Since we first recommended ActiveCampaign, there have been a number of companies that also promise easy-to-use marketing automation tools: Autopilot, ConvertKit and Drip.

We put all three to the test and you can rest assured that ActiveCampaign still bests them all, although they’re getting close.

Autopilot still relies on bolting in SendGrid to be able to send emails. That requires changing DNS settings at your domain registrar. No matter what we did, we could not get Autopilot to get past the “error detected” stage, so we passed on Autopilot.

The Autopilot experience was no better than two years earlier when we struggled with many similar issues. You wonder how that $12 million in funding was spent.

The experience with ConvertKit was similarly flawed. This service insists on adding a “message content starts here” line to any custom HTML email, which produces a blank line at the top of your emails that looks bad with colored backgrounds. ConvertKit is designed from the ground up for using plain-Jane emails without much customization and this experience shows it.

Drip presents both usability and email problems. The control panel relies on a two-tiered menu structure with some much-needed functions buried in non-conventional places. While Drip did a good job with our test HTML template on the desktop, it failed mobile by left aligning the email in our mobile client. Tech support was unresponsive in solving this issue, so we bailed out on our test.

The upshot is that ActiveCampaign has had many years to perfect its marketing automation technology and the others are going to have spend more time honing their end product, which directly impacts your brand image.