Karon Thackston moved Marketing Words off ActiveCampaign onto ConvertKit. She published the write-up on 16 August 2023. This is her own post, not a vendor page.
ConvertKit renamed itself Kit in October 2024. The product she moved to is the one in the ActiveCampaign → Kit playbook.
She also uses affiliate links. A comment on the post points at her partner URL. Her recommended page says the same thing up front.
Why she left
She treats email as her main marketing channel because she can export the list and keep it. She called the business small because the list sat under 10,000 people. She does not publish the exact count.
ActiveCampaign Lite had been enough for years. Then the complaints piled up. About a year to a year and a half before the post, she said price increases also came more often.
The trigger was an email in April 2023. Her plan would go up $28 a month. That was more than she wanted to pay. ActiveCampaign said the new features were worth it. She did not need those extras to make money.
The product also got in the way. She and her assistant kept fixing formatting in emails. Sometimes they stripped the markup and started over. Sending to a tagged group meant building a new segment first. Scheduled emails sat on “sending” for hours. Support had to log in and repair them, or tell her to delete the email and schedule it again. Support wait times got longer.
On her later recommended page she put it shorter: deliverability went down, and the rates went way up. The 2023 post talks about sends that never left the queue. She never published an inbox-placement number, so I am leaving that claim as her wording.
ActiveCampaign’s contact bands also annoyed her. The jumps she listed were 1,000, then 2,500, then 5,000, then 10,000. If you had 5,100 contacts, you paid for 10,000. A year later ActiveCampaign said those gaps were too large and added bands like 7,500 and 15,000. Lite itself was replaced by Starter. That 2024 rewrite does not change what she paid in 2023.
Why ConvertKit
Friends recommended it. She liked the price bands. ConvertKit’s tiers sat closer together: 300, 1,000, 5,000, 8,000. She said the overall price was lower, and you were less likely to get shoved into a much bigger band.
She also liked the daily work. The interface felt cleaner. Stats sat on the home page. Dropdowns were searchable, so she could find a segment without scrolling. She could send to tags from a menu instead of building a new segment. Sequences felt easier to set up. Broadcast results lived on the broadcasts page. Support was fast. After two months she had not seen a mailing glitch.
ActiveCampaign still had more features. ConvertKit had the ones she used.
She also listed the gaps. To change a scheduled email she had to unschedule it, edit, then schedule it again. Kit’s current docs still walk you through Unschedule, and they also have an Edit action that puts the broadcast back into a draft. I am quoting her 2023 workflow.
Split testing was the other miss. ActiveCampaign let her send one subject to a slice, pick a winner, then send that winner to the rest. Or she could split the list and send both subjects at once. ConvertKit sent both subjects to a portion of the list, then sent the winner to everyone else four hours later. She could not test the body, only the subject, which she said made last-call emails with a cutoff time hard to test.
Kit still defaults to a 240-minute subject test. Two variants each go to 15% of recipients. The winner goes to the remaining 70%. You can now shorten that window to 30 minutes. Content tests exist on Creator Pro. They did not when she wrote the post.
ActiveCampaign still documents both modes she liked: pick a winner, or send an equal split with no winner. You can test subject, from-line, and body. The default winner window there is two days, not four hours.
She also missed one-click shaded boxes. ConvertKit could do the same look with HTML. Multiple tags on a clickable link needed a group tag first, which she said just took a bit more time.
How they moved it
She did not import the list herself. ConvertKit’s migration team did the work. Kit still offers that for free if you sign up for a paid plan.
Her VA joined a pre-migration Zoom. They walked through how Marketing Words used ActiveCampaign, and how the same jobs would look in ConvertKit. Then they got a personal migration representative and a shared team channel.
A few things needed extra work. She names visual automations. She does not name which ones, or how many. Kit’s own ActiveCampaign guide is honest about this part. Contacts and tags can come across. Forms, templates, sequences, and automations get rebuilt.
Kit’s importer can pull ActiveCampaign subscribers with an API key. Tags come with them. You can also export a CSV from Contacts → Export and upload it. Download links on the ActiveCampaign side last seven days. Notes do not export. She never says which path the team used, so I am not picking one.
If you do the CSV yourself, Kit overwrites existing fields, including blanks. Tags get added, not replaced. Importing into a tag or form can fire a Visual Automation. Pause those first. Kit also asks a blunt question before import: do you have permission to email these people?
ActiveCampaign can hold many lists. Kit holds one list and uses tags instead. That matches how she already wanted to send.
She had been through other email, website, and hosting moves. She called this the smoothest one.
What she gained
The bill dropped. She wrote that ConvertKit saved her $56 a month versus the ActiveCampaign price after the hike. That is $672 a year. She does not publish the old Lite bill or the new ConvertKit bill, so I am not inventing those two numbers.
She kept the features she used and dropped the ones she was paying for but not using. Sends stopped getting stuck. Tag-based sends no longer needed a new segment each time.
She wrote the post after about two months on ConvertKit. That is the window she is judging. She did not publish open rates, click rates, or a deliverability report after the move.
Her recommended page still listed ConvertKit as the email tool when I fetched it. I have not found a later post where she leaves Kit.
What broke or got skipped
Visual automations did not land as a clean copy. The team massaged them. Kit says you recreate ActiveCampaign automations as Visual Automations: entry points instead of triggers, then actions, events, and conditions. Those automations do not run retroactively. People already in an ActiveCampaign flow do not continue on their own.
She lost the split-test style she used for last-call emails, and she lost in-place edits on a scheduled send. The shaded-box shortcut went with them.
She does not describe a failed launch, a double send, a missing unsubscribe file, or a rollback. The playbook treats suppressions, forms, sender DNS, and campaign history as work you plan. She does not cover those, so they stay out of this write-up.
She also does not say when ActiveCampaign was turned off, or whether both tools sent for a while.
What I would copy
List the features you actually click every week before you answer a pricing email. She already knew Lite had extras she never used.
If Kit will do the migration on a paid plan, take the pre-migration call. Bring the VA or whoever builds the emails. Walk through every live automation, not just the list size.
Export ActiveCampaign yourself anyway: contacts, tags, and a separate inactive file. Keep that CSV even if the migration team does the import.
Rebuild the automations on purpose. Then test them by entering through a real form or tag, the way Kit tells you to. Do not import the full list into a live trigger.
If you send deadline emails, try a Kit subject test on a quiet broadcast first. Four hours is too long for a last-call send. Kit now lets you cut that window to 30 minutes. If you need a true even split with no winner, ActiveCampaign still does that and Kit’s default test does not.
Run the ActiveCampaign → Kit playbook. Use Karon’s post for the small-list, price-hike, vendor-migration path. She wrote it as a user, and she also earns if you sign up through her link.