You’ve had the dream.  You want your marketing on autopilot, with custom messages depending on your customer type and actions taken on your website.  You figured out how to get your sign-ups to self-identify in a form field, and each submission starts the beginning of a carefully crafted funnel that may not generate the next drip for another 45 days.

Trouble is, every time you explore a software as a service platform, there is one feature or lack thereof that drives you up the wall.  The flaw could be anything from a broken email editor to a bulk upload process from your CRM (customer relationship management tool) that results in confusion not clean data.

Now you can benefit from the trial and error of others, at least if you trust reading about experiences from the year 2025.  If that’s not too old, most of the research has been done for you.  If that’s too old and things have changed, this could be a good starting point.  Regardless of solution, you will also need Zapier for about $30/month.  For super advanced work, expect $194/month.

High Cost

Testing each marketing automation service is how you find out what doesn’t work, but after how much time, energy, and money spent?  Disqualifiers are different for each person.  For many, sky high cost makes it easy to rule out things like Salesforce or its Email Studio.  Hubspot offers the most streamlined white glove service for at least $800/month.  The amount of integration Hubspot expects could position it to be the Amazon of CRM, with enough data gathered to create a scary new competitor if that data is sold.

While almost all services have different packages, references to cost herein are based on reasonable needs not exceeding 20,000 contacts.  Keap is an attractive platform, but it can set you back $539/month and still have limited features.  The popular Mailchimp is no longer cheap once you add marketing automation, which can take you to $350/month.  Braze does not disclose its pricing, but AI indicates levels that can only be considered crazy.  ContactPigeon is expected to be $200/month.  Constant Contact rounds out the high end options, coming in at $275/month thanks to a far-reaching reputation for ease of use and brand recognition.

Disqualifiers

If cost hasn’t scared you away yet, there are plenty of other even more important caveats.  ClickSend is only $76/month, but its email automation is only in beta since the platform is mostly for SMS (text message) marketing.  You might not be using SMS, but it’s nice to have the option to pivot later.  You won’t have that option on Elastic Email, Aweber ($135), or Mandrill ($350).  Aweber is also very strict, requiring double opt-in unless importing or somehow disabling the default setting through a third-party app.  Zoho, at $142/month, is similarly strict and appears complicated to setup.  Zoho also requires a minimum of 100 emails for a non-automated single blast.  Mandrill connects to Zapier but not Gravity Forms.

Elastic Email is a goose egg for other reasons, too.  While it can integrate with Gravity Forms and Zapier directly, there is not enough inherent automation.  Worse yet, the contact segmentation is very poor.  Elastic Email can’t justify its $119/month price with those concessions.

Drip or No Drip

Some services claim to do marketing automation but amazingly aren’t able to do the very specific form of drip marketing.  That seems to defeat the whole purpose.  Drip marketing has almost become synonymous with marketing automation; otherwise you are just scheduling messages as one-time events, rather than triggering a staggered series of communications.  With any sense, the series is sent over a long period so the intervals are not too obvious.  For example, people get used to a monthly cadence.  They can almost feel the past month expire as soon as they see your email.  Then two things can happen.  First, they know to expect a monthly pest whether or not they thought they wanted it.  A month goes fast.  Second, that fast month reminds them they are falling behind in their work.  You don’t want to be associated with a regular feeling of being overwhelmed.

Pacing of drip content is important, but it’s not an option for Mailgun and Pepipost.  The most obvious provider of drip functionality is Drip.com, a very simple $154/month platform whose incredible deliverability ratings are hard to believe.  Perhaps the high success is due to the simple emails.  There won’t be a lot of visual pizazz, but that usually counts against you anyway as many company servers don’t pass your images.  If a clunky template system can be tolerated, this might have appeal to customers that don’t want to go on a deep dive to get started.  Klaviyo is also known for good delivery at $150/month, but like Mailerlite ($110) it strangely doesn’t seem to have an option to logout.  It must be well hidden.  If you are in a multi-user environment, beware of your browser settings which others can change.

Small Contenders

Having covered most platforms, there are few workable options under $200.  That said, the monthly fee for Sendgrid is $80.  Kajabi is $159.  ConvertKit prices at $119 if you work with the referral system.  Flodesk is understandably limited at $38/month.  TeamSupport and Sage are other options.  Commence is yet another option that probably adjusts its pricing based on big customers like the Maryland General Assembly.

Artificial Intelligence

Writing your own marketing content is always the best option.  Sometimes AI can give you a lift, though.  GetResponse ($114/month) has good AI for creating content, if you can get past the struggles with DKIM during setup.  OmniSend ($132/month) may be catching up, but neither can beat the advanced performance of ActiveCampaign ($189-247/month).  The site analysis is impressive.  While you may have to replace images, the AI email builder comes the closest to being on target.  The generated prose is not bad, and the idea behind the text is usually solid and easy for you to tweak without a big re-write.  ActiveCampaign also has the most polished presentation and navigation.  Building a workflow for your triggers and drips looks and feels good.

ActiveCampaign is probably the best product overall.  The automation works great, but there was a brief difficulty pushing a simple email blast without automation.  During what might have been a bug, Brevo became the fallback.  At only $74/month, it handles both automation and blasts with satisfying ease and a clean interface.  Previously known as the French company Sendinblue, Brevo has erased the broken functions of its predecessor.

Brevo is popular among developers for providing a low-cost solution.  The only detractors are the lack of AI and some lost connections with Zapier due to a deprecated zap for “Add or Update Contact”.  The new zap is called “Contact Create or Update”.  In conclusion, start your marketing automation journey with ActiveCampaign or Brevo.  That way the journey is short.