ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign's automation canvas is the deepest in this category at its price point, letting you branch a sequence on email opens, site visits, deal stage, or custom field values, then feed the result straight into its built-in CRM pipeline for sales follow-up. The email editor itself is competent rather than flashy, and that's the right trade: most of the product's engineering effort goes into what happens after someone clicks, not how the email looks.

Plans bill by contact count across four tiers, from Starter through Enterprise, with pricing scaling further once you add the CRM/sales features or SMS. There's no permanent free plan, only a 14-day trial, and annual billing knocks about 20% off the monthly rate. It fits a business that has outgrown simple newsletters and needs behavior-based automation and a lightweight CRM without the implementation overhead of a platform like Keap or Ontraport.