It’s nearly unfair to pit one in every of our prime and lowest rated options towards one another. We’ve written extensively about how ActiveCampaign is without doubt one of the strongest e-newsletter instruments you should use for your online business because of their mastery of automations. In the meantime, AWeber underwhelmed us with their lack of options and typically complicated editor.
Nevertheless, it’s value going into element about what every platform presents. Who is aware of, you may truly 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 presents a wonderful consumer expertise. Which is humorous as a result of they’ve a ton of options, and it normally means extra complexity. However no complaints right here: managing lists and subscribers is each versatile, highly effective, and simple to do. One other instance of wonderful UX is when creating campaigns: you may test earlier and subsequent steps, which makes the method quick and simple to assessment.
ActiveCampaign’s marketing campaign navigation system
AWeber, then again, generally is a bit complicated. For 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 e-newsletter and say “Campaigns” when speaking about e mail automations. Your principal selector is the subscriber listing, which makes it more durable to go to the campaigns and automations. And at last, they lack a visible, workflow-based navigation menu like ActiveCampaign’s.
AWeber’s e-newsletter editor – lacking a transparent navigation for the creation course of
Winner: Weirdly sufficient, though ActiveCampaign is a a lot highly effective instrument and comes with extra choices, it’s nonetheless simpler to make use of than AWeber.
Design and Flexibility
ActiveCampaign presents 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 also code in HTML in the event you’re assured with that.
AWeber provides you a number of choices out of the field, with 150 templates accessible in varied coloration schemes. Nevertheless, the editor feels a bit clunky and missing in flexibility. Like ActiveCampaign, HTML can also be accessible.
AWeber’s templates
Winner: Based mostly on the variety of templates alone, AWeber would win this spherical. However we’d somewhat 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 pretty much as good as they get. Their system permits you to monitor (registered) guests in your web site and to adapt e mail advertising and marketing packages to their behaviour and pursuits. For instance, if a registered consumer in your cooking weblog visits a web page about cheesecake, you may ship an automatic e mail with totally different recipes. Or you can ask them to price the recipes after three days. The probabilities are limitless. What’s extra, creating automations is finished by means of visible workflows, each intuitive and simple to make use of.
ActiveCampaign’s visible automation workflow
AWeber’s automations (confusingly referred to as Campaigns) are a brand new addition and nonetheless a beta function on the time of writing. You’ll be able to apply tags to customers once they subscribe to your listing (for instance: “excited about cheesecakes”) and you’ll section your mailing lists accordingly. In brief, it’s not probably the most superior system there’s.
Winner: ActiveCampaign takes the (cheese)cake right here, with top-of-the-line automation techniques we’ve examined. AWeber does have automations however they’re nowhere close to as highly effective.
Registration varieties
You’ll be able to create and customise ActiveCampaign’s registration varieties with a good quantity of flexibility, together with all of the fields you want. Word that in the event you’re on the lower cost plan, they are going to maintain their branding on the shape. The opposite benefit of the pricier Skilled and Enterprise plans are extra kind sorts: on prime of inline, you additionally get floating containers, modal pop-ups and floating bars.
AWeber kind editor
AWeber’s varieties offer you a number of toys to play with, together with fields in fact, 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 straightforward to arrange.
Winner: You’ll be able to decide your individual winner right here; AWeber’s varieties are extra versatile, and in the event you want particular options like audio varieties, then they’re nice. If you need ease of use and no frills, go for ActiveCampaign.
Spam & design testing
If you wish to be certain that your emails attain subscribers, you should use ActiveCampaign’s cross / fail check. It’s not detailed, although, so don’t count on 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 on…). It’s a paid service although….
…however we’ll nonetheless take it over AWeber, who supply nothing in any respect on this class.
Winner: Clearly, ActiveCampaign. However they’re undoubtedly not one of the best right here in contrast with different suppliers.
Reporting
If you need detailed experiences, ActiveCampaign is but once more top-of-the-line options for you. Sure, they’re lacking ecommerce experiences, however you get just about every part else, from opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes to superior experiences like geo-reports, social media experiences or hyperlink CTR distribution.
ActiveCampaign experiences
AWeber’s experiences provide the fundamentals resembling openers, bounces, clicks, and even a “Domains” experiences that may 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 generally is a bit laborious 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 supplied ecommerce monitoring, they’d be laborious to beat right here.
Deliverability: AWeber vs ActiveCampaign
In fact, probably the most essential duties any e-newsletter service wants that can assist you with is to truly arrive in your reader’s inbox (versus the spam folder or undelivered).
We constantly check of varied suppliers’ deliverability. ActiveCampaign normally carry out very properly, scoring within the nineties, whereas AWeber have been on the decline.
Listed below 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 | |
|---|---|---|
| Total Deliverability Charge | 74 | 91 |
Winner: ActiveCampaign wins this one.
Integrations
Each ActiveCampaign and AWeber do properly right here. Yow will discover the complete listing for ActiveCampaign integrations right here. Notable ones in each camp embrace 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 essential to your workflow.
Assist
We favored each ActiveCampaign and AWeber’s assist. Their solutions had been quick and pleasant. Each supply chat and e mail, however AWeber additionally has a telephone line. Their information base is a bit more durable to trawl for good data, in contrast to ActiveCampaign’s, who additionally supply webinars and foster a very good neighborhood with questions and solutions.
ActiveCampaign’s assist pages
Winner: One other tie right here. If you really want telephone assist, go along with AWeber. However we doubt you’ll have to 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 supply, which helps you to handle 500 subscribers and three customers. AWeber’s supply for a similar quantity of subscribers is $19.99 a month – not a giant distinction in worth, however what you get when it comes to options is kind of totally different.
After that, Lively Marketing campaign’s costs shoot up dramatically. You’ll be able to 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. Nevertheless, their costs appear honest as they provide greater than different e-newsletter companies when it comes to options. AWeber then again has numerous cheaper competitors, which presents a lot better worth for cash. We’ll name it a draw.
By the way in which, if you wish to evaluate their costs with different e mail advertising and marketing options, you may test our worth comparability instrument.
