As ActiveCampaign restructured its pricing in 2023, it looked like they'd dropped their value tier of ActiveCampaign Lite – the place where most of us cut our teeth on the platform.
There's currently two ways of getting access to the plan, both on this page
You can either sign up for the plan directly on this page, or use the regular free trial, then downgrade before the trial ends.
Let's look at what you do or don't get for the Lite plan, and whether it's suitable for a business selling online courses or coaching.
What you won't get with ActiveCampaign Lite, and how to work around it while you grow:
SMS
Not a big deal. The only thing I've ever used these for is webinar reminders, which can be useful, but you can run them out of Zapier if you need them in small quantities.
Advanced forms
Even the versions opn the paid plans, including the landing pages are pretty clunky.
I either use Carrd for single page landing pages, or one of the WordPress plugins on bigger sites. All these integrate nicely with the Lite plan.
If you're being really basic, the Lite plan still gives you a form on a page you can link to like this one:
https://stephenpratley.activehosted.com/f/1
(Honestly, the difference in conversion from this to a more designed page isn't as high as you'd expect)
Landing Pages
Just buy a Carrd subscription for like $19 a year – they're way nicer.
Facebook Custom Audiences and Lead Ads integration
OK, these are useful, but you're not going to be doing this on day 1 anyway. When you're ready to go to paid ads, you're going to want a solution like this, but you can just as well do it natively by tracking conversions with your cart and feeding that data back to Facebook.
Ecommerce Integrations
The carts with the integrations set up are all for physical products, and not much use for courses.
Most cart products do have integrations with ActiveCampaign, but they just add tags. It is entirely possible to run the majority of your automations like this.
I ran a $3m funnel just using tags like:
ProductName|Purchased
ProductName|Refunded
You can also trigger abandoned cart sequenced from the cart in many cases – we do this with ThriveCart
Reporting
You'll get the email and automation reporting you need, but not the in depth ecommerce reporting, but again, much of this will be in your Cart product anyway.
What you DO get
What you do get with the Lite plan is the most powerful automation program at this end of the market.
I've spent almost £7000 to get equivalent functionality from Hubspot, and I'm not even sure it's as useful.
If you're going to run the 5 core campaigns we recommend to clients who are starting at below $10,000 month revenue, all these will run on the Lite plan.
