ActiveCampaign Alternatives for Email Sequences

Leave ActiveCampaign when the bill follows your contact count faster than your revenue, or when you sit on Starter and keep hitting its cap of 5 actions per automation. The default move for that reader is MailerLite: at 10,000 subscribers its pricing page reads $89 for Comfort and $129 for Power, against $149 for ActiveCampaign Starter and $189 for Plus. Choose Brevo if you would rather pay by emails sent, Customer.io for product-event sequences, and HubSpot or Keap if the CRM is the real reason you are here. Stay if deals, lead scores and automations already run together and you are not near 25,000 contacts.

What the ActiveCampaign page actually sells

ActiveCampaign's pricing page sells four email plans, billed annually, with a price that rises with the contact count you select. At 1,000 contacts the page reads $15 for Starter, $49 for Plus, $79 for Pro and $145 for Enterprise, and there is a free trial but no free plan. This page is about whether to go and where, so the plan-by-plan costs stay on that page and below are only the limits that make people leave.

Five things on that page that push people out

1. The 5-action ceiling on Starter. The Starter card lists "5 actions per automation"; Plus, Pro and Enterprise list "Unlimited automation actions". Count a welcome email, a wait, a tag, a second email and a branch and you are at the ceiling before the sequence has reached day three. The step up is $15 to $49 at 1,000 contacts and $149 to $189 at 10,000.
2. The price curve by contacts. Read from the contact selector on 7 October 2026, Starter goes $39 at 2,500, $79 at 5,000, $149 at 10,000 and $391 at 25,000. At 25,000 it costs $2 more than Plus ($389), and the page says Starter is only available on plans with 25,000 contacts or fewer, so the entry plan disappears just as the list gets large. At 50,000 the page reads $609 for Plus, $969 for Pro and $1,169 for Enterprise.
3. Depth held back for Pro. Predictive and conditional content, attribution and conversion tracking and 3 users start on Pro. The feature grid also shows A/B testing covering "Email & automation" on Pro and Enterprise, and email only on Plus and Starter, so testing a step inside a sequence is a Pro feature.
4. CRM sold as an add-on. The grid lists an Enhanced CRM add-on with two parts, Pipelines (pipeline management, deal records, account records, lead scoring) and Sales engagement (automated 1:1 email and win probability). It is listed as available on Plus, Pro and Enterprise and not on Starter, and the page shows no price for it, so budget by asking.
5. Send and seat caps. Email sends are capped at 10x the contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12x on Pro and 15x on Enterprise, and users are 1, 1, 3 and 5 in the same order. At 5,000 contacts that is 50,000 sends a month on Plus. A weekly broadcast uses about 20,000 of those (5,000 contacts x 4 sends), leaving roughly 30,000 for sequence emails.

Seven places to go, ranked for an ActiveCampaign leaver

1. MailerLite: the default when cost is the reason

You gain a price that follows subscribers only, with Comfort at $49 for 5,000, $89 for 10,000 and $179 for 25,000, and Power at $69, $129 and $239, per MailerLite's pricing page. Its automation page gives the limits that matter for sequences: Free has 3 active automations and 5 steps, Comfort 50 active automations and 100 steps, Power unlimited automations with up to 100 steps each. Comfort sends 10x the subscriber tier ceiling, the same ratio as ActiveCampaign Starter; Power is unlimited. You lose the CRM: nothing on the pricing or automation pages mentions deals or pipelines, and transactional email is a separate product (MailerSend). The plus side for EU senders is that the page states its data storage centre is in the European Union with ISO 27001 certification.

2. Brevo: pay per email instead of per contact

Brevo's Standard plan starts at $18 a month at 5,000 sends and includes marketing automation with no cap on contacts inside it; Free and Starter keep automation to 2,000 contacts. Every plan also carries a free sales area with 50 open deals and 1 pipeline, per Brevo's pricing help article, which helps if your deal tracking is light. The catch is storage: the 10,000-send tier stores up to 1,500 contacts and the 20,000-send tier is the first to store 500,000. Price lines are on Brevo's pricing page, and Brevo vs ActiveCampaign compares the two in depth.

3. Drip: when your sequences start from orders and carts

Drip's pricing page reads $89 at 5,000 people, $154 at 10,000 and $369 at 25,000, with unlimited email sends and up to 50 workflows in the plan shown, and its plans include dynamic segments and onsite campaigns. Against Starter it costs more ($89 against $79 at 5,000, $154 against $149 at 10,000), but Starter carries the 5-action cap; against Plus, the plan that removes it, Drip is lower at all three sizes read: $89 against $145, $154 against $189 and $369 against $389. Drip's pricing page lists no pipeline or deal records, which is the trade. See ActiveCampaign vs Drip and Drip's pricing page.

4. Customer.io: when the trigger is something your product does

Customer.io prices on profiles: its Essentials plan reads $100 for 5,000 profiles, $145 for 10,000, $235 for 20,000 and $325 for 30,000, billed monthly, with 1 million emails included and a visual workflow builder (pricing page). Transactional email is included in every plan. Essentials does not include managed deliverability, and the billing documentation says a profile that exists at any point in the month counts even if you delete it later, so clean before you import. Early-stage companies that raised under $10M can get 12 months free through its Startup Program. Nothing in its plan list covers pipelines, so deals need another home.

5. Kit: for creators and newsletter-led businesses

Kit's pricing page reads Free up to 10,000 subscribers, but Visual Automations and sequences start on Creator: $33 a month at 1,000 subscribers (listed as $390 billed yearly), $75 at 5,000, $116 at 10,000 and $166 at 25,000. Creator has unlimited visual automations and unlimited sequences, a 14-day trial with no card, and the page lists free migrations. At 10,000 contacts that is $33 under ActiveCampaign Starter ($149 less $116). You give up pipelines and anything ecommerce-heavy. Details at kit.com/pricing.

6. Keap: sales and email in one price

Keap's pricing page reads $299 a month at 1,500 contacts with 2 users, $449 at 5,000, $539 at 10,000 and $719 at 25,000, billed monthly, with CRM, automation, pipeline and payments in one plan and extra users at $39 a month. Required implementation services are priced separately and unpublished, and annual contracts carry a $299 early termination fee. That is a different class of spend than MailerLite; it only makes sense if you were about to buy the Pipelines add-on anyway. Compare in Keap vs ActiveCampaign and on Keap's pricing page.

7. HubSpot Marketing Hub: when the CRM is the product

HubSpot lists free tools, Marketing Hub Professional at $800 a month and Enterprise at $3,600 a month on its pricing page, with email automation limited to 1 automated action on the free tier and up to 10 on Starter before unlimited actions arrive on Professional. Pick it when sales and marketing share one database and someone else is paying; it is the most expensive route on this list. See HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign. Selling online? Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign covers the store-first route, where Klaviyo's Email plan reads $100 at 5,000 profiles and $150 at 10,000.

The same list at 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 contacts

Monthly list prices in US dollars, read from each vendor's own page on 7 October 2026. ActiveCampaign figures are billed annually; MailerLite, Customer.io and Keap figures are monthly-billing readings and Kit's are the rates shown for yearly billing, so the bases are not identical, and where a vendor discounts annual billing the real gap is slightly wider. Brevo prices by emails sent, so its row assumes each contact gets 2 emails a month and uses the cheapest Standard tier that can store the list (the 20,000-send tier, then 50,000 sends at 25,000 contacts: 25,000 x 2).

Arithmetic on the like-for-like pair, Plus against MailerLite Power (both without the 5-action cap): at 5,000 contacts $145 - $69 = $76 a month, or $912 a year; at 10,000, $189 - $129 = $60, or $720 a year; at 25,000, $389 - $239 = $150, or $1,800 a year. Against Comfort the 5,000 gap is $145 - $49 = $96, or $1,152 a year. Brevo's $69 at 5,000 contacts looks high beside its $18 headline because the headline is the 500-contact tier; storing 5,000 contacts needs the 20,000-send tier, which reads $69 on Standard.

Your CRM and deal data on the way out

This is where ActiveCampaign leavers lose things. The deal side of the account exports separately from contacts. The deals export article says you need export permissions, that you can export across all pipelines and statuses or one pipeline at a time, that the CSV carries deal ID, title, value, currency, status, owner, pipeline, stage, primary and secondary contact, account, created and updated dates, next action date and forecasted close date plus every custom deal field, and that links expire after 30 days. Deal notes cannot be exported. Accounts export through their own article.

Decide where deals live before you pick the email tool, because only some alternatives have a place for them. Brevo includes 50 open deals and 1 pipeline on every plan (more with the $31 Sales Essentials add-on per its help article). Keap and HubSpot carry a full CRM. And if you only want a pipeline next to a cheap email tool, Pipedrive's pricing page lists Lite at $14 per seat a month and Growth at $39 per seat a month, billed annually, with automations and nurturing sequences from Growth. Lead and deal scores export as columns in the contact CSV, but a score computed by ActiveCampaign rules will not keep updating anywhere else, so treat the number as history.

Getting out cleanly: exports, consent and a 30-day overlap

1. Export all contacts. The help article has you open Contacts, use the ellipsis, choose Export, pick fields and download from the Exports page within 7 days. Avoid special characters in the export name, since the article says the file then comes out as a text document rather than a CSV.
2. Export by list and status. The list export article lets you choose Active, Unconfirmed, Unsubscribed, Bounced or Any, and its CSV adds a Status column and Date Subscribed and Date Unsubscribed columns. That is the only export that tells you who opted out and when, so run it for Unsubscribed and Bounced on every list and keep the files as your suppression record.
3. Merge across lists before you import. One person can be unsubscribed from list A and Active on list B, and the help center counts that person as Active. If your new tool has a single global unsubscribe state, decide the rule first (the safe rule is to suppress anyone unsubscribed anywhere from marketing email) and apply it to the merged file.
4. Import suppressions before audiences. Load the unsubscribed and bounced file into the new tool first, as a blocked list, then import the active contacts. Doing it the other way round gives an unsubscribed person a window to receive your first send.
5. Rebuild, do not expect transfer. The export articles cover contacts, lists, deals and accounts. None mentions exporting an automation, a campaign or a form, so rebuild the three sequences that make money first and leave the long tail until after cutover.

An overlap plan that fits the annual billing: on day 0, set a calendar reminder 30 days before your renewal and run all four exports. Days 1 to 3, import suppressions, then contacts, and send a test to your own addresses. Days 4 to 10, rebuild your three highest-value automations and run them against internal contacts. On day 11 point new signups at the new tool and pause new entries into the matching ActiveCampaign automations, letting people already inside finish there. Days 12 to 24, watch both tools' unsubscribe counts and re-export Unsubscribed and Bounced once more. On days 25 to 29 import that last delta, pause what is left and cancel before renewal. For general guidance see the email sequence tools migration guide.

Reasons to stay put

Stay if you are a five-person sales-led team on Pro or Enterprise at 10,000 contacts or fewer, with deals, lead scores and automations wired together, since leaving means a CRM migration and a rebuild for a saving that disappears once you add a pipeline tool back. Stay if you are on Plus and your sends stay well under the 10x cap. And stay if your list is small: at 1,000 contacts Starter reads $15 a month, which is hard to beat as long as 5 actions is enough for your welcome series. Browse the wider field in the alternatives directory and the tools directory before you commit.

Questions people ask before leaving ActiveCampaign

Is Plus enough for sequences, or do I need Pro?

Plus is enough for long linear sequences, because its feature list reads unlimited automation actions where Starter reads 5 actions per automation. Pro is where ActiveCampaign's pricing page puts advanced segmentation, predictive and conditional content, attribution tracking and split tests inside automations (Plus and Starter read email only), plus 3 users instead of 1. At 10,000 contacts the page reads $189 for Plus and $375 for Pro, so the gap is $186 a month, or $2,232 a year.

Do unsubscribed contacts count toward my ActiveCampaign bill?

ActiveCampaign's help article on archiving says contacts with a bounced or unsubscribed status do not count toward the contact limit and are not charged, and it adds that a contact unsubscribed from one list but subscribed to another is counted as Active. The same article says it describes accounts created on or before 2 November 2025 and points newer accounts to a separate article on contact list statuses, so check which rules your account follows before you trim anything.

Will my deals move when I export contacts?

No. The contact export gives you a CSV with columns for custom fields, lead scores and deal scores, with tags in a single column, but deals have their own export from the Deals area, and accounts have a third one. Notes are the loss: ActiveCampaign's articles say contact notes cannot be exported and deal notes cannot be exported, so copy any notes you rely on by hand or through the API before you cancel.

How long do the export download links last?

ActiveCampaign's contact export article says the download link on the Exports page is valid for 7 days, and its deal export article says deal export links expire after 30 days. If your destination tool needs a few days of cleaning before import, start the contact export the day you plan to import, not a week earlier, or you will run it twice.

What happens to contacts who are halfway through an automation?

The export articles list contact fields, tags, scores and deal fields, and none of them lists a contact's position inside an automation. Plan on that state not travelling. Stop new entries into the old automation on a chosen day, let people already inside finish there, and start new entrants in the new tool from that day.