| Functionality | 7 <p>While ActiveCampaign has most marketing automation features that a business would need (campaigns, automations, deals, reports, websites, and reports), it lacks on some crucial templating features, including use-case and scenario-based templates (e.g., for conversion, festivals, sales).</p> | 6 <p>Customer.io focuses on delivering functionality that enhance customer engagement through highly personalised, data-driven messaging across multiple channels. It offers excellent, granular segmentation and flexible automation workflows across a wide range of channels. However, this means that compared to other Marketing Automation Platforms, Customer.io lacks some common functionality, e.g. creating landing pages, websites and signup forms.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>It would take an average small business employee less than an hour or two to properly figure out the functionalities of this software - a great learning curve if you ask us. The layout is also extremely intuitive, making this a beginner-friendly piece of software.</p> | 2 <p>Customer.io is designed for technical, data-driven teams.The emphasis on technical integrations and real-time data makes it more complex than many other marketing automation tools. To fully unlock Customer.io's power, you'll nede the technical expertise to manage data integrations, create advanced workflows, set up custom events and more.</p> |
| Look and feel | 4 <p>While the interface is generally friendly and easy to pick up (especially the intuitive segmentation between the different key features on the menu bar), the frustratingly slow loading times (more than 2 seconds for email and automation) can be a real deal-breaker.</p> | 5 <p>We find Customer.io's interface visually acceptable, but largely just functional. The design's not fully responsive i.e. text escapes containers when browser window is shrunk. We also found page loads to be rather slow (e.g. 3-5 seconds), which quickly becomes painful.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Users can customise a lot of the product (especially around email campaigns and automations). However, ActiveCampaign lacks the ability to make sophisticated custom reports and segmentation conditions.</p> | 8 <p>Customer.io offers a high level of customisability in allowing you to tailor messaging campaigns extensively based on any data you bring in. You can create complex workflows with conditional logic, customize messages using dynamic content, and design personalized customer journeys based on detailed segmentation. However, note that this level of customisability can only be unlocked with technical expertise. Without code, Customer.io only offers a average/ below average level of customisability, especially in designing client-facing emails.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 10 <p>ActiveCampaign has truly standout ease of setup – it takes around 10-20 minutes to finish basic setup, and fully customising workflows takes 1-2 days at most.</p><p>What we love especially is how easy its AI capabilities improve the setup times: no more painstakingly trawling through manual workflow setups, since AI fully takes care of populating the correct information!</p> | 2 <p>Given that Customer.io's focus on data-driven campaigns, there's a steep learning curve when it comes to setup.</p><p><br></p><p>In particular, basic setup can take more than an hour, and fully customising data panels and real-time data can take weeks.</p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>There are three helpful avenues of support, the most helpful of which is of course the live chat (only available 3am-11pm CT).</p><p><br></p><p>Supplementing this is the support centre and self-serve training materials.</p> | 7 <p>For personalised Q&A, you can submit a support request via Customer.io's platform (after getting past a somewhat unhelpful AI chatbot). We found the support team to be quick to reply (within 2 business hours), helpful and friendly. Their help centre is also of decent quality, with detailed guides and video walkthroughs.</p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>ActiveCampaign supports 950+ integrations, meaning that most of your commonly used apps will likely be covered by the long list of integrations. Key areas, such as e-commerce, analytics etc, are obviously included.</p> | 9 <p>Customer.io excels in integratability, providing robust options to connect with various data sources and tools. It has excellent integrations with all of the most popular data sources and third-party applications, such as analytics, sales and content management tools. It also has a comprehensive APIs that supports custom integrations, allowing you to easily bring in real-time data from your own databases, data warehouses, websites, and applications.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>As with most marketing automation platforms, contacts can be exported easily directly through the app.</p> | 9 <p>Key data (e.g. users, objects) can be easily exported to CSV format via self-serve. Customer.io is also designed to facilitate export customer data to most reasonably relevant third party tools e.g. data warehouse, analytics tools, CRMs via its API and pre-built integrations.</p> |
