Marketing covers so many different functions all rolled into one.
You need to effectively target and reach new customers through a variety of channels. On top of that, you need to engage and nurture them with the right content at the right time.
It can be challenging for marketers to execute every task with precision.
That’s where marketing automation platforms like Ontraport and ActiveCampaign come into play. Both offer valuable products, but which one is right for you?
In this post, we’ll cover the marketing automation features of both products, pricing, and more.
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ActiveCampaign overview
ActiveCampaign is a marketing platform that transforms businesses’ ability to attract and engage new and existing customers.
The platform helps marketers meet customers where they are — whether that’s in their inbox, on their phone, or their laptop.
ActiveCampaign doesn’t stop with only offering marketing functionality. The platform has a wide array of features for sales teams too.
Ontraport overview
Ontraport is a leading marketing automation platform that offers a variety of digital marketing features and functions to help businesses scale and reach their customers more effectively.
Based in Santa Barbara, California, Ontraport has grown rapidly from its conception.
Ontraport’s founders were committed to creating a platform “that would combine all the core tools a business needed.”
ActiveCampaign features
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one solution with a diverse set of features useful throughout the sales and marketing process and overarching customer journey.
ActiveCampaign’s most notable features include marketing automation tools, CRM and sales automation, ecommerce integrations, and transactional functionality.
Marketing automation
Similar to Ontraport, ActiveCampaign offers an expansive marketing automation suite that frees up marketers from having to manually launch and execute many campaigns.
Users can create an automation map with goals that serve dynamic contact based on specific events that occur.
In addition, ActiveCampaign offers a suite of other marketing features to aid in your marketing strategy including email marketing, landing pages, forms, site tracking, and more.
CRM and sales automation
ActiveCampaign’s full-service customer relationship management platform (CRM) is paired with extensive marketing capabilities, making it easy to engage, capture, store, and score leads as they interact with your brand.
The CRM and sales automation platform provides lead scoring, pipeline visibility, win probability rating, attribution, one-to-one email, and more.
The sales automation capabilities give you visibility over your entire sales process while saving your team hours and effectively engaging prospects on a more personalized basis.
Deals can be updated automatically, leads can be segmented, and automations can be triggered.
Ecommerce
ActiveCampaign will take your marketing and sales operation one step further by integrating with your ecommerce platform to provide visibility over your conversions and sales.
The platform uses ecommerce features to integrate with giants including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and more.
This will transform your ecommerce marketing efforts by providing insight into which campaigns are driving sales.
Transactional
ActiveCampaign offers a robust transactional email functionality to deliver the custom automated messages required after each purchase.
These can range from receipts, confirmations, reminders, and more.
The platform helps with deliverability, personalization, message streams (back-and-forth communication documentation), and many other tasks.
Now that you know how the two platforms compare in functionality, let’s look at their costs.
Ontraport features
Ontraport has many features that businesses use to market and sell their product or service to a wide range of potential customers.
Some of the platform’s most popular functions include an email marketing tool, a sales CRM, and marketing automation capabilities.
Email and SMS
Ontraport offers targeted marketing campaigns on two major channels: email and SMS.
Marketers can use the platform to automate and trigger new email and SMS campaigns, execute split testing, and much more. The time recommendation feature recommends the best time to send your SMS or email messages to maximize engagement.
With Ontraport’s visual campaign builder, email content templates, and other advanced features, you can easily send SMS messages and launch beautiful email campaigns that delight and engage your customers.
You can evaluate the SMS marketing and email campaign analytics in Ontraport’s dashboard to guide the strategy for future campaign management.
CRM
Ontraport isn’t just for marketers. The platform can act as a functional CRM as well enabling sales representatives to collect and categorize leads with various data points.
In addition, sales representatives and directors can use the platform for pipeline management. This deal tracking capability provides sales teams with visibility over the entire sales pipeline and process.
Perhaps the most useful feature is the ability to automate follow-up directly in the platform.
Sales teams will save time and money from having to remember when to send a follow-up email while closing more deals from the automated follow-ups that happen as scheduled.
Landing pages
To be a full-service marketing suite, the platform needs a way to ingest data and build its knowledge base. That’s where Ontraport’s landing pages and forms functionality comes into play.
Ontraport enables users to create drag-and-drop pages with ease with custom embeddable form builders to capture relevant prospects browsing their sites.
The pages are also capable of hosting dynamic content, specific copy, and graphics that change depending on the type of viewer.
Marketing automation
Ontraport’s marketing automation capabilities scale companies’ marketing and sales operations exponentially.
Through automated campaigns and enhanced tracking and attribution, experienced marketers can effectively reach and engage customers while knowing exactly what’s contributing to their sales.
You can send automated emails with Ontraport’s marketing automation platform. Most importantly, though, is how granular you can get with your targeting.
Ontraport’s automation functionality has many different features to enhance your campaign and engage your prospects. You can time your emails more precisely with their “wait element” feature, which will trigger an email after a period of time or designated action. Plus, you can split test your emails to see which subject lines or content performs better.
These capabilities will make your automated marketing campaigns more effective.
Now that you know some of Ontraport’s core features, let’s take a look and see how ActiveCampaign’s features compare.
ActiveCampaign pricing
Need a specific type of plan that fits your business and has just the right amount of features you need? ActiveCampaign offers it.
From marketing-only and sales-only packages to bundles that combine both of them, there are many different ways to purchase an ActiveCampaign license. Let’s dive in.
Marketing pricing
If you’re just interested in the marketing functionality, take a look at the various marketing plans offered.
ActiveCampaign offers the following email and marketing automation plans:
- Lite: A $29/month plan that’s great for solo entrepreneurs. It includes the email marketing and automation platform, support, forms, site tracking, webhooks, and more.
- Plus: A $49/month plan that’s perfect for small teams. It includes landing pages, Facebook Custom Audiences, lead scoring, pop-ups, ecommerce integrations, and more.
- Professional: A $149/month plan that’s perfect for teams that want to scale their marketing. It includes all of the functionality above in addition to predictive sending, split automations, CRM integrations, attribution, and more.
If you need more of a custom approach, enterprise plans are available for larger organizations and teams.
Sales pricing
ActiveCampaign offers a handful of sales-only plans to choose from.
These plans include:
- Plus: A $19/month plan for small sales teams that need to catalog leads and manage pipelines.
- Professional: A $49/month plan for larger teams that want more capabilities like one-to-one email, sentiment analysis, win probability rating, Facebook lead ads, and more.
Need marketing and sales functionality?
Don’t fret. ActiveCampaign offers bundles that combine both functionalities starting at $93 per month.
Ontraport pricing
Ontraport offers many different pricing plans,with a 14-day trial period, based on your use case. All of their plans depend on how many contacts you have in your email list.
Here’s a look at each plan for 500 contacts:
- Basic: A $24/month plan that includes email and text message automation, web forms and pages, and a scalable platform for growth.
- Plus: A $83/month plan that includes all of the above and the ability to accept payments online, create membership sites, and more.
- Pro: A $124/month plan that includes all of the above and additional features like deep customization, marketing tracking and testing, partner programs, user roles, permission management, and more.
An enterprise plan is also available for large-scale enterprises that need enhanced security.
ActiveCampaign vs. Ontraport reviews
Both ActiveCampaign and Ontraport are highly rated by their users. ActiveCampaign received a user rating of 4.6/5 on G2, while Ontraport received a rating of 4.5/5.
ActiveCampaign users appreciate how the platform can go beyond standard email marketing functions. For others, though, the consensus is that the interface is targeted at more sophisticated CRM users.
Users love Ontraport’s simple-to-use interface. Their support team is top-notch and delivers for its customers. However, some users said that various features — like the “Send From” feature for emails — are missing from their products.
So which is best?
ActiveCampaign outperforms Ontraport
There is always a new marketing automation platform that can be used to scale your marketing efforts. But which one is right for you?
ActiveCampaign edges out Ontraport slightly for its unique, comprehensive offering across marketing, sales, ecommerce, and more.
In terms of cost, Ontraport is slightly cheaper than ActiveCampaign if you don’t have many contacts. However, the prices will quickly climb if you have a large database.
Try out ActiveCampaign and begin scaling your digital marketing efforts today.
