ActiveCampaign Review: Why I No-Longer Recommend this Former Favourite

As the author of one of the best-selling books on Email Marketing in history (Email Persuasion), I often get asked, “which system do you recommend for email marketing?”.

And my first answer always used to be “ActiveCampaign”. But no longer.

Here's why I now recommend you should avoid ActiveCampaign:

As background, I was a pretty early adopter of ActiveCampaign and used and recommended it for close to a decade. I was even consulted by the venture capitalists who provided a key round of funding for them.

But there are two key reasons why I recommend small businesses and solo professionals in particular should steer clear of ActiveCampaign.

Before I get into it, you may be looking for an email service. Some you can try out for size are Kit and Brevo (see at the very end)

1. ActiveCampaign Can't Be Trusted

After using and recommending ActiveCampaign for a few years I became an affiliate. That means when someone bought it through my link I would get paid a commission for every payment they made.

I also created ActiveCampaign specific email templates and training to help users.

It was never a huge earner for me, but over the years I must have brought in multiple 6 figures of income for ActiveCampaign. 

Then in 2022 something changed. ActiveCampaign contacted their affiliates to tell them that they would be changing the way commission was paid so that you would only earn a commission if you brought in new buyers in the previous period.

What that meant was that no matter how many customers you'd brought them in the past, you wouldn't get paid any commission for those customers unless you brought in new and different ones each period. Even though Active Campaign was still earning money month after month from those original customers they wouldn't be paying you any commission for them.

Now to a certain degree that's fair enough as a policy moving forward. It's a way of incentivising affiliates to stay active. And new affiliates can decide whether to sign up under those terms or not.

The problem is that they applied the policy retroactively. In essence tearing up the agreements they made with affiliates in the past to pay lifetime commissions and saying “actually, no we won't.”

Assuming this was just an oversight I wrote to them asking them to clarify and explaining that you can't just go back on an agreement like this. Affiliates who had brought them literally millions over the years and had been a driving force in growing their business had done so on the understanding that they would be paid lifetime commissions. Some of them had worked their socks off in the past to bring in customers for ActiveCampaign and just because they weren't so active now doesn't mean it's OK to suddenly say “sorry, I know we promised lifetime commissions in the past and you put in all that work to help us on that understanding…but tough”.

But when ActiveCampaign wrote back to me it became clear this was no oversight – it was a deliberate and calculated “business decision” (their words). They had figured out that they would make more money this way and really didn't care that they were breaking the agreements they'd set up with affiliates over the years.

I simply don't want to do business with a company that thinks it's OK to break its promises because it can make more money by doing so.

And if it's happy breaking promises to the affiliates who help build it as a company, what other promises will it be happy to break?

I don't want to find out.

2. ActiveCampaign is Moving Away from Small and Solo Businesses

When I started recommending ActiveCampaign it was a brilliant solution for my clients: small and solo professional businesses.

It had similar powerful features to much more expensive systems aimed at bigger businesses, but it was much cheaper and without all the bloat and unnecessary features that smaller businesses don't need. And it didn't try to be “all things to all people” – it did marketing automation well, and didn't waste time and effort trying to add landing pages, live chat and other features most small businesses already have tools for.

That's all changed now too.

After the affiliate issue I moved to a different email provider. But in Kathy's business we stuck with ActiveCampaign because it's so tightly integrated into how the business runs and we have a lot of complex automations that would have taken many weeks to recreate in another system.

In the last 2 years ActiveCampaign have raised the price of our subscription by 75%.

That's right, not 7.5%, a massive 75%. Our costs have almost doubled in two years.

Have we got better service as a result? No – we've seen more bugs and worse response times. One bug we raised took nearly a year to get “resolved” – with the resolution being “well, we've changed the system since then so we don't think it'll happen again”.

What ActiveCampaign have done is add all sorts of fluff and features that small businesses really don't need (like a “predictive sending” feature that decided the best time to send to Kathy's UK customer base was midnight on Friday).

It's very clear that they're moving away from the small businesses who helped get them off the ground to what they see as a more lucrative market with larger businesses. And they're doing it by raising prices so much that only bigger companies or those who are so locked in they can't move will stay.

I can only see this trend continuing. So if you're a small business I'd steer well clear – “great features for a value price” is out of the window.

In many ways I'm really sad that a platform I used and recommended for almost a decade is now one I active advise people to steer clear of, but the deliberate decisions they've made in their business have made it impossible to recommend them.

So, what email software do I recommend? 

Well you may be here to look at options for software similar to ActiveCampaign then.

1. Kit – is similar to ActiveCampaign in that it does advanced email automation without additional shopping cart and other features of the more expensive systems. I know many people who moved to Kit when ActiveCampaign started bumping their prices up. They've had excellent experiences since, and in some cases Kit actually did the migration for them, recreating emails and automations as well as transferring contacts.

And it is good for consultants / creators because you can have your newsletter promoted by other creators through their recommendation network. If you find you don't get on with ActiveCampaign usability-wise, you could give them a look, in their free trial.

2. Another email automation system is Brevo, this was suggested by my friend Jordie van Rijn who also wrote a bit about the reasons behind why people choose ActiveCcampaign alternatives.

Brevo has been around for many years. The nice part about that is that it is very affordable, with a free version and then $8 starting price. And you can even do pay-as-you-go. Also nice is that it has the option to add a CRM and keep all your contacts in there.
Brevo is worth a trial. It is a bit cheaper than Kit, but you would have to add the recommendation network separately if you like that.