ActiveCampaign and HubSpot bill on opposite axes, and that single fact settles this choice for most businesses in the United Kingdom. ActiveCampaign charges for the size of your contact database and lets you add users freely. HubSpot charges for every seat, but hands its entry paid tier a contact allowance many times larger than ActiveCampaign's. So the cheaper option flips depending on whether your team or your list is the thing that keeps growing.
Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure below is read live from our pricing database.
Pricing and plans compared
The two headline rates are not measuring the same thing. ActiveCampaign's entry cost is Per contact (from £13/mo), while HubSpot's is £18/seat/mo. Comparing those two numbers directly is the most common mistake made on this matchup, because one of them multiplies by people in your team and the other by people in your database.
Neither carries a fixed platform charge on top: the monthly base fee is £0 on ActiveCampaign and £0 on HubSpot. Seat minimums are None on ActiveCampaign and None on HubSpot, so neither forces you to buy licences you will not use.
At the very bottom of the market HubSpot wins outright. Its free tier is Yes (2 users, 1,000 contacts), where ActiveCampaign's answer on a free plan is No. A founder testing whether they need a CRM at all can run HubSpot indefinitely without spending anything, and ActiveCampaign has no equivalent on-ramp.
The received wisdom about contact limits is the wrong way round here, so read the row rather than the reputation. ActiveCampaign's entry contact allowance is 1,000 (Starter entry) and HubSpot's entry paid allowance is 25,000 (Starter). HubSpot is usually cast as the platform that punishes you for holding contacts, but against ActiveCampaign it is the more generous of the two at the entry rung by a wide margin. A four-person team holding a large marketing list will climb ActiveCampaign's contact ladder long before HubSpot's, and that is the scenario where the two products diverge most sharply on cost.
Both are low-risk to try. Contracts are No on ActiveCampaign and No on HubSpot, and onboarding costs None and None (Starter) respectively, so the price of choosing wrong is a migration rather than a write-off.
Who each one is for
ActiveCampaign is for marketing-led businesses with a defined list and a growing team. Agencies, consultancies and service businesses that run considered, multi-step customer journeys, where the number of people touching the system matters more than the number of records in it. Because seats are free, it is also the natural answer for a business that wants everyone, including operations and delivery staff, to see the customer record without a licensing conversation.
HubSpot is for businesses that need to start at zero, that are call-heavy, or that hold a large database on a small team. It is also the safer pick if you expect to grow past a small business shape, since its target market runs SMB to Enterprise against ActiveCampaign's SMB to Mid-Market.
Email marketing and automation depth
This is ActiveCampaign's home ground and the clearest quality gap on the page. Its email marketing is rated Yes (best-in-class) and its marketing automation Yes (best-in-class), against HubSpot's Yes and Yes (Starter+).
The practical difference is depth rather than presence. Both let you send a campaign and trigger a follow-up. ActiveCampaign lets you branch that journey on behaviour, timing, custom field values and conditional logic several layers down without reaching for a developer, which is why it is chosen by businesses whose marketing is the growth engine rather than a supporting function. If your automation needs stop at a welcome sequence and a lapsed-customer nudge, that depth is capability you will pay for and never use.
Everyday CRM work
Away from marketing the two are much closer than their reputations suggest. Pipeline management is Yes on ActiveCampaign and Yes on HubSpot, and both cover custom fields, email tracking, reporting, workflow automation, a mobile app and API access. Workflow automation is Yes on ActiveCampaign and Yes (Starter+) on HubSpot.
The split that matters day to day is the telephone. HubSpot's phone integration is Yes, whereas ActiveCampaign's is Via integrations. For a team that lives on calls, that is a second vendor, a second invoice and another integration to keep working. For a team that sells over email and forms, it is irrelevant.
Integrations, support and AI agent access
HubSpot has the larger ecosystem, at 1,000+ integrations against ActiveCampaign's 870+. Both comfortably cover the accounting, e-commerce and helpdesk tools a business in the United Kingdom actually runs, so the gap only bites at the long tail. Support is a genuine tie: 24/7 chat on ActiveCampaign and 24/7 chat on HubSpot.
On AI, ActiveCampaign runs Native (Active Intelligence) and HubSpot runs Native + add-ons (Breeze), which is a real cost distinction: some of HubSpot's AI capability is sold on top rather than bundled. Agent access is the fastest-moving row on this page. ActiveCampaign's is Native MCP (official) and HubSpot's is Native MCP (official, beta), so both let an AI assistant query your CRM directly, with ActiveCampaign's the more settled of the two today. Recheck this before you commit, because it changes faster than anything else here.
UK considerations
Data residency is the one row where you should read the detail rather than the summary. On our data residency row HubSpot reads EU hosting, while what we hold for ActiveCampaign reads EU/US hosting, which describes its billing rather than a hosting region. If a documented hosting location is a procurement requirement for you, ask ActiveCampaign directly and get it in the data processing agreement rather than inferring it.
UK GDPR applies to both. You need a lawful basis for holding customer records, a data processing agreement with the vendor, and a defensible answer on international transfers, since both are United States companies serving customers here. Neither is disqualifying, and both publish the paperwork, but it is your obligation rather than theirs to hold a copy.
PECR is the sharper obligation in this matchup, and it lands harder on ActiveCampaign precisely because ActiveCampaign is the stronger marketing tool. Sending electronic marketing to individual subscribers requires prior consent, with only a narrow soft opt-in for people who have already bought something similar from you, and every message needs a working unsubscribe and clear sender identification. The failure mode we see most often is a business importing a legacy spreadsheet into a shiny new automation platform and treating the migration as though it renewed consent. It does not, and the more automated your sending becomes, the faster that mistake scales.
Pros and cons for this matchup
ActiveCampaign wins on billing that ignores headcount entirely, so a growing team never moves the bill, on the best email marketing and marketing automation in this category, on a settled official AI agent connection, and on the higher user rating of the two. It loses on having no free plan at all, on a much smaller entry contact allowance so a growing list moves you up the ladder quickly, on a smaller integration library, and on treating the telephone as somebody else's problem.
HubSpot wins on a genuinely free starting point, on a far larger entry contact allowance than ActiveCampaign gives, on the biggest integration library here, on native phone integration, and on a target market that stretches further as you grow. It loses on charging for every seat so the bill tracks your headcount, on automation that is broad rather than deep, on selling some AI capability as an add-on rather than bundling it, and on an agent connection that is still in preview.
The verdict
If marketing automation is the reason you are buying, and your team is bigger than your list is fast-growing, choose ActiveCampaign. Free seats mean the whole business can see the customer record without a licensing argument, and the automation depth is genuinely a class above HubSpot's. Watch the entry contact allowance, because that is the rung that will move your bill.
If you need to start at zero, make calls for a living, or hold a large database on a small team, choose HubSpot. The free tier is a real on-ramp rather than a trial, the entry contact allowance is the more generous of the two by a wide margin, and native phone support removes a tool from your stack. The cost you are accepting is per-seat billing, which is the axis that grows most reliably in a business that is doing well.
Run your own seat and contact counts through the calculator above, then see every platform we track in our UK CRM comparison, compare a sales-first alternative in Pipedrive vs HubSpot, or read our Pipedrive pricing guide.