Product-led or sales-led?
Loops and ActiveCampaign are both used by software companies, and the choice usually comes down to how your company grows.
In a product-led company, people sign up on their own, try the product and upgrade without talking to anyone. Email's job is to react to what users do: welcome them, nudge them toward activation, celebrate milestones and remind them before a trial ends. Loops is built for this. Your app sends events and contact updates through its API, and loops (its automations) respond. Transactional email, such as password resets and receipts, goes through the same account.
In a sales-led or sales-assisted company, leads arrive through content and forms, get nurtured, and eventually book a demo. Email's job is to warm leads up and tell sales who is ready. ActiveCampaign is built for this, with site tracking, lead scoring and deal pipelines that automations can update.
A trial conversion flow in each
In Loops, your app sends a trial_started event. A loop sends a welcome email, waits a day, and checks whether a project_created event arrived. If not, it sends a setup tip; if so, it sends a use-case email. Before the trial ends, a reminder goes out, and when your billing system marks the account as paid, a thank-you email follows. The receipt itself is a transactional email from the same tool.
In ActiveCampaign, the trial signup form or an integration adds the contact and a tag. An automation sends onboarding emails, checks site visits to the pricing page, adds points to a lead score, and when the score passes a threshold, creates a deal for an account executive. The receipt comes from Postmark or your billing tool.
Both flows work. The first is simpler and more tied to product behavior. The second connects email to a sales team.
The bracket cliff
Loops charges by subscribed contacts in brackets: free up to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 sends a month, $49 for 1,000 to 5,000, and $99 for 5,000 to 10,000, with unlimited sends on paid plans. That makes costs very predictable within a bracket and gives you a clear reason to keep your list clean near a boundary. Crossing 5,000 subscribers doubles the bill overnight.
ActiveCampaign also prices by contacts, through bands and four tiers. The difference is that its tiers also gate features, so you can hit a price change either from list growth or from needing a feature like landing pages (Plus) or predictive sending (Pro).
Pricing reality at 10,000 contacts
| Setup | Monthly | Year one |
|---|---|---|
| Loops, 5,000 to 10,000 bracket | $99 | $1,188 |
| ActiveCampaign Starter (annual) | $149 | $1,788 |
| ActiveCampaign Plus (annual) | $189 | $2,268 |
| ActiveCampaign Pro (annual) | $375 | $4,500 |
For a SaaS company that also sends receipts and password resets, add Postmark's cost to the ActiveCampaign rows, since transactional email is a separate product. Loops includes transactional sending, so its row is the complete email bill.
Pricing compared
| Contacts | Loops | ActiveCampaign (annual) |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,000 | Free (4,000 sends/mo) | Starter from $15, Plus from $49 |
| 1,000 to 5,000 | $49/mo, unlimited sends | Rises by contact band |
| 5,000 to 10,000 | $99/mo, unlimited sends | Starter $149, Plus $189, Pro $375 at 10,000 |
Loops counts subscribed contacts and includes unlimited sends and seats on paid plans. ActiveCampaign counts all contacts and gates features by tier: Starter limits automation actions and has one user, landing pages start on Plus, predictive sending on Pro. If you want transactional email from the ActiveCampaign family, Postmark is billed separately.
Use-case matchups
| Need | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Self-serve SaaS onboarding from product events | Loops | Event API and simple loops |
| One vendor for transactional and lifecycle email | Loops | Both in one account |
| Demo requests, lead scoring and account executives | ActiveCampaign | Scoring and deal pipelines |
| Many marketing tools to connect | ActiveCampaign | Large integration catalog |
| Stripe, Paddle or Polar billing drives the emails | Sequenzy | Native billing sync and revenue attribution |
What each does better
Loops is better at: SaaS-shaped onboarding driven by product events, keeping transactional and marketing email together, a clean writing experience, and predictable pricing with unlimited sends.
ActiveCampaign is better at: multi-condition nurture with goals and split tests, scoring and pipelines for sales teams, site tracking, landing pages, and connecting to a wide range of marketing tools.
When a product-led company adds sales
Many SaaS companies start product-led and add a sales team once larger customers appear. That is the moment teams on Loops start looking at ActiveCampaign.
Before switching, consider whether you need to move email at all. A common setup keeps Loops for product lifecycle and transactional email, adds a CRM for sales, and syncs a few fields, such as plan, seats and last active date, between them. Reps get context, and developers keep the event integration they already built.
Switching makes more sense when marketing, not product, starts driving most pipeline: webinars, gated content and paid campaigns that need scoring and nurture before a demo. In that case, ActiveCampaign's automations and pipeline sit in one tool, and the product events you send can feed its scores.
Editing and design
Loops' editor is minimal and document-like, which makes writing fast and keeps emails looking like plain, personal messages. It is less suited to heavily designed promotional layouts. ActiveCampaign's drag-and-drop editor offers more blocks and layout control, useful for newsletters and promotions with images and multiple columns.
Migration notes
ActiveCampaign to Loops. Export contacts, tags and custom fields, plus unsubscribes. In Loops, create matching contact properties and mailing lists before importing. The main engineering task is sending product events to Loops from your app. Rebuild automations as loops, keeping them simpler where possible. Move transactional templates from Postmark if you want one vendor. Keep a CRM if you use deals or scores.
Loops to ActiveCampaign. Export contacts, properties and subscription status. Import unsubscribes first, map properties to custom fields and lists to tags, and send events through ActiveCampaign's API or an integration. Arrange transactional email before switching off Loops, since password resets and receipts cannot pause.
In both directions, authenticate your sending domain and send to engaged users first.
Migration checklist
| Step | ActiveCampaign to Loops | Loops to ActiveCampaign |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts | Create properties and mailing lists, then import | Map properties to custom fields, lists to tags |
| Suppressions | Import unsubscribes first | Import unsubscribes first |
| Product events | Point event calls at the Loops API | Send events through ActiveCampaign's API or an integration |
| Transactional | Move templates from Postmark if consolidating | Set up Postmark or another provider before cutover |
| Automations | Rebuild as loops, keep them simple | Rebuild as automations, add scoring if useful |
| Sales data | Keep deals and scores in a CRM | Create pipelines if you want CRM in ActiveCampaign |
Decision checklist
- Self-serve product, developers send events: Loops.
- Want transactional and marketing email in one bill: Loops.
- Sales team works leads from marketing: ActiveCampaign.
- Need site tracking, landing pages or predictive sending: ActiveCampaign.
- Billing lifecycle is the core trigger and many signups never activate: Sequenzy.
Where Sequenzy fits
Sequenzy is closest to Loops in spirit: built for SaaS, with an API, web SDK and transactional email in one account. The differences are billing and pricing. Sequenzy syncs Stripe, Paddle and Polar natively, so subscription changes such as trial endings, failed payments and cancellations trigger sequences without custom event code, and revenue can be attributed to emails. It charges by emails sent with unlimited contacts, which helps if many signups never activate: $49/month for 60k emails (unlimited subscribers). It can also generate full sequences from a prompt.
Loops has the more generous free plan and unlimited sends, which helps if you email a moderate list very often. Neither Sequenzy nor Loops has a CRM or lead scoring, so ActiveCampaign remains the better fit for sales-assisted teams.
See the Loops comparison and the ActiveCampaign comparison for more detail.
