Mailgun vs ActiveCampaign

Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield. In 2021, Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Company headquarters are in San Antonio, Texas.

ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Hubs in Chicago, Sidney, and Dublin.

The service is aimed at developers and people with advanced coding knowledge, so it’s not easy to use for the general public.

No coding or design skills are required as there are plenty of automation recipes available. The system itself is comparatively complex, though, and needs some getting accustomed to.

Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.

Businesses that plan to scale their email marketing up to include CRM, e-commerce integrations, and diverse automation schemes.

No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.

No free plan. Has a free 14 days trial with up to 100 email sends to 100 contacts. The features available within the trial match the Professional tier of features.

The trial is limited to 1 user and doesn’t include:

• Predictive Sending
• Predictive Content
• Sending auto-responder campaigns
• Custom fields in forms
• Using “Email Results” in subscription forms
• SMS credits or sending
• Adding a domain to a landing page

Billed monthly:

• Foundation starting at $35 for 50,000 emails a month. Includes APIs, webhooks, ticket support.
• Scale starting at $90 for 100,000 emails a month. Includes everything from the previous plan and 5,000 email validations, live chat and phone support, dedicated IP pools.
• Enterprise with custom pricing. Includes everything from the other plans and dedicated support, comprehensive onboarding, early access to new features.

Extra emails and email validations available for additional price

Marketing + CRM

For 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:

• Lite $9 / $15
• Plus $49 / $70
• Professional $149 / $187
• Enterprise — individual pricing

Other pricing features:

• 2-year price lock
• Billing pause for 12 months with the account and campaigns intact.
• Only charges for the contacts the client actively markets to, no matter how many lists they’re on.
• A 20% discount for nonprofits.
• Free 14 days trial.

Ticket support with 24-hour response time, Knowledge Center, Comprehensive SDKs, Customer Feedback Forum, and Documentation available on all plans.

Chat and phone support are available on the Scale and Enterprise plans. Chat support is available Monday through Friday from 7 am to 7 pm CST. Phone support is available Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm CST.

On the Enterprise plan, users also have access to managed support.

Working hours: 9 am – 11 pm CDT (GMT-5)
Either live chat or email requests

Aside from online support, ActiveCampaign offers:

• Free online training
• Community and forum
• FAQ website section
• Study Hall — in-person learning classes

• Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
• SMTP services for sending transactional emails
• Email validations
• Email previews on 100+ devices and clients
• Inbox placement testing
• Send time optimization
• Email analytics
• Integrations with various services via APIs
• Additional email optimization services for monitoring

• Marketing automation
• Landing page builder
• Built-in CRM for small-medium-sized businesses
• Many service integrations
• Drag-and-drop email designer
• Free migration from other services
• SMS marketing
• Site messages
• Live chat and automated chatbot workflows

• Basic 7 templates with different layouts.
• Mailgun Templates API allows to integrate other templates into the service and manage the existing ones.

125+ templates
No-code dynamic content available
Email template recommendations and guides

Templates for:

• Abandoned Cart
• Conference Event
• Customer Service
• Holiday
• Newsletter
• Reviews Feedback

64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.

Facebook, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, Salesforce, Zapier, and more

• Available only on the web.

• No installable solution.

• Website
• Email extensions for Chrome and Outlook
• Mobile app for Android and iOS (possible to review email reports, track customer activity, and manage CRM data).

• No installable solution

English

Czech Dutch English French German Hungarian Indonesian Italian Polish Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Russian Slovenian Spanish Danish Finnish Simplified Chinese Turkish Vietnamese

Basic automations using API (requires coding)

800+ automation recipes for email and other marketing channels.

Offers the whole customer experience automation:

• Links different integrated services (like Shopify or Facebook) into cohesive scenarios.
• Collects broad data on each customer, so it’s possible to customize segments based on almost any parameter.
• Helps to choose the best content, send time, and delivery channel for each individual customer.
• Has AI advice on improving the marketing strategy.

• Useful API that easily integrates into other services
• Deliverability features
• Reliability and data protection
• Helpful support

• Hundreds of automation options even for sophisticated purposes
• CRM features
• Mobile app
• A dedicated email deliverability specialist checks the client’s email for compliance before sending
• Automation of 1:1 communications to customers on the website or social media

• Learning curve for beginners
• Interface is not very intuitive
• Stiff pricing structure

• High price and no free plan
• Customer support is often unavailable or slow
• Complicated automations system
• Steep learning curve
• Reports aren’t great (not enough information, no real-time results, visually unappealing, etc.)