ActiveCampaign vs MailerLite

What each plan really buys a SaaS team

MailerLite's pricing page says every paid plan gets the full feature set and that you pay more for a bigger list or more sending. In practice the plans differ in limits: Free allows 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails, 2 seats, 3 active automations and 5 automation steps; Comfort allows 3 seats, 50 active automations and 100 steps with sends at 10 times the tier ceiling; Power makes seats, active automations and monthly emails unlimited, adds multiple triggers and 24/7 live chat support.

ActiveCampaign's four tiers separate things differently. Starter is for sending campaigns with a few automations: limited segmentation, 5 actions per automation, 15 active business goals, 1 user. Plus unlocks unlimited actions, landing pages and 25 goals. Pro adds advanced segmentation, predictive sending, conditional content, attribution and 3 seats. Enterprise adds custom objects, SSO, a dedicated account team and 5 seats.

Matching these by work done rather than by name gives Plus against Power as the useful pair for most lifecycle programs, and Pro against Power when you need conditional content or attribution, which MailerLite's price list does not describe in the same terms.

Cost at 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 subscribers over a year or two

Prices were read from both vendors' pages on 2026-10-07. ActiveCampaign is the monthly rate billed annually; MailerLite is the monthly-billing price shown by its slider.

At 5,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Starter is $79 a month, or 12 x $79 = $948 a year; Plus is $145, or $1,740 a year; Pro is $205, or $2,460 a year. MailerLite Comfort is $49, or $588 a year; Power is $69, or $828 a year. Plus against Power is $1,740 against $828, a $912 difference in the first year and $1,824 over two.

At 10,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Starter is $149, or $1,788 a year; Plus is $189, or $2,268 a year; Pro is $375, or $4,500 a year. MailerLite Comfort is $89, or $1,068 a year; Power is $129, or $1,548 a year. Plus against Power is $720 a year apart, which is $1,440 over two years, and Pro against Power is $2,952 a year.

At 25,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Starter is $391, or $4,692 a year; Plus is $389, or $4,668 a year; Pro is $629, or $7,548 a year. MailerLite Comfort is $179, or $2,148 a year; Power is $239, or $2,868 a year. Plus against Power is a $1,800 difference per year, or $3,600 over two years.

At 1,000 contacts the order flips for the cheapest tiers. ActiveCampaign Starter is $15 a month, or $180 a year, while MailerLite Comfort is $19, or $228 a year. A team that stays under 1,000 contacts for a long time is paying about the same on either side, and the decision rests on automation limits and trigger types.

One caution on counting: MailerLite bills on active subscribers and counts any address that was active at any point during the billing cycle, even if it is deleted before the cycle ends, per its pricing FAQ. A mid-month cleanup of 3,000 stale trial addresses therefore lowers the next cycle's bill, not this one's.

• MailerLite's yearly billing takes 10% off at the 500-subscriber tier (Comfort $12 monthly against $10.80), so a yearly choice makes the gap wider than shown.
• ActiveCampaign sends are capped at 10x contacts on Starter and Plus: 5,000 contacts allow 50,000 sends. MailerLite Comfort allows the same 50,000 at 5,000 subscribers, and Power has no cap.

What the entry plans leave out

• ActiveCampaign Starter: 1 seat, limited segmentation, 5 actions per automation, 15 active goals, standard integrations only, no landing pages. Pro is where predictive sending, conditional content and attribution begin.
• MailerLite Free: 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month, 3 active automations of up to 5 steps, one website and one landing page, limited templates and a limited API without sending. Sending locks above 250 subscribers.
• MailerLite Comfort: 3 seats, 50 active automations, 100 steps, 10 landing pages, and sends at 10x the tier ceiling. Unlimited sending, unlimited seats, multiple triggers per automation and live chat need Power.
• Neither side lists a company or account object in the base email plan; if you need one, ActiveCampaign sells it through Pipelines and custom objects, MailerLite does not list it.

Starting lifecycle emails from product activity

ActiveCampaign's event tracking guide covers the case directly: enable event tracking, use the event key with your account ID to post events to its tracking endpoint, then start an automation with the Event is recorded trigger. Event data posted with the call can be merged into the email, so a message can quote the exact number your product measured. Each event needs an existing contact.

MailerLite's automation triggers are Joins a group, Completes a form, Clicks a link, Updated field, Joins a segment, Event anniversary and Exact date, plus ecommerce triggers that need a store connection. There is no custom product-event trigger on that list, so the standard pattern is to translate events into data: your backend calls the subscribers API to add the person to a group or update a field, and the journey starts on Joins a group or Updated field.

Two details of that pattern matter. A POST to the subscriber endpoint only adds groups and never removes them, while a PUT replaces group membership and drops unlisted groups, so a sync job that uses PUT can silently eject people from journeys. And a subscriber can be triggered only once every 24 hours, so two events inside a day, such as a trial extension followed by an upgrade, may not both start a flow. Test both in a free account before you design around them.

Counted honestly, this makes MailerLite fine for five to eight group-based flows (welcome, activation nudge, trial ending, upgrade announcement, win-back) and awkward for an event-per-feature program with dozens of triggers.

Seats, support and where the data lives

Seats are a clear MailerLite advantage: 2 on Free, 3 on Comfort and unlimited on Power, against 1, 1, 3 and 5 on ActiveCampaign's four tiers. For a lifecycle owner, a designer, a product manager and a founder who approves copy, that is four logins: MailerLite Power at 10,000 subscribers is $129 a month, while the same four logins need ActiveCampaign Enterprise at $589 a month.

Support follows the plan on both sides. MailerLite lists email support on every plan, priority email on Power and 24/7 live chat on Power. ActiveCampaign lists basic email and chat on Starter and Plus and priority support on Pro and Enterprise, with free services such as contact migration and ActiveTraining for all.

On data location, MailerLite's pricing page says its data storage center is in the European Union with an ISO 27001 certificate, and that it has the GDPR controls and procedures needed for personal data processing; the data-processing terms are in its privacy policy. ActiveCampaign publishes a DPA template but the pricing page does not state a hosting region, so a buyer with an EU residency clause should request that confirmation before signing.

Transactional email, sales tools and channels

MailerLite's feature table marks transactional email as Try MailerSend on every plan, which means receipts, resets and invoices need a separate sender. ActiveCampaign sells a transactional email add-on and does not print its price. For either tool, the practical plan is to keep system mail on a dedicated sender and use the marketing tool for lifecycle mail.

Sales tooling is where the products diverge most. ActiveCampaign puts pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring into its Pipelines add-on, and a Sales Engagement add-on adds one-to-one email and win probability. Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics sit in the Enterprise column. MailerLite's pricing page lists websites, landing pages, forms, digital products and ecommerce integrations, and no CRM.

On channels, ActiveCampaign sells an SMS add-on and WhatsApp plans from $99 a month, billed annually. The MailerLite pricing page lists no SMS. A SaaS that wants demo reminders by text will need ActiveCampaign or a separate service.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to MailerLite

1. Follow MailerLite's own migration guide: export your contacts from ActiveCampaign as a CSV, then on the Subscribers page choose Add subscribers, upload the file and map the columns to MailerLite fields. The guide advises bringing over only subscribers who have opted in.
2. Convert ActiveCampaign tags and lists into MailerLite groups before the upload, because group membership is what most MailerLite triggers key on. Create custom fields first so the mapping step has a destination.
3. Rebuild forms and landing pages, then email templates, then automations; the guide lists them in that order and does not describe any automatic transfer of automations. Count the steps of your longest ActiveCampaign automation against the 5 steps allowed on Free and 100 on paid plans.
4. Replace Event is recorded triggers with a group or field change your backend writes through the subscribers API, and test the 24-hour trigger limit with a repeated event.
5. Authenticate your sending domain in MailerLite, send tests to yourself, and run the first live send to a small group. Keep ActiveCampaign until its annual term ends, since it quotes prices as billed annually.

Moving from MailerLite to ActiveCampaign

1. In MailerLite, an admin can export subscribers from the Subscribers page as a CSV or CSV for Excel, per its export guide. Only the visible columns are exported, and group names appear only if you switch on Groups under Set columns, so set the columns before exporting.
2. Export each status separately if you want unsubscribed people kept as suppressed records, and bring in only active subscribers as Active.
3. Create target lists and custom fields in ActiveCampaign, then follow its CSV import guide: map columns, add a source tag, choose Active or Unsubscribed, and uncheck Trigger Automations so existing journeys do not fire for the whole file. Map groups to tags by putting several tags in one column separated by commas.
4. Rebuild each journey. A MailerLite Joins a group trigger becomes a list or tag trigger; if your backend now sends product events, replace the group workaround with event tracking.
5. Check seats: MailerLite Power has unlimited seats, while ActiveCampaign Plus has one, so list who needs a login before you pick a tier.