Battle of the Titans: Constant Contact or ActiveCampaign—The Ultimate 2025 Showdown

Using email marketing platforms, companies can automate their campaigns while keeping a personal touch.

With a wide array of features designed to boost effectiveness, selecting the right email marketing service can be a difficult choice. Being able to compare two leading options side by side helps bring clarity to this decision-making process.

In this article, I’ll compare Constant Contact vs. ActiveCampaign, two of the most popular email marketing tools available today.

By the end, you should have a clear understanding of which platform suits your business needs best.

Let’s dive into the details.

Constant Contact has been a staple in the industry for years, offering all the essential features expected from a quality email marketing service. It’s flexible enough to let users upgrade or downgrade their plans based on evolving needs, so you only pay for what you use.

You can design mobile-friendly emails that look great on smartphones, ensuring your message reaches customers even when they’re on the move.

You can also adjust your plan at any time, providing flexibility as your business grows or changes.

This allows businesses to customize their plan as needed, ensuring they only pay for the features they require.

The platform offers mobile-optimized email templates that ensure your messages are effectively displayed on any device, increasing engagement and readability.

An included sales CRM system that comes with ActiveCampaign helps its users better understand their marketing efforts and segment their customers, enabling more targeted and effective email campaigns. This system helps improve open and click-through rates, encouraging more customer actions and boosting overall campaign success.

The platform also features an anti-spam policy that ensures your emails reach inboxes rather than spam folders, which is especially important for time-sensitive campaigns. Moreover, it offers multiple integrations that can streamline your marketing processes, including chatbot automation triggered by specific user actions.

Another advantage of ActiveCampaign over Constant Contact is its capability to build sophisticated marketing automation workflows using a visual interface, making it easier for users to create complex sequences without coding knowledge. Additionally, SMS marketing options allow for more personal communication with your audience.

Now that we’ve summarized each platform, let’s compare their features more closely to see which one better fits your needs.

Managing your email list with Constant Contact is quite straightforward, making it easy to organize and keep track of your contacts.

To effectively manage your contacts, you can add multiple contacts at the same time by copying and pasting, or import contact lists from sources like Google Sheets, Excel, and others. This helps keep your contact list current and organized. Many platforms also integrate with e-commerce services, allowing you to import contacts from platforms such as WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and more.

Get started with Constant Contact for streamlined contact management and easy importing options.

In addition, ActiveCampaign offers a user-friendly way to import and manage contacts. It features tools for cleaning your list to ensure all contacts are genuine, which is vital for high email deliverability. You can segment your contacts based on various criteria like location or purchase history, enabling targeted email campaigns that can improve open and click-through rates. Like Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign supports numerous integrations to import contacts from platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

Email design and templates are crucial for creating engaging campaigns. Out of the box, Constant Contact provides up to 250 customizable templates. Recently, a feature called Brand Templates was added, which uses artificial intelligence to scan your website and generate a personalized template based on your site’s colors and design. This simplifies crafting a brand-consistent email.

ActiveCampaign offers over 150 templates, and it allows complete customization through code, giving you full control over the look and feel of your emails. This flexibility makes ActiveCampaign a better choice if you prefer a highly tailored design experience.

Creating email campaigns is straightforward on both platforms. Constant Contact provides a single interface to manage emails, social media posts, landing pages, and other promotional tools. On the other hand, ActiveCampaign categorizes campaigns into six types: standard, auto-responder, RSS-triggered, split testing, automated, and date-based campaigns. This clear structure makes it easier to choose the right campaign type for your needs. For example, date-based campaigns are perfect for scheduled promotions like sales or webinars.Overall, ActiveCampaign’s detailed categorization provides a slight advantage in managing different campaign strategies.

Building your emails is made simple with drag-and-drop editors. Constant Contact features a user-friendly layout that allows you to add images, text, and links easily, without coding knowledge. It also offers predefined blocks like polls, coupons, and donation forms to enhance your emails. ActiveCampaign offers similar features, and although it does not support free mail providers, this restriction helps improve the delivery rate by reducing spam filtering risks.

Automation is a key element in modern email marketing. Both platforms support automation workflows, which allow you to set up tasks that run automatically based on triggers or schedules, saving you time and increasing efficiency. For more details on the top tools for marketing automation in 2025, you can explore additional resources.

Overall, these tools offer powerful features for contact management, email design, campaign creation, and automation, helping you to streamline your email marketing efforts effectively.Users can choose between two main types of automation features: single-step and multi-step automation. Single-step automation covers basic templates such as welcome emails, birthday messages, and anniversary notifications. This option is ideal for those looking to automate their email marketing without needing complex setups, especially small businesses or individual entrepreneurs. However, larger organizations might find this approach too limited for their needs.

For more advanced workflows, Constant Contact offers multi-step automation tools that activate when a specific action occurs. For example, if a contact opens an email, this can trigger an automated follow-up message. This setup is particularly useful for sales teams aiming to nurture leads and increase conversions without constant manual effort. Triggers can include actions like clicking a link within an email or making a first purchase.

One drawback of Constant Contact’s automation system is that it lacks a visual interface, meaning users must create workflows through a step-by-step process, which can be time-consuming and less intuitive. In comparison, ActiveCampaign excels in automation capabilities, offering a vast library of over 100 pre-designed templates suitable for various purposes like e-commerce, lead generation, and customer engagement, helping users get started quickly. Additionally, users can craft custom automation workflows from scratch using an easy-to-use, user-friendly automation builder.

When it comes to reporting, Constant Contact provides basic analytics such as email delivery rates, bounces, and unsubscribes, which are standard across most email marketing platforms. ActiveCampaign, however, enhances this with a broader array of analytics to help optimize campaigns. It also integrates with a CRM system that allows you to assess sales performance and track revenue generated from email campaigns. With integrations supporting e-commerce platforms, you can gain more detailed insights into where your sales originate and how much revenue each email generates, enabling data-driven decision making.

Regarding email deliverability, both Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign implement DKIM authentication measures. This method encrypts emails to prevent them from being marked as spam, aligning with best practices deployed by top-tier email service providers to ensure your messages reach your audience’s inboxes effectively.

Both platforms play a crucial role in ensuring your emails reach your subscribers’ main inboxes. They both have strong policies against spam to protect recipient inboxes and maintain their reputation. To stay compliant, you need to focus on sending high-quality, relevant content rather than trying to oversell or spam your contacts. Constant Contact is more strict in this regard, limiting only one out of every 1,000 emails to be marked as spam. If this threshold is exceeded, their team will review your account to verify if spam has been sent.

ActiveCampaign is slightly more lenient but still firmly opposes spam. They have a similar policy where too many spam complaints will trigger an account review. When it comes to affiliate marketing, Constant Contact does not allow emails containing affiliate links or promotions, positioning itself as anti-affiliate marketing. In contrast, ActiveCampaign permits sending emails with affiliate marketing content, but only in specific instances where the product is highly relevant to the email’s main content. This means you can’t promote affiliate products indiscriminately; the relevance is key.

Another noteworthy feature is ActiveCampaign’s option to buy a dedicated I.P. address, which can significantly improve your email deliverability. A dedicated I.P. address is solely used by your account, reducing the risk of blacklisting due to another user’s behavior. This option costs extra each month but can be a vital investment if email marketing is central to your business. Constant Contact, however, does not offer this feature.

Split testing capabilities are quite limited in Constant Contact. You can only test different subject lines across segments of your list. This restriction means you cannot experiment with other elements like content, call-to-action buttons, or layouts. ActiveCampaign allows you to test up to five different components of your email, such as subject lines, images, or layout variations. This extensive testing ability makes it easier to discover the most effective email strategies for your audience. While setting up these tests can be time-consuming since you need multiple versions, investing this effort can be highly worthwhile if email performance directly impacts your business growth.

Creating effective landing pages is a critical part of email marketing, and a good landing page builder can save you both time and money. Instead of paying for separate software or hiring a designer, you can use the built-in tools to craft landing pages that capture leads or promote products. Constant Contact offers an easy-to-use landing page creation feature, allowing you to quickly design pages without much hassle.

The process is simple, enabling you to set up a landing page in just a few minutes. Additionally, you can integrate Facebook lead ads to automatically collect leads from your Facebook campaigns and send them directly into your Constant Contact account, streamlining your lead generation efforts. This integration enhances the overall efficiency of your marketing funnel and helps maximize your ROI from advertising campaigns.

Get started with ActiveCampaign.

The main limitation with this approach is that your design options are quite restricted—you can only change the background color and font styles. If you desire more flexibility in customizing your landing pages, it’s a good idea to use dedicated landing page software alongside Constant Contact. ActiveCampaign offers a landing page builder that allows you to craft sign-up forms easily. While this feature isn’t available in all plans, if your subscription supports it, you can select from up to 50 professionally designed templates. These templates are visually appealing and look very polished. Using drag-and-drop tools and multiple content blocks, you can assemble a customized landing page tailor-made for your business in just a few minutes.

Constant Contact offers a basic plan named Core, priced at $9.99 per month. The Plus plan starts at $45 monthly and provides features like conversion tracking, automated email campaigns, and various tools to grow your mailing list. For businesses requiring an integrated CRM system, the Sales Accelerator plan begins at $449 per month.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing is structured more gradually, making it suitable for small to larger businesses. The Lite plan costs $29 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. The Plus plan is priced at $49 monthly, and the Professional plan starts at $149 per month, also accommodating up to 1,000 contacts. Pricing increases with larger contact lists. For more advanced needs, there’s an Enterprise plan, for which you’d need to contact their sales team for a quote. Both platforms offer free trials, allowing you to explore their features without commitment to determine which best fits your needs.

Constant Contact’s customer support hours vary depending on your location. In the U.S. and Canada, support is available weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time. You can also reach support via phone, Twitter, or their community forums. ActiveCampaign offers live chat support from Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. Central Standard Time, and on Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST. Customers on plans like Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise have access to both live and email support, while Enterprise customers also benefit from phone support. Additionally, ActiveCampaign provides extensive resources, including a comprehensive knowledge base and various training opportunities to help users maximize the platform’s potential.

Many email marketing platforms are designed with simplicity in mind, making them suitable for newcomers. You don’t need technical skills or prior experience to start building your email campaigns effectively.

A user-friendly email editor that enables you to craft attractive, mobile-responsive emails is vital. Features like tutorials, training materials, phone support, and live chat are particularly helpful, especially if you’re new to email marketing. Lead scoring and automation tools are also valuable because they can automate routine tasks and save you significant time. Additionally, real-time reporting features are essential for monitoring your campaign’s performance effectively.

Popular alternatives such as GetResponse, Sendinblue, ConvertKit, and Drip offer comprehensive digital marketing solutions that extend beyond email to include broader online marketing strategies.

Absolutely. Zapier can be used to create customized workflows that integrate with your email marketing software, automating many repetitive tasks. For instance, if you use WordPress, Zapier can automatically send a new blog post to your email list. It can also trigger pop-up notifications for website actions like newsletter sign-ups or purchases, streamlining your marketing efforts.

Choosing between ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact depends on your needs; both are excellent options for email marketing. However, considering all key factors, ActiveCampaign stands out as the superior choice. It offers all essential features, delivers high overall inbox placement success, and remains user-friendly, making it a top contender in the current email marketing landscape. Its popularity is no surprise due to its ease of use and robust functionality.

For those ready to start, you can explore ActiveCampaign at this link. If you’re curious about Constant Contact and want to see if it fits your business, there are plenty of reviews and comparisons available. Further information on StepThroughThePortal.com includes comparisons like Constant Contact versus Mailchimp and alternative platforms that might suit your needs better.

Additionally, if you’re interested in leveraging cold email strategies for business growth, check out my guide on the best cold email software of 2025. It can help you connect with potential customers efficiently without breaking the bank.