HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign

Last Updated:

Our analysts compared HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

HubSpot provides a cloud-based platform built around inbound methodology and designed to help businesses be more customer-centric. It offers a free CRM package along with marketing, sales, service and CMS hubs, which can be deployed individually or together for full flexibility and scalability.

Timeline segmentation provides users with an overview of their prospect’s journey from the attraction stage to closing. Additional capabilities include funnel automation, lead targeting, analytics and reporting, email templates and more. It caters to small businesses but has paid versions robust enough to support the needs of larger organizations.
read more...
ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.
read more...
$800 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
$9 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Built Around Inbound: Designed to attract leads and nurture them with helpful information and inbound best practices, all at the push of a button. 
  • All-in-One Software: Managing every aspect of customer relationships is seamless with an integrated suite that helps engage with leads and customers at any stage. Offers a cohesive experience, process alignment and holistic data. 
  • Free CRM: Small businesses can leverage capabilities to enhance and grow without spending a dime. Includes sales, marketing and service tools in addition to foundational CRM features. Supports unlimited users and can store up to a million contact records. 
  • User-Friendly: An intuitive UI and no-code tools make it easy to leverage regardless of technical ability. 
  • Better Organization: Keep teams and data more organized via an all-in-one, centralized structure and tools that simplify tracking and updating information. Managers can use hierarchies and partitioning to focus each team member in the right area and ensure they have the most appropriate content. 
  • Full Scalability: Support business growth at any stage by deploying the free toolsets and adding premium features along the way, all within a single ecosystem. 
  • Salesforce Integration: Achieve a seamless marketing and sales strategy by setting up two-way sync between HubSpot and Salesforce databases. Deliver insights to Salesforce for sales activities and pull relevant information back into HubSpot to enhance marketing efforts. The integration doesn’t require technical setup and is supported by a team of HubSpot engineers. 
  • Free Website Insights: Optimize a website using a free website grader, which determines strengths and weaknesses and offers free improvement tips. 
  • Generators: Receive creative or strategic direction through tools that generate blog topics, build buyer personas, craft email signatures and suggest invoice templates. Go through a step-by-step process that produces a marketing plan based on company needs. 
  • Prospect Journeys: Track prospects from the attraction phase of the buyer’s journey to the closing stage for a high-level overview of where leads are coming from and where they’re going afterward. 
read more...
  • Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving. 
  • Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less. 
  • Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates. 
  • Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier. 
  • Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users. 
read more...
  • Pipeline Management:
    •  Reduces data entry through auto-populated data and grants control over pipelines to match how users work. 
    •  User-friendly edit tools alongside a drag-and-drop interface simplify the entire management process. 
    •  Quick access to key metrics is available with a sales dashboard. 
  • Lead Management: Perform CRM activities without the hassle of reconciling different data sets and gain full visibility into contacts by accessing data-rich profiles in one location. Capabilities include lead segmentation, contact activity history and tasks. 
  • Messaging: Facilitates better internal and external communication, promotes strong customer experiences, supports lead generation and enables more timely follow up. Offers Facebook Messenger, a customizable live chat widget, shared email and a chatbot builder. 
  • Conversations Inbox:
    •  Provides context, alignment and transparency for marketing, sales and service teams through a team-wide inbox. 
    •  Aids cross-functional collaboration via a central hub for communicating with prospects, leads and customers. Routing rules deliver emails to the most relevant team or member. 
    •  Offers a seamless experience to customers no matter what stage they’re in. 
  • Contact Activity: Gain deeper insights by leveraging analytics that show website interactions. Track form submissions, page visits and more. 
read more...
  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
read more...

Product Ranking

#1

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#2

among all
Marketing Automation Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

91
86
79
57
100
93
100
83
Show More Show More
Campaign Management
Compliance and Data Security
Dashboard and Reporting
Social Media Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead Management
Lead Nurturing
Email Campaign Management
Platform Capabilities
Campaign Management

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

HubSpot
ActiveCampaign
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 79 100 100 100 97 93 95 98 62 95 100 57 57 93 83 81 95 75 100 100 62 95 88 76 0 25 50 75 100
71%
0%
29%
57%
0%
43%
100%
0%
0%
93%
0%
7%
100%
0%
0%
83%
0%
17%
100%
0%
0%
82%
0%
18%
95%
0%
5%
95%
0%
5%
86%
0%
14%
57%
0%
43%
90%
0%
10%
100%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
60%
0%
40%
60%
0%
40%
91%
0%
9%
91%
0%
9%
100%
0%
0%
75%
0%
25%
14%
0%
86%
71%
0%
29%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

81%
0%
19%
81%
0%
19%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 10050 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

HubSpot has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 10050 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

92%
of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.8 (19)
n/a
4.3 (5644)
4.6 (5328)
4.5 (2623)
4.6 (800)
4.3 (142)
n/a
4.3 (1622)
4.5 (292)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated HubSpot and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall Marketing Automation Software available today and earns best-in-class honors for Campaign Management, Compliance and Data Security, Dashboard and Reporting and Social Media Campaign Management.

Analysts' Pick Award
Campaign Management Award
Compliance and Data Security Award
Dashboard and Reporting Award
Social Media Campaign Management Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated ActiveCampaign and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management. ActiveCampaign stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Lead Management Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Ease of Use: Every user referencing navigation reports the platform is user-friendly.
Customer Support: The support team is reliable and offers quick responses to any need, according to 91% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
Automation: Automating email campaigns, lead scoring and workflows, managing sales funnel and social engagement, and creating email templates is easy, according to 95% of reviewers who talk about automation.
Feature-Rich: The range of features offered, such as creating landing pages, forms and email campaigns, is a benefit to 85% of users mentioning functionalities.
Marketing: Every user who refers to marketing feels it’s easy to market products.
Interface: A slick interface makes it easy to navigate, in the experience of 80% of reviewers referencing the UI.
Show more
User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
Show more
Price: Premium products are expensive for the amount of functionality, especially for small and mid-sized companies, according to 86% of reviewers mentioning cost.
Training: In 85% of reviews referencing training, users say it’s difficult for average users to perform complicated tasks such as tracking leads and making different mailing lists, causing a learning curve.
Email Functionality: All reviews about this issue note that customizing the mobile version of an email affects the desktop version, inserting custom HTML such as a for promo timer isn’t possible and more.
Show more
Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
Show more

With basic CRM alongside marketing, sales, service and content management, Hubspot offers a lot of functionalities, which users cite as a primary benefit. Its slick interface ensures an intuitive experience and extensive automation simplifies tasks, although some complicated functions make it time-consuming to learn. Users also appreciate how prompt customer support is, and that there’s a free version that’s ideal for small and mid-sized businesses. However, certain email elements present issues and the paid versions are expensive for what they offer. Overall, businesses that are in need of a robust and scalable product suite, especially those with a focus on inbound marketing, might find this to be a good fit.

Show more

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

Show more

Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Marketing Automation Software


ActiveCampaign

AWeber

Brevo

Constant Contact

Eloqua

GetResponse

Keap

Klaviyo

Mailchimp

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Marketo

Omnisend

Ortto

Sendinblue

SharpSpring

Zoho Marketing Automation

Related Categories

Show more

Head-to-Head Comparison

WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...

Compare products
Comparison Report
Just drag this link to the bookmark bar.
?
Table settings