ActiveCampaign Reviews 

ActiveCampaign just charged me $2,280 for the renewal of an inactive account without any advance notification.

I never sent a single email through ActiveCampaign. I barely set up the platform before realizing it wasn’t going to work for my use case, and my last login before this renewal was November 24, 2025.

Yet they automatically renewed my account for another year with no advance notice, charged me $2,280, and refused my immediate request for a refund based on their “strict no-refund policy.”

What makes this particularly troubling is that ActiveCampaign is an EMAIL MARKETING AND AUTOMATION company.

A simple automated email saying, “Your annual subscription is renewing for $2,280 on September 3” would have solved this. Sending automated, date-triggered emails is literally what they sell.

Instead, they choose not to send an advance renewal notice and then rely on automatic renewal and a strict no-refund policy once the charge goes through.

I have filed a complaint with the FTC and am pursuing additional remedies available under their Terms and Conditions.

I encourage others who have experienced the same issue to consider reporting it as well. In my view, automatically charging customers thousands of dollars for another year without advance notice, and then refusing to reverse the charge, is a predatory business practice that could easily be prevented with a simple renewal email.

The fact that ActiveCampaign has the technology to send that email, but chooses not to, is exactly the problem.

The backend on this platform has gotten out of hand, and having the email editor strip out basic formatting every single time you paste copy is infuriating when you're trying to hit a deadline. On top of that, replacing actual support reps with useless AI bots means you're completely stranded if an account lockout or list glitch hits your launch day. Locking a small business into a rigid annual contract for software that breaks basic daily tasks just doesn't make sense anymore.

I lost access to my owner account and have not been able to change my account settings. I think the AC account was easily hacked and there is no way to reach support or get any help even though we are investing significant funds in them every month. Terrible customer support.

The pasteboard has made me so mad that I specifically sought out a way to give Active Campaign a 1 star review. Why when I paste text into preset style formatting does it return to the default, non-styled version of the text. It will not retain the style of the text existing in the block. it makes me so mad. I am physically ill trying to copy and past different chunks of text into a text style I already have in that block, and it returns to the ugly basic default. Why can it not remember? I cannot stand it please fix this oh my god. I am wasting time resetting the proper text styles on chunks of text that should already be the same if they exist in the same block.

Active campaign used to be good but they are terrible now. And I have been with them for several years.

They prey on you with annual contracts, if you try to cancel they will auto renew it anyways then make it impossible for you to contact anyone.

They also have taken away the ability to contact an actual HUMAN for customer support. They force you to talk to some AI bot that is not helpful at all.

I understand some companies have added AI for additional support but active campaign has completely wiped there support team and replacing it with a bot that can't help you with anything.

Horrible horrible service. I spent two hours uploading contacts, crafting email, working with its frustrating interface. Then after sending the email - which APPEARED to have been sent - i had to contact customer service hours later when it never went out. The trial run only allows 100 recipients, WHICH THEY NEVER TELL YOU! Just a massive waste of time & effort. Pure deception.

The admin interface is one of the slowest I have ever experienced in SAAS solutions. I would not recommend this platform at all.

Free trial limits contacts to only 100, it is too small a sample size to make it worth it. Huge rip-off.

I have used Active Campaign for years and love the automations which are powerful and straight forward to set up once you have your head around the way it works. The email designer is much improved recently and the AI insights are helpful, the AI email design not so much for me anyway. Where it has started to grate is the price going up but the service getting worse - where it used to be relatively easy to speak to a human on live chat - the bots have taken over and it isn't useful when you've got something more complex to sort out than the real basics. I'd still recommend it as it seems this is an issue with most platforms and functionally it is still one of the best and a price I can manage even though it's not the great value it was.

I had a decent experience with Active Campaign although it is quite complicated to use and definitely expensive.

Really disappointed though that when I cancelled they offered to save my profile info for 3 months and then sent me the cancellation confirmation email 2 weeks later so I marked the wrong date on my calendar and ended up having to pay for an additional month and they refused to refund me.

12 years or so ago, I was looking at reviews online to choose an online marketing platform. There was Infusion Soft, Hubspot for automations, and mailchimp for newsletter. A few more I can't remember but after reading good reviews after the customer service of Active Campaign, I decided to jump in and hope for the best.

I've now been with them for 12 years and it's very sad how the quality and availability of customer service went down hill. I think everyone who's been with them for more than 6-7 years can agree. We used to have a free monthly call with a manager to help with debugging automations/creating new ones, then they brought it down to 2 calls per year, then 1, then none-but a helpful chat support that would help you within minutes, then they removed the chat to now this AI CRAP that they call AI Intelligence, which is nothing more than an interactive FAQ that can't solve anything. It's really the most frustrating customer experience,

SO why do people stay? Because we spent 100 of hours setting our marketing using their platform. Automations, newsletter, deals, contacts, forms, tags, you name it.

While they were cutting down their cost with their human customer service, they aslo raised their prices agressively over the year. Splitting between the "marketing" service and the "sales" service. Then prie doubled in a few years. It wouldn't be a big deal if they kept the same level, after all there is inflation and every business most grow, but I feel the way the cut the level of service was like taking away the #1 reason why people liked the company.

They've also cut the live chat that you could put on your website as ell - which would generate many leads, they've discontinued it without notice. One day you find out a few months later that you're getting less leads and sales and woah the chat disappeared on my website!
wtf?.

The forms designs are so basic, you can't do much if you want to set up a button for to create a lead magnet, you'll have to put the html in Claude AI and go back in forth for 1-2 hours until it looks the way it's supposed to.

And they think their AI feature is so great, but aside from giving you stats of delivery from your email campaign, all the other features are crap: the "brand kit" is so bad you wouldn't want to use it unless you were running a trucking company in the 90's- it's much nicer to design your own campaign and copy the last one and modify the next one with the content.

The automation it creates has bugs or do things you wouldn't have done yourself in that way, so it gets confusing.

Anyways, if you have been a long term client, I'm sure this review will resonate with you. If you're considering Active Campaign for your business, keep considering and looking somewhere else, they've turn a great company bad for corporate greed, and most people don't have time to switch platform. 2 stars for the good old days and because everything do work-most of the time, as long as you don't have any technical issue or questions. But this is one company that I wish didn't try to jump on the AI wagon and focus on bringing back the reason people became a client of them, and fixing their weaknesses instead of cutting all the cost, brining useless features and jacking up the price.

Active Campaign is a robust program IF you have time to learn it all and put into action all of the cool automations into your email campaigns. I however as a small business owner do not have the amount of time needed to dedicate to fully using this product so it seems a bit overwhelming at times.
We currently use the auto email campaigns, sign up form on our website and contact tracking once the form is submitted for leads.
I do like that is have a high success rate of the first email and even second email hitting a customers mailbox VS other programs we've used in the past and the reporting features. Overall does a decent job for what we need at the level we are using it now.

I have a small business that has used their basic plan for almost 10 years. Up until the last year or so, they had excellent customer service and was immediately helped by a real person via chat or phone, solving my problems and helping me navigate their tech changes. Recently they started delegating human help to AI and this has been a nightmare to solve my problems. I currently am dealing with an issue archiving contacts that has not been resolved in 5 days. Their chat customer service takes time to respond... I don't sit in front of my computer just waiting to answer, as I actually have patients to attend, so by the time I return to my computer the chat has been closed. Definitely an awful experience.

A user friendly platform with good features and use experienvce

Worst software. The AI that sets up everyting for you makes so many mistakes that it would be easier to do from scratch. Tehn the help desk can't help you they can't make any edits to the mistakes the AI made

It used to be okay, though rather complex. Until they decided to go full AI. Now the whole thing is un-navigatable! No structure, no support, extremely hard to use!
Then there's the 'customer service'. Basically a Slack group where users just try help each other, while the admins post about their upcoming events.

The only reason I'm currently still using is it because I'm in a lock-in contract, which I was forced to take after I moved to a lower tier plan.
As soon as that's over, I'm moving elsewhere.

Do not recommend.

One of the most robust and user friendly marketing automation platforms. It's great for creating and managing email automations and campaigns. ActiveCampaign has continued to lag in its CRM functionality, reporting, and is now pushing an AI toolset that is largely optics versus useful. Where ActiveCampaign has lost my trust has been its predatory price increases and changes to my subscription over the years. They took me from a fan to a customer using their tools because they're cheaper than Hubspot.

Pretty intuitive to use, I had no prior experience with email marketing and for me is working seamsly, I can see that ActiveCampaign crearly cares about customer success because I got a follow up call (without asking for it) + they have an AI assistant integrated to it to help users, 5 out of 5!

Very good all-in-one CRM, but with pricing rising every year.

This is a very good CRM that has a lot of ways to integrate it with other tools like Spoki, email, etc via internal integrations or webhooks.

It has a great team that helps you to start using it ASAP.

I have been using it since 2023, and thanks to the integrations and automations, we have saved tons of time to focus on our clients instead of our CRM.

The only thing that I disagree with is that they are raising the prices, and there are no updates that accompany it.