Brevo Transactional Email vs ActiveCampaign

by Gralio Feb 11, 2025

Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign cater to different needs. Brevo excels in sending crucial emails like order confirmations with a user-friendly interface and cost-effective plans. ActiveCampaign provides a wider range of marketing automation and CRM features, suitable for businesses seeking more complex customer journey management.

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This comparison was created by analysing 6080 reviews and 50 websites, saving 1 day, 10 hours, 11 minutes of reading.

Brevo Transactional Email

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ActiveCampaign

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About

Brevo Transactional Email helps businesses send important emails like order confirmations and password resets. It offers easy email design tools, integrates with existing business systems, and automates sending based on customer actions. You can track if emails are opened or clicked and the service is secure for your customer's data. Brevo Transactional Email is suitable for both small and large businesses.

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform designed for businesses of all sizes. It helps you create personalized customer journeys across various channels like email, SMS, and ads. You can automate repetitive tasks, track customer behavior, and improve your marketing campaigns with its CRM and sales automation features. ActiveCampaign integrates with over 900 popular business tools and offers a wide range of pre-built templates and automation recipes to streamline your marketing efforts.

Summary

Main difference

Brevo Transactional Email is a focused email platform ideal for transactional emails, offering simplicity and cost-effectiveness. ActiveCampaign offers broader marketing automation and CRM functionality, enabling more complex customer journeys but at a higher price point.

Relative strengths of Brevo Transactional Email (compared to ActiveCampaign)

Simpler user interface, making it easier to learn and use, especially for transactional emails.
More affordable pricing, particularly beneficial for smaller businesses or those with basic transactional email needs.
Strong focus on email deliverability, ensuring important emails reach recipients.

Relative weaknesses of Brevo Transactional Email (compared to ActiveCampaign)

Limited marketing automation capabilities compared to ActiveCampaign.
Fewer integrations with other business tools.
Less comprehensive CRM functionality for managing customer interactions.

Who should use Brevo Transactional Email VS. ActiveCampaign

Brevo Transactional Email is a user-friendly and cost-effective solution for sending crucial emails such as order confirmations and password resets. Its ease of use, helpful tutorials, and responsive customer support are frequently praised. However, some users have reported occasional lagging and limitations with the email editor.

ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform ideal for businesses seeking streamlined customer journeys. Users praise its ease of use and comprehensive features, especially for email automation and campaign tracking. However, some users have noted occasional glitches and slow loading times. Despite some mixed feedback on pricing, ActiveCampaign remains a popular choice for automating marketing and sales processes.

Best for small to medium-sized businesses.
Ideal for E-commerce, Retail, Finance, and various other industries.

Best for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) seeking robust marketing automation.
Ideal for various sectors, including E-commerce, Healthcare, Finance, and more.

Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign features

Supported

Partially supported

Not supported

Type in the name of the feature or in your own words tell us what you need

Email deliverability

Supported

Brevo Transactional Email prioritizes deliverability with dedicated IPs and a focus on minimizing technical issues and filtering.

Supported

ActiveCampaign ensures reliable email delivery with features like domain authentication and list hygiene.
Email personalization

Supported

Transactional emails can be personalized with customer data like names and product details.

Supported

ActiveCampaign allows personalizing emails with customer data, prices, and product details using various features.
Easy setup

Supported

Brevo offers easy setup with developer guides, SDKs, APIs, SMTP, plugins, and webhooks.

Supported

ActiveCampaign offers developer guides, API documentation, and setup tutorials for easy integration.
Drip Campaigns

Supported

Brevo supports setting up automated email sequences for lead nurturing and drip campaigns, including personalization and timed email interactions.

Supported

ActiveCampaign supports the automation and sending of pre-defined sequences of emails to nurture leads or onboard users with personalized content.
Workflow Automation

Supported

Brevo offers workflow automation for sales and marketing, reducing manual effort.

Supported

ActiveCampaign supports workflow automation to automate sales workflows and tasks to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency.

Qualities

Value and Pricing Transparency

+0.33

Rather positive sentiment

-0.27

Neutral sentiment
Customer Service

+0.67

Rather positive sentiment

+0.41

Rather positive sentiment
Ease of Use

+0.91

Strongly positive sentiment

+0.62

Rather positive sentiment
Reliability and Performance

+0.59

Rather positive sentiment

+0.24

Neutral sentiment
Ease of Implementation

+0.5

Rather positive sentiment

+0.18

Neutral sentiment
Scalability

+0.68

Rather positive sentiment

+0.08

Neutral sentiment

Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign Pricing

Brevo offers a range of pricing plans, including a free plan with limited features. The pricing model is tiered subscription based on the number of emails sent per month. Add-ons are available for removing the Brevo logo and multi-user access.

Plans

User sentiment

Rather positive

+0.33

See full Pricing page

No data

User sentiment

Neutral

-0.27

See full Pricing page

Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign review insights

6013 reviews analysed from and

Users love

User-friendly interface praised for its simplicity and ease of use
Cost-effective pricing plans, especially the free plan, are highly appreciated
Brevo Academy and available tutorials are commended for their helpfulness
Responsive and helpful customer support, frequently praised for their assistance

Easy to use and has all the features I need.
Campaigns get tracked and I know what works and what not.
Automations are easy to build.
My business is working while I am lying on my sofa.

Users dislike

Occasional lagging and freezing issues reported
Email editor limitations and lack of flexibility in design customization
Complaints about the complexity of setting up automations
Mobile app functionality is limited and considered underwhelming

The UI can be a bit glitchy.
It can be slow to load, I tend to have several browser tabs open to avoid losing time with the pages loading.
Prices for Brazil are expensive, there could be regional or student discounts.
Support in your own language would be nice.

Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign Ratings

G2

4.6/5

(1148)

G2

4.5/5

(2486)
Capterra

4.6/5

(2388)
TrustPilot

3.6/5

(67)
Glassdoor

3.6/5

(444)

Company health

Employee growth

No data

4% increase in the last year

Web traffic

No data

11% decrease in the last quarter

Financing

No data

January 2021 - $360M

How do Brevo's email deliverability rates compare to ActiveCampaign's?

Brevo and ActiveCampaign both prioritize email deliverability. Brevo emphasizes its use of dedicated IPs and focus on minimizing technical issues and spam filter triggers. ActiveCampaign does not provide specific details about its deliverability practices in the provided information. Therefore, a direct comparison of their deliverability rates is not possible based on this data. Further research, such as consulting independent email deliverability reports, would be necessary to make a more informed comparison.

Which platform offers easier setup for transactional emails, Brevo or ActiveCampaign?

Brevo offers easier setup for transactional emails. Brevo explicitly states easy setup with various tools like developer guides, SDKs, APIs, SMTP, plugins, and webhooks. While ActiveCampaign is a robust marketing automation platform, its focus is broader and its setup for transactional emails is not highlighted as a key strength.

What are the advantages of Brevo Transactional Email?

Brevo Transactional Email offers an easy setup process with various integration options, including APIs and plugins. It provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor for creating emails and allows for personalization using customer data. Brevo focuses on email deliverability and offers transparent pricing suitable for businesses of all sizes, particularly smaller businesses. It also benefits from a highly rated user experience, praised for ease of use and helpful customer support.

What are the disadvantages of Brevo Transactional Email?

Brevo has some limitations in its email editor, lacking the flexibility for advanced design customization. Users have also reported occasional lagging and freezing within the platform. Setting up automations can be complex, and the mobile app functionality is limited.

Alternatives to Brevo Transactional Email and ActiveCampaign

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive marketing platform designed for businesses of all sizes. It offers a suite of tools including email marketing, marketing automation, social media management, analytics, and SEO optimization, all within a single platform. This helps businesses streamline their marketing efforts, improve efficiency, and track results. Its focus on inbound marketing and lead generation makes it a popular choice for businesses looking to attract and convert leads into customers. HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's CRM platform for enhanced sales and marketing alignment.

Instantly

Instantly is a sales engagement platform designed to help businesses find and reach potential customers through personalized email outreach at scale. It offers tools for building targeted contact lists, automating email sequences, and managing responses, all while prioritizing high email deliverability rates to ensure messages reach their intended recipients. Instantly also provides analytics to track campaign performance and offers resources like templates and a customer community to guide users.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool designed to make sales teams more efficient. It helps businesses of all sizes track leads, manage deals, and analyze sales data. Pipedrive stands out for its ease of use and intuitive interface, making it simple for teams to get started quickly. It offers features like pipeline management, sales automation, and reporting to streamline the sales process and improve performance. The software aims to help close more deals and make more informed decisions with real-time insights and AI-powered recommendations.

Elastic Email

Elastic Email is an email platform designed for businesses to send transactional emails, like password resets and order confirmations. They offer an email marketing tool, but their strength is their reliable delivery engine and API, allowing easy integration with your existing systems. They focus on providing cost-effective solutions for small to medium businesses and pride themselves on strong customer support.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform designed for businesses of all sizes. It helps you create personalized marketing campaigns across email, SMS, and other channels. Klaviyo offers tools for email and SMS marketing, automation, segmentation, and data analysis. It stands out with its customer data platform, which provides a centralized view of customer information, enabling highly targeted campaigns. Klaviyo promises to help you increase conversions and customer lifetime value.

EngageBay All-in-One Suite

EngageBay is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) software designed for growing businesses. It combines marketing automation, sales tools, and customer support features within a single platform. With EngageBay, you can manage contacts, run marketing campaigns, automate sales processes, and provide customer support. It aims to be a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to streamline their operations and improve customer engagement.

Page co-authored by

Michal Kaczor

CEO at Gralio

Michal has worked at startups for many years and writes about topics relating to software selection and IT management. As a former consultant for Bain, a business advisory company, he also knows how to understand needs of any business and find solutions to its problems.

Tymon Terlikiewicz

CTO at Gralio

Tymon is a seasoned CTO who loves finding the perfect tools for any task. He recently headed up the tech department at Batmaid, a well-known Swiss company, where he managed about 60 software purchases, including CX, HR, Payroll, Marketing automation and various developer tools.

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