ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation and email marketing platform with built-in CRM capabilities, used by over 180,000 businesses globally. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Chicago, ActiveCampaign bridges the gap between email service providers (Mailchimp) and complex marketing clouds (HubSpot, Marketo) — providing sophisticated automation at a mid-market price point that most SMBs can afford. ActiveCampaign's automation builder uses a visual flowchart interface to create complex, multi-branch email and SMS sequences triggered by contact actions (email opens, link clicks, form submissions, purchases, and website behavior). Automations can create CRM deals, update contact scores, send internal notifications, split contacts by condition, and A/B test entire sequence branches — capabilities that require HubSpot Professional ($800/month) or similar in other platforms. ActiveCampaign's Deals CRM provides pipeline management, task automation, and win probability scoring for SMB sales teams, but is primarily used as a lightweight sales layer attached to the marketing platform rather than a standalone CRM replacement.