MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign: Pricing and Feature Comparison [2026]

This comparison began with a bold number: 19,450.

That’s how many ActiveCampaign users MailerLite claims have switched to its platform. Whether that number is exact or not, it points to a fair question: what would make someone move from one platform to the other?

To answer that, we compared ActiveCampaign and MailerLite across pricing, usability, and key features that matter for effective email marketing. Not to crown a winner, but to help you figure out which one fits the way your business runs.

If you manage straightforward campaigns for a small business or blog, your decision may look very different from a SaaS or eCommerce team running multi-channel automation. Let’s break it down.

TL;DR MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign at a glance

Before we get into the details, here’s the big picture. Use it as a quick reference, or click any category to jump straight to the full breakdown.

The score says ActiveCampaign beats MailerLite. The real question is where it wins and whether those wins actually matter to you – that is what this comparison is here to help you figure out.

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MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign across pricing and key features

Before diving into each category, it’s worth stepping back for a moment and looking at what sets these two platforms apart at their core.

MailerLite prioritizes making email marketing simple and affordable. ActiveCampaign is built around managing customer journeys, with email as one part of a broader strategy that includes CRM and automation.

That contrast shapes nearly every score in this comparison. Let’s see how it plays out in pricing, automation, segmentation, and reporting – starting with cost.

Pricing plans

⭐ MailerLite: 10/10 | ActiveCampaign: 7.4/10

Disclaimer: Pricing changes frequently. These figures are accurate as of February 2026. Always verify final costs on official pricing pages.

Pricing is where the gap between these platforms becomes most visible. Here’s what you can expect to pay as your contact list grows:

MailerLite is less expensive at every tier shown above, and the difference becomes more noticeable as your audience expands.

There’s also an important difference that doesn’t always show up in headline pricing: email limits. MailerLite’s paid plans include unlimited email sends. Once you choose a tier based on your contact count, you can run as many campaigns and automations as you need.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, ties email volume to both your plan and the number of contacts. If you send frequently, you may need to move to a higher tier to avoid hitting limits.

For high-volume senders, this is something to take into account, too.

Ease of use and interface

⭐ MailerLite: 10/10 | ActiveCampaign: 8.8/10

Comparing MailerLite and ActiveCampaign on usability isn’t a battle between easy and complicated. Both platforms are intuitive enough that a non-tech-savvy user can find their way around without much hand-holding.

The real difference is that MailerLite is optimized entirely around simplicity, while ActiveCampaign balances usability with deeper automation and CRM functionality.

As a result, the gap shows up less in whether you can figure things out, and more in how long it takes before everything feels second nature.

MailerLite scores higher across most usability factors, which makes sense given that ease of use is its primary design goal. It is faster to learn and quicker for day-to-day tasks. ActiveCampaign starts slower, with the first month spent understanding how all its functionality pieces fit together. By month three, experienced users tend to feel just as comfortable, but with significantly more capability available to them.

Email builder and templates

MailerLite: 8.6/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.8/10

The email builder is a key part of any email marketing platform, since it’s where most daily campaign work happens. Both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign offer intuitive drag-and-drop editors with flexible layouts, content blocks of various kinds, and solid template libraries, so their scores here are very close.

The difference comes down to how much design control you want versus how quickly you want to move from draft to sent email. Here’s how those differences show up in practice:

MailerLite’s editor is clean and easy to move through. You start from a template, drag blocks from the left sidebar, and adjust content, colors, spacing, links, and other style settings in the right panel. There are also advanced content blocks in the “Special” tab, such as product listings, countdown timers, RSS feeds, surveys, and video embeds.

ActiveCampaign’s email builder lets you start from a ready template and customize it using drag-and-drop blocks. You can adjust layout containers, replace content like text or images, and fine-tune styles from the side panel.

You can also save custom blocks to reuse them across emails and make a block, section, container, or structure conditional by setting rules that determine the content that should appear in an email to contacts on your list.

Marketing automation

MailerLite: 6.5/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9.6/10

Automation is where an email tool becomes a comprehensive marketing system. It determines how much of your communication runs on its own, how detailed your customer journeys can be, and how easily those workflows scale as your business grows.

MailerLite keeps automation practical and easy to set up, covering the core triggers and flows most teams need. ActiveCampaign’s automation, by contrast, is the product itself. Everything else in the platform is built around it, allowing for deeply branched, event-driven workflows.

Here’s how they compare across the main automation factors:

To make the difference between MailerLite and ActiveCampaign automation clearer, let’s look at how their automation templates compare.

MailerLite offers ready-made automation templates for common stages of the customer journey, including welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and re-engagement campaigns. Selecting a template loads a pre-built sequence of triggers and steps that you can edit and customize before activating the automation.

If your needs stop at straightforward sequences, MailerLite will get the job done without much effort.

ActiveCampaign’s automation library goes further. Its templates load multi-step workflows with branching paths, CRM actions, lead-stage triggers, and engagement-based conditions. A single automation can branch, pause, send an SMS, update a deal, and move a contact into an entirely different sequence based on what they do next.

Because automation in ActiveCampaign connects email, SMS, web messaging, and CRM activity within the same workflow, it helps teams coordinate multiple touchpoints within a single customer journey.

One thing worth noting before you assume ActiveCampaign is the better choice by default: more automation complexity also means more setup time and more expertise required to maintain it.

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Contact management

MailerLite: 8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 9.5/10

Contact management determines how precisely your automation and targeting can respond to customer behavior. Both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign handle basic list organization well. The gap opens up when segments need to react dynamically to what contacts actually do.

MailerLite uses a shared list model with groups (tags) and rule-based segments to keep subscriber data organized. ActiveCampaign centers contact management around a unified profile that connects email activity, automation logic, and CRM data in one place. As contacts interact with campaigns, websites, or their data changes in related deals, their records update automatically – and segmentation adjusts in real time.

Here’s how that difference plays out across key areas:

Compared to ActiveCampaign, MailerLite has some limitations in certain aspects. For example, it doesn’t provide a comprehensive tagging system or AI assistance and lacks the insane number of detailed segmentation conditions that ActiveCampaign offers.

Signup forms and landing pages

⭐ MailerLite: 8.6/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.6/10

Signup forms and landing pages are where your business growth begins. They shape the first impression about your brand and determine how smoothly new leads move into your marketing or sales pipeline.

Both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign include built-in tools for capturing leads – no third-party builders required. The difference lies in how those tools connect to the rest of your workflow. MailerLite keeps form and page building simple and quick, while ActiveCampaign ties signups more tightly to automations and CRM workflows.

Here’s how the two platforms compare in their lead-capture toolkits:

MailerLite’s landing page builder feels like a mini website studio made for marketers who want results fast. You start from a polished template, drag ready-made sections onto the page, and can use AI to draft the copy or layout if inspiration runs low.

It includes SEO settings, A/B testing, and analytics, so you can measure page performance without additional tools. For many small teams, that’s enough to run effective lead generation campaigns without technical overhead.

Compared to MailerLite, ActiveCampaign takes a more structured approach. Pages and forms are tightly connected to tags, automations, and CRM records. When someone signs up on your page, they can immediately enter a nurturing flow, be assigned a deal stage, or trigger a follow-up task.

The page you create with ActiveCampaign isn’t just collecting leads; it becomes the starting point of a consolidated customer journey.

Deliverability

MailerLite: 9.8/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 10/10

Deliverability determines whether your emails land in the inbox or disappear into spam. Most of it comes down to how you manage your mailing list, how often you send emails, how relevant your content is, and whether you’ve set up proper authentication. The email platform should provide a stable infrastructure, enforce good sending standards, and give you tools to catch related issues early.

MailerLite and ActiveCampaign both handle deliverability fundamentals well, which is why the scores here are close and both are high.

For most senders, both platforms will deliver strong inbox rates if you’re following good sender reputation practices.

Integrations

MailerLite: 6.4/10 | ActiveCampaign: ⭐ 9/10

When platforms start counting integrations in the hundreds, the numbers can sound impressive. In reality, most teams stick to a small core stack: their website or eCommerce platform, CRM system, accounting software, analytics tools, and a few automation connectors.

Both MailerLite and ActiveCampaign cover those essentials well. What really matters is how well the platform slots into your setup when it grows more complex. If you’re looking for in-depth CRM coordination, advanced automation triggers, or specialized data syncing, that’s where things get interesting.

If your stack includes a store, a CRM system, and basic reporting, either platform will connect the dots. You’re unlikely to hit limitations quickly.

But when your workflows span departments, ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM and larger integration catalog make it way easier to sync up marketing and sales without integrating as many external tools. That flexibility matters even more as teams and operations expand.

AI features

MailerLite: 5/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.9/10

AI in email marketing can mean very different things. On some platforms, it helps you write faster. On others, it shapes how you build campaigns, who receives them, and when they are sent.

MailerLite applies AI mainly to content creation, helping you draft subject lines and email copy inside the editor. ActiveCampaign embeds AI into emails, automation, contact management and segmentation, deals, reporting, and websites.

Here’s how their AI capabilities compare in practice:

The score gap reflects how deeply AI is integrated into each platform.

MailerLite’s AI features help teams draft campaigns more efficiently, while ActiveCampaign applies AI more broadly. You can use its Active Intelligence to make decisions you might not have had the data or time to make manually, like which leads to reach, which contacts are close to converting, or which segments are worth targeting.

Reporting and analytics

MailerLite: 6.4/10 | ⭐ ActiveCampaign: 8.4/10

Reporting rarely sells a platform on its own, yet it plays a crucial role in how confidently you make decisions. Clear analytics help you understand what’s effective, where performance drops, and how automation impacts revenue over time.

Here’s how MailerLite and ActiveCampaign analytics capabilities compare:

MailerLite provides clean, accessible performance tracking. You can quickly see open rates, click behavior, location-based information, automation performance, and basic eCommerce results if your store is connected.

ActiveCampaign goes the extra mile, offering deeper insights into your campaign and automation performance, contact behavior, and CRM and eCommerce activity. It also filters out bot-generated email opens and clicks from your reports, so you get an accurate picture of your user engagement rates. On top of that, the platform provides tailored suggestions on actions you can take to grow your business, like segmenting contacts in a specific way to increase customer loyalty or purchase conversion.

Customer support

⭐ MailerLite: 7.3/10 | ActiveCampaign: 6.8/10

Customer support tends to stay unnoticed while everything runs smoothly, and suddenly becomes important the moment something doesn’t. When settings or configurations are confusing, what matters most is response time, support channel and agent availability, and clear documentation.

Let’s compare the support options available at MailerLite versus ActiveCampaign:

The score gap comes down to two factors: MailerLite offers multilingual support that ActiveCampaign simply does not, and it also holds a significantly higher rating based on verified user reviews (4.8/5 vs 4.4/5).

We noted a similar pattern in the MailerLite vs Klaviyo comparison: the more complex and feature-rich the software becomes, the more demanding its support needs tend to be. A platform that lets you build multi-channel, CRM-driven automations will naturally generate harder support questions, which may influence user ratings.

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Your decision checklist

You’ve walked through the full MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign comparison. Now it’s time to translate all those features into a real-world choice. Use the checklist below to see which side you land on.

If one column clearly fits the way you run your marketing, that’s probably the right choice. You don’t need every row to match – just pay attention to what matters most for your business.

Final verdict and recommendations

⚖️ Final scores: MailerLite – 8.7/10 | ActiveCampaign – 9.2/10

So, back to those 19,450 switchers according to MailerLite statements. Whether or not that number is real, our comparison shows why it’s believable – in either direction.

There are solid reasons a team might move from ActiveCampaign to MailerLite: a cleaner interface, simpler workflows, lower costs, and faster setup. And there are equally valid reasons to move the other way: deeper automation and segmentation, a built-in CRM system, and AI-powered decision-making tools.

Basically, these platforms aren’t competing for the same users and aim at solving different problems for different stages of growth.

The safest way to decide is to test both platforms with a real workflow – build an automation, send a campaign, segment your audience, and see which one fits your process more naturally.

And remember, these aren’t your only options. If neither feels like a perfect fit, there are alternative solutions worth exploring, from budget-friendly tools like MailerLite to automation-heavy platforms like ActiveCampaign.