ActiveCampaign vs Keap: a plan ladder against one platform price with a setup package

Price at five list sizes

Keap's numbers come from its live pricing panel, billed monthly with 2 users, read on 7 October 2026; the panel has a 1,500-contact minimum, so there is no 1,000-contact figure. ActiveCampaign's come from its contact selector on the same day for the email plan on annual billing. Billing bases differ and the table labels each.

Sources: keap.com/pricing and activecampaign.com/pricing. Keap says additional contact pricing is in tiers with the cost per contact falling as you add more.

A year of each, with the seats evened out

Keap includes 2 users and charges $39 a month for each additional one. For a fair three-user comparison at 5,000 contacts, Keap is $449 + $39 = $488 a month against ActiveCampaign Pro's $205. The gap is $283 a month, which is $3,396 over twelve months. At 10,000 contacts, a three-user Keap account is $539 + $39 = $578 against $375 on Pro, a gap of $203 a month or $2,436 a year. At 10,000 contacts with five users, Keap is $539 + (3 × $39) = $656 and ActiveCampaign Enterprise is $589, so the gap narrows to $67 a month.

Two things are missing from these sums. Keap's pricing page says an implementation package is required, covering data import, migration services and recurring strategy calls with an expert, and it does not publish that price. And Keap prices monthly where ActiveCampaign's readout is annual billing, so the contract commitments differ: Keap states a $299 early termination fee on annual contracts.

What is inside each price

• Keap: the pricing page lists CRM, automation, email and text, pipeline, landing pages and payments in one plan. Text marketing tier 1 (500 messages and 100 voice minutes) is included, and higher tiers start at $24 a month.
• ActiveCampaign: email marketing, marketing automation and landing pages come in the plan, while pipelines, sales engagement, SMS, WhatsApp, transactional email and custom reporting are listed as add-ons. Seat counts are 1, 1, 3 and 5 from Starter to Enterprise.

That is why the price gap exists: Keap prepackages things ActiveCampaign sells separately. If you would buy the CRM add-on, SMS and extra seats on ActiveCampaign anyway, the real gap shrinks. If you only need email automation, it is large.

Billing events for a SaaS

Keap's payments feature is built for invoices, quotes and one-off charges taken in Keap. It is not a view onto subscriptions that Stripe Billing runs for you. For events, Keap's developer portal documents REST hooks: you create a subscription at /crm/rest/v1/hooks, your endpoint answers a verification handshake, and events such as invoice.payment.add or contactGroup.applied arrive batched, with the payload carrying object IDs rather than field values. You then call the API to fetch each record. Delivery is retried up to four times, after which the subscription goes inactive until you re-verify it (Keap REST hook docs).

ActiveCampaign's route is more direct for Stripe users: its help article describes syncing customers, invoices, charges, checkout sessions and subscriptions and starting automations from the result. If a failed card should move a contact into a recovery sequence, ActiveCampaign gives you a no-code way, and Keap gives you a webhook pipeline you maintain.

Trial terms

Keap's free trial is deliberately limited: 25 email sends, no payment processing and no texts, according to its pricing page. That is enough to see the builder but not to test a real sequence. ActiveCampaign lists a free trial and a $15 Starter at 1,000 contacts, so you can run an actual onboarding sequence on a small list before choosing.

Moving between them

1. Export contacts with tags, custom fields, notes and deal stages; Keap's implementation package includes data import and migration, so ask what it covers if you are moving in.
2. Move unsubscribed and bounced contacts across as suppressed.
3. Recreate automations by outcome, not step by step: lead captured, trial started, payment failed, renewal due.
4. If you are leaving Keap mid-contract, price in the $299 termination fee and move at the end of the term.

Which one

ActiveCampaign is the sensible default for a software product billing through Stripe. Keap makes sense for a small team selling services alongside software, where invoicing, bookings and texting sit next to the CRM, and where paying for implementation help is a feature. If you sit between the two, price the three-user, 5,000-contact case on both sides and add the setup package to Keap's total before comparing.

Related reading: HubSpot vs Keap, Customer.io vs ActiveCampaign, integrating your SaaS stack, marketing automation tools and the comparison hub.