ActiveCampaign vs Nutshell

ActiveCampaign and Nutshell are two CRM platforms designed to enhance customer relationships and streamline outreach, each with a unique focus. ActiveCampaign combines CRM with powerful marketing automation, enabling teams to manage customer interactions across email, SMS, and more, making it ideal for businesses focused on multi-channel engagement. Nutshell, by contrast, integrates CRM with built-in email marketing and sales automation, providing a straightforward solution for managing contacts, sales pipelines, and campaigns. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you decide which CRM best fits your needs. Or, if folk might be a more flexible alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

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. While it isn't a traditional CRM, it has a CRM and sales automation feature alongside its main marketing focussed product.

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.
• Minor CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using sales automation.
  

What is Nutshell?

Nutshell is an all-in-one CRM specifically designed to help B2B teams close more deals. It combines contact management, pipeline tracking, and email marketing tools to support every stage of the sales process, from lead generation to deal closure. With features like customizable pipelines, activity tracking, and seamless integration options, Nutshell also enables sales teams to stay organized, collaborate, and drive results—all within a user-friendly platform tailored for B2B needs.

Key features of Nutshell

• Contact management: Centralizes customer information and tracks communication history to keep teams organized and informed.
• Pipeline management: Customizable sales pipelines to track leads and deals through every stage of the sales process.
• Email marketing: Built-in email campaign tools that enable targeted outreach and engagement with prospects and customers.
• Activity tracking: Logs all interactions, including calls, emails, and meetings, allowing teams to stay on top of follow-ups and engagement.
• Reporting and analytics: Provides insights into sales performance, forecasting, and team activity, helping to make data-driven decisions.

ActiveCampaign vs. Nutshell: 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. Nutshell’s pipeline management feature provides tools for tracking leads and deals through different stages using various views, including board, list, map, and chart views. The pipeline is customizable, allowing users to organize and prioritize leads according to their workflow needs.

2. Ease of use

ActiveCampaign features a user-friendly interface with a strong focus on marketing, offering intuitive navigation and a straightforward setup process. However, its CRM functionality is secondary, which can lead to a steep learning curve for users. In contrast, Nutshell centers on its all-in-one CRM, providing a streamlined experience tailored for sales teams to manage leads and track sales activities efficiently while remaining user-friendly.

3. Contact enrichment

ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature, which may limit its ability to automatically gather additional contact information from external sources. Nutshell’s contact enrichment feature is focused on minimizing manual data entry by allowing users to import contacts, emails, and calendar events from various sources.

4. Outreach

ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities are functional, offering email, SMS, and some social media tools for multi-channel communication. It allows businesses to segment their audiences and send personalized messages, while automations help manage follow-ups across different channels. However, the SMS functionality is quite basic. Nutshell’s outreach feature includes built-in email marketing and automation capabilities, allowing users to create and send email campaigns directly within the platform. This feature enables teams to manage targeted outreach and follow-up sequences as part of their sales process, providing basic email tracking and engagement metrics to assess campaign effectiveness.

5. Automation

ActiveCampaign's automation features are marketing focussed. Allowing users to create workflows that automate tasks like sending emails, updating contact records, and triggering follow-up actions based on predefined conditions. These workflows can be set up using a visual drag-and-drop builder, and they support a range of triggers, such as contact behavior, form submissions, or sales pipeline changes. Nutshell’s automation features are focused on streamlining basic sales and marketing tasks. Its automation tools support activities like sending follow-up emails, managing task reminders, and progressing deals through pipeline stages. Nutshell also offers email marketing automation, allowing users to set up drip campaigns and manage customer engagement within the platform.

6. Integration

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of integrations with over 900 third-party applications, allowing users to connect the platform with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. Similarly, Nutshell offers integrations with a range of popular tools to enhance its functionality and streamline workflows. It connects with major productivity platforms like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack, allowing users to manage emails, calendars, and team communication within their existing tools.

7. Artificial Intelligence

ActiveCampaign integrates AI features to enhance various aspects of its platform, such as email marketing and automation. The AI-powered tools include predictive sending, which analyzes contact behavior to suggest the best time to send emails, and predictive content, which helps in optimizing subject lines and messaging. Nutshell’s AI integration offers several tools to enhance team productivity and streamline workflows. Key AI-driven features include timeline summarization, which helps users quickly sort through historical records by summarizing past interactions and activities.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

Nutshell prices

Nutshell offers several feature-rich plans tailored to different goals and team sizes.

• Foundation: $16 per user, per month.
• Pro: $42 per user, per month.
• Power AI: $52 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: $67 per user, per month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to ActiveCampaign and Nutshell

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. What makes folk unique is its ability to scale with you as an all-in-one CRM that can be used by solopreneurs, small to mid-sized teams and large enterprises. folk also supports 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.

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. Nutshell: What's the Verdict?

From the comparison between ActiveCampaign and Nutshell, it's apparent that both platforms offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. ActiveCampaign excels in marketing automation, making it ideal for businesses focused on personalized communication. Nutshell, on the other hand, is a comprehensive CRM designed for B2B sales teams, offering strong pipeline management and collaboration tools. 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.