As many of my projects continue to move forward this year, I’ve been testing out different email automation programs and autoresponders, from Mailchimp to Drip to ActiveCampaign.
Mailchimp is great for starting from ground 0 to get your feet wet, but not great for marketing automation in the long term, in my opinion. So in come Drip and ActiveCampaign. After trying them both out for a bit, here are my thoughts and a quick comparison on the two.
Drip vs ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons
- ActiveCampaign does not automatically resend confirmation emails – Drip does have this setting. However, in ActiveCampaign you can manually resend a confirmation email.
- ActiveCampaign is not capable of sending confirmation emails for double opt-in if you are adding someone to a list via the API, or really via any method other than their built-in forms.
- ActiveCampaign does NOT auto-score leads. Drip does. There are pros and cons to both of these methods. Drip scores people on your list much more automatically out of the box, and you can also customize this. With ActiveCampaign, scoring is far more customizable and granular, but it takes much more time to set up everything out of the box – it is not plug and play at all.
- ActiveCampaign does NOT have a native integration with Stripe, or even a native “LTV”/Lifetime Value field like Drip does. I find this odd since marketing automation is so closely tied to the intent to increase customer LTV and revenue. On the other hand, you can link Stripe to ActiveCampaign via Zapier and create automations to update a custom LTV field, and this works on all plans.
- ActiveCampaign does NOT have forms that are as pretty as Drip’s.
- Drip does NOT have lists, ActiveCampaign does. Drip bases their marketing fully off of tags – which may or may not be beneficial to you depending on how you email.
- Drip DOES allow for easy multi-site management in one login. ActiveCampaign does not. Ie in Drip, you can manage multiple website accounts with different tracking codes and subscriber lists. In ActiveCampaign, everything is grouped together just with different lists.
- Drip does NOT have as nice of a contact overview as ActiveCampaign does. The reason I originally began switching from Drip to AC, in fact, is because I felt like it was difficult to get a full picture of any single contact or segment of contacts in Drip. AC’s person overview page is far more valuable and intuitive compared to Drip’s timeline.
That’s about it – which one is better for you really depends on what your needs are, and I know it’s always annoying to read that from an online review, but after trying them both (and thinking I’d find a “winner”), your unique needs are really what will be the deciding factor. 🙂
I hope that helped – I’ll update this blog in the future but wanted to quickly publish my findings for now.
