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ActiveCampaign vs SharpSpring

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Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs SharpSpring based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features Analyst Ratings Comparison Charts User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
ActiveCampaign Software Tool
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SharpSpring Software Tool
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Product Basics

Analyst Rating

86 Detailed Analysis

User Sentiment

Excellent User Sentiment (6420 Reviews)

Analyst Rating

82 Detailed Analysis

User Sentiment

Great User Sentiment (1663 Reviews)
ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.
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SharpSpring is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that facilitates building automation rules to send customers with dynamic content or targeted emails based on their interests. It also provides adequate support for marketing agencies.

Features include behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, a blog builder, anonymous visitor ID, a form builder, reporting and analytics, social media management, and integrations. Lead scoring helps track a lead’s page visits, demographics and engagement to enhance nurturing efforts.
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$449 Monthly
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Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving. 
  • Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less. 
  • Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates. 
  • Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier. 
  • Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users. 
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  • Email Templates: Leverage prebuilt email templates optimized for mobile devices and any email client, including Outlook. The templates' prebuilt layouts can be edited and sent to customers on the fly. 
  • Folders Categorization: Stay organized by grouping emails and templates in folders. 
  • Document Storage: Store documents such as case studies, white papers and marketing sheets with a content delivery network. 
  • Custom Fields: Capture detailed information about customers, including buyer personas, customer service and other attributes. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create buyer personas using a customizable template that can be stored on the platform. Use personas to segment content and campaigns, delivering personalized content. 
  • Cart Abandonment Follow-up: Set up email workflows to automatically follow up with leads that forego their purchases. 
  • Important Page Visits: Mark specific areas of the website as “Important Pages” and the system will automatically boost lead scores for contacts who visit those pages. Set up automated workflows and lead nurturing campaigns for leads who visit those pages. 
  • Email Inbox Delivery: Identify daily priorities without logging into the platform with information about daily anonymous website visitors, leads, opportunities and customers delivered via email. 
  • Landing Page Templates: Create a series of linked pages to funnel visitors and prospects for lead generation by using predesigned templates. 
  • RSS Email Syndication: Automatically send email blog posts to a list of followers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Customize with thumbnail images, titles, dates and other dynamic content. 
  • Content Page Templates: Offers a library of prebuilt index and content page templates that are mobile responsive and can be edited from the blog editor. 
  • Campaign Tagging: Create custom categories and common tags such as email, Google, referrals, organic and offline to group, ungroup or break down campaigns. 
  • Social Notes: Promote internal collaboration with social avatars, “Mark as Read” tags and a clear conversation timeline. 
  • Webinar Integrations: Promote, share and improve web conferences through integration with WebEx and GoToWebinar. Capture lead data from sign-ups and link a dedicated sales funnel to each event to follow up with automated email workflows. 
  • CMS Compatibility: Supports all major content management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and more. 
  • Reminders: Create reminders from any page and attach them to opportunities and contacts to schedule a follow-up. Reminders can also be combined with social notes to assign tasks. 
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  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
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  • Email Builder: Offers drag-and-drop email editor and HTML customization. Dynamic features and smart tags automate the process of customizing email messages. Designs can also be saved as templates for later use. 
  • Email Campaign Testing: Native integration with Litmus facilitates testing and previewing emails on dozens of applications, email providers and devices. 
  • Behavioral-Based Email Tracking: Gives complete information on visitor activity, including page visits, form fills, webinar sign-ups and white paper downloads from email campaigns. 
  • Web Form Builder: Provides: 
    • A drag-and-drop tool with auto-completion capabilities to design and customize web forms and CTA buttons.
    • The option to view and test forms before making them live.
    • CSS to customize forms.
    • Data sharing with other applications and databases by adding a Postback URL to sync information automatically.
  • Customer Segmentation: Offers lists that automatically update as contacts meet the list’s criteria such as location, visited pricing pages, product interest and more. Map a field in web forms to preset buyer personas, setting up questions accordingly. Responses aid list segmentation, allowing follow up with personalized information. 
  • Workflow Builder: Supports automation tasks and leverages branching logic, task combination and action groups to devise a path buyers should take. Responses use custom triggers and filters to personalize lead journeys. 
  • Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on engagement. Custom metrics allow increasing or decreasing scores, including page visits, filled out forms, content downloads and specific demographic characteristics. Assigning a decay rate on leads automatically decreases scores over time. 
  • Real-Time Alerts: Automated workflows can trigger notifications via email and SMS whenever a sale is made, a high-quality lead is created or a prospect moves along their buyer’s journey. 
  • Pipeline View: Create and customize custom deal stages to track the progress of an opportunity. Provides a drag-and-drop interface to move opportunities across deal stages to get an overview of each prospect’s progress through the sales cycle. 
  • VisitorID: Tracks anonymous visitor IP addresses with reverse IP lookup to identify companies that visit the business’ website. Records page visits, recognizes visitors’ views on an important page, determines where they came from and identifies which search terms led them to the website. 
  • Customer Timeline: Offers a timeline view of individual buyers’ journeys to track significant events associated with each contact. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG interface with HTML for customization. Pages can automatically adapt based on visitor preferences and behaviors. Supports optimizing for mobile and creating a series of linked pages to design a funnel for visitors and prospects. 
  • Content Calendar: Offers an interactive application with daily, weekly or monthly list views of all the planned content such as social activity, scheduled emails and blog posts. Share social media content immediately or at a later date. 
  • Site Tracking: Embeds a custom tracking code snippet in landing pages, websites, microsites or blogs to track every visit. Add media center links to track visits to external resources. 
  • Blog Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG blog and website editor that’s customizable with HTML views. Includes dynamic content that can automatically adapt to resonate with different audiences based on who they are, what interests them and how they behave on the blog and website. Also has an embeddable social sharing widget. 
  • Google Ads Integration: Tracks the ROI of paid search engine marketing campaigns and derives keyword data. 
  • Campaign Analytics Tracking: Automatically tracks website visitors conversions from the moment they first visit till the final sale. Detailed campaign analytics track campaign ROI goals and work offline without the need to set up conversion funnels. 
  • Social Listening: Find and filter social conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by hashtag, keyword and more. Spots customer queries, captures interactions to identify prospects that are ready to buy and offers affiliate programs to promote current customers to help close the next deal. 
  • Custom Reports: Customizable across campaigns, email, social media and CRM to include business-specific metrics. Measures and predicts present and future performance, turning data into insights. 
  • Open API: Developers have access to a platform-agnostic, open API that supports programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and more for building custom integrations with third-party software. 
  • Third-Party Integration: An app marketplace provides access to prebuilt extensions and integrations across categories such as CRM, accounting, analytics, forms and more, extending capabilities. 
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Product Ranking

#2

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Marketing Automation Software

#7

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Analyst Rating Summary

86
82
57
86
93
35
83
0
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Lead Management
Lead Nurturing
Email Campaign Management
Platform Capabilities
Campaign Management
Email Campaign Management
Mobile Capabilities
Text Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead Generation

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign
SharpSpring
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 57 93 83 81 95 75 100 100 62 95 88 76 86 35 0 54 100 91 90 92 100 0 50 100 0 25 50 75 100
57%
0%
43%
86%
0%
14%
93%
0%
7%
29%
0%
71%
83%
0%
17%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
82%
0%
18%
40%
0%
60%
95%
0%
5%
100%
0%
0%
57%
0%
43%
82%
0%
18%
100%
0%
0%
90%
0%
10%
100%
0%
0%
83%
0%
17%
60%
0%
40%
100%
0%
0%
91%
0%
9%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
75%
0%
25%
0%
0%
100%
71%
0%
29%
100%
0%
0%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

81%
0%
19%
77%
0%
23%

User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1663 reviews
92%
of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

SharpSpring has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 1663 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.6 (5328)
4.5 (571)
4.6 (800)
4.5 (620)
4.5 (292)
3.9 (472)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated ActiveCampaign and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management. ActiveCampaign stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Lead Management Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SharpSpring and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Email Campaign Management, Mobile Capabilities and Text Campaign Management.

Email Campaign Management Award
Mobile Capabilities Award
Text Campaign Management Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
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User-Friendly: The platform is easy to use, and the kanban boards, the marketing automation and drip campaigns are easy to adapt to, in the experience of 69% of users referring to this aspect.
Robust Lead Tracking: Over 60% of reviews about this feature appreciate the end-to-end tracking functionality for marketing and sales data, with the ability to generate, track, filter and score leads.
Customer Service: All reviews on support say it’s professional and highly responsive.
Updates: The system constantly keeps updating with new features and offers updated dashboards for use, a benefit according to 75% of users mentioning updates.
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Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
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Mobile App: Every user referencing the mobile app suggests it’s inoperable, not relevant and lacks basic functionalities.
Limited Design Flexibility: The landing page builder lacks the ability to add custom code, restricting users' ability to fully customize their pages and potentially hindering brand consistency or advanced functionality.
Email Deliverability Issues: Some users report challenges with emails landing in spam folders, which can impact campaign performance and lead to missed opportunities. It's important to note that email deliverability can be influenced by various factors, so it's recommended to investigate and address potential causes to improve deliverability rates.
Reporting Limitations: Users mention that the reporting features could be more robust, particularly in terms of attribution and providing deeper insights into campaign performance. This might make it difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
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ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

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SharpSpring combines CRM and marketing automation functionalities to provide robust, user-friendly features and performance. Users particularly appreciate its lead tracking and regular software updates that improve and add features. Comprehensive customer support is another prominent benefit. Some product limitations include a lack of display functionality in the form and landing page builders and a mobile app that isn’t user-friendly and lacks responsiveness. Custom stylesheets are also time-consuming to work with. Despite some drawbacks, it can be a solid option for businesses looking for a budget-friendly and intuitive sales and marketing solution.

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Screenshots

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Head-to-Head Comparison

ActiveCampaign VS AWeber
ActiveCampaign VS Constant Contact
ActiveCampaign VS Eloqua
ActiveCampaign VS HubSpot
ActiveCampaign VS Keap
ActiveCampaign VS Klaviyo
ActiveCampaign VS Mailchimp
ActiveCampaign VS Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
ActiveCampaign VS Marketo
ActiveCampaign VS Omnisend

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