Best ActiveCampaign Alternative (100% WordPress solution – Autonami)

I was paying $99-149 per month for ActiveCampaign until I found Autonami, the best ActiveCampaign alternative for WordPress. From $129 per year.auto

The aim of this post is for you to be able to walk away and know exactly how you would rebuild your ActiveCampaign set up inside of WordPress using Autonami, the best alternative on the market.

This post contains all the information I wish I had before I made the switch over to Autonami.

Autonami is very new and there is no information online that I could find that gave me 100% confidence in making the switch when I was researching myself.

ActiveCampaign was also working for what I needed, so I just never bothered to investigate.

I spoke to the owner of BuildWooFunnels about an unrelated query I had regarding their other plugin I replaced ClickFunnels with, called WooFunnels and he was EXTREMELY excited about the Autonami plugin they’d just released.

I love WooFunnels and the BuildWooFunnels team are incredible, so after that conversation I realised I really had to try this plugin he was talking about.

I installed the Autonami, started playing with it and the next week I had integrated it into all my WordPress websites.

I am writing this blog post because if you’re searching for the best ActiveCampaign alternative for WordPress, this plusin Autonami is what you need.

I have affiliate links to Autonami but even if they had no affiliate program, I would be writing this article – it’s that good of a plugin.

What you can expect to see in this post that’ll help you:

By the end of this post, I can pretty much guarantee you that you’ll be confident swapping over to Autonami and leaving ActiveCampaign.

Everything happens in WordPress to make your life simple

Why I went looking for an ActiveCampaign alternative

There were a lot of things in ActiveCampaign I wasn’t happy with and I’m sure you’re not too.

The ActiveCampaign email editor problems

C’mon – that email editor?

I hated writing emails using the email editor in ActiveCampaign.

I cringed every time I would click to add an image – maybe you know that feeling?

You want to be able to write emails quick and part of that process is just having your UI load quick and being able to find your content easily.

So many times I would click to upload an image, upload it, and then it would go into this massive list of images and I’d have to remember what I named the image to find it.

I mean, sure – you can organise your images into folders, but it’s a far from ideal solution.

I mean, go to your ActiveCampaign email editor and check the UI and then look at this image below where I am uploading an image from my Media Library into an email I’m writing inside Autonami.

Sure, the red box I have highlighted above is a third-party plugin called Folders by premio, but that’s the thing.

There are so many great WordPress plugins like that that make your life easier and with a SaaS like ActiveCampaign, you have to put up with whatever they release.

If you’re already running a WordPress plugin you know and love the ability to tweak your ecosystem to your liking and using Autonami as your CRM and Email Marketing software allows you to do just that.

I’ll touch more on how this email designer works later on, but for now my point it more so…

You can customize Autonami to be exactly what you want as it runs in WordPress.

ActiveCampaign was expensive for how I was using it

A good example of this is for new businesses who are just starting out like my website you’re on – WagePirate.com

This website up until now has been a hobby that I’ve posted to in between running my main WooCommerce store.

Over time, from posting on YouTube and writing some blog posts, my mailing list got to over 2500 contacts and that cost $125 USD per month.

$125 USD per month * 12 months = $1,500 USD per year.

For me, it just didn’t suit the type of business I was running at the time.

Like I said, this was a part-time gig for me.

I would post on YouTube and write blog posts when I could and I just wanted to build up a Mailing List in case I ever needed to email people in the future.

At $125 per month to store Contacts, it was an expensive option.

So I ended up cutting 1500 contacts just to get to 1000 contacts so I could pay $70 a month.

I did that and the next day was thinking wtf did I just do?

I had been so small-thinking!

I didn’t even consider other options as I’d been using ActiveCampaign for so long and had just thought of the best way to reduce my ActiveCampaign costs.

Fast-forward and I now have everything running inside Autonami happily and it would only cost you $129 per year.

I say that, because I actually bought the lifetime deal that has Autonami and WooFunnels all-in-one.

So the first thing I want to give in this article is what Autonami actually does.

Because if you go to their website, you might get confused like I was.

Not because their website is bad, but mainly because Autonami does SO MUCH that it’s hard to really see how you’d use each feature in your business together to make a complete ecosystem.

So let me do that in the next few sections.

But the first thing I want to touch on is the speed of the UI in Autonami.

Autonami loads very quick while you’re editing

I put this first, because this is one of my BIGGEST issues when I am deciding if I should use a WordPress plugin or a SaaS for a specific thing in my business.

No matter how extensive a WordPress plugin’s features, if it is slows down your workflow, you will hate using it.

This is literally the 1 reason I swapped from WooCommerce to a SaaS for my Ecommerce store (don’t worry, I’m back on WooCommerce now – I’ve learned my lesson 😛 ).

Autonami is powerful for WooCommerce stores and normal WooCommerce sites like business websites and blogging sites. This example with WooCommerce is just to get my point across that WordPress can be slow.

You know how you’re using a SaaS’ like Facebook and you can just scroll and things load very fast?

And you click on a link and that loads fast. Then you type a comment and it posts instantly?

You know that instant feeling you’re used to when you’re using a Software that isn’t WordPress?

Well, one of the code libraries that is making all that possible is ReactJS and that is what is used to power the Gutenberg edit that comes built-in to WordPress now.

Since Gutenberg was released with ReactJS it just seems like so many advancements are happening with WordPress Plug-ins as they too start to adopt these libraries.

Autonami uses ReactJS (like Facebook) and so everything loads super quick – much quicker than a normal WordPress plugin you might be used to using.

I can click to create an Automation and it loads faster that ActiveCampaign.

So if the slow backend of WordPress is something that you’re worried about – I wouldn’t be.

So far, I am building Automations and managing my Contact Lists as fast as (if not faster) than ActiveCampaign and their UI.

But please note: Hosting and caching will play a massive role in all of this, so please consider that with regards to my comments about speed. I use Digital Ocean for hosting WagePirate.com and AWS for hosting my Ecommerce store. The other alternative I recommend if you’re just starting out is to use NameHero.

This WooCommerce website has 141,000 orders and about 85,000 WordPress users and it loads in about 0.5 seconds when I click into Autonami > Automations, which is where you go to create your Automations (which we will cover later in this post).

So now that I’ve hopefully eased your concern about Autonami being slower to create things with than you’re used to with ActiveCampaign, let’s get into the next part of this article which is answering the question you’re wanting the answer to…

Why is Autonami the best alternative to ActiveCampaign?

The first thing we’ll look at is the CRM capabilities…

Autonami

Autonami’s email designer is lightyears ahead of ActiveCampaign’s

You drag your columns in to build your grid and then you drag in your elements (like text and images).

You can better organise your media in Autonami

I’m actually going to take the time to list out why I love this so much haha (bare with me):

I’m actually going to take the time to list out why I love this so much haha (bare with me):

Automations

I have a general form at the bottom of most pages of my website where users can subscribe to join my Mailing List.

Someone completes that form, then I add the tag “General Opt-in” to that Contact which triggers this Automation below.

What the above Automation is doing is sending a different email to people based on whether or not that are (2) Already on my Mailing List, (3) Previously unsubscribed but are wanting to Resubscribe, (4) brand new people.

That way I can send a personalized email to each person. New people get “Hey good to meet you etc”, while already subscribed get “Hey good news, you’re already on the list – oops” and previously unsubscribed wishing to resubscribe get “Hey – good to have you back. I’m curious, what made you resubscribe? I’d love to give you more of that content”.

Very simple example but that’s what it looks like as a simple Automation.