Home > Marketing Automation Software > ActiveCampaign > ActiveCampaign vs iContact

ActiveCampaign vs iContact

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs iContact based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features Analyst Ratings Comparison Charts User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots

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Product Basics

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.

iContact is an email automation and marketing tool geared towards small and medium-sized businesses running Windows, MacOS and Linux. It offers several standard features, with a distinct focus on email features and easy-to-use technology. These include templates, a drag-and-drop editor, automation, A/B testing, list segmentation and campaigns.

It also comes bundled with a handful of additional features to support marketing and sales activities, such as reporting, landing pages, sign-up forms and a free email lookbook.

$9 Monthly

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Tailored to your specific needs

$8.50 Monthly

Free Trial is available →

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Tailored to your specific needs

Small

Medium

Large

Small

Medium

Large

Windows

Mac

Linux

Android

Chromebook

Windows

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Linux

Android

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Cloud

On-Premise

Mobile

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Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation

In Person

Live Online

Videos

Webinars

Documentation

In Person

Live Online

Videos

Webinars

Phone

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FAQ

Forum

Knowledge Base

24/7 Live Support

Phone

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Knowledge Base

24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving.
Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less.
Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates.
Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier.
Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users.

Automate Funnels: Streamline all levels of the marketing funnel, taking the work of a whole marketing team and automating it.
Manage Subscribers: Easily access and manage contacts list, facilitating healthy relationships with the right leads.
Boost Sales: Nurture leads and pass them along to sales with included CRM integrations.
Unlimited Users: Onboard unlimited new users at no additional cost.

Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey.
Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers:

Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease.
Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times.
Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically.

Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information.
CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers.
Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys.
Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available.
Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation.
Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores.
Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more.
Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns.
Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity.
Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement.
Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign.
SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more.
Conversation Features: Provides:

Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations.
A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers.

Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time.
Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close.
Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior.

Email Builder: A no-code interface is included, making it easy to build effective emails without any programming experience.
Automatic Email: Running without user intervention, it can accurately deliver emails on time.
Scalable Templates: Built to be delivered efficiently, effectively and to display correctly on mobile or desktop platforms.
Time-Based Campaigns: Create and map out time-based campaigns in a short amount of time by utilizing multiple email templates and building platforms.
A/B Testing: Test content performance and customer reception by splitting email campaigns into groups.
Email Lookbook: Select from 55 prebuilt email designs, free of cost, that have been proven to generate high ROI.
List Segmentation: Send relevant and personalized emails using audience segmentation, increase subscription chances by creating and targeting audience lists based on defined conditions, and send dynamic content by incorporating merge fields into messaging.
Reporting: Stay informed with updates about campaigns through dashboards, make informed business decisions with real-time reports, and track and analyze data using granular reports.
Integrations: Integrates with major platforms such as Google Forms, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce, PayPal, Zoho CRM, WordPress, Zapier, Magento, Shopify, LeadsBridge and more.
Sign-Up Forms: Create forms quickly using an easy interface and embed them on a website or business Facebook page.
Salesforce Mass Email: Gain insights into campaign effectiveness through reports and dashboards, send personalized emails using templates, track opens and clicks, and explore customers’ response to email campaigns.

Product Ranking

#2

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#17

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign

iContact

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57%

43%

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93%

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83%

17%

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82%

18%

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95%

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57%

43%

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100%

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40%

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91%

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71%

29%

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81%

19%

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User Sentiment Summary

92%

of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

86%

of users recommend this product

iContact has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 2227 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.6 (5328)

4.1 (1069)

n/a

4.48 (548)

4.6 (800)

4.5 (521)

n/a

3.8 (4)

4.5 (292)

4.0 (85)

Awards

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.

Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.

Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.

Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.

Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.

Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.

Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.

Email Automation: Equipped with every essential feature, the tool enables quick email sending, keeping track of delivered mails, mass emails, marketing campaigns and more, according to 97% of reviewers referencing it.

Ease of Use: The system is easy to learn, understand and use, note 96% of reviewers referencing user-friendliness.

Templates: Almost 75% of reviewers mentioning templates report that well-designed, customizable templates help save time and auto-answer templates help deliver emails designed for all devices.

Interface: A clear, pleasant and clean interface is a benefit to 81% of reviewers who mention it.

Support: Every user mentioning this aspect notes that customer service is fast and attentive.

Feature-Rich: Features like A/B testing, automation, email subscriber entity management, multi-user accessibility and a drag-and-drop editor are a plus, in the experience of every user referencing them.

Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.

Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.

Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.

Cost: It has a high cost for the few tools offered, and it’s also expensive to use large volumes of data, according to almost 80% of users mentioning pricing.

Limitations: Every user talking about this aspect mentions limitations such as limited storage and email customization, difficulty in fixing mistakes, deleting files, adding contacts and spell check.

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

iContact provides email automation and marketing tools in an easy-to-use interface. It offers a wide range of features and offers a lot of options to make interesting designs and templates. It also has a prompt customer service team according to most reviewers. However, the pricing is on the higher side and there are certain limitations that prevent users from getting the most out of the solution. Overall, it has a lot to offer for email marketing, with use-friendly tools that are great for small and medium businesses, though there are more robust platforms available.

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FAQ

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