ActiveCampaign vs Brevo

Looking for a CRM? ActiveCampaign and Brevo are two popular platforms designed to enhance customer engagement and marketing efforts. ActiveCampaign focuses on advanced email automation and personalized customer journeys, making it ideal for businesses that rely on targeted, automated outreach. Brevo, on the other hand, provides a broader range of tools, including SMS, WhatsApp, and CRM capabilities, aimed at supporting multi-channel engagement and customer relationship management. In this blog post, we will examine key features, ease of use, pricing, and more. However, if you’re looking for a well-rounded solution that balances user-friendly features with enhanced contact management, folk CRM might just be the better alternative.

What is ActiveCampaign?

Active Campaign is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer interactions and drive growth through personalized and automated communication.

Key features of ActiveCampaign

• Email marketing: Create personalized email campaigns with drag-and-drop templates, advanced segmentation, and automated sequences to engage your audience effectively.
• Marketing automation: Automate workflows for email, SMS, and site messages, based on user behavior and custom triggers, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
• Sales automation: Integrates a CRM with automation tools to streamline the sales process, track leads, manage deals, and automate follow-ups.
• CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using automation.
  

What is Brevo?

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.

Key features of Brevo

• Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
• Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
• Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
• Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
• Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.

ActiveCampaign vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

ActiveCampaign's sales pipeline management feature is integrated with its CRM, enabling businesses to streamline their sales processes. It allows users to visually manage deals through customizable pipelines, automate tasks like follow-ups, and track every stage of the sales journey. Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks.

2. Ease of use

ActiveCampaign and Brevo both offer user-friendly interfaces, but ActiveCampaign's platform is often praised for its intuitive design, making it easier for users to navigate and manage campaigns. Brevo, on the other hand, provides a straightforward setup process, which is beneficial for users new to CRM systems. However, they're both a marketing automation-first focused product, with some CRM features.

3. Contact enrichment

ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature, which might limit its ability to automatically gather additional information about contacts. Whereas Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.

4. Outreach

Outreach is front of mind for both ActiveCampaign and Brevo. ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities include email, SMS, and some social media tools, allowing for multi-channel communication. Brevo focuses on email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing, offering a cohesive outreach strategy with automation options for optimal message timing based on customer behavior.

5. Automation

ActiveCampaign's automation features include a visual drag-and-drop builder for workflows that automate tasks based on triggers like contact behavior. Brevo offers automation across its platforms, including marketing and sales, with tools for automated campaigns and task management, supported by AI for personalization.

6. Integration

ActiveCampaign provides extensive integration options with over 900 third-party applications, facilitating connections with popular tools such as Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms. This allows businesses to easily sync data across systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing the functionality of their existing tech stack.

7. Artificial intelligence

ActiveCampaign integrates AI for predictive sending and content optimization, enhancing email marketing. Brevo's AI tools focus on personalizing and optimizing email content to boost engagement.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both ActiveCampaign and Brevo.

ActiveCampaign prices

ActiveCampaign's price plans are based on the number of contacts you have. The following is based on a plan for 1,000 contacts.

• Starter: Starting from $15/month.
• Plus: Starting from $49/month.
• Pro: Starting from $79/month.
• Enterprise: Starting from $145/month.

Brevo  prices

Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month. And, the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.

• Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
• Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to ActiveCampaign and Brevo

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, investment relations and more.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
• Outreach: folk’s outreach feature is designed to simplify and streamline communication efforts, especially for relationship-focused teams. It enables users to organize and segment contacts, making it easier to send personalized messages to specific groups. Folk’s email outreach includes tracking and scheduling options, allowing users to monitor engagement and automate follow-ups.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

ActiveCampaign vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?

From our in-depth comparison, it's apparent that both ActiveCampaign and Brevo offer robust tools for managing customer relationships and marketing automation. ActiveCampaign shines with its advanced automation capabilities, while Brevo provides a simple, user-friendly interface. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.