ActiveCampaign vs. BigCartel: A Detailed Comparison
Developing an e-commerce business demands a proper selection of different tools that help scale operations and improve not only customer interactions but also a broader marketing strategy. In this respect, ActiveCampaign and BigCartel usually stand one-on-one, the active choices for running an online store and managing customers’ relationships. Each has different strengths that will help online sellers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses make a good choice.
This article will provide a detailed review of the main features, differences, and benefits of the ActiveCampaign and BigCartel systems to see how these solutions differ from the other popular ones, such as BigCommerce, Carrd, ClickFunnels, and Webflow.
What Is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing automation, email marketing, and CRM system to help businesses engage customers, track interaction, and drive sales processes. It is very highly recognized for the granular audience segmentation, workflow automation, and deep analytics it gives to businesses that help them drive conversions
What Is BigCartel?
Big Cartel is an e-commerce site directed at small-scale, largely independent artists and creatives, along with smaller businesses. Big Cartel lets users create tiny online stores and sell their products without overwhelming them with a plethora of features. Since BigCartel focuses on ease of use and affordability, it’s extremely popular with beginners and small shops.
Key Differences Between ActiveCampaign and BigCartel
ActiveCampaign does a different job compared to BigCartel, and hence, a little hard to compare directly. However, pointing out the differences between them will be relevant when businesses are choosing either of these platforms upon which to base their activities. The main difference will be outlined hereafter.
Primary Purpose:
ActiveCampaign was meant for email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM aimed at helping companies trace leads, manage customers, and communicate more efficiently.
Big Cartel, in turn, would focus on e-commerce: it is an opportunity for creators to sell physical and digital products via an online store.
Target Audience:
ActiveCampaign targets organizations of every size to improve customer engagement; BigCartel targets smaller businesses-especially creatives-needing a simple place where they can showcase products and sell them.
Complexity:
ActiveCampaign has more features packed in, and at times it may be overwhelming for a beginner because of its great automation and CRM capabilities.
BigCartel is light enough and therefore easy to work with. It is meant for those just starting an eCommerce platform and hence need something quite simple.
Comparing ActiveCampaign and BigCartel with Other Platforms
BigCommerce versus BigCartel
While BigCartel focuses on small-scale sellers, BigCommerce targets companies of any size, including larger-scale ones. BigCommerce has advanced features in eCommerce that involve multi-channel selling, themes that can be adjusted to one’s needs, and scalable solutions when dealing with larger inventories. In the process, BigCommerce allows companies to scale more easily, whereas BigCartel is ideal for beginning businesses or those with a smaller product line.
Carrd vs. ActiveCampaign
Carrd is a light one-web page website builder. Many people build personal sites or portfolios with it. Carrd is great for landing pages and shallow websites, but for email marketing automation, you should look at ActiveCampaign. Fortunately, you can connect Carrd to ActiveCampaign. With this integration, you can collect leads within your landing page and follow up using the automation tool of ActiveCampaign.
ClickFunnels vs. ActiveCampaign
ClickFunnels builds high-converting sales funnels and landing pages, guiding prospects right from being a potential buyer to a very actual customer. Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign can provide some integrations related to email marketing and CRM that could also be involved in the process of a sales funnel, but ClickFunnels does it way better regarding funnel creation and management. But if your business needs more extreme automation and complex customer segmentation, then ActiveCampaign would be your pick.
Duda vs. BigCartel
Duda is a responsive, multi-device website builder for web professionals and agencies. While BigCartel specializes in eCommerce, Duda is more all-purpose and does just fine when it comes to making an online store, blog, portfolio, or any type of website. In short, Duda provides you with a more flexible platform ready for almost any kind of website that you may have in mind. But BigCartel would be the right fit if you were building some simple store targeting a certain niche.
Webflow vs BigCartel
Webflow is a design-first website builder that lets you totally customize a website without requiring any knowledge about coding. BigCartel can only provide mere functionalities related to eCommerce, while Webflow provides great latitude in design for its users. Where highly customized online stores are concerned, Webflow is the way to go. If you have simpler needs, BigCartel is more straightforward.
HighLevel (GoHighLevel) vs. ActiveCampaign
GoHighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform for agencies, bringing together CRM, funnel creation, email marketing, and appointment booking under one roof. ActiveCampaign is super focused on email marketing, automation, and CRM but simply doesn’t have the variety of marketing tools available that GoHighLevel has. Agencies may like GoHighLevel because of its versatile nature, while businesses that focus a great deal on customer engagement via email might want to go with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign and BigCartel in the Context of Jamstack
Jamstack is a modern web development architecture that decouples a website’s front end from the back end, offering security, scalability, and better performance. BigCartel and ActiveCampaign can be integrated into a Jamstack architecture through APIs. You could, for example, use BigCartel as your eCommerce engine, and ActiveCampaign for your marketing and CRM, while building your front end using Jamstack tools like Netlify or Eleventy.
Framer vs BigCartel
Framer is a design tool mainly used in the development of prototypes and interactive interfaces. It targets way more design and UX than BigCartel, which targets eCommerce. As much as Framer is great at developing beautiful-looking website prototypes, it still lacks some functions that will keep an online store running. For a small eCommerce business, BigCartel still remains a better option.
Other Competitors: Kajabi, Kartra, and Teachable vs. ActiveCampaign
Kajabi, Kartra, and Teachable are designed for selling online courses and digital products. They offer course builders with additional email marketing and membership management capabilities. They can be integrated with ActiveCampaign for advanced marketing and CRM capabilities. Kajabi and Kartra, however, are more about providing the digital entrepreneur with advanced tools to create and sell content, while ActiveCampaign provides more general marketing automation and customer management functions.
Instapage vs. ClickFunnels
Instapage and ClickFunnels are separate from ActiveCampaign and BigCartel but are usually used in building high-converting landing pages and sales funnels. Both Instapage and ClickFunnels have a shared mutual interest in the generation of leads to drive conversions, but Instapage is way more flexible in design, while ClickFunnels focuses on creating and optimizing funnels.
Wix, Weebly, and Square vs. BigCartel
Wix, Weebly, and Square make website building and eCommerce easy. BigCartel is simple, easy, and fits artists and small businesses, while Wix and Weebly offer a bit more robust website-building tools, including drag-and-drop editors and templates. Square, the parent company of Weebly, integrates seamlessly with its payment processing services, making it best for brick-and-mortar stores looking to expand online. BigCartel remains a good option for the niche seller who has very minimal needs, but Wix, Weebly, and Square go further in helping a business grow.
Conclusion
It basically depends on the needs of your business. ActiveCampaign is a feature-rich solution for businesses needing advanced features in marketing automation, CRM, and email marketing. BigCartel will be great for small eCommerce stores, especially creatives who want to sell their products without the complexities involved in larger platforms such as Shopify or BigCommerce.
While BigCommerce, ClickFunnels, Webflow, and GoHighLevel are designed to service enterprise businesses of a different size or type, the integration with ActiveCampaign or BigCartel will help a business develop an overall solution for marketing and sales.
Leave a Reply