Keap
Keap is an all-in-one CRM and sales and marketing automation platform for small businesses, bringing contacts, email, SMS, landing pages, appointments, invoicing and payments together with built-in AI assistants that draft emails and generate whole campaigns.
What is Keap?
Keap is an all-in-one platform for small businesses that folds CRM, marketing automation, sales automation, e-commerce and payments into a single subscription. The company began as eNovasys in 2001, founded by Scott and Eric Martineau, became Infusion Software in 2003 after Clate Mask joined in 2002, and dropped the Infusionsoft name for Keap in January 2019. The site still says "We started Keap in 2001" and "Helping thousands of small businesses succeed since 2001". In 2024 Keap was acquired by Thryv, and a dedicated FAQ page promises continuity of product, accounts, billing and support; the legal documents that govern the service are now Thryv's, and the roadmap is a group decision.
At the centre sits a contact database with tag segmentation, saved lists and searches, custom fields, tasks, notes, company records, lead source tracking and lead scoring. Around it Keap layers landing pages and multi-page sales funnels, forms, broadcast and one-to-one emails, newsletters, SMS, an appointment scheduler, quotes, one-off and recurring invoices, order forms with order bumps and promo codes, and a reports hub. Automation comes at two levels: Easy Automations built by drag and drop and an Advanced Automations builder for complex sequences, both fed by a library of proven templates sorted into Marketing, Sales, Service and Operations, from lead capture and webinar sequences to abandoned-cart follow-up, satisfaction surveys, review requests, employee onboarding and invoice automation. The home page puts it bluntly: "If you can drag and drop, you can automate your business using Keap."
Artificial intelligence is present but supporting rather than central. The AI Content Assistant drafts and adjusts emails with controls for length, tone and creativity, while the AI Automation Assistant builds a full campaign from a proven template, producing copy for landing pages, SMS, follow-ups, sales emails and social posts.
Keap Business Line adds a dedicated business number for calls and texts, and Keap Pay processes payments natively in the United States, with PayPal, Stripe and Eway elsewhere. An open API covering REST v1, REST v2, REST v2 Pipelines, XML-RPC and OAuth2, with sandbox accounts, handles what the interface does not. Keap claims more than 200,000 small businesses served, over twenty years of history and 5,000+ integrations, and shows a G2 rating of 3.8 out of 5 from 33 reviews.
What it does
- Centralise contacts, history, notes and communications in a single CRM
- Trigger automated email and SMS follow-up without writing code
- Capture leads through forms, landing pages and multi-page funnels
- Generate campaign copy with the AI Automation Assistant and the AI Content Assistant
- Let prospects book time through a scheduling link synced with Gmail or Outlook
- Send quotes and recurring invoices and collect payments
- Track deals in a sales pipeline and measure them in a pinned reports hub
When to use Keap / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Keap is the right fit.
When to use Keap
- Growing small businesses hitting operational growing pains that need better systems to scale sustainably
- Consultants, coaches and marketing agencies that sell services and chase leads by hand
- Teams that would rather run one platform than stitch together a stack of separate tools
- Service verticals Keap addresses directly: accounting, financial advice, insurance, real estate, fitness, health and wellness, photography, nonprofits and startups
- Buyers who welcome paid guided onboarding and a dedicated Customer Success Manager instead of pure self-service
When not to use Keap
- Solo operators and tight budgets: the entry point is 299 USD per month before the mandatory implementation package
- Anyone looking for a permanent free plan, since the only free access is a 14-day trial
- Businesses outside the United States whose growth depends on SMS broadcasts or automated texting, both US-only
- Teams outside the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand that need the mobile app
- Larger organisations: Keap's own comparison pages position Salesforce as better suited for larger businesses
How to use Keap
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Take the five-minute self-guided demo, or book a live demo, to see the platform before committing
- Start the 14-day free trial at try.keap.com; no credit card is required
- Work within the trial limits: 25 emails maximum, DKIM to configure before sending, no payments and no SMS
- Subscribe and go through the mandatory implementation package: mapping session, done-for-you automations, data import, migration, strategy calls and third-party tool integration
- Meet the dedicated Customer Success Manager assigned to the account
- Sit down with a Keap strategist familiar with your industry to identify and implement three priority automations
- Import contacts and connect Gmail or Outlook to sync one-to-one email and the calendar
- Start from the Proven Automation Templates rather than from a blank canvas
- Build simple flows in the drag-and-drop Easy Automations editor, then move to the advanced builder for complex sequences
- Connect the rest of the stack through Zapier or the open API
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely all-in-one: CRM, email, SMS, landing pages, scheduling, quotes, invoices, payments and reporting under one subscription
- Drag-and-drop automation builder backed by an advanced builder when the sequences get complicated
- Library of automation templates refined over more than twenty years of small business use
- Built-in AI assistants that draft emails and generate entire campaigns from proven templates
- Human help included: dedicated Customer Success Manager, US-based phone support, 24/7 chat, Keap Academy and an active community
- Documented open API, webhooks and a native Zapier integration reaching more than 5,000 applications
- One pricing tier instead of feature-gated plans, with a published 90-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- High entry point at 299 USD per month, with a mandatory implementation package billed separately on top
- 299 USD early termination fee on an annual contract, and additional users at 39 USD per month beyond the two included licences
- SMS features restricted to the United States and the mobile app to five countries
- Modest published G2 rating of 3.8 out of 5 from 33 reviews, and a testimonial on the site that calls the feature set overwhelming
- No usable security documentation: the data security page announced in the pricing FAQ returns a 404, and no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification is published
- Privacy policy and terms sit on thryv.com with no Keap-specific version, no data processing agreement and no sub-processor register
- Nothing published on whether customer data feeds AI model training, and no opt-out documented; the product's future is tied to its integration into Thryv
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Keap offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, then a single software subscription starting at 299.00 USD per month, also presented as 2,988 USD per year. Two user licences are included and each additional user costs 39 USD per month, while additional contact volumes are priced on a degressive scale calculated by the slider on the pricing page. An implementation package is mandatory and quoted separately. SMS tier 1, covering 500 messages and 100 voice minutes, is included; tiers 2 to 6 cost 24, 39, 79, 139 and 279 USD per month, with overage billed at 0.015 USD per message and 0.01 USD per voice minute, 500 extra messages at 6 USD per month and a local number at 10 USD per month. An early termination fee of 299 USD applies on an annual contract, payment processing fees are charged by the processor at standard rates, and a 90-day money-back guarantee is published.
- Single software subscription with no feature-based tiers
- from 299.00 USD per month or 2
- 988 USD per year
- two user licences included
- 39 USD per month for each user beyond the two included
- degressive tiers priced by the slider on the pricing page
- tier 1 included (500 messages
- 100 voice minutes)
- then 24
- 39
- 79
- 139 and 279 USD per month
- 500 extra messages at 6 USD per month
- local phone number at 10 USD per month
- sold separately
- covering strategy
- data import
- migration and done-for-you automations
- 14-day free trial with no credit card required
- no permanent free plan
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Keap handles your data.
GDPR overview
The GDPR machinery is in place but thinly documented. Thryv has appointed an Article 27 EU representative, VeraSafe Ireland Ltd in Cork, and a UK representative, VeraSafe United Kingdom Ltd in London, and names a Data Protection Officer reachable at dpo@thryv.com. The policy lists the expected rights: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, portability, withdrawal of consent and complaint to a supervisory authority. International transfers rely on "Standard Contractual Clauses" approved by the European Commission, and that clause is in fact the single place where the word GDPR appears in the whole policy: there is no explicit compliance claim in plain words. No data processing agreement or processing addendum is published or even mentioned. A HIPAA Business Associate Agreement does exist for the Keap application, and the data security page announced in the pricing FAQ returns a 404.
Who owns the data?
The governing documents are Thryv, Inc. texts: a privacy policy last updated on 1 October 2025 and terms of use dated 1 June 2024. On the customer records you load into the platform, Thryv casts itself as a supplier rather than an owner: "Our Clients use our platform to store and process their own customers' Personal Information", and it "does not control this information, and are contractually limited to acting as a Service Provider (or Processor, or similar terms under Applicable Laws) over this data". Ownership of your own account content is therefore implied rather than stated. The terms claim Thryv's ownership of the website and its content, but no published clause explicitly assigns ownership of the data a customer creates inside the product.
Reuse rights
Because Thryv positions itself as a processor and says it does not control customer data, nothing in the published documents stops a customer from using, exporting and reusing the records held in Keap without asking permission. The privacy policy names third parties involved in processing, among them Google Analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings, Twilio, YouTube API Services and Meta Pixel, plus unnamed session replay, chatbot and analytics vendors, yet publishes no formal sub-processor register. Profiling is mentioned in connection with eligibility for certain financial products (ThryvPay). On the acquisition, the dedicated FAQ states that "Keap and Thryv may share certain data, but only in accordance with applicable data protection laws. All data sharing will be limited to that which is necessary for the purpose of the acquisition." Nothing at all is said about using customer data to train AI models; the only related clause runs the other way, forbidding third parties from using "any means to scrape or crawl any Web pages contained in This Website...to develop or improve any software program, algorithm, or machine learning or artificial intelligence model".
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Thryv's privacy policy is explicit about storage: "Please be advised that we store all information in the United States or Australia." Processing is another matter and may take place in a far longer list of countries: the United States, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, the European Economic Area, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Tunisia and the United Kingdom. International transfers are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission. The web server resolves behind Cloudflare's anycast network, so the IP address reveals nothing about where the data actually lives. No usable trust or security page exists, the one announced in the pricing FAQ returning a 404, and no certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is published.
Where Keap works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Keap.
- The implementation package is mandatory and billed on top of the software, so the real first-year cost sits well above the advertised 299 USD per month
- An annual contract carries a 299 USD early termination fee, and cancellation must be requested by phone at least ten days before the next invoice
- SMS and voice overage is billed by usage, so an automated sequence left running can quietly inflate the bill
- The privacy policy and terms live on thryv.com with no Keap-specific version, and the data security page announced in the pricing FAQ returns a 404
- No data processing agreement and no sub-processor register are published, which makes a GDPR-driven vendor assessment harder to complete
- Nothing is published about whether customer data is used to train AI models, and no opt-out mechanism is documented
- Automating every follow-up and letting the AI assistants write the copy can dull the personal voice small businesses sell on, and the deeper the automation goes, the harder any later migration becomes from a platform whose roadmap now belongs to Thryv
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low to moderate, but not instant. The promise is "If you can drag and drop, you can automate your business", and the Easy Automations editor delivers it. In practice Keap requires an implementation package: a mapping session, assisted data import and migration, and a strategist who helps put three priority automations live. DKIM must be configured from the trial onwards to send email, and Gmail or Outlook sync has to be set up. Advanced connections go through Zapier without code, or the API where Zapier stops. Testimonials mention a minor learning curve and an overwhelming feature set.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Keap
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Keap.
Frequently asked questions
Does Keap have a free plan?
How much does Keap cost?
Is the implementation package really mandatory?
Can I cancel whenever I want?
Is SMS marketing available everywhere?
Does Keap offer an API?
Who publishes Keap now?
Where is my data hosted?
Is a data processing agreement available?
What support is included?
Should you pick Keap?
Keap is a mature all-in-one platform for small businesses rather than a young AI product. Twenty years of CRM, email, SMS, scheduling, invoicing and payments have been folded into one subscription, and since the 2024 acquisition the product sits inside Thryv, which now supplies the terms of use and the privacy policy that govern it. Continuity is promised for accounts, billing and support, but the roadmap has become a group decision, and that is worth weighing before a multi-year commitment.
Artificial intelligence is real but peripheral. The AI Content Assistant drafts and tunes emails, the AI Automation Assistant turns a proven template into a complete campaign, and both save time on copy; neither is the engine of the product. What carries Keap is the automation builder, the template library and the sheer breadth of the feature set.
Price is the first filter. At 299.00 USD per month with a mandatory implementation package on top, two included licences and a 299 USD early termination fee on annual contracts, this is a commitment, not a casual sign-up. The 14-day trial without a credit card and the 90-day money-back guarantee soften the entry, but no permanent free plan exists.
Geography is the second. SMS broadcasts and automated texting are United States only, one-to-one texting and the business line stop at Canada, the mobile app covers five countries and native payments run through Keap Pay in the US alone. The compliance file is the third: an Article 27 representative, a DPO and enumerated rights are in place, yet the announced security page returns a 404, no DPA or sub-processor register is published and nothing is said about AI model training. Well suited to a US-centric growing small business ready to be onboarded; harder to justify elsewhere.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.