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DrryvsActiveCampaign

Drry vs ActiveCampaign

A warmer home for your community, without the cut.

ActiveCampaign is one of the most capable marketing-automation and CRM tools there is, sold by contact count with a 14-day trial rather than a free plan. It does not take your members' money, hold your courses, or host your community, because it is the automation layer, not the place your people live. Drry is that place, with email on every plan and automations from Creator.

Start free, no cardFree forever to start. No credit card.
ActiveCampaignDrry
Payment feeNo payments0%
Starts atPaid onlyFree
Funnels includedPagesYes
Own your StripeNoneYes
Side by side

Drry vs ActiveCampaign, the full picture

DrryActiveCampaign
Free planYes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card.No free plan. A 14-day trial, no card needed, and then the bill starts.
Fee on your member payments0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.It does not process member payments at all, so there is no cut, and no payments either: taking the money is another tool's job, and reconciling the two is yours.
Courses + community togetherBoth built in, in one branded space you own.Neither. Its own pricing page names no courses, communities, or memberships; this is email, marketing automation, and a sales CRM.
Step-by-step guides and how-tosBuilt in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too.Nothing here is a step-by-step your members read and follow. It is a tool for reaching people, not a place they come to.
Funnels + landing pagesBuilt in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans.Landing pages and forms, wired straight into the automation engine, which is the strong part. Attribution runs against deals and contacts rather than a membership's revenue per page.
Your own brand and domainYour own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too.Your emails and pages carry your brand. There is no member-facing site behind them to carry it further.
Knowing who is showing upSee who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo).Extremely deep contact-level reporting, engagement scoring, and CRM pipelines, more than most creator tools can touch. What it can see is your MARKETING; who is quietly drifting out of a community is invisible to it, because the community is elsewhere.
Where pricing startsFree, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth).No free plan, and the price climbs with your contact count, with SMS and transactional email as paid add-ons on top.
Getting paid for 1:1s and packagesSend any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool.It can automate everything around a sale. Taking the payment, splitting it into installments, and getting an agreement signed first all happen in other tools you connect and maintain.
Email your membersBuilt in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (free covers 100 sends a month, unlimited on paid). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own.World class, and the reason people pay for it: automations, segmentation, and a CRM built for a business with a marketing team. Also only this layer, so it is one line on a stack of subscriptions rather than the whole thing.
Selling digital downloadsBuilt in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again.Selling a file to a buyer is not something its pricing page describes; a store is another tool in the stack.
Audio and private podcast feedsAn audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report.There is no audio library or podcast here. Audio lives wherever you already host it, and nothing reports who listened.
Letting clients book a call with youBuilt in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link.Picking a time with a client happens in whichever scheduler you connect to it, and the call happens somewhere else again.
Members messaging each other, and youDirect messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities.Contacts in a database, not members with profiles, so there is no member surface for anyone to message on and no member-to-member thread to have.
What each member is worth to youLifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name.It can total what a contact has spent, once you have wired the deal or e-commerce data into it from wherever the money actually lives. Drry needs no wiring: the payments happened here, so that member's lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, is already on their row, on every plan including free.
Drip, prerequisites, and quizzesDrip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past.There is no course product here to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz. Its automations drip EMAILS, extremely well, which is a different job.

Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.

Why switch

Moving off ActiveCampaign is easier than staying.

Keep your margin

On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.

One tool, not five

Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.

You own the rails

Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.

Why creators pick Drry

  • Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
  • Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
  • Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
  • A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
  • Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
  • Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
  • Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
  • Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
  • Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
  • Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
  • Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
  • Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
  • Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (100 sends a month free, unlimited on paid), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
  • Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
  • Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
  • Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
  • Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.

Drry vs ActiveCampaign, questions

Is Drry an ActiveCampaign alternative for coaches?

For a coaching membership, usually yes. ActiveCampaign is a marketing-automation and CRM layer that sits on top of wherever your product actually lives. Drry IS where it lives, and the email automations come with it from the $29/mo Creator plan.

What do I give up moving from ActiveCampaign to Drry?

Honestly: CRM pipelines, deal management, SMS, and the sheer depth of its automation builder. Drry does not try to be a sales CRM. What you get instead is the community, courses, payments, guides, audio, and email in one branded space, starting free.

Does Drry have email automations?

Yes, on the $29/mo Creator plan and up: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own. A journey can also carry a goal, and because that goal is read fresh each time the journey comes back to someone rather than frozen in on the day they entered, one you add today reaches people who are already partway through.

Compare Drry to other platforms

Make the switch

Try Drry free. Bring your people.

Spin up your branded space in minutes, courses and community together, and keep 100% of what your members pay you.