Head to head · Both vendors re-checked 23 August 2026 · Billing terms 27 August
ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse: depth against breadth, and a $15 plan that can't
Short answer: ActiveCampaign's $15 plan caps every automation at five actions, so the real comparison is $49 against $19. Take ActiveCampaign if you can name the automation you can't build today — branching journeys, lead scoring, a CRM on the same contact record. Take GetResponse for broadcasts, a welcome sequence, a free tier while you build, or webinars. If you can't name the automation, you don't need ActiveCampaign yet.
Read this first: GetResponse pays us a commission. ActiveCampaign pays us nothing. This page recommends GetResponse in several places, so you should know that before you weigh a word of it. Those recommendations were written before the commission existed and have not been altered since — they rest on the five-action cap and the price gap, both of which you can check on the vendors' own pricing pages. Check them. How this works
On a pricing page these look close: ActiveCampaign from $15, GetResponse from $19. Pick the cheaper one and move on.
That comparison is false, and it's the reason this page exists. ActiveCampaign's $15 plan caps every automation at five actions — a hard ceiling on precisely the capability you'd choose ActiveCampaign for. At the real spread of $49 against $19, the question changes completely.
The short answer
| Your situation | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You can name the automation you can't build | ActiveCampaign | Branching logic and lead scoring that GetResponse, Kit and Moosend don't attempt |
| You sell through webinars | GetResponse | Native hosting; ActiveCampaign has none. Check which tier — see below |
| You want a free tier while you build | GetResponse | ActiveCampaign has none, just a 14-day trial |
| Broadcasts and a welcome sequence | GetResponse | You'd be paying for depth you'll never open |
| You need a CRM with deal pipelines | ActiveCampaign | Built in, on one contact record |
What each costs
| Plan | Annual | What matters |
|---|---|---|
| GetResponse free | $0 | 500 contacts, 2,500 emails a month. One autoresponder, but not the automation workflow builder |
| GR Starter | from $19 | At 1,000 contacts. Unlimited sends. Exactly one custom automation workflow, and the AI generators are capped at three uses each |
| GR Marketer | $59 | Unlimited automation workflows, advanced segmentation, scoring, funnels |
| GR Creator | $69 | Adds courses and paid newsletters. Webinars sit on this tier or Marketer — see the note |
| AC Starter | $15 | 5 actions per automation, no branching. No landing pages, no SMS, no CRM deals, no A/B testing. One user. Caps at 25,000 contacts |
| AC Plus | $49 | Unlimited automation actions, landing pages, SMS, CRM with deals, A/B testing |
| AC Pro | $79 | 3 users, conditional content, split testing inside automations, attribution |
US dollars per month at 1,000 contacts, annual billing. ActiveCampaign monthly runs roughly 20-25% higher; GetResponse annual saves about 18%. GetResponse's annual plans are non-refundable — cancel mid-term and the prepaid months are gone, so test on monthly before committing to a year. We haven't confirmed ActiveCampaign's cancellation terms and would rather say so than assume they match. Both scale with contact count. Re-checked 23 August 2026 — every figure above survived verification unchanged, but several things underneath them did not, which is what the rest of this page is about. GetResponse renamed its plans: what older guides call Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and Ecommerce Marketing are now Starter, Marketer and Creator.
The five-action cap
An action is any step in an automation — send an email, wait, apply a tag, check a condition, branch. Five of them is a welcome email and not much else: send, wait two days, send, wait three days, send, and you are already at the ceiling. There is no conditional branching on Starter at all.
ActiveCampaign's entire reputation rests on automation depth. Buying Starter for that reason is buying the brand without the product. If automation is why you're here, budget for Plus at $49 from day one and treat $15 as a number that exists for the pricing page.
GetResponse's entry plan has the same problem in a different shape: Starter includes exactly one custom automation workflow. Not one type — one. If your marketing is more than a newsletter and a single welcome sequence, the real GetResponse entry point is Marketer at $59, not $19.
Two things that don't show up in either price
ActiveCampaign's sends are not unlimited. Every plan caps monthly sends at a multiple of your contact count — ten times on Starter and Plus, twelve on Pro. At 1,000 contacts that's 10,000 emails a month, which is generous until you're mailing a segment daily. GetResponse includes unlimited sends on every paid plan, and that is a real difference rather than a marketing line.
And ActiveCampaign changed what counts as a billable contact. Accounts opened before 3 November 2025 are billed only for active contacts. Accounts opened after it are billed for unsubscribed, bounced and unconfirmed contacts too — so if you're signing up now, your billable count is your whole database, not your mailable list. Nobody's pricing page leads with that.
We should be even-handed about that last one. GetResponse advertises that it bills only for active contacts, and we haven't verified it — which is why we won't state it as fact here or anywhere else on this site. ActiveCampaign's rule is written down and dated; GetResponse's is a marketing claim we'd like you to confirm before you rely on it. Those are different levels of evidence rather than different levels of trust, and on the tool we're paid on we'd rather show you the gap than fill it.
GetResponse's version of the same trap is automatic tier bumping. Pass 1,000 contacts on Starter and you move to the 2,500 tier at $29 without being asked. The same happens at every threshold, so an active list-building month can raise your invoice on its own.
If webinars are your reason, confirm the tier before you pay
Native webinar hosting is the strongest single argument for GetResponse, and it's why this page sends webinar sellers there. But the tier it sits on is genuinely unclear right now: GetResponse's own help documentation places webinars in the Creator package, while several current pricing guides put them on Marketer. That's a $10/month difference at 1,000 contacts and a bigger one as your list grows.
We're not going to guess which is right and print it as fact. If webinars are the deciding feature, open GetResponse's pricing page and confirm the tier for your own list size before committing — and note that we earn a commission if you sign up, which is exactly why we'd rather tell you the sources disagree than pick whichever answer reads better.
Where it lands as your list grows
Both scale with contacts, and ActiveCampaign's curve is the steeper one. At 10,000 contacts: Starter around $149, Plus around $239, Pro around $419. GetResponse Starter is roughly $79.
Notice what that means inside ActiveCampaign's own range: Starter at 10,000 contacts costs around $149 — nearly double what Pro costs at 1,000. Past a certain list size you're paying more than the top tier's entry price for five automation actions, and Starter stops entirely at 25,000 contacts anyway. It isn't a long-term home at any list size.
In fairness to the tool we don't earn on: GetResponse's own pricing climbs steeply too — roughly four times between 1,000 and 10,000 contacts — and its serious automation sits behind the $59 tier, not the $19 one. The gap between these two is real, but it is narrower than the entry prices suggest.
The costs outside the headline price
ActiveCampaign sells several things separately:
- SMS — credit-based, from around $17 a month, and unused credits expire monthly with no rollover
- Enhanced CRM — the Pipelines and Sales Engagement packages are add-ons on Plus and above, not included
- Custom reporting — a substantial monthly addition on top of any plan
GetResponse reaches the same place by a different route. It sells fewer add-ons and instead locks capabilities to higher tiers — SMS, for instance, isn't something you bolt onto Starter or Marketer. So comparing add-on lists will mislead you: price the total capability you actually need on each platform, at your own list size, rather than the tier you first land on. Confirm both on the vendors' pricing pages, because this is the part that moves most often.
What GetResponse has that ActiveCampaign doesn't
A free plan, for one — small at 500 contacts, but real, and ActiveCampaign offers nothing equivalent. Its 14-day trial is capped at 100 contacts and 100 sends, which is enough to look around and not enough to build anything.
Unlimited email sends on every paid plan, against ActiveCampaign's 10-12x contact-count ceiling. And native webinar hosting, which ActiveCampaign doesn't offer at all — subject to the tier question above.
When ActiveCampaign is genuinely worth it
- You're running journeys that branch on behaviour — different paths for people who opened, clicked, bought or went quiet
- You want lead scoring, so sales attention goes to the right contacts automatically
- You want marketing and sales on one contact record without wiring a separate CRM in
- You're doing ecommerce and want revenue attribution rather than open rates
The common thread: you can name the thing your current tool can't do. If you can't, that's the answer. And if you can, ActiveCampaign is the pick here — the one we are not paid on.
Questions
Can I really start ActiveCampaign at $15?
You can pay $15, but Starter caps automations at five actions with no branching, gives you one user seat, and excludes landing pages, SMS, CRM deals and A/B testing. If automation is your reason for choosing it, Plus at $49 is the real entry point.
You earn on GetResponse and this page mostly recommends it. Why should I believe it?
You shouldn't take it on trust — that's why the conflict is stated at the top rather than buried. Every claim the recommendation rests on is checkable in five minutes on the vendors' own pricing pages: the five-action cap on ActiveCampaign's Starter plan, the absence of a free tier, and the price at 10,000 contacts. Check them. And note what this page does with the awkward facts: it tells you GetResponse's own entry plan allows a single automation workflow, that its tiers bump automatically as your list grows, that its annual plans are non-refundable, that its free plan is narrower than the word automation suggests, that we can't currently tell you which tier webinars sit on, and that its billing-by-active-contacts claim is one we haven't verified. Where the analysis favours ActiveCampaign — branching automation, lead scoring, the built-in CRM — it says so plainly, and we earn nothing when you go that way.
Which is cheaper overall?
GetResponse, clearly — roughly $19 against $49 at 1,000 contacts, and about $79 against $239 at 10,000. ActiveCampaign is more expensive because it does more; the question is whether you'll use it. Factor in ActiveCampaign's send ceiling and, on new accounts, that unsubscribed and bounced contacts are billable too.
Did either price change recently?
Neither did, and that's the interesting part. We re-checked both on 23 August 2026 and every published figure held. What moved was underneath: GetResponse renamed its three plans, and ActiveCampaign changed which contacts it bills for on accounts opened after November 2025. A comparison that only re-checks prices would have passed both vendors and stayed wrong — which is why we re-read the billing terms rather than just the numbers.
What does ActiveCampaign expect you to set up?
More than a simple email tool does, and that's the trade you're making. Branching journeys, lead scores and a CRM with deal pipelines all have to be designed before they do anything — the software gives you the mechanism, not the decisions. An ActiveCampaign nobody has configured does less than a simpler tool somebody has. Budget the setup time alongside the money. We don't rate how hard these tools are to learn, because nobody here has built in them — how we choose explains why.
What about Kit?
Different reader again. Kit's free plan gives 10,000 subscribers, one basic automation and no email sequences — so a welcome series needs a paid plan, but broadcasting to a large list doesn't. Kit pays us nothing. If you're a creator building a list rather than a business running complex journeys, see Kit vs GetResponse.
Can I move from GetResponse to ActiveCampaign later?
Yes, and that's often the right order — start simpler, move when you hit a wall you can describe. Budget for rebuilding automations rather than importing them; the logic rarely transfers cleanly between platforms. Note that GetResponse's annual plans are non-refundable, so if you think you might switch within the year, pay monthly.
How to decide today
Before starting either trial, write down the one automation you can't build in your current tool. One sentence.
If you can write it, take ActiveCampaign's 14 days and build exactly that — and price Plus at $49, not Starter. If you can't write it, you don't need ActiveCampaign yet, and the difference is better spent on traffic than on tooling.
Read the full GetResponse review →
Read the full ActiveCampaign review →
Both links go to our own reviews and earn us nothing. GetResponse pays us a commission if you later sign up through the link on its review page; ActiveCampaign pays us nothing at all.