11 min read

Our verdict

ActiveCampaign

Best for: Plus at $49 is the real entry plan for anyone buying ActiveCampaign for automation, because Starter's five-action ceiling stops a basic welcome sequence. Pro at $79 earns its extra when you are optimising rather than building — predictive sending, conditional content, attribution and A/B testing on automations are measurement tools, and they are wasted until there is something to measure. Enterprise is an SSO and governance purchase.

Overall score

7.9/ 10

What we liked

Plus removes the automation action cap entirely, which is the single biggest jump between any two tiers
Pro's predictive sending picks a send time per contact from their own engagement history, which is genuinely hard to replicate by hand
Pro includes A/B testing on automations rather than only on campaigns, so you can test a whole journey instead of a subject line
Enterprise adds SSO, custom objects and HIPAA support for organisations that need them
Every tier above Starter allows unlimited automations, so the limit is depth rather than count

What to watch

Starter's five actions per automation makes the cheapest plan unsuitable for the product's main use, which is not obvious from the pricing page
Landing pages start on Plus, not Starter, so a $15 plan cannot build a lead-capture page
Conditional content and predictive sending require Pro, which doubles the price from Plus at some contact bands
Pipelines and Sales Engagement are add-ons on every tier that offers them, so no plan includes the full sales stack
Custom reporting is an add-on on Plus and Pro and only bundled at Enterprise

PriceAt 1,000 contacts: Starter $15 · Plus $49 · Pro $79 · Enterprise $145

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ActiveCampaign plans: Starter vs Plus vs Pro

Starter caps automations at five actions. Plus removes that and adds landing pages. Pro adds predictive sending and attribution. Which one your job needs.

By Liam O'Connor · Workplace Software Writer

17 October 2026

How we pay for this

We buy the hardware and pay for the subscriptions we write about. Claim a deal through our link and we may earn a commission — our readers sometimes get a discount or a freebie out of it too, but it never pushes the price up, and it never changes what the review says.

The decision between ActiveCampaign's plans comes down to two limits, and neither is prominent on the pricing page: Starter caps an automation at five actions, and predictive features start at Pro. Everything else is detail.

This works through what each tier actually unlocks and which job needs it.

The four tiers side by side

What you get	Starter $15	Plus $49	Pro $79	Enterprise $145
Actions per automation	5	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Users	1	1	3	5
Monthly send allowance	10× contacts	10×	12×	15×
Landing pages	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Predictive sending	No	No	Yes	Yes
Conditional content	No	No	Yes	Yes
Attribution and conversion tracking	No	No	Yes	Yes
A/B testing on automations	No	No	Yes	Yes
SSO and custom objects	No	No	No	Yes
Custom reporting	No	Add-on	Add-on	Included
Pipelines / Sales Engagement	No	Add-on	Add-on	Add-on

Starter, and the five-action problem

At $15 a month for 1,000 contacts, Starter looks like the obvious place to begin. It is the right plan for a narrower job than most buyers have in mind.

Count the actions in a basic welcome sequence: send email one, wait three days, send email two, apply a tag, wait, send email three. That is six, and the ceiling is five. A single conditional branch costs an action too.

So Starter works for broadcasts, a simple autoresponder and light tagging. It does not work for the behaviour-triggered journeys ActiveCampaign is actually known for, and it has no landing pages. If those are why you are buying, you are buying Plus.

Where Starter is genuinely the right answer: you want ActiveCampaign's segmentation and deliverability for a newsletter, with one short automation behind a signup form, and you expect to stay there. That is a real use and it is cheaper here than at most competitors.

Plus, which is the real entry plan

$49 at 1,000 contacts removes the action cap entirely and adds landing pages. That is the jump that turns the product into what the marketing describes.

What you can build at Plus: multi-step journeys with conditions and branches, lead scoring that changes what happens next, segmentation on site behaviour, a landing page that feeds an automation, and integrations driving all of it.

What you cannot: test one version of a journey against another, serve different content inside one email based on who is reading it, or see which campaign produced a conversion. Those are Pro features, and the common thread is that they are all about measuring and optimising rather than building.

For most small businesses, Plus is where to start and where to stay for a while. It is also where the pipelines add-on becomes available if sales follow-up matters.

Pro, and when measurement is worth $30 a month

Pro at $79 adds four things, and they share a character.

Predictive sending picks an individual send time for each contact based on when they have engaged before. That is a genuinely hard thing to do by hand and it needs enough engagement history to mean anything.
Conditional content changes blocks inside one email based on contact attributes, so one send covers several audiences.
Attribution and conversion tracking connects marketing activity to revenue, which is the thing that answers "is this working".
A/B testing on automations, not just campaigns — you can run two versions of a whole journey.

The honest test for whether Pro is worth it: are you currently running enough volume that a 10% improvement is worth more than $30 a month, and do you have someone who will act on the numbers? If the automations were built last month and nobody has looked at them since, Pro buys reports nobody reads.

The other reason to take Pro is the user count — three against one on Plus. A second marketer needing their own login is a real constraint on the lower tiers.

Enterprise, which is a governance purchase

$145 at 1,000 contacts, five users, and the things organisations rather than businesses need: single sign-on, custom objects for records that are not contacts or deals, HIPAA support for eligible healthcare organisations, and custom reporting included rather than added.

Nobody buys Enterprise for marketing features. It is bought when IT requires SSO, when compliance requires a documented arrangement, or when the data model genuinely needs objects beyond contacts and deals. If none of those apply, Pro does the marketing work.

The upgrade path in practice

Most accounts follow the same route, and knowing it saves a month of paying twice.

People start on Starter because of the price, hit the five-action wall inside a fortnight, and move to Plus. They stay on Plus for a year or more. They move to Pro when somebody starts asking which campaigns produce revenue, or when a second person needs a login.

If you already know automation is the point, skip the first step. The trial exposes roughly Pro-level functionality for 14 days, so build the automation you actually intend to run during it — that tells you which tier you need before any money changes hands.

What none of the plans include

Worth restating because the tier table does not show it: pipelines and Sales Engagement are enhanced CRM add-ons at every level that offers them, SMS needs Plus or above plus its own add-on with credits that do not roll over, and transactional email through Postmark is a separate product.

Price the add-ons you will actually use alongside the plan. Our pricing breakdown works through all of them, and the full review covers whether the depth is worth the complexity for your business at all.