ActiveCampaign vs Mailtrap

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

Founded in 2011 by Railsware Product Studio, Mailtrap is a bootstrapped product owned by Railsware with company headquarters in Kyiv, Krakow, and Los Angeles.

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.

The service is geared for developer and product teams. Although not easy for the general public, its interface makes it easy for professionals to adopt the tool.

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

SMEs and enterprises who require detailed, well-laid-out analytics, high deliverability, as well as transactional and marketing emails within a highly scalable and stable solution.

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

Yes, 3,500 emails per month with 150 emails/day throughput, one domain and one user seat.

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.

Mailtrap offers four pricing plans, billed monthly, and based on the number of emails and contacts, features, data retention and additional services.

Basic starts from $15 per month for 10,000 emails and up to 50,000 contacts.

• No daily email throughput limit
• 5 domains
• 5 days of email log and body retention
• Click rate tracking
• 3 user seats 
• 2FA

Business starts at $85 per month for 100,000 emails and up to 750,000 contacts.

• Everything you get in Basic +
• 3,000 domains
• 15-day email log retention
• 7-day email body retention
• Max email size up to 30MB
• Dedicated IP
• Auto warm-up
• HTTPS link branding
• 1,000 user seats
• 2FA & SSO
• 24/7 customer support (email & live chat)
• Priority support
• Deliverability expert assistance
• Migration assistance

Enterprise starts at $750 per month from 1,5M emails and up to 2.5M contacts.

• Everything you get in Business +
• 30-day email log retention
• 15-day email body retention
• Activity logs

Mailtrap for big senders

• Custom pricing
• Deliverability manager
• Onboarding assistance
• Unlimited user seats

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

Email support available to all plans, Knowledge Base, well-documented APIs and SDKs, YouTube tutorials, documentation available on all plans. 

Live chat and priority support available on higher plans (Business, Enterprise, and Mailtrap for big senders). This also includes migration and deliverability expert assistance and live chat and priority support – available 24/7.

On lower-tier plans, email support is available 20-hours per day, Monday to Friday.

• 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

• Separate sending streams for bulk and transactional emails
• SMTP & API (+SDKs for major programming languages)
• Email campaigns with scheduling, segmentation and automation
• Industry best analytics 
• Drag-and-drop email builder with AI assistance and fee image library
• Email template code editor
• Email templates and the template API
• Fast delivery and high inboxing rates.

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

Templates for:

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

• Two simple out-of-the-box templates with the option to import your own. 
• Templates API that allows you to programmatically send emails from your app or service.

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

18+ integrations including VS Code, Cursor, Replit, Gemini, Heroku, Zapier, Make, and more.

• 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

✅Available only on the web.
❌No installable solution.

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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.

Setting triggers, actions, and rules available in Alpha at the time of writing.

• 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

✅ High inboxing rates

✅ Fast email delivery 

✅ Industry best analytics

✅ Safe and fast scaling

✅ 24/7 expert support

• 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.)

❌Automations in Alpha stage
❌Requires intermediate coding skills