8 Hubspot Alternatives for Marketing Automation
Hubspot is good at what they do, that’s why they are one of the most well known marketing automation platforms on the Internet. But, they are not the only tree in the forest. There’s actually quiet a few of them that offer core functionality a business needs to successfully generate leads and automate their marketing.
Let’s look at the 8 Hubspot alternatives for marketing automation and see how they compare. To be fare, here’s a list of features that are imperative to successfully implement inbound marketing strategy for your business and are offered at the lowest pricing plan:
- Blog/Content Management System
- Landing Pages with Lead Capture Forms
- Lead Nurturing/Autoresponders
- Email Marketing/Email Blasts
- Social Media Updates/Monitoring
- SEO Tools and Optimization
All other features and functionality are an added bonus. Please note, the order is random and is not indicative of quality or recommendation.
1. Optify – B2B Marketing Software – Basic – $250/mo
Optify is a good contender to rival Hubspot. They offer comprehensive features to automate marketing and are good at educating their customers through a blog and webinars.
Quick overview:
- Up to 10,000 page views
- 1 active landing page
- Contact manager included
- Email marketing and lead nurturing not included
- No CMS or Blog
- Basic social media tools included
- Basic SEO – Track 50 keywords and 5 competitors
The biggest thing to consider with Optify is that they do not offer website hosting, like Hubspot. Their own website and blog uses WordPress. For $250/mo their list of features is quiet unimpressive, they charge a lot but offer little.
You would have to cough up a lung every month on Optify and a bundle of other services to effectively engage in inbound marketing.
2. InfusionSoft – Small Business CRM – Standard – $199/mo
InfusionSoft offers a most features that you would need for marketing automation, with limits higher than Hubspot and at the same price as Hubspot’s lowest plan. But, like Optify, InfusionSoft does not offer website hosting and management.
Quick overview
- Send unlimited emails
- 5,000 contacts
- Landings pages and lead capture forms
- Email autoresponders & lead nurturing campaigns
- CRM
- Analytics for the above features
For an additional $100 (Plus plan and above) you also get sales automation and e-commerce store. But, beware, when you become a customer you HAVE TO pay $2,000 for “quick-start services,” which covers educational resources and training.
Visit InfusionSoft’s Pricing Page
3. Act-On – Marketing Automation Software – Starts at $500/mo
Act-On seems to offers very good features, and offers all the features to all pricing levels. They charge based on how many active contacts you have in your CRM with them.
Unfortunately, their website is next to impossible to understand. They lack clear features page, and their pricing page is just a block of text you need to comb through. They really need to improve their copywriting to facilitate scanning, and it definitely improve their lead conversions.
Quick overview
- Landing pages and lead capture forms
- Lead nurturing
- Webinar management
- Syndicate content to your remote sales team
- Lead management and scoring
If they offer any other features, they did not mention anything on their website. Pretty poor copywriting, a lot of inflated language without concrete examples. They “tell us, not show us” how their product is better from the competition.
4. Genius – Marketing Automation – Small Business – Free
Genius is quiet a nice small package that will fit many small businesses. They offer very basic features for free, with an opportunity to upgrade to the Pro account. Unfortunately, as expected, email marketing is not included in the free plan, as well as no website hosting.
Quick overview
- Web analytics
- Lead capture forms
- 1 on 1 emails
- Some sort of automation
The marketing information is very superficial, it’s really hard to understand what is free and what you need to pay for. It shouldn’t be this hard trying to understand what product features are included in what pricing plan.
Their cheapest plan is $220/mo for 10,000 emails.
5. LoopFuse – Marketing Automation – FreeView – Free
They are not very well known, but they do pack a good set of feature to help businesses automate marketing. Especially, with their free basic offer. It’s great for small businesses and self-employed professionals to get started. They do not offer website hosting or landing page creation or SEO.
Quick Overview
- 500 contacts
- 1,000 emails
- 10,000 pageviews
- Standard SalesForce integration
- Lead capture forms
- Lead nurturing emails
- Lead management and scoring
- Marketing reports and analytics
If you need more contacts, you’ll be in for $450/mo and get up to 10,000 contacts and everything else unlimited. It’s a good option for very small businesses and self-employed professionals that do not deal with high volumes of clients and leads.
6. Marketo Spark – Marketing Automation Software – Small Business – $750/mo
Marketo’s small business plan Spark is heavily focused on email marketing, with limited functionality for everything else. It’s really one of the least appealing alternatives to Hubspot.
Quick overview
- Up to 30,000 emails
- Lead nurturing programs
- Email marketing
- Landing pages and lead capture forms
- Marketing analytics and reports
- Social media integration
Visit Marketo Spark’s Pricing Page
7. Pardot – Marketing Automation – Professional – $1,200/mo
We’re in some premium territory now, over one thousand dollars, and they do offer some good enterprise features for power users. They do not offer website hosting, though.
Quick overview
- Unlimited users and prospects
- Custom lead scoring
- 30,000 emails
- 50 lead nurturing campaigns
- 50 landing pages
- 50 forms
- 100 custom fields
- Custom URL for landing pages
- CRM integration
They offer some nice features, but there’s no SEO functionality and you still need your own website to be able, which adds to the expenses. Frankly, $1,200 for 30,000 emails is a joke. MailChimp offers up to 50,000 for $240. It’s doubtful that $1,200 would justify itself, especially for small businesses.
8. WordPress – Lead Generating Machine – Price of hosting ($10/mo on average)
Saved best for the last. You might not consider WordPress to be marketing automation software and lead generating machine, but I beg to differ. Out of the box, WordPress is an excellent CMS, and with excellent plugins it can be extended to pretty much anything you heart desires.
That’s what I do for my clients, either help them convert their Hubspot website to WordPress or create lead generating website based on WordPress, with many automated features you find in other platforms.
Quick overview
- Easy to use CMS
- Advance SEO with plugins
- Landing pages with custom post types
- Lead capture forms with plugin
- Social medai integration with plugins
- CRM integration with plugins
- Email marketing
- WordPress plugin to send out emails and autoresponders
- MailChimp integration with plugin (additional price)
- Freedom to customize anything you want
WordPress is the best and most affordable alternative to Hubspot for small businesses. Once the initial setup is complete, you don’t have to pay huge monthly premium that doubles when you get more clients and leads into the pipeline. My clients absolutely love it after moving from Hubspot, and I love it too and will continue recommending it. For more information check out my free guide WordPress: A FREE Alternative to Hubspot for more in-depth review.
Visit Hubspot to WordPress Conversion Page
To conclude, any of these options will offer you some sort of marketing automation. You just need to know exactly what features you need and what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t forget, it’s not really automatic. The system needs an operator to function correctly, that means at least 5-10 hours per week dedicated to inbound marketing to make it work for your business. None of these systems are set and forget, they all require tweaking to get better and generate more leads.
What are some alternatives to HubSpot?…
There are many alternatives to Hubspot, 2 were already named in the previous comments. So I’ll add a few more and even a free alternative
– optify.net – actonsoftware.com Act On seems to be a very good, better priced alternative to Hubspot. But the…
What is a good SaaS lead generation software that can be integrated with 3rd party CRM?…
One of the most popular options would be Hubspot. They offer everything you need to generate leads as well as integration with many other platforms, including CRM. * Landing pages and custom forms * Lead scoring * Conversion tracking * Lead nurturing c…
Twitter: atrichatt
says:
Victor, thanks for the mention on your blog and we appreciate the constructive criticism of the website.
Act-On Software provides marketing automation to the Fortune 5 million. Our goal is to enable small marketing teams whether they be a group in a large company or an SMB whose entire marketing team is small and therefore does not have dedicated specialists focused only on marketing automation. We’ve grown rapidly in the last two years and have over 800 customers today. In fact we were identified by David Raab, as the fastest growing vendor in this space. See his blog post on the subject.
There are two important things to know about Act-On’s pricing:
1) Pricing tiers are based on the number of active contacts you are marketing to, NOT the number of contacts in your database. For example, you can have a database of 100K contacts but are only interacting with 10K active contacts in a given month. And marketing activities to those 10K contacts through the Act-On system is unlimited. The systems meters your active contacts in real time.
2) Act-on does not tie in customers to long-term contracts. It’s month-to-month. Unlike most other companies that lock people in through contract, we rather have people lock themselves in because they like our system.
For those interested here are videos of Act-On in action.
Thanks for your comment Atri, I appreciate additional information and reading the post.
Who are the competitors for Hubspot?…
This is something I’ve been researching recently, but more from an “alternative to Hubspot” perspective – rather than competitor, though they are. First resource you need to check out is another question on Quora with many options to look at: What a…
Sometimes I stumble upon a blog post that perfectly answers a question that brought me to perform a search in the first place – your post is a good example of such a happy encounter. Thanks!
Twitter: bhaveshg
says:
Really good post and comments are useful.
Glad you found this post useful Bhavesh.
For an early-stage company that wants to do lead scoring and nurturing and drip marketing, what is the best tool to use?…
The most important thing you need to consider is the cost. How much can you comfortably afford to pay for marketing automation platform? It’s very important because these tools are not cheap, and you have limited funding until you begin generating you…
Twitter: venntive
says:
Great article. I appreciate your unvarnished, no frills evaluations of these various applications. We are in the process of doing a comprehensive comparison spreadsheet of Venntive versus our closest competitors.
I invite you and anyone else who’s interested to set up a 30-day trial of Venntive. It includes email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, SMS marketing, surveys, event management, CMS, brand monitor, social deck, etc. We think we kick the asses of all those other guys! In features and price!
I’d love to learn what you think! I’d love to have a conversation! Just include a note in the “How can we help you?” text box.
Lydia Sugarman recently posted..LinkedIn Boot Camp Infographic
Twitter: qqqfolio
says:
Viktor, I’m so glad I woke up in the middle of the night upset because I realize I can’t afford infusionsoft and Hubspot… nor can I afford to run my financial design business by cold calling when my competition are cleaning my clock through inbound marketing!
Your blog touches on it but one of my biggest dilemmas is continuing to provide high quality service and cross selling to existing customers, while prospecting and nurturing leads. I discovered WordPress/apache already utilize SQL databases and my contact information is already in my blog. It’s just a matter of using the information intelligently.
From what I’ve read since I discovered you at 3 this morning, you’re doing that and more and I’m looking forward to working with/speaking with you.
Thanks Dave
Hey Dave,
Thanks for stopping by my blog. Glad you were able to find it at 3AM. That’s usually when I get creative and able to write.
Yes, if you want to use WordPress to manage your contacts there are several good plugins. For example, one that comes to mind is WP-CRM. It offers contact management as well as forms to capture data.
Feel free to reach out to me with any questions. I’m always here to help.
Viktor
Twitter: elcarg
says:
I’ve been working on HubSpot recently and really like it, but realize that it may not be affordable for all companies. Thanks for the list so I can recommend some of these solutions for our clients. Marketing analysis, content marketing and inbound lead generation is where companies have to be focusing efforts these days.
Thanks for commenting John. Glad you found something you can use to recommend different options to your clients. If you have any questions about Hubspot, feel free to drop me a note. Will be more than happy to help.
Twitter: caitlin_vonh
says:
Always so nice to come across these good, candid posts on the various options in the Inbound Marketing Software space (Thanks Viktor!), and it becomes so sad to discover we have not been included!
I work with Spectate, an inbound solution that compares with all these guys on price ($250/mo), features (site and visitor tracking/analytics, content creation tools, SEO & keyword analysis, social media tracking, forms, landing pages and more!) and usability, but without a lot of the caps on numbers that seem to penalize you when you are doing well. We really like that part.
Next time you decide to update your post, Viktor, give us a look! We’d be happy to show you (or anyone!) a look around and/or a demo!
Hi Caitlin,
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. I wanted to keep the list short, so I focused on companies that I was able to quickly find or already knew about. There are couple new ones, including Spectate, that I’ve learned about since I wrote this post (thanks to this post). So I do plan on having another post with more marketing automation platforms. Once I find some free time between the projects
Thanks again.
[...] out the infographic below and start creating your landing pages in WordPress, or using some other service that allows you to create landing [...]
Twitter: jumpleadapp
says:
Hi Viktor,
Great article, and it looks as though this space is hotting up!
For our part, we run Jumplead http://www.jumplead.com
We started life as a visitor identification tool, and progressed by adding in lead management, live chat, lead scoring, conversion forms, event triggers and email nurture campaigns.
Everything we needed to run inbound marketing for ourselves!
If you get a chance to take a look at what we’re doing i’d love to get your opinion.
Thanks again for the article, it’s a great resource.
Matt
Matt Fenn recently posted..5 Steps to Getting the Best Results with LinkedIn Advertising
Thanks for commenting Matt. Will make sure to include you in my next post. Since this post, I’ve learned about more alternatives, enough for another post. Thanks again!
Happy New Year 2013 and thank you for this – we are interested in your alternative to hubspot based on WordPress – I still guess the current pricing of the SaaS marketing automation solutions is not flexible enough – as always the market finds a solution, like infrastructure as a service vs. SaaS or SMTP services vs. list management providers. Great to know you have an update as well – will check back in a few days, once the January blues goes away :-p
Victor McNamara – Soliber Net recently posted..Why Is Web Analytics Important?
Thanks for the comment Victor. Yes, I’m working on more things to help make WordPress a really good competitor to most, if not all, marketing automation platforms. January is a busy month, thats for sure.
Twitter: ianguiver
says:
this is a great blog Viktor. As you say, there are now more alternatives but in my experience the main point is this: All of these products work pretty well. The question is: Will you use them sufficiently often and with sufficient strategic thinking to achieve your objectives? I have had several conversations with folk who have spent a great deal of time and energy considering their platform but have not reaped the enormous potential benefits of inbound Marketing because they don’t allocate the resources to make use of the tool that they have. You need a LOT of content. That either means taking people off their day job, employing an internal specialist or working with an external agency. Your 5-10 hours/week estimate is on the cautious side I’d say. By the time you add in the production of good quality original content it is going to be quite a lot more, even if you have pretty low expectations of immediate results. The real or opportunity cost will be a lot higher than the cost of the software but if you take it seriously, Inbound Marketing will increase your leads and reduce your marketing costs in the long run.
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your comment. I deal with clients who are leaving Hubspot every month who were not able to use inbound marketing effectively to make Hubspot pay for itself because they didn’t realize what sort of commitment they had to make every day/week/month to make it effective. I see this happening over and over again, and I don’t understand why it’s not something that Hubspot, and other marketing automation platforms, are not communicating well enough during the sales process. It would help their retention rates and customers would be more satisfied.
I even heard some clients say they thought Hubspot will generate leads for them (marketing automation = autopilot), and when they got it they realized that automation is NOT autopilot. You need to produce content, that’s the foundation of inbound marketing.
Cheers,
Viktor
Twitter: dirincorporated
says:
In my opinion ONLY Optify, Spectate, Marketo, and Eloqua can hold a candle next to HubSpot. When, price is considered, OPTIFY is the only alternative.
Twitter: dirincorporated
says:
Almost forgot to share an link to a blog post the compares the strategic inbound marketing tools … http://www.dirincorporated.com/blog-1/bid/221229/Marketing-Performance-Indicators-Top-Marketing-Firms-Monitor
Rob Rohena recently posted..Marketing Performance Indicators Top Marketing Firms Monitor
In my opinion, Hubspot offers no unique services. Everything Hubspot offers is readily available in many other platforms. The only differentiator I see is their user interface and how these services connect inside one platform. The only innovative tool Hubspot did create is marketing grader, available for free. There are many other platforms not on this list that offer great alternatives to Hubspot.
Twitter: MeeAParkins
says:
Hi Viktor,
I’m a small business owner and very new to web marketing. I love the all-in-one package that Hubspot offers but cannot afford it at this stage, especially given that the South African Rand is so weak against the Dollar.
Which of these solutions would you recommend for someone with no budget or digital know-how?
Which WP plug-ins would you recommend for turning my WP site into an integrated marketing platform? Are they free?
Hi MeeA,
Yes, for small business owners it’s hard to be able to afford marketing automation platform – especially if they are located outside US. Not sure if you’ve seen my guide about using WordPress as a possible alternative to Hubspot, but if that’s something that you can’t do. You can try either LoopFuse free plan to get started, or you can try Leadsius.com (not on this list, something new I learned about recently) – they offer a free plan as well. Whatever you decide to use, do let me know.
Thanks for commenting.
Twitter: stefankrafft
says:
Thanks for mention us! We released our Free version of Leadsius in December last year and we do now have almost 500 Marketers using our platform. We offer e-mail marketing, tracking, landing page creation, web forms, lead database and analytics totally free of charge. Only one restriction and that´s the size of your database, the limit will be 10 000 contacts. It´s a game-changer for B2B Marketers that want to test what MA is all about. Thanks for a great article, hoping to be included in the list in the future. Once again, thanks for the mention.
/Stefan Krafft
Twitter: venntive
says:
Risking backlash for redundancy and/or self-promotion, I invite you to compare Venntive to any and all alternatives cited in this thread. We are competitive with Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua, yet a fraction of the cost. That’s just the markting automation.
We include a great CMS in lieu of Hubspot as well as enterprise-level email marketing, mobile marketing, CRM, surveys, social media marketing, event marketing, project management, and on and on…without compromise. We believe in delivering an affordable, sophisticated platform that will grow with your business.
There are hidden, but real costs to compromising and using an entry-level app to “start out” and that you’ll outgrow. Seriously, why compromise when you don’t have to?
It’s free to set up a 30-day trial. Try us! You might very well find you’ll love us! (http://www.venntive.com)
Lydia Sugarman recently posted..No One Is Searching For Your Business on Social Media
Thanks Lydia for adding Venntive to the list.
Twitter: getspokal
says:
Hi Viktor,
Please add Spokal (http://www.getspokal.com) to that list too! We’re WordPress based, designed specifically for small business (less than 5 employees), and start at $39/month.
14 day free trial if you want to check it out.
Cheers,
Chris
Chris Mack recently posted..Passion Sells
Thank you soooooooooooo much. As a start up we did not where to start at marketing. I suppose I still dont but I will be making contact. Thanks again
In response to your post, it will be very helpful and perhaps game changing to know that MakesBridge offers complete Marketing Automation for $150/month.
MakesBridge is fully integrated with Salesforce, has a 4.9 star rating. We even offer Immediate Marketing Routines to jump-start your Marketing Automation.
What makes it unique is you don’t need to do any time consuming administrative tasks in order to setup marketing automation because everything is done for you including email templates with landing pages, forms, conversion tracking, lead scoring, custom charts and more…
One final unique bit is MakeBridge is the only platform to support blended automation – direct mail, email, sms, social media even telesales.
Waqas recently posted..buttons on homepage
Twitter: puntoretail
says:
I would like to invite you to compare Punto for retail on http://www.ayna.com. Our company provides marketing automation tools on top of managed service focused on small to medium businesses.
We focus on an integrated service (presence, social media marketing and automation, SMS, email and merchandising)
We do offer a free consultation to see what aspects are of most value to business and how we can help.
Twitter: justifacts
says:
This is a great article. I have been struggling to find a WordPress plugin that would do the following:
-Capture a lead through a contact form.
-Supply the lead with a PDF (white paper, report, etc).
I know that Hubspot provides this service, but I wanted to see if there are any WordPress plugins that enable this capability. Please let me know if you are aware of a solution.
Thank you!
Thanks for your comment Chas. Check out Contact Form 7 plugin if you’re looking for a free plugin, it offers 2 instant emails that can be sent out once someone submits the forms. I use one to receive lead information and second to send a download link to the lead. You can also setup confirmation page with a download link, when someone submits the form. Let me know if that’s what you wanted. Thanks.
Twitter: justifacts
says:
Thanks Viktor! Sometimes you get so wrapped up in the thought of the way a process should work that you lose sight of the purpose. We have been using Contact Form 7 so this was an easy transition. It has been tested and ready to go live. Thanks again for all of your help!
-Chas
Glad I could help Chas. I actually recently released a plugin (my business did) for Contact Form 7 that integrates it with Nimble CRM (what I use) to import leads automatically into Nimble CRM. Not sure if you have anything in place to manage contacts and leads, but something I would definitely recommend. It seems to me like a good match between your business services and what Nimble does… it pulls social media data on leads so you know who they are – like a social media background check
http://www.viktorixinnovative.com/app/contact-form-7-nimble-addon/
I’m all about automation. I am partner with Nimble, but I do use it and like it.
I would recommend trying it out, free trial to see if you like it (I bet you would). This is my partner link for trial sign up, which will assign me to your account to help with any issues you might have.
http://partners.nimble.com/viktorix/
Don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here to help.
Twitter: getspokal
says:
Hi Chas,
You can set that up with any email provider too (like Mailchimp or Aweber). Mailchimp is free for the first 500 leads too.
Just put one of their (many, many) forms on your site (or a combination of them, so you could have sidebar form, a shortcode form, a contact form, a popup etc – anything you want) and then as part of the welcome email Mailchimp sends out, you can send them the link to the PDF.
There are dozens of free ways to achieve what you’re looking for.
Cheers,
Chris
Chris Mack recently posted..What have we been up to?
Thanks Chris for your comment, you’re right email marketing platforms can also be another way to do it. I’m using Mailchimp integrated with Contact Form 7 plugin, so I have more control over how I can embed the forms. Works great.
Also, Mailchimp increased their free plan to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails/mo – but, they removed autoresponders from their free plan.
Twitter: sharanyanlk
says:
I’m using Hubspot from 2011, it’s really good and Their support always outstanding! But Their charges really high than others.
Sharanyan recently posted..Who Wants to own This Beautiful Social Networking Website ?
Thanks for your comment Sharanyan. Since you began using Hubspot in 2011, are you able to generate leads and sales that pay for Hubspot? (make Hubspot pay for itself).