MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign - Which is the Best Email Marketing Tool?
Introduction
When seeking to maximize email marketing success, selecting either MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign as the central email service provider and platform can have major implications. Both solutions equip growing businesses to create high-converting email messages, automated nurture workflows, targeted segments and solid delivery rates for driving revenue through this digital channel. But key differences define their ideal customer base.
For small ecommerce brands or online businesses focused purely on leveraging email, MailerLite provides an affordable solution with excellent core features like beautiful email builders, customizable forms and templates, drag-and-drop automation, and fantastic deliverability. For larger organizations seeking deep behavioral segmentation, connected customer experiences across channels, and advanced analytics, ActiveCampaign delivers despite slightly higher pricing.
Understanding solution differences in terms of pricing models, features by use case, overall usability and reporting capabilities aids brands in determining the right platform for their current and future email marketing goals. This evaluation aims to educate readers on the strengths of MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign to guide prudent investments aligned to strategic business needs.
Table of Contents
Pricing Structure: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When evaluating email marketing software like MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, pricing structure is often a key consideration. MailerLite offers a free plan along with two paid tiers: Basic at $9/month and Standard at $18/month. The key differences in features between these paid plans are subscriber list size, email sending limits, and automation workflows.
Free
$0
For up to 1,000 subscribers
Growing Business
$9.00 / month
$108.00 billed yearly for up to 500 subscriber
Advanced
$18.00 / month
$216.00 billed yearly for up to 500 subscribers
In contrast, ActiveCampaign has four paid subscription levels: Lite at $39/month, Plus at $70/month, Professional $187/month and Enterprise pricing that is customized. The major differences across ActiveCampaign pricing plans include number of contacts, email marketing automations, marketing CRM features, and integration options.
- Marketing Email & Marketing Automation
- Sales CRM & Sales Engagement
- Bundles Marketing Automation + Sales CRM
- Transactional Emai lAPI + SMTP for Your Site or App
Lite
For solopreneurs who need their marketing to run effortlessly
Starts at
$29/MO billed annually or
$39/month billed monthly (USD)1 User10x contact email send limit Includes 1,000 marketing contacts.
- Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
- Personalized Chat & Email Support
- Inline Forms
- Site & Event Tracking
- Automation & Campaign Reports
- API & Webhooks
- Goals
Plus
For small teams focused on crafting excellent experiences across the customer lifecycle
Starts at
$49/MO billed annually or
$70/month billed monthly (USD)3 Users 10 x contact email send limit Includes 1,000 marketing contacts.
Everything in Lite +
- Landing Pages
- Facebook Custom Audiences & Lead Ads
- Facebook Lead Ads
- Lead Scoring
- Pop-Up and Modal Forms
- Conditional Content
- WooCommerce, Shopify & BigCommerce Integrations
- Custom Mailserver Domain
MOST POPULAR
Professional
For teams that want to experiment and optimize their marketing efforts
Starts at
$149/MO billed annually or
$187/month billed monthly (USD) 5 Users12 x contact email send limit Includes 2,500 marketing contacts.
Everything in Plus +
- Predictive Sending AI
- Split Automations
- Salesforce Integration
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Integration
- Website & In Application Messages
- Marketing Attribution Reporting
- Conversions
Enterprise
For growing teams in larger orgs looking to personalize their marketing at scale
Starts at
$259/MO billed annually or
$323/month billed monthly (USD) 10 Users 15 x contact email send limit Includes 2,500 marketing contacts.
Everything in Pro +
- Custom Reporting
- Custom Objects
- Single Sign-On
- HIPAA Support
- Uptime SLA
- Unlimited Email Testing
One notable pricing difference is that MailerLite charges based on subscriber list size, while ActiveCampaign charges per number of contacts. This causes MailerLite pricing to potentially rise much faster for rapidly growing lists. ActiveCampaign could be more cost effective at large volumes since their Enterprise pricing is customized.
When choosing between this email marketing software, businesses should consider subscriber count, email volume, automation needs, CRM requirements, and any platform integrations. Comparing these specifics in relation to the pricing structure of MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign can determine which solution makes more financial sense.
Email Marketing Features: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When evaluating email service providers like MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, understanding the core email marketing features each platform offers is key. MailerLite provides intuitive email builder and editor tools, signup forms and landing pages, and basic automation for segmentation and sequences. It focuses on essential email capabilities for small businesses.
Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign includes more robust email marketing options like predictive sending, A/B testing, advanced behavioral automations, site tracking, and scoring. It also offers a full-featured CRM with extensive segmentation and sales pipeline features ideal for marketing teams.
In terms of list building, MailerLite provides basic signup forms, popups, and landing pages to convert website visitors into subscribers. ActiveCampaign delivers more advanced lead capture like CMS integrations, event tracking, connected sites, and comprehensive tagging.
For segmentation, MailerLite lets you group contacts using tags, location, subs date, and basic filters. ActiveCampaign utilizes more complex segmenting by any attribute, filters, scores, and predictive models for more personalized messaging.
In the automation department, MailerLite enables creating basic sequences with pre-made templates. In comparison, ActiveCampaign offers very customizable multi-path lifecycle workflows with extensive trigger options.
When deciding between these two platforms, businesses should factor in the complexity of their email programs, CRM needs, marketing workflows, and the level of analytics required. Evaluating the differences in key email marketing features will dictate which solution best matches their requirements.
Deliverability Rates: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When choosing an email service provider like MailerLite or ActiveCampaign, scrutinizing their sender reputations and deliverability rates is prudent. MailerLite touts excellent deliverability with inbox placement rates typically above 97% for both Gmail and Yahoo. This ensures subscribers receive the emails campaigns and communications sent through MailerLite reliably.
ActiveCampaign also prioritizes deliverability as a core competency. Their most recent aggregated sender score at major ISPs averages about 95%. The company actively monitors reputation levels and takes proactive measures to maintain stellar deliverability metrics across its user base.
In terms of actual inbox placement data, direct comparisons between MailerLite and ActiveCampaign are difficult to obtain. However, both vendors provide deliverability dashboards so senders can monitor key statistics like open, bounce, and spam rates specifically for their own accounts. It is reasonable to expect inbox rates above 95% for both tools.
Senders aiming for the highest delivery success should follow best practices like permission-based sending, list hygiene, relevant content, and authentication protocols no matter which provider they choose. But prioritizing an email marketing platform with a strong existing sender reputation can give a slight advantage in achieving inbox placement.
Evaluating recent deliverability metrics for MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign combined with your intended sending behavior can help determine possible performance differences between the two.
Expanding the capabilities of your email marketing platform requires integrating adjacent martech tools in your stack. When comparing MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, evaluating their respective app integrations and developer APIs is advised.
MailerLite offers over 750 native integrations with popular small business tools like WordPress, Shopify, Facebook and other CMS platforms. This allows capturing website leads directly to customized audiences for email campaigns.
ActiveCampaign includes over 300 native integrations focused more on sales, service and marketing automation stacks. Partners include Salesforce, Zendesk, Eventbrite and other more advanced martech solutions.
On the API front, both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign offer developer access to manage contacts, gather analytics and connect other solutions not covered by existing integrations. ActiveCampaign provides more API endpoints across its various products while MailerLite focus mainly on its core email tool.
Deciding which solution has the right types of integrations depends on your existing martech stack and functional goals beyond basic email campaigns. Those needing to embed email deeper into complex workflows may require ActiveCampaign’s more robust automation and API capabilities versus MailerLite’s simpler approach. Selecting the optimal platform for integrating your tech comes down to carefully matching feature needs.
Automation Capabilities: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When evaluating email marketing and marketing automation software like MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, understanding the differences in their implemented workflows and processes is crucial. MailerLite provides simple yet intuitive drag and drop workflows for basic email marketing automation. Users can easily set up sequences to onboard subscribers, create product abandonment funnels, and design an email journey without needing to know code.
ActiveCampaign offers significantly more advanced automation capabilities that can support more complex lead nurturing and lifecycle marketing for businesses. Marketers are equipped with highly customizable multi-path email workflows using segmented lists, dynamic content, and hundreds of action and trigger combinations through an intelligent visual canvas.
In addition, ActiveCampaign delivers integration with other channels like chat, SMS, social media, eCommerce platforms, and the robust built-in CRM to incorporate activity data from these sources into the automation logic to enhance personalization. This level of connected multi-channel automation simply isn’t possible to achieve in MailerLite at this time.
When deciding between the two platforms, small businesses may find MailerLite automations offer sufficient capability for creating drip campaigns, welcome series, and basic conditional logic. But larger organizations will likely require the more sophisticated workflows, segments, external connections, and progressive profiling found in ActiveCampaign’s automation engine. Understanding automation use cases can help determine the best email marketing platform fit.
Design and Interface: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When choosing an email marketing provider like MailerLite or ActiveCampaign, assessing their overall usability through the lens of design and interface differences is important. MailerLite prides itself on simplicity and ease-of-use – the dashboard is clean and focused on core email marketing tasks without overloading users. The intuitive drag-and-drop builder makes creating sign up forms, newsletters, and automations quick even for beginners.
ActiveCampaign delivers a much more robust but potentially complex interface due to the breadth of marketing automation and CRM capabilities packed into one platform beyond email alone. There can be a steeper learning curve navigating the numerous configuration options. However, an intelligent design philosophy still shines through in workflow builders like Strategies and intelligent content blocks for dynamic email creation.
When evaluating these differing design approaches, businesses should consider their team’s technical proficiency, need for multi-channel features, and the importance of rapid implementation. MailerLite simplifies getting started fast thanks to ease-of-use focused design. But ActiveCampaign provides powerful segmentation once you embrace the expansive environment. Aligning to internal needs and skills can determine which design resonates most.
Assessing the back-end design can be just as crucial as the front-end when ensuring administrators set up optimal data tracking, metrics visibility, and campaign analytics. Test driving both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign for interface and design fit is highly recommended during an evaluation.
Templates and Customization: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
Email templates serve as the building blocks to easily create attractive and effective newsletter designs. MailerLite and ActiveCampaign both offer a mixture of ground-up customization and pre-built templates, though they differ greatly on specifics.
MailerLite templates focus on core communication types and its drag-and-drop editor caters more to visual tweaks and one-off designs. However, it does offer less template variety than some competitors.
ActiveCampaign includes over 500 fully customizable templates – at least 4-5X more of a selection than MailerLite. With more drag-and-drop choices across promotion types, industries and layout orientations, marketers have more visual starting points.
MailerLite is likely a better fit for brands prioritizing a highly customized brand identity in their emails. For marketers who benefit from opportunities to experiment across myriad templates, ActiveCampaign delivers a library to match needs and preferences.
Plus, for those seeking complex templates coded by an email design pro, ActiveCampaign does offer access to Experts Services including custom template builds for one-off fees. Overall both platforms offer responsive email creation flexibility, but ActiveCampaign opens more pre-made possibilities.
Analytics and Reporting: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When selecting an email marketing platform like MailerLite or ActiveCampaign, evaluating the built-in analytics and reporting functionality each solution provides is important for optimizing campaigns. MailerLite offers core email analytics allowing users to track opens, clicks, unsubscribes, shares, and links to monitor audience engagement at a basic level. Users can view reports on individual messages or full campaigns.
ActiveCampaign includes significantly more advanced email analytics such as predictive sending, A/B testing, pinpoint delivery metrics, deeper link analysis, and subscriber lifecycle tracking. Robust segmentation paired with a visualization suite for sharing reports provides enhanced analytics capabilities to pore through campaign performance data.
When choosing between the two platforms, MailerLite likely offers sufficient reporting for basic email campaigns if simple analytics are needed. But the enhanced segmentation, testing, and integrated data in ActiveCampaign empowers more advanced analysis for optimizing complex omni-channel marketing performance. Understanding reporting needs is prudent.
Customer Support: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
In terms of integrations, MailerLite analytics can connect basic subscriber data with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. However, ActiveCampaign builds comprehensive lead and customer profiles by aggregating behavioral data across connected sites, CRM activities, external apps and other channels beyond email itself. This enables viewing multidimensional lifecycle reports.
The level of customer service and technical expertise provided by email marketing providers greatly impacts the user experience. Comparing MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, both focus on responsive support with some variability.
MailerLite offers email and in-app support tickets for issues and how-to questions. As a streamlined platform, representatives can typically assist with most email, integration and deliverability.
ActiveCampaign supports its wider array of products with prioritized email ticketing, live chat for urgent needs and phone help for complex troubleshooting. For technical teams managing multifaceted campaigns, this expertise ensures productivity.
An added dimension is ActiveCampaign’s access to Expert Services – specialized personnel for tasks like 1-on-1 platform orientation, design services and customized integration building. This caters well to mid-market and enterprise clients with more deliiverability.
In summary, both providers focus heavily on customer care with MailerLite simplifying for email users while ActiveCampaign scales for complex systems. Factoring where product-specific knowledge may be required as your marketing stack grows can ensure the ideal long term support model.
Ecommerce Features: MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign
When evaluating email marketing software like MailerLite and ActiveCampaign, understanding their distinct ecommerce capabilities is essential for retail businesses. MailerLite provides simple shopping cart and order tracking integrations through plugins like WooCommerce along with basic purchase tags and segments to market to customers based on past order data. But advanced features tailored for ecommerce are lacking.
By contrast, ActiveCampaign delivers more specialization like automated post-purchase targeting to generate repeat sales. Shopping behaviors tracked across multiple sites can inform lifecycle-based segments leveraging machine learning. There is also deeper integration for syncing products, customers, events and sales channels through the CRM and automations.
In terms of metrics visibility, MailerLite offers sufficient email analytics related to opens, clicks and transactions from your connected store. However ActiveCampaign centralizes key indicators like revenue influenced by marketing efforts, campaign ROI, LTV metrics and more for quantifying business impact beyond email alone thanks to CRM data fusion.
When deciding between providers, ecommerce brands should examine use cases beyond basic sales-related email targeting to determine sufficient versus advanced requirements suited for high-growth omnichannel strategy.
Conclusion
Determining the best email marketing platform between MailerLite and ActiveCampaign depends largely on your business’s unique needs and capabilities sought from these tools. MailerLite excels as an affordable starting point for SMEs focused purely on core email functionalities like beautiful campaigns, automation, and solid deliverability. ActiveCampaign shines for mature brands needing advanced analytics, granular segmentation, and customizable automation across integrated channels.
Carefully examine your subscriber base, workflows, analytics needs and future cross-channel goals when evaluating which solution best aligns to your use case requirements. Establishing clear expectations around must-have features versus unnecessary extras can help identify the ideal balance of simplicity versus sophistication for your marketing stack. With both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign offering free trials, extensively testing the experience first-hand is recommended before committing to optimize your email marketing performance.