Ontraport review (2026): CRM, automations and checkout on one database

What Ontraport is and who it suits

Ontraport is a CRM and marketing automation platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Landon Ray, Pin Chen and Steven Schneider started it in Santa Barbara, California, in 2006, and it now says it serves thousands of businesses in more than 60 countries.

One account holds:

• a CRM with pipelines, deals, companies, tasks and a calendar
• a drag-and-drop campaign builder for email and text automations
• order forms, invoices, subscriptions and payment plans
• landing pages, forms and login-protected customer portals
• an optional CMS add-on for course, blog and directory pages built from your own data
• an optional shared inbox with web chat

The reason to pick Ontraport over a cheaper email tool is that all of these read and write the same contact record. When someone buys from an order form, the purchase lands on their CRM record. From there it can start a campaign, open a portal and count toward the lifetime value figures on your campaign map, with no Zapier step in between.

That makes it a good fit for coaches, consultants, course sellers, membership sites and service businesses that sell online and have outgrown a stack of separate tools. It is a poor fit for a newsletter writer who needs cheap sending, or for a Shopify store, which Ontraport only connects to through Zapier or ClickFix.io.

Setting up your account

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and Ontraport doesn't ask for a card until you upgrade. If you do nothing when the trial ends, you aren't charged.

Setup is where Ontraport puts in more effort than most tools at this price. All new users get two free hours with a dedicated rep, who helps build your first funnels and shows you around the app, and you can book free strategy sessions during the trial. Ontraport's team also helps move data from the tools you are leaving. If you want more hands-on help, the Done-with-you Setup and Training Package costs $897 once. It includes a 30-minute strategy call, two 60-minute sessions where a rep works in your account with you and records the session, and a follow-up strategy call.

You will need that help more than you would with an email-only tool, because there is a lot to configure. A typical setup runs like this:

1. Import contacts and decide which fields and tags you need.
2. Connect a payment gateway and build your first order form.
3. Pick a prebuilt campaign, such as a newsletter sign-up, abandoned cart or webinar registration funnel, and run its Setup Wizard.
4. Set up your sending domain. Plus includes one custom mail server domain, Pro two and Enterprise three.
5. If you plan to text US or Canadian numbers, register a Sender Profile first, since unregistered traffic to those countries has been blocked since August 31, 2023.

The free Ontraport University library has more than 150 videos, including a Getting Started course, and there is a Bootcamp course if you prefer structured training.

Building campaigns

Campaigns are built on a visual map. You drag emails, texts, conditions and goals onto it, and Ontraport keeps the layout tidy as it grows. A contact can enter one campaign from several places: a form, a page visit, a booked demo or a purchase.

Goals do a lot of the work. You can set several goals along a campaign and use them to move people forward, so a contact who buys skips the rest of the sales emails and moves on to onboarding. Task outcome goals let a sales rep log the result of a call and send the contact down the matching path. Conditions and forks handle the rest, for example asking only customers who finished onboarding for a referral.

You can split-test whole paths against each other, not only single emails or pages. On Pro, with deep funnel conversion tracking, you can judge the winner on later conversions rather than opens.

The part we like most is Performance Mode. Switch it on and the map shows conversion rates, time to convert and lifetime value at each step, and you can click any element to see the contacts sitting there. Most email tools show you an open rate per email. Ontraport shows you where buyers drop out.

Ontraport says it has dozens of prebuilt campaigns, each with a Setup Wizard. They are a sensible starting point, though you will want to rewrite the copy.

Email and text messages

Emails can be designed in a drag-and-drop editor or from templates, written as plain text, or pasted in as HTML. You can save headers and footers as reusable sections and set brand colors and fonts once. Sends can go out in each contact's own time zone, and split tests cover subject lines, send times and the order of emails in a series.

On deliverability, Ontraport offers a custom sending domain, private IP addresses and an in-house postmaster team, and high-volume senders get free regular reviews with its delivery team. It describes its delivery rates as among the best in the industry but publishes no figures, so treat that as a claim.

Text messaging is two-way. Each account gets its own dedicated SMS number, not one shared with other businesses, and replies land in the Inbox with the contact's history beside them. Plus and higher plans include the first number; extra numbers cost $5 a month in most countries and more in a few, such as $10 in Australia. Texts are billed per 160-character segment on a separate SMS plan, and when the plan runs out Ontraport buys rollover credits in $20 blocks. A daily spend limit pauses scheduled and automated texts once you hit it, though the cap can be exceeded slightly because carrier costs are confirmed after delivery. Sending runs through Twilio, and picture messages only work from US and Canadian numbers.

CRM, pipelines and the mobile app

The CRM sits at the center of the product. Each contact record keeps one history of emails, texts, purchases, page visits and tasks, and you can add your own fields and tags to segment by anything you track.

Plus adds the sales tools: deals and companies, a card view for Smart Pipelines, lead scoring and routing, task automation, and a calendar with Google Calendar sync and self-scheduling links. Pro adds custom user roles, and Enterprise adds field-level permissions, so you can hide sensitive fields from some staff.

If you need more than contacts, deals and companies, custom objects let you store other records, such as properties, students or proposals, and link them to contacts. They come with the CMS add-on, which starts at $49 a month with two custom objects and goes to eight on the $149 Architect tier.

The iOS and Android app covers the jobs you do away from a desk: reply to emails, texts and chats, call a contact and log notes, add someone to a campaign, create follow-up tasks and check the day's sales and new leads.

Payments, order forms and member portals

This is where Ontraport pulls ahead of most email platforms. You can sell from order forms or invoices, set up subscriptions and payment plans, record offline payments and run decline recovery on failed cards. Pro adds coupon codes and order bumps. Ontraport supports 16 built-in payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal Payments Pro, Authorize.net, NMI, Payflow Pro and QuickBooks Payment Services, and it only supports the gateways on that list.

Because the sale writes straight to the contact record, it can start a campaign, tag the buyer and open their member area in the same step.

Member areas come in two forms. Customer portals with access control are part of every plan: one on Plus, three on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise. For bigger builds, the CMS add-on publishes pages from your own records, so a course can have a lesson template filled from a list of lessons, or a directory can list members from their CRM data. Ontraport offers app templates for blogs, forums and courses to start from. If your site already runs on WordPress, Ontraport's WordPress integrations let you show its pages there or use a membership plugin.

Tracking and attribution

On Pro and Enterprise, Ontraport captures UTM data automatically and reports lead source and conversions, with Google, Meta and LinkedIn pixels feeding in. Because payments live in the same account, you can see which source brought in buyers, and Performance Mode shows what they spent afterwards. Meta Custom Audiences sync lets you build ad audiences from your segments.

The catch is the plan line. Plus has none of this reporting, and the jump from Plus to Pro is $50 a month at 500 contacts and $74 at 1,000. If attribution is why you are looking at Ontraport, budget for Pro from day one.

AI features: Opie, the MCP server and AI credits

Ontraport's AI comes in three parts, and two of them cost nothing extra.

Opie is a chat assistant inside the app. It answers how-to questions with links to support articles, jumps you to records and screens, and returns counts and lookups for contacts, companies, tasks and custom objects. It is read-only and never changes your account. Ontraport is turning it on account by account, so you may not see it on day one.

The MCP server connects Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other tools that support remote MCP servers. Once connected, your AI tool can look up contact history, open invoices and email results, update records, move deals, tag contacts and manage payments. It works within each user's role, and you can switch off actions such as deletes.

The AI Assistant adds AI steps to campaigns: writing personal follow-ups from contact fields, summarizing or classifying data and saving the answer to a field. This part needs purchased AI credits, and Ontraport doesn't publish their price. AI-built campaigns and pages are listed for 2027.

Pricing and value

Ontraport's public pricing page shows three plans, priced by contacts and billed monthly or yearly. As of November 4, 2026, for 500 contacts billed monthly:

• Plus: $99 a month
• Pro: $149 a month
• Enterprise: $299 a month

At 1,000 contacts those become $135, $209 and $356, and at 10,000 contacts $356, $471 and $660. Yearly billing costs 10 months' price. Each plan includes one user. Extra users cost $19 a month on Plus, where the cap is 10 users, $49 on Pro and $69 on Enterprise. Once a plan would pass about $900 a month, the page asks you to contact sales.

Several things cost extra: SMS plans and extra numbers, the shared inbox and web chat, the CMS add-on from $49 a month, AI Assistant credits, SSO and private infrastructure on Enterprise, and the optional $897 setup package.

Whether that is good value depends on what it replaces. Next to an email tool alone, Ontraport is expensive. ActiveCampaign Plus costs $59 a month at 1,000 contacts and $239 at 10,000, billed monthly, against $135 and $356 for Ontraport Plus. But if Ontraport replaces your email tool, your CRM, your cart and your membership plugin, the total can come out lower, and you have fewer connections between tools to maintain.

If you cancel within 30 days of signing up, Ontraport refunds the payment in full when you ask support.

Support and training

Ontraport's support team is in-house and covers every plan with no paywall. You can reach it by live chat, email or screen share. As of November 4, 2026, hours are 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time on weekdays, email only on Saturday, and 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday. Unlimited screen shares are unusual at this price and help a lot when a campaign isn't doing what you expect.

Outside those hours you have the Support Center articles, the 150-plus Ontraport University videos and a private Facebook group that Ontraport says has more than 10,000 users. Businesses with big launches or large lists can buy VIP support with direct access to senior reps; its price is not published. Ontraport reports 99.99% average uptime and has a public status page.

Ontraport vs ActiveCampaign and Keap

ActiveCampaign is the cheaper choice if email automation is the main job. At 1,000 contacts its Plus plan is $59 a month billed monthly, or $49 billed yearly, and Pro is $99 or $79. It lists more than 1,000 integrations, so it plugs into whatever cart or course platform you already use. Choose it if you are happy to keep payments and member areas in other tools. Choose Ontraport if you want checkout, subscriptions and portals in the same database as your automations.

Keap is the closest match in spirit, since it also targets small businesses that sell services and want sales and marketing in one place. Keap's pricing starts at $320 a month, or $3,195 billed yearly, with two users included, $39 for each extra user and required implementation services whose price it doesn't publish. Its trial limits you to 25 emails and turns off payments and texting. Ontraport's entry price is lower, its trial needs no card, and its two free setup hours are included, so it is easier to test properly before you commit.

HubSpot is the option if you want free CRM tools to start with and expect to grow into a larger sales team. Platformly does link and revenue tracking well, but it is closed to new signups as of November 4, 2026.

Pricing and value

As of November 4, 2026, Ontraport has no free plan and a 14-day free trial with no card. For 500 contacts billed monthly, Plus costs $99 a month, Pro $149 and Enterprise $299; at 1,000 contacts they cost $135, $209 and $356. Yearly billing costs the price of 10 months. Each plan includes one user, with extra users at $19 (Plus, up to 10), $49 (Pro) or $69 (Enterprise) a month. Add-ons include SMS plans, the shared inbox and web chat, the CMS add-on from $49 a month, AI credits and a one-time $897 setup package. Plans that would pass about $900 a month are priced by quote.

Who should buy it

Buy Ontraport if you run a coaching, course, membership or service business that takes payments online and you are paying for separate email, CRM, cart and membership tools. It suits you best when you will use the order forms, portals and campaign map together, and when you can afford Pro so that you get lead source and UTM reports. Teams that value a human on chat or screen share seven days a week will also get a lot from it.

Who should skip it

Skip Ontraport if you mainly send a newsletter, because ActiveCampaign or Kit cost far less for that job. Skip it if you run a Shopify store and want email driven by product and cart data; Klaviyo is built for that. Skip it too if you need many users on a small budget, since every login past the first adds $19 to $69 a month.