ActiveCampaign vs Omnisend
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedActiveCampaign compared with Omnisend
Omnisend is an ecommerce specialist with prebuilt cart and post-purchase flows and unlimited sends on its Pro plan; ActiveCampaign is a general-purpose automation platform with a CRM attached. A store should take Omnisend and spend less. A business with a consultative sales cycle should take ActiveCampaign, because Omnisend has nothing resembling lead scoring or deal pipelines.
Omnisend compared with ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign has a far deeper general-purpose automation builder, lead scoring, and deal pipelines, and it is the right choice if a human sales process drives revenue. Omnisend is narrower and better at the one thing stores need, at lower cost and with unlimited sends on Pro. Omnisend has nothing resembling lead scoring; ActiveCampaign has nothing resembling a browse abandonment template that works out of the box.
Choose ActiveCampaign if
Small and mid-size businesses with a real sales process rather than a checkout: consultancies, agencies, coaches, B2B services, and course sellers who need behavioral automation, lead scoring, and deal pipelines in one system and will actually use the branching depth they are paying for.
Choose Omnisend if
Small and mid-size ecommerce stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix that want the standard revenue-producing flows working quickly and cheaply, especially stores that send frequently enough for Pro's unlimited email sending to pay for itself.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | ActiveCampaign | Omnisend |
|---|---|---|
| Category | ESPs | ESPs |
| Starting price | About $15/mo on Starter at 1,000 contacts billed annually (about $19 monthly) (14 days trial) | $0 (free up to 250 contacts), then $16/mo on Standard (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Self-serve tiers priced by contact count with a 14-day trial, where monthly sends are capped at a multiple of the contact count. Critically, accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed, unconfirmed, and bounced records; earlier accounts are grandfathered onto active contacts only. WhatsApp, SMS, transactional email, and deeper CRM capability are separately priced. | Self-serve tiers priced by contact count, where both subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages are billable and only unsubscribed contacts are excluded. Standard caps monthly emails at twelve times the contact count; Pro removes the email send meter entirely. SMS is a separately metered Pro-only add-on for new subscriptions since May 2026. |
| Free plan | No | 250 contacts, 500 emails per month, and 500 web push notifications, with full access to automations, segmentation, forms, and landing pages. SMS is billed separately. |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee | No fixed-length trial; the free plan is the evaluation path and includes full feature access |
| Best for | Small and mid-size businesses with a real sales process rather than a checkout: consultancies, agencies, coaches, B2B services, and course sellers who need behavioral automation, lead scoring, and deal pipelines in one system and will actually use the branching depth they are paying for. | Small and mid-size ecommerce stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Wix that want the standard revenue-producing flows working quickly and cheaply, especially stores that send frequently enough for Pro's unlimited email sending to pay for itself. |
| Setup time | A day to send, two to four weeks to be using the product properly. Importing contacts and sending a campaign is straightforward. Designing a tag and custom-field taxonomy that will not need rebuilding in six months, installing site and event tracking, and constructing genuinely branching automations is the real project, and it is the work that determines whether the subscription is worth anything. | A day to have the core flows running. The store connector installs quickly, syncs products, orders, and customers, and the prebuilt workflows can be enabled with default content immediately. A full migration including domain authentication and testing typically takes around five business days. |
| Learning curve | The steepest in this category, and unapologetically so. The automation canvas rewards people who think in flowcharts and frustrates everyone else. The specific traps are building an unstructured tag sprawl early, and not understanding that goals exist, which leads to people receiving nurture sequences for things they already bought. Budget real learning time or use an agency. | Low, and deliberately so. This is the most approachable serious ecommerce marketing tool in the category. The workflow builder is legible to someone who has never built an automation, and the prebuilt library means most stores never start from a blank canvas. The one thing to understand early is the contact-counting rule, because it determines your bill. |
| Platforms | Web application, iOS and Android apps, Site tracking script, Postmark for transactional sending | Web application, Onsite tracking script, Native connectors for a dozen ecommerce platforms |
| Compliance | SOC 2 report available self-serve through the Trust Center, GDPR with a DPA, HIPAA with a standard BAA on the Enterprise plan only | GDPR with a published data processing agreement, CCPA-aware privacy policy |
| Founded | 2003 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States | London, United Kingdom, with engineering in Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Ownership | Private, venture and growth-equity backed | Effectively bootstrapped and independent; an early convertible note was repaid once the company became profitable and no venture capital has been taken since |
Strengths and limitations
ActiveCampaign
Strengths
- The deepest automation builder available to a small business: conditional branching, five-way splits, wait-until conditions, goals, score arithmetic, and mid-flow webhooks on one canvas.
- Split testing entire automation sequences against each other, not just email variants, which almost nothing else at this price can express.
- Arbitrary custom event tracking makes lifecycle messaging genuinely behavioral, and is what lets a SaaS product drive onboarding from real product usage.
- Lead scoring feeding a built-in CRM with deal pipelines, where stage changes are themselves automation triggers, closes the marketing and sales loop in one system.
Limitations
- New accounts since 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed and bounced, a straight monetization tightening that makes an old list materially more expensive to bring across.
- The pricing page no longer publishes static prices, and extra seats, enhanced CRM, and most add-ons are genuinely unpublished, so total cost is hard to establish before committing.
- The Starter plan's five-action cap per automation makes it unusable for the thing the product is bought for, so the real entry price is Plus.
- Seat allocations are stingy: one seat on Starter and Plus, three on Pro, five on Enterprise, with unpublished pricing for more.
Omnisend
Strengths
- Unlimited email sending on Pro removes the send meter entirely, which is a genuine structural advantage over every contact-plus-send-cap competitor.
- The prebuilt ecommerce workflow library gets abandoned cart, welcome, browse abandonment, and post-purchase live in a day, which is where most of the money in store email actually comes from.
- Cross-channel steps inside a single workflow, so email, SMS, and web push run from one sequence and one consent record rather than parallel automations.
- 24/7 live chat and email support with a real human on every plan including Free, with advertised response times measured in minutes. Nothing else in this category does that.
Limitations
- Billing counts non-subscribers who received automated messages, so guest checkouts and imported contacts without an opt-in date inflate the bill beyond your actual marketing list size.
- SMS credits were removed for new subscriptions on 4 May 2026, making SMS a Pro-only metered add-on and quietly raising the cost of the omnichannel proposition.
- Hitting the Standard send cap blocks campaigns and cancels contacts out of running automation workflows, which breaks live sequences rather than just charging you more.
- No customer data platform, warehouse sync, identity resolution, or predictive lifetime value modelling, so a brand that outgrows the flows will eventually look at Klaviyo anyway.
Pricing compared
ActiveCampaign
Self-serve tiers priced by contact count with a 14-day trial, where monthly sends are capped at a multiple of the contact count. Critically, accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 are billed on all contacts including unsubscribed, unconfirmed, and bounced records; earlier accounts are grandfathered onto active contacts only. WhatsApp, SMS, transactional email, and deeper CRM capability are separately priced.
- StarterAbout $15 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $19 monthly), about $149 at 10,000
- PlusAbout $49 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $59 monthly), about $189 at 10,000, about $609 at 50,000
- ProAbout $79 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $99 monthly), about $375 at 10,000, about $969 at 50,000
- EnterpriseAbout $145 at 1,000 contacts annually (about $179 monthly), about $589 at 10,000, about $1,169 at 50,000
If you genuinely use the automation, ActiveCampaign is worth its price and there is nothing comparable at this level of the market. Split testing entire automation paths, wait-until conditions, goals, arbitrary event triggers, and lead scoring feeding a real pipeline is a combination that Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Brevo simply cannot match. The problem is that most buyers do not use it. A business that ends up sending broadcasts and one welcome sequence is paying roughly $189 a month at 10,000 contacts for capability it never touches, when MailerLite would charge a fraction of that. Two 2025 and 2026 changes have also degraded the value proposition: billing new accounts for unsubscribed contacts, and pulling deeper CRM capability out of the bundle into add-ons. Buy it deliberately, on the basis of specific workflows you have already sketched, and it earns its keep. Buy it because it appears near the top of comparison articles and you will overpay considerably.
Omnisend
Self-serve tiers priced by contact count, where both subscribers and non-subscribers who received automated messages are billable and only unsubscribed contacts are excluded. Standard caps monthly emails at twelve times the contact count; Pro removes the email send meter entirely. SMS is a separately metered Pro-only add-on for new subscriptions since May 2026.
- Free$0
- Standard$16 at 250 to 500 contacts, about $20 at 1,000, about $132 at 10,000, about $413 at 50,000
- Pro$59 flat from the entry band up to roughly 2,500 contacts, about $150 at 10,000, about $715 at 50,000
- CustomQuoted
Omnisend is the value play in ecommerce email and is priced with a clear view of who it is taking customers from. At 10,000 contacts you are looking at roughly $132 on Standard or $150 on Pro against roughly $150 on Klaviyo's Email plan, which is a wash on headline price but not on terms, because Pro carries no send cap while Klaviyo's allowance is ten times your profile count. At 50,000 contacts the same comparison runs roughly $413 or $715 against roughly $720. So the saving is not enormous at the top, and the real argument is unlimited sending plus getting the standard flows working in a day. Two things erode the case: the inclusive contact meter that bills non-subscribers, and the May 2026 removal of bundled SMS credits, which quietly raised the true cost of the omnichannel pitch the product is named for. For a store that mails often and does not need a customer data platform, it remains the best money in this category.
Editorial verdict on each
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is the right answer to a narrow but real question: how does a small business get genuinely sophisticated behavioral automation without buying enterprise marketing software. The builder is the best in its class, custom event triggers make it properly behavioral, and lead scoring feeding a real deal pipeline closes a loop that most ESPs leave open. It is also the most commonly over-bought product in this category, because the depth that justifies the price is depth that most buyers never use, and two recent changes have made the deal worse rather than better: new accounts are now billed for unsubscribed contacts, and the deeper CRM capability was pulled out of the bundle into add-ons. Buy it if you can already name the branching workflows you intend to build and Plus or above is in budget. If your honest plan is broadcasts and one welcome sequence, buy MailerLite or Brevo and keep the difference.
Read the full ActiveCampaign profileOmnisend
Omnisend is the sensible default for a small or mid-size online store that wants the flows that actually make money working quickly, without buying a customer data platform it will not use. The prebuilt workflow library, the cross-channel steps, the capture tooling, and 24/7 human support on every plan including free make it the most approachable serious ecommerce marketing tool in the category, and unlimited email sending on Pro is a real structural advantage over every competitor that caps sends at a multiple of your list. Two caveats deserve weight before you sign: the contact meter counts non-subscribers who received automated messages, which inflates the bill for stores with heavy guest checkout, and the May 2026 removal of bundled SMS credits quietly raised the cost of the omnichannel promise. Buy it if you run a store, mail frequently, and want revenue flows live this week. Look at Klaviyo instead if the reason you are shopping is segmentation depth, and look at MailerLite if your email programme is really just a newsletter.
Read the full Omnisend profileActiveCampaign profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Omnisend last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.