It may be unusual to pit one top-rated platform against a lesser known one but it is worth it to compare the options available to you. ActiveCampaign is known to be one of the most highly touted email marketing/CRM tools you can use for your business because of their advanced features. How does AWeber stack up against this formidable competitor?
To answer this question, we need to delve into what each platform offers. Who knows, one tool may suit your business better than the other. The criteria for your decision should always be centered on helping you save time and grow your business.
Let’s start by looking at what each one was designed to do:
About AWeber
Established in 1998, AWeber has more than 20 years of demonstrated achievement helping more than one million clients around the globe exploit the potential of email marketing. AWeber aims to simplify email marketing and help users create beautifully designed emails and landing pages.
About ActiveCampaign
With a comprehensive backend, ActiveCampaign offers an impressive client experience because it is easy to navigate. One example of great UX design is that when you are creating campaigns or automations, you can check past and subsequent stages, which makes the process of campaign or automation creation quick and simple to review as you go.
Ease of Use
AWeber, on the other hand, can be somewhat confusing. For example, for some unexplained reason a few sections are hidden, such as the option to reuse a campaign or choose senders’ locations. Their terminology muddies things even further for the user. For instance, they call automations “Campaigns” and regular email campaigns are called “Broadcasts”. Autoresponders are strangely called “Legacy follow up messages”. They also come up short when it comes to having an easy-to-use top menu like Active Campaign’s.
Design and Flexibility
ActiveCampaign offers 40 responsive, modern-looking templates. They also let you modify the layouts, which adds flexibility to the templates, especially with all their customization options. You can also type in HTML if you’re comfortable with that.
AWeber gives you a lot more options out of the box with 150 templates available in various color schemes. However, their designs look a bit dated. Similarly, the editor feels a bit clunky and lacking in flexibility. For example, you can’t modify certain layouts to change the number of columns. However, like ActiveCampaign, HTML formatting is available.
An in-depth test of these two platforms and a comparison of the findings are shown in the table below:
| ACTIVECAMPAIGN | AWEBER | |
| Overall Deliverability Rate | 90.2% | 80.5% |
| Primary Inbox | 87% | 70.2% |
| Promotions Inbox (Gmail) | 20% | 26.2% |
| Spam | 5.2% | 17.9% |
| Undelivered | 1.3% | 1.7% |
| Sender Score | 98.4% | 97.5% |
AWeber Pros & Cons
Pros:
This software has everything some people will need for email campaigns. Also, their handling of potential spam triggers is excellent. When you use this software to create your email campaigns, you are unlikely to have problems with your emails being characterized as spam.
AWeber is a simple to use email marketing / autoresponder platform. This software allows you to build your list with opt-in forms and send out automated emails to your subscribers.
Also in AWeber’s automations, you can apply labels to clients when they buy into your offer (for instance: “intrigued by cheesecakes”) and you can fragment your mailing records in a similar manner.
Cons: To be affordable, you need to have a large number of subscribers and lots of email campaigns. It is not cost-effective for small users or companies that have sporadic email campaigns.
ActiveCampaign Pros & Cons
Pros:
ActiveCampaign is one of the most user friendly all-in-one marketing platforms for small to mid-sized businesses. ActiveCampaign combines email marketing, marketing automation and sales CRM software in a simple to use visual platform to help businesses like yours acquire, retain and engage your customers.
ActiveCampaign lets you easily create eye catching email campaigns to help you stay in touch with your contacts and customers. Their visual campaign builder lets you easily create automated marketing campaigns and send out targeted emails to your potential customers based on their personal interactions with your business and their integrated CRM lets you keep track of your leads and close more deals to grow your business.
ActiveCampaign allows you to apply lead scoring to your contacts and to adjust your email campaigns to match their behavior and interests. For instance, if an enrolled client on your cooking blog visits a page about cheesecake, you can send an automated email with various offers or you could ask them to rate your offers. The potential for increasing revenue through tailor-made offers is tremendous. In addition, the process of creating automations is simple and intuitive.
Cons:
ActiveCampaign offers significantly less email templates than AWeber.
If you want to change your emails to look drastically different from a default template, you’ll have to manually write custom CSS code, and this may not be smooth sailing.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign plays nice with others and integrates with over 700 apps and services. From accounting to CMS and analytics applications, all the way to services that are focused on sales, support and lead generation.
Both ActiveCampaign and AWeber do well here. Notable integrations in both camps include Facebook, WordPress, Woo Commerce, PayPal and Zippier.
Winner: we’ll call it a draw. You’ll have to search for the integrations you need and make sure they’re there if they are really important to your workflow.
Support
We liked both ActiveCampaign and AWeber’s support. Their answers were fast and friendly. Both offer chat and email, but AWeber also has a phone line. Their knowledge base is a bit harder to trawl for good info, unlike ActiveCampaign’s, who also offer webinars and foster a good community with questions and answers.
Winner: Another tie here. If you really need phone support, go with AWeber. But we doubt you’ll need to call them up.
Pricing
Neither ActiveCampaign nor AWeber offer free plans. The entry tier for ActiveCampaign is the $15 a month offer, which lets you manage 500 subscribers and 3 users. AWeber’s offer for the same amount of subscribers is twice as expensive at $19 a month.
After that, Active Campaign’s prices shoot up dramatically. You can go up to 5000 subscribers for $69 a month vs $49 for AWeber. Then it’s 10,000 for $111 a month with ActiveCampaign and $69 a month with AWeber.
Overall Winner
Weirdly enough, even though ActiveCampaign is a much powerful tool and comes with more options, it is still easier to use than AWeber.
We would be hard pressed to recommend AWeber over ActiveCampaign. AWeber’s costs are similar to the competition’s but they are lacking in advanced features. ActiveCampaign offers the better combination of modern design and a variety of easy-to-use features in a user-friendly interface, making this platform the right solution for your email marketing.