ActiveCampaign Vs Shopify – Which Is Best For Your Business?

ActiveCampaign vs Shopify - which of these tools is right for you? 

Both tools provide quite different functions, are used for different purposes, and often complement each other through seamless integration.

If you’re having a hard time trying to figure out whether you should use one or the other (or both together!), you’re in the right place.

Let's take a dive and go over both platforms.

ActiveCampaign Vs Shopify - Summary

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform created in 2003 that provides powerful tools to run automated email campaigns and effectively manage your audience.

Shopify is a popular eCommerce platform that gives you the tools to start, manage your online business, create an online store and sell to anyone.

Take a look at this google trends graph photo below to see relative popularity over one year for these two tools. As you can see, Shopify is a juggernaut compared to ActiveCampaign as far as public interest:

ActiveCampaign Vs Shopify - Side By Side Review

Here you'll find a side-by-side comparison of ActiveCampaign vs Shopify structured using a horizontal layout so you can compare both platforms based on their differences including features, pricing, ratings, and more easily.

NOTE: you’ll be able to view the side-by-side horizontal layout below on a desktop, not mobile.

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing ActiveCampaign Vs Shopify?

These tools are not competitors, but actually compliment each other perfectly, although in some cases you might be struggling to decide which would be the best for your business..

First, ActiveCampaign is widely known as an email marketing and automation platform. You get tools to collect leads, build landing pages, grow your email lists, run automated email campaigns, do SMS marketing and that's not all.

With ActiveCampaign, you also get an in-built CRM to save time managing your audience and sales processes.

Overall, when it comes to powerful email marketing and automation, you don’t need to look any further than ActiveCampaign.

On the other hand, Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that provides you with tools to create an online store, showcase your products, and sell online.

It is probably the No# 1 choice for most ecommerce business owners for building their store and managing their ecommerce business.

You can build your online store and start an ecommerce business on the platform without coding skills, design skills, or the help of a developer.

Overall, Shopify is more popular with ecommerce business owners who need a platform to build their store and sell products online.

Which is best for marketing automation?

When it comes to marketing automation capabilities, Shopify is nowhere near ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign is a powerful automation platform with features to run automated email campaigns. You can build automation workflows with their in-built visual workflow builder while combining actions, conditions, and triggers to create desired workflows.

This feature also works in collaboration with the built-in CRM to automate your endless sales, and audience management processes.

Shopify offers none of this in their email marketing tool and is fully focused on being the go-to tool for online commerce.

WINNER: With top-notch, superior capabilities compared to Shopify, ActiveCampaign is the clear winner in the marketing automation category.

Which has the best CRM solution?

ActiveCampaign has an impressive CRM in its software that does a beautiful job of managing your audience and sales processes in one dashboard.

Using ActiveCampaign saves you the extra cost of getting an external CRM software. The built-in CRM helps you to segment your audience the right way and also track and score leads to get more sales fast.

And you can build sales pipelines and work with the marketing automation functionality seamlessly. If you’re hoping to hop on Shopify for CRM reasons, sorry to disappoint but Shopify doesn’t have a nativeCRM, although you might be able to find one in the Shopify App Store.

WINNER: Again, ActiveCampaign wins this category by having a built-in CRM with its software.

Which Is Best For Email Marketing?

From template designs to drag and drop editor, Shopify Email provides the tools that help you connect with your customers and build lasting customer relationships through email marketing.

And the good news is you don’t need much technical experience to use these tools. Shopify helps you create simple, good-looking email messages customized for your brand.

If you don’t want to build your emails from scratch, you can take advantage of their growing collection of email marketing templates (including newsletters, product collections, sales, and more) and pick one for your brand.

You can edit the template to suit your brand, preview to see how it will look, and send it to your customer list from your domain name to build brand trust. And lastly, Shopify provides you with analytics tools to analyze and track email campaigns performance, and see reports to improve your marketing efforts. That's all you get from Shopify.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign is best-in-class for running email campaigns. You get a fast and easy to use drag-and-drop editor with useful options to build emails easily.

And you also get plenty of templates too, if you don’t know how to build emails from scratch. ActiveCampaign provides 30 professional, mobile-friendly email templates and flexible content blocks.

They also give you the option to import your templates just in case you don't like the ones they provide.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign comes with an intuitive drag and drop editor and multiple templates and is my favorite when it comes to creating your email messages for your campaigns.

Which is best for ecommerce?

Shopify is the top choice for e-Commerce. The platform helps you bring your business or business ideas online by providing the powerful tools you need to create an ecommerce site, find customers, get sales, and manage your daily business activities.

The platform has empowered independent business owners and has been used by 1,000,000+ businesses to make $200 billion+ in sales. Shopify has tools for you to sell your products to anyone, anywhere (website, social media, online marketplaces, in-person, and more).

And they let you market your business by providing built-in tools to create, execute, and analyze marketing campaigns. Finally, you get a dashboard to see your sales reports and insights you need to identify what's working and what's not.

Unlike Shopify, ActiveCampaign isn't an ecommerce platform so you can’t run your entire ecommerce business on it.

They do however give you an ecommerce dashboard where you can monitor your ecommerce business after you integrate with your favorite ecommerce platform. You'll be able to see how your sales were impacted by your marketing channels on the ecommerce dashboard.

This dashboard will also help you identify the growth strategies and marketing channels that work best for you by showing you six metrics such as total orders, revenue, repeat customers, average order value, abandoned cart recovery rate, and more.

Even better, the dashboard lets you filter these metrics by currency, all stores, and different timeframes.

WINNER: As a top solution for creating an online store and running your ecommerce business, Shopify wins this round and remains the favorite solution with tools to create online stores and sell to anyone.

Which Is The Best Price For The Money?

Both platforms provide a free 14-day trial so you can try them risk-free before upgrading to a paid plan.

ActiveCampaign is priced based on the number of subscribers you have and gives you four plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise.

Shopify has three plans (Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify) and they come with a range of features for running your ecommerce business for as low as $29 per month (on the basic plan).

WINNER: This one depends on what you want. Both tools are quite affordable for the value they give you and the functions they provide.

In summary, who wins the ActiveCampaign vs Shopify debate?

Final Thoughts - Which Is Better, ActiveCampaign, or Shopify?

Shopify is best-in-class for ecommerce stores, and ActiveCampaign is best-in-class for marketing automation, so if you’re looking to scale an ecommerce store with email, this could be your perfect marketing stack.

If you are an ecommerce business owner and need an easy to use platform to run your online business, Shopify is right for you.

But if email marketing and automation is what will help you scale your business, ActiveCampaign should be top on your radar.

Both platforms are amazing at what they do. And the best part is they can be seamlessly integrated and used with each other to enjoy the best of both worlds. So if you have the budget to afford both platforms, go for it.