ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful email marketing platforms you can buy. It’s also one of the most confusing to price out. Four plans, contact-based scaling, different email send limits per tier, and a recent policy change that charges you for unsubscribed contacts. I’ve spent time digging through every plan to figure out what each tier actually gives you, where the hidden costs live, and which plan makes sense for different types of businesses.
The short version: the Starter plan looks affordable but is severely limited. Real value starts at Plus.
All Plans at a Glance
ActiveCampaign prices scale based on your contact count and which plan you choose. All prices below are for monthly billing.
| Contacts | Starter | Plus | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $19/mo | $59/mo | $99/mo | $179/mo |
| 2,500 | $49/mo | $119/mo | $189/mo | $319/mo |
| 5,000 | $99/mo | $179/mo | $259/mo | $469/mo |
| 10,000 | $189/mo | $239/mo | $469/mo | $739/mo |
| 25,000 | N/A | $489/mo | $789/mo | $1,099/mo |
| 50,000 | N/A | $759/mo | $1,209/mo | $1,459/mo |
Annual billing saves 20% across all plans. At 1,000 contacts, annual prices drop to: Starter $15/mo, Plus $49/mo, Pro $79/mo, Enterprise $145/mo.
Nonprofits get an additional 20% discount.
Notice that Starter maxes out at 10,000 contacts. Once your list grows past that, you’re looking at Plus or higher.
Starter Plan: The Trap
Starter begins at $19/mo for 1,000 contacts and looks like a reasonable entry point. On paper, you get a drag-and-drop email editor, 150+ templates, site tracking, basic automation, A/B testing on emails, and a basic marketing CRM. That sounds like a lot for $19.
Here’s the thing most reviews won’t tell you: those automations are capped at 5 triggers and actions per workflow. Five. If you’ve ever built a real automation sequence, you know that limit is going to feel tight almost immediately. A welcome series with conditional branching and a couple of follow-up paths can hit five actions before you’ve finished your first draft.
And the missing features are significant. No landing pages. No generative AI. No conditional content. No custom user permissions. You get one user seat. The CRM is basic, with no sales pipelines.
Email sends are capped at 10x your contact limit. With 1,000 contacts, that’s 10,000 emails per month. For a weekly newsletter, that’s fine. For anything more frequent, you’ll feel the squeeze.
I’d describe Starter as a demo tier. It lets you test the interface and get familiar with ActiveCampaign’s approach, but the automation limitations make it hard to use for anything beyond simple newsletter sends. If simple newsletters are all you need, there are cheaper tools that do it better.
ActiveCampaign does offer a 14-day free trial with Pro-level features, so you don’t even need Starter to explore the platform. The trial gives you 100 contacts and 100 email sends, which is enough to test the automation builder and decide if the interface is right for you.
Who Starter works for: Someone who wants a paid sandbox to test beyond the trial limits, or a very small business sending a single weekly email with no automation needs.
Plus Plan: Where It Actually Starts
Plus runs $59/mo for 1,000 contacts. It’s triple the price of Starter, and here’s why that jump is worth it for most businesses.
The automation limits disappear. Unlimited triggers and actions per workflow. This is the feature that makes ActiveCampaign worth using in the first place. Their visual automation builder is one of the best in the industry, and the Starter plan barely lets you touch it.
You also get landing pages and templates, site messages, generative AI for email copy, custom user permissions, and upgraded reporting. The CRM gets full sales pipelines. Your team can have up to 3 users.
Email sends stay at 10x your contact limit, same as Starter. At 5,000 contacts, that’s 50,000 emails per month. At 10,000 contacts, it’s 100,000. Plenty for most use cases.
The pricing curve gets interesting at higher contact counts. At 10,000 contacts, Plus costs $239/mo while Starter costs $189/mo. That’s only a $50 difference for a dramatically better feature set. At 25,000 contacts, Starter isn’t even available anymore, so Plus at $489/mo becomes the entry point.
If you’re considering ActiveCampaign at all, I’d recommend budgeting for Plus from the start. The Starter plan’s limitations will push you to upgrade quickly, and you’ll wish you’d started with the full automation capabilities.
ActiveCampaign also boasts 1,000+ integrations at this tier and above. Whatever’s in your stack - Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, Slack - there’s likely a native connection or a Zapier bridge.
Who should pick Plus: Most businesses. If you need real automation, landing pages, or more than one user, this is the plan. It’s ActiveCampaign’s sweet spot.
Pro Plan: Conditional Content and Attribution
Pro starts at $99/mo for 1,000 contacts. The jump from Plus to Pro is substantial - at 10,000 contacts, you’re going from $239/mo to $469/mo. So what justifies nearly doubling the price?
Two features stand out: conditional content and automation A/B testing.
Conditional content lets you show different blocks within the same email to different segments. Instead of creating four separate emails for four audience groups, you build one email with dynamic sections. For teams running complex campaigns across multiple customer segments, this saves real time and reduces errors.
Automation A/B testing goes beyond email subject lines. You can test entire automation paths against each other. Send half your new signups through workflow A and half through workflow B, then measure which converts better. This is how you optimize at scale.
You also get advanced segmentation, attribution and conversion tracking, advanced reporting, priority support, and 5 user seats. Email sends jump to 12x your contact limit instead of 10x.
Who should pick Pro: Businesses with multiple customer segments who need dynamic email content, teams that want to systematically optimize their automations, or anyone who needs attribution tracking to tie email campaigns back to revenue. If you’re sending the same email to everyone on your list, you don’t need Pro.
Enterprise Plan: For Large Organizations
Enterprise starts at $179/mo for 1,000 contacts and scales to $1,459/mo at 50,000 contacts. It includes everything in Pro, plus premium segmentation, premium reporting, custom objects, a dedicated account rep, and email sends at 15x your contact limit.
Custom objects let you build data models beyond the standard contact/deal structure. If you need to track things like products, subscriptions, or custom entities and connect them to your automations, that’s an Enterprise feature.
ActiveCampaign also offers Postmark for transactional email (order confirmations, password resets, that sort of thing), starting at $15/mo for 10,000 emails. It’s a separate product, but worth knowing about if you need both marketing and transactional email under one roof.
The Enterprise plan exists for large organizations with complex data needs and big enough budgets. If you need it, you probably already know. I won’t spend more time on it here.
The Unsubscribed Contact Problem
This is important, and it’s something ActiveCampaign doesn’t make obvious during signup.
Since November 2025, new ActiveCampaign users are charged for all contacts in their account. That means unsubscribed contacts, bounced emails, and unconfirmed signups all count toward your billing total. If you have 5,000 active subscribers and 2,000 unsubscribed contacts sitting in your account, you’re paying for 7,000.
Users who signed up before November 2025 are grandfathered in and only pay for active contacts.
This is a meaningful policy change. Most competitors - including Kit and MailerLite - charge only for active, opted-in subscribers. Mailchimp has a similar policy to ActiveCampaign’s new approach, charging for unsubscribed contacts unless you archive them.
The workaround is to regularly purge unsubscribed and bounced contacts from your account. It’s manageable, but it’s maintenance you shouldn’t have to do, and it’s easy to forget. If you’re migrating from another platform with a large list that includes old unsubscribes, clean it up before importing.
How ActiveCampaign’s Pricing Compares
Here’s how ActiveCampaign stacks up against three popular alternatives at common contact counts. I’m comparing Starter-tier plans for a fair baseline:
| Contacts | ActiveCampaign (Starter) | MailerLite (Growing Business) | Kit (Creator) | Mailchimp (Essentials/Standard) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $19/mo | $15/mo | $39/mo | $13/mo |
| 5,000 | $99/mo | $39/mo | $89/mo | $100/mo |
| 10,000 | $189/mo | $73/mo | $139/mo | $135/mo |
At 1,000 contacts, ActiveCampaign is competitive. At 5,000 and above, it gets expensive quickly - especially when you consider that Starter’s automation limits mean you’ll likely need Plus, which costs even more.
The comparison isn’t entirely fair, though. ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities on Plus and above are in a different league than what MailerLite or Kit offer. If you need complex, multi-step automations with branching logic and dozens of triggers, ActiveCampaign does it better than anyone in this price range. You’re paying more because you’re getting more.
MailerLite is the budget pick. At 10,000 contacts, it costs less than half of ActiveCampaign Starter. If your needs are straightforward - newsletters, basic automations, landing pages - MailerLite covers it for a fraction of the price.
Kit sits in the middle and caters specifically to creators. Simpler automations, but a workflow designed for newsletters and digital product sales.
Mailchimp is closest to ActiveCampaign in pricing at higher tiers but doesn’t match the automation depth.
Which Plan Should You Pick?
Here’s my decision framework:
Try the 14-day free trial first. ActiveCampaign offers a trial with 100 contacts, 100 emails, and access to Pro features. That’s enough to test the automation builder and see if the interface clicks for you before committing any money.
Skip Starter and go straight to Plus if you’re planning to use ActiveCampaign for real. The automation limits on Starter undercut the main reason you’d choose this platform. Paying $59/mo instead of $19/mo saves you the frustration of hitting walls every time you try to build a workflow.
Consider Pro if you send different content to different audience segments, want to A/B test entire automation sequences, or need to track which campaigns drive conversions. The conditional content feature alone can justify the upgrade for teams managing multiple customer types.
Look at Enterprise only if you need custom objects, premium reporting, or a dedicated account rep. Most businesses won’t.
Think twice about ActiveCampaign entirely if your needs are simple. A weekly newsletter to a few thousand subscribers doesn’t require this much firepower. MailerLite or Kit will save you real money without sacrificing anything you’d actually miss.
And whatever you do, remember the contact billing policy. If you sign up now, you’re paying for every contact in your account, including unsubscribes. Clean your list before importing and set a reminder to purge regularly.
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Pricing last verified: March 2026. Some links are affiliate links. How we make money.
