ActiveCampaign vs Pipeliner CRM

Looking for a CRM? ActiveCampaign and Pipeliner CRM are two popular platforms designed to help businesses manage customer relationships and streamline workflows. ActiveCampaign focuses on combining email marketing, sales automation, and customer experience tools, making it ideal for businesses seeking a unified platform for engagement. Pipeliner CRM, on the other hand, offers a visually driven approach to sales management, with customizable pipelines and robust analytics for tracking performance. In this blog post, we’ll compare their features, pricing, and ease of use to help you decide which fits your needs better. We'll also explore how folk might just be a 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 Pipeliner CRM?

Pipeliner is an AI-powered sales CRM designed for small, mid-sized, and enterprise organizations, focusing on simplicity and scalability. It offers a visual approach to sales management, allowing teams to track pipelines, forecast outcomes, and automate workflows.

Key features of Pipeliner CRM

• Sales force automation: Automates routine sales tasks, helping teams focus on selling while ensuring consistency across workflows.
• Key account management: Provides tools to manage and track relationships with high-value clients, ensuring personalized attention and strategy.
• Communications and activities tracking: Logs and organizes all interactions, calls, and emails, providing a centralized view of customer communication.
• Reporting engine: Offers customizable reports and dashboards to deliver insights into sales performance and team productivity.
• Process and workflow automation: Automates repetitive workflows, such as task assignments and approvals, to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.

ActiveCampaign vs. Pipeliner CRM: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of ActiveCampaign and Pipeliner CRM and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, user experience, and more.

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. Pipeliner CRM’s pipeline feature offers a visual interface to track sales opportunities through different stages. The drag-and-drop function allows you to move deals across stages, providing an overview of your sales progress. While the feature is functional and adaptable, its focus is primarily on sales tracking, which may limit its utility for broader project management needs.

2. Ease of use

Pipeliner CRM offers a user-friendly interface with visual representations of sales processes, making it intuitive for users to navigate and manage tasks. ActiveCampaign, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features, which may require more time to master for new users.

3. Contact enrichment

ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature. Pipeliner CRM also lacks a robust contact enrichment capability, focusing more on managing existing contact information rather than automatically enriching it with external data sources.

4. Outreach

ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities include email, SMS, and some social media tools, allowing personalized multi-channel communication, though its SMS functionality is basic. Pipeliner CRM provides basic outreach through mass emails, with customization and tracking features, but lacks advanced multi-channel campaign management, often requiring third-party tools for comprehensive outreach.

5. Automation

ActiveCampaign excels in automation, offering a visual drag-and-drop builder for workflows that automate emails, contact updates, and follow-ups based on various triggers. Pipeliner CRM provides automation for sales tasks like email follow-ups and deal updates, with integrations available for enhanced functionality, though complex setups may need additional configuration.

6. Integration

ActiveCampaign offers extensive integration options with over 900 third-party applications, enabling seamless connections with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics, enhancing its versatility and adaptability to different business needs. Pipeliner CRM integrates with over 50 popular applications, including Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, and various marketing, email, and data synchronization tools, to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.

7. Artificial Intelligence

ActiveCampaign uses AI for features like predictive sending and content optimization, enhancing email marketing and automation. Pipeliner CRM’s Voyager AI Gen provides sales insights through data analysis, offering recommendations and forecasts to prioritize tasks, though its AI focus remains largely on sales insights rather than broader predictive capabilities.

Price and plans comparison

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

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.

Pipeliner CRM prices

Pipeliner provides a few price plans to cater different price points.

• Starter: Starts from $65/seat/month.
• Business: Starts from $85/seat/month.
• Enterprise: Starts from $115/seat/month.
• Unlimited: Starts from $150/seat/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to ActiveCampaign and Pipeliner CRM

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 and recruitment. You can use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.

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. Pipeliner CRM: What's the verdict?

It's clear that both ActiveCampaign and Pipeliner CRM offer robust features tailored to different business needs. ActiveCampaign excels in marketing automation and personalized customer engagement, while Pipeliner CRM provides a visual approach to sales management with AI-driven insights. 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