, much lower price, clean interface
• Best for large contact lists: Brevo — charges by emails sent, not contacts stored
• Closest feature match: GetResponse — similar depth, similar price, more webinar features
• Best budget option: Moosend — full automation at $9/month for 500 contacts
• Best for ecommerce: Drip — built specifically around Shopify and WooCommerce revenue flows

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MailerLite — Best Overall Alternative

MailerLite is the most common upgrade path for users leaving ActiveCampaign Starter. The automation builder covers the core use cases—welcome sequences, behavior-based triggers, conditional branching, goal steps—and the interface is significantly cleaner than ActiveCampaign’s.

For 1,000 contacts, MailerLite’s Growing Business plan runs around $18/month on annual billing. That is roughly one-third the cost of ActiveCampaign Plus for the same list size. The free plan covers up to 500 subscribers with 12,000 emails per month, though note that this limit was cut from 1,000 in September 2025, so if you previously relied on the old free tier, the math has changed.

What MailerLite does well: Affordability at every tier. The editor is fast and produces clean output. Landing pages and forms are included on all plans. The automation builder handles 80% of what most marketers actually need.

Where it falls short: Reporting is lighter than ActiveCampaign. There is no built-in CRM on lower plans. The AI writing tools are behind the Advanced plan paywall. If you rely heavily on contact scoring, predictive sending, or deep CRM integration, you will hit the ceiling.

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Brevo — Best for Large or Fast-Growing Lists

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) charges based on email volume, not contact count. That one structural difference makes it dramatically cheaper than ActiveCampaign once your list grows beyond a few thousand contacts.

The free plan allows 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts—useful for testing. The Starter plan starts at around $9/month for 5,000 emails per month, and the Standard plan begins around $18/month for 5,000 emails with added features like multi-user access and landing pages. If you are sending to a list of 20,000 contacts once a week, you are in a different pricing bracket than with any contact-based platform.

What Brevo does well: Value at scale. Email deliverability is solid. Transactional email and marketing email live in the same account, which simplifies setups for teams sending both. The marketing automation is capable enough for standard nurture sequences.

Where it falls short: Brevo’s automation is shallower than ActiveCampaign’s. Contact scoring, lead attribution, and advanced segmentation are limited compared to what ActiveCampaign Professional offers. Removing the Brevo logo from emails costs an extra $10.80/month—a minor irritation on lower tiers. Customer support response times on the Starter plan are slower than most competitors.

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GetResponse — Closest Feature Match

GetResponse is the alternative that most directly competes with ActiveCampaign on features. Both platforms have been in the market for over two decades. Both offer marketing automation, CRM tools, landing pages, and webinars. The learning curve is similar.

GetResponse’s Starter plan runs $19/month for 1,000 contacts (annual billing), compared to ActiveCampaign Starter at $15/month. The gap is small, but GetResponse packs more into that tier—webinar hosting (up to 10 attendees on Starter) and AI-powered email generation are included where ActiveCampaign reserves similar features for higher plans.

What GetResponse does well: Webinars are a genuine differentiator. If your business uses webinars for lead generation or onboarding, GetResponse handles both email and the webinar platform in a single subscription. The template library is large. Automation workflows are visual and intuitive.

Where it falls short: GetResponse’s interface feels dated compared to newer tools. The CRM is functional but not as deep as ActiveCampaign’s. Pricing scales steeply—the Marketer plan jumps to $59/month for 1,000 contacts, which is no cheaper than ActiveCampaign Plus for the same list.

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Moosend — Best Budget Option

Moosend is worth considering if you need solid automation at the lowest possible price. The Pro plan starts at around $9/month for 500 contacts ($7.65/month on annual billing). For 1,000 contacts, you’re looking at roughly $16/month monthly or closer to $13/month annually.

The automation builder supports triggers, conditions, and branching logic. It handles e-commerce tracking for Shopify and WooCommerce. There is no free plan, but a 30-day trial with unlimited sends to up to 1,000 contacts gives you time to evaluate properly.

What Moosend does well: Price-to-feature ratio is genuinely strong. Landing pages, forms, and transactional email are included. The deliverability is respectable. Nonprofits get a 25% discount on top of the standard annual discount.

Where it falls short: Moosend is a smaller company with a smaller team behind it. Integrations are not as numerous as ActiveCampaign’s 900+. Reporting is functional but basic. If you rely on a specific CRM or niche integration, check the connector list carefully before committing.

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Drip — Best for Ecommerce

If you were using ActiveCampaign primarily for ecommerce automation—abandoned cart flows, post-purchase sequences, win-back campaigns—Drip is worth a closer look. It is built specifically around revenue data from Shopify and WooCommerce, with pre-built playbooks for the most common ecommerce scenarios.

Drip is not cheap. Pricing starts around $39/month for 2,500 contacts, so it is not a budget alternative. But the ecommerce-specific reporting—revenue per email, customer lifetime value by segment—is more actionable than what ActiveCampaign provides on equivalent plans.

What Drip does well: Deep Shopify and WooCommerce integration. Revenue attribution at the email level. Pre-built ecommerce workflows that work out of the box. The onboarding is structured around store revenue, not generic marketing.

Where it falls short: Drip is narrow. If your business does anything beyond ecommerce—B2B lead nurturing, event-based sequences, webinars—Drip is the wrong fit. There is no free plan. Support quality has received mixed reviews.

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How to Choose

The right alternative depends on why you are leaving ActiveCampaign and what you actually used it for.

If you mainly used basic email automation: MailerLite replaces 90% of your workflow at a fraction of the cost. Start there.

If your list is over 10,000 contacts and growing: Run the numbers with Brevo. At high contact counts, volume-based pricing frequently wins.

If you relied on webinars: GetResponse is the only direct replacement with native webinar hosting included in the platform.

If you were on ActiveCampaign for ecommerce: Drip or Klaviyo will serve you better. Klaviyo is more expensive but the deepest ecommerce automation platform in the market.

If budget is the primary driver: Moosend. Full stop.

What You Are Actually Giving Up

ActiveCampaign’s depth is real. The platform has 900+ integrations, a CRM that handles complex pipelines, predictive sending, and contact scoring that few competitors match at the Starter tier. If you are a power user on ActiveCampaign Professional or Enterprise—running multi-step automation trees, scoring contacts across many behaviors, managing a full sales pipeline inside the tool—no alternative in this list is a drop-in replacement.

The alternatives in this guide compete best against ActiveCampaign Starter and Plus users who were using 30–40% of the platform’s features and paying full price for the rest. For that majority, the switch makes financial sense.

Use our how-to-switch guide to migrate with minimal disruption. For a broader comparison of what each platform costs at different list sizes, see our email marketing pricing comparison.

The Bottom Line

ActiveCampaign is still a capable platform, but the 2026 price structure removes it from contention for most small and mid-size businesses. The best overall replacement is MailerLite—it handles the majority of automation use cases at a price that stays reasonable as your list grows. Brevo wins for large or fast-growing lists. GetResponse is the closest match for users who want similar depth. And Moosend is the right call if you need to minimize costs without giving up automation.

Check our full ActiveCampaign review and MailerLite review to see how each tool performs against your specific requirements. The pricing differences are significant enough that it is worth taking an hour to run the numbers before your next billing cycle. For a direct look at what the new plans cost, see ActiveCampaign’s pricing page and MailerLite’s pricing page.

Sources

1. ActiveCampaign Review — Venture Harbour — accessed 2026-04-13
2. ActiveCampaign Pricing — accessed 2026-04-13
3. MailerLite Pricing — accessed 2026-04-13