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Are you searching for the best tool to run email marketing campaigns between Kartra and ActiveCampaign?

I'll help you pick the best-fit tool for your business with this Kartra vs ActiveCampaign side by side review.

In this review, I'm going to compare Kartra and ActiveCampaign in terms of their features, pricing, integrations, affiliate program and more, side-by-side so you can make an informed decision and pick the best fit for your business.

Kartra Vs ActiveCampaign - Summary

Kartra and ActiveCampaign are both powerful marketing solutions used by entrepreneurs and online business owners to get more results with digital marketing.

While ActiveCampaign is used primarily for running targeted email marketing campaigns, and marketing automation, Kartra is more of an all-in-one marketing solution for entrepreneurs for building sales funnels and running your business online.

Take a look at this google trends graph below to see the popularity of both tools over a year.

kartra vs activecampaign

Kartra Vs ActiveCampaign - Side By Side Review

We have reviewed both tools side by side so you can easily compare their features against each other and see where each one excels over the other.

Below this section is a side-by-side review laid out horizontally comparing what makes up each tool (like pricing, features, integrations, how we rated each tool, and more) so you can have an awesome user experience comparing both tools.

NOTE: the side-by-side horizontal layout shows best when viewed on desktop (not mobile)

kartra logo

KARTRAâ„¢

Kartra is an advanced all-in-one online business and marketing tool.

How we rated Kartra

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

What is Kartra?

Kartra is a complete online marketing platform built for entrepreneurs and online business owners with various tools to build sales funnels, run email campaigns, and automate your entire online business with ease from one central place. The platform is owned by Genesis Digital.

Who is Kartra for?

Kartra is really designed for solo-entrepreneurs, authors, digital product owners, and course creators who want an all-in-one system to minimize tool "clutter." While it's a steep price point for most newcomers to online business, you should theoretically be able to save money by using Kartra if you're using other tools like CRMs, email marketing systems, membership sites, etc. Kartra let's you ditch all that and focus on one platform. 

Notable feature: Kartra membership sites combined with their marketing automation features are worth the money alone.

Kartra Pros and Cons

Pros
  • $1 14-day full trial
  • Full website, funnel, membership site system
  • All-in-one system replaces other expensive tools
  • Native email marketing system
  • Agency portal facilitates client work
Cons
  • No email marketing integrations (only SMTPs)
  • Less integrations than other platforms
  • Steep learning curve compared to the competition
  • Can be overwhelming at first
kartra alternatives

Kartra Pricing - How much does Kartra cost?

Kartra pricing options start at $99/month - $499/month

Starter Plan - $99/mo - the "Kartra Starter Plan" gives you all features except Kartra Agency, but limits traffic, leads, domains, and features.

Silver, Gold, and Platinum Plans - $199/mo - $499/mo. With the upper tier Kartra plans, you get Kartra agency, unlimited pages, products, membership sites, and funnels. Each plan gives you more leads, domains, emails / mo. 

Kartra Annual Discount - When you pay annually with Kartra you immediately save 25% on any Kartra plan.

Kartra Pricing Information

Free 14 Day Trial Available

$1 Trial for 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Freemium Account

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

Kartra Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency portal

Kartra Integrations

Kartra is designed to replace your email marketing platform, so lack of email system integrations makes sense. Instead they integrate with SMTPs and Zapier so using your autoresponder shouldn't be a problem.

Email Marketing Integrations

Actionetics

ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit

Aweber

MailChimp

HTML forms

+ many more

Other Integrations

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

Kartra Affiliate Program

Yes. Once approved, you can promote any of the Kartra products, as well as a marketplace of other products. Affiliate payouts vary per product.

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Andy Jenkins, Mike Filsaime

Location: USA

Customer Support: Email

Founded: 2017

Website: Visit Website

What we love about Kartra

When it comes to "All-In-One" business building platforms, Kartra really stands out as top of its class. You can easily build your entire solo-preneur business on top of this platform, and ditch other expensive tools like membership site builders, email autoresponders, funnel tools, landing page tools, and more. If one of your goals is to reduce marketing tool overwhelm and you want to be able to "see" your entire business from one vantage pont and system, than Kartra might be right for you. We absolutely love how easy it is to keep in front of your leads with Kartra.  

Kartra Alternatives

Need to compare Kartra with more alternatives before you make a decision? We've written comparison articles on all major Kartra competitors.

ACTIVECAMPAIGNâ„¢

ActiveCampaign is an advanced email marketing automation tool.

How we rated ActiveCampaign

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform with powerful automation capabilities, landing page creation tools, and CRM tools to send personalized messages to your audience, run incredible email marketing campaigns, nurture your email list and automate your marketing processes to save time. 

Who is ActiveCampaign for?

ActiveCampaign was built for individuals, small and large businesses, or companies to send better-automated emails, nurture their leads, and provide an incredible, optimized email experience. The platform comes with powerful automation tools to run automated email processes, save time, and make more money for your business. If you're looking for the best in email marketing, go with ActiveCampaign.

Notable feature: a ton of intelligent tools to run automated email marketing campaigns and grow your business online.

ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons

Pros
  • 14-day full trial
  • Best in class for email marketing
  • CRM is great for pipeline development
  • Affordable pricing for the value
  • Best email automation features
Cons
  • Clunky user interface and email editor
  • Not friendly to affiliate marketing links
  • Not beginner friendly
  • Customer service is not great on the "Basic" plan
activecampaign dashboard

ActiveCampaign Pricing - How much does it cost?

ActiveCampaign pricing options start at $39/month - $187/month

Lite Plan - $39/month - pay $29/mo (billed annually) and comes with basic email marketing features for 1000 contacts

Plus Plan - $70/month - pay $49/mo (billed annually) to get automation maps, built-in CRM, and custom audiences for 1000 contacts. If you want 2,500 contacts in this plan, you would have to pay $99/mo (billed annually).

Professional & Enterprise Plan - $187/month - pay $149/mo (billed annually)- unlimited and custom features with custome audiences for 2,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign Annual Discount: You pay $29, $49, $149 per mo (billed annually) for each of the plans above respectively, price may go up with the increase in custom audiences.

ActiveCampaign Pricing Info

Free 14 Day Trial Available

Free Trial For 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

ActiveCampaign Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency Portal

ActiveCampaign Integrations

Editor's Note: ActiveCampaign was built to help you manage your email marketing campaigns and automation and you can connect to 290+ third-party apps to get results with email marketing for your business.

Email Marketing Integrations

Actionetics

ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit

Aweber

MailChimp

HTML forms

+ many more

Other Integrations

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

ActiveCampaign Affiliate Program

Yes, you can become an ActiveCampaign affiliate partner and earn a 30% recurring monthly commissions. Sign up and join the program here.

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Jason VandeBoom

Location: Chicago, USA

Customer Support: help@activecampaign.com

Founded: 2003

Website: Visit Website

What we love about ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an affordable, email marketing automation tool and one of our favorites amidst the many good options out there (In fact, it’s the tool we use for our own business). With features such as a drag-and-drop email editor to create beautiful emails with ease and a smart sales CRM to manage and nurture your leads. You also get better, smarter marketing automation features to build smart automated workflows with few clicks, nurture your contacts, and enable a better experience for them. 

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing Kartra Vs ActiveCampaign?

Kartra and ActiveCampaign are both powerful marketing solutions.

They were created to help entrepreneurs, small and large businesses to get more results with their marketing.

ActiveCampaign is completely streamlined for email marketing. It is essentially an email marketing automation platform at its core.

Some of its features include an email builder for creating beautiful email content, the most powerful email automation builder of any platform we’ve reviewed, sales CRM and machine learning to keep track of your leads and make better business decisions.

There are a LOT more advanced features you get with ActiveCampaign and it is simply the best email marketing tool out there.

Unlike ActiveCampaign, Kartra is more of an all-around tool. It is an all in one marketing software, helping entrepreneurs with not only tools for email marketing but tools for funnel building, online course creation, video hosting, and more.

Kartra and ActiveCampaign intersect mostly with email marketing. Both tools help you run better email marketing campaigns and manage automation.

But in terms of the QUALITY of each solution for email marketing, I’ll go with ActiveCampaign as the winner. Why? It was built for that singular purpose and excels at it, unlike Kartra which is a jack of all marketing tool trades.

Plus, ActiveCampaign comes with more features (like machine learning and predictive sending) which are missing in Kartra to help you nurture your leads and run better email marketing campaigns.

activecampaign pricing

 And in terms of pricing, ActiveCampaign comes at a price of $15 per month (pay $9 per month, billed yearly) for 500 contacts on its lowest tier.

This tier only comes with basic email marketing features and you’ll have to upgrade to get more on automation, sales CRM, and machine learning.

To get the same basic email marketing features on Kartra, you’ll have to pay at least $99 per month.

kartra pricing

Kartra offers three pricing plans starting at $99 per month up to $499 per month with no extra transaction fee.

On the Kartra starter plan, you can send up to 15,000 emails and have about 2,500 contacts and can get fewer restrictions on higher plans.

Final Thoughts - Which Is Better... Kartra or ActiveCampaign?

Now the BIG question is: Who wins the Kartra Vs ActiveCampaign debate, and which should you use?

Both platforms have a similar goal to help you run better email marketing campaigns. They are both good choices and your choice should largely depend on what you want to achieve.

There are various parts to running an online business.

And if you don’t want to combine various tools for marketing your business, then you’ll be better off with Kartra.

Kartra has it all and helps you do more than just email marketing. You get to build sales funnels, host your marketing video, host online courses, build membership sites, run webinars, and more at a starting price of $99 per month.

It's more like an all-in-one, jack of all trades marketing platform for running your business.

However, if you are tired of sloppy email marketing campaigns and want to get the BEST standalone email marketing automation tool out there, then I can’t recommend ActiveCampaign enough.

ActiveCampaign was built to help you run better automated email campaigns. It greatly shines in this aspect and they have over 90,000 customers in 161 countries.

You get email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools to create incredible customer experiences.

At a base price of $15 per month (for 500 contacts), ActiveCampaign is quite affordable and you can upgrade to get fewer restrictions, more features, and more contacts.

My Most Trusted Resources

I've negotiated special discounts and trials using my links to the right. Every tool or app recommended has my full trust and has been personally tested by me. I consider these three resources to be FOUNDATIONAL to any online business. 

bluehost review

Bluehost

#1 for Hosting Websites & Blogs. Get a free domain and discount here.

Go High Level Logo

HighLevel

#1 for Landing Pages & Sales Funnels. Get a 2 week free trial here.

ActiveCampaign

#1 for Email Marketing and automated email follow-ups. Free Trial here.

About the author 

Sam Rexford

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