13 HubSpot Alternatives [2024] – Find The Right CRM For Your Business

by Lewis Ogden | Last Updated: February 22, 2024 | Traffic
hubspot

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:

Cons:

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.

Pros
  • Scales to an enormous number of leads and sales
  • Marketing integrates easily with familiar social media sites
  • The dashboard comes with a wide variety of customizable widgets
  • The largest customer base of any CRM leads to a broader support community
Cons
  • The interface is easy for some users, excessively cluttered for others
  • Generating documents is not user-friendly
  • Designated support experts more limited than with other options

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.

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.

Pros
  • A full suite of “engagement applications” that goes beyond automation to create a comprehensive platform
  • Every application is connected to a central database for easy searching
  • Marketing and sales can share lead data
  • Powerful analytics and AI support
  • Integrates with other services via API
Cons
  • The user interface can be unintuitive to people not versed in automatic marketing
  • Disappointing design control for emails and landing pages
  • Lack of shared knowledge among community members and sometimes employees
  • Price increases 4 percent every year

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.

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.

Pros
  • Strong app library accessed through the Oracle store, including their Social Suite for social media marketing
  • Shared marketing and sales database
  • Shared interface for all graphic projects like emails and landing pages
  • Lead scoring technology allows multiple models to be run by a single company in different markets
  • Closed-loop reporting to nurture leads
  • SmartStart addresses previously steep learning curve
Cons
  • Another divisive interface
  • More expensive than its competitors
  • Does not integrate with Google Ads

Pricing

Like Marketo, Eloqua’s plans scale depending on the number of leads in the database. Each listed price is the price for fewer than 10,000 leads in the database.

Free trial? Up to 3,500 hours for up to 30 days.

4. Wishpond

Service: Creative lead generation

Wishpond has a classic tech-world can-do tale. It began as a platform to host contests on social media, but when they wanted to automate marketing campaigns for their own product, they couldn’t find a service they liked, so they built their own. In a few years, it was their primary product.

It’s possible that if they’d had HubSpot, things might have turned out differently. Instead, though, they ended up creating another solid alternative for turning website visitors into viable leads.

Wishpond’s two watchwords are creativity and growth. The service aims to constantly be expanding the features they offer. Their 2017 release allowed for graphics and pop-ups on a sliding scale of visibility in order to entice website visitors to opt into customer-focused marketing.

Their email marketing campaign editor focuses on creating a visually enticing final product. “Lead generation” is as simple as getting people to click.

Wishpond also has a “done for you” service to build your campaign, with prices discussed following a demo. Also, they do still actually offer those social media contests. There’s just a lot of other stuff bundled in.

Who is it for?

Website owners who want to grow their mailing lists, nurture client relationships, or just rack up views on a page, but don’t have the financial clout to pay for a larger-scale service.

Pros
  • Affordable compared to the competition
  • Mobile-responsive landing pages and contests
  • Broad integration potential
  • Focus on ease-of-use and continually rolling out new features
Cons
  • Not an all-in-one platform
  • Page builder and editor can be slow
  • Doesn’t track ROI
  • Lead caps on plans are absolute

Pricing

Free trial? 14 days

5. SharpSpring

Service: Cloud-based CRM and CMS

SharpSpring is a powerful cloud-based marketing platform that’s working in the same space as Wishpond. In a crowded field–so crowded that Wishpond and SharpSpring both got interviewed by the same podcast within a couple of months of each other–Sharpspring distinguishes itself by a laser focus on user tracking, flexibility, and landing pages.

Its price and feature availability set it in a “you-get-what-you-pay-for bracket” above Wishpond but slightly below Eloqua, Pardot, and Marketo.

What do you get with your SharpSpring subscription? Behavior-based automation, a choice between native or third-party CRM, a popular user interface, and a wide range of “after-the-click” tracking analytics that both report on customer behavior and monitor automated campaigns in response. It even tracks phone calls alongside emails.

SharpSpring is also notable for working hard to integrate with almost anything, including all Content Management Systems, everyone else’s CRMs, and hundreds of apps.

The major point of controversy around SharpSpring has to do with its customer service, which is not always well-reviewed by users. Some aspects of the software are not intuitive without help from customer service, which gets mixed reception for responsiveness.

Who is it for?

Businesses who fall in the gray area between mid-range firms and massive enterprises, or who want to base all their marketing decisions on customer behavior.

SharpSpring also makes a point of pitching their subscription directly to marketing agencies, with agency-specific plans and features–so if marketing is your service, they’re worth a look.

Pros
  • Straightforward user interface
  • Excellent value for the price
  • Well-suited for both agencies and their clients
  • A robust set of customer behavior reports and analytics
Cons
  • Some features are less intuitive than the main interface
  • Customer support receives mixed reviews

Pricing

Every one of these plans comes with unlimited users and support, but limited contacts.

Free trial? No, but they will conduct a live demo for your company.

6. Hatchbuck

Service: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Hatchbuck is a CRM that focuses on the small and nimble. Its brand tells a similar story to Wishpond that evolves into one of the main alternatives to that service.

Yet despite the similarities, I’m very glad both of them exist. With many of the leaders in the direct-to-customer marketing field seeming to leapfrog over smaller clients in the pursuit of large enterprises, it’s great to see a race to present competitive features to the small business owner. It’s one big reminder that in all these service competitions, the winner is definitely the consumer.

Hatchbuck, like Wishpond, was founded because its creator wanted it and couldn’t find it. Its array of intuitive tools is tailor-made to appeal to highly mobile entrepreneurs.

You’ll find everything you might need in here: email automation, capture forms, and lead databases, along with integrations–Google calendar, WordPress for your landing page, etc.

No CRM though, because it bears repeating, Hatchbuck is a CRM. It’ll provide you with all the analytics and metrics you need for marketing and sales, along with dedicated support at no additional cost.

Who is it for?

Small to midsize businesses that want a CRM with automation tools rather than an Automator they can integrate with a CRM. Like Wishpond, this is best for a company that might not start with “General” but recognizes the potential of a dedicated customer relationship platform.

Pros
  • Captures and records leads intuitively for reference, easy categorization, and tracking
  • Effective information display
  • Features and automations focus on keeping a small team updated and in sync
  • Simple but versatile tools
  • Sales integration
Cons
  • Design options are limited
  • No mobile app or responsive pages
  • No native social media functions

Pricing

Each of these plans is paid out semi-annually and includes a free “Quick Start Pro” onboarding package.

Free trial? No, but an optional free live demo

7. Infusionsoft

Service: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Infusionsoft is working to position itself as the go-to CRM for small businesses. It’s got all the basic features you could ask for from any other service: contact and lead management, social media, email tracking, reporting, a mobile app.

But it builds on top of them with features focused specifically on growth. You can think of it similarly to Wishpond, with less focus on creative customization and a lot more on nurturing every lead into a reliable returning customer.

The gambit of building for the SME segment of the market seems to be paying off so far: as far back as 2015, Infusionsoft boasted 25,000 customers for a total of 87,000 people using its service.

They also boast a lot of good reviews on their site, where they tout an average 24 percent increase in customer retention and 28 hours saved each month.

Too good to be true? The only way to answer that is to consider your business’s needs against the features Infusionsoft offers. For growth, they’ve got automatic lead capture and manual tagging, plus analytics.

Along with automating marketing emails, their platform includes a coordinated sales workflow, and–in a strong move–e-commerce capability, allowing you to create a storefront complete with payment platform right there on your CRM.

If you like the sound of Infusionsoft but are still unsure, we’ve created a guide to the top Infusionsoft alternatives.

Who is it for?

As their web presence tries to make clear, small or medium businesses who see a well-leveraged CRM as their ticket to growth.

Pros
  • Relatively affordable, especially compared to documented ROI
  • Tools focus on lead management for SMEs
  • Single platform for all sales and marketing workflow
  • Mobile app
Cons
  • Purchase requires a mandatory $1,999 kickstarting program
  • Third-party integrations aren’t a priority
  • Less flexible and customizable than competitors

Pricing

Free trial? 14 days

Read our complete Infusionsoft review

8. Drip

Service: Email Marketing Automation

Continuing the theme of services that are just trying to do one thing as well as they can, here we’ve got an email marketing powerhouse.

I’ve talked about how other services on this list aim to help you grow your business by personally acting on your customers as they grow from initial leads, but Drip takes it to another level of detail: you can get reports on every action a customer takes, what pages they visit, how long they stay there, what else they buy, what they look at before they buy it.

It’s an analytical depth that rivals SharpSpring’s vaunted after-click reports. But there’s more. In order to take advantage of what could be just a firehose of information, Drip’s email automation function allows personalized messages to be sent to customers at every stage of the process, and different messages to go to leads with different tags and scores.

So, for example, you could have different emails sent not just to businesses and individuals, but to businesses who clicked through your website, businesses who opted in on the first click, leads who visit often but don’t turn into customers, and so on.

Drip even offers a visual interface on all this, for the graphic learners out there.

Rounding out the experience are two extra perks: full API integration from third parties, and–this is just something I love personally–a website that shows all reviews, not just those for 4 and 5 stars.

Who is it for?

Businesses of any size who already have their sales and marketing workflow figured out, but want a more efficient way to save labor hours on email.

Pros
  • Email marketing focus allows a specific function to be executed in exquisite detail
  • Graphic interface helps interaction with complex processes
  • Full suite of CRM options including lead tagging
  • API integration
  • Free option for very small campaigns (<100 contacts)
Cons
  • Slow response times from customer support
  • Email visual editor doesn’t support templates or themes
  • High learning curve for onboarding

Pricing

All of these come with unlimited email sends.

Free trial? 14 days

Read our complete Drip review

9. Nutshell

Service: User-friendly CRM

Nutshell is a CRM that has put a lot of work into its frontend, reasoning that all the astounding features in the world aren’t going to grow your business if your sales team doesn’t understand or engage with them.

The result is a software that scores high on affordability and acceptability of the learning curve.

Nutshell’s features are designed to head off practically any objection to a new software becoming core to a company’s procedures. Its contact database can be imported from an Excel spreadsheet.

Its dashboard syncs with Google Calendar–in fact its everything syncs pretty well with Google everything–and provides a friendly experience not even the most curmudgeonly salesman could complain about. And once you’re in your database, you can see the full history of a lead just by clicking on the name.

Don’t take any of this to mean that Nutshell is a stripped-down or discount system. Its reports, summaries, forecasts, and analytics are as strong as anyone else’s on the market.

Where it does run into trouble is scaling and exporting, as users have reported trouble with migrating away from Nutshell, plus sluggishness when over 1,000 contacts are placed in the database.

Who is it for?

Business owners comfortable with the current size of their enterprises, who need to put their sales teams on the same page without spending thousands on onboarding.

Pros
  • User-friendly dashboard
  • A single database can replace a business’s worth of spreadsheets
  • Integrates with most other useful services including Google suite
  • Allows automation of sales workflow
  • A wide variety of reports available
  • Highly affordable if you have a relatively small team
Cons
  • Doesn’t scale well to growing businesses
  • Can be difficult to migrate away from

Pricing

Free trial? 14 days

10. Aritic Pinpoint

Service: Full-stack marketing automation

“Full-stack” is possibly something of a misnomer here, as Aritic Pinpoint is not a CRM. However, it integrates with so many CRMs that this shouldn’t influence your decision.

Now that we’ve dealt with what Aritic Pinpoint is not (it’s also not a stitch pattern, in this context), what is it? It’s a high-end service to capture and nurture your leads like they’re beautiful exotic creatures you’re raising in a luxuriant menagerie.

With a focus on multi-channel campaigns through tools like push notifications, site notifications, and even texting, Aritic goes beyond email to bring your campaign up several levels.

Other great perks include a drag-and-drop editor for landing pages and forms that also offers templates if you don’t feel like designing your own.

Almost every task that might take up a marketer’s day can be automated, and–as is practically required by this point–account-based marketing is there to help you understand your leads where it counts.

“But HubSpot offers push notifications,” you might rightly say. “What does Aritic have that’s different?” Two things: multiple SMTP servers to help speed up mass email sends, and a single tool that unites all of your campaign channels.

It even has a service that tells you how likely your emails are to wind up in a recipient’s spam folder. Taken together, the Aritic team does seem to have a good idea of what users actually want.

Who is it for?

Who you might call “the Marketo market”: marketing teams at large companies that haven’t yet adopted a digital strategy but know how critical one is to survive in today’s economy.

Pros
  • Enough simultaneous servers to remove the lag from email marketing campaigns
  • Easy unity of all campaign channels, including SMS and social media
  • Templates for form editing
  • Intuitive lead capture and nurture
  • Integrates easily with other CRMs
Cons
  • Newer and might lack the community of other platforms
  • Reporting section can be cluttered, especially SEO
  • Large list of third-party integrations can be daunting
  • Relatively high price

Pricing

Free trial? Yes, but length not clear.

11. ActiveCampaign

Service: Marketing automation with CRM components

ActiveCampaign started as a campaign manager but has begun to distinguish itself in the automation space. Their philosophy is that, as long as people are still using email for anything as opposed to social media (and they are), email campaigns should be personal, responsive, and distinguished from the spam.

They work to keep the picture of customer data clear and readable, and beyond that, to just let you send fewer emails to accomplish better results.

Like Aritic, ActiveCampaign now allows you to work across other channels, like SMS. They distinguish themselves with some nifty upgrades that let users share email designs with other users via a personalized link and allow marketing actions to be triggered by data changes made within ActiveCampaign, such as if new data is logged in a lead’s contact form.

They even offer their own Chrome extension that allows sales reps to create their own automated workflows and track when emails are opened.

To increase its versatility, ActiveCampaign integrates with top e-commerce platforms WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify, and allows data to be shared from those platforms to the ActiveCampaign database.

Who is it for?

Businesses of any size whose top priority is that campaign data be presented in a clean, usable form. It’s also a fantastic budget option.

Pros
  • Extremely fair pricing compared to alternatives
  • All plans include unlimited sending
  • Automate sales, marketing, and productivity from the same platform
  • CRM allows campaign customization for different products and services
  • E-commerce integration shares data
Cons
  • Not a basic solution– the number of features can take a while to grasp
  • Only truly worthwhile for complex automations
  • No free plan

Pricing

These prices scale based on the number of contacts in your database. Each increases at 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 75,000, and 100,000.

Free trial? 14 days

Read our complete ActiveCampaign review

12. Ontraport

Service: Business automation

Content is the word for Ontraport, which understands that no amount of sharp automation can substitute for emails people actually want to read.

Their first line of features includes all of the content management options you’d expect from a blogging platform like WordPress.org, which you can use to build up your emails and landing pages.

From there, Ontraport branches out into the full suite of what it calls “business automation” to draw attention to its unified marketing-sales platform. The service aims to make personalized content easy by helping you sort your leads into segments based on demographics and engagement.

From there you can take that funnel directly to sales without missing a beat. Its CRM also does a good job of keeping a full team organized and in touch.

Its list of integrations is also impressive, including pay gates and e-commerce stores. Neither does Ontraport stop at just hosting other services–if you’re selling online, it’s got features to make that seamless, including order forms and up-selling potential.

Who is it for? Businesses looking to grow quickly, whatever size they are now.

Pros
  • Content-focused automation pipeline lets you be sure you’re putting your best foot forward for customers
  • Sales and marketing on a unified platform
  • E-commerce integration
  • Tracks high-quality leads for you
  • No setup fees
Cons
  • No free plan (though a longer free trial than most)
  • Difficult-to-read reporting dashboard
  • Text-based campaign builder might not appeal to visually-minded users

Pricing

Each of these includes unlimited emails.

Free trial? 90 days

13. EngageBay

engagebay-logo

Service: All-In-One Marketing and Support

EngageBay is a leading all-in-one customer relationship management software that offers sales, support, and marketing services. Its goal is to provide modular, uncomplicated products to small and medium businesses using one sole platform.

As an award-winning software, EngageBay has a large user base and has served over 28,000 customers so far. Despite being an all-in-one software, it also provides options for separated marketing and CRM services.

On the Marketing side, EngageBay offers a set of comprehensive tools. These include tools for lead generation, marketing automation, email marketing and templates, landing pages, social suites, and more. Reports provide you with detailed insight into every single guest interaction, so you know what your customers are doing and how they use your site.

On the CRM side, EngageBay provides free software used by more than 15,000 customers. CRM tools encompass contact management, visual deal pipelines, appointment and task management, unlimited mailboxes, and targeted company marketing.

EngageBay has proven to be a worthy competitor for Hubspot because it fills many spaces that Hubspot overlooks. For one, its contracts are flexible and it offers different split testing options to suit different needs. Interestingly, Hubspot doesn’t offer a lot of reporting or testing support, and its price can skyrocket with more inclusive plans. EngageBay’s strengths lie in these areas, making it a trustworthy and appreciated alternative, if not a preferable one to some businesses.

Who is it for?

EngageBay is most valuable for smaller businesses, scaling from startups to midsize companies. To these types of corporations, fees can add up quickly with a lot of other software providers, and the affordability of EngageBay makes it more appealing to those on a tighter budget.

The simple all-in-one nature of EngageBay’s software makes it easy to navigate and use for people of many computer literacy levels. This is also friendly to new businesses that don’t have much experience with these kinds of tools. The scalability of each plan, which can grow to an impressive number of contacts, means that users can continue to use EngageBay as their business grows.

Pros
  • Its all-in-one system allows for the convenience of a single platform
  • A simple and functional system is user-friendly but powerful
  • The automation services are some of the industry’s best
  • It has won multiple awards
  • The customer service team is friendly and helpful
  • It boasts several free plans that make it accessible to the smallest upstarts, and even the paid plans are among the industry’s most affordable
Cons
  • Training manuals may be difficult to use for some users
  • There is a limited number of templates and landing page options, and they can be hard to edit
  • Mobile optimization has to be done manually

Pricing

EngageBay prices plans based on individual features, number of branded emails, and number of contacts. For the paid All-In-One plans, the following prices are listed, but other plans for only marketing and only CRM are also available.

Free Trial?

There is no free trial for EngageBay, but limited free options for services are included. Service Bay is free forever and all other plans come with a free subscription option.

Read our complete Ontraport review

Which Online Marketing Service should I choose?

If you’ve decided HubSpot isn’t for you, where you go next depends 100% on the needs of your business.

  1. You have a very large enterprise without a digital strategy, choose Salesforce, Marketo, or Aritic Pinpoint.
  2. A small business looking to grow, check out Wishpond and Hatchbuck.
  3. A small business intending to stay small, Infusionsoft and Nutshell are your best bets.
  4. You need is a flexible platform for integration, try Eloqua, ActiveCampaign, or SharpSpring.
  5. You just want to cut the clutter and focus on the email, Ontraport and Drip are for you.

Tags: ,