MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign: Which is best? [2025]

Email marketing tools are rarely as different as MailerLite and ActiveCampaign: MailerLite prides itself on ease of use and caters to small businesses, while ActiveCampaign includes advanced automation features and a fully capable sales CRM.

Still, some people end up with the wrong tool. I was one of them: after using ActiveCampaign for around two years, I switched to MailerLite. In this article, I’ll walk you through the pros and cons of each platform to help you decide which is best for you.

Table of contents:

MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign at a glance

A few years ago, I decided to use ActiveCampaign for its CRM, pipeline management, and automation features. With only a couple hundred contacts on my email list, though, ActiveCampaign turned out to have more power than I needed. Switching to MailerLite worked well in my case—but only because I was willing to accept fewer features for the sake of simplicity.

Here’s a high-level overview to help you decide which tool is right for you:

• MailerLite is an email marketing tool built for small businesses, and it comes with one of the best free plans around. It’s affordable and easy to use, while still offering solid design, automation, and analytics features.

• ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform designed for enterprise customers, eCommerce brands, and advanced marketers. It’s pricey but powerful—integrating email marketing, sales automation, and customer relationship management into a single tool—and its AI features let you easily create complex productivity-boosting automations.

MailerLite is significantly more affordable

Let’s talk about pricing first: if you have a limited budget, your decision is about to get a lot easier.

ActiveCampaign is pricier than MailerLite across the board. For example, MailerLite’s Advanced plan costs $110/month for 10,000 subscribers, while ActiveCampaign’s comparable Pro plan costs $419/month. And that’s before taking user seats and send limits into account: MailerLite offers unlimited monthly emails and unlimited user seats, while ActiveCampaign caps both and charges for overages.

ActiveCampaign revamped its pricing and plans in mid-2024. The good news: it’s now cheaper to get started ($19/month for the Starter plan versus $39/month on the old Lite plan). It’s also less confusing to pick a plan now that ActiveCampaign has rolled up its marketing and sales tools into a single product. 

A serious downside of the new plans, however, is ActiveCampaign’s removal of its old “unlimited emails” policy. Now, the email send limit for most plans is 10x your contact limit (Pro users get 12x and Enterprise users get 15x). As a result, whatever plan you pick has the potential to get a whole lot more expensive. For example, if you send four emails a week to a list of 5,000 contacts, you’ll exceed your send limit by 30,000 emails and owe $150 in overage charges ($0.005 per email).

ActiveCampaign’s $19/month (for 1,000 contacts) Starter plan offers multi-step automations, eCommerce automation, A/B testing, and basic segmentation—though it’s missing many of the app’s most appealing features, like dynamic content, sales automation, and AI content generation. The $59/month Plus plan buys you access to those features, while the $89/month Pro plan gives you advanced features, like AI-powered predictive sending, conditional content, and conversion tracking. Then there’s the $159/month Enterprise plan, which you’ll need if you want to integrate with enterprise tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

If these prices feel eye-wateringly high to you, MailerLite is a great alternative: its most powerful plan is 3x cheaper than the equivalent ActiveCampaign plan. So if you don’t need ActiveCampaign’s enterprise-focused features or its sales and marketing muscle, MailerLite will save you a lot of money. Its robust “forever free” plan supports users until they hit 1,000 contacts and includes useful features like segmentation, email automation, landing pages, and pop-ups. Meanwhile, MailerLite’s entry-level Growing Business plan is $15/month for 1,000 subscribers, and its highest-priced Advanced plan is just $30/month.

MailerLite has a much quicker learning curve

MailerLite is much faster to learn than ActiveCampaign. The fact that it has fewer features certainly contributes to this, but another key factor is its approachable user interface. MailerLite is a slick, modern app with copious white space and simple navigation.

Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign is text-heavy, has dozens of features to navigate, and feels much more like enterprise software.

Using ActiveCampaign’s basic features, like sending email campaigns, is straightforward enough. But in general, ActiveCampaign emphasizes power and customization over simplicity. It’s the kind of tool you’ll only get the most out of by searching through FAQs, documentation, and courses. Figuring out ActiveCampaign’s capabilities can feel like a project unto itself: ActiveCampaign University has dozens of instructional courses to help you navigate the platform’s features, while MailerLite Academy makes do with just a handful.

MailerLite is much more straightforward and intuitive, whether you’re dragging and dropping an email design or creating automations. To speed things along, you can also use one of MailerLite’s 90 customizable email templates. Everything from creating pop-ups to designing landing pages is designed to prioritize simplicity over complexity. For example, MailerLite’s form builder uses one-click presets to help you choose between different form layouts and settings, while ActiveCampaign’s form designer requires more jumping between tabs and customization.

While ActiveCampaign is most definitely playing catch-up when it comes to ease of use, the good news—as I’ll explain in the next section—is that it’s recently released a whole slew of AI features that make it easier to handle day-to-day tasks like email campaigns and automations.

ActiveCampaign’s AI features are a huge productivity boost

Some apps add a bolt-on ChatGPT integration, offer a few generative text features, and market themselves as an AI-powered gift to humankind. ActiveCampaign isn’t one of them. Its AI features are actually useful and have the potential to remove a lot of the grunt work involved in marketing automation.

Take the AI campaign builder, for example: you can use natural language to tell ActiveCampaign what sort of email you want to send. Click Generate, wait a few seconds, and you’ve got a ready-to-send email, complete with a subject line, preheader, and images. Like any AI-generated text, it probably won’t be perfect the first time around, but you can easily use the same AI tool to adjust your message and tone of voice.

This feature gets even more useful if you already have a point of reference (like a promotional landing page) that can give ActiveCampaign more context. Just drop the URL in, and AI does the rest.

Then there’s the AI image generator. If you’ve played around with Midjourney or DALL·E, you won’t be too surprised by what you see here, but the quality is good and it’s nice to have the option to generate images right in the campaign builder. (You get 20 images/month on the Plus plan and 50/month on the Pro plan. The Starter plan doesn’t offer generative images.)

You’ll also want to populate your AI brand kit, which ActiveCampaign uses to create on-brand designs and marketing collateral. For example, rather than using ActiveCampaign’s standard email templates, you can use AI-generated templates inspired by your brand kit. And if you have multiple brands, you can set up multiple brand kits, making it easy to spin up different email styles as needed.

But the real productivity booster is ActiveCampaign’s AI-powered automation features. There’s a lot to cover here—from ActiveCampaign’s AI workflow builder to its automated follow-up tool—so I’ll get more in-depth in the next section.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to talk about when it comes to AI in MailerLite. They released an AI writing assistant (for emails and subject lines) in 2023 and an AI-powered landing page builder in 2024—and that’s about it. Both features are fun to play around with, but neither provides the kind of efficiency gains that ActiveCampaign’s suite of AI tools offers.

ActiveCampaign offers more powerful and complex automations

ActiveCampaign outclasses nearly every other email marketing tool with its powerful automations—and that includes MailerLite.

That’s not to say MailerLite’s automation capabilities are poor; its features will be enough for most beginners, solopreneurs, and small businesses. MailerLite packs an impressive amount of flexibility into its lightweight platform: you can design automations that trigger when subscribers join a group, complete a form, or click a link. Fairly complex automations are possible, and prebuilt templates make them easy to design. For example, here’s a MailerLite “winback” automation template that sends discount offers to subscribers who haven’t engaged recently.

Although MailerLite’s automation capabilities are serviceable, they’re no match for what’s possible with ActiveCampaign. The automation features offered by ActiveCampaign are seemingly endless: you can initiate automations with standard triggers, like when a customer subscribes to a list, but also advanced ones like web page is visited, replies to an email, enters a pipeline, and sentiment changes.

While there’s certainly a learning curve to put this all together, ActiveCampaign has about a thousand time-saving “recipes” that allow you to import common automations for popular industries. For example, realtors can swiftly deploy automations like Homebuyer Onboarding and Open House Follow-Up.

Here’s an ActiveCampaign automation template for realtors who want to send an email drip campaign to first-time homeowners.

While ActiveCampaign has recently simplified its automation-building interface, it can still be intimidating to use a visual workflow tool like this if you’re new to creating automations. Fortunately, the relative complexity of putting together an ActiveCampaign automation is offset by the hundreds of prebuilt templates you have access to, along with ActiveCampaign’s hugely valuable AI-powered automation tools.

Even if you’re not actively looking to create an automation, ActiveCampaign nudges you to do so—and uses AI to take care of the heavy lifting. For example, ActiveCampaign’s AI Follow Up tool proactively offers to generate a follow-up automation each time you send a standard email campaign.

ActiveCampaign also offers AI-powered automation recommendations based on your industry. You can choose a goal—like Convert leads into paying customers or Automate operational workflows—and ActiveCampaign generates a personalized multi-step automation workflow, and the emails to go along with it.

And with ActiveCampaign’s AI Builder, you can use natural language to describe your automation and let the app build it for you. (For some reason, I could only find this feature on the “old” automations builder and not the new interface, but your mileage may vary.)

As you start to create more and more automations, it can get tricky to figure out how customers flow from one to the next. ActiveCampaign’s unique Automation Map feature gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your various automations affect your customer journey.

ActiveCampaign is better for eCommerce

MailerLite and ActiveCampaign both integrate with eCommerce platforms, but if you’re serious about eCommerce, ActiveCampaign is a better option.

MailerLite has a decent set of eCommerce tools, including integrations with major platforms like WooCommerce, Stripe, and Shopify. It also features automations for common eCommerce scenarios, like following up with customers who abandon their shopping carts. Here’s what MailerLite’s prebuilt abandoned cart email sequence looks like.

While MailerLite offers just a handful of eCommerce automations, ActiveCampaign offers dozens. Whether you need to send refund notifications, repurchase reminders, Black Friday emails, or requests for customer reviews, ActiveCampaign has automation templates designed to streamline your eCommerce processes.

ActiveCampaign also boasts advanced features like predictive sending, which can help you gauge when customers might be interested in repurchasing, as well as cross-selling and upselling workflows. And with ActiveCampaign’s product catalog feature, you can fully integrate your eCommerce store with your automation sequences, making it easier to populate emails with hyper-relevant products.

Digital products are an exception to ActiveCampaign’s eCommerce dominance. If your goal is to sell recurring subscriptions, paid newsletters, or digital products, you’ll want to go with MailerLite, which allows you to create an entire website promoting your products and process payments via Stripe. MailerLite is no superstar in this area—that title belongs to Kit—but ActiveCampaign simply isn’t geared toward this kind of activity.

Sales teams will prefer ActiveCampaign

If you don’t do any inbound or outbound sales, you can skip this section. Otherwise, read on: it might be the deciding factor in your decision to go with ActiveCampaign or MailerLite.

It’s important to point out that MailerLite never claims to be a sales or CRM platform. That means it’s not entirely fair to judge it by those standards; but even so, you’ll need to consider this feature to understand how each platform fits into your marketing stack.

MailerLite does have some sales-friendly features—including a few that ActiveCampaign doesn’t have, like the ability to deliver email campaigns by time zone. And by using integrations, you can tie MailerLite into your existing sales workflows on external CRM platforms like HubSpot, Intercom, Pipedrive, and Salesforce. While MailerLite is far from being a CRM, you can add notes to each subscriber, see basic user data, and keep track of subscriber interactions.

But anyone managing deals and sales pipelines will find ActiveCampaign much more useful. It offers its own powerful integrated CRM with features like predictive sending, one-on-one email personalization, behavioral-based triggers, lead scoring, and pipeline management. As a result, you can design reliable, time-saving workflows that adapt to sales-focused variables like deal status and lead activity.

ActiveCampaign’s CRM lets you create contact-dependent tasks, set reminders, and trigger task-based automations. Let’s say you’re scheduling a call to review a sales proposal with a client, for example: using ActiveCampaign’s built-in workflows, you can automatically send over sales collateral before the call, and then trigger a follow-up sequence afterward.

ActiveCampaign has more advanced reporting capabilities

When it comes to email analytics, both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign do the basics well. But if you need more powerful reporting options, ActiveCampaign is the clear winner.

Both platforms make it easy to see basic metrics like open rate, click rate, and bounce rate, as well as more advanced stats like user location and hourly open trends. And each offers some unique features: ActiveCampaign can track email forwards and replies, which helps you understand which leads are engaging more, while MailerLite offers email click maps to help visualize where recipients are engaging with each email.

MailerLite’s edge is its data visualization, which makes complex numbers easier to understand by turning them into attractive charts.

This is especially handy with inherently visual data like subscriber location, which MailerLite displays using a map so you can quickly see a location breakdown for each campaign.

ActiveCampaign offers similar data (though it’s not presented quite as beautifully). But it’s the hands-down winner when it comes to the diversity of the reporting it offers: you can see reports for marketing revenue, conversion attribution, sales pipeline activity, and trends in your email list growth. And if all that isn’t enough, you can create your own reports and view progress toward custom goals.

ActiveCampaign also recently integrated BotSense into its reporting suite, which boosts the accuracy of your data by filtering out illegitimate clicks. For example, antivirus scanners sometimes auto-click email links to determine if they’re malicious or not; with BotSense enabled, ActiveCampaign filters this sort of activity so it doesn’t show up in your analytics.

Both have a wide variety of integrations

At first glance, it looks like ActiveCampaign has MailerLite beat based on the sheer number of integrations it offers. ActiveCampaign’s website lists a staggering 970+ apps, while MailerLite has a respectable 150+.

Fortunately, both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign integrate with Zapier, so you can connect them to nearly any app you can think of. That way, you can automatically add leads from forms, ad clicks, or anywhere else they come in—and you can send data from your marketing software to all the other apps you use.

Learn more about how to automate ActiveCampaign and how to automate MailerLite, or use one of these pre-made workflows to get started.

ActiveCampaign vs. MailerLite: Which should you choose?

If you’re still weighing your options, here’s the bottom line.

Choose ActiveCampaign if you’re looking for a comprehensive marketing and sales platform. With its powerful AI features, 950+ automation templates, and integrated CRM, it’s ideal for businesses that need sophisticated workflows. While it comes at a premium price point, ActiveCampaign’s enterprise-grade features can deliver serious ROI for the right business.

Go with MailerLite if you need simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Its intuitive interface, unlimited email sends, and straightforward pricing make it perfect for small businesses and solopreneurs who want effective email marketing without the complexity. While you’ll miss out on advanced features, you’ll get all the essential tools—including automation, analytics, and landing pages—at a fraction of the cost.

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This article was originally published in December 2023. The most recent update was in January 2025.