Both ActiveCampaign and AWeber are popular email marketing software tools, but which platform is a better choice to supercharge your email marketing efforts?
This comparison will give you a clear idea of what these two email marketing tools can do.
In a nutshell, ActiveCampaign is a complete marketing automation platform with integrated CRM and sales automation features that is perfect for any medium or large business.
AWeber is more focused on email marketing service, and hence, lacks some of the more advanced features you will find with ActiveCampaign.
Quick Takeaways:
- ActiveCampaign’s Comprehensive Features: Highlighting that ActiveCampaign is a complete marketing automation platform with integrated CRM and advanced features, making it ideal for medium to large businesses.
- AWeber’s Focus on Simplicity: Emphasizing AWeber’s dedicated focus on email marketing services, with basic automations and a user-friendly interface, suitable for small businesses and individual bloggers.
- Ease of Use Comparison: Noting that ActiveCampaign offers a streamlined user experience with a well-organized dashboard and intuitive campaign creation process, whereas AWeber’s interface, though neat, can be confusing at times.
- Email Automation Capabilities: Mentioning that ActiveCampaign provides powerful marketing automation solutions with advanced templates and a visual builder, while AWeber offers basic automation features more suited for simple email marketing needs.
- Pricing and Accessibility for Different Budgets: Pointing out that AWeber offers a more affordable solution with a free plan, making it suitable for solopreneurs or digital nomads on a budget, whereas ActiveCampaign, starting at $15/month, offers more advanced features but at a higher cost.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: TL;DR
- Type: Complete marketing automation platform with email marketing
- Marketing automations: Offers advanced automations
- Drag-and-drop editor: Powerful editor with excellent user experience
- SMS marketing: Supports sending text messages within an automation
- Lead & contact scoring: Allows tracking engagement of reach out to potential customers when they are about to purchase
- Sales automations: Offers various sales automations such as CRM, deal scoring, lead nurturing, task management, etc.
- Pricing: Pricing starts at $15 a month for 500 contacts. Free trial available
- Type: Focuses on email marketing
- Marketing automations: Provide basic automations
- Drag-and-drop editor: A bit clunky & confusing editor
- SMS marketing: Does not support SMS automations
- Lead & contact scoring: This feature is absent
- Sales automations: No such sales automation features are available
- Pricing: Pricing starts at $19.99 a month for 500 contacts. Generous free tier available
ActiveCampaign Pros:
- It offers advanced email automation features with dynamic automations.
- Offers lead and contact scoring features.
- Supports SMS marketing.
- Provides a drag-and-drop email builder.
- Supports sales automations like CRM, deal scoring, etc.
- Supports A/B testing.
- Supports rule-based conditional content.
AWeber Pros:
- Supports HTML emails and also provides a visual email builder.
- Supports dynamic content and AMP emails.
- Provide email split testing feature.
- Allows email automation and behavioral automation.
- Provides web push notifications.
- Allows selling physical and digital products through a landing page.
- Provides highly advanced analytics.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Detailed Comparison
Comparison breakdown by features
- Ease of Use & Editor
- Templates
- Forms
- Email Automations
- A/B Split Testing
- Messaging
- Reporting
- Integration
- Customer Support
- Pricing Plans
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Ease of Use & Editor
An email marketing platform must not only be easy to use but should also provide a good user experience.
ActiveCampaign:
This platform offers a fast and streamlined backend with logically arranged features. You can easily manage your subscribers & lists and access all features quickly from the dashboard.
The brilliance of the UI is visible even when you create campaigns. The previous & next buttons make the campaign creation & review process easy. There is a visual workflow-based navigation menu in the header that speeds up the campaign creation process even further and helps you to save time.
Overall, ActiveCampaign has put a lot of thought into user experience (UX) despite being loaded with numerous features.
AWeber:
AWeber could have improved in this segment. Yes, their UI is neat, but there can be confusion at times. For instance, they call email automations ‘Campaigns.’ For regular newsletters, they use the name ‘Broadcasts.’ They aren’t very intuitive names and users can find them a bit confusing.
Plus, while creating a Broadcast (email newsletter), you will find that certain options like selecting senders’ addresses or reusing campaigns are hidden.
Because they use the subscriber list as the main selector, navigating to automations and campaigns is unnecessarily difficult. Plus, they don’t have any workflow-based visual navigation and the previous/next step buttons. These shortcomings slow down the process of creating email broadcasts.
Winner: ActiveCampaign because they have a better UI that improves user experience.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Templates
Email templates can help you to get started with email newsletters quickly. Designing a newsletter can be time-consuming.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign offers a nice selection of around 125 templates. All these email templates have responsive and contemporary designs. They went with a minimalist approach while designing their email templates. Also, the template editor is smooth and allows easy customization of the templates. You can even add HTML code if required.
AWeber:
Aweber offers a massive collection of 700 email templates. None of their competitors come close. Unfortunately, barring a few hidden gems, almost all email templates look a bit dated when compared to modern design standards.
The template editor feels a bit clunky, and it is not as flexible as the one found with ActiveCampaign. However, custom HTML code is allowed.
Winner: AWeber beats ActiveCampaign in the number game, but quality-wise ActiveCampaign wins.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Forms & Landing Pages
Both platforms offer opt-in forms to collect emails. But which one is better?
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign will not provide form templates. Instead, they provide a lot of formatting options, which will allow you to heavily customize opt-in forms. You can even add custom fields to a form very easily without quitting the form editor.
ActiveCampaign will allow you to create landing pages, but unfortunately, you must be on their Plus plan or a higher plan. This is quite stifling for people on a small budget. Good thing is that they have various landing page templates that you can edit using their easy drag-and-drop landing page builder.
This platform will allow you to sell physical and digital products, get email subscribers, offer coupons, get leads, and more. This email software has a WordPress plugin that will allow you to integrate opt-in forms directly into your WordPress blog. However, you cannot add landing pages to your blog.
AWeber:
This platform has powerful form features. You can easily add page redirects, audio files, and videos. Because of extensive customization options, you can customize the signup forms to match your brand’s design.
You can easily tag and segment your subscribers depending on the type of form they use to sign up. This allows for easy subscriber management. You can add custom fields to the forms if required.
Like ActiveCampaign, AWeber also offers over 100 customizable landing page templates and a powerful landing page builder that you can use to quickly edit the templates. In fact, AWeber goes a step ahead of ActiveCampaign and integrates Canva to help you design a landing page. You can use a landing page to sell physical or digital products, collect leads, get email subscribers, and more.
Winner: Tie because both platforms have a powerful landing page and form builder with the ability to add custom fields.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Email Automations
Email automation is a common feature found in major marketing solutions. Both ActiveCampaign and AWeber offer this feature, but who wins?
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign offers one of the most powerful marketing automation solutions you will come across. Users can utilize many advanced automation templates or automation recipes along with a flowchart-style visual automation builder.
There are many advanced options and you can set automation rules. It is easy to set follow-up campaigns to automate sales processes, tag subscribers automatically based on actions they take, send abandoned cart emails, and more.
ActiveCampaign supports dynamic automations under which you can use multiple go-to actions and goals to create flexible workflows in which you can send different contacts down different unique paths.
This email marketing software also has something called an automation map that will show how your automations connect. This will allow you to adjust your marketing strategy, and if necessary, map out new automation workflows. You can even use a feature called Start/Stop to send a contact to or remove a contact from an automation workflow.
ActiveCampaign also offers other advanced features like automation split-testing, contact scoring, etc., that allow you to capture and nurture leads at the right time. Even more, the platform comes with an integrated CRM tool that you can use to create pipelines and track customer journeys to automate sales processes. ActiveCampaign offers lead scoring so that you can better understand your prospects and create more effective email campaigns.
AWeber:
You can create visual workflows using this platform, but the automation system is very basic. In fact, AWeber’s marketing automation features are relatively new and not very polished.
However, AWeber’s marketing automation feature will allow you to tag users when they subscribe. This allows for advanced segmentation and makes it easy to manage when building a huge email list.
Unfortunately, AWeber’s marketing automation does not have any integrated CRM feature. If this is important for you, you will need third-party integrations. Because AWeber’s automation features are very limited, the platform is suitable for small businesses and individual bloggers who don’t need such advanced features.
Winner: ActiveCampaign because it comes with advanced automation features.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: A/B Split Testing
Split testing helps businesses understand the effectiveness of their email messages. Both platforms offer this feature.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign has powerful A/B testing features that allow you to test everything from subject lines to email content, automation, title, etc. You can use these features to improve the efficiency of your email campaigns.
AWeber:
You can easily create A/B split tests for your email campaigns. The process is simple and you can test both the subject line and the email content. Unfortunately, you cannot perform automation split tests.
Winner: ActiveCampaign because it has more powerful split testing features.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Messaging
The ability to communicate with your subscribers or contacts through various channels is important.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign offers various messaging features. You can enjoy Site Messaging – a feature that you can use to add a chat option to your site and connect it directly to your email autoresponder. The platform also offers SMS Messaging that will allow you to send text messages to your contacts.
AWeber:
Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t have site messaging or SMS messaging features. Thus, if these features are important for your business, you need to select other providers.
Winner: ActiveCampaign because it offers messaging options.
ActiveCampaign vs AWeber: Reporting
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign offers advanced reporting. You can delve deep into the performance of your email campaigns and find data on opens, page visits, click maps, geo-tracking, and more.
Moreover, if you have an online store powered by WooCommerce, Shopify, or BigCommerce and you sell digital products or physical products, you can get additional reports if you are using their Plus plan or a higher plan.
Since ActiveCampaign comes with CRM features, you find deal reporting, sales performance metrics, and forecasts in addition to email & automation reporting.
AWeber:
The platform offers highly advanced reporting and analytics. In fact, this email marketing platform offers one of the most extensive reporting tools you will find today. Even the free plan offers many reports that you can find only with paid plans of ActiveCampaign.
You can find detailed reports on A/B split testing, custom audiences, geotracking, and e-commerce, that can help you to optimize your newsletter campaigns so that you can ensure that your targeted emails always reach subscribers’ inboxes.
You can even update your lists and create new segments directly from the reports section, which helps in the advanced segmentation of your mailing lists. For instance, if a Black Friday sales promotion performed well, you can target those subscribers who opened the email with a follow-up campaign.
Winner: AWeber because of highly advanced reporting capabilities.
AWeber vs ActiveCampaign: Integrations
Third-party integrations help to connect different marketing channels with your email marketing tool. This in turn gives you valuable data that can help you to automate many daily tasks.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign has 250+ integrations out of the box. This means that you will most likely find native integrations for most of the tools. Additionally, you also get Zapier integration. Building an API is also simple with ActiveCampaign and this feature is very useful for any business looking for custom integrations.
AWeber:
AWeber offers more native integrations than ActiveCampaign. I stopped counting at 300. But if you don’t find any native integration, you can use Zapier integration to connect with thousands of third-party apps.
They also have an email marketing API for developers who want to create apps with AWeber integration.
Winner: AWeber because it offers more native integrations.
AWeber vs ActiveCampaign: Customer Support
Customer support must be an important factor when selecting any email marketing software. Both ActiveCampaign and AWeber have dedicated customer support departments, but who is better?
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign provides live chat and email support. They also have various tutorials available through their knowledge base.
If you use their Professional plan, you will receive three 1-on-1 training sessions. You can also get community support through their forum.
Unfortunately, they do not have any call support available. Also, their response time is not as effective as you will want it to be.
AWeber:
This provider’s customer support is excellent with superfast response times. They have phone support, email support, and live chat support available. While phone support is available between 8 AM and 8 PM ET USA, live chat and email support are available 24/7.
They also have a thorough knowledge base that you can access anytime and use to resolve common issues.
Winner: AWeber gets the extra point because of phone support and fast response.
AWeber vs ActiveCampaign: Pricing Plans
Pricing of an email marketing platform is a critical factor for small businesses operating on a tight budget.
ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign doesn’t have any free plan, but they have a free trial with limited access to ActiveCampaign’s features. No credit card required for a free trial. They have four pricing options.
You can choose to pay annually or monthly, and the pricing depends on how many subscribers you have.
Lite Plan: $15 a month (for 500 contacts)
- Marketing automation
- Unlimited emails
- Drag & drop email Builder
- Segmentation
- Subscription forms
- Automation & email reporting
- Site and Event Tracking
- Lead capture forms
- Sales emails
- Leads import
Plus Plan: $70 a month (for 500 contacts)
- Everything in Lite Plan
- Landing pages
- Facebook custom audiences
- Contact scoring or subscriber scoring
- SMS marketing
- Conditional content
- e-Commerce store integrations
- Abandoned cart automation
- Advanced performance reporting
- Mobile campaign reporting
- CRM with sales automation
- Lead scoring
- Inbox sync with CRM
- SMS nurturing
Profession Plan: $187 a month (for 500 contacts)
- All the features in the Plus plan
- Website Personalization
- Predictive Content
- Predictive Sending
- Marketing Attribution
- Split Automations
- Conversion Reporting
- Site Messages
- Salesforce Integrations
- Win probability
- Sentiment analysis
- Sales engagement automation
Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing
- Everything in the Professional Plan
- Custom mailserver domain
- Custom domain support
- Free design services
- Unlimited email design testing
AWeber:
This platform has one free plan and one paid plan! That’s all! What’s interesting is that both the free plan and the paid plan will allow unlimited users (team members), free migration service, and access to all support channels. Paid customers are entitled to priority support.
Free Plan:
- Max subscribers: 500
- Max email sends per month: 3,000
- List profiles: 1
- RSS to Email (automatic blog post to newsletter)
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Access to all templates
- Dynamic content
- Google analytics integration
- Forms
- WordPress plugins
- E-commerce features with 1% transaction fee
- 50,000 Web Push Notification subscribers
- All integrations
Pro Plan: $19.99 a month
- Max subscribers: 500 (price increases as subscribers increase)
- Max email sends per month: unlimited
- List profiles: unlimited
- RSS to Email (automatic blog post to newsletter)
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Access to all templates
- Dynamic content
- Email split testing
- Google analytics integration
- Facebook pixel tracking
- Forms (with split testing)
- WordPress plugins
- Advanced reporting
- E-commerce features with 0.6% transaction fee
- Unlimited Web Push Notification subscribers
- All integrations
Winner: For solopreneurs or digital nomads on a budget, Aweber is the more affordable solution and can do everything you need it to do to build an email list and grow your business.
AWeber vs ActiveCampaign: Summary
Both AWeber and ActiveCampaign are popular email marketing platforms. Though ActiveCampaign has more powerful features, its whole gamut of marketing automation features can be a little overwhelming for lifestyle bloggers and solopreneurs who don’t need to create complex sales funnels or track the journeys of their customers.
But it is undeniable that for those in need of advanced automations with the ease of visual workflows, ActiveCampaign is a more logical choice. AWeber makes more sense if you need to focus only on emails.
You can try both platforms for free to decide which one is better suited for your business.
AWeber vs ActiveCampaign: FAQs
What’s the difference between AWeber & ActiveCampaign?
AWeber is a dedicated email marketing platform with e-Commerce support. Both platforms have all the main features you will need to fulfill the email marketing needs of your business or website/blog.
However, ActiveCampaign lets you do more with powerful sales automation features. You can track the customer journey of your contacts, measure win probability, perform lead scoring, and other important tasks that can help you to earn more money.
Can I use AWeber and ActiveCampaign for free?
AWeber doesn’t have free trials. However, they have a generous forever free plan that you can use to get a clear overview of the platform’s capabilities and understand whether it is suitable for your business/company or website/blog. The Pro plan will give you the same features and some extra options.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, doesn’t have a free plan. You can enjoy free trials with limited capabilities.
What is ActiveCampaign best for?
ActiveCampaign is best suited for any medium or large business that requires a CRM tool and sales automation features. However, any individual website owner or lifestyle blogger can still use the platform for its incredibly powerful email marketing capabilities.
AWeber is not suitable for a medium or large business. It is best for a small businesses or an individual blogger with a small contact list or no requirement for sales automation.
Is ActiveCampaign the same as Mailchimp?
No, ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are different platforms. While both offer email marketing campaigns, ActiveCampaign is known for its advanced automation features and integrated CRM capabilities, which are ideal for a digital marketer looking to integrate email marketing with other marketing channels. Mailchimp, on the other hand, is more user-friendly and suited for those who need simple, pre-made templates and basic marketing tools.
Is ActiveCampaign a CRM?
Yes, ActiveCampaign functions as both an email marketing platform and a CRM. It offers a range of automation features that can manage customer relationships, making it a good value for small business owners. Its CRM capabilities are combined with machine learning and predictive sending, which allow businesses to optimize their email campaigns based on customer behavior.
What unique features does AWeber offer?
AWeber offers a variety of features tailored for email marketing campaigns. It stands out with its wide range of pre-made templates, easy-to-use sign up forms, and robust email live chat support. AWeber’s simplicity makes it a great choice for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs who need efficient, straightforward email marketing tools.
How do ActiveCampaign’s automation features compare to other providers?
ActiveCampaign’s automation features are more advanced than many other providers. They include complex automation sequences, machine learning for optimizing sends, and integration with other marketing channels. This makes ActiveCampaign particularly valuable for a digital marketer seeking a comprehensive tool that goes beyond basic email marketing.
Can ActiveCampaign integrate with other marketing channels?
Yes, ActiveCampaign offers extensive integration capabilities with other marketing channels. This includes social media platforms, CRM systems, and e-commerce tools, providing a cohesive approach to digital marketing strategies.
Does AWeber offer live chat support?
Absolutely, AWeber offers email live chat support, providing quick and efficient assistance for users. This feature ensures that small business owners and digital marketers can resolve queries promptly, enhancing the overall user experience.
What are the benefits of using pre-made templates in AWeber?
AWeber’s pre-made templates allow for quick and easy creation of email marketing campaigns. These templates are designed to be visually appealing and are customizable, saving time for businesses and ensuring a professional look even without design expertise.
Is there a phone line support available for ActiveCampaign and AWeber users?
AWeber provides phone line support, offering a more direct and personal assistance method. ActiveCampaign, however, primarily offers support through email and live chat, with extensive online resources available for self-help.