ActiveCampaign Pricing 2026: ActiveCampaign Cost by Contacts, All Plans, Free Trial and Alternatives

How much does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign costs $15 a month for Starter, $49 for Plus, $79 for Professional and $145 for Enterprise at 1,000 contacts when you pay for a year up front. Billed month to month those same four tiers are $19, $59, $99 and $179. There is no free plan. Every price on this page is tied to a contact count, so the tier you are quoted today is not the tier you stay on.

That is the easy part. The harder and more useful part is that ActiveCampaign has changed three separate things in the last two years, and a large share of the pricing articles you will find still describe the product as it was before those changes. The seat allocations are smaller than most guides say. The rule about which contacts you get billed for was rewritten in November 2025. And the plan structure itself was rebuilt in mid 2024, with features that used to be included moved to paid add-ons. Each of those affects your invoice more than the difference between two adjacent tiers.

ActiveCampaign pricing by contact count

This is the annual ladder, expressed as the monthly rate you pay when you commit to a year. Two independent pricing trackers publish this ladder and they reconcile to within a few dollars in every cell, which is about as much corroboration as this category ever offers.

Billed monthly instead, the same ladder runs roughly 20 percent higher: $19, $59, $99 and $179 at 1,000 contacts, $49, $119, $189 and $319 at 2,500, $99, $179, $259 and $469 at 5,000, and $189, $239, $469 and $739 at 10,000. At 25,000 contacts the monthly figures are reported at $489 for Plus, $789 for Professional and $1,099 for Enterprise.

One structural detail that is easy to miss: the tiers are steps, not a meter. You do not pay for 6,200 contacts. You pay the 10,000 contact price the moment you pass 5,000, and the move happens automatically at your next billing cycle. Crossing a boundary by forty addresses costs the same as crossing it by four thousand.

Do unsubscribed contacts count in ActiveCampaign?

It depends entirely on when your account was created, and this is the single most expensive detail in ActiveCampaign pricing. The company help center article titled "Do unsubscribed, unconfirmed, or bounced contacts count against my contact limit?" documents that accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 have all contacts count toward the contact limit regardless of list status. Accounts created before that date are billed on active contacts only.

An active contact, under the older rule, meant someone who had confirmed their subscription where confirmation was in use and who had not unsubscribed or bounced. So the old rule quietly forgave you for every dead address in the account. The new one does not.

Work through what that does to a real list. Say you have 9,000 people who still want your email, plus 2,500 accumulated unsubscribes and hard bounces from four years of sending. Under the old rule you are a 10,000 contact account paying $189 a month on Plus billed monthly. Under the new rule you are an 11,500 contact account, which puts you in the 25,000 tier at $489 a month. Same audience, same sending, roughly $300 a month difference, decided by your signup date.

Two things follow from this. If your account predates 3 November 2025, that grandfathered status is worth real money and is a reason not to casually open a fresh account. If it does not, list hygiene stopped being a deliverability chore and became a line item, and you should be archiving dead contacts on a schedule rather than letting them pile up.

It is worth saying plainly that this change was not announced with any fanfare. It surfaced in help center documentation, and the practical effect is that most new customers meet it when their contact count looks larger than their list. It is also why the detailed pricing tables published by third party trackers should be read carefully: at least one of the trackers that publishes the most complete price ladder still describes the pre November 2025 rule as current.

Where Starter stops being the cheap plan

Starter looks like the obvious choice for a small business, and at a small list it is. What almost nobody publishes is that Starter has the steepest price curve of the four tiers, so the saving evaporates as your list grows and then the plan disappears from under you.

Read the last column downward. At 1,000 contacts you are giving up the CRM, landing pages and real segmentation to save $34 a month, which is a defensible trade for a business that only wants to send newsletters. At 10,000 contacts you are giving up all of the same things to save $40 a month, on a bill that is already $149. The trade has stopped making sense and the pricing did that to you, not any decision you made.

Then at 25,000 contacts Starter is not offered. Whatever you were saving becomes a forced migration to a plan you did not budget for. If you expect to be above roughly 5,000 contacts inside a year, the honest read is that Starter is a temporary discount rather than a plan, and pricing your project on Plus from the start will give you a number you do not have to revise.

Now combine that with the section above. On a post November 2025 account, dead contacts inflate the count that decides which rung you stand on. So the billing rule pushes you up a ladder that is steepest precisely on the plan people choose in order to spend less. Those two mechanics compound, and neither one appears on the pricing page.

What are the plans that ActiveCampaign offers?

There are four email marketing tiers: Starter, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. The gating is mostly about automation depth and segmentation. Starter caps automations at five actions each and offers limited segmentation. Plus lifts segmentation to standard and adds the sales CRM and landing pages. Professional removes the cap on automation actions and adds advanced segmentation. Enterprise adds premium segmentation and a dedicated account team.

Alongside those, ActiveCampaign now sells a separate WhatsApp product with Core, Advanced and Premium tiers, and combined email plus WhatsApp bundles. The WhatsApp tiers are metered on message volume at 25x, 50x and 100x limits, with 3, 5 and 8 seats and up to two or five lines depending on tier. This is a whole product line that most pricing roundups do not mention at all, largely because it postdates the articles that rank for the topic.

The vendor pricing page does not render dollar figures to an automated reader for any of it, WhatsApp included. That is not a complaint, it is a caution: any specific WhatsApp price you find quoted has been reconstructed by someone dragging a selector, and we are not going to publish a number for it that we cannot stand behind.

Sending is metered too, and separately from contacts

Your contact count sets your plan price. A second, independent limit sets how much email you can actually send: a multiple of your contact limit, at 10x on Starter and Plus, 12x on Professional and 15x on Enterprise. The vendor pricing page and an independent tracker agree on those multipliers.

In practice that is more generous than it sounds for most senders and tighter than it sounds for a few. A 5,000 contact Plus account gets 50,000 sends a month, which is ten full sends to the whole list, or a weekly newsletter plus a couple of automated sequences with room left over. A business running daily promotional email to its whole list, or heavy multi step automations that touch the same people repeatedly, will find the ceiling. Worth checking against your actual send volume before you assume the contact tier is the only constraint.

Does ActiveCampaign charge per user?

Yes, past the seats included in your plan, and the seat allocation is smaller than most of the internet reports. The vendor pricing page lists 1 user on Starter, 1 on Plus, 3 on Professional and 5 on Enterprise. A number of widely republished guides still show 1, 3, 5 and 10, which is the older allocation. If you built a budget from one of those, you budgeted for seats you will not get.

The price of an extra seat is the least reliable figure in this entire category, and rather than pick one and call it verified, here is the actual state of the published record.

Our read: assume seats are quoted rather than listed, and get the number in writing before you commit, because a three person marketing team on Plus needs two paid seats and the difference between $12 and $39 each is $648 a year on a plan that costs $588.

What the plan price leaves out

The headline tier does not include everything the product does. Several capabilities that buyers reasonably assume are bundled are sold on top, which is the main reason quoted budgets and real invoices diverge.

Those add-on figures come from a single tracker and we are labeling them as reported rather than verified. The shape of the point stands regardless of the exact dollars: a $49 Plus account that needs pipelines and reporting is not a $49 account, and stacking two add-ons onto Plus can cost more than simply buying Professional.

Why did my ActiveCampaign price increase?

Three common causes, in rough order of how often they apply. You crossed a contact tier and the system moved you up at the next billing cycle. An add-on came off a promotional period. Or you are a longer standing customer who was migrated off the older plan structure.

On that last one: in June 2024 ActiveCampaign replaced the original Lite, Plus and Professional structure with Starter, Plus, Pro and Enterprise, reshuffling features and moving several of them into paid add-ons. Existing customers were migrated automatically from August 2024 onward, on their first billing date after the cutover. The company indicated increases would be capped around 30 percent; customers reported real increases in the 30 to 40 percent range once the newly separated add-ons were counted, and one analysis puts the cumulative rise at roughly 40 percent since June 2024. Those figures are reported by third parties rather than published by the vendor, so treat the percentages as directional.

The pattern across all three of these changes is the same, and it is the reason this page exists. ActiveCampaign restructures pricing without much noise, and the search results for its own pricing keep describing the previous version. If you are reading a guide that quotes Lite as a plan name, or shows Plus including three seats, or says only active contacts are billed, that guide is describing a product that is no longer for sale.

Does ActiveCampaign have a free plan?

No. ActiveCampaign has no free tier at any list size. What it offers is a 14 day free trial available on all paid plans. The trial is reported to run with Professional level features but to cap at 100 contacts and 100 email sends, which is a meaningful constraint: it is enough to build an automation and see how the builder feels, and not enough to run a genuine campaign against a real list and judge the results.

If your evaluation depends on seeing deliverability or engagement data at your own volume, plan for that to happen after you are paying, and pick the shortest commitment you can rather than taking the annual discount on day one.

Is ActiveCampaign cheaper than Mailchimp?

Mostly no, once you compare monthly list price to monthly list price. ActiveCampaign Starter at $19 a month for 1,000 contacts just edges Mailchimp Essentials at about $20, and that is the only tier where ActiveCampaign wins. At 5,000 contacts Starter is $99 against $75 for Essentials, and Plus is $179 against $100 for Mailchimp Standard. The premium runs roughly 1.7 to 2.2 times on the mid tier plans.

It is easy to get this backwards, and a lot of published comparisons do, by putting the ActiveCampaign annual rate next to the Mailchimp monthly one. ActiveCampaign takes about 20 percent off for a yearly commitment, which narrows the gap and does not close it: Plus at 5,000 contacts is $145 annual against $100 for Mailchimp Standard monthly.

Higher up the ladder it gets closer and the comparison starts depending on which contacts each one counts. Mailchimp bills on total contacts, including unsubscribed and non subscribed records, until you manually archive them, and it prices on your peak contact count during the period. ActiveCampaign now does something similar on accounts created after 3 November 2025, and something more generous on accounts created before it. Two businesses with the same 8,000 person audience can therefore get four different quotes across the two vendors depending on account age and how much dead weight is sitting in the database.

The practical takeaway is unglamorous: clean the list before you price the tools. On both platforms, archiving dead contacts is the cheapest price cut available to you, and it is the one step nobody sells you.

Where AutoMarketer fits, and where it does not

Being direct about this, because the comparison is only useful if it is honest. AutoMarketer is not an email service provider. It does not send your email, it does not host your list, it does not manage deliverability, and it has no CRM. If you need the things ActiveCampaign is genuinely good at, ActiveCampaign is the right purchase and nothing here changes that.

What AutoMarketer does is the step before sending. You paste your website URL, it builds a brand profile from what it reads, and it drafts the campaigns, the sequences, the blog posts, the social copy and the ad copy from that profile. You review everything before it goes anywhere. The plans are flat: Starter at $49 a month, Growth at $149 with email included, Scale at $399, and the number does not move when your list grows, because contacts are not what we meter.

Six of those nine rows go to ActiveCampaign, which is the correct answer for a tool that has spent a decade building sending infrastructure. The two that come to us are worth something specific: they matter when the reason your email program is underperforming is that this month campaigns were never written, rather than that your platform cannot send them. That is a real and common failure, and it is not a problem more automation features will fix.

Plenty of businesses run both. ActiveCampaign sends, AutoMarketer drafts what gets sent along with everything else the brand publishes. If you want to see what that looks like against your own site, paste your URL at the top of this page. It reads the site and shows you the plan and sample assets before you create anything.

How confident we are in each number

Pricing pages age badly and most of them never say where their figures came from, so here is ours.

Checked directly at activecampaign.com/pricing on 2 September 2026: the four email plan names, the WhatsApp product line and its tiers, the seat allocations of 1, 1, 3 and 5, the send limit multipliers of 10x, 10x, 12x and 15x, and the feature gating for each tier. The vendor page does not render dollar amounts to an automated reader, so no price on this page comes from it.

Corroborated across two independent pricing trackers: the full contact ladder in both monthly and annual form. The two sources reconcile to within a few dollars in all twenty cells at a consistent 20 percent annual discount, which is strong agreement for this category.

Documented in ActiveCampaign help center material: the 3 November 2025 split between accounts billed on all contacts and accounts billed on active contacts only. The help center article is behind a bot challenge, so we read it through search rather than fetching it directly, and two searches returned consistent wording.

Reported, not verified, and labeled as such above: extra seat pricing, which four sources describe four different ways, the add-on figures for pipelines, SMS and custom reporting, the 100 contact and 100 send trial caps, and the percentage increases attributed to the 2024 restructure.

If something here goes stale, it is most likely the add-on figures and the seat price. The plan structure and the billing rule are the parts we would expect to hold, and they are the parts that decide your bill.