When it comes to email marketing and automation software, AWeber and Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) are two of the most well-known platforms available today. With the ability to help manage subscriber communication flows, online storefronts, and in-depth analytics, choosing the right email marketing solution is crucial for small business owners.
In this comprehensive comparison article, we evaluate AWeber vs Keap across key criteria to determine the ideal platform based on business needs. We will analyze crucial elements business owners need when considering automation and CRM options.
This includes the software’s market standing, usability and interface design, built-in features, website performance, customer support reliability, pricing structures, as well as reviews and reputation.
By exploring this set of factors, we aim to provide actionable recommendations on selecting either AWeber or Keap to meet core business goals like driving leads and revenue through efficient digital marketing and sales processes.
1. Understanding the Basics
AWeber was founded in 1998 by Tom Kulzer. It is one of the largest and most well-known email service providers, with over 250,000 customers and 4.5 million subscribers. Popular AWeber Facebook communities include the AWeber Users Group and AWeber Support Group.
Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) was created in 2001 by brothers Scott and Eric Martineau. It focuses on sales and marketing automation for small businesses and has over 100,000 customers. Popular Keap Facebook groups are the Infusionsoft Users Group and Keap Small Business Group.
In terms of market position, both AWeber and Keap command substantial market share but operate in slightly different niches. AWeber leads in email marketing and automation while Keap excels at integrated sales and marketing tools. Both are popular choices amongst small business owners and entrepreneurs.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
AWeber
AWeber provides automation through its Autoresponder series tools. Key features include drip campaigns to automatically send timed email sequences, segmenting subscriber lists, and triggers to send emails based on user actions.
You can create multi-step drip campaigns with email drips sent days or weeks apart to nurture subscribers.
AWeber’s segmentation allows automation targeted to specific subscriber groups based on behavior or attributes. Triggers offer basic email sends if a subscriber clicks a link, visits a web page, or has a birthday.
Overall, AWeber focuses more on email marketing automation over complex customer journeys. It works well for basic subscriber nurturing through email but lacks robust conditional logic.
Keap
Keap prioritizes automation through its Visual Automator tool. Users can create multi-channel workflows across email, ads, SMS, and more.
The Visual Automator provides a drag-and-drop builder to set up intricate automations using advanced conditional logic, integrating data, wait timers, and filters. Workflows can be personalized for each customer based on attributes, tags, behaviors, and more.
In summary, Keap offers significantly more advanced, personalized, and multi-channel automation capabilities compared to AWeber. It enables complex customer journeys tailored to each individual.
Winner: Keap
Both email marketing tools have a lot of value, but Keap is the clear winner for its superior automation functionalities. With its Visual Automator and ability to create advanced, customized cross-channel workflows tailored to each customer Keap far surpasses AWeber’s email marketing-focused automations in terms of capabilities.
Its advanced features and versatility through conditional logic, data filtering and integration, wait timers and personalization allows small businesses to execute sophisticated automation strategies that convert and retain customers.
Email Templates
AWeber
AWeber provides hundreds of professionally designed email templates that users can customize for their campaigns. Templates are organized by categories, such as welcome emails, sales pipeline offers, announcements, holidays, and more.
The drag-and-drop editor allows changing colors, fonts, images, and layouts with no coding needed. You can also develop custom HTML templates if desired. Dynamic content tags enable personalizing email marketing campaigns using subscriber attributes and links track analytics.
Overall, the email marketing platform makes it very simple to create professional, stylish, and personalized emails from pre-made templates.
Keap
Keap offers a smaller library of email template options compared to AWeber. Their templates focus on common small business email needs like promotions, lead nurturing, and newsletters.
The template editor allows customizing template design including colors, fonts, sections, and content elements. You can also edit the HTML source code for greater control. Dynamic tags pull in subscriber information to personalize messages.
In summary, while Keap provides email customization options, AWeber has far more template choices for designing on-brand and effective email campaigns.
Winner: AWeber
AWeber wins for best email templates with its vast library of professionally designed, categorized templates that make email creation easy through simple drag-and-drop editing and personalization options.
The abundance of templates ensures there is a design suited for any email campaign goal and its customization tools enable businesses to develop emails that reflect the brand image.
Ultimately AWeber simplifies email design so small business owners can build and send highly engaging campaigns faster.
Segmentation
AWeber
AWeber enables segmenting subscriber lists based on attributes, behaviors, and user profiles. You can create segments using checkboxes, dropdowns, date fields, and more to group subscribers.
Segment conditions can be based on email opens/clicks, custom fields, subscriber ratings, social profiles, purchase history, tagged attributes, and more. Complex nested logic lets you combine multiple types of criteria to target segments.
Overall, AWeber provides robust segmentation to group subscribers for targeted email campaigns, with the flexibility to customize parameters.
Keap
Keap allows the creation of customer segments within its contact database. You can manually tag and group contacts or set up smart segments using filters.
Filtering options include customer properties, order history, contact owner, recent activity, tagged attributes, and more. Complex conditional logic statements help define segments.
Keap also connects segments across its CRM, email marketing, landing pages, and other tools to align targeting.
In summary, Keap enables flexible subscriber segmentation, similar to AWeber. Both platforms provide advanced options to group contacts based on attributes and behaviors.
Winner: Tie
This is a tie between AWeber and Keap when it comes to segmentation functionality. They offer very similar capabilities to manually or automatically group contacts using custom parameters, tags, properties, and conditional logic filters. They enable personalizing messaging through granular audience targeting.
Both platforms provide the tools small businesses need to divide customers into meaningful segments without extensive technical skills.
Analytics
AWeber
AWeber provides email campaign analytics to help optimize and improve email marketing performance.
Key reports include email sends, open rates, clickthrough rates, unsubscribes, abuse reports, reader locations, links clicked, and more. You can segment data by campaign, lists, timing, and other factors.
Integrations with Google Analytics and ad platforms allow further connecting email efforts to website visits, conversions, and advertising. Reports are presented in visual interactive charts.
Overall, AWeber has robust email analytics, especially when paired with Google Analytics, to measure campaign impact and tweak the approach. But beyond the email scope, there is limited analytics.
Keap
Keap delivers company-wide analytics across marketing, sales, and revenue metrics through its Insights reports.
Detailed reporting covers email campaigns, landing pages, forms, ads, calls, invoices, profits, and more. Dashboards can be customized by metrics important to your business goals and KPIs. Integration with Google Analytics enhances data.
The Customer Lifecycle dashboard traces contacts from lead to customer and displays interactions, engagement, and spending over time. Reports help optimize areas underperforming goals.
In summary, Keap provides significantly deeper analytics into broader metrics from emails to revenue, funnels, and customer lifecycle. This 360-degree business intelligence is more comprehensive than AWeber’s predominantly email reports.
Winner: Keap
Keep wins for its expansive analytics capabilities that go beyond email and surface key company insights across sales and marketing funnels.
Its unified dashboard connecting CRM interactions, conversions, revenue, and Customer Lifecycle provides complete business intelligence to boost ROI – a level of analytics AWeber cannot match. For any data-driven small business owner, Keap is the way to go.
Unique Features
AWeber
A key unique feature of AWeber is its Split Testing tool. This allows sending campaign variants to small segments of a list to compare open/click rates. You can test subject lines, send times, content, and design to optimize performance.
AWeber also provides over 800 integrations with other platforms through Zapier including webinars, surveys, chat, and more. Its automation features connect to other workflows.
The Inbox Preview tool shows exactly how your campaigns will look across all major email providers and devices. This helps maximize deliverability and engagement.
Overall AWeber has compelling split testing, expansive integrations, and previews to improve email campaign effectiveness.
Keap
Keap offers multi-channel journeys that integrate and sequence interactions across email, web, ads, SMS, and more. These cross-channel automations nurture customers with the right message at the right time.
Powerful event triggers respond instantly to customer behaviors with automated campaigns. Merging dynamic data creates hyper-personalized messaging with custom offers for each individual at scale.
Keap also provides deep financial intelligence with its Profit Maximizer tool revealing which campaigns and segments yield the highest revenues. This allows allocating budgets to top-converting efforts.
In summary, Keap has multi-channel automation, personalization, and profitability insights as differentiators over AWeber’s predominantly email focus.
Winner: Keap
With features like multi-channel customer journeys, instant event triggers, personalized messaging, and profit analytics, Keap pulls ahead of AWeber for its broader business automation capabilities, not just email.
These robust tools sync sales and marketing to drive repeat business and maximize LTV through individualized cross-channel experiences optimized for profitability. The winner is clear – Keap!
3. Ease of Use
AWeber
AWeber provides an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface that is easy for beginners to navigate. The main menu contains clear sections for key features like creating broadcast or automation campaigns, managing subscriber lists, viewing reports, and editing account settings.
Within each section, simple workflows walk users through steps like designing emails, segmenting lists, establishing sequences, and more with prompting cue cards. Inline help features explain how tools work.
The UI has a clean, uncluttered layout using common conventions. Learning where features are located takes little time. With its user-friendly design, even novices can create professional emails, build basic automation, and analyze reports quickly.
Keap
In contrast to AWeber’s user-friendly interface, Keap has a steeper learning curve. While the navigation menu follows logical categories, workflows have more steps jumping between various editors and builders even for basic campaigns.
Building complex conversions or multi-channel journeys requires piecing widgets, triggers, and filters together across stages almost like coding. There are no guided walkthroughs or prompting for new users. The extensive feature set also hides commonly used tools behind dropdowns and submenus.
Without structured processes or intuitive layouts, Keap presents usability challenges. Mastering its array of sophisticated tools ultimately provides flexibility yet takes more effort compared to AWeber’s simplicity.
Winner: AWeber
AWeber wins for its intuitive and visually guided interface that allows new users to easily create professional emails, lists, and basic automation within minutes. Its drag-and-drop editor centrally locates features in expected places with cue cards that explain capabilities.
This frictionless user experience enables beginners to start marketing faster compared to Keap’s steeper learning curve. For usability, AWeber is the clear frontrunner.
4. Email Deliverability
AWeber
AWeber optimizes email deliverability through advanced Verification Procedures for subscriber lists, including double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, and spam check filters during signup. This ensures engaged recipients and minimizes bad addresses or bots.
Sending infrastructure runs thorough message analysis for factors impacting inbox placement like content, images, links, and metadata every send. Reports identify deliverability issues.
AWeber enforces stringent sender reputation standards across its servers. All messages pass authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. This signals to ISPs that the mail is legitimate.
In summary, AWeber uses advanced technical protocols and infrastructure to maximize email deliverability for customers.
Keap
Keap incorporates deliverability protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC as well but provides fewer tools for list and message analysis compared to AWeber.
There is less visibility into subscriber engagement levels or content quality analysis on sent messages that support deliverability. Some optimizations like triggered automation lack open/click tracking.
Instead, Keap relies more on general inbox placement techniques like management of sender reputation, IP warming for new accounts, and suggestive sender identities based on the brand name.
Overall Keap fulfills core requirements but doesn’t fine-tune deliverability to the same extent AWeber does.
Winner: AWeber
With advanced subscriber verification procedures, individual message scanning, and stricter server standards, AWeber wins for superior optimization of email deliverability rates.
Their toolbox surfaces subscriber and campaign deliverability insights while Keap takes more of a hands-off approach simply enabling essential protocols. For reliability, AWeber’s proactive optimization gives them the edge.
5. Customer Support and Community
AWeber
AWeber offers multi-channel customer support through 24/7 email assistance, live chat features, phone support during business hours, an extensive searchable knowledge base, and weekly live webinars to answer common questions.
As one of the leading email marketing platforms with over 250,000 customers, wait times to connect with support agents are minimal and the team is highly knowledgeable and responsive at resolving account, technical, and troubleshooting issues.
Additionally, AWeber fosters an engaged user community across dedicated Facebook forums like the AWeber Users Group and AWeber Support Group, which enable crowdsourcing guidance and insights from over 25,000 seasoned peers and experts.
These collaborative spaces allow new users to learn best practices from others who have used AWeber extensively for email marketing, saving time and effort trying to problem-solve issues independently.
Keap
In comparison, Keap also provides email, live chat, and phone assistance for customer issues with some availability 24/7.
However, as a smaller platform serving 100,000 businesses, wait times can often run longer during peak periods before connecting with a support representative. For self-service help, Keap also maintains a knowledge base documenting answers to common questions.
Since Keap has a lower volume of users compared to email leader AWeber, its current user community forums on Facebook are not as developed or high-trafficked as AWeber’s groups.
Two of the largest Keap spaces include the Infusionsoft Users Group and Keap Small Business Group, but combined membership reaches just a few thousand compared to the tens of thousands in AWeber communities.
In summary, AWeber’s longstanding market leadership enables more expansive, responsive around-the-clock support coverage through varied channels, as well as established vibrant peer forums where thousands connect to guide one other in applying AWeber tools for email marketing – invaluable assets that Keap presently lacks the scale and maturity to match at AWeber’s caliber.
Winner: AWeber
Thanks to exceptional multi-channel assistance availability, extensive self-service content, and an engaged 25,000+ user community, AWeber earns the top spot for customer support and learning resources for new users alike.
Both platforms offer robust interfaces for complex email marketing and sales workflows, making community guidance invaluable alongside official customer service.
With Keap still growing its user base, AWeber’s maturity offers the support infrastructure and connections needed to master such tools most effectively.
6. Integrations
AWeber
AWeber provides over 800 direct integrations with other software platforms via its Solutions Hub and through integration partnerships like Zapier.
Popular connections include webinar tools like GoToWebinar, email plugins for CMS platforms such as WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify, analytics through Google Analytics, landing page builders like Unbounce, chat tools, and more.
These allow capturing email sign-ups automatically, syncing across systems, connecting email efforts to site/sales data, and expanding features. AWeber makes it easy to activate critical marketing platform integrations needed for small businesses seamlessly.
Keap
Comparatively, Keap offers 200+ native integrations to CRMs, email services, accounting platforms, telephony systems, and sales tools.
Zapier also connects Keap to 1,000+ additional apps used by businesses like Stripe, Slack, MailChimp, Facebook Lead Ads, and other systems, enabling syncing between them and Keap’s sales automation features.
However, the integration setup requires more technical work including installation/configuration of plugins and custom field mapping between platforms versus AWeber’s simpler automatic data flows.
Winner: AWeber
With over 800 pre-configured integrations that instantly expand its email marketing capabilities alongside website tools small businesses use, AWeber makes platform connections easy and frictionless through its Solutions Hub and partners.
While Keap enables expanded functionality via 200+ integrations as well, implementation requires more technical skill and manual work integrating datasets.
7. Pricing
AWeber
AWeber pricing is subscription-based determined by the number of subscribers, starting at $12.50/month for up to 500 subscribers. Discounts are available for annual plans.
Core features like automated email series, broadcast emails, list-building forms, and reports are included. Add-ons include advanced integrations, SMS capabilities, and expert services. Custom enterprise quotes are also available.
Overall AWeber is affordably priced for small businesses compared to similar email marketing platforms, with transparent pricing that scales subscriptions based on audience size. Most functionality comes built-in.
Keap
Keap’s pricing is also subscription-based but more complex with multiple plans based on features plus pricing tiers by the number of contacts managed.
Plans start at $159/month for basic CRM and $229/month for the email marketing automation suite with up to 2,500 contacts. Enterprise-level plans with full feature sets are approximately $3,000+/month. Extra fees add up for add-ons.
In general, Keap offers pricing tailored to business needs but packages force buying features that may be unnecessary for customers. Complete automation requires premium enterprise pricing many small businesses cannot afford in contrast to AWeber.
Winner: AWeber
Thanks to transparent pricing that predominantly scales based on subscribers, including most key features by default without complex packages and enterprise premiums, AWeber easily beats Keap for affordability and value made for small business budgets.
Keap niches its pricing by mixing features and contacts but with too many limitations or high fees.
8. Reviews and Reputation
AWeber
AWeber enjoys a highly positive reputation as a leader in the email marketing space, evidenced by their 4.7/5 rating on G2 from over 5,000 reviews, and 4.5 stars across 10,000+ Capterra reviews.
Users praise the intuitive, easy-to-use interface, pre-designed templates that make beautiful emails drag-and-drop simple, and robust analytics with benchmarks to improve performance. Some dislike the lack of advanced automation features found in other platforms.
Keap
Keap earns positive 4.5/5 ratings on G2 and 4/5 stars on Capterra based predominantly on their automation and advanced CRM capabilities connecting sales and marketing.
However, the platform receives criticism for its steep learning curve, convoluted pricing, lackluster onboarding, and support issues relative to its cost. Many recommend Keap for larger established businesses rather than smaller teams.
See Infusionsoft (Keap) Reviews on G2
Winner: AWeber
With leading review scores over Keap and better reception from actual small business users around its accessible email marketing prowess versus Keap’s complex, expensive sales-focused automation, AWeber pulls ahead on reputation thanks to its greater ease of use, affordability, and features for the target customer demographic. AWeber’s approach better aligns with small business buyer needs.
9. FAQ’s
AWeber
- What types of email campaigns can I create?
AWeber allows sending welcome emails, follow-up sequences, broadcast messages, alerts, newsletters, promotional blasts, and more. Campaigns are customizable. - How do I get subscriber data into AWeber?
You can manually upload CSV files, integrate with signup forms on your website, or connect to other apps via Zapier to automatically capture leads. - What kind of templates and designs are included?
AWeber offers hundreds of professional, customizable email templates covering common use cases that you can edit via an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. - What analytics do you provide on email performance? Robust email analytics cover opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam reports, device/location data, and clicked links, plus integrations with Google Analytics for deeper insights.
- Is there a free or trial version? Yes, AWeber offers a free 30-day trial to test drive features and also has a forever free plan for up to 500 subscribers.
Keap
- What marketing automation features are included?
Options include multi-channel journeys, complex workflows, conditional logic, personalization, lead scoring, landing pages, forms, CRM, and more. - How easy is Keap to learn and use?
Keap has a steeper learning curve than other platforms. Plan for a few weeks of ramp-up time to understand and leverage the fuller feature sets due to complex, multi-step workflows. - What systems can Keap integrate with?
200+ native app integrations are available including popular tools like Stripe, MailChimp, PayPal, Slack, and LinkedIn. Zapier connects 1,000+ additional programs. - Is phone support offered?
Yes, Keap provides 24/7 phone assistance although wait times can run longer than top competitors depending on package level. Priority routing comes with premium plans.
Final Thoughts
Choose AWeber if…
With AWeber’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder, expansive template library, built-in automation tools, competitive pricing, great support, and seamless website integrations, it is the ideal email marketing solution for small businesses focused predominantly on email campaigns, especially those without large marketing budgets or needing advanced CRM and complex multi-channel workflows.
Compared to more complex tools like Keap or Constant Contact, AWeber is easier to use and beginner email marketers benefit tremendously from its intuitive interface to create professional, high-performing email campaigns.
Choose Keap if…
Keap is best suited for established mid-size to larger businesses ready to graduate beyond basic email into customized automation across marketing, sales, and service. The robust platform consolidates CRM, email, messaging, reporting, and e-commerce into a central hub to streamline repeatedly engaging each contact.
While setup takes more effort and scales in cost, the payoff is 360-degree tracking of all prospect and customer journeys. If email is just the start of automating complex business workflows, then Keap delivers the tools more advanced teams need.
Choosing the right email and/or marketing automation platform is critical for executing effective campaigns tailored to your business needs and audiences.
Hopefully, this comprehensive comparison provides clarity on whether user-friendly AWeber or sophisticated Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) best fits your requirements.
Please ask any additional questions below on how these solutions can empower your customer engagement strategy specifically!