ActiveCampaign vs Drip

How each tool stores people, accounts and events

ActiveCampaign's pricing page feature table lists contact profiles, custom fields, tags and lists on every plan. The sales layer is separate. Deal records, account records and lead scoring sit in the Pipelines enhanced CRM add-on, and win probability sits in the Sales engagement add-on. Custom objects are shown on Enterprise. ActiveCampaign's custom objects guide adds that object records written through private apps or direct API calls are only available on enterprise accounts, which matters if engineering would be the one writing subscription data.

Drip keeps one profile per person. Its segmentation page says store, onsite, email and integration data land on that profile, and that segments are dynamic rather than list-based, so a person leaves a segment as soon as they stop matching. The subscriber object in the Drip API reference carries status, custom fields, tags, a time zone, lead_score, base_lead_score, lifetime_value and user_id. Its resource list covers subscribers, events, tags, custom fields, segments, workflows, orders, carts and products. We found no company or deal resource in it.

• If your buyers are teams and you need to see all contacts at one company, ActiveCampaign's account records (Pipelines add-on) are the only built-in way of the two.
• If every user stands alone and you track plan, signup date and last action as fields, Drip's single profile with custom fields and events is enough and costs less.
• Both tools accept tags. Drip's own guidance is to use tags for yes-or-no facts and segments for anything with a threshold, such as spend or recency.

Sending product events into each tool

ActiveCampaign's event tracking guide describes the order of operations: switch Event Tracking on under Website, then Site Tracking, copy the Event Key that every request needs, and add the event names you want to use in automations. You can log any event name against a contact, but the guide recommends whitelisting a name first if an automation will use it. Account-level API traffic is held to 5 requests per second, with a 429 and a Retry-After header beyond that, which is 18,000 requests an hour at the ceiling.

Drip's events endpoint accepts an email, an action name such as Logged in, optional properties and an occurred_at time. The same API reference has a call that starts a person on a given workflow, a call that removes them, and calls to create and update workflow triggers. Drip limits integrations to 3,600 individual requests an hour, so bulk work belongs on the batch endpoints: 50 batch requests an hour, each with 1 to 1,000 records. A 10,000-person backfill fits in 10 batch calls.

Pacing is the practical difference. A product that fires an event for every click will hit ActiveCampaign's 5-per-second ceiling before it hits Drip's hourly one, so a queue in your own code is useful on either side.

Automation builders and the limits that bite SaaS teams

ActiveCampaign lists 950+ automation recipes, multiple triggers per automation, an automations map, and a cap on active goals that rises from 15 on Starter to 25 on Plus and 200 on Pro and Enterprise. The limit most teams notice first is Starter's 5 actions per automation, because a welcome series with a branch for activated and non-activated users, a delay and a sales alert exceeds it quickly. From Plus upward the pricing page lists unlimited actions. A/B testing covers automations only from Pro.

Drip's builder is click-based: you drag triggers, delays and conditions into place, and can start from 20+ ecommerce workflow templates. Its automation page separates Rules, meant for a simple trigger followed by one action, from workflows, meant for multi-step evergreen sequences, and caps an account at 50 workflows. The templates are about carts, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back, so a SaaS team usually starts from a blank canvas and fires custom events.

Worked cost example: 10,000 contacts and a three-person lifecycle team

Take a product with 10,000 contacts that sends six emails per person each month, which is 60,000 sends, and a team of three that needs to log in: one marketer, one sales rep and one customer-success manager.

ActiveCampaign Pro is the cheapest plan with three users, at $375 a month. Billed annually that is 12 x $375 = $4,500. Plus at $189 ($2,268 a year) has one seat, and Starter at $149 ($1,788 a year) has one seat and a 5-action cap. Send volume is not the constraint: Pro allows 12 times the contact limit, and 12 x 10,000 = 120,000, double the 60,000 planned.

Drip at 10,000 people is $154 a month. Its page shows no annual rate, so the year costs 12 x $154 = $1,848, and no seat count is listed. Against ActiveCampaign Pro the gap is 375 - 154 = 221 a month, or 12 x 221 = 2,652 a year. If you can live with one login, Plus at $189 leaves a gap of 189 - 154 = 35 a month, or 420 a year, and ActiveCampaign Plus adds standard segmentation and landing pages while Drip adds unlimited sends and its 50-workflow ceiling.

Add the layers that are not in those figures. If sales needs deal tracking, the ActiveCampaign Pipelines add-on is extra; the pricing page lists it but the readout we captured does not show a price. If you need password-reset mail from the same account, the transactional add-on is extra on ActiveCampaign, while Drip says transactional email is billed within its usage model.

Two more sizes: 2,500 and 25,000

At 2,500 contacts the cheapest ActiveCampaign plan and Drip are the same price, $39 a month, which is $468 a year on either side. The difference is what the money buys. Starter limits each automation to 5 actions and has one user; Drip includes up to 50 workflows. Moving up to ActiveCampaign Plus, which adds standard segmentation and landing pages, costs $95 a month ($1,140 a year), so the gap to the $39 plan is 95 - 39 = 56 a month, or 672 a year.

At 25,000 contacts Drip is $369 a month, or $4,428 a year. ActiveCampaign Plus is $389 ($4,668 a year, 240 more), Starter is $391 ($4,692 a year), Pro is $629 ($7,548 a year, 3,120 more than Drip) and Enterprise is $879 ($10,548 a year). The gap between Drip and Plus is small enough that the decision should come from the data model, not the invoice. The gap to Pro and Enterprise is not small, and you should only pay it for 3 or 5 seats, conditional content and, on Enterprise, custom objects.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to Drip

1. List every live automation and note how many exceed what you want to rebuild by hand. Drip's migration service page describes a full migration for lists above 17,500 people: people with their tags, custom fields and segments are moved, but active workflows are capped at 5 on lists under 80,000, templates at 3 and onsite campaigns at 3, so most of your automations will be rebuilt by you.
2. Mark the automations that depend on deals, accounts or lead scoring from the Pipelines add-on. Drip has a lead_score field on the person, but no deal or company resource in its API reference, so those records need a new home (your CRM) before you cancel.
3. Replace each ActiveCampaign Event Key call with a call to Drip's events endpoint, keeping the event names identical so segments translate. Move the backfill through the subscriber batch endpoint, 1,000 people per call.
4. Rebuild the automations as workflows. Keep a list of how many you create, because the account ceiling is 50 workflows.
5. Run both tools for one sending cycle on a slice of the list, then switch the signup forms and stop the ActiveCampaign automations. Plans are billed annually, so read the cancellation terms before you choose the cutover date.

Moving from Drip to ActiveCampaign

1. Export the people with their tags, custom fields and lead scores, and write down which Drip tags are really segments (a threshold on spend or recency) so you can recreate them as ActiveCampaign segments rather than tags.
2. Decide the plan from the rebuild, not from the list size alone: you need Plus or higher to avoid the 5-action cap, and Pro if you need three users or conditional content.
3. Turn on Event Tracking in ActiveCampaign, copy the Event Key, and whitelist the event names your Drip workflows used, then repoint your product code. Throttle the sender to 5 requests a second; Drip's own limit is hourly, so code written for it may send in bursts.
4. Rebuild the workflows as automations. Drip's template-led flows for carts and win-back have ecommerce-integration equivalents on ActiveCampaign's integrations row (Shopify, Square and WooCommerce are standard; BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus are premium).
5. Ask for the onboarding and migration support included in your plan: the pricing page says it is Basic on Starter and Plus and Priority on Pro and Enterprise.

Data protection and hosting

ActiveCampaign publishes a data processing addendum as a template; the pricing and legal pages we read do not state a hosting region. We found no data protection or hosting terms on Drip's pricing, segmentation or automation pages. For either vendor, ask for the data processing agreement and the sub-processor list in writing before you load customer data.