HubSpot is a widely-used sales and marketing platform that’s had a grip on the market for years. Despite the toolbox of features HubSpot boasts, many small and medium-sized businesses can’t justify the high cost of HubSpot’s paid plans. Without the staff and time to maximize many aspects of HubSpot’s platform, you just might not get your money’s worth.
If you’re looking for a HubSpot alternative that can help you automate your marketing processes and streamline sales, this list is for you. We’ve broken down the seven top HubSpot competitors and how they can benefit your business. Plus, they all cost less than HubSpot’s paid plans.
Before we dive into our top HubSpot alternatives, let’s see what HubSpot is really about and why businesses might look for other options. HubSpot consists of a marketing automation solution, a customer relationship management (CRM), a content management system (CMS), and a help desk solution. Some of their standout features include:
A visual automation builder
Cross-property reporting
A complete blogging suite
Ad automation
Sequences, which is their sales email automation tool
HubSpot has always been good at providing an intuitive platform for growth-minded digital marketers. They have historically been a leading brand in the inbound marketing world and the marketing aspects of the software certainly reflect that. Their marketing automation software and marketing reporting functions are still some of the best on the market.
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Reasons why businesses are choosing HubSpot alternatives
Despite these benefits, there are several reasons why some companies may look for other options:
Pricing: Each of HubSpot’s tools can be purchased individually, and a number of them are actually free to get started with. However, to get started with their Marketing Hub, it’s $50/month. Their highest listed price for the Marketing Hub is $3,600/month for the enterprise plan. After that, it’s custom pricing plus contracts and high onboarding fees.
Limited features: Next, while HubSpot’s marketing features are world-class, its other segments are lacking. The free tools are very limited, for instance. Unlocking basic marketing capabilities costs $20/month for two users. To unlock more advanced email automation for sales, it’s an increase of almost 45 times that—$890/month.
Report limitations: Reporting is crucial for any marketer who wants to see whether their strategies are working.Other things that the free and Starter HubSpot plans don’t offer include campaign and custom reporting. The reporting dashboards are also limited to 10 on Starter plans.
The 7 top HubSpot alternatives
Now that you know what you’re looking for, let’s take a look at the best HubSpot competitors we’ve found:
1. Nutshell
Nutshell is a CRM-first solution that in recent years has focused on adding a powerful suite of sales automation and sales engagement features. Nutshell’s native email marketing automation tool, Nutshell Campaigns, allows users to design and send email blasts, newsletters, and drip sequences, as well as create audiences with the help of Nutshell’s impressive filtering features.
Nutshell’s other standout features include:
A user-friendly interface that is intuitive to learn without extensive training
Nutshell’s powerful pipeline management lets marketers and sales reps simplify their workday by automating email marketing campaigns, lead advancement, and much more. Reviewers say that Nutshell is super easy to learn and that the software’s ease of use helps convince sales teams to adopt Nutshell more readily than other solutions.
Who should use Nutshell
Comparing Nutshell with HubSpot, it’s easy to see why Nutshell is a solid alternative. Growth-focused sales teams will find Nutshell helpful in improving their sales process, while marketing teams will find Nutshell’s marketing features excellent for covering the email marketing basics while staying in sync with their sales team.
Nutshell pricing
Nutshell also starts at just $16/month per user. And with access to several types of reports, tons of email marketing automation features, and the ability to send up to 150 Nutshell Campaigns emails for free every month, you get excellent value on just the Foundation plan.
The next plan up, Nutshell Pro, costs just $42/user/month, and includes up to 10 customizable sales pipelines, unlimited click-to-call and phone recordings, advanced sales reports and user permissions, and other sales automation features.
You can also get good discounts for paying annually. Nutshell Campaigns is a tiered add-on that starts at $5/month for up to 100 contacts.
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ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation-first solution. They seek to help the customer-centric company grow further with a CRM and customer support offering rolled in.
Some of the noteworthy features ActiveCampaign boasts are:
Automating SMS messages as well as email
Automated win probabilities and lead scoring for contacts
Sales process management
A/B testing in automated marketing campaigns
Multi-touch attribution
Birds-eye view mapping of your complete automation system
What ActiveCampaign does well
ActiveCampaign excels in its marketing automation functionality. The fact that it includes a feature enabling you to take a birds-eye view of how all your automations interact at once is honestly incredible. As a marketing automation expert, this particular feature captured my heart during the demo.
The automation builder itself is also a very easy-to-use visual drag-and-drop tool, enabling A/B testing right within automations—not something HubSpot offers.
Who should use ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a top-notch option for marketing automation nerds who already have a good landing page and CMS solution. However, ActiveCampaign’s sales automation lacks the ability to auto-drip emails to contacts from work emails.
EngageBay explicitly seeks to provide small businesses and entrepreneurs with the same kind of all-in-one marketing system that HubSpot provides to larger businesses. They feature a CRM, a marketing automation solution, and a help desk offering. Some noteworthy features include:
A landing page builder that includes a drag-and-drop editor
Automated SMS marketing sends
Social media automation, with monitoring abilities
Predictive lead scoring
An easy-to-use visual automation builder
What EngageBay does well
EngageBay’s pricing is very impressive. For businesses with very small marketing budgets, EngageBay is really out here doing the work for less.
Who should use EngageBay
Engagebay is a solid option for experienced digital marketers with tiny budgets. EngageBay means you don’t have to settle for limited EMS functionality when you can make use of so much more.
EngageBay pricing
EngageBay’s basic marketing plan for $12.99/user/month with up to 500 contacts, with plans increasing from there. As a result, though, EngageBay’s feature set is often lighter than some users expect.
4. Drip
Drip is a fairly unique take on growth software. Its foundation is a B2C CRM and is best suited to service ecommerce marketing teams. The CRM and marketing automation systems are not as clearly defined from each other as other growth software solutions. Drip sees itself not as a suite, but as a single solution that gathers contact data, customizes your storefront to that data, and then engages the customer where they are with email, SMS, and social media outreach.
Beyond the unusual perspective, Drip offers a number of notable features such as:
Funneling your data from across your tech stack (like your Shopify store) into Drip, where you can analyze it all in one place.
Automating social media ads that complement campaigns you’re running or pages the contact has just viewed.
Workflow split testing allows you to test not just email versions against each other, but different content types, like an email vs an ad.
Utilizing tracking events to trace your contacts’ behaviors
What Drip does well
Without question, Drip does eCommerce well. With more than 90 integrations, many of which can be reported on right from Drip’s dashboard, it’s easy to keep a singular view of your eCommerce business and personalize your store’s marketing efforts.
Who should use Drip
Growth-focused eCommerce marketers with a holistic view of the customer journey will find Drip to be a great tool.
Drip pricing
Drip starts at $39/month for up to 2,500 contacts, and listed pricing caps out at $1,899/month for up to 170,000 contacts.
5. Ontraport
Ontraport is focused on providing a simple solution to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The solution has a foundation of marketing automation with a CRM, a CMS, and an online payment processor built-in.
Some of their standout features include:
A membership sites feature that enables you to run a subscription-based business.
Email and SMS automation
Drag-and-drop builder for website pages
Automate responses to your text messages based on keywords
Sales task automation
What Ontraport does well
For the small business that doesn’t want to pay for multiple pieces of software, Ontraport is a solid all-in-one solution. Customers love that it provides a wide functionality to get their business off the ground.
Who should use Ontraport
A small team that doesn’t need deep functionality on any of the types of software that Ontraport offers will find it very useful to center all their data in a single location.
Ontraport pricing
Ontraport’s Basic plan starts at $24/month for up to 500 contacts. Their highest established price is $524/month for their Enterprise plan for up to 10,000 contacts. After that, it’s custom pricing.
6. Brevo
Brevo bills itself as an easy-to-use marketing software system focused on SMBs (though they do have an enterprise offering). Its foundation is an email marketing system, though it features some lite marketing automation features, as well as a CRM and customer chat. Its notable features include:
Automate retargeting ads.
Create landing pages and forms within SendinBlue
Send SMS messages with dynamic content
Drag-and-drop form builder
Quick set-up for the CRM
What Brevo does well:
Brevo’s basic capabilities are great at helping beginners advance their digital marketing skills. It’s a well-priced solution that even expert marketers find useful to get the job done.
Who should use Brevo
Brevo is a great growth marketing solution for a business without a dedicated marketer. Its ease of use makes it ideal for a marketing beginner to get a business rolling on modern digital marketing practices.
Brevo pricing
Brevo offers a free plan for up to 300 emails sent per day. Paid plans start at $15/month for up to 20,000 emails sent in a month. Their highest established price is $550/month for 1,000,000 emails sent per month.
7. Keap
Built by the people at Infusionsoft, Keap is a CRM-first growth software designed for SMBs. Notable features include:
Sales pipeline automation
The ability to send customers quotes
Send SMS messages from the CRM
Smartforms making adding contact information easy
What Keap does well
Unsurprisingly, Keap’s CRM functions are its best offering. Solopreneurs in reviews mention that Keap works great as a secretary.
Who should use Keap
SMBs with a sales team, but no marketing person will find Keap a useful tool to set up some marketing functions for the company.
Keap pricing
Keap starts at $159/month for two users and 1,500 contacts. Their established prices top out at $229/month for three users and up to 2,500 contacts.
Which HubSpot alternative should you choose?
When it comes to choosing an alternative to HubSpot, the best strategy is to look for the features that you need. HubSpot may try to sell you add-ons and capabilities your business doesn’t really need, increasing your cost and weighing your platform down with additional tools. But there are plenty of options that won’t do that, so you only pay for what you’ll actually use.
While your company’s needs are the top priority, remember that HubSpot also provides a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, sales automation, and a customer support tool on top of their marketing automation features. The best alternatives will make collaboration between marketers, salespeople, and support teams easy.
Here are a few additional features to consider when comparing HubSpot alternatives:
Marketing automation features
Lead management and nurturing
Email marketing tools
CRM features
Customer service capabilities
Frequently asked questions about HubSpot alternatives
These FAQs might provide some additional information that can help you choose the best HubSpot alternative for your team:
Is HubSpot worth it?
Whether HubSpot is worth it depends on your company’s needs and budget. For many—if not most—small to mid-sized businesses, HubSpot’s inflated prices and features are just unnecessary.
What platforms are similar to HubSpot?
There are many email marketing and CRM platforms on the market that are comparable to HubSpot while being much more affordable. Each option is designed to meet different needs, although Nutshell offers robust email marketing tools along with its CRM for lead nurturing and pipeline management.
Is there a better CRM than HubSpot?
When it comes to usability, affordability, and power, Nutshell is a better CRM than HubSpot. With unlimited contacts and data storage, advanced automation, affordable pricing, and free live customer support in every subscription, Nutshell is one of the best CRM options on the market. Compare the two platforms to see for yourself!
Choose a powerful CRM and email marketing combo
Whether you’re looking for a CRM-first or email marketing-first solution, there’s a good option for every growth-minded company in these top HubSpot alternatives. And while you’re here, start a free trial of Nutshell to see our email marketing and sales automation features in action.
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