| 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> | 8 <p>MailerLite has most functionalities that businesses would need within marketing automation, including email campaign management, email templates, automated sending, landing pages, and surveys. However, it's missing some advanced features – notably, the ability to make custom analytics dashboards. We'd also caution against MailerLite users because of the bugs we experienced during testing (which compromised the email campaign creation experience).</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> | 5 <p>MailerLite is extremely easy to pick up, making it an ideal choice for beginners to email marketing. Fair warning though – if you're looking to write rich text emails / emails from scratch, it's extremely time-consuming to add photos, edit text, and quickly write emails on the fly.</p><p><br></p><p>We also noticed a few times when elements or text was deleted without us noticing, meaning the software sadly isn't bug-free where it matters most!</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> | 7 <p>Page load times on MailerLite are a bit slower than some of its counterparts - but not so slow as to be a dealbreaker for most people.</p><p><br></p><p>The interface in general is super pleasant and simple, and the drag-and-drop builder is also extremely simple and slick.</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> | 6 <p>We haven't been able to give MailerLite a high score on customisability because its rich text email editor is simply too difficult and frictionful to use, meaning that you either have to opt for their nice pre-made templates, or find another app to use.</p><p><br></p><p>If you're looking to use exclusively templates, you shouldn't be too concerned about this drawback.</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> | 8 <p>We found MailerLite to be extremely easy to setup. Since it's so beginner friendly, there (a) wasn't much setup to be done, and (b) where there was, the toggles and customizations were minimal.</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> | 8 <p>We have seen great things about MailerLite's customer service chats, and their fast and helpful support agents. On top of this, they provide comprehensive video tutorials, FAQ and troubleshooting, and a useful community if you need advice.</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> | 8 <p>Like most of the marketing automation platforms that we tested, MailerLite supports almost all of the integrations that a small to medium business might need. Crucially, it boasts integrations with e-commerce, marketing, CRM, payment, and design platforms.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>As with most marketing automation platforms, contacts can be exported easily directly through the app.</p> | 8 <p>MailerLite makes it easy to export your contacts and segments through a self-serve button in their interface. To export other information, you'd have to contact their customer service.</p> |
