ActiveCampaign vs LeadStack

For the agency use case — managing many clients' contacts, pipelines, email and SMS campaigns, booking, quotes, and AI-assisted lead response under your own brand — yes, and it covers a much wider surface than ActiveCampaign does: unified inbox, WhatsApp and social DMs, voice agents, booking pages, quotes and invoices, client billing. What it doesn't try to out-do is ActiveCampaign's deepest email-nurture machinery — if your entire business is one list with intricate multi-month drip logic, their automation builder is genuinely hard to beat.

ActiveCampaign's program — to its credit, one of the few in the email space — lets you resell discounted accounts. But there's no white-label interface: your clients log into ActiveCampaign's app, the margin is capped by their discount schedule, and the pricing curve (per contact, per client) is theirs to change. With LeadStack you own the software outright: your brand on every screen, your prices, your entire margin, and no contact meter anywhere in the stack.

Yes, on your timeline. Contacts export cleanly from ActiveCampaign via CSV — custom fields and tags included — and import straight in; other records come across through the public REST API. Automations don't transfer mechanically (no two builders share a format), but the common agency sequences — welcome flows, speed-to-lead, no-reply follow-ups, review requests — ship as ready-made workflow templates you adapt in minutes. Most agencies onboard new clients first, run both side by side, and migrate the rest at renewal.

You deploy LeadStack to your own cloud under your own domain and set your brand in one config file — name, logo, tagline, support email, pricing. Every surface your clients touch renders as your brand: the landing page, every dashboard screen, transactional emails, public booking pages, the AI chat widget, and customer-facing quote pages. The LeadStack name never appears. And each sub-account can carry its own sending domain and dedicated phone number, so your clients see fully separate brands right down to the channel.

After the one-time license, a small agency runs on the generous free tiers across hosting, database, and email — around the price of a cup of coffee a month. There is no contact tier and no send cap: email costs are your provider's published per-send rates, paid directly, with no platform markup. Compare that to a per-client ActiveCampaign subscription that grows with every list you succeed in building.

You do — completely. Every contact, deal, conversation, and call summary lives in your own cloud project, under your billing and your access control. There's no LeadStack-controlled database in the loop, and you can export everything at any time with your database vendor's standard tools. Your clients' data is your asset, not a vendor's leverage.

No code, ever — once it's deployed, the entire CRM runs in the browser. Setup is a one-time, guided process: you create a few standard provider accounts and paste in the keys, with an AI coding assistant able to walk you through every step. There's nothing to write — just accounts to connect. Budget around a couple of hours if it's your first time and this isn't something you do every day; faster if it is. After that, it's just your CRM.

You keep everything. It's your code on your infrastructure with your data — so your deployment runs as long as you want it to, with or without us. That's the whole point of owning an asset instead of renting access: a SaaS disappears the day the company does; what you own doesn't.