SendGrid vs ActiveCampaign
Trying to choose between SendGrid vs ActiveCampaign as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
SendGrid
- 1.4/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.2/5 on Capterra
- 4/5 on G2
SendGrid is a cloud-based platform for transactional and marketing emails.
Pricing
Starting at $15/month, dynamic pricing, depends on the number of emails sent monthly and the contact list volume.
Key features
- Email automation
- Email builder with templates
- Email testing
- A/B testing
- Signup forms
- List management
- Dynamic content in emails
Support
Web form tickets, Twitter DMs, live chat support for paid users, phone support for users on Pro/Advanced plans and higher
ActiveCampaign
- 3.6/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.6/5 on Capterra
- 4.6/5 on G2
An automation platform that combines email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for cross-channel management, segmentation, and personalization. It can also be used to automate sales and support processes.
Pricing
Starts from $9 a month for 500 contacts (billed yearly)
Key features
- Automation features for marketing
- Integrated CRM tools
- Integrations with various popular services
- Landing page constructor
- Intuitive email builder
Support
Availability: 9 am - 11 pm CDT (GMT-5) Communication in the chat or via email
SendGrid is based in Denver, Colorado, and it was founded in 2009. In 2019, the company was acquired by Twilio, the service for customer communications and data storage.
ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Hubs in Chicago, Sidney, and Dublin.
SendGrid may require technical expertise to set up and start working, so it’s not 100% beginner-friendly.
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.
Entreprises and tech companies
Businesses that plan to scale their email marketing up to include CRM, e-commerce integrations, and diverse automation schemes.
SendGrid offers a free plan with a limit of up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails sent per month. The free plan includes:
- Design & code editors
- Segmentation
- A/B testing & actionable insights
- 3 email testing credits
- 1 signup form
- Ticket support
- 1 user
- Automation
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
Dynamic pricing, depends on the number of contacts, emails sent per month, the number of users, and the set of platform features:
Basic: $15–200/month, 5–100K contacts, up to 300K emails per month. Includes:
- Design & code editors
- Segmentation
- A/B testing & actionable insights
- 10 email testing credits
- 5 signup forms
- Ticket & chat support
- 1 user
Advanced: $60–900/month, up to 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month. Unlike the Basic plan, it includes:
- 60 email testing credits
- 15 signup forms
- Up to 1,000 users
The plan also unlocks access to:
- Automation
- Dedicated IPs
- Guaranteed response times on ticket, chat, & phone support
Custom: Custom pricing for high-volume sending over 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month.
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.
Support is available 24/7 in English via the following channels:
- Twitter DMs and web form tickets — for all users
- Live chat support — for paid users
- Phone support — for paid users on Advanced email marketing plan/Pro API plan and custom high-volume plans
SendGrid also provides a knowledge center for marketers and developers with screenshots and video tutorials. Articles in the knowledge base are partially translated to French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), German, and Spanish (Mexico). The videos are only available in English.
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 marketing automation
- Signup forms
- List management
- Email editor: both no-code and code
- Email templates
- A/B testing
- Analytics
- Email testing
- Dynamic content
- Deliverability insights
- 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
60+ free templates for different campaign types and industries, including:
- Healthcare
- Traveling
- E-commerce
- Non-profits
- Emails for small businesses
SendGrid also offers templates for:
- Welcome emails
- Holiday emails
- Promotional emails
- Newsletters
- Transactional emails (i. e. order confirmation, shipping confirmation, etc.)
Some of these templates contain dynamic content.
125+ templates
No-code dynamic content available
Email template recommendations and guides
Templates for:
- Abandoned Cart
- Conference Event
- Customer Service
- Holiday
- Newsletter
- Reviews Feedback
100+ integrations with other ESPs like Klaviyo and Litmus, CRM systems like AgileCRM, content management systems like WordPress and Verst., and more.
Facebook, Google Analytics, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, Salesforce, Zapier, and more
A web app and an iOS app with limited functionality (management and troubleshooting only), you can find an APK for Android but it’s not an official release
- 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
SendGrid offers a tool for building custom automated sequences and a pre-built welcome series. The automation editor allows users to select entry criteria, enable and temporarily disable the sequence, set conditions, and add as many emails to the sequence as they want.
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.
- A solid transactional API
- Good choice of integrations
- Great testing tool
- Good for scaling businesses
- 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
- Slow customer support
- Many reviewers complain about deliverability issues like blacklisted IPs
- Bugs like no 2FA emails to log in to the platform
- Could be more user-friendly
- 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.)
One of the most useful aspects of the email editor is the ability to add tags in the message, which allow you to add custom fields. This includes adding the recipient's name and location, date of last open, or any other information you collect on your subscribers, which enables a high level of personalization.
What I like most about Sendgrid is that most of the tools out there offer easy integration with Sendgrid. Some apps can even directly integrate with SendGrid without using automation software like Zapier.
While its decent feature set could potentially be let down by the rather high prices on more expensive plans, ActiveCampaign still provides good value for your money”.
As this ActiveCampaign review highlights, it’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within an email marketing platform, but they do it very well.
The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers, ecommerce and more. One area that is slightly lacking is the email builder, not offering an experience as slick as other services out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history)”.
*This information is current as of 01/20/2025. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
