Keap

Keap is a CRM built for small business owners who want to stop duct-taping together five different tools for contacts, email, payments, and automation. If you’re running a small e-commerce operation, coaching business, or service company doing $200K–$2M in revenue, Keap tries to be your entire back office. But that convenience comes at a price—literally. At $249/month minimum, you need to be sure the all-in-one approach actually saves you money versus assembling your own stack.

I’ve implemented Keap (and its predecessor Infusionsoft) for about a dozen small businesses over the years. The platform has improved significantly since the rebrand, but it still carries some baggage from its Infusionsoft roots. Here’s where it actually delivers and where it doesn’t.

What Keap Does Well

The automation builder is the crown jewel, and it’s legitimately good. I’m not talking about simple “if someone opens an email, send another email” stuff. Keap lets you build multi-step sequences that trigger based on purchases, form submissions, tag applications, payment failures, and appointment bookings—all in one visual canvas. For a small business tool, this level of automation complexity is rare. I’ve built sequences for e-commerce clients that handle the entire post-purchase lifecycle: order confirmation, shipping notification, review request at day 7, cross-sell at day 14, and a re-engagement campaign at day 60. All automated, all running without anyone touching it.

The native payment processing through Keap Pay is a genuine differentiator for small e-commerce sellers. At 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, the rates are competitive with Stripe. But the real value isn’t the rate—it’s the integration. When a customer pays through a Keap order form, their contact record automatically updates with purchase history, tags get applied, and automation sequences fire. There’s no Zapier connection to maintain, no webhook to troubleshoot at 2 AM. I’ve seen too many small businesses lose sales because a Stripe-to-CRM integration broke silently. With Keap, the payment is the CRM event.

Invoicing and recurring billing deserve their own mention. If you’re a service business or you sell subscription products, Keap handles the entire billing cycle internally. You can set up recurring charges, send automatic payment reminders before a card gets charged, handle failed payment recovery sequences, and even offer payment plans on higher-ticket items. One coaching client I worked with reduced their accounts receivable from 45 days to 12 days just by automating payment reminders through Keap. That’s real money.

The tagging system, while conceptually simple, is surprisingly powerful once you learn to use it well. Tags in Keap function like a flexible labeling system that drives everything: segmentation, automation triggers, lead scoring, and reporting filters. A well-structured tagging taxonomy means you can slice your contact database a hundred different ways without creating custom fields for every attribute. I typically set up clients with tag categories for lead source, product interest, purchase history, engagement level, and lifecycle stage. It takes planning upfront, but the payoff in targeted communication is massive.

Where It Falls Short

The pricing model is the elephant in the room. Starting at $249/month for 1,500 contacts and 2 users, Keap is expensive by any small business standard. HubSpot gives you a free CRM with 1,000,000 contacts. ActiveCampaign starts at around $49/month for similar email automation capabilities. And here’s the kicker: Keap’s contact-based pricing means your bill grows as your list grows. Hit 5,000 contacts on the Ignite plan and you’re looking at add-on fees that push your monthly cost well past $300. I’ve had clients whose Keap bill crept up to $600-700/month before they realized what happened. You need to be disciplined about cleaning your contact list—something most small business owners never do.

The interface, while improved from the Infusionsoft days, still feels heavy. There’s a learning curve that’s steeper than Pipedrive or HubSpot, particularly with the automation builder. The campaign builder uses a canvas-based visual editor that’s powerful but can feel like programming for someone who just wants to send a follow-up email. Keap offers onboarding coaching (included in the price), and I’d strongly recommend taking them up on it. Budget 2-4 weeks to get comfortable, and 2-3 months before you’re building advanced automations confidently.

Reporting is a genuine weakness. The built-in dashboards cover basics—revenue, email open rates, conversion on landing pages—but anything beyond surface-level metrics requires workarounds. Want to know your customer lifetime value segmented by acquisition channel? You’ll need to export to a spreadsheet or connect a tool like Databox. For a platform at this price point, the analytics should be significantly better. This is one area where HubSpot and even Ontraport have Keap beat handily.

The landing page builder, while functional, produces pages that look like they were designed in 2019. Templates are limited, customization is clunky, and the pages won’t win any design awards. Most clients I work with end up using a dedicated landing page tool like Leadpages or Unbounce and connecting it to Keap via integration. It works, but it defeats some of the “all-in-one” promise.

Pricing Breakdown

Keap simplified its pricing in 2025, moving to three tiers. All plans include the CRM, email marketing, basic automation, and appointment scheduling. Here’s what you actually get at each level.

Ignite ($249/month) includes 2 users and 1,500 contacts. You get the CRM, email marketing, basic automation sequences, invoicing, and Keap Pay. This is enough for a solopreneur or two-person team selling a few products. The automation is limited to simpler sequences—you don’t get the full visual campaign builder with advanced branching at this tier. Additional contacts cost roughly $30 per 500.

Grow ($329/month) bumps you to 3 users and 2,500 contacts. The big additions are lead scoring, A/B email testing, and more advanced automation capabilities. If you’re running an e-commerce business with multiple product lines and you want to automate different post-purchase sequences per product, this is where you need to be. The jump from Ignite to Grow is worth it if you’re doing more than basic email follow-ups.

Scale ($499/month) gives you 5 users, 5,000 contacts, and unlocks the full feature set. Advanced reporting, promo codes for e-commerce, subscription management, and the most sophisticated automation tools. This tier makes sense for businesses doing $500K+ in annual revenue where the automation genuinely replaces a part-time employee’s worth of manual work.

There’s no free trial as of early 2026, but Keap offers a 14-day money-back guarantee. One important note: all tiers include a one-time onboarding fee. This ranges from $99 to $499 depending on the plan and any current promotions. The onboarding includes one-on-one coaching sessions, and I’d argue it’s actually worth the cost—unlike many CRMs that charge setup fees for a glorified webinar.

Key Features Deep Dive

Visual Automation Builder

This is where Keap earns its keep. The campaign builder uses a drag-and-drop canvas where you map out entire customer journeys. You can trigger sequences from dozens of events: form submissions, purchases, tag applications, email clicks, appointment bookings, even manual triggers from your sales team. Each step in the sequence can include delays, conditions (if/then logic), and goals that pull contacts out of one sequence and into another.

In practice, I’ve built automations that handle abandoned cart recovery for e-commerce clients. A customer hits the order form, starts filling it out, but doesn’t complete the purchase. Keap captures their email (if they entered it), waits 30 minutes, sends a reminder email, waits 24 hours, sends a second email with a 10% discount code, and if they still don’t buy, adds a tag that triggers a different long-term nurture sequence. All hands-free.

Keap Pay and E-Commerce

Keap Pay processes credit card payments directly inside the platform. You can create order forms, add one-click upsells after purchase, set up payment plans for high-ticket items, and manage subscriptions. The order forms aren’t the most beautiful—you won’t mistake them for a Shopify checkout—but they’re functional and they convert reasonably well for small catalogs.

For small e-commerce businesses selling 5-50 products, this works. For someone running a full online store with hundreds of SKUs, complex inventory management, and shipping calculations, you’ll still need a dedicated e-commerce platform. Keap isn’t trying to replace Shopify. It’s targeting the coach selling a $997 course, the consultant offering a monthly retainer, or the small business selling a handful of physical products directly.

The integration between payments and CRM is where the magic happens. Every transaction creates a record in the CRM. You can segment customers by purchase amount, frequency, recency, and specific products bought. This powers targeted upsell campaigns that actually work because they’re based on real purchase behavior, not guesswork.

Invoicing and Recurring Billing

Keap’s invoicing system handles one-time and recurring invoices with automatic payment collection. You set up a recurring charge, the system bills the customer’s card on file, and if the payment fails, it automatically enters a recovery sequence: retry in 3 days, send an email notification, retry again, escalate with a phone task for your team.

I tracked results for a service business client over six months. Before Keap, they were manually chasing about 15% of their monthly invoices. After implementing automated billing with payment recovery sequences, their involuntary churn from failed payments dropped from 8% to under 2%. That’s significant revenue saved for a subscription business.

Email and SMS Marketing

The email builder is solid—not spectacular. You get templates, a drag-and-drop editor, personalization tokens, and segmentation based on tags, purchase history, and engagement data. A/B testing is available on Grow and Scale tiers. Deliverability has been reasonable in my experience, though dedicated email platforms like ActiveCampaign generally have a slight edge here.

SMS marketing is available as an add-on and integrates into automation sequences. You can mix email and text messages in the same campaign, which is effective for time-sensitive communications like appointment reminders, flash sales, or shipping notifications.

Appointment Scheduling

Built-in scheduling eliminates the need for Calendly or Acuity. You set your availability, share a booking link, and appointments sync to Google Calendar or Outlook. The real value is that booking an appointment can trigger an automation: send a confirmation email, a reminder 24 hours before, a follow-up survey after, and tag the contact for future marketing based on the appointment type.

Lead Scoring

Available on Grow and Scale tiers, lead scoring assigns points based on email engagement, website visits, form submissions, and purchase behavior. The scoring model is customizable—you define what behaviors matter and how many points each earns. When a lead hits a threshold score, it can trigger a notification to your sales team or move the contact into a high-priority sequence. It’s not as sophisticated as Salesforce’s Einstein scoring, but for a small business, it’s more than adequate.

Who Should Use Keap

Keap fits a specific profile well: small businesses with 1-5 people, revenue between $100K and $2M, selling products or services where the relationship and follow-up matter more than the storefront itself. Think coaches, consultants, online course creators, professional services firms, and small e-commerce brands with curated product lines.

You should have a basic comfort level with technology. Keap isn’t hard, but it’s not as intuitive as Pipedrive or HubSpot’s free tools. If you’re willing to invest the time learning the automation builder, the payoff is real. Budget $250-500/month and expect to spend 2-3 months building out your initial automations before you see the full return.

The sweet spot is a business currently paying for 3-4 separate tools (email platform, CRM, invoicing, scheduling) and spending hours on manual follow-up. If your combined tool spend is already $150-200/month and you’re losing deals because follow-ups fall through the cracks, Keap’s consolidation makes financial sense even at its higher price point.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you’re a startup watching every dollar, Keap’s $249/month minimum is tough to justify. HubSpot gives you a free CRM and their Starter tier at $20/month covers basic email marketing. You’ll outgrow it eventually, but it buys you time. See our Keap vs HubSpot comparison for the full breakdown.

If you’re primarily a sales organization focused on pipeline management and deal tracking, Pipedrive does that better for a fraction of the cost. Keap’s pipeline view exists, but it’s not the platform’s strength.

If you’re running a full-scale e-commerce operation with hundreds of products, complex inventory, and shipping logistics, you need Shopify or WooCommerce with a CRM integration—not Keap’s built-in commerce tools. Keap’s e-commerce features are designed for simplicity, not scale.

If you need enterprise-level reporting and analytics, Keap will frustrate you. Look at HubSpot’s Professional tier or Salesforce instead.

And if you’re a marketing automation power user who wants deep email analytics, sophisticated segmentation logic, and deliverability tools, ActiveCampaign gives you more email marketing muscle at a lower price—though you’ll need to add separate tools for payments and invoicing.

The Bottom Line

Keap is a genuinely useful all-in-one platform for small businesses that want CRM, marketing automation, and payment processing under one roof. The automation builder punches above its weight, and the native payment integration saves real time and prevents revenue leaks. But at $249/month minimum with contact-based pricing that scales up fast, you need to be sure the consolidation justifies the cost—and that you’ll actually use the automation capabilities that make the premium worthwhile.

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