ActiveCampaign vs Encharge

Two data models, two starting points

Encharge's pricing page describes its target as a marketing automation platform built specifically for B2B SaaS businesses, with a company data model that supports multiple people per company and a way to segment companies based on the fields of their users, for example every company with a team member in the US. It adds custom data entities, so a workspace or a licence can be its own object. All three of those items are marked as not available on Growth.

ActiveCampaign takes the contact as its core object. Its pricing page places account records, deal records and lead scoring in a Pipelines enhanced CRM add-on rather than in the base plans, and lists custom objects on Enterprise alone. For a SaaS that means a workspace-level lifecycle program costs either the add-on or the top tier; below that you carry company facts as fields on each user.

The practical test is a customer with four users: the owner on a trial, one admin who invited colleagues, and two members who never logged in. Encharge Premium can attach all four people to one company and segment on the company. On ActiveCampaign you decide which of the four receives the renewal email, and you keep the account link in a field or in the Pipelines records.

What Growth leaves out, and why that settles the plan comparison

Encharge lists the same flow builder, advanced segmentation, behaviour-based emails, webhooks, Zapier, Stripe and Chargebee on both plans. Premium then adds the HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, WooCommerce and Shopify integrations, transactional emails, API events with event-based segmentation, and custom objects, as well as Slack support and a 12x rather than 10x send allowance.

So if your product emits events you want to branch on, Growth is a webhook-and-billing tool, not an events tool, and the honest comparison is Premium against the ActiveCampaign tier that does the same job. That is Plus or Pro on segmentation depth and Enterprise if custom objects are on your list.

• Premium-only at Encharge: company profiles, custom objects, API events, event-based segmentation, transactional email, HubSpot, Salesforce and Segment integrations, startup onboarding expertise.
• Enterprise-only at ActiveCampaign: custom objects, SSO, a dedicated account team, premium CRM integrations, and the 5th seat.
• Both offer a forms layer and website tracking; neither plan structure includes a free tier.

Cost at 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 contacts over a year

ActiveCampaign numbers below are the monthly rate when billed annually, and Encharge numbers are monthly billing, from each vendor's pricing page on 2026-10-07. Encharge advertises 20% off for yearly billing, so its true yearly cost is lower than the figures shown, which makes every comparison here slightly favourable to ActiveCampaign.

At 5,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Plus is $145 a month, or 12 x $145 = $1,740 a year; Pro is $205, or $2,460 a year; Enterprise is $375, or $4,500 a year. Encharge Growth is $179 a month, or $2,148 a year; Premium is $269, or $3,228 a year. For the custom-objects comparison (Premium against Enterprise) Encharge is $1,272 a year cheaper, and it also removes the 5-seat limit.

At 10,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Plus is $189 a month, or $2,268 a year; Pro is $375, or $4,500 a year; Enterprise is $589, or $7,068 a year. Encharge Growth is $249, or $2,988 a year; Premium is $399, or $4,788 a year. Premium costs $288 a year more than ActiveCampaign Pro and $2,280 a year less than ActiveCampaign Enterprise.

At 25,000 contacts: ActiveCampaign Plus is $389 a month, or $4,668 a year; Pro is $629, or $7,548 a year; Enterprise is $879, or $10,548 a year. Encharge Growth is $389, or $4,668 a year, identical to Plus; Premium is $649, or $7,788 a year, $240 a year above Pro and $2,760 a year below Enterprise.

Small lists reverse the order. At 1,000 contacts ActiveCampaign Plus is $49 and Pro $79 a month, which is 12 x $49 = $588 a year for Plus and 12 x $79 = $948 a year for Pro. Encharge cannot go below $99 a month with monthly billing, or $79 a month billed yearly, which is 12 x $79 = $948 a year for Growth. A pre-launch team with a few hundred users gets more email per dollar from ActiveCampaign until the list approaches 2,000.

• Prices come from the ActiveCampaign pricing page contact selector and the Encharge pricing page slider, read on 2026-10-07 and exclusive of tax.
• Email volume: Encharge Growth allows 10x the subscriber limit per month, so 5,000 subscribers send up to 50,000; extra email is charged at $100 per 100,000.
• Neither side's totals include ActiveCampaign add-ons or Encharge's paid flow-building service.

Getting product events into each tool

Encharge's developer guide names three routes. The Segment integration suits apps that already send people and events to Segment. The Ingest API creates or updates people and submits events from your backend. JavaScript tracking records what happens on your front end or website. Events live in a separate allowance: per Encharge's pricing explainer, Growth gets 50x the plan's subscriber limit per month and Premium 100x, and a plan that passes the cap stops receiving events rather than moving up a tier. At 5,000 subscribers that is 250,000 events on Growth and 500,000 on Premium, which is plenty for signups and activations but tight if you ship every page view.

ActiveCampaign's event tracking guide asks you to enable event tracking under site tracking, take the event key it gives you, optionally whitelist event names, and post events with your account ID to its tracking endpoint. An event is logged against an existing contact, so your backend creates the contact first. The Event is recorded trigger then starts an automation, and event data can be merged into the email body.

Both work for a developer. Encharge is built for it from the first page of its docs, with Segment as the shortcut. ActiveCampaign's version asks you to treat event tracking as one feature among many and still covers the same ground once the event key is set up.

Billing events, trials and renewals

A trial-ending reminder and a failed-card message are the two most valuable lifecycle emails a SaaS sends. Encharge's Stripe integration page lists 12 triggers: Trial Started, Trial Ends, Trial Converted, Trial Expired, Subscription Activated, Subscription Past Due (described as a failed payment), Subscription Reactivated, Scheduled Subscription Cancellation, Subscription Cancelled, Subscription Expanded, Subscription Contracted and New Stripe Payment. It also says historical billing data is imported when you connect Stripe, so billing-based segments can cover existing customers as well as new ones. The pricing page names comparable billing-data connectors for Chargebee, Chargify, Paddle and Recurly, and Stripe, Chargebee and Zapier sit on Growth.

ActiveCampaign's pricing page lists Stripe and PayPal among its integrations, and every event after that depends on how you map it: a payments connector, Zapier or the event tracking endpoint carrying the billing event from your server. It works, but each billing event becomes a small piece of integration work you own.

If you bill on Paddle, Chargebee or Recurly, Encharge is the shorter path on paper. If you bill on Stripe, the gap narrows, since either tool can take a Stripe event through a backend call.

Seats, services and who builds the flows

ActiveCampaign caps seats by plan: 1 on Starter and Plus, 3 on Pro and 5 on Enterprise. Encharge has unlimited team members on both plans, and offers live chat support on both, with Slack support on Premium. For a three-person growth team this alone can outweigh a $20 monthly price difference.

Services differ too. ActiveCampaign's pricing page lists free services for every plan, including contact migration, ActiveTraining, video tutorials and enablement workshops, with priority onboarding and migration support on Pro and Enterprise. Encharge offers free done-for-you onboarding and migration only on yearly Premium plans, limited by how many emails and flows are moved, and sells flow-building from $350 a month under Premium Services.

Encharge's FAQ says cold or outbound email is not allowed: you can import only inbound leads, product users and contacts that have given permission. That matters for teams who have been mixing prospecting lists into their marketing tool.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to Encharge

1. Export contacts from ActiveCampaign with their custom fields and tags, and drop the bounced and unsubscribed people you do not intend to mail. Unsubscribed people can still be imported if you want them suppressed.
2. Import into Encharge using the steps in its import guide: upload a spreadsheet with a header row, map every field yourself (Encharge does not match fields automatically, and email is the only required mapping), create missing fields from the mapping screen, and choose Update or Ignore for duplicates.
3. Bring tags across by mapping a tags column to the Tags field with commas between values. For unsubscribed people add an Unsubscribed column set to true and map it to the default Unsubscribed field.
4. Connect your product: start with Segment if you already send there, or the Ingest API and JavaScript tracking, then connect your billing system. Confirm events arrive before rebuilding flows.
5. Rebuild each ActiveCampaign automation as an Encharge flow, one trigger at a time. If you are on yearly Premium, ask Encharge about its free migration help before you start, because the pricing page limits it to that plan.

Moving from Encharge to ActiveCampaign

1. On Encharge's People page, use the export described in its export guide: all people, a segment or hand-picked people, as a CSV with every person field. The export carries no activity history, so keep screenshots of flow reports if you need them.
2. Create the destination lists in ActiveCampaign first, since its CSV import cannot create lists mid-import. Map columns, create any missing fields, add a source tag and decide whether the file is Active or Unsubscribed.
3. Model companies before you import. Encharge's company profiles have no direct match in the base ActiveCampaign plan, so decide whether you need the Pipelines add-on for accounts or a field on each person. The CSV guide describes mapping an Account column to link contacts to account records.
4. Uncheck Trigger Automations on import so existing automations do not fire for the full list.
5. Recreate flows, reconnect billing and product events, then check the seat count: anyone who edited flows in Encharge needs an ActiveCampaign login, and Plus has only one.