Zoho vs ActiveCampaign

Choosing a new CRM platform? Zoho and ActiveCampaign stand out as two prominent contenders. Both are designed to optimize business processes, enhance customer interactions, and boost sales efficiency. However, each platform offers distinct features tailored to different business models and priorities. This article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of Zoho and ActiveCampaign, examining their core functionalities, pricing structures, and overall benefits. Our goal is to help you determine which CRM solution aligns best with your organizational needs. Additionally, we'll explore folk as a viable alternative.

What is Zoho?

Zoho is a CRM system with a strong sales focus. It has journey orchestration, sales process management, and workflow automation features. There's also something for marketing teams, including event management and customer segmentation.

Key features of Zoho

• Sales automation: Automates sales tasks like lead management, deal tracking, and follow-up actions.
• Customizable dashboards and reports: Allows users to create and customize dashboards and reports for in-depth analytics.
• Multi-channel communication: Integrates with email, phone, social media, and live chat to manage customer interactions.
• Lead and contact management: Manages customer information, tracks interactions, and segments contacts for targeted campaigns.
• Workflow automation: Automates routine tasks and processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.
• AI-powered sales assistant (Zia): Provides predictive analytics, task automation, and intelligent suggestions to enhance sales performance.
  

What is ActiveCampaign?

Active Campaign is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer interactions and drive growth through personalized and automated communication.

Key features of ActiveCampaign

• Email marketing: Create personalized email campaigns with drag-and-drop templates, advanced segmentation, and automated sequences to engage your audience effectively.
• Marketing automation: Automate workflows for email, SMS, and site messages, based on user behavior and custom triggers, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
• Sales automation: Integrates a CRM with automation tools to streamline the sales process, track leads, manage deals, and automate follow-ups.
• CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using automation.

Zoho vs. ActiveCampaign: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

Zoho CRM's pipeline management feature provides a visual overview of the sales process, allowing users to track deals at various stages and manage the flow of opportunities effectively. ActiveCampaign's sales pipeline management feature is integrated with its CRM, enabling businesses to streamline their sales processes. It allows users to visually manage deals through customizable pipelines, automate tasks like follow-ups, and track every stage of the sales journey.

2. Ease of use

Zoho CRM offers a user-friendly interface, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced users, while ActiveCampaign provides a straightforward setup with intuitive navigation. Both platforms prioritize ease of use, but Zoho's extensive customization options might present a steeper learning curve for some users.

3. Contact enrichment

Zoho CRM's contact enrichment feature, powered by its AI assistant Zia, automatically updates and enriches records using data from various online sources. The feature can fill in missing details, such as email addresses, phone numbers, company information, and social media profiles.

4. Outreach

Zoho CRM supports multichannel outreach, enabling businesses to connect with leads through email, social media, and other platforms. The platform automates workflows such as lead assignment and follow-up reminders, while AI-driven sentiment analysis helps prioritize customer responses for timely engagement. ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities are functional, offering email, SMS, and some social media tools for multi-channel communication. It allows businesses to segment their audiences and send personalized messages, while automations help manage follow-ups across different channels. However, the SMS functionality is quite basic.

5. Automation

Zoho CRM provides comprehensive automation features that streamline tasks like sending emails, updating fields, and triggering alerts through workflow automation. It includes Blueprint for standardizing sales processes, Macros for automating repetitive tasks in bulk, and Zia AI for predictive automation that suggests workflows and actions based on data patterns. ActiveCampaign's automation features allow users to create workflows that automate tasks like sending emails, updating contact records, and triggering follow-up actions based on predefined conditions. These workflows can be set up using a visual drag-and-drop builder, and they support a range of triggers, such as contact behavior, form submissions, or sales pipeline changes.

6. Integration

Zoho integrates with a wide range of third-party applications to expand its functionality, including popular tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. It also connects with accounting software such as QuickBooks and more. ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of integrations with over 900 third-party applications, allowing users to connect the platform with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Zoho CRM integrates AI through its assistant, Zia, which enhances productivity by automating tasks like data entry, lead prediction, and workflow recommendations. Zia provides predictive analytics for sales forecasting, identifies anomalies in sales processes, and suggests the best times for customer engagement based on past interactions. ActiveCampaign integrates AI features to enhance various aspects of its platform, such as email marketing and automation. The AI-powered tools include predictive sending, which analyzes contact behavior to suggest the best time to send emails, and predictive content, which helps in optimizing subject lines and messaging.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Zoho and ActiveCampaign.

Zoho prices

Zoho offers a Free plan limited to three users suitable for small businesses. After that, an annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $14 per user, per month.
• Professional: $23 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: $40 per user, per month.
• Ultimate: $52 per user, per month.

ActiveCampaign prices

ActiveCampaign's price plans depend on the number of contacts in your database. The following plans are based off 1,000 contacts.

• Starter: Starting from $15/month.
• Plus: Starting from $49/month.
• Pro: Starting from $79/month.
• Enterprise: Starting from $145/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Zoho and ActiveCampaign

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. There is a reason why folk is a multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Zoho vs. ActiveCampaign: What's the Verdict?

Between Zoho and ActiveCampaign, there are a few distinct advantages. Zoho excels with its comprehensive sales automation and customizability, making it ideal for businesses seeking robust sales management tools. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, stands out with its powerful marketing automation features, perfect for businesses focused on enhancing customer engagement. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free