ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse: Which one to go for and Why?
If you are on the fence on selecting ActiveCampaign and GetResponse. This guide will help you to select the one that suits you.
Written by Louis Perry | Last Updated On: [date format=”d F, Y” timestamp=”-47 days”]
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Table of Contents
GetResponse official site: https://getresponse.com
ActiveCampaign official site: https://activecampaign.com
ActiveCampaign and GetResponse
ActiveCampaign and GetResponse are both amazing tools and in many ways, they have similar feature and characteristics. Both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse allow you to send targeted and personalized emails within a short period. Both tools are very easy to use and are user-friendly.
While ActiveCampaign started primarily as a marketing automation tool, GetResponse focused specifically focused on email marketing since the beginning of its journey. Both companies have gone through various changes and now have similar features with some tweaks in between. Both companies focus on different things while making life easier for businesses and as such.
ActiveCampaign and GetResponse have often fought frontal and flank battles. Now it’s time for them to fight another one in our article! We will compare the major features of these two agencies and find out which one comes out on top with all guns blazing.
Comparison of Key Features
If your company needs great landing pages, you should go for GetResponse and if you need to incorporate advanced automation, you should go for ActiveCampaign. Thus, you need to understand and compare the key features of these agencies to pick the one that best suits your interest.
User Friendliness
For someone starting their businesses or someone looking to manage their growth by actively marketing their products for ensuring customer retention, GetResponse might be the best place to start. Why do we think that? We have analyzed the homepage or the dashboard that a user sees when they first sign up for either of these websites and as you can see from the images, GetResponse looks a bit less intimidating.

While ActiveCampaign has their own benefits in terms of some other features, we believe GetResponse is the more user-friendly one as you won’t have much difficulty creating your first sales funnel or webinar and you can also find some tutorials on the tools which might come in handy for beginners trying to understand automation.
Whenever you open an account in GetResponse, you will get two emails immediately and one of them will be from one of their senior marketing managers, who would welcome you to their platform and let you know the type of contents you would be getting in your email from their website. You will also have the chance to reply directly to the email from their marketing manager and ask any questions you might have, which is great for a beginner. While ActiveCampaign does send you a quick-start guide in their only email, there doesn’t seem to be a personal touch associated with that.
Although beginners will find it easier to navigate through GetResponse, if you aren’t new to the world of email and automation marketing, it might be a good idea for you to start with ActiveCampaign as it has the more complex and amazing features needed for a company at their matured stage of development.
Deliverability
If you’re looking to automate your customer retention tactics, you must be thinking about signing up for a tool which will ensure your emails reach your target segment’s inbox and not their spam folders. Getting the promotional messages/newsletters directly to a customer’s inbox is known as Email Deliverability.
In February 2020, Emailtooltester did a study to find out what percentage of time an email from an automation tool reached a customer’s inbox. The results revealed that around 90.2% of the time, an email sent from ActiveCampaign reached their target customer’s inbox while for GetResponse the email deliverability rate was 75.6% only. So, in the case of email deliverability, we have a clear winner in ActiveCampaign.
Sending out Affiliate links
Recently, there has been a surge in the number of affiliate marketing campaigns run by businesses. For many of these businesses, affiliate marketing is the primary source of revenue. If you’re one of them, you might be looking forward to sending out affiliate links to your customer’s inbox via an email campaign. Although the deliverability of an affiliate link depends on different factors such as not redirecting the links directly to offers, disclosing the affiliate links and maintaining transparency with your customer, you must expect the email marketing tool to at least do its job, which is letting you send a link in the first place.
If you’re looking to include affiliate links in your email campaigns, you should definitely go for GetResponse as they allow you to incorporate these links inside your email but ActiveCampaign won’t allow you to do that.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Studies have proved that acquiring a customer is around 20% more expensive than retaining a customer and thus building a profitable relationship with customers to capture value from them in return while providing value to them simultaneously is very important.
CRM is an aspect that many companies have been focusing on recently and ActiveCampaign definitely allows you to do CRM the way it should be done. ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM has many facilities including but not limited to customizing the customer pipeline, sorting the deals, managing the activities assigned to the company’s team members, sorting the data by deal value, using the activity feed to understand recent developments in a deal, scheduling tasks for team members, moving a deal from one stage to the another in terms of its development and finally creating a seamless path from marketing to sales.
GetResponse also has a CRM tool in place but neither it is as powerful as ActiveCampaign’s CRM tool and nor it is as functional as ActiveCampaign’s one. You can still perform basic CRM tasks such as turning email leads into sales, nurturing contacts into sales, dragging and dropping entries to do repeat sales, keeping the information of leads in one place, building your custom sales pipeline, etc.
So, if you want a more robust approach in managing your customer relationships and want to sleep peacefully at night, you should definitely go for ActiveCampaign.
Automation
If you’re a bread lover, you must enjoy the feeling of having bread with the perfect butter, and if you’re a lover of both bread and butter, you must know that it doesn’t seem right taking one without the other.
ActiveCampaign and Automation are Bread and Butter of the email marketing world. You simply can’t do automation in any better way than doing it on ActiveCampaign. There are probably hundreds of ways you can automate your email marketing campaign with ActiveCampaign and that’s not even exaggerating its brilliant automation tool a bit. You can also design the entire automation process in the visual format of the Interface of ActiveCampaign.
Some interesting automation recipes of ActiveCampaign are product interest tagging, forward a campaign incentive, share a campaign on social media incentive, accessory upsell after purchase, create a task on-reply, re-engagement campaign, etc. The best part of ActiveCampaign’s automation tool is that you can customize your workflow according to your preference and add or delete any widgets on the go and create an unlimited number of workflows. This helps you start the automation from scratch and cook the type of dish that you want to.
GetResponse simply doesn’t have enough legs to compete with ActiveCampaign in terms of automation and even the automation process is a bit slower compared to ActiveCampaign. Although there are 40+ email templates to kickstart the automation workflow, GetResponse won’t allow you to customize the workflow and add in widgets on the go.
Landing Pages, Sales Funnels, Webinars
In this section you will learn ActiveCampaign and GetResponse in terms of Landing Pages, Sales Funnels & Webinars
How to create a landing page?

>> Try To Create Your Landing Page With GetResponse <<
Landing pages, Sales funnels and Webinars are all important features but we are listing them together here because ActiveCampaign doesn’t have any of these features and thus it is easy to say that GetResponse is the uncontested winner here.
In GetResponse, you have the ability to use the auto-funnel feature to build your sales funnel automatically which is very convenient and add that to the vital fact that this feature calculates your sales automatically and you will get a complete package in GetResponse. Instead of a sales funnel, you can also use unlimited landing pages using the drag and drop function of GetResponse and the UI is very easy to navigate through and you will have around 200 templates to choose from while creating your page.
After the emergence of the recent pandemic, we have been doing most of our activities online and the surge in webinars has been very noticeable during the last year or so. For selling to medium to high ticket products, webinars are one of the efficient methods and you can also reach your target customer base very easily with this feature. GetResponse makes your life easier as it allows you to host interactive webinars where you can do your own poll or surveys to get more info about your TG.

Integration
Integration with different software and social networks are very important features to have in an email automation tool and both GetResponse and ActiveCampaign comes with a lot of direct integrations. The number of integrations for GetResponse is around 130 while for ActiveCampaign this number reaches up to 250. Also, both of these websites have ensured that they are integrated with Zapier, which allows the users to get access to an additional 1000-1500 apps. In terms of functionality, ActiveCampaign’s integrations have been proven to be more diverse, broad and smooth.
GetResponse won’t allow you to send any text messages to the subscribers who have signed up on your platform and thus, there is a definite winner in ActiveCampaign as this website allows you to send text messages to the subscribers whose number you have been able to capture. You can also collect phone numbers using the built-in function of ActiveCampaign.
Pricing
To set a uniform criterion for comparison, we have decided to compare the pricing of ActiveCampaign and GetResponse using their pricing options for 1, 000 contacts. While GetResponse’s starting point is 1, 000 contacts, there is also a 500-contacts option available for ActiveCampaign which makes it a suitable option for beginners. You can also see their pricing plans by visiting their website, going to their respective pricing menu and choosing the number of contacts that you would like to send communications to.
From the image given below, we can clearly see that ActiveCampaign requires you to pay a bit more compared to GetResponse and that could be understood from the incorporation of advanced automation features. Also, GetResponse comes with a 30-day trial period while for ActiveCampaign this trial period is only 14 days.
Pros and Cons
In this section you will learn ActiveCampaign and GetResponse pros and cons
In this section, we would like to do an overall analysis of ActiveCampaign and GetResponse by listing their pros and cons side by side so that it is easier for you to sum up all the information you have read above
The Good Side
ActiveCampaign | GetResponse |
Highest Email Deliverability rate in the industry | Easy to navigate for beginners |
More advanced CRM features | Makes incorporation of affiliate links possible |
Can customize workflows | Has an auto-funnel tool |
Advanced automation features (even on the lowest plans) | Landing page service available |
More integrations | Webinar service available |
Includes SMS Marketing Option | Provides access to different courses and education for beginners |
Offers great visuals for campaigns | Longer trial period |
The Bad Side
ActiveCampaign | GetResponse |
Might be overwhelming for beginners | Might be too simplistic for experts |
Can’t be used directly for sending affiliate links | Limited CRM features |
Doesn’t incorporate a sales funnel facility | Inadequate automation features |
Landing page service isn’t available | Not many diverse integrations |
Can’t be used to host webinars | Can’t be used to do SMS marketing |
Might take a bit of time to get customer care support | A lot of tools require third-party syncing |
Shorter trial period and more expensive | Less landing page design options |
How to Create a Sales Page to Sell Your Product With GetResponse

>> Want To Try Creating Your Sales Page For Free With GetResponse? <<
Conclusion
GetResponse and ActiveCampaign are both amazing options if you’re looking to automate your email marketing system and choosing one or the other largely depends on your type of business and the needs you want to meet by getting a subscription to either of them. If you’re someone just starting out and looking to host some webinars and calculate your sales and use a funnel to do that, GetResponse should definitely be your pick. On the other hand, if you didn’t have much use of webinars and landing pages, you should definitely go with ActiveCampaign as its automation and CRM features will definitely come in handy for you. There’s no definite winner here but we hope you can be the winner by making the right pick.
>> GetResponse 30 Days Free Trial [Risk Free] <<

Louis Perry
Louis is a full-time blogger and email marketing expert. He is a contributor in Income Roar