Both Activecampaign and Infusionsoft are reputable marketing automation tools. But it is important to know everything you can about both to decide which is the best option for you.
Both Activecampaign and Infusionsoft compete for the same market. This consists of startups, agencies, and small businesses.
They differ in pricing, user-friendliness, and the variety of features that each offer.
Quick Overview of their Differences
Infusionsoft
- All-in-one marketing angle. It aims to take care of most of your sales and marketing necessities.
- Prides itself in its CRM sales automation and e-commerce capabilities
- Infusionsoft’s goal is to take care of their customer’s needs
- They are designed for smaller companies with at least 2-3 marketers on their team.
Activecampaign
- Focuses on email automation. But has a strong focus on user-friendliness as well.
- Activecampaign has some sales features. But they appear limited when compared to Infusionsoft’s.
- It does not have any e-commerce features
- Because of its pricing, Activecampaign is great for bloggers, solopreneurs, and authors.
About Activecampaign
Activecampaign combines various features that are associated with smaller companies. They have successfully created an integrated user-friendly platform for small business marketing.
This tool allows you to use social media marketing and create engaging emails. You can also uncover more information about your contacts.
You can create marketing automation unattainable for smaller companies in the past.
Activecampaign includes many tools that help smaller to medium-sized companies get customers. It also helps to engage them. It is known for its email and messaging features. But Activecampaign goes more above and beyond than a regular email service provider.
Companies can create unique marketing workflows and automated follow-up sequences. But it also simultaneously tracks behavior via many marketing channels.
ActiveCampaign is integrated with more than 150 applications and services. These applications and services vary from analytics to accounting. They are primarily focused on lead generation, sales and support.
About Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft enables small businesses under 25 people to deliver customized service to customers. It helps to grow their companies.
The software can create a sales pipeline and integrated order forms and analytics. Other useful features include online sales and payments, creating appointments and marketing automation.
Infusionsoft’s goal is to make the business easier to manage for users. Users can manage their customer databases, product pages, discounts, and coupon codes. They also include e-commerce functionality, which enables users to manage customers’ shopping carts.
Features
Marketing automation
Infusionsoft comes with a full-featured marketing automation base. This has a visual drag-and-drop campaign builder. It also has triggered messaging that is behavior-based, CRM integration. You also get pre-made automation campaign templates to choose from.
But it has limited content personalization features. It has no built-in split testing or customer automation.
While ActiveCampaign is a feature rich marketing automation tool, it is not full-featured. It does include a visual campaign builder and in-depth segmentation. It also includes triggered messaging that is behavior-based. You also enjoy pre-made automation campaign builders and CRM integration.
Furthermore, unlike Infusionsoft, it includes built-in split testing. But it does not include drag-and-drop automation. Which Infusionsoft does include. It does not have customer automation.
CRM
Infusionsoft is great for small busineses. It has an expanding list of capabilities and features. It also has activity tracking for websites and in-depth segmentation. You can do so for all orders, appointments, and task management.
But it does not include full-featured CRM for mobile, built in calling or call recording, role management and permission management, and social CRM.
With Activecampaign, this feature is relatively new. While it is user-friendly, its features are limited compared to Infusionsoft. It does include website activity tracking, in-depth segmentation, and task management. But unlike Infusionsoft, its orders, appointments, and interactions history feature are limited.
Sales Features
Infusionsoft offers many features to help you automate sales activities. These can even double as sales solutions for most businesses. It also includes custom quote creation, pipeline or deal management, custom sales reporting, and lead scoring. But it does not have data importing or exporting.
ActiveCampaign is not a replacement for sales software. But it can work for smaller companies. Not only does it offer automated-assisted sales abilities, but also a pipeline management tool.
Like Infusionsoft, it offers lead scoring. But, unlike Infusion, it does not offer custom quote creation or custom sales reporting. It also does not have data import or export, forecasting, or sales gamification and leaderboards.
Navigation and Design
Infusionsoftdoes an exemplary job of categorizing its large list of features for its users. This enables you to find what you want with no difficulty. The search functionality is effective as well.
While the user-interface is not the best looking on the market, it is clean and modern looking. The dashboard can be customizable. But, its way of showing information is quite visually unimpressive. The automation builder blends seamlessly with other tools while being visual and easy to use.
Furthermore, it gives you a lot of data and customization options to choose from. The best thing is, it doesn’t become too difficult to use. The email editor provided is both clunky and unimpressive.
Although it includes built-in templates, it does nothing to salvage the design. Lastly, you may have some difficulty learning how to use Infusionsoft on your own. But, mandatory onboarding may help a lot through the learning process.
With ActiveCampaign, the navigation feature is clean and well-organized. It gives you the ability to find your way around within a few clicks. But, the search functionality is limited. The user-interface is well-designed with well-labeled features.
Thanks to the visual automation tool you have access to many options that can help you create complex automation.
Like Infusionsoft, the email editor is clunky and has limited customization features. This makes sending a simple email more complex than necessary. Unlike Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign is quite easy to learn. You will not even have to consult the documentation much. With some patience, you can master in a few days.
Integrations
You can get well over five hundred apps and integrations with Infusionsoft’s market. Some integrations include the following: API access, Quickbooks, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier.
If you want to, you can also build your own integrations with the API access. Infusionsoft also comes with affiliate programs.
ActiveCampaign offers lesser when it comes to integrations. It only allows over one hundred and fifty apps and integration. They drag behind Infusionsoft by over three hundred and fifty integrations and apps.
Some of their integrations include Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Zapier. You can also connect Gmail, WordPress plug-in, Quickbooks, and Inbound Now. Inbound Now is a great integration for attracting clients to purchase products. It’s a great inbound marketing campaign and happens to be one of the most useful membership plugins.
Comparison of User-Experience
Overall, Infusionsoft has been rated 4.5 out of 5 stars for user-experience. Their features have also been rated 4.5 out of 5 stars, and their pricing and support were given 4 out of 5 stars. Overall, they have a 4.5-star rating out of 5. They are known best for Saas startups and business with a little under 100 workers.
ActiveCampaign has slightly lower ratings. Their features and pricing stand at 3.5 out of 5 stars. Their user-experience is 4 out of 5 stars. And their overall rating is resting at just 3.5 out of 5 stars. They are good for small business and agencies as well as bloggers and SaaS startups.
Being a Tool in the Ecommerce World
The Infusionsoft sales process comes with built in ecommerce. In other words, you can add a product and sales form to your website to collect certain payment information.
This payment information will be connected directly to any popular payment site like Venmo. With Infusionsoft, the payment process will not be as long and drawn out. It is simple, and will basically run on its own on autopilot, but it is still secure to keep all client information safe.
With specific Infusionsoft subscriptions, you can set up a sequence that notifies you when any payment is not made at the right time. Infusionsoft will pull up kept records for you to view what has been paid, what needs to be paid, how much, etc.
ActiveCampaign’s process is a little different. You have to do more for the sales process with ActiveCampaign. This is because they do not offer any features that don’t allow for Paypal and other payment processors to work.
Realistically, they are not the best if you want to host a large number of products on your website. This is because ActiveCampaign does not really offer you all of the necessary features to make your job easier.
You have wide variety of selections for selling online with Infusionsoft.
Infusionsoft gives you six great features for small businesses such as: order forms, shopping cart, order fulfillment, online storefront, smart card reader, and one-time and recurring payments.
As for ActiveCampaign, they do not give you any ecommerce capabilities at all. To sell products as well as accept payments, you will have to work through many of the different integrations that ActiveCampaign has to offer.
Community
Both Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign have active communities for the most part. They each have blogs and podcasts to connect with their clients, as well as an agency partner program. Their community features begin to differ when it comes to conferences.
Infusionsoft offers ICON Conference, but ActiveCampaign does not offer a conference at all.
When it comes to live events and freelancer availability, Infusionsoft has been rated excellent and ActiveCampaign has been rated as limited. Overall, Infusionsoft comes out on top with the better community with a star rating of 4.5 out of 5. ActiveCampaign only had a 2.5 out of 5 star rating.
Pricing Information
With ActiveCampaign, you get four different pricing plans for five hundred contacts. They are Lite Plan, Plus Plan, Professional Plan, and Enterprise Plan. You pay $15 per month monthly or $9 per month yearly for the Lite plan.
The Lite Plan gives you unlimited sending, email marketing, the ability to send newsletters, and it’s available for up to three users.
The Plus Plan, $70 per month monthly or $55 per month yearly, is available for up to twenty-five users, you get custom branding, custom domain, custom user permissions, SMS marketing, and CRM with Sales Automation.
The Professional Plan is $159/mo monthly or $129/mo yearly. You get the same features as the plus plan along with twenty-five extra users, unlimited sending, attribution, and site messaging.
Finally, the Enterprise Plan, $279/mo monthly or $229/mo yearly, and it has all of the Professional Plan features along with uptime SLA, in-depth onboarding process, free social data, free design service provider, and more.
Infusionsoft charges $299 for new users, in addition to extra pricing depending on how many contacts you wish to have.
For 500 contacts, you pay $80/mo. 1,500 contacts is $104/mo, 2,500 contacts is $144/mo, 5,000 contacts is $184/mo, 10,000 contacts is $240/mo, 25,000 contacts is $280/mo, and 50,000 contacts is $304/mo.
With each of these contact plans, you get 1 user account, marketing automation features for marketers, unlimited emails, and contact management. With an additional cost to your monthly payment, you can get ecommerce and a sales team pipeline.
Support
As far as Email support and training videos go, Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign are in the same boat as they both offer each of these features.
Infusionsoft offers free phone support and free live chat support. It also has in-person training. ActiveCampaign does not. Both of them have fast support responsiveness. This is great for problems that you need to fix right away.
ActiveCampaign has average documentation quality, while Infusionsoft has excellent documentation quality. Infusionsoft takes their work a step further with customer relationship management.
Overall, Infusionsoft once again comes out on top with a 4.5 star rating out of 5 stars. ActiveCampaign, not far behind, only has a 4 star rating out of 5.
Final Verdict?
So, which of these should become a part of your life? We will go over the features that both of them offer.
Out of the two, ActiveCampaign is the more user-friendly site. Infusionsoft has a big learning curve that takes time to work through.
ActiveCampaign has a range of different pricing options for different types of preferences. But Infusionsoft has one type of plan that allows you to have way more contacts. ActiveCampaign happens to have built-in split testing. But Infusionsoft does not.
If you prefer to live chat with a customer support representative, go for Infusionsoft. You get some of the best marketing automation software and features as well as a great community. You get to enjoy simpler ways to set up payment processors for your clients. And they have a higher rating for user-experience than ActiveCampaign.
In the end, you will be better off deciding to go with Infusionsoft as they have proven time and time again to disappoint less than ActiveCampaign. They also have more to offer with less work and the more efficient marketing services.
Leave a Reply