ClickFunnels Vs ActiveCampaign (The Surprising Winner)

I’m going to show you the best solution between ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaign - two marketing software platforms that come highly recommended for sales funnels, email marketing, and automation.

ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are two popular tools for online marketers and entrepreneurs.

Even though they have different use cases and serve different audiences and work well together through integrations, they have enough functional crossover that they often get compared.

But how do both tools level up, side-by-side? I guess that's what brought you here.

If you’re struggling to decide between ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign, I wrote this post for you. Without further ado, let’s jump right in and see who wins the ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaign battle!

ClickFunnels Vs ActiveCampaign - Summary

ClickFunnels is a marketing platform that helps you build sales funnels, landing pages, and sell your products.

Whereas ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing and automation platform that empowers you to build your audience, run email campaigns, grow your email list and manage your audience.

Take a look at this Google Trends graph below to get an idea of the relative popularity of these two tools over the last year:

ClickFunnels Vs ActiveCampaign - Side By Side Review

We’ll take a look at how ClickFunnels compares to ActiveCampaign with a side-by-side comparison of both tools.

You’ll be able to compare both platforms based on their features, ratings, pricing, and more easily with a side-by-side format.

NOTE: It’s easiest to view the side-by-side horizontal comparison layout below on a desktop, not mobile.

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing ActiveCampaign Vs ClickFunnels?

While comparing ActiveCampaign vs ClickFunnels, here's what stood out for us.

ClickFunnels is widely known as a top choice for building sales funnels and selling online. Whether it’s online courses, services, digital products, memberships, and even physical products, ClickFunnels was built to help ANYONE sell online easily. 

The platform provides a range of features including:

• Drag-and-drop page builder
• Ready-made sales funnel templates
• Email marketing capability (Actionetics)
• Follow-up funnel builder
• A/B split testing
• E-commerce capability
• Domain hosting
• Analytics 
• And more

You don’t need to code or have any special technical ability to use ClickFunnels. Its suite of tools is intuitive and beginner-friendly, from top to bottom.

Plus, there’s a whole collection of products built around the core ClickFunnels software. They include training courses, books, masterminds, software, events, and much more (for example, the One Funnel Away Challenge).

Another thing worth mentioning is the valuable, online ClickFunnels community which will be beneficial to you as an online entrepreneur.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign is a noteworthy email marketing and automation tool used by over 130,000 businesses. They describe themselves as the #1 customer experience automation platform.

The platform handles email campaigns, landing page creation, automation, audience segmentation, contact management, and more for your online business.

ActiveCampaign gives you the RIGHT marketing automation and CRM tools you need to create incredible customer experiences.

You can build forms, create landing pages, collect leads, grow your email list, and send an email (and SMS messages) to your audience.

The part of ActiveCampaign that stands out the most is its robust automation system. ActiveCampaign helps you do less active, repetitive work (through automation) so you can focus on other parts of your business. The platform empowers you to automate your sales, marketing, and audience management processes.

You also get a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tool that does a fine job of managing your audience and sales processes. With this plethora of powerful built-in features, ActiveCampaign is truly all-in-one and a robust marketing automation platform you should have in your stack. 

Now, let’s see how ClickFunnels compares to ActiveCampaign based on individual features.

Which Is Best For Sales Funnels?

ClickFunnels was specifically built to help you generate more leads and sales through the power of sales funnels. Without any iota of doubt, it is SUPERIOR to ActiveCampaign in this department.

ClickFunnels offers you the best features in the industry. You get access to a drag-and-drop funnel builder along with a ton of battle-tested templates to build your own sales funnels (if you don’t want to start from scratch).

And you can A/B test your funnels and see detailed analytics on their performance. Undoubtedly, sales funnel creation is ClickFunnels’s primary strength as a software solution.

But can you build an ActiveCampaign sales funnel?

ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a sales funnel builder per se... You only get a drag-and-drop page builder to build landing pages for your business, which you could string together to build your DIY sales funnel. And, using the ActiveCampaign API and CRM, you could connect to other services and build a real sales machine.

WINNER: ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is still the best sales funnel builder online by far and at this time of writing, ActiveCampaign can’t beat them.

Which Is Best For Marketing Automation?

As a platform primarily built to automate your customer experience, ActiveCampaign handles automation far better than ClickFunnels.

You can automate tasks and processes such as sending a thank you email to your subscribers after they sign up, send new subscribers a welcome email series, finding your most engaged contacts, and much more.

And you don’t need to be a tech guru to do this. With ActiveCampaign's built-in drag-and-drop automation builder and email templates, you can set up automated workflows and automate your marketing in minutes.

The workflow also allows you to set actions, conditions and triggers to make sure the right contacts get the right message.

Plus, ActiveCampaign allows you to combine automation systems with your CRM system to automate your sales and audience management processes. This collaboration will save you time doing active work and grow your business.

To enjoy these automation capabilities with ClickFunnels as your funnel builder, you’ll have to set up an ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels integration.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign beats ClickFunnels hands-down in marketing automation by offering you powerful, superior automation functionality to get more done with less active work

Which Has The Best CRM Solution?

ActiveCampaign has a full-fledged built-in CRM as a part of its suite of tools. Although, ClickFunnels also have a CRM called Actionetics. But if you are not happy with its built-in CRM, you can integrate any other powerful CRM with it.

Built-in CRM of ActiveCampaign which helps you monitor and track your audience. Even though you’ll have to upgrade to a higher tier to get this feature, I believe it’s worth it especially since you’re going to save money from not getting a third-party CRM platform.

Using ActiveCampaign's CRM tool, you get to manage your audience, leads, and sales processes all from one place. The tool also helps you with lead scoring and audience segmentation so you can run personalized email campaigns.

And the best part is that you can automate all of these tasks when you combine the CRM functionality and ActiveCampaign’s automation system.

On the other hand, ClickFunnels doesn’t offer a full-fledged CRM tool to its users.

Actionetics (Follow-up Funnels) is ClickFunnels built-in email autoresponder system and CRM-wannabe that helps you create action funnels, build smart lists and send emails to your audience, but doesn’t function like a true CRM.

It's only available on the higher-priced plan of ClickFunnels which is why you’re better off seamlessly integrating with ActiveCampaign CRM.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides a full-fledged, native CRM tool that allows you to manage your audience and marketing processes. ClickFunnels lacks a full-fledged CRM tool.

Actionetics Vs ActiveCampaign - Which Is Better?

Actionetics (Follow-Up Funnels) is ClickFunnels’s native email tool. The tool helps you build your list and send email broadcasts to your contacts and follow up on your audience.

Before you can build your follow-up funnels inside Actionetics, you need to create a list or a smart list. If you create a smart list, you can add some conditions to the smart list and Actionetics automatically segments everyone who meets the conditions and places them in your smart list.

Actionetics "Follow-Up Funnels" also provides you an amazing email editor to create your email messages. And once you have built your emails, sending email broadcasts to your subscribers is quite easy inside Actionetics. You can send email messages to your entire list, smart list, or even list segment.

Plus, you can build automated follow-up funnels to engage with your subscribers via emails (or text messages, direct mail, and more).

And after each campaign, ClickFunnels will show you real-time analytics of your emails and the action score of each of your subscribers.

On the other hand, ActiveCampaign’s email atutomation functionality is pretty straightforward and one of the BEST in the industry. The platform provides you the right tools you need to build beautiful emails and send them to the right people at the right time.

Inside ActiveCampaign you can set up a variety of email campaigns including:

• One-time broadcast emails
• Email autoresponders
• Email templates
• Triggered emails
• Targeted emails
• Scheduled emails
• And more

You get a drag-and-drop email designer to create beautiful emails. You can choose to build your emails with the templates provided under a few clicks and no tech skills are needed to use ActiveCampaign’s email builder.

With the data you’ve collected from your audience, you can personalize your emails and ensure they’re well-targeted.

WINNER: Both Platforms

Both platforms provide you a seamless, intuitive tool for running your email marketing campaigns. But I’ll recommend ActiveCampaign for a superior experience.

Which Is Best For Landing Pages?

ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign both come with in-built landing page builders.

The Etison Editor is used for building simple landing pages and websites in ClickFunnels. It’s a drag-and-drop page builder that lets you build awesome landing pages to delight your audience.

You simply need to select a design from the dozen of amazing, proven-to-convert templates available in ClickFunnels. Then, edit the page template by adding your branding, content, style, color, video, images, and other elements.

Additionally, you can choose to add any of over 50 proven sales elements instantly onto your page by simply dragging and dropping them on the canvas before publishing.

It’s so simple to use.

ActiveCampaign also provides a pretty similar landing page creation experience.

They have a zero-code, intuitive drag-and-drop designer for building awesome landing pages called Pages.

Just as in ClickFunnels, ActiveCampaign also provides you with a library of amazing landing page templates to build landing pages fast.

And the beautiful part of using Pages is that it allows you to seamlessly connect data from your landing pages with other ActiveCampaign tools just to make sure your leads stay engaged till they become customers.

WINNER: ClickFunnels

Both platforms provide great, intuitive tools for building awesome landing pages, but ClickFunnels has built their entire business around high-converting landing pages and it shows.

Which Is The Best Price For The Money?

ClickFunnels has two main pricing tiers; the ClickFunnels starter plan for $97 per month and the Platinum plan for $297 per month.

ActiveCampaign have reasonable pricing across its four pricing tiers (from $19 up to $279 monthly) for its mouth-watering features, you pay based on how popular your email list is. This means the higher your number of subscribers, the more you pay.

Here is the pricing of ActiveCampaign, you can adjust it for your needs.

By looking at numbers, ActiveCampaign is a much more affordable option and visibly gives you great value for money. But if you’re strictly looking at building sales funnels for your business, then you should go with the ClickFunnels Starter plan.

Or you can choose to combine the sales funnel builder with a third-party ClickFunnels autoresponder integration.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign gives more value for money than ClickFunnels. And it is the best option for you if landing pages, email marketing, and automation are your business’s greatest need. If you’re looking at creating sales funnels for your business, then it’s worth shelling out money for ClickFunnels.

Final Thoughts - Which Is Better, ClickFunnels or ActiveCampaign?

While ClickFunnels is #1 for building sales funnels and selling online, ActiveCampaign is the BEST platform you can use for running email campaigns and automation.

And the best part is that you can enjoy the best of both worlds. Both platforms can be used together through a seamless ActiveCampaign ClickFunnels integration.

If you have the budget to maintain active subscriptions with both platforms, I'd advise you to go that route.

But if you’re running your business on a shoestring budget and need to pick one, then here's my verdict: 

ActiveCampaign gives you powerful email marketing, automation, and CRM tools to manage your entire business. It’s a great fit and highly recommended if marketing automation is critical to your business marketing strategy.

ClickFunnels is a sales funnel building platform. If your business revolves around selling products online, services, memberships, courses, and more, you should leverage sales funnels and try out this solution for your business.

And don’t forget that both platforms can be integrated and used together so you can enjoy the best of both worlds.

Related ClickFunnels Resources: 

• New to ClickFunnels? Start here with all our guides and resources
  
• How To Create A Product Launch Funnel With ClickFunnels
• How To Make Money As A New ClickFunnels Affiliate Marketer
• One Funnel Away Review
• Start a Free ClickFunnels 14-day Trial And Get Our bonuses
• Join Our Free Course "ClickFunnels Mastery" In The Academy
• What is ClickFunnels Platinum?
• Free Social Media Sales Funnel Template
• Lead Funnels Review