Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail:

Over the past two weeks, I used Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign to create emails, run SMS campaigns, utilize lead scoring, and improve audience engagement. Although both platforms offer features to do all of that, they’re built for different audiences.

Constant Contact is an email marketing software, designed to help small businesses and solo marketers with the tools they need to manage multiple marketing campaigns. It has a simple, drag-and-drop email builder with 100s of templates. It also allows you to send out newsletters, manage contacts, collate campaign reports, and build sign-up forms. However, it doesn’t provide as many customization options as ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation software, best suited for large companies and marketing agencies that want to build and manage complex automations. In addition to the marketing campaign builder, it also provides an advanced analytics dashboard. Marketing agencies can keep track of client accounts, monitor revenue generated from online stores, and make data-driven decisions with the help of AI forecasts, all from one platform. It also offers an extensive library of email templates and third-party integrations, making it easy for your business to manage a whole marketing strategy.However, Constant Contact becomes very expensive as contacts grow while ActiveCampaign has a steep learning curve. Because of that, we’ve decided to include ActiveTrail in this comparison.

ActiveTrail has a cost-effective marketing automation toolbox: you’re able to perform complex email and SMS marketing for a fraction of the cost of more expensive platforms. This makes it a great fit for small and medium businesses that are rapidly scaling. It also uses a simple editor to create questionnaires, survey forms, and landing pages, enabling fast workflow formation.

In this article, I compare Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail in the following categories:

• Pricing
• Email Marketing and Campaigns
• Audience Engagement
• Reporting and Analytics

I'll also briefly touch on SMS marketing and show you each platform's key features in the comparison table below.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Comparison Summary

What is Constant Contact?

"DIY marketing made easy for small businesses" ⚒

Created in 1995 by Randy Parker, Constant Contact was built to provide small enterprises with the digital marketing tools they needed to compete with large corporations. With its affordable plans and extensive knowledge base, the platform has helped over 600,000 customers build effective email marketing strategies.

Constant Contact has over 200 customizable templates and a simple drag-and-drop editor that small business owners can use to create stunning emails and newsletters. Users can add elements like videos, tables, and product catalogs, or even create an email from a PDF file. When managing contacts, the platform allows you to create targeted workflows based on segments, tags, and complex rules. Additionally, users can collate detailed analytics such as website tracking for individual contacts, e-commerce reporting for online stores, and industry trends that improve data-driven decision making.

Constant Contact is best for DIY marketers, small companies, and nonprofits that need an affordable, all-in-one marketing tool to drive growth.

What is ActiveCampaign?

"All-in-one marketing automation powerhouse for large teams" ⚡

Created in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom, ActiveCampaign started as a consulting firm and quickly grew to become a Software-as-a-Service platform that helps businesses create effective campaigns.

ActiveCampaign allows you to build multiple marketing campaigns, including email, SMS, and social. It provides a drag-and-drop builder to create custom emails, targeted campaigns, and personalized onboarding flows for specific segments. Additionally, you can build custom pages, manage revenue generation via a ‘Deals’ dashboard, set up advanced automation flows, and create lead generation forms. The platform also provides detailed analytics and reports, including individual audience engagement, automation performance, and even predictive forecasts to improve future email campaigns.

Overall, ActiveCampaign is a powerful tool that marketing agencies, e-commerce marketers, and large companies use when they want to create advanced automations, compile detailed reports, and manage multiple marketing campaigns.

What is ActiveTrail?

Emails & SMS marketing on a budget

ActiveTrail is a popular email marketing platform that was built in 2004 by RealCommerce group. What started as a passionate side project has grown into a leading, multi-channel email service provider and marketing platform.

With over 60 customizable templates, marketing teams can build stunning emails without code. To upscale its email marketing software, ActiveTrail prides itself with nearly 100% deliverability, enabled by partnering with internet service providers (ISPs) worldwide to deliver emails consistently without obstacles. And when it comes to precise email targeting, you can create contact list segmentation based on subscriber behavior, demographics, and preferences. You can also improve conversion rates by building professional landing pages, sign-up and pop-up forms, and online surveys. Integrated with your e-commerce store, ActiveCommerce 2.0 will help you maximize profits and drive website traffic through various marketing channels. And to top it all off, you can even automate repetitive tasks like email sequences and drip campaigns, track key metrics like open rates and click-through rates, and implement SMS marketing for better conversions.

ActiveTrail is ideal for mid-size businesses, high-volume senders, email experts, and affiliate marketers who are budget-conscious but need a simple, powerful platform to manage large contact lists.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Email Marketing and Automation

Constant Contact has a user-friendly builder, ActiveCampaign offers the most email automation capabilities, and ActiveTrail is best for creating quick email campaigns.

“Email Marketing and Automation” is a broad use case so, in this section, we broke the comparison down into four subsections:

• Email and Campaign Building Tools
• SMS Marketing
• Optimization Features
• Contact Management

Constant Contact has a simple drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy to create emails and campaigns.

When creating an email, you can either build one from scratch, import a PDF to email, or choose from over 200 email templates. What’s more, you can also apply custom elements to any template you pick when you set up a brand theme. These features make Constant Contact truly beginner-friendly.

Beyond crafting stunning emails, Constant Contact’s campaign tools allow you to build and manage whole marketing campaigns. You can run a single campaign across multiple channels like email and SMS, making it easier to engage your audience.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign doesn’t have a separate email builder. Instead, it has a more general marketing campaign builder.

With over 250 templates, you can build a variety of campaign types such as automated emails, RSS-triggered messages, and auto-responder emails. The campaign editor allows you to perform basic customization such as alignment, font & color change, device responsiveness, and even custom settings for mobile devices.

One unique feature ActiveCampaign offers is the ability to include tracking and automation options when building a campaign.

For example, you can set up reply tracking, link tracking, and even Google Analytics. Furthermore, you can build a private or public campaign archive page that makes it easy for subscribers to access all previous campaign issues.

However, ActiveCampaign’s extensive customization might come with a steep learning curve for new users.

Then there’s ActiveTrail. It provides a straightforward, user-friendly email builder with all the necessary tools for building and designing your email campaigns.

Although the email templates aren’t as numerous as ActiveCampaign’s, you can fully customize them and integrate interactive elements such as product catalogs, PayPal payment buttons, and videos. Furthermore, the design is mobile responsive by default, which improves user retention and email conversion.

What sets ActiveTrail apart from other platforms is that it prides itself on a nearly 100% delivery rate.

That’s because, since its founding nearly two decades ago, the company built a reliable network with third-party email providers. Additionally, it’s built with built-in SPAM scores to help you reduce bounce rates, increase email deliverability, and improve email conversion.

Moving on, ActiveTrail’s campaign builder allows you to create single and multi-channel campaigns, automations marketing, automatically send out event-triggered emails, include multiple subject lines in email headers, and even edit email images.

Constant Contact offers SMS marketing as a separate feature that you can integrate into your account. You can integrate with 200+ SMS providers via Zapier.

It also provides an AI content generator that helps you create texts using criteria like keywords and tone of voice, shorten outbound links, and access a live preview that makes it easier to build captivating SMS messages. Furthermore, if you’re a marketer, you can build SMS marketing campaigns that allow customers to subscribe to emails via text.

Additionally, the platform provides 10-digit mobile numbers that you can use for phone support and building familiarity with your customers. However, this service is only available to businesses within the US.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign offers multiple phone numbers—local numbers are available in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland.

Although, the platform has some drawbacks. For example, you can’t activate SMS marketing unless you’ve selected unique keywords that customers can use to subscribe—if a keyword is taken, you’ll need to keep changing until you find one that is unique to you.

Secondly, ActiveCampaign does not provide uniform pricing for SMS credits—text messages are charged differently based on the delivery location. This inconsistent model makes it harder for global businesses to scale their SMS campaigns.

Then there’s ActiveTrail. Compared to ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact, it offers the most advanced SMS marketing software.

ActiveTrail has a user-friendly SMS builder that allows you to set up instant text message campaigns. As a result, there’s no need for elaborate third-party integrations and you can manage messages in one dashboard. Additionally, it’s easy to search for campaigns, perform quick edits, manage contacts, and even combine SMS messaging with other email marketing tools.

Additionally, you can use ActiveTrail’s SMS marketing builder to:

• send branded text messages with the company’s name, phone number, or brand name for easier identification
• personalize texts using tags such as names, city, phone numbers, and emails
• directly integrate and send custom messages with WhatsApp
• and send periodic push notifications

Constant Contact offers over 300 native integrations and 6,000 third-party integrations via Zapier, making it easy to connect your account to your whole martech stack and optimize your workflow.

In Constant Contact’s Apps & Integrations menu, you can select templates from categories like CRM platform integrations, e-commerce, phone & SMS, and any other category you’d ever need.

Constant Contact also has an SEO tool, which helps you with search engine optimization recommendations, supported by keyword research and competitor reports.

When it comes to deliverability optimization, the platform automatically detects spam and filters out suspicious content to improve your email deliverability rates.

And finally, to optimize your space and time, you also have access to a library to store business assets like images, documents, and videos.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign offers the most sophisticated automation capabilities and triggers.

It has 600+ pre-built automations that you can use to create elaborate marketing campaigns. You can simply build your own automations, starting with triggers based on different categories, including behaviors & actions, website properties, e-commerce, email, and sales & CRM tools.

Furthermore, you can integrate with 800+ third-party apps to provide more custom options when building automations.

Some of these apps allow you to issue coupons and gift cards, perform email verifications, and even send physical gifts. While this level of customization is great, you have to rely heavily on third-party apps to build complex flows.

Having it all straightforward, that’s where ActiveTrial shines.

With ActiveTrail, it’s easy to build complex marketing campaigns in-house without relying on third-party integrations. It comes with dedicated SMS marketing, a landing page builder, a sign-up and pop-up forms builder, and a survey builder. Your workflow is optimized by having it all on one platform.

ActiveTrail’s marketing automation features include a drag-and-drop, visual automations builder, which visualizes the logic behind any sequence of emails or SMS marketing events. You can set up autoresponders, triggered by various actions your customers do on your website or landing pages.

You can also set up basic automations and just-in-time campaigns that use AI to deliver emails at the most optimal time, based on the subscriber’s history.

Some other notable optimization tools on ActiveTrail include:

• Multiple subject lines: create different campaign titles that target different segments within your contact list
• AB testing: test two different email designs against each other
• Interactive personalization: deliver personalized email images using “if” conditions
• Email deliverability: reduce bounce rate and send emails directly to the client’s inbox

With Constant Contact, you can perform basic contact management such as creating unique segments, lists, and tags. The contact management dashboard is user-friendly and provides a brief overview of important metrics like subscriber growth trends.

Like Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign has a user-friendly contact management dashboard that allows you to manage your clientele. One unique feature is that it has an additional business account dashboard, which allows you to capture the details of your client’s specific business needs.

ActiveTrail has all the necessary contact management tools that help you build a uniform and organized mailing list. You can simply import your contacts with an Excel document, combine existing lists, create segmented groups, get an overview of any specific customer, and automatically manage unsubscriptions.

What sets ActiveTrail apart is the ability to create dynamic groups. These automated contact lists are updated based on predetermined triggers and conditions, making it easier for users to manage segmented email lists.

Email Marketing and Automation

Winner: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign offers the most sophisticated email and campaign building tools. You have access to pre-built campaign templates and can set up email campaigns according to unique triggers and rules.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Audience Engagement Tools

Although Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign offer elaborate engagement tools, ActiveTrail offers all the essentials with quite innovative options.

Constant Contact offers additional interactive elements like social integration and event management.

Audience engagement tools are simply interactive elements you can use to keep your target audience engaged with campaigns. On Constant Contact, audience engagement happens over landing pages, sign-up forms, and surveys.

With the landing page builder, you have access to six templates and can create simple sign-up pages where visitors can join mailing lists, download resources, and access offers. Additionally, you can use these landing pages to perform ad campaigns directly on social media and Google.

Furthermore, marketing teams can build sophisticated survey forms to collect information. Constant Contact has a drag-and-drop survey builder that offers a lot of customization options. For example, you can:

• list events and online products directly on forms
• embed interactive elements like videos, images, and data tables
• integrate social follow and share links
• and perform basic customization like changing colors, fonts, and buttons

ActiveCampaign offers an extensive library of templates.

ActiveCampaign offers two main audience engagement tools: forms and landing pages.

When building a form, you can choose from four different template structures and pre-determine an action from a limited list. Form actions include subscribing to a list, adding a tag, adding to a deal, and email results.

Unlike Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign has an extensive library of 63 landing page templates. What sets ActiveCampaign apart is that you can receive payments directly on the landing page by integrating a PayPal payment button when designing a landing page.

ActiveTrail offers all the essentials as well as the most comprehensive interactive features.

On ActiveTrail, you have access to interactive engagement tools such as landing pages, pop-up & sign-up forms, and surveys.

When building a landing page with ActiveTrail you can choose from over 100 templates, customize your design completely up to your liking, drag-and-drop any kind for content you want, edit your images right on the platform, and even set a dynamic background.

For building surveys, ActiveTrail uses a simple, pre-designed survey builder. It’s a great fit for teams who want to build surveys quickly without worrying about their form's appearance. What makes this survey builder unique is that you can choose from an extensive list of question types and determine the format in which contacts can submit their answers.

Furthermore, you can set up different types of forms: sign-up, pop-up, call-to-action, and embeddable sign-up forms. Start from scratch or use one of the pre-built templates—whatever is easier for you.

With ActiveTrail’s social integration, you can:

• create personalized messages for contacts on Facebook and Instagram
• target customers who have unsubscribed from your mailing list with targeted ads
• offer coupon codes to customers who dropped off shopping journeys on your online store
• and re-engage customers who have completed a journey or made a purchase on your online store

These tools help you enhance client engagement and drive lead conversion rates. They also help you be everywhere: in your client’s email box, texts, notifications, social media, and on your website.

Audience Engagement Tools

Winner: ActiveTrail

ActiveTrail offers the most robust and accessible audience engagement tools. You can build landing pages, sign-up forms, surveys, social media campaigns, and push notifications, all for an affordable price.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Reporting & Analytics

ActiveCampaign's reports are the most in-depth, Constant Contact's are focused on e-commerce, and ActiveTrail is most focused on providing key insights in real time.

Constant Contact’s report dashboard offers a basic overview with limited customization options.

Constant Contact’s reporting dashboard provides an overview of three key areas:

• email
• contacts
• and e-commerce

These basic reporting features allow users to keep track of campaigns, monitor revenue, and manage their contacts.

One feature that sets this email marketing tool apart is the ability to use industry trends to make data-driven decisions. You can monitor email data (1) and compare it with industry averages to ensure your campaigns are matching the needs of your audience (2 & 3).

Furthermore, you can measure how email marketing campaigns perform over time at granular levels. For example, track how many opens, clicks, and shares an email has.

Another unique feature is Constant Contact’s e-commerce reporting dashboard which allows you to connect to 246 different e-commerce tools, set up your products, automate email responses, and collate revenue reports.

Although Constant Contact offers some pre-built report templates, its customization options are limited.

ActiveCampaign provides the most comprehensive reporting dashboard.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign offers more customization and granular monitoring.

For example, you can delve deeper with per-subscriber analytic monitoring. It’s easy to see, monitor, and calculate how individual subscribers interact with your emails.

Unlike the other email platforms that provide feature-specific analytics, ActiveCampaign records all reports in one dashboard (1). This segmentation makes it easy for you to access and compare important data all in one place. You can also filter for information based on an email sent date, event date, time frame, tags, and Apple privacy opens (2).

With ActiveCampaign, you can:

• determine open/read trends by week and by hour
• perform forecast analysis to improve email campaigns
• see how individual subscribers interact with your website
• monitor deals and the revenue generated via campaigns
• and oversee sales performance and engagement analytics

ActiveTrail gathers all email reports in one simple dashboard and offers a variety of reports.

Compared to both email platforms, ActiveTrail analytics are the most straightforward.

It has a simple reporting dashboard that provides an overview of key metrics like bounce rate, click rate, complaints rates, and contact growth list. These analytics are presented in real time, which gives you precise insight into your campaign performance.

The various reports you get access to include: email campaign reports, individual user reports, A/B split comparison reports, campaign comparisons, mobile vs. desktop reports, “hotspot” click reports, and SPAM complaint and erroneous removal reports.

Despite its simple reporting dashboard, you can still perform sophisticated actions like:

• create custom filters that match unique data needs
• monitor the email and SMS status of individual contacts
• monitor the email and SMS status of individual contacts

Furthermore, you can integrate Google Analytics when sending out emails for better monitoring and data collection.

Reporting & Analytics

Winner: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign allows marketers to gather, measure, and monitor important metrics such as revenue generations, per-subscriber interactions, and conversion rates. Furthermore, it offers a forecast feature that allows you to make data-driven marketing decisions.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Pricing

Constant Contact works for small contact lists, ActiveCampaign’s pricing works well for large companies, and ActiveTrail offers the most affordable price and best value for growing companies.

Constant Contact offers affordable pricing plans for small businesses and DIY marketing teams, but not so affordable as you grow.

Constant Contact offers three pricing plans, the pricing is set for 500 contacts and rises with the number of contacts:

Because Constant Contact is an all-in-one digital marketing software, it’s a cost-effective solution for small companies and marketing agencies who need to perform sophisticated marketing on a budget. However, the pricing becomes less competitive as you require more contacts and email tools.

ActiveCampaign is more expensive but offers the most comprehensive marketing features.

ActiveCampaign offers four pricing plans, the pricing is set for 1000 contacts and rises with the number of contacts:

When comparing ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact, the former comes with the most comprehensive feature set. It’s a great fit for large corporations that need advanced analytics, automation, sales engagement, and integrations.

The drawback with ActiveCampaign is that it charges for separate marketing services, making it expensive for users to access a complete marketing package. For example, it charges for limited products like:

• SMS marketing automation
• transactions emails
• and sales engagement features

ActiveTrail offers the most affordable pricing if you factor in the refinement of its email marketing services, including unlimited email sending and full API integration.

ActiveTrail offers three pricing plans, the pricing is set for 500 contacts and rises with the number of contacts:

All platforms charge based on the number of contacts and offer a free trial period. However, ActiveTrail has the most affordable pricing. This makes it very accessible for growing small and medium-sized enterprises that need an affordable, sophisticated tool to run their business. Furthermore, you can send large volumes of SMS messages to their customers for as low as $0.082 per SMS.

Pricing

Winner: ActiveTrail

ActiveTrail offers the most value for money. It’s a great fit for small and medium-sized enterprises that need an affordable tool to create sophisticated emails. It also offers the most affordable plan for large companies to scale their marketing.

Constant Contact is a cost-effective solution for small marketing agencies that need advanced marketing features beyond emails.

Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail: Pros & Cons

Final Verdict: Constant Contact vs ActiveCampaign vs ActiveTrail:

Small marketing teams will love Constant Contact, large enterprises will value ActiveCampaign, and growing businesses will thrive with ActiveTrail.

If you've been with me throughout the entire comparison, you'll know by now that these three tools aren't competitors because they support different target audiences.

Constant Contact is the marketing software you need if you run a small team that needs to perform above-average marketing campaigns. ActiveCampaign is better suited for large companies that need all-in-one software to build and monitor complex automations & campaigns. ActiveTrail serves busy growing businesses that need a straightforward, affordable marketing tool they can easily scale with.

With that, I’d recommend you to…

Use Constant Contact if:

• You’re a small business or a solo marketer that needs different marketing tools in one platform.
• You want to build simple email and SMS automations.
• You’re looking for an easy-to-use marketing automation tool.

Click here to get started with Constant Contact!

Use ActiveCampaign if:

• You need to create, run, and monitor large campaigns across different channels.
• You run a large marketing agency and handle multiple clients across different industries.
• You need a robust platform with pre-built automations that can save time.

Click here to get started with ActiveCampaign!

Use ActiveTrail if:

• You’re a growing business that wants to run marketing campaigns on a budget.
• You want to send out stunning campaigns without spending time building from scratch.
• You’re interested in creative advanced features like SMS marketing, push notifications, and WhatsApp marketing.

Click here to get started with ActiveTrail!