In this post, we’re going to compare ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaign – to see which is the best and the better option for you right now.
To avoid wasting your time, below is a comparison table of both:
Comparison Table: ClickFunnels 2.0 vs ActiveCampaign
| Feature | ActiveCampaign | ClickFunnels |
|---|---|---|
| Software Type: | Email marketing and automation system | All-in-one business and marketing system |
| Free trial: | 14-days here | 30-days here |
| Pricing: | Starts at $19/month | Starts at $147/month |
| Email Marketing: | Yes (Visual workflow builder and automation) | Yes (follow-up funnels) |
| Integrations: | Integrates with over 150 tools to automate your business | Allows you to connect with your favorite third-party tools |
| Forms: | Yes, with a form builder and customizable templates | Yes, with a form builder and customizable templates |
| Support: | 24/7 customer support with live chat and email | Email support and the Funnel Hacker forum/community |
| Affiliate manager: | No | Yes (inbuilt) |
| A/B Testing: | Yes on email campaigns | Yes emails, funnels and pages |
| Landing Page & Sales Funnels Builder: | No | Intuitive drag-and-drop page builder for funnels and pages |
| E-commerce: | No | Yes |
| Blog builder: | No | Yes |
| Facebook Community: | No | 250k members |
| Inline forms: | Yes | No |
| Funnel/campaign sharing: | Only emails | Full campaign/funnels |
| Email Marketing Automation: | Has a visual workflow builder to create complex automation with conditional logic | Does not have a visual workflow builder |
| Ready to try? | Get ActiveCampaign >> | Get ClickFunnels >> |
Let’s get into the full details now:
What is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps entrepreneurs build high-converting sales funnels (and landing pages) and take their message to the world.
Founded in 2014 by Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson, ClickFunnels is ultimately interested in helping entrepreneurs sell their products and services using sales funnels.
You don’t need to know how to code to use ClickFunnels and you can build:
- Sales pages
- Squeeze pages
- Landing pages
- Membership sites
- Affiliate program centers
- Webinar pages/funnels
- Checkout pages
- And a whole lot MORE!
All to be covered soon.
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is a complete email marketing automation and CRM platform designed to help you stay in touch with your contacts.
The Chicago-based company was founded in 2003, headquartered in Chicago with offices in Indianapolis and Sydney, Australia. It is an intelligence-driven email marketing platform and sales CRM platform.
One thing that sets them parties the high level of automation and ultimate power they give their users over their email marketing.
ActiveCampaign is one of the biggest email marketing platforms on the market with its impressive automation features.
ActiveCampaign vs ClickFunnels – Features
There are quite some cool features that make up both platforms for what they are. Let’s take look:
ClickFunnels Features
ClickFunnels has a variety of features that anyone looking to sell and build a business online would find useful. Let’s take a look.
All-In-One Marketing Solution
Let’s face it.
When you want to take your product or services to the market, you’re gonna need a bunch of tools. Like a website, an email marketing tool, a shopping cart software, webinar software, a landing page builder, and more.
Having get your business running will cost you a LOT of money.
But ClickFunnels allows you to save costs and get all these tools in one place. The software provides an all-in-one marketing solution, comprising of the above tools, for getting your message to the world.
Intuitive Drag & Drop Page Builder
ClickFunnels comes with a drag-and-drop page builder making it pretty easy (and fast) for anyone to build sales funnels, without any knowledge of code or design.
Yes, they make it that easy. You don’t need to worry if you’ve never designed a landing page or sales funnel in your entire life.
In addition to the page builder, ClickFunnels provides proven-to-convert sales funnel templates that you can edit and customize to taste easy.
Share Funnels
Share funnel allows you to share your already built ClickFunnels sales funnels with literally ANYONE with a ClickFunnels account.
This is one of the features that truly separates the sales funnel builder from the crowd.
Here’s how it works:
Assuming you just built a funnel, launched it, it converts pretty well, and someone wants it, you can easily generate a share funnel link in your ClickFunnels dashboard and send it to that person.
When they receive the link, they can import the funnel under one click into their ClickFunnels account under one click and use the funnel as if it were theirs.
Another cool thing is that if the person you’re sharing the funnel with is not a ClickFunnels user, they would be prompted to take the 14-day FREE trial in order to access the funnel.
And if they do so, you’ll get affiliate commissions in the process when they pay for Clickfunnels.
A/B Split Testing
A/B testing is an important concept in marketing generally.
This feature allows you to test and compare two versions of your ClickFunnels sales funnel against each other to know which one converts better.
You can split-test funnels, Ads, landing pages (and even page elements like copy, images, and buttons) to see which one converts better.
Third-Party Integrations
With ClickFunnels, you can integrate seamlessly with plenty of third-party tools so you can run your business with no hassles.
There are various categories of third-party software and tools you can connect to ClickFunnels and this including:
Payment Gateways
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Infusionsoft
- ClickBank
- Apple Pay
- And more
Email Marketing Tools & Autoresponders
- AWeber
- GetResponse
- MadMimi
- MailChimp
- ActiveCampaign (itself yeah!)
- Constant Contact
- ConvertKit
- Hubspot
- Drip
- Infusionsoft
- SendLane
- And more
SMTP Tools
- Mandrill
- Sendgrid
- Mailgun
- SparkPost
Webinar Tools
- EverWebinar
- GoToWebinar
- WebinarJam
- Zoom Webinar
Email Hosting Tools
- Zoho
- G-suite
FunnelFlix
In late 2019, ClickFunnels introduced an entirely NEW platform to its software base called FunnelFlix.
Fondly referred to as the ‘Netflix for Entrepreneurs, Funnel Hackers, and Internet Marketers’.
FunnelFlix is a compilation of courses and training programs covering various topics such as sales, funnels, marketing, personal development, and copywriting all in one place to grow your business.
These training sessions were created by Russell Brunson and some of the world’s TOP leading experts in various fields. And these training sessions are available for free as a ClickFunnels user.
Affiliate Program
ClickFunnels has an awesome ClickFunnels affiliate compensation program that pays well and makes a lot of marketers jump into.
The ClickFunnels affiliate program is one of the most profitable affiliate programs on the internet. Why is that so?
Simple!
There are a lot of offers to promote as a ClickFunnels affiliate.
If you don’t want to promote the core ClickFunnels software, you can promote the popular Russell Brunson-authored marketing books (DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets, Traffic Secrets & Network Marketing Secrets).
Support
Talking about support, ClickFunnels doesn’t disappoint. At least from my personal experience.
The level of value support, encouragement, and motivation you get in the official (free to join) ClickFunnels Facebook group is absolutely incredible.
And this is why the company is successful. They have worked to build an amazing culture and they also provide live chat and email support to all users.
Who is ClickFunnels Best for?
ClickFunnels is best suited for entrepreneurs, marketers, and businesses that rely on sales funnels to generate leads and sales.
It is particularly beneficial for those who don’t have the technical expertise to create their own sales funnels from scratch or who want a more streamlined approach to building and managing their funnels.
ClickFunnels offers an all-in-one solution for creating landing pages, sales pages, order forms, and checkout pages without requiring any coding skills.
As a sales funnel platform – it is also ideal for those who want to test and optimize their sales funnels to maximize their conversion rates. With its built-in A/B testing functionality, users can easily create multiple versions of their sales funnels and test different variables to see which one performs better.
Furthermore, ClickFunnels is suitable for businesses that sell digital or physical products and services, as well as for those in the e-commerce industry.
Its integrations with payment gateways, email marketing tools, and other third-party services make it a versatile tool for creating and managing online sales funnels.
ActiveCampaign Features
Email List Segmentation
With ActiveCampaign, you’ll get to use both lists and tags to segment your subscribers.
The email marketing tool helps you manage your subscribers by having multiple lists or a single list with multiple tags.
You can set up conditions to segment your subscribers based on their actions with automation workflows. The sweet spot comes when you combine their tagging system with their site-tracking feature.
This allows you to tag subscribers according to their interactions with your website and also be more specific with your marketing.
Automation
This ActiveCampaign feature is essentially what makes the tool essentially powerful, hands down.
ActiveCampaign uses a visual workflow builder (although slow and clunky, at times) to create complex automation with conditional logic.
When you combine this automation with powerful intelligent tagging and site tracking, the results would be mind-blowing for your email marketing campaigns.
Split A/B Testing
When running email campaigns with ActiveCampaign, you can split-test two different email campaigns side by side.
There are TWO ways to do this:
You can either do this by selecting an option to split test (subject lines or other variables) as you set up a new email campaign or you could split test two different email templates against each other.
Plus, ActiveCampaign gives you enough stats to determine a winner during or after the campaign has run.
Better still, you could leverage the super cool split-tests feature on ActiveCampaign by split-testing entire automation workflows and you can determine your winner via dozens of different criteria.
Forms
You need an email form to build an email form and ActiveCampaign provides you with that functionality. The email form builder is pretty straightforward and allows you to build and implement basic email forms.
The tool also has a CSS editor, for anyone with some basic coding understanding.
One issue is that you are restricted to building only an “inline” form and you have a “Marketing by ActiveCampaign” branding at the bottom of the form unless you move to more expensive plans.
You can embed the code for the form on your page, use a direct ActiveCampaign form link, use a WordPress plugin, and add the form to your Facebook page.
Templates
Email templates determine the outlook of your emails and with only about 30 email templates, ActiveCampaign doesn’t seem to shine with this feature. The email templates are of different types and can be used for various industries.
Plus, most of the designs of the templates are average so it would be better off starting your email designs from scratch.
ActiveCampaign has an awesome email builder that lets you arrange page elements, style them, and make a flexible design.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign integrates with over 150 other third-party apps and tools. The email marketing tool integrates with Facebook, WordPress, Stripe, and Shopify, and a WHOLE lot more apps.
And in case you don’t find your favorite tool supported here, you could always go the Zapier way.
Tracking & Reporting
Regarding tracking & reporting, ActiveCampaign offers some impressive email marketing analytics options.
Asides from the usual open/read and link tracking, ActiveCampaign offers you ‘Reply Tracking’, which allows you to run different automation based on replies.
Also, you get access to ‘Google Analytics’, which allows you to get deeper insights into your campaigns.
Lastly, ‘Site Tracking’ allows you to do some cool stuff with your marketing automation. ActiveCampaign gives you a much more detailed breakdown and all the statistics for each individual campaign in a report.
8: Support
ActiveCampaign has a detailed knowledge base where you’re likely to find answers to most of your questions when you run into problems using the email marketing tool.
There are also how-to articles, videos, and webinars covering almost every aspect of the tool for you to get conversant with it.
About support, ActiveCampaign offers customer support via email and a response time (within 24 hours). You can also contact them by phone and live chat if emails don’t work for you.
Plus, there’s an official ACTIVECampaign Facebook group that is ACTIVE (no pun intended) with a ton of value posts every day.
So, it’s difficult for you to get lost using the email marketing tool.
Affiliate Program
ActiveCampaign has an affiliate program that allows you to earn up to 30% recurring commission on every referral.
You will be paid every month for your referrals and can earn higher commissions based on your tier.
- Silver Tier: 20% Commission
- Gold Tier: 25% Commission
- Platinum Tier: 30% Commission
Who is ActiveCampaign Best for?
If you’re looking for an all-in-one marketing platform to optimize your email campaigns, generate leads, and provide a great customer experience, ActiveCampaign is perfect.
With this email marketing tool, you can segment your audience based on behavior, preferences, and engagement level. This way, you get to deliver the right messages to the right people – making sure they resonate with your customers.
ActiveCampaign comes with tons of features too:
email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and sales automation. Plus advanced analytics and tracking help measure ROI and understand how effective your campaigns are.
To top it off, their pricing model is based on contacts – which makes it a great choice for budget-savvy business owners growing their customer base.
Similarities – ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaign
ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are individual tools with one identical goal – to help you succeed in your business. And both tools come with some similar features.
Templates
Both ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign give you a suite of well-designed, responsive templates to choose from. Though the template’s goal differs.
Forms
ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign have a form builder that gives you the ability to create custom email forms (along with fully customizable templates) for collecting data on your website or sales funnels.
Integrations
Both marketing tools allow you to connect with your favorite third-party tools even though ActiveCampaign integrates with a LOT more tools (over 150) in various categories to entirely automate your business.
Support
Both tools offer an amazing level of customer guidance and assistance with software and community-based support.
A/B Testing
ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels both allow you to perform A/B split testing on all your campaigns.
Affiliate Program
They both have affiliate programs that allow users and non-users of the software to earn cash from promoting it.
Differences Between ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels
Here’s what separates ClickFunnels from ActiveCampaign:
Software Type
While ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation tool, ClickFunnels is an all-in-one business and marketing solution that has a sales funnel builder, email marketing tool (Follow up funnels), marketing training platform (FunnelFlix), and lots more.
Landing Page & Sales Funnels Builder
ClickFunnels comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder, making it suitable for building sales funnels while ActiveCampaign is simply an email marketing and CRM tool.
Email Marketing Automation
Since ActiveCampaign is essentially an email marketing software, it shines GREATLY in its aspect.
The software has a visual workflow builder to create complex automation with conditional logic while ClickFunnels does nothing of such.
ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaign Pricing
ClickFunnels has a higher price point (of course, owing to all the features they provide) starting from $97 per month for the ClickFunnels Startup Plan while ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, charges as low as $15 per month for 500 contacts.
ClickFunnels Pricing
ClickFunnels has three standard plans where the features are limited in some way according to the costs. The Basic plan costs $147 per month, The Pro plan costs $197 per month and the Funnel Hacker plan costs $297.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
With its mouth-watering features, ActiveCampaign does have reasonable pricing.
The email marketing tool has four pricing plans namely:
- Lite
- Plus
- Professional
- and Enterprise
ActiveCampaign Lite Plan
This plan is great for small teams and comes with most of the email marketing automation features and is usually enough for most businesses.
You’ll also get design options and social media integration. But however, you’ll get limited support (just live chat and email) and 500 contacts for just $29/month (paid yearly).
ActiveCampaign Plus Plan
Great for big teams and organizations, the ActiveCampaign Plus plan supports up to 25 accounts and starts at $49/month (paid yearly) for 500 contacts.
You are able to remove the ActiveCampaign branding, send SMS and get all forms of support.
ActiveCampaign Professional Plan
This plan has a detailed analysis that will help you in tailoring your marketing strategies and it supports up to 50 user accounts. It goes for $149/month (paid yearly) for 500 contacts and you’re able to show site personalized messages personalized to your users.
ActiveCampaign Enterprise Plan
Suitable for big companies and you get robust support options like phone support, unlimited one-on-one training, and a dedicated account manager who will assist.
You’ll have to talk to their sales team to get this plan
Plus, ActiveCampaign also gives out 20% discounts for non-profits.
Activecampaign Clickfunnels Integration: Can You Integrate?
Yes, it is possible to integrate ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels offers a direct integration with ActiveCampaign that allows users to automatically send new leads captured through ClickFunnels pages and products directly into their ActiveCampaign account.
This integration can be set up quickly and easily, and it enables users to leverage the powerful automation and segmentation capabilities of ActiveCampaign to engage and nurture their leads.
With ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities, users can create complex workflows and triggers based on user behavior to deliver targeted messaging and content to their prospects.
This integration is an excellent option for marketers that are using ClickFunnels for lead generation and ActiveCampaign for marketing automation, as it allows them to seamlessly transfer leads from one platform to the other and deliver personalized, relevant messages at scale.
Final Thoughts
Clickfunnels and ActiveCampaign are TWO different software solutions with overlapping features.
One is an all-in-one marketing solution used mainly for building highly converting sales funnels WHILE the other is a marketing solution used for managing and running email marketing campaigns and automation.
Your choice in the ClickFunnels Vs ActiveCampaign debate should depend largely on your digital marketing needs.
- Choose ActiveCampaign: if you want to create and automate personalized email campaigns, segment their audience, and track their customer’s behavior.
- On the other hand choose ClickFunnels if you want to create landing pages, sales pages, and complete sales funnels. It also offers features like A/B testing, upsells, downsells, and order bumps to optimize conversions.
While both tools have some overlapping features like email marketing and CRM, they have different focuses and serve different purposes.
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