13 HubSpot Alternatives [2025] – Find The Right CRM For Your Business

Much like Squarespace looms over ease-of-use-oriented web builders, marketing platforms have an acknowledged pack leader in HubSpot–though it’s not as alone at the top as Squarespace is, as we’ll soon see.

Hubspot offers two platforms, their flagship product for marketing and a newly-developed platform for sales. Their service has an “all-in-one” focus: they want to be the Costco of customer relations, incorporating everything from social media and SEO to mailing list management to landing pages to analytics.

Why choose HubSpot, or any other CRM platform, to market your business? Simply put, this stuff is hard to manage on its own. Customers are decentralized and have short attention spans in the modern-day. CRM subscription services help make your marketing into a more focused, better-aimed machine.

Let’s run down the pros and cons of HubSpot itself.

Pros:

• Offers a free service that can be supplemented with purchased tools
• Integrates well with other programs, including Google apps
• Focus on ease of use
• Easy-to-search contact info database
• Shared platform for marketing and sales
• Robust customer support

Cons:

• Basic service with fewer features
• Doesn’t scale well to large companies
• Limited customization
• Smaller user base than the biggest competitor, Salesforce

Just from this list, you can see the massive appeal of HubSpot’s product, which explains why it’s risen to compete with the juggernaut of Salesforce just five years after being launched. Its secret weapon, being free when many of its competitors cost hundreds a month, has proven strong indeed.

Given these points, though, when wouldn’t you want to use it? With its ease of use and free option, HubSpot could be called the Wix of combined sales-CRM services, and like Wix, it’s not for business owners with ambitious needs.

HubSpot doesn’t scale well. If you need a lot of features, it might not be enough. And if you run a business that doesn’t involve a lot of sales data–say if you have only one client, don’t sell online, or don’t have the time or inclination to do a lot of inbound marketing–it’ll prove too much.

So if you don’t think HubSpot’s for you, what are your other options? We’ve gathered ten of the best here. These services perform different functions for different types of user, so I’ll make it clear which does what as we go–a CRM is not the same as a sales cloud, which is not the same as an automater, etc. Read on.

1. Salesforce/Pardot

Service: All-in-one

Going on without mentioning the other industry leader would be like giving directions from San Francisco to Tokyo without mentioning there’s an ocean in the way.

Salesforce offers separate marketing and sales services, with tools that let you track a prospective customer from initial lead to closing.

The marketing side, a CRM and campaign automator known as Pardot, manages email campaigns and lead generation. The Salesforce mobile app offers a dashboard and a custom feed. And about 150,000 firms use it every year.

It all adds up to one truth: some of the services on this list do individual things better, but few can stand up to Salesforce in offering a comprehensive suite.

HubSpot launched its product to directly compete with Salesforce using its free option–a bold move, as Salesforce doesn’t come cheap. But there’s a good reason for Salesforce to price its service so highly: it’s built to scale for the biggest of the big.

A business with hundreds of employees selling thousands of products to millions of customers isn’t going to notice the fees. But if they can’t efficiently organize their leads and numbers, they’ll start noticing an awful lot of losses elsewhere.

Who is it for?

To a small startup, those fees could be the difference between the red and the black this month. So it should be pretty clear by now that Salesforce is for a business that plans to get a lot bigger.

One thing that’s especially interesting, though, is that HubSpot planned for this–all their services, including the functions they have that Salesforce doesn’t (a single technology for marketing and sales, and better communication between them, along with desktop integration and document management), can be integrated into Salesforce.

So if you start out with Hubspot and grow later, you don’t need to sacrifice the parts of it you’ve come to rely on. Within Salesforce, Hubspot can keep track of single-customer questions like how many leads open your emails, no matter how large your market grows.

Pricing

Salesforce prices its plans based on the number and type of users, so don’t imagine these numbers as individual subscriptions–they’re licenses, and you’ll almost definitely need more than one. The prices below are for the sales cloud service. Marketing prices are not publicly listed.

• Salesforce Essentials ($25/month): Reports, case management, data storage per user, desktop apps
• Lightning Professional ($75/month): Complete CRM based on the “lightning” upgrade platform
• Lightning Enterprise ($150/month): Adds better sales forecasting, improves customer management, sales insights, and partner integration
• Lightning Unlimited ($300/month): Includes services that require extra fees with Enterprise licenses

Free trial? 30 days.

2. Marketo

Service: Marketing campaign automation

These early few entries are ideal for companies big enough that marketing and sales are their own distinct functions, requiring new solutions. One such solution that comes into play as digital marketing campaigns grow is to automate them, thus reducing all the time-consuming tasks that go into managing a mailing list and nurturing leads.

That’s where Marketo, and services like it, come in. Calling themselves the world leader in campaign automation, Marketo focuses on campaigns that reach out to customers with personalized contact timed for the most responses and closed deals, while also integrating easily with a human sales team.

These campaigns can be account-based, email-based, focused on social media or conducted through digital ads.

Automated marketing is exploding. Two-thirds of “marketing leaders” employ it, and an even bigger market share is on the way. A massive advantage of services like Marketo is the ability to respond delay-free to the demand side of any transaction, which is taking increasing power whether a firm sells to other businesses or to individual customers.

Who is it for?

Marketers at large companies who don’t yet have a strategy in place. Think of a Marketo campaign as a built-in procedure you can use instead of figuring out how to nurture your leads the old analog way. Sales reps will also find it useful to have a continually-expanding log of the behavior of strong prospects.

It’s worth noting that Marketo counts General Electric among its clients, proving that the upper limit of how far it can scale is pretty high indeed.

Pricing

Subscription costs start below $1,000 and scale based on several factors, though the leading metric is the number of contacts and leads in your database.

• Spark ($1,195/month): $1,495 above 10k leads, $2,495 above 30k, 100k cap
• Standard ($1,995/month): $2,995 above 10k leads, $3,995 above 30k, $5,395 above 100k, $7,195 above 250k, 500k cap
• Select ($3,195/month): $4,395 above 10k leads, $5,595 above 30k, $6,795 above 100k, $7,995 above 250k, $9,995 above 500k, $11,995 above 750k, not listed above 1M

Free trial? 7 days

Read our complete Marketo review

3. Eloqua

Service: Marketing campaign automation

Eloqua was acquired by Oracle in 2012, which now offers its automation service on its own or integrated with the rest of their CRM.

Like Marketo and Salesforce/Pardot, Eloqua is a SaaS platform for customer relations that promises to increase sales by improving a firm’s understanding of its sales base. Like Marketo and Salesforce/Pardot, it offers users control over the design of their campaign emails and landing pages.

Like Marketo, it integrates easily with other CRM, event, social media, content, and digital ad programs.

So what sets Eloqua apart from its two competitors? Sherrie Mersdorf of NewBrand says that while some subjectively prefer its “spaghetti monster” organizational interface, what really makes Eloqua worth a look is its library of apps. Pound for pound, it just offers more options.

Its increase in cost–the base price of any subscription is around twice that of Marketo–reflects that increase in functionality. Furthermore, a lot of fairly critical stuff, like broad reporting, is only present in upgraded versions of Marketo, while Eloqua offers them in its base plan.

One last feature to touch in is form data, which Eloqua offers and Marketo doesn’t, making Eloqua the better choice for anyone who’s familiar database environment is Access.

Who is it for?

Experts suggest Marketo is best for mid-sized businesses, while large businesses choose Oracle’s Eloqua. In the end, though, if you’ve got a large enough marketing and sales force to be asking the question, it’s best to give both a try and see which is best for you personally.