It’s virtually unfair to pit one among our prime and lowest rated options towards one another. We’ve written extensively about how ActiveCampaign is without doubt one of the strongest publication instruments you need to use for your small business due to their mastery of automations. In the meantime, AWeber underwhelmed us with their lack of options and generally complicated editor.
Nonetheless, it’s value going into element about what every platform gives. Who is aware of, you may really be higher off with the underdog this time? Let’s discover out under:
Ease of use & editor
With a quick and neat backend, ActiveCampaign’s platform gives a superb person expertise. Which is humorous as a result of they’ve a ton of options, and it often means extra complexity. However no complaints right here: managing lists and subscribers is each versatile, highly effective, and straightforward to do. One other instance of fantastic UX is when creating campaigns: you possibly can examine earlier and subsequent steps, which makes the method quick and straightforward to evaluate.
ActiveCampaign’s marketing campaign navigation system
AWeber, however, is usually a bit complicated. As an example, some choices are unnecessarily hidden, like reusing a marketing campaign or selecting senders’ addresses. Their naming additionally muddies issues. For instance, they name “Broadcast” common publication and say “Campaigns” when speaking about e mail automations. Your essential selector is the subscriber checklist, which makes it tougher to go to the campaigns and automations. And eventually, they lack a visible, workflow-based navigation menu like ActiveCampaign’s.
AWeber’s publication editor – lacking a transparent navigation for the creation course of
Winner: Weirdly sufficient, despite the fact that ActiveCampaign is a a lot highly effective device and comes with extra choices, it’s nonetheless simpler to make use of than AWeber.
Design and Flexibility
ActiveCampaign gives 125+ responsive and modern-looking templates. In addition they allow you to modify the layouts, which provides flexibility to the templates, particularly with all their customization choices. You may as well code in HTML in case you’re assured with that.
AWeber provides you numerous choices out of the field, with 150 templates out there in numerous shade schemes. Nonetheless, the editor feels a bit clunky and missing in flexibility. Like ActiveCampaign, HTML can be out there.
AWeber’s templates
Winner: Based mostly on the variety of templates alone, AWeber would win this spherical. However we’d reasonably have much less selection with higher trying templates and a sleeker editor. So ActiveCampaign takes an additional level right here.
E-mail advertising and marketing options
E-mail automations
ActiveCampaign’s automations are nearly as good as they get. Their system means that you can monitor (registered) guests in your web site and to adapt e mail advertising and marketing applications to their behaviour and pursuits. For instance, if a registered person in your cooking weblog visits a web page about cheesecake, you possibly can ship an automatic e mail with totally different recipes. Or you might ask them to price the recipes after three days. The probabilities are limitless. What’s extra, creating automations is completed by visible workflows, each intuitive and straightforward to make use of.
ActiveCampaign’s visible automation workflow
AWeber’s automations (confusingly known as Campaigns) are a brand new addition and nonetheless a beta characteristic on the time of writing. You possibly can apply tags to customers once they subscribe to your checklist (for instance: “desirous about cheesecakes”) and you’ll section your mailing lists accordingly. Briefly, it’s not probably the most superior system there’s.
Winner: ActiveCampaign takes the (cheese)cake right here, with among the best automation programs we’ve examined. AWeber does have automations however they’re nowhere close to as highly effective.
Registration varieties
You possibly can create and customise ActiveCampaign’s registration varieties with a good quantity of flexibility, together with all of the fields you want. Observe that in case you’re on the lower cost plan, they’ll hold their branding on the shape. The opposite benefit of the pricier Skilled and Enterprise plans are extra type varieties: on prime of inline, you additionally get floating bins, modal pop-ups and floating bars.
AWeber type editor
AWeber’s varieties provide you with numerous toys to play with, together with fields after all, but additionally issues like audio information, web page redirects, movies and extra. You additionally get a customizable thanks web page when customers end their subscription. Sadly, the varieties aren’t tremendous simple to arrange.
Winner: You possibly can decide your individual winner right here; AWeber’s varieties are extra versatile, and in case you want particular options like audio varieties, then they’re nice. If you’d like ease of use and no frills, go for ActiveCampaign.
Spam & design testing
If you wish to be certain your emails attain subscribers, you need to use ActiveCampaign’s go / fail check. It’s not detailed, although, so don’t anticipate nice insights about why your emails find yourself within the spam inbox. Moreover there’s a third get together service for previewing emails in numerous inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, and so forth…). It’s a paid service although….
…however we’ll nonetheless take it over AWeber, who provide nothing in any respect on this class.
Winner: Clearly, ActiveCampaign. However they’re positively not the perfect right here in contrast with different suppliers.
Reporting
If you’d like detailed stories, ActiveCampaign is but once more among the best options for you. Sure, they’re lacking ecommerce stories, however you get just about every part else, from opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes to superior stories like geo-reports, social media stories or hyperlink CTR distribution.
ActiveCampaign stories
AWeber’s stories provide the fundamentals comparable to openers, bounces, clicks, and even a “Domains” stories that can present you the share of various e mail suppliers you despatched a marketing campaign to. In addition they have superior ecommerce and geo monitoring knowledge, however these is usually a bit onerous to seek out. We counted half a dozen clicks to get to the that sort of data, which is annoying.
Winner: one other level for ActiveCampaign. In the event that they provided ecommerce monitoring, they’d be onerous to beat right here.
Deliverability: AWeber vs ActiveCampaign
In fact, some of the vital duties any publication service wants that can assist you with is to really arrive in your reader’s inbox (versus the spam folder or undelivered).
We constantly check of varied suppliers’ deliverability. ActiveCampaign often carry out very nicely, scoring within the nineties, whereas AWeber have been on the decline.
Listed here are the common figures of how they carried out in our final 3 rounds of bi-annual deliverability exams (Mar 2021 – Apr 2022):
| AWEBER | ACTIVECAMPAIGN | |
|---|---|---|
| General Deliverability Charge | 74 | 91 |
Winner: ActiveCampaign wins this one.
Integrations
Each ActiveCampaign and AWeber do nicely right here. You will discover the total checklist for ActiveCampaign integrations right here. Notable ones in each camp embody Fb, WordPress, WooCommerce, Paypal and Zapier.
Winner: we’ll name it a draw. You’ll should seek for the integrations you want and ensure they’re there if they’re actually vital to your workflow.
Assist
We appreciated each ActiveCampaign and AWeber’s assist. Their solutions had been quick and pleasant. Each provide chat and e mail, however AWeber additionally has a cellphone line. Their information base is a bit tougher to trawl for good data, not like ActiveCampaign’s, who additionally provide webinars and foster a very good group with questions and solutions.
ActiveCampaign’s assist pages
Winner: One other tie right here. If you really want cellphone assist, go together with AWeber. However we doubt you’ll must name them up.
Costs
Of the 2, AWeber is the one one to supply a free plan, which incorporates 500 subscribers and three,000 emails a month. The entry tier for ActiveCampaign is the $15 a month provide, which helps you to handle 500 subscribers and three customers. AWeber’s provide for a similar quantity of subscribers is $19.99 a month – not an enormous distinction in worth, however what you get by way of options is sort of totally different.
After that, Lively Marketing campaign’s costs shoot up dramatically. You possibly can go as much as 5000 subscribers for $99 a month vs $49.99 for AWeber.
Winner: AWeber’s entry plan is on par with ActiveCampaign’s. Transferring as much as different tiers, ActiveCampaign’s costs enhance pretty sharply. Nonetheless, their costs appear honest as they provide greater than different publication providers by way of options. AWeber however has a number of cheaper competitors, which gives a lot better worth for cash. We will name it a draw.
By the best way, if you wish to evaluate their costs with different e mail advertising and marketing options, you possibly can examine our worth comparability device.
