ActiveCampaign pricing and review

Reachkit makes a cold email tool, not an email marketing platform. Every price here was checked in October 2026 against ActiveCampaign’s own pages; review-site figures are labeled.

ActiveCampaign pricing starts at $15 a month for Starter, billed yearly for 1,000 contacts, and every plan costs more as your list grows. activecampaign.com/pricing lists these prices for its default of 1,000 contacts, billed yearly, as of October 2026:

All plans include 500 AI credits a month. Starter is email only, with 5 lists and 5 actions per automation. Plus adds landing pages and the CRM, SMS and WhatsApp add-ons, Pro (Professional in the help center) adds predictive sending, and Enterprise adds SSO and Salesforce integration.

Monthly billing isn’t on the pricing page. Two review sites checked in August 2026 agree on Starter at $19 and Plus at $59, but give Pro as $89 or $99 and Enterprise as $159 or $179 (Emailtooltester, Email Vendor Selection).

Who counts. On accounts opened on or after November 3, 2025, unsubscribed, unconfirmed and bounced contacts all count toward the plan; older accounts count only active ones (help center). At the limit, campaigns can’t go out until you upgrade, unless auto-upgrade is on.

Extra sends cost $0.005 each, and sending is turned off until next month if “the overage value of sends reaches three times your limit” (send limits).

Add-ons with no price on the pricing page: the Enhanced CRM, SMS, custom reporting and transactional email through Postmark, which ActiveCampaign owns. WhatsApp has its own pricing page.

Refunds. The refund policy says no partial or full refunds, while a promotion running since February 2026 refunds first-time direct customers who cancel within 30 days.

What a typical setup costs: 1,000 contacts on Plus is $588 a year before add-ons. At 10,000 contacts, Venture Harbour’s September 2026 figures put Plus at $189 a month, about $2,268 a year.

ActiveCampaign sends marketing email to people already on your list and automates what happens next. Contacts arrive through forms, landing pages, integrations or an import. You segment them, send campaigns, and build automations: multi-step flows that start when a contact signs up, clicks or buys, and branch on what they do after that.

Marketing email goes out through ActiveCampaign’s own servers. Its anti-spam policy requires permission from every subscriber and bans bought or rented lists, so it’s built for opted-in email, not cold outreach.

For sales, the Sales Engagement CRM add-on has a “Send a 1:1 email” automation step: plain text, sent from your own connected mailbox, up to 500 a day per mailbox. Deal pipelines and lead scoring come with the Enhanced CRM add-on.

Active Intelligence, the AI layer, drafts campaigns and flags dead ends in automations. A remote MCP server gives you a private link that lets Claude or ChatGPT add contacts, pull campaign results and send campaigns in your account. Founded in 2003 and based in Chicago, ActiveCampaign says it has over 180,000 customers.

Strengths

• Automation depth. It’s what reviewers praise first. Emailtooltester calls it “one of the most powerful email marketing services on the market, hardly missing a thing” (review).
• A low first price. $15 a month billed yearly already buys multi-step automation.
• Many channels, one account. Email, landing pages, SMS, WhatsApp and a CRM, the last three as add-ons.
• Open to builders. A public API with a free developer sandbox, plus the MCP server with guides for Claude and ChatGPT (developer docs).

Drawbacks

• The bill follows the list. On newer accounts, contacts you can no longer email still count. Venture Harbour’s Plus example works out to “$2,400 a year for people you legally can’t email”.
• Sales tools cost more. Pipelines need the CRM add-on and Salesforce needs Enterprise. Venture Harbour calls the CRM and reporting “remarkably average”.
• Support and cancelling. Two October 2026 Trustpilot reviews say ActiveCampaign “will NOT talk to you on the phone” and its support AI “is often wrong”. Cancelling may require a 1:1 session with the Success team (cancellation help).

ActiveCampaign rates well on business software sites and poorly on Trustpilot. As of October 2026, Google’s results show 4.4 out of 5 on G2 from about 14,800 reviews and 4.6 on Capterra from about 2,570. Trustpilot shows 2.7 from 1,452 reviews, with 44% five-star and 25% one-star.

Reviewers praise the automations and how much fits in one account. Complaints repeat across sites: prices that climb with the list, support that’s hard to reach, and an interface that takes time to learn. A Capterra reviewer wrote: “Its price keeps going up over time, but we can’t really say the same about its features”.

ActiveCampaign suits businesses that email customers and subscribers who signed up, and want those emails to react to behavior: a welcome series, a follow-up after a click.

Look elsewhere for prospects who never opted in, which the anti-spam policy rules out, or for a full sales CRM without an add-on. If you need both kinds of email, I’d keep them apart: opted-in marketing in ActiveCampaign, cold outreach on separate domains in a tool made for it.

• GoHighLevel: an all-in-one CRM and marketing suite for agencies from $97 a month, with unlimited contacts on every plan and email at $0.675 per 1,000. See the GoHighLevel profile.
• SendGrid Marketing Campaigns: Twilio’s newsletter editor from $15 a month for 5,000 contacts; automation starts on Advanced at $60. See the SendGrid profile.
• HubSpot: CRM first. Its sales sequences need Sales Hub Professional, $90 a seat a month billed yearly plus $1,500 onboarding. See Reachkit vs HubSpot.
• Postmark: app email only (receipts, password resets), from $15 for 10,000 emails a month, owned by ActiveCampaign. See the Postmark profile.
• Reachkit (our product): for the cold outreach ActiveCampaign’s policy doesn’t allow. From $39 a month per workspace, it finds verified prospects (1,000 lead credits a month), registers new domains ($15 a year) and sets up Google or Microsoft inboxes ($5 a month) that warm up automatically, away from your main domain. Its CRM sync (Scale, $99) covers HubSpot, Zoho, Odoo and GoHighLevel, not ActiveCampaign.