If you had to recommend one marketing automation tool for small business, here it is

I refuse to ever tell a client there's a single software in any category that they should use without proper investigation further, but I have yet to run into a time where ActiveCampaign wasn't a massive improvement to upgrade to from other tools of similar price but lesser capabilities, like MailChimp and ConstantContact. AC has been my own email marketing and marketing automation system for approximately five years now and I don't see myself moving away from it at any point. It's important for me to be aware of the tools on the market, and there are other great ones, but none that have been a worthwhile transition off AC for.

Pros

You have a massive amount of features available to you to handle basic email marketing, advanced marketing automation, behavioral automations, tagging and audience segmentation, and so on. That's just the basic package, too. More advanced packages introduce a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) aspect that is particularly helpful for sales teams, Lead scoring to help prioritize accounts for your sales teams to be more efficient, and dynamic content (among many other features).

Cons

There is little to see on the Cons. If I had to select something, I suppose the limit of three users on the Lite plan can be frustrating. However, it's typically safe enough for a small business, easy to share logins if needed, and the price and added features of upgrading to the Plus plan is quite affordable as well.

Prettayyy... Prettayyy.. Good

Choosing Active Campaign has been a great move for us to save some money but I would caution folks who are looking for hands-on account management and support or who are not technically proficient. We have a pretty technically sound team so we did all of the set up ourselves - given my experience with our account manager - I'd be worried if he was responsible for helping a less technical team set up their account/integrations etc.

Pros

We came to Active Campaign from Pardot and what we like MOST is the price difference. AC is much cheaper and has all the core functionality (and more) that you need to set up a pretty robust marketing automation and customer support system.

Cons

I gotta say the one detractor from giving them an all-around 5 star review has been the unresponsive nature of our contacts there. I have had a few billing questions and was trying to move to an annual contract and my dedicated account rep just flat out hasn't responded in weeks. I had to go back to the guy who originally sold us the software to get the invoice and forms I needed. I also tried to follow up with both of them to make sure we were good on the annual plan and haven't heard anything from either of them. So I have to say the customer support (from a billing/account management perspective) has been sub-optimal.

Strong Automation System & Ecomm DataLayer, Weak Support and Long Standing Bugs

Pros

Activecampaign sets the bar for building automations, with great sorting and filtering features including customer records, tags, lists, conditional rules/routing, e-commerce data such as purchases, crm pipelines and even a custom event layer. We have created very complex integrations for dozens of businesses ranging from E-Commerce stores, to Gyms to local businesses. It's really simple to learn and use, and powerful enough to tackle even the most complex business processes. This includes in-store purchases on a POS to sending out emails or automation's based on purchases or LTV. It also supports multiple E-Commerce platforms natively, but be aware those features are nearly 4x the price to unlock after the trial.

Cons

After months of issues that resulted in one of our clients losing an excess of $40,000 in revenue, we can no longer recommend activecampaign. Poor support was to blame for this issue, with it being impossible to get someone on a call even though we pay 6 figures a year for service. Activecampaign is growing really really fast. Because of this, They have pretty terrible support and there are also long-standing bugs that they seem to have no intention to fix. For instance, the system is supposed to generate previews for each automation's email steps and in various other places, but instance shows a broken image. We have inquired about this to the support to be told they are aware it's been broken for over a year and have no ETA or intention on repairing it. We have this problem on all our client's accounts(dozens), and it's a serious issue with UI/UX but they don't seem to care. There are also some major logic issues, such as if you filter an automation to show anyone with 0 purchases, it doesn't work. We also inquired about this but got another non-response... So basically, where it works, it works well but there are a few major issues and they don't seem intent on repairing them, even though they are steady releasing more features to add to their pricing tiers. Overall, it's hard to find another system that provides the ease of use, features, and value of activecampaign but the support and existing bugs are a nasty/necessary compromise.

Had to switch from MailChimp

Pros

I like how straightforward and intuitive the software is. -- I can actually see a visual flow map of the customer journey, I can create automated series and then schedule them easily, I can create a standard template for my weekly video campaign and then customize it without revisiting old or pre-designed templates; I wasn't able to do any of those things intuitively with MailChimp. I have fewer than 400 subscribers right now, and I'm really glad to be making the switch now instead of later down the road. ActiveCampaign is where I want to build the foundation for my email marketing from here on out. Also, I had to buy a whole separate online course to learn how to use MailChimp and ActiveCampaign includes a startup course, "Getting Started," in their platform. Much appreciated! This is turning into a MailChimp critique, but the other thing I didn't like was how I couldn't just type directly into the body of the email like how a NORMAL email works; I had to write in a separate box to the side and it made it hard to see what the actual email would end up looking like sometimes.

Cons

Honestly I don't have any feedback about what to improve yet; I've been using ActiveCampaign for just a couple weeks.

A convenient All-in-One CRM and Automation

In my company, Active Campaign is used on a daily basis. We are a franchising network, needing one full-service CRM and Marketing Automation to be shared within the network (similar automations for the whole network), while leaving space and autonomy for each franchisee to develop its own (Sales management, marketing management). Active Campaign allows not only this structure to work seamlessly, but the way the service is organized allows a whole range of possibilities for my company, most of which we haven't yet scratched the surface.

Pros

It's easy to use, easy to deploy and being all-in-1 solution for marketing and sales management, automation, it's very convenient and comparatively affordable.

Cons

A few areas are still under development and not quite up to the task, namely features such as landing page development, or conditional forms.