Planning to implement marketing automation and considering ActiveCampaign? We advice to view similar platforms to find a solution.

When customers choose marketing automation app, most often they are trying to find functionality for omni-channel communication, lead management, website builder, lead scoring, B tests etc.

Comparing ActiveCampaign with competitors people pay attention to the HTML email builder, customer data platform, chatbots, conversations, form builder, segmentation, number of triggers and actions and so on.

We’ve made a list of top 10 competitors that are very resembling in cost and functionality to ActiveCampaign. The list is based on user reviews, so if ActiveCampaign doesn’t suit you in any way, here you can easily choose the best solution for you.

E2 Shop System

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We help shops and manufacturers of all kinds and sizes work smarter for improved efficiencies, greater flexibility and bigger profits.

RDstation

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RD Station Marketing brings together the essential tools for your company to effectively manage and automate your Digital Marketing activities: attract visitors to your website, turn them into business opportunities, close deals and monitor all your results, all in one place.

Omnisend

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Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform built for eCommerce. With email marketing at its core, creating effective email campaigns is easier than ever before. Using Omnisend's marketing automation, you can personalize your message with customer data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior. Omnisend allows you to add several channels into the same automation workflow: email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more.

Google Drive

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File sharing platform that allows users to store and share contacts, photos, videos, presentations, recordings and more.

Bynder

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Bynder is the fastest way to professionally manage digital files. Teams get on the same page for real-time collaborative edits and approvals, easy file sharing and storage, auto-formatting for channels and file types - it provides one central hub for all company materials and messaging. With company creative at your fingertips, your next big idea is a click away.

Autopilot

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Autopilot is a cloud-based email marketing and marketing automation software platform that helps companies to connect their marketing systems, automate their marketing touchpoints, and convert more customers. Autopilot's built-in integrations to marketing, messaging, lead intelligence, and CRM tools allow marketers to message consistently using email, SMS, and physical mail.

Twilio

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Twilio is a cloud-communications platform that sells a diverse set of services to help developers program voice, message, and video communications into apps—granting them call center-level scale at a fraction of the time and equipment costs.

Iterable

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Iterable is a growth marketing platform that allows you to send personalized messages at scale across channels.

Tridens Monetization

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Tridens Monetization enables service providers to quickly launch innovative digital subscription and usage-based services that differentiate against competitors, develop recurring revenues, and deepen customer relationships.

Google Analytics Events

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Use Events to collect data about interactions with your content. Events are user interactions with content that can be measured independently from a web-page or screen load. Downloads, link clicks, form submissions, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to analyze as Events.

SignUpGenius

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SignUpGenius simplifies the process of coordinating events and people by providing online sign ups for non-profits, schools, sports, churches, families, colleges, businesses, and organizations. By enabling up to 12 million unique visitors per month to sign up for tasks online, SignUpGenius has done away with the need for paper sign ups, "reply to all"​ emails, and phone trees.

How to choose ActiveCampaign substitute

Many marketing automation apps are similar to each other. Tools with identical functionality can differ in price by 4 times. The first feature you should look at is the availability of funnel builder. This is a basic feature of marketing automation platforms and if it doesn’t include this feature, most likely this software isn’t completed yet. All node interfaces look almost the same. It's important not to pay attention to the UI, but pay attention to the functionality.

In a month, you'll get used to the design, but the lack of functionality will always annoy you. Changing marketing automation apps is very time-consuming. If you have the usual email chains set up, it's not that hard to switch to another tool. But if you've already set up integrations, business processes, and have complex funnels, it can take weeks to change the software. That's why you should be attentive to choosing an alternative.

What to pay attention to when investigating the node interface? It has 4 significant features categories.

1. Triggers. For instance, "Form submit" is a trigger that starts a business process. The most popular triggers are: opening an email, clicking a link in an email, reaching a goal, adding or removing a tag, closing a deal, visiting a page, etc. In each platform for marketing automation this set may differ. The more, the better.
2. Action. For example, "Send email". This is the most basic action you can have. The most popular actions are: add or remove a tag, send a text message, send a messenger message, set a salesperson task, update a transaction, notify someone by email, move a transaction to another stage, etc.
3. Delay. For example, "Wait 3 hours. Prospect fill in the form on the website and get in the marketing automation platform (Trigger), the tool sends a Welcome email (Action). After that the app waits 4 hours (delay) and sends a second email. This is the most simple automation. But there are other options. For instance, "Wait until something happens". Or wait until January 10th, or wait until 10 PM in the contact's time zone.
4. If/else. For example, "If a lead, has the tag "Bought product #1", send the email, if the lead doesn't have the tag "Bought product #1", wait 5 days and send the email. The most popular if/else parameters are: visited the site page, bought certain items, opened certain emails, user field the client card matches some criteria. This is data according to which you can segment the subscriber base.

Studying the automation builder, you should look carefully at all four categories of functions. The more, the better. Sometimes it appears that powerful marketing automation platforms with the biggest number of functions look uncomfortable. Young software look nice, but they have few functions. You look into the software you want to use very deeply. Otherwise, it will be very painful to change it in the future.

Once you've studied the automation builder, you understand whether there are integrations with the tools you need. Fortunately, Apiway can help you. In most cases, software like ActiveCampaign are the core of business IT infrastructure. It's kind of digital hub for all your subscriber. This type of system is like an tree, which is putting its tentacles into other system. Tool like ActiveCampaign need to integrate with most other ones. Or you’ll have to spend a lot of money and time developing custom integrations.

Also people who are looking for alternatives to ActiveCampaign use systems from other categories like email marketing software, helpdesk software, CRM software, sales engagement software