ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp: Which is best? [2026]

Everyone who’s stepped foot into the world of email marketing—and even folks who haven’t—has heard of or used Mailchimp. The email giant made its debut back in 2001 and has managed to stay on top with small businesses, mostly due to its simplicity and clear, targeted branding.

But if you’re looking for Mailchimp alternatives, ActiveCampaign is a strong contender. It’s been around almost as long (since 2003) and has a reputation for being a marketing automation beast that satisfies even the most seasoned marketer. 

I’ve used both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign for past projects, but a lot’s changed for both apps during the AI era—especially ActiveCampaign. As I was updating this article, I spent a few days with each app to see how they’ve developed recently. Here’s how they stack up: Mailchimp vs. ActiveCampaign.

Table of contents:

ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp at a glance

Here’s a quick comparison table to get you started, but keep reading for details about the various features and my experience using each platform. Or you can scroll to the end for a quick summary of which email marketing tool will be best for you.

Mailchimp is simpler—and better for people new to email marketing

Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign go beyond email creation, offering everything from a landing page builder to marketing automation. But Mailchimp makes all those things simpler.

It makes sense, since it’s a small business brand—they likely assume that lots of their customers are business owners who are wearing multiple hats (including email marketing). ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has a slightly steeper learning curve. That might not be a barrier for seasoned marketers, but it can be a bit much for small businesses with straightforward marketing needs.

For example, both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer lead scoring, but to different extents. Mailchimp uses a five-star system, which rates your subscribers according to how often they open or click through your emails, or how much they buy from you. If you just want a basic idea of how your emails are resonating with the average subscriber, this feature is plenty. 

But let’s say you want a deeper dive into the specifics. With ActiveCampaign, you can add or subtract points from a subscriber’s profile depending on whether or not they meet certain campaign conditions. This can help tremendously when it comes to personalization and segmentation. Take a look at the image below, where I’m creating really granular contact score rules.

When Mailchimp ventures beyond email marketing, it does so in ways that make sense for small businesses. For example, you can also schedule social posts, run Google remarketing ads, and survey your customers without leaving Mailchimp’s platform.

The end result is an email marketing tool that does a savvy job of anticipating the needs of small business customers. For local businesses with basic needs, a Mailchimp account can often work as a single hub for all your marketing activities.

ActiveCampaign is more advanced, yet surprisingly easy to use

The age of AI has been kind to ActiveCampaign. When I last used ActiveCampaign regularly, around 2020, it felt powerful but fairly clunky. Now, ActiveCampaign has embedded AI throughout its platform in ways that make it feel like an entirely different app. Just look at the home screen, which now takes more inspiration from ChatGPT than from traditional marketing automation tools.

There’s a lot you can do with ActiveCampaign’s AI, which we’ll explore more in-depth shortly. But the important point here is that it’s taken processes that used to be enormous time sinkholes—like mapping out multi-path automations—and made them way easier.

For example, you can:

• Generate entire email automations in one shot

• Automatically build multi-path workflows with conditional logic

• Create complex audience segments

• Optimize or debug existing automations

I asked ActiveCampaign’s AI to build a five-day drip series with three emails. It generated the entire thing (including the email designs and content), meaning I just had to tweak a few things rather than starting from scratch.

While Mailchimp also provides AI automations (or “flows”), it still relies on templates rather than creating custom workflows based on a prompt. If Mailchimp has a flow template for the automation you need, it’s quick to launch, but if it doesn’t, you’re stuck putting your workflow together manually.

Email marketing is just one aspect of ActiveCampaign. It’s also a robust CRM with deep sales automation. You can create workflows that automatically assign leads, send personalized follow-ups, and move deals through pipelines based on custom triggers.

With Mailchimp, you can set up automated email sequences, tag contacts, and send internal notifications, but it lacks the complexity of full sales pipeline automation.

Mailchimp is also weaker when it comes to segmentation. Mailchimp offers a couple dozen filters related to contact details, email and SMS activity, signup source, and predicted gender or location.

ActiveCampaign has 100+ filters, which means you can get a lot more detailed about how you segment your audience, including by pulling in data from your sales pipeline, automations, and website. 

For example, you can filter based on:

• Predicted customer sentiment

• Total number of website visits

• Replied/hasn’t replied to email

• Total conversion value

• Deal win probability

In the example above, I created the segment manually for clarity, but you can do it even more easily using ActiveCampaign’s AI segment builder.

One last feature that’s worth mentioning: ActiveCampaign’s automation map. Most email services will offer at least some visual mapping to view individual customer journeys, but ActiveCampaign takes it to another level by allowing you to fit multiple automations into one big map, connect them to each other, and see exactly how they work together.

In Mailchimp, there’s no way to do this: you can scroll through your Automations dashboard to see a list of all your automations at a glance, but there’s no visual map feature to see how they connect.

ActiveCampaign embeds AI everywhere; Mailchimp offers a few token features

We’ve already covered the fact that ActiveCampaign’s AI assistant (dubbed “Active Intelligence”) is accessible throughout the platform and automatically handles tasks that used to take lots of time. You can generate multi-step automations or create audience segments by just typing what you need, whereas with Mailchimp, those actions still take manual work. 

But ActiveCampaign’s AI features run so deep that there’s plenty more to cover.

What’s neat is that there’s a sequential logic to them: 

• You start by using AI to generate your brand kit.

• Then you provide custom instructions to your AI assistant (like “avoid marketing fluff”).

• From there, ActiveCampaign has what it needs to populate your dashboard with campaign suggestions and generate assets with one click.

Let’s start with the brand kit. Unlike Mailchimp, which offers a solid but limited brand scraper, ActiveCampaign pulls in everything: logos, primary colors, secondary colors, fonts, social links, mission statement, and brand description. You can also create your brand kit manually, which is what I’ve done below since my made-up eCommerce brand (“Backpack City”) doesn’t have an existing website to pull assets from.

Just like with chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, you can give custom instructions to ActiveCampaign’s AI so it understands your strategy and gives you output that’s closer to your brand voice.

With your brand kit and custom instructions in place, you’re ready to start launching campaigns. If you’re not sure where to start, you can just scroll down on ActiveCampaign’s home screen, find a custom-generated suggestion, and click it.

ActiveCampaign’s AI automation-building features generally saved the most time for me. They hit an AI sweet spot: since creating workflows manually takes a lot of time and it’s also relatively logical and mechanical, oftentimes AI does it better and faster.

Emails are a bit of a different story. ActiveCampaign can generate single-email campaigns and full email sequences with AI, but it’s best to think of them as a rough starting point. If you’ve ever struggled to get human-sounding content out of other chatbots, you’ll find similar challenges here. Email marketing is highly sensitive to open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes, which means it’s often worth the time to add some captivating human-written magic to your emails so your audience keeps opening and clicking.

Still, ActiveCampaign’s AI-generated emails do provide a decent starting point, and that’s more than you can say for Mailchimp. You can create AI copy inside your emails with Mailchimp and drag and drop AI-generated content blocks, but there’s no “one-click” functionality to create entire campaigns. Strangely, Mailchimp used to offer more in terms of AI designs with its Creative Assistant feature. But in the process of consolidating all AI functions under its “Intuit Assist” umbrella, most of Mailchimp’s AI design features seem to have either been demoted or quietly retired, at least for now.

Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign also offer “micro AI” features that assist in small ways, like subject line generators and email send time optimization. But ActiveCampaign offers far more AI-powered features overall, including:

• Audience segmentation

• Predictive sending

• Win probability for deals

• Predictive lead scoring

• Automation path optimization (to see where users drop off)

• Editing prebuilt email templates with AI

My main gripe with ActiveCampaign AI right now is speed. Interactions with its AI assistant tend to hang, and creating an automation often took 3+ minutes in my tests rather than seconds. It’s not a big drawback, particularly given that ActiveCampaign’s AI assistant is still in beta, but it’s worth mentioning.

Mailchimp offers a more streamlined design experience

Mailchimp has a reputation for being very easy to use, especially when it comes to creating emails. While I still think the platform is extremely intuitive and simple for beginners, over the past few years, ActiveCampaign has caught up somewhat by making some helpful changes to improve its ease-of-use, specifically when designing email templates.

Both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer hundreds of customizable, ready-to-go email designs. They both let you add conditional content, view and edit HTML code, and preview your email on different devices.

The drag-and-drop email builder works similarly on each. If you start from scratch, you’ll get a few editable blocks, and you can easily add sections and elements by dragging and dropping them from the menu. 

Here’s Mailchimp’s email editor:

Mailchimp has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. There are integrations with Canva and GIPHY, making it easy to add images. You can also create surveys for your emails in Mailchimp: when you drag and drop the survey element into your email, you’ll be directed to a surprisingly robust survey builder that embeds into your email as a button. (ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer an integrated survey builder.)

ActiveCampaign’s email builder experience has lots to offer if you need advanced email marketing features like conditional content, but it feels a little less polished than Mailchimp. Still, it can accomplish most of the same things as Mailchimp can, and you can also use AI to quickly adjust ActiveCampaign’s prebuilt templates so they fit your needs better.

ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder is a little less straightforward for newbies, and unfortunately, there aren’t any AI features here to speed up the process. You do get access to 60+ landing page templates, from lead generation-focused pages to upsell templates, and once you get comfortable with all the features, you can make some really attractive landing pages.

While ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder isn’t hard to use, especially with its drag-and-drop interface, there’s a lot more customization needed with spacing and borders as you’re adding elements. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, the design flexibility could be overkill for someone who just wants to quickly spin up a landing page to collect emails.

Mailchimp’s landing pages don’t give you as much to choose from template-wise—there are only nine options, either for lead generation or promoting a product. But there’s enough variety in the design styles that most people will find something appealing.

What’s great about Mailchimp’s landing page builder is that it’s extremely straightforward. It uses a drag-and-drop model like ActiveCampaign, but there’s no need to adjust any padding or borders. Once you learn Mailchimp’s email builder, you’ll have no problem building landing pages since the process is almost exactly the same.

It’s also worth noting that unlike ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp can also create entire websites. You can integrate with Shopify to sell products or add a bookable calendar integration to offer services. This isn’t a huge focus for Mailchimp—and oddly enough, they also encourage users to create a full website with Wix—but if your needs are simple and you want to manage your email marketing and website in the same place, it’s a decent option.

I found the form builder much more intuitive. You just drag and drop the fields you want included, and they snap perfectly into place, with appropriate spacing. You can still customize further by changing the width, the background color, the font, and so on, but the form will still look perfectly fine if you don’t.

Mailchimp is cheaper if you just need email marketing; ActiveCampaign gives you more bang for your buck

ActiveCampaign positions itself as more than just an email marketing tool, and as a result, its pricing tends to be more premium across all plans.

Both apps let you get started without pulling out your credit card: you get a 14-day free trial when you sign up for either Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. If you want a free plan, only Mailchimp has that option. However, it’s pretty restrictive if you compare it to alternatives like Kit or MailerLite: you get just 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month, and essential features like automations and A/B testing are missing entirely. That said, if you’re just starting to grow your list and only send occasional email blasts—which is the case for lots of small businesses—it’s a solid place to start.

As you move into the world of paid plans, Mailchimp is reliably cheaper than ActiveCampaign at most subscriber counts and it lets you provide access to more users. However, it also offers a slimmer set of features.

For straightforward email blasts and basic automation, Mailchimp’s Essentials plan, starting at $13/month for 500 contacts, is a solid option. However, you’re limited to a maximum of four email automation steps, which isn’t great for anyone who needs more than just a basic welcome sequence. Mailchimp’s Standard plan, starting at $20/month for 500 contacts, gives you nearly everything Mailchimp has to offer, including AI features, dynamic content, advanced segmentation, and custom reporting. Most important, you get 200 automation steps with multiple starting points and branching.

Mailchimp is particularly affordable if you have a team to collaborate with or if you need landing pages. The Essentials plan includes three users, the Standard plan includes five users, and landing pages come standard with any paid Mailchimp plan. By contrast, with ActiveCampaign you don’t get landing pages or additional users until you upgrade to pricer plans.

Despite ActiveCampaign’s reputation as a more premium option, it actually does provide a competitive entry-level plan—Starter—for $19/month for 1,000 contacts. And unlike with Mailchimp, you get access to a robust CRM, lots of AI features, and advanced automation capabilities like branching and multiple triggers right away, though you’re limited to five steps per automation. ActiveCampaign’s $55/month Plus plan gives you unlimited automation actions, landing pages and site messages, AI-powered content, and sales automation features. The $89/month Pro plan adds predictive and conditional content, attribution tracking, predictive sending, and three users.

ActiveCampaign can also morph into an even more advanced marketing tool if you take advantage of its paid add-ons, which include:

• Pipeline management for $44/month

• Sales engagement for $77/month (includes pipeline management)

• WhatsApp messaging for $71/month

• SMS messaging for $19/month

• Transactional email for $15/month

• AI agents and AI-powered translations (credit-based system)

You get the idea: Mailchimp’s pricing is more competitive for basic email marketing, but for businesses that want to up their marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM game, ActiveCampaign has much more to offer—especially if you’re experimenting heavily with AI marketing workflows.

ActiveCampaign has more app connections, but both connect to Zapier

Both apps offer an impressive set of integrations: Mailchimp connects with 330+ apps, while ActiveCampaign connects with 1,000+. 

With Mailchimp, you get access to all of its integrations right away (even on the free plan). ActiveCampaign is a little stingier, with some integrations only available on pricier plans. (For example, you can’t connect Slack, Stripe, or Calendly unless you’re on the Plus plan, and Salesforce and Zendesk are only available on the Enterprise plan).

Fortunately, both platforms integrate with Zapier, which means you’ll be able to connect either Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign with Zapier’s library of 8,000+ app connections. That way you can send information to and from your marketing software, no matter your tech stack.

Learn more about how to automate Mailchimp and how to automate ActiveCampaign, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Mailchimp vs. ActiveCampaign: Which should you use?

ActiveCampaign is a natural next step for businesses that have outgrown basic email marketing, but Mailchimp’s simplicity and free tier still make it the right starting point for many small businesses.

Here’s a quick recap to help you decide which email marketing platform makes sense for you.

Choose Mailchimp if:

• You have a $0 budget and need a free plan to get started

• You’re new to email marketing and want the simplest possible setup

• You have a small team that needs multiple user seats without paying extra

• You want an all-in-one platform for basic marketing needs (email, landing pages, website, social media posts, surveys)

• You value ease of use over advanced features

Choose ActiveCampaign if:

• Marketing automation is central to your business strategy

• You need a robust CRM with sales pipeline management

• You want AI deeply embedded throughout your workflows

• You need advanced segmentation with 100+ filtering options

• You want to visualize how multiple automations connect on a single map

Read more:

This article was originally published in January 2022 by Kristina Lauren. The most recent update was in February 2026.