Loops vs ActiveCampaign: a focused SaaS email tool against a CRM with automation attached

What 1,000, 10,000 and 25,000 contacts cost

ActiveCampaign's numbers come from the contact selector on its pricing page (Email plan, billed annually), read on 7 October 2026. Loops' numbers are slider readouts from the same day, taken a few contacts below the round figure. Starter is not sold above 25,000 contacts.

Against Plus, which is the first plan with unlimited automation actions, Loops saves $90 a month at 10,000 contacts ($1,080 a year), $191 a month at 25,000 ($2,292 a year) and $360 a month at 50,000 ($4,320 a year). The two figures are not perfectly matched, since ActiveCampaign counts 25,000 contacts and Loops 24,339 subscribers, but the difference is under 3 percent of the list. See activecampaign.com/pricing and loops.so/pricing.

How ActiveCampaign carves up its plans

The cheapest tier is deliberately limited. Starter allows one user, limited segmentation and five actions per automation, which is too short for a trial-to-paid sequence with branches. Plus removes the action limit and adds landing pages and standard segmentation, still for one user. Pro adds advanced segmentation, predictive and conditional content, attribution and conversion tracking and three users. Enterprise adds premium segmentation, custom objects, single sign-on, a dedicated account team and five users.

Monthly sends are also capped by plan: 10 times your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12 times on Pro and 15 times on Enterprise. At 10,000 contacts, Plus allows up to 100,000 emails a month. Loops states unlimited sends to subscribers on its paid plan, and charges no per-seat fee. ActiveCampaign sells transactional email and SMS as add-ons, whereas Loops includes transactional sending on paid plans at no additional charge.

Feeding product events into each one

Loops takes events through POST https://app.loops.so/api/v1/events/send, which needs only an email or userId plus an eventName. If the contact does not exist, Loops creates it. A workflow can then start from an "Event received" trigger, or from a contact property changing, such as a plan going from free to paid. Its Stripe app forwards events including invoice.payment_failed, customer.subscription.trial_will_end and customer.subscription.deleted straight into workflows.

ActiveCampaign's event tracking is switched on under Site Tracking and needs the account's event key. Its help center describes events as things such as signups, orders, upgrades, downgrades, cancelations and billing errors, and says an event is matched to a contact by email address. If no contact exists, the event is not recorded. That matters for a SaaS that fires events for a user before the signup has been synced. Its API reference also returns an error when event tracking is off or the account lacks custom-event access, so confirm that before building a billing integration on top of it.

Where each one is ahead

• ActiveCampaign leads on CRM, landing pages, predictive content, custom objects on Enterprise and a published data processing addendum template. Loops lists none of these, and its pricing page as read does not state a hosting region.
• Loops leads on price from 10,000 contacts, on having a free plan with every feature, and on a short path from "my backend knows something happened" to "a workflow runs". Its automations include branching on contact properties, timers and experiments.

Which team should pick which

A seed-stage product with a founder or one growth hire writing lifecycle emails should start on Loops, since the free plan carries a welcome and onboarding workflow to 1,000 users. A sales-assisted SaaS with account executives who log activity against contacts is a closer match for ActiveCampaign Plus or Pro, as long as the team will use the CRM rather than keep a separate one. Between those two, the deciding question is whether your email data and your sales data need to live in the same place.

Moving from ActiveCampaign to Loops, or the reverse

1. Export contacts with tags and custom fields. Decide which tags become contact properties and which become mailing lists in Loops, since Loops workflows can branch on properties.
2. Import unsubscribed people as unsubscribed. In Loops, a CSV import does not fire the "Contact added" trigger, so importing your list will not start a welcome series for everyone.
3. Recreate automations one at a time. Anything that depends on ActiveCampaign deals or CRM steps has no equivalent in Loops and needs a different home.
4. Run both for two sending cycles, with the new domain authenticated before you move transactional mail.

If a third candidate is on your list, these pages cover the neighbors:all comparisons, Loops vs HubSpot, Loops vs Customer.io, ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot, Customer.io vs ActiveCampaign and Ortto vs ActiveCampaign.