HubSpot is one of the most comprehensive marketing and CRM software examples available. But what if you don’t need such a complex service? Consider turning to a HubSpot competitor for the features and functionality you need at a better price.
To help you make an informed decision, we’ve analyzed HubSpot’s platform for its sales and marketing functionality and compared it to nine alternative solutions.
Top HubSpot competitors
- Brevo
- Mailchimp
- Salesforce
- SendPulse
- ActiveCampaign
- Marketo
- Constant Contact
- Campaign Monitor
- GetResponse
- Pipedrive
- Zoho CRM
- Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
HubSpot features & functionality
HubSpot is a behemoth of a sales and marketing solution. Its offerings are split into “hubs” based on the purpose they serve:
- Sales Hub
- Marketing Hub
- Service Hub
- CMS Hub
- Operations Hub
HubSpot email marketing features
Email marketers will find most of the features they’re looking for within the Marketing Hub. On the entry-level Starter plan, you’ll get the following features:
- Forms: Standalone, embedded, and pop-up forms.
- Emails: Monthly email sending volume is five times your contact limit. (If your contact limit is 1,000, then you can send 5,000 emails per month.)
- List segmentation: Up to 25 active lists and 1,000 static lists. You can segment contacts only by submission data, contact property information, and marketing email activity.
- Landing page builder: Custom domains and simple templates.
- Reporting: Email health insights, basic performance metrics, including deliverability rates, open rate, and click-through rate. Additional performance data, like time spent viewing email and granular view of email performance with each individual contact.
- Integrations: Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Shopify, WordPress, Hotjar, Databox, and 100+ integrations.
- Project management: Built-in collaboration tool for HubSpot users.
HubSpot sales features
All the above features are a part of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. Sales teams will find more of what they’re looking for in the aptly named Sales Hub. Here’s what’s included on the Starter plan:
- Sales CRM: Intuitive CRM software for keeping track of prospects and deals with limited automation features.
- Live chat: Remove HubSpot branding from live chat. Limited automated features.
- Meeting scheduling: 1,000 meeting links per month.
- Deal pipeline: Two deal pipelines per account per month.
- Sales automation: Task and email notifications when deals change status.
- Reporting dashboard: 10 dashboards, 10 reports per dashboard.
Beyond the Starter plan, HubSpot provides a wide range of advanced features. On higher-level plans, the CRM solution can be customized and has more advanced automation functionality. The same goes for the Marketing Hub and marketing automation tools.
HubSpot pricing
HubSpot offers free CRM and sales pipeline management software where you can send up to 2,000 emails per month. You can also access basic email marketing features on the free plan.
HubSpot’s entry-level plans have attractive starting prices. Depending on your needs, you can purchase access to individual Hubs or a bundle.
Pricing for individual Hubs starts at $20-25/month. The CRM Suite bundle starts at $50/month for access to all the Hubs Starter plans. However, these entry-level plans simply add more credits and remove HubSpot branding from emails, landing pages, and forms.
From there, you’ll need to upgrade to the Professional plans for more features. The Professional Marketing Hub plan includes automation, A/B testing, contact scoring, content management, SEO, and social media management features.
The Professional Sales Hub plan offers advanced analytics, email automation capabilities, higher inbox and sales pipeline limits, and customization options for the CRM interface.
This is all well and good, but there’s a pretty significant price jump to get these features. The Professional Marketing Hub starts at $890 per month, and the Professional Sales Hub at $500 per month.
HubSpot: pros and cons
What makes people choose HubSpot? Without a doubt, the platform has a number of advantages:
- All-in-one software
- No contact limits for transactional emails
- Built-in performance analytics and granular data visibility across channels
- Free basic customer relationship management functionality
- Completely customizable software solution
- Functional mobile app
On the downside, users usually notice the following drawbacks:
- No tagging system
- Marketing Hub isn’t intuitive
- High setup costs ($3,000-$6,000)
- Workflow automation only available from Professional Sales Hub (starting at $500/month)
- Rigid free plan
- Lacking overall flexibility for those not willing to use the HubSpot API
12 Top HubSpot alternatives for email marketers and sales
Now, let’s go through a list of HubSpot competitors for those in search of a comprehensive sales and marketing solution — small businesses, SaaS startups, and large retailers alike.
Here’s what you can expect to pay for each type of functionality on HubSpot competitors’ monthly entry-level plans. Be aware that the feature offering of each plan can vary widely per competitor.
1. Brevo
Brevo, a full CRM suite, offers sophisticated solutions for businesses of all sizes. Despite the abundance of advanced features, Brevo is extremely easy to use.
All within the same platform, Brevo offers four main services: Marketing Platform, Conversations, Sales Platform, and Transactional Email. Since this article is mostly focused on email marketing and sales automation/CRMs, we’ll take a closer look at those.
Brevo’s Marketing Platform includes:
- Unlimited contact storage
- Drag & Drop email builder & 40+ free email templates
- Marketing automation functionality
- A/B testing functionality
- Transactional email (automation workflows, API, SMTP service)
- List segmentation
- Send time optimization
- GDPR-compliant forms
- SMS & WhatsApp campaigns
- Ecommerce conversion tracking
- Push notifications
- Landing pages
Brevo’s Sales Platform includes:
- Unlimited contact storage
- Sales pipeline management
- Task allocation
- CRM automation
- Meetings (online scheduling tool, host video calls, accept payments, manage invoicing)
Check out the full comparison of HubSpot vs Brevo here.
Brevo pricing
The forever-free plan includes 300 emails/day, one live chat seat, core email marketing features, and real-time reporting.
For the Marketing Platform, paid plans start at $25/month. On the Starter plan, you get 20,000 monthly email credits for $25/month.
Brevo has a flexible pricing structure — you can add prepaid SMS, WhatsApp, or email credits to any plan.
Even better, Brevo’s Sales Platform is free for unlimited users. Advanced features are available for as little as $12/month per user.
Why choose Brevo over HubSpot?
First and foremost, Brevo is far more affordable than HubSpot. For $25/month, you can send 10x more emails with Brevo than a $50 HubSpot plan would allow you to. And at a cost of $65/month, you’ll be using features that are only included in HubSpot’s higher-level marketing plans, starting at $890/month.
AI Camp now saves $30k a year after switching from HubSpot to Brevo CRM Suite. |
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Brevo’s Business plan and HubSpot’s Starter plan:
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of HubSpot’s biggest competitors in the world of email marketing. Similar to HubSpot, Mailchimp offers a variety of products for marketing teams, sales reps, and customer support teams.
If all you need is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor and the ability to build simple sales funnels, Mailchimp is a good choice for you. But if you need advanced automation tools, you’d better search for a different HubSpot competitor. While Mailchimp offers segmentation and even multi-step automation workflows on its top-tier plans, building custom automations is hardly possible.
Unfortunately, transactional emails aren’t included in Mailchimp’s standard pricing plans. You’ll need the Standard or Premium plan and buy an add-on (Mandrill) starting at $20/month to send transactional messages to your customers.
Mailchimp pricing
Compared to HubSpot, Mailchimp is also more affordable. Its Essentials plan starts at $13/month, with a maximum of 500 contacts and 5,000 emails per month. You can buy extra contacts, and the email limit will grow accordingly.
Discover more: The Best Mailchimp Alternatives Compared: Make the Switch
3. Salesforce
The Salesforce platform packs a punch. There’s a wide feature offering and nearly endless possibilities for customization.
Like HubSpot and Brevo, Salesforce divides its product into distinct hubs called “clouds.” The Sales Cloud is an advanced CRM solution, complete with workflow automation, pipeline and task management capabilities, AI-powered lead scoring, a powerful web services API, and loads of integrations.
As for email marketing, the Marketing Cloud (Engagement) also covers all the bases. Users can create and send email campaigns, manage social media, personalize content, set up automation scenarios, manage customer data, and set up transactional emails.
Despite all its functionality, Salesforce is known for being rather difficult to use. Getting started on the platform often requires training, and users may not feel as autonomous as they would with other tools. For these reasons, it’s best for sales teams with plenty of experience.
Salesforce pricing
Another downside of Salesforce is pricing. To get access to the full Salesforce CRM, you’ll need the Professional Sales Cloud plan, which comes to $75/month per user. And to truly benefit from Slesforce’s strong suit — the options for customization — you’ll need the Enterprise plan, starting at $150/month per user.
The Marketing Cloud Basic plan starts at $400/month. But beyond email personalization and segmentation, it’s pretty limited in terms of features. To benefit from automation, you’ll need the Enterprise plan, starting at $1,250/month.
What about Salesforce Pardot?
Salesforce Pardot is the enterprise app by Salesforce for B2B marketing starting at $1,250/month. Read more about enterprise email marketing solutions.
4. SendPulse
SendPulse is a user-friendly and simple alternative to HubSpot.
The best thing about SendPulse is how many features you access on its free plan. You can send up to 15,000 emails per month to 500 contacts, use SMTP relay, and create up to five one-step automation flows without paying a cent. SendPulse is well known for its powerful transactional email capabilities in particular.
In addition, it supports SMS marketing, push notifications, and live chat. And for WordPress website owners, SendPulse offers an email plugin allowing users to send marketing and transactional emails.
On the downside, contact verification and campaign approval often take some time. As well, the platform doesn’t offer much in terms of customizable workflows or contact segmentation.
SendPulse is definitely more geared toward email marketers than sales teams. While it offers a CRM, the solution lacks key features to support business’s sales processes.
SendPulse pricing
If the features available on the free plan aren’t enough, you can upgrade to the Standard plan for only $8/month or choose a Pay-As-You-Go option starting at $32 for 10,000 emails.
5. Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign is another HubSpot competitor. Its easy-to-use platform is popular among small businesses.
ActiveCampaign is primarily an email marketing tool, but also offers an integrated sales CRM. Compared to the HubSpot CRM, ActiveCampaign is lacking in terms of features and customization, but nevertheless allows you to manage tasks, automate communications, and do basic lead scoring.
As far as email marketing goes, ActiveCampaign provides everything you need to get up and running with professional marketing campaigns and timely transactional emails. Its interface is intuitive and requires no specific training.
ActiveCampaign pricing
Compared to some of the other HubSpot alternatives on this list, ActiveCampaign is one of the more affordable options. For $29/month, the Marketing Lite plan includes email marketing and automation for 1000 contacts. The Sales Plus plan gives you access to the CRM platform and sales automation for $19/month.
Transactional emails must be purchased separately, starting at $15/month for 10,000 emails.
More: ActiveCampaign Alternatives
6. Marketo
Marketo is one of the most comparable HubSpot competitors, both in terms of features and pricing.
Within Marketo, there are numerous plans and bundles, including Email Marketing, Lead Management, Customer Marketing, Consumer Marketing, and Mobile Marketing. Across all these verticals, Marketo offers cutting-edge features and deep data analytics to power highly targeted and personalized marketing.
Marketo (now owned by Adobe) was originally created as a B2B marketing and sales software. It’s since been adapted for B2C use, but it’s by no means the most user friendly platform in the world. For this reason, as well as the price, Marketo is most often used by enterprise-scale organizations.
Marketo pricing
Marketo doesn’t display its pricing online. What we can tell you, though, is that it’s not cheap.
The entry-level plan, Growth, starts at $895/month for ten users. If you’re after Marketo’s more advanced features or have a team of more than 10, you can expect to pay well into the thousands every month.
As we said, Marketo is a highly advanced software with a matching price tag.
7. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a marketing solution specializing in lead generation, event marketing, marketing automation, and online surveying.
Aside from the typical features of an email marketing tool, Constant Contact offers email surveys that you can embed in your campaigns to get insights into your customer feedback.
The company has designed its product around small businesses and nonprofits in particular.
Constant Contact pricing
The Core plan starts at $9.99 for up to 500 contacts and a monthly send limit of 24x your total contacts. The most basic package includes tools for email list building, email marketing, and real-time reporting. Automated emails and list segmentation are available in the Plus plan which starts at $45/month. No free plan is available.
More: Constant Contact Alternatives
8. Campaign Monitor
Here comes one more popular HubSpot competitor. Campaign Monitor is an email marketing software offering many popular features:
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Segmentation
- Marketing automation
- Email personalization
- Transactional email service provider
- Performance analytics
Campaign Monitor’s Link Review tool is also worth mentioning — it automatically crawls your emails and identifies any links that are broken or outdated.
The ease and flexibility of contact management are two major reasons users choose Campaign Monitor. It’s easy to build segments based on a wide range of criteria. Also, you can import and export audience lists almost without restrictions.
One downside of Campaign Monitor is that its workflow templates tend to be a bit rigid, not offering the flexibility or options for customization many email marketers would expect.
Of all the email marketing tools on this list, Campaign Monitor is the most popular among agencies. It’s great for those managing multiple accounts and campaigns.
Campaign Monitor pricing
Like Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor doesn’t offer a free plan. The product starts at $9/month for 500 contacts and has a monthly email sending volume of 2,500 emails. You can increase your contact and email allowance by buying extra credits within the Basic plan or by upgrading to the Unlimited plan at $29/month.
More: Campaign Monitor Alternatives
9. GetResponse
GetResponse is an online marketing platform for all things email marketing, inbound marketing, lead management, sales automation, paid advertising, and more. Users often choose GetResponse because of its autoresponder and drip marketing features.
The platform is popular among ecommerce marketers on account of its ecommerce toolkit, which includes payment gateway integration and e-product delivery. GetResponse also offers a WordPress plugin and a wide range of other integrations for ecommerce businesses.
On the downside:
- Emails are not optimized for mobile view automatically. You need to design separate mobile versions yourself.
- Transactional email service is only available on custom plans.
- Most of the automation workflows (except for birthday, welcome, and thank you emails) are accessible only on the Pro plan.
GetResponse pricing
On the forever-free plan, you can store up to 500 contacts, send unlimited emails, and use GetResponse’s contact and signup forms. There’s also a 30-day free trial where you can access all the premium features.
Paid plans start at $19/month – at this point, you can set up autoresponders, use basic segmentation features, run A/B tests, and access major integrations. However, to build advanced automation flows and segment contacts dynamically, you’ll need to go for the Pro plan ($59/month).
Further reading: CRM Sales Management: A Beginner’s Guide to CRM Software
10. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM platform for small businesses that focuses on, as the name suggests, pipelines. There is no free plan available, but the entry price for basic plans and features is accessible
The strengths of Pipedrive center around deals. With customizable sales pipelines, smart sales assistants, and deal reports, you can really focus on opportunities management.
However, it’s important to note that some add-on features come at an extra monthly price and are not included in any plan. Features like live chat and website visitor insight easily cost more than their Essentials plan, so make a list of features that are absolute must-haves for your business and compare them against its offer.
Pipedrive pricing
There is no forever free plan, however, the Essentials plan starts at $14.90/month. Keep track of deals with deal customization, rotten deal tracking, and data import from spreadsheets. Upgrade to their Advanced plan to unlock meeting functionalities and email open and click tracking for $24.90/month.
11. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a CRM platform that is good for small companies that want to engage customers and follow deals, but that don’t need many fancy bells and whistles. Their free plan gives you access to contact management, lead, and deal tracking.
To unlock mass emailing (250 emails/day) and custom deal reports you will need to upgrade to their Standard paid plan. Marketing automation and customer segmentation start on their Professional plan.
All in all, Zoho CRM is good for keeping track of contacts and engaging customers and is best for individuals or very small companies. If you want to expand into digital marketing, you will need to upgrade to their paid plans.
Zoho CRM pricing
Zoho CRM has a forever free plan with limited features. Upgrade to their Standard plan at $14/month per user billed annually ($20 billed monthly) for KPIs, customized deal analytics, and mass emailing. Email autoresponders and customer segmentation start on their Enterprise plan at $40/user/month billed annually.
12. Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
Keap is an all-in-one CRM platform with strong contact capture capabilities, drag-and-drop pipeline builders, and marketing automation. You even have your own success manager to help you set up beginning goals.
Some things to consider are that while Keap starts out with a lot of everything, you pay as your contact list grows and when you add more users to your account. Integrations also come at an added fee, with a $499 one-time payment for your success coaching.
Keap pricing
Pricing starts with the Pro plan at $159/month billed annually, limited to 1,500 contacts and two users. Extra contacts can be added at a sliding pay scale. The Max plan allows you to integrate a business phone system and send text broadcasts, set up lead scoring, and get insight with business analytics. The Max plan starts at $199/month for 2,500 contacts and 3 users.
Get started with a HubSpot competitor
HubSpot can be overwhelming for SMBs. If you don’t want to overcomplicate your email marketing and sales, there are plenty of more intuitive and affordable CRM platforms out there. The best HubSpot alternative for your company is the one that fits your needs and doesn’t require you to pay for extra features that you’ll never use.
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