Drip Vs. ActiveCampaign: Comparison Of Two Popular Email Marketing Platforms

Picking the right email marketing platform is an important step in growing your online business. We want to help you choose the right solution for your website or blog.

In this comparison guide, we review Drip vs. ActiveCampaign to highlight key features, pricing, and overall ease of use. We then wrap up with a list of pros and cons for each email software tool.

Both Drip and ActiveCampaign utilize “tags” to categorize and assign properties to the members within your CRM. In each platform, these tags are automatically applied and function according to the parameters that you set. Within both software tools, these tags can be used for a variety of purposes.

For example, you might choose to segment your email list or grant a user specific permissions based on a purchase or opt-in. Tagging is invaluable when you’re ready to really start targeting specific client groups and provide a more personal experience for them.

However, because neither system offers a way to organize these tags, it’s helpful to either limit the number of tags you create or create a spreadsheet to help you remember the names and purposes of each tag.

Inside ActiveCampaign, tags can be added to a subscriber at any point inside your campaign automations (more on that in the next section).

And, like Drip, you can also use tags to trigger a new series of action steps.

Unfortunately, since there’s no way to “organize” your tags, so keeping track of them in a separate spreadsheet will help you to search for the ones you need when necessary.

Creating a spreadsheet for your tags can be a great way to manage them (as long as you have a process to always keep it up to date). Since ActiveCampaign does allow you to search for tags by name, you can easily locate the right ones that you need to edit or merge.

Drip and ActiveCampaign both allow you to create multi-step automations to enhance your email marketing.

While both software tools are solid in terms of their functionality, ActiveCampaign stands out because it includes more elements and nuances for you to use in your automation activity.

ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is a bit more user-friendly, in the sense that all elements are available as drag-and-drop via the sidebar on the right OR via the popup that appears when you click on one of the add icons.

While the functionality is essentially the same, ActiveCampaign also comes out a bit ahead in terms of what functions you can add to each automation.

(And even though there isn’t a “rule” option like Drip offers, you don’t lose out on any functionality, since you could simply create an automation that does the same thing, making for a simpler setup and one less “thing” to have to worry about).

If you are planning to sell products on your website, the e-commerce side of the ActiveCampaign vs. Drip debate runs fairly evenly.

Neither platform includes a built-in e-commerce solution, so you’ll end up looking at adding some other tools that integrate with your choice.

Within ActiveCampaign, the e-commerce side of things requires a little more work on your part, in addition to the basic setup.

To begin with, ActiveCampaign actually does not include any e-commerce within its platform. However, it does have the capability to integrate with any number of payment processing systems, such as PayPal, Stripe, WooCommerce, etc.

Before you get super excited that your favorite payment processor claims an ActiveCampaign integration, be aware that not all integrations work the same. (See the current list of ActiveCampaign integrations here.)

Example: The Shopify integration will actually auto-add a new customer to your ActiveCampaign email list only if that customer chooses to optin to your marketing updates during the checkout process.

If they don’t, you’ll have to manually add them yourself before you can apply any tags and add them to a follow-up sales sequence.

Whereas the Bigcommerce integration does point out that it will automatically add any new clients to your ActiveCampaign CRM.

While I can’t make the decision for you, I hope that now you have a better understanding of what each system is best used for, and which one you’ll want to investigate further.

In terms of when the right time to make the move is… I say before you’re ready. Because it takes a while to make a big move to a new platform like this. I’ll also say that it’s best to be running from a profitable place because these monthly fees are in the triple digits.

Take a look at both ActiveCampaign and Drip’s websites and try their demos or talk to their representatives to get a feel for what they can offer. They’re both really amazing options, and it boils down to what you are specifically looking for.