EmailOctopus vs ActiveCampaign — which should you choose?

EmailOctopus and ActiveCampaign are the two extremes of our comparison. One is the cheapest and simplest, the other the most expensive and most versatile, and there is hardly any price level they share. That is why this page does not try to settle which is better — it tries to work out whether you need what you pay for in the pricier one.

The short answer

Choose EmailOctopus if you send a newsletter. It is cheaper at every list size, it has the most generous free plan in the comparison, and the data stays in the EU.

Choose ActiveCampaign if you build paths where the email is chosen by the recipient’s behaviour or score. It is expensive, but EmailOctopus does not do this at all.

Comparison table

← scroll →

Prices exclude VAT, billed monthly unless stated otherwise.(ad) = ad link

• The price is the monthly price of the cheapest paid plan at that list size. The Free plan column shows when you do not have to pay.
• EmailOctopus and ActiveCampaign: the price list only shows the monthly price on annual billing. Monthly billing costs more.
• ActiveCampaign: the smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts, so the 500-contact column shows that price.

Prices side by side

Both price by contact count and both in euros, so the figures are directly comparable. The gap grows steeply with the list.

← scroll →

Cheapest paid plans (EmailOctopus Pro, ActiveCampaign Starter) read from the price lists (EmailOctopus, ActiveCampaign) on 3 September 2026, monthly prices excluding VAT. Both price lists show monthly prices on annual billing. ActiveCampaign’s smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts, so the 500-contact row shows the price for a thousand contacts.

The biggest row is the one worth reading twice: at a 10,000-contact list the difference is €1,356 a year. That is more than most small businesses’ entire marketing budget, and it has to pay for itself as the return on the automation.

Note the top row too. EmailOctopus’s free plan carries up to 2,500 subscribers, i.e. the list size at which ActiveCampaign asks €39 a month. Up to there the difference is not €276 a year but €468.

What the pricier one really gives

The price difference is big, so what it buys should be stated precisely. Both figures can be read from the price lists.

ActiveCampaign’s Starter plan limits automation to five actions per automation, and it has no conditional content. Conditional content starts on the Plus plan and lead scoring on the Pro plan; at 2,500 contacts they cost €95 and €149 a month. There are over 1,000 integrations.

EmailOctopus’s automations are light: a welcome series and a scheduled queue work, conditional branches do not. It also has no CRM and no e-commerce integrations on the same scale.

The line is therefore clear and not a matter of taste. If you describe your need with the sentence “I send a newsletter to the list and a new subscriber gets a welcome email”, EmailOctopus does that for €36 a month for 10,000 names. If you describe it with “someone who visited the pricing page gets a different email from the others”, EmailOctopus does not do that at any price.

Free plan: the most generous in the comparison at one, nothing at the other

EmailOctopus’s free plan holds 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month. That is ten times MailerLite’s and Mailchimp’s 250-contact free plans, and in practice it means four newsletters a month to a 2,500-name list without paying anything. The emails carry EmailOctopus branding.

ActiveCampaign has no free plan at all, only a 14-day trial. After two weeks you pay or leave. All seven free plans side by side: free email marketing.

Data location

EmailOctopus is a British company, but the lists are stored in AWS’s Irish data centre inside the EEA. ActiveCampaign’s own privacy policy lists transfers to the United States, Australia, Ireland, Brazil and Costa Rica. Both read from the services’ own privacy policies on 3 September 2026.

The practical difference is in what you have to record in your own policy and what you answer a customer who asks. What to check and what to record: email marketing and GDPR.

Deliverability: both have the basics, only one has the tools

We do not test deliverability ourselves. Below are two things: Tooltester’s 2017–2024 series as history — it ended in January 2024, and the source no longer stands behind its method — and eight points from the services’ own help pages, which are the current basis of this comparison.

← scroll →

Tooltester ended the series with the January 2024 round and explained why in August 2026: seed lists proved unreliable and providers started optimising for them. The figures are therefore history, not a measurement of current deliverability.

Source: Tooltester deliverability test, 12 rounds 8/2017–1/2024. About 80 seed addresses, 28 providers, shared IP addresses. Average across all platforms in the latest round 83.1%. Average and range calculated from the published rounds.

Deliverability features from the help docs

Eight points read from each provider’s own help pages on 13 September 2026. This replaces percentages as a buying basis: a feature can be checked and dated, a seed-list result no longer can. Every cell links to the article it was read from.

← scroll →

Yes = the help page describes the feature. No = the help page says it is absent or points to an external tool. — = not found in the help pages; that does not mean the feature is absent.

As history: in Tooltester’s series ActiveCampaign’s average was 90.8% and its range 73.0–97.0%; EmailOctopus was not in the series. The series ended in January 2024, and the lack of measurement was a gap then — now both can be read from the help pages.

Read from the help pages, the difference is in the tools, not the basics. ActiveCampaign has the Engagement Management tool, which unsubscribes the inactive from the list, and a dedicated IP is available on any plan once the list is 100,000 contacts. EmailOctopus’s help page tells you to check the list by hand and warm up the sender domain yourself, 50–100 emails a day to start. Neither help page describes a deliverability meter for an ordinary account.

Most of deliverability is still the sender’s own responsibility — authentication, list quality and sending pace: what Gmail and Yahoo require of senders.

Contact counting

← scroll →

The rules are read from the providers’ own help pages. “Not read” means the rule could not be opened in the original source — we do not guess it in either direction.

• EmailOctopus. Unsubscribed contacts do not count toward the limit, nor do hard bounces and spam complaints, which are marked as unsubscribed automatically. Contacts awaiting double opt-in do not count either. One trap: the same address is counted separately for every list — an address on six lists is six contacts.
• ActiveCampaign. The rule depends on the account creation date. ActiveCampaign’s own help article gives two answers: on accounts created on or after 3 November 2025, all contacts count toward the limit regardless of status, i.e. unsubscribed, unconfirmed and bounced too; on accounts created on or before 2 November 2025, only active ones. A new account is therefore in the same group as Mailchimp in this comparison. The help page opens only in a browser (HTTP 403); the text was read through the help centre’s own API on 5 September 2026.

At EmailOctopus the unsubscribed do not count toward the limit, nor do hard bounces or spam complaints. There is one trap: the same address is counted separately for every list, so a member on six lists is six contacts. The practical instruction is to keep one list and separate groups with tags.

At ActiveCampaign the rule depends on the account creation date: on accounts created on or after 3 November 2025 all contacts count toward the limit regardless of status. All seven rules side by side: how contacts are counted.

A third option if the line runs in between

If you need more automation than EmailOctopus gives but less than ActiveCampaign sells, two tools fit in between. MailerLite costs €29 at 2,500 contacts and keeps the data in the EU. Brevo costs €28 a month at a 10,000-contact list if the newsletter goes out rarely. The whole field’s prices side by side: best email marketing software.

Which one for you