ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Which is Best?
Both ActiveCampaign and Drip are great tools for email marketing, but other email marketing tools offer similar features, however, the great contest is between ActiveCampaign and Drip.
This makes it very difficult and frustrating to choose the right one for your email marketing campaigns, there is a high probability of choosing the wrong one if a careful examination is not taken.
This doesn’t mean anyone is bad among them, both are great but there’s a slight difference when it comes to the efficiency of work and ease of use.
Now, the big question is, ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Which is Best? this doesn’t have a direct answer because it all depends on what feature you need to maximize your reach at a lower cost.
In this detailed comparison of ActiveCampaign vs Drip, I’m going to share the experience I had using these tools and this experience can be the roadmap for you to choose which is best for your organization or project.
Now, let’s welcome Activecampaign as we dive into the comparison section!
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software that has been around since 2003 and was founded by Jason VandeBoom. Over the years, ActiveCampaign has built a massive reputation for itself and is well known for its powerful automation system and integrated CRM
During these years, Activecampaign has acquired close to 200,000 users and increased its numbers of employees by 160% and one of its major focuses is on the e-commerce aspect.
Features of ActiveCampaign
When it comes to choosing an email marketing tool, one place to pay more attention to is the feature section because that’s what will determine the one you will pick in a long run.
The 20 main features of ActiveCampaign are:
- Marketing automation
- Built-in integrations
- Conditional email content
- Onsite/In-app contact tracking
- Contact location/travel tracking
- Drag-and-drop email designer
- Newsletters
- Smart autoresponders
- Campaign, contact, and list reporting
- Live eCommerce data to emails
- SMS marketing
- Advanced segmentation & targeting
- Custom forms
- Automated series
- Free phone, live chat, and email support
- Social media monitoring & reaction
- Free one-on-one training
- Contacts based on ASL
- CRM & Sales Automation
- Free email templates
The slideshow shows the features you will get per plan.
Plans and Pricing of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign prices are pretty much low as compared to the features they offer per plan. ActiveCampaign offers a free trial that allows you to add up to 1000 contacts after which you can decide to upgrade your plan or simply cancel it.
Activecampaign subscription plans start from $29 per month when you’re going for the annual plan, but when you decide to pay monthly, you will have to pay an additional $10 which makes it $39 per month for their lite plan and this principle applies to all their plans. So I will advise you to go for the annual plan to save yourself the extra cost!
What is Drip?
Drip is an email marketing platform that I would say is pretty new in the email marketing industry that was founded in 2013 10 solid years after ActiveCampaign.
Being a newcomer in the email marketing industry hasn’t stopped Drip from making a huge success and so far Drip hasn’t gotten any bad profile because they’ve delivered exactly what they promise and to date, Drip is still fighting to take advantage of e-commerce CRM’ features and intuitive automation.
Features of Drip
Drip quite has some pretty features just like ActiveCampaign, here is a list of the,
Top 15 Features of Drip;
- Email Address Capture
- Subscriber Tagging
- Integrations
- One-Off Emails
- Reports
- Email Blasts
- Process Automation
- Campaign Templates
- Split Testing
- Performance Tracking
- Subscriber List Management
- Lead Scoring
- Drip Campaigns
- Facebook Ads
- Workflow Builder
Plans and Pricing of Drip
Drip also offers a 14-day free trial that enables you to explore their platform and see how it works so you will be sure of what you are about to get into. This is one great feature I love about Drip.
Drip’s official plans and pricing starts from $39 whether you’re going for monthly or annual plans this is because Drip deals with an email list of 2500 subscribers and above. Meaning the amount you pay will depend on the number of subscribers in your email list.
Head-to-Head Comparison of ActiveCampaign Vs Drip
Before we jump into the head-to-head comparison of ActiveCampaign vs Drip, let me give you a brief of what both Drip and ActiveCampaign are best for.
What is ActiveCampaign Best for?
If your goal is to make more sales or a better Lead scoring marketing automation experience, then ActiveCamaign should be the best option for you.
What is Drip Best for?
If you’re a blogger or simply a content creator looking for a simple and smooth user experience, why not go for Drip?
ActiveCampaign Vs Drip Marketing Automation
ActiveCampaign and Drip offer an inborn/hereditary environment that enables you to craft and send your automated campaigns to meet the needs of your potential clients. However, this doesn’t mean all are both equal to better help you understand this, I am going to break them down. So let’s start with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers one of the best and most in-depth tree-like marketing automation systems with an easy drag and drops workflow builder environment which happens to be the best I have ever seen in the email marketing industry, and this is one great feature that makes it unique and stands out among its competitors.
Do you know you can set auto segmentation with ActiveCampaign? “Really” “Yeah”. With Activecampaign you set auto email segmentation depending on the action being carried out by the customer.
Here is an Example: Let’s say you’re selling a product on your eCommerce store and you decided to send an email campaign to promote a link to that particular product, all you can simply do from here is set up an auto segmentation for click and purchase.
So when a subscriber clicks on the link without making a purchase, ActiveCampaign will then send that user to a particular group and when another subscriber clicks on that link and make a purchase,
ActiveCampaign will then also send this user to a separate group this helps you to know which customers are interested in that particular product and taking advantage of this system could drastically increase your sales. Because your email now goes to the right audience.
However, there’s also a sad part to this sweet story, the sad part comes in when you’re about to add an email to your already existing workflow.
For you to be able to add an email to your existing workflow on ActiveCampaign, you will have to move out of your drag-and-drop builder and navigate to your email template tool instead of doing it directly from the drag-and-drop section.
From my experience and honestly speaking, this doesn’t stop ActiveCampaign from being a leading software when it comes to email marketing. So don’t feel disappointed!
Drip
Drip quite has a neat and well-featured marketing automation system in their editor. After taking a dip dive into exploring Drip automation workflow, I was so amazed by their neat, well-structured, colourful and not to talk of their easy-to-use interface.
With Drip, you do not have to complain about not having enough marketing automation triggers because Drip is fully loaded with automation triggers.
Some of Drip’s popular automation triggers include; Tags, Link clicks, Page views and even to the extent of allowing you to use custom triggers from your integrated eCommerce shop.
Drip also gives you the ability to add more steps to workflow with ease these steps include; transferring existing contacts into other campaigns, splitting lists down multiple paths and more.
With Drip, you can even set your own customs automated rules that apply when any of your email subscribers takes a specific action on your landing page.
One great and unique feature about Drip is that when someone views a specific page on your site you can set up a custom rule that automatically sends them an email, without having to craft a full campaign for that action.
Winner
After going through the amazing features of Drip, I almost pick Drip as the winner due to its endless trigger and beautiful interface, but ActiveCampaign should be your go-to if you have a sales and marketing team to connect with or if your sales process is complicated.
This doesn’t mean Drip is bad “No” it also has good aspects.
ActiveCampaign Vs Drip Email Segmentation and CRM
Email segmentation is a crucial aspect to consider when doing email marketing because it enables you to send the right campaigns to the right audience and enhances the relationship between you and customers.
For you to be able to achieve your campaign goals, is necessary for you to choose the right email marketing platform to go with.
Both Drip and Activecampaign have good segmentation process but there is a slight difference that will make one stands out. In breaking each platform segmentation process down, we are going to start with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign allows you to import a CSV file of your existing contacts (Email subscribers) or by simply connecting it to any database where your existing contacts are being stored for easy importation, in this way you can easily transfer your contacts from your existing email marketing software to ActiveCampaign without adding them one after the other.
After successful importation, ActiveCampaign enables you to organize your contacts into specific groups using tags so you can know the most important audience and know what product to promote to each group.
With their built-in CRM, you can easily combine multiple segmentations aspects and tools with both tracking and sales features.
ActiveCampaign also has an in-built Lead Scoring system which can help track the leads in your email list that have a high chance of converting and becoming a buying customer.
ActiveCampaign quite has some great features not talk of its sales journey tracker, which tells you the exact stage a particular customer is in the buying circle.
Drip
Just like that of ActiveCampaign, Drip’s segmentation process is way better because it’s straightforward and most of the parts can be automated and are also filled with more segmentation features as compared to that of ActiveCampaign.
With the help of Drip Tags, Events and custom fields, you can easily track how your contacts are interacting with your products.
Additionally, Drip allows you to create a list of people who have interacted with your email Campaigns and those who haven’t interacted with your previous campaigns in an automated series.
Also, Drip tracks all your email opens, clicks and purchases, this feature will assist you to better understand what your customers (contacts) are expecting from you, in this way, you can be sure to send the right campaigns and this could 10x your revenue.
The whole Drip system is crafted to help you better engage with your contacts that are far gone on the buying journey and this system is automated which makes it so easy for you to get in touch with your ready-to-by customers.
Winner
At first glance, I was lost with the great lead scoring features of ActiveCampaign, but then I came across the great automated systems of Drip which give Drip an upper hand in the segmentation aspect.
Honestly speaking, Drip won the segmentation session due to its easy-to-use interface, which could be easier for beginners to understand. If you’re already good at email segmentations, then ActiveCampaign won’t be bad either.
ActiveCampaign Vs Drip Usability
The awesome features in this challenge of AcTiveCampaign Vs Drip can easily carry you away and make you forget the importance of usability. But to me, no matter how good a product is, usability plays a very important role.
So let us start with the usability of ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign
Like other email marketing platforms that pay more attention to cuteness and how they appear, ActiveCampaign doesn’t care about cuteness, they slide directly to the business making everything straight forward which is great for many who have already used other email marketing platforms like GetResponse.
So this might not be right for total beginners, however, with Google at your fingertips, you can easily navigate through and with time, you would come to master the interface and find no fault with it.
If you are already used to the Drag and Drop systems of creating a website or have ever dragged and dropped on computers before, then you should be able to create awesome emails with ease.
Additionally, If you have a little coding knowledge of HTML, then “Good luck” you will probably have an upper hand because, with a single click of a button, you can easily switch to the code editor and even add more fields and twist to give your emails that “WOW” look.
Additionally, When you first open ActiveCampaing, it is quite a bucky with welcome messages and tabs all around, but thanks to their “Get Started Tour” which takes you through every part of the interface and shows you how you can easily close those tabs and make your interface little more attracting.
So, if you go with ActiveCampaing, don’t be bored with their first appearance, just go through their guide and understand the platform and is that easy.
Now, let us talk about Drip.
Drip
Drip has a well organise and interactive interface which is far more good-looking than that of ActiveCampaign. Also, All Drip tabs are well arranged at the top menu to make it easier for beginners to navigate and start their email automation faster.
Nonetheless, Drip also has its own downsides when it comes to email compositions. Drip default email builder is in HTML and not an easy Drag and Drop like that of ActiveCampaugn which can be quite easy.
But in the Drip email builder, you will have to select each element you want to edit one after the other and pick the elements you want to place there. Though this isn’t that difficult if you’re a total beginner, you can’t give your emails the catchy look that you wish since there are no already made templates.
But if you think you find Drip more attractive and would go for them, then one thing you can do is, go through your email box and pick out some email campaigns that you have received from other brands then extract their HTML code and take change some aspect of it and paste that into DRip and continue customizing from there.
Winner
Drip appears to be the winner here due to his intuitive and clean interface, however, we aren’t just concerned about the appearance because it won’t set up the campaign itself.
So looking from a beginner’s perspective, ActiveCamapaign is the winner because they have done for you templates and also give you multiple email builder options of both HTML and Drag and Drop which is much easier.
ActiveCampaign Vs Drip Plans and Pricing
For the best and easy email marketing campaign you will have to spend more money to get features, But this isn’t the case as always there are few email marketing platforms that you can get both at a lower budget but trust me every platform has a downside.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign has 4 major plans starting at $28/mon when you go for a yearly subscription but $39 when you decide to go for their monthly plans as well and a free plan that allows up to 1,000 subscribers which is okay, but the problem here is that.
Additionally, as the prices appear to be very low and moderate, features are also limited, meaning the higher the plan you choose the more features you get.
Drip
Drip has only two plans which are the 14days free trial and their paying plan for an email list of up to 2,500 this plan is worth $39 per month which I think is better as compared to that of ActiveCampaign because with Drip all payment plans contain all features including unlimited email sending.
However, Drip automatically scale up your plan depending on the size of your email list, meaning the moment your email list increases to more than 2,500 subscribers, they are going to upgrade it automatically and the same applies when your email subscribers drop to 2,500 subscribers, they are also going to bring you back to the lowest plan that can handle that number of contacts.
This may be quite different from other software but I think is much better since you get access to all features regardless of the plan you are in.
Winner
Without hesitation and further thinking, when it comes to pricing Drip is way better than ActiveCampaign because each plan contains all features you need.
But if you think spending more to get the best experience isn’t your problem, then going with ActiveCampaign won’t be a bad idea either.
Summary of ActiveCampaign Vs Drip
If you are looking forward to making sales through eCommerce and you know your sales process is kind of complicated, then ActiveCampaign should be the best option.
But if you are just a blogger or an Author, Drip could be easier and the best fit for you.
Both ActiveCampaign and Drip are undoubtedly one of the best email marketing systems. Just like other automation platforms both have negative and positive aspects and I believe the review above, can help you make the right decision depending on the feature you are looking for.
Apart from ActiveCmapign Vs Drip, there are other great Competitors like GetResponse. Take a look at GetResponse Vs ActiveCampaign Which is best for your Business?
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