Anyone coming from Active Campaign?

Jorge de los Reyes Thanks for your reply. Do you mind if I ask what host and server specs you have and approximately how many contacts you have? We have about 100k contacts but many of them are dormant, those are from the last decade of accumulating. We probably have closer to 30-50k that open the emails, maybe even less. We send our newsletter out to about 50k who are "active". (they might not really even be because of Apple opening emails first).

Bob Our own FluentCRM setup is mainly for B2B client relationships, with fewer than 1,000 active contacts. For a closer comparison, we’ve migrated B2C client accounts with roughly 60k–100k contacts, and they’ve been very happy with the move.

The key is how quickly you need to send those 50k newsletters, rather than simply how many contacts you store.

For hosting, I’d consider a VPS through xCloud (ref). New WordPress sites already use server-based cron, managed from the dashboard. For FluentCRM, check that the interval is set to every minute rather than the default five. Here’s their setup guide.

FluentCRM’s current guidance recommends multiple CPU cores and at least 4GB RAM for multithreaded sending, or 8GB+ for several parallel workers. Treat those as starting points to test, rather than guaranteed specs for your list.

Before committing, I’d read this discussion about sending speed and internal batch limits. It began in 2025, so some details may have changed, but it’s worth discussing your workload with the team and testing campaign completion times. More powerful hosting alone won’t necessarily fix every bottleneck.

For another migration experience, Jack Arturo from WP Fusion wrote a detailed account of their switch. There’s also a testimonial reporting 300k imported contacts, although that doesn’t establish sending speed either.

Also, in case it helps, finally, I’d use the migration as an opportunity to clean up that ten-year-old list and review your permission records. Where consent is required, you need to be able to demonstrate it. And this migrations could be sensible.

Start with a smaller, engaged segment you have permission to email. Where appropriate and legally permitted, invite subscribers to reconfirm their interest(but avoid a blanket re-permission email where permission is missing, and preserve existing unsubscribes).

That gives you a chance to test FluentCRM while building a cleaner, better-qualified list before making the full move.

P.S. FluentCRM also published our migration story if you’d like more background on why we switched.

Jorge de los Reyes Thanks for your in-depth suggestions. I currently use xCloud and have been happy with them so far. They were more or less an experiment because I'm not overly happy with Cloudways. I actually run my Fluent community on xCloud, and it's been pretty quick. Granted, it's a very lightweight website with just the community but it's still quite fast.

I also read the article from Jack Arturo a while back, and that did kinda of plant the seed for me to potentially move to another provider. In terms of sending speed, it's not mission critical, but I would obviously want to make sure everything gets sent out within a few hours. Last question for you: What mail sender are you using or recommend?

Bob I send out about 70k at a time and urgency is not important to me but they all get delivered and I get open rates around 40% (though I suppose the open rate is domain dependent, not so much Fluent related)

I send them out with automations, not a regular campaign, so I don't know exactly how quickly it happens as it happens behind the scenes, but my guess is an hour or two, but I really don't know. Replies and sales start coming in right away.

I came from Drip and I was paying about $600 a month back then. Also did Sendy, and a bunch of others before stopping on FCRM a few years ago.

Sending out 70k emails now costs me about $7 (using Amazon SES)

Bob, I'd shortlist Amazon SES. Pay for what you send, not the size of your database.

Also worth a look: https://tosend.com/; built by the FluentCRM/FluentSMTP team on Amazon SES, with a simpler dashboard, searchable logs, reports and automatic bounce suppression.

It's still in early access. Either way, test an engaged segment first and measure sending time before moving the full list :)

Jorge de los Reyes Great. Thank you.

Nicolai Good to know, thank you!

Greg Robins There's tagging in ActiveCampaign as well. It's not really a benefit to me to integrate the other FluentCRM products because I really don't want to have a gigantic site that deals with email and ecommerce, etc. I more or less would just operate the CRM independently. And if anything, I'd probably use webhooks for certain things that are outside of the CRM.