ActiveCampaign features: what you get on each plan

Everything below was read on the ActiveCampaign pricing page and in the ActiveCampaign help center on 26 August 2026, and cross-checked against independent pricing trackers. Where the published comparison grid and the help center disagree, we kept the help center and say so, because the granular source is the one that describes what the product actually does.

Feature matrix

Feature by feature

ActiveCampaign CRM

The CRM exists, and it is not in any plan. What every plan does include, from Starter up, is contact records with custom fields, tags and lists. That is a contact database, not a sales pipeline, and the difference is where most of the confusion about ActiveCampaign pricing comes from.

Pipelines, deal and account records and lead scoring sit in the Pipelines add-on. Automated one-to-one email and win probability sit in a second add-on, Sales engagement. Together they are sold as Enhanced CRM. Both require a Plus plan or higher, so the gate is double: you buy the plan step, then you buy the add-on. Starter accounts cannot buy them at all, because the only add-on ActiveCampaign sells to Starter is transactional email.

Seats are the second constraint. Plans ship with 1, 1, 3 and 5 user seats for Starter, Plus, Pro and Enterprise, with more sold through a Users add-on. A three-person sales team on Plus is therefore paying for the plan, the CRM add-on and two extra seats before anyone opens a deal.

ActiveCampaign does not publish add-on prices on its own pricing page, which we verified on 26 August 2026: the grid names the add-ons and leaves the cost to the configurator. Independent trackers put the Pipelines add-on somewhere between fifty and seventy dollars a month, which is wide enough that we treat it as an order of magnitude and not a price. Against a dedicated sales tool the gaps are real: no native quoting or invoicing, and the premium CRM integrations for Salesforce and Dynamics are Enterprise-only.

ActiveCampaign SMS

SMS is an add-on, and it starts at Plus. This is the one line where ActiveCampaign contradicts itself: the public comparison grid shows an SMS add-on in all four columns, and the help center article on SMS requirements displays all four plan badges, but the plan overview article and the purchase article both restrict the add-on to Plus, Professional and Enterprise. An independent review dated 24 August 2026 reaches the same conclusion. We kept Plus, because the granular source is the one that describes the purchase flow.

The add-on buys capability, not volume. Messages are paid in credits, the number of credits per message varies by destination country, and unused credits do not roll over to the next month. Annual subscribers are billed once a year with credits renewing monthly. So “SMS available” and “SMS included” are two different statements here, and only the first is true on any plan.

Sending to United States numbers adds a compliance step that has nothing to do with your plan: A2P 10DLC registration is required before a message goes out. On top of that, ActiveCampaign requires per-campaign consent rather than blanket consent, an opt-in flow that discloses the program name, message frequency, “Message and data rates may apply”, HELP instructions and a STOP opt-out, and a company name or brand identifier inside every message. Public link shorteners are banned; the built-in shortener only works once a registered number and a custom subdomain are in place.

ActiveCampaign forms

Forms are the one lead-capture feature that survives on the entry plan, and only in part. Starter accounts get standard and inline forms, which is enough to put a signup box in a page or a sidebar and drop contacts straight into an automation. What Starter does not get is the intrusive formats: floating bars and modal popups start at Plus, a limit the editor states in its comparison grid and an independent reviewer confirms from inside the builder.

Beyond the format, the builder is the same across plans: the usual field types including hidden fields, custom CSS and HTML for accounts that want to match a site exactly, and a direct wiring from submission to tag, list or automation. Since site tracking is included from Starter, a form submission can be tied to browsing behaviour on the entry plan, which is unusual this low in a lineup.

Branding is the quiet gate. Custom branded forms and landing pages start at Plus, which means an entry-plan form carries ActiveCampaign’s marks. For a business testing the product this is noise; for a business putting the form on a client-facing page it is the reason to move up a step, independently of the popup formats.

Against a dedicated capture tool the missing piece is behaviour-triggered display logic: exit intent, scroll depth and per-page targeting rules are not what ActiveCampaign forms are built for. The compensation is that the form and the automation live in the same product, so there is no connector to maintain between capture and follow-up.

ActiveCampaign landing pages

Landing pages start at Plus, and this is the second place the published grid disagrees with the help center. The comparison grid lists landing pages from Starter. The help center says otherwise twice: the plan overview places landing pages in the Plus feature list, and the article on page limits states that the feature applies to “all tiers that have access to the Pages feature (Plus, Professional, Enterprise)”. Both independent trackers we checked put the page builder at Plus. We kept Plus.

Once unlocked, the ceiling is generous: ActiveCampaign states there is no limit on the number of landing pages an account can create. That is worth naming, because several competitors gate the page count rather than the feature, and a single-page allowance makes testing two variants arithmetically impossible.

Custom domains are included rather than sold separately, with one naming restriction: a custom subdomain cannot contain “activecampaign” or “ac-page”. The help center article on connecting domains shows all four plan badges, which looks like a contradiction and is not: that article also covers the account-level CNAME used for tracking and link branding, which every plan needs, while the page domain is only reachable if you have Pages at all.

The personalization layer is a plan higher. Conditional content and predictive sending are Pro features, so a Plus account builds pages that are the same for everyone. Against a dedicated page builder the template library and the A/B tooling for pages are thinner, but the pages inherit the contact record, which a standalone builder cannot do without an integration.

ActiveCampaign automation

Automation is what ActiveCampaign is bought for, and the entry plan does not really have it. Starter caps every automation at 5 actions. That is not a soft limit on a large workflow, it is the whole workflow: a welcome sequence with three emails, a wait and a tag is already at the ceiling. An independent review puts it plainly, noting that Starter accounts cannot build branched automations at all. Unlimited automation actions arrive at Plus, and that single line is the honest reason the Plus plan exists.

A second counter runs alongside: active business goals are capped at 15 on Starter, 25 on Plus and 200 on Pro and Enterprise. Goals are how ActiveCampaign measures whether an automation worked, so the low tiers limit measurement as well as construction.

The advanced layer is stacked at Pro. Conditional content, predictive sending, connected automations and automation split testing all land there. Campaign split testing is the exception and is available from Starter, with up to five variations testing subject line, from information and email content, which is unusually generous for an entry plan and worth knowing before paying for a step you do not need.

Enterprise adds a premium suite of triggers and actions on top, along with the governance features that come with it. For most buyers the decision is simpler than the grid suggests: Starter is a mailing tool, Plus is where automation begins, and Pro is where it gets clever.

Where the grid and the help center disagree

Two lines in this matrix do not match ActiveCampaign’s own public comparison table, and both go the same way: the grid is more generous than the product.

A third divergence runs the other way and is worth the correction. The grid shows A/B testing starting at Plus; the help center lists A/B testing among Starter features and the split-test article shows all four plan badges with up to five variations. What actually starts higher is automation split testing, at Pro. One grid row was describing two different products, which is exactly the case where the summary loses and the granular article wins.

Continue reading

Plan prices, contact-volume scaling and the cost of the add-ons named above belong to the ActiveCampaign pricing page. Our overall assessment, scores and buyer personas are in the ActiveCampaign review. If the automation ceiling on the entry plan is the sticking point, the ActiveCampaign alternatives page compares platforms that do not gate branching.