ActiveCampaign vs Drip (2023)
- January 08, 2023
ActiveCampaign vs Drip is a battle between the best. Even though having different backgrounds, both of them are among the top few email marketing solutions currently available on the internet. Anyone saying otherwise is definitely biased.
Marketers and business owners often face a dilemma when they need to make a choice between these two tools and maybe that is the reason you are reading this article. Being a digital marketing agency, we have used both the tools for a reasonable period of time for our different clients and hence we decided to share our experience in this article to help people make the right choice.
We will start with a short introduction to both the tools, compare their features and pricing in detail and at last, advise you on the best choice for your business.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign was founded way back in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom in Chicago, United States. It recently reached 150,000 customers in 2023.
Drip
Drip, on the other hand, is a relatively new organization founded in 2012 by Rob Walling in Minneapolis, United States. On 26 July 2016, it was acquired by LeadPages, one of the top page-building software companies for an undisclosed amount. Currently, they claim a total of 27,000 users.
1. ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Form & Page Builder
Forms are required to capture leads and subscribe on your website. Sometimes it becomes tricky to integrate your website’s form plugin with your email marketing software and as a result, almost all email solutions come with a form builder of their own. Some of them even provide a landing page builder.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign allows you to create forms of 4 different styles: Inline, Floating Bar, Floating Box, and Modal. The form builder is pretty simple without any designer templates or customizability. The page builder, on the other hand, comes with beautiful templates and can be customized just like most of the other page builders. However, it is not as advanced as specialized page building solutions like Kartra, Unbounce, or Instapage.
Drip
The Drip form builder also provides very few templates to choose from. However, they are a bit more customizable and you can even create exit intent pop-ups and side bar forms. On the other hand, since Drip is owned by LeadPages, it does not come with a page builder of its own.
Winner - ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign and Drip have quite similar form building capabilities. But since ActiveCampaign provides a page builder, which Drip does not, it easily gets the edge.
2. ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Lead & Customer Management
Email marketing tools come with a system to help their users manage subscribers, leads, and customers. The features are not as advanced as specialized CRM solutions like Hubspot or Salesforce but capable enough to meet the needs of most small and medium-sized businesses.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an exception to the above statement. The lead and customer management system provided by ActiveCampaign is so good that it can be considered a top CRM. Apart from allowing you to track each customer’s individual journey and interaction with your brand, ActiveCampaign gives you the ability to add tasks inside each customer’s timeline. This helps you keep track of leads and customers you want to follow up pronto.
Drip
Drip’s lead and customer management system is more E-commerce oriented. You get to know the engagement level of a customer as you can see all his previous interactions with your brand like website visits, product purchases, and even the lifetime value at a single glance. This helps you send the most relevant message to each of your customers.
Winner - ActiveCampaign
Both the tools provide robust features for subscriber management but ActiveCampaign is clearly a lot more advanced and as a result, stands out among the competition.
3. ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Campaigns and Automations
An email campaign is a series of emails that is automatically sent to the person who triggers it by having some kind of interaction with your business like website visit, product purchase, etc. An automation is also triggered in a similar fashion but instead of just sending a series of emails, it defines the entire path your customers are guided through. You can tag them at different stages, score them for interactions and much more.
ActiveCampaign
The ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is well-known in the software world for its advanced features. It comes with a long list of triggers and actions to help you automate long workflows and complex sales processes. You also get access to a large number of done-for-you automations where the entire workflow is pre-built and all you need to do is to customize them for your business and goals.
Drip
If there’s one worthy opponent that can compete with ActiveCampaign in terms of automations, it is none other than Drip. It makes the automation builder much more intuitive and easier-to-use with great design and color coding. You can set up “if this, then that” automation rules that get applied universally to all your campaigns. Also, you can split test 2-5 different paths to decide which is the most effective.
Winner - ActiveCampaign
Both ActiveCampaign and Drip provide a visual automation builder and gives you the ability to create even the most complex and sophisticated automations quite easily. But again ActiveCampaign triumphs, credit to the more advanced features and pre-built templates.
4. ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach subscribers’ inboxes instead of ending up in the promotions or the spam folder. It depends on quite a few factors, an important one of which is the email software you use. It is one of the most crucial points of comparison while choosing the right software for your business because no matter how great your email campaigns and automations are, if the emails are not reaching inboxes you are at a heavy loss.
Winner - Drip
Along with the best subscriber management and automation builders, ActiveCampaign and Drip top the list of high-deliverability email tools as well. Both are capable of providing a 90%+ deliverability rate consistently. However, nothing beats Drip when it comes to deliverability. It can even get you 100% deliverability.
5. ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Pricing
There’s a big difference in the pricing structure of these two software. Drip provides all its features in a single plan whereas ActiveCampaign distributes them over four plans. The cost of both the tools increases with an increase in the number of your contacts.
ActiveCampaign
Drip
Winner - Drip
The single package of Drip costs almost similar to ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan. However, it includes all the tools whereas in ActiveCampaign you will need to purchase higher plans in order to access some important features.
ActiveCampaign vs Drip: Conclusion
ActiveCampaign is definitely the best email marketing solution currently available on the internet. However, Drip is not further behind.
Go with Drip
- If you are an E-commerce company. There’s no better software for handling the email marketing duties of an E-commerce company than Drip
- If you are a small or medium-sized business. Drip’s single plan provides more value than ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan and both are almost of the same price. On the other hand, if you subscribe to ActiveCampaign’s higher plans, though you will get some advanced features, they won’t be of much use at the current stage of your business and hence won’t be able to justify the added cost.
Go with ActiveCampaign
If you are a large enterprise and do not care about a few hundred dollars per month. The advanced features in ActiveCampaign will not only save you time but help you with complex automations and effective lead management.
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