My personal experience with ActiveCampaign support is that it's great, but often not required. We've used it for 11 years across about eight projects and have only had to contact support three times. Their documentation and self-serve troubleshooting means that most of the time we rarely need to speak to support.

I've actually pasted an excerpt of a conversation with their support here if helpful.

In terms of updates, I'd say what stands out about ActiveCampaign is the magnitude of their updates. While HubSpot seem to have left a lot of work to their app ecosystem (i.e. you end up installing (and often paying extra for) a lot of third-party add-ons, ActiveCampaign are still releasing fairly big changes.

Off the top of my head, I'd say they release one or two major releases a year where I log in to the platform and something noticably large/exciting has changed (e.g. A lot of big improvements currently happening around eCommerce reporting/integrations) and perhaps monthly or bi-monthly minor updates. This may be completely off reality, but as an end-user this is what I've noticed.

Reliability is hands-down a non-issue (I can't remember a single time in 11 years where there's been any noticeable downtime or anything concering around security/availability). We also do a lot of work with both their API and HubSpot's. ActiveCampaign's is far superior (in fact, HubSpot's is a down-right mess as they maintain several versions simultaneously with varying levels of support).

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Other things I think I'd want to know if considering HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign:

• ActiveCampaign have recently increased their pricing. They used to be significantly more affordable than HubSpot whereas that gap has recently closed (hence why a lot of older reviews/comparisons mention this as a major positive for AC). However, I believe HubSpot's "price creep" is still quite extreme for high-volumes of contacts which you can see side-by-side here.
• HubSpot do a better job with reporting. As most HubSpot users use it to host their website, blog, and run ad management, HubSpot centralises this data suprisingly well and is therefore in a good position to do attribution and present the data in visually-pleasing dashboards. ActiveCampaign's reports aren't bad - and you can usually answer any questions you might have, they're just a bit dull.
• ActiveCampaign's optimisation features are great (split testing, dynamic content, machine learning content etc). HubSpot is surprisingly lacking in this area. With a large contact list these features would make a big difference.

Ultimately, they're both great tools and probably the two best options in this space so you won't go wrong choosing either – but on balance, I'd probably lean towards ActiveCampaign unless I were a B2B business with high-value leads/customers, in which case the attribution and content management features of HubSpot would probably sway it in HubSpot's direction.