ActiveCampaign vs ConvertKit (Kit)

ConvertKit is now Kit: what that means for this comparison

ConvertKit now operates as Kit at kit.com. Its resources menu lists a series called Rebranding in Public, its data processing page still lives at convertkit.com/dpa, and sample payloads in the Kit API reference still use convertkit.dev addresses. This URL keeps the old name because that is what people type when they compare the two tools. Everything on this page about Kit comes from the current kit.com pricing page and developer documentation.

The positioning has not changed with the name. Kit's pricing page describes Creator as the plan for growing creators and Pro as the plan for scaling creators, and the extras it lists (paid newsletters, a recommendations network, a growth concierge team, newsletter referrals) are audience-building features, not product-lifecycle features.

How each tool models a person

ActiveCampaign's pricing page lists contact profiles, custom fields, tags and lists on every plan. Above that sits the sales layer: the Pipelines add-on carries deal records, account records and lead scoring, and Enterprise lists custom objects. ActiveCampaign's custom objects guide describes a schema step first, with field types such as text, number, date, currency, dropdown and multiselect, and notes that records written by private apps or API calls require an Enterprise account.

Kit's record is the subscriber. According to the Kit API reference the resources are Accounts, Broadcasts, Custom Fields, Email Templates, Forms, Posts, Purchases, Segments, Sequence Emails, Sequences, Snippets, Subscribers, Tags and Webhooks. There is no companies resource, no deals, no lists and no events. Extra data goes into custom fields, which must exist before you set them: the create-subscriber call returns an error if you send a key that has not been created.

• A team that sells seats to companies and tracks which contacts belong to which account should look at ActiveCampaign's account records first.
• A list that mostly consists of readers, customers and buyers of one-off products can live on Kit's subscriber plus tags without any loss.
• Both tools can hold a lead_score-style value in a custom field; only ActiveCampaign ties scoring to the Pipelines add-on.

Getting product activity into each tool

ActiveCampaign's event tracking guide walks through turning tracking on, copying an Event Key and whitelisting the event name so that automations can use it. Logins, button clicks, purchases and downloads are given as examples. The cost is throughput: the account is held to 5 requests per second.

On Kit you express the same activity as state on the subscriber. A product hook would create or find the subscriber, call the tag endpoint, or write a custom field. Kit's authentication page sets an API key at 120 requests per rolling 60 seconds, which is 2 a second, with 600 requests allowed over OAuth, and says bulk and purchase endpoints require OAuth. Outbound, Kit's webhook endpoints deliver up to 100 events per POST, sign them with HMAC-SHA256 and retry failed deliveries 8 times over about 41 hours.

One behavior to plan around: Kit's create-subscriber call is an upsert, and for an address that already exists it updates only the first name, and the endpoint cannot change the subscriber state. Anything else, such as a plan name, goes through a separate update or tag call.

Automation depth: what the extra price on ActiveCampaign buys

ActiveCampaign's Starter plan allows 5 actions per automation, so the cheap entry point is a short drip. Plus and above list unlimited actions, and goals rise from 15 active on Starter to 25 on Plus and 200 on Pro and Enterprise. Predictive and conditional content are Pro and Enterprise features, A/B tests extend to automations from Pro, and the pricing page lists 950+ recipes and an automations map for reading a large setup.

Kit's pricing page lists unlimited Visual Automations and unlimited email sequences from the Creator plan, and adds A/B tests for subject lines on Creator and for subject lines and content on Pro. It does not name goals, conditional content or branching limits, and the help article on visual automations was behind a CAPTCHA when we tried to read it, so we cannot describe the node types. The honest summary is that Kit gives you the sequences and visual flows a newsletter business needs without an action cap, and stays quiet on the controls a multi-branch lifecycle program would test.

Worked cost example: 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers

At 1,000, a team that wants automations without ActiveCampaign's 5-action cap pays for Plus: $49 a month, 12 x $49 = $588 a year. Kit Creator is $33 a month, or $390 billed yearly, so Kit is $198 a year cheaper. Starter at $15 ($180 a year) is the cheapest paid line on either side if five actions per automation is enough, and Kit's Free plan costs nothing if you only send broadcasts.

At 10,000, Kit Free still applies for broadcasts, forms, landing pages, tagging and segmentation. For automations, Creator is $116 a month. ActiveCampaign Starter is $149, which is $33 more; Plus is $189, which is $73 more, or 12 x $73 = $876 a year. With a team of four in the tool, the comparison moves: Kit Pro is $158 a month with unlimited users, while ActiveCampaign needs Enterprise at $589 for five users. That is $431 a month, or $5,172 a year, more for the seats and CRM objects.

Nothing in the Kit figure includes a CRM. If your sales team needs deals and accounts, add the ActiveCampaign Pipelines add-on to its side and an external CRM to Kit's side before you compare. The Pipelines price is not in the plan readouts we captured.

Worked cost example: 25,000 subscribers

At 25,000 the free plan has ended. Kit Creator is $166 a month and Pro is $233. ActiveCampaign Plus is $389, which is $223 a month above Creator, or 12 x $223 = $2,676 a year. ActiveCampaign Pro at $629 against Kit Pro at $233 is $396 a month, or $4,752 a year. Enterprise at $879 is $646 a month above Kit Pro, which is $7,752 a year.

ActiveCampaign Starter is $391 at this size and Plus is $389, so Starter stops being a bargain. For a team already paying for a CRM and wanting one cheap tool for newsletters and onboarding, these gaps are why Kit is attractive; for a team where the email platform is the CRM-adjacent record of truth, they are the price of ActiveCampaign's objects and caps.

A newsletter-sized list: 7,500 subscribers

Founders who write a weekly letter beside the product have a different problem. At 7,500 people, ActiveCampaign Starter is $109 a month ($1,308 a year), Plus $169, Pro $289 and Enterprise $479. Kit Free costs $0 and includes unlimited broadcasts, unlimited landing pages and forms, tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions. The difference is that real automations start on Creator, so the first welcome sequence moves you off the free plan.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to Kit

1. Decide what you will lose before you export: deal records, account records, custom objects and lead scoring from the Pipelines add-on have no resource in Kit's API reference, so keep that data in a CRM or a spreadsheet you control.
2. Create every custom field in Kit first. Its create-subscriber call returns an error for a key that does not exist, and up to 140 custom fields can be created or updated in one request.
3. Turn each ActiveCampaign list into a tag, a segment or a form source, because Kit has no lists resource. Import subscribers in bulk, noting that bulk endpoints need OAuth and that the create-subscriber call cannot change a subscriber's state afterwards, so leave unsubscribed addresses out of the import file and keep your own suppression list.
4. Rebuild each automation in Visual Automations. Anything that relied on goals, conditional content or predictive sending needs a manual equivalent, and any event-triggered flow becomes a tag or field change that your backend writes.
5. Use Kit's offer of free migrations, which its pricing page advertises, and send a test sequence on the 14-day trial before you cancel ActiveCampaign's annual plan.

Moving from Kit to ActiveCampaign

1. Export subscribers with their tags and custom fields, and keep a record of who is unsubscribed so that you do not email them from the new account.
2. Choose the plan from the rebuild. Plus lifts the 5-action cap and adds landing pages; Pro adds three users and conditional content; Enterprise adds five users and custom objects.
3. Map Kit tags to ActiveCampaign tags, and decide which tags were really lists. Turn on Event Tracking, copy the Event Key and whitelist event names if your backend will push product activity.
4. Rebuild each sequence as an automation. Kit's commerce items, such as paid newsletters and digital product sales, have no matching ActiveCampaign feature on the plan table, so leave them on Kit or move them to a billing tool first.
5. Ask for the migration help included in your plan: the pricing page lists it as Basic on Starter and Plus and Priority on Pro and Enterprise.

Data protection and hosting

ActiveCampaign publishes a data processing addendum as a template and does not state a hosting region on the pages we read. Kit's data processing page at convertkit.com/dpa was behind a CAPTCHA when we tried to read it, so we cannot report its terms. Ask both vendors for their agreements and sub-processor lists in writing before you load customer data.