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SharpSpring vs Act-On

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Our analysts compared SharpSpring vs Act-On 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.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features Analyst Ratings Comparison Charts User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
SharpSpring Software Tool
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Act-On Software Tool
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Product Basics

Analyst Rating

82 Detailed Analysis

User Sentiment

Great User Sentiment (1663 Reviews)

Analyst Rating

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Detailed Analysis

User Sentiment

Great User Sentiment (656 Reviews)
SharpSpring is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that facilitates building automation rules to send customers with dynamic content or targeted emails based on their interests. It also provides adequate support for marketing agencies.

Features include behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, a blog builder, anonymous visitor ID, a form builder, reporting and analytics, social media management, and integrations. Lead scoring helps track a lead’s page visits, demographics and engagement to enhance nurturing efforts.
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Established in 2008, Act-On is a comprehensive platform that offers marketing professionals all the standard features in an automation tool, alongside several other unique features.

Sophisticated email automation, landing page construction, analytics, automated campaigns, useful templates, and social channels are just some of the features that are available to users. This product is ideal for medium to large enterprises, especially those that have dedicated marketing departments.

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$449 Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Email Templates: Leverage prebuilt email templates optimized for mobile devices and any email client, including Outlook. The templates' prebuilt layouts can be edited and sent to customers on the fly. 
  • Folders Categorization: Stay organized by grouping emails and templates in folders. 
  • Document Storage: Store documents such as case studies, white papers and marketing sheets with a content delivery network. 
  • Custom Fields: Capture detailed information about customers, including buyer personas, customer service and other attributes. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create buyer personas using a customizable template that can be stored on the platform. Use personas to segment content and campaigns, delivering personalized content. 
  • Cart Abandonment Follow-up: Set up email workflows to automatically follow up with leads that forego their purchases. 
  • Important Page Visits: Mark specific areas of the website as “Important Pages” and the system will automatically boost lead scores for contacts who visit those pages. Set up automated workflows and lead nurturing campaigns for leads who visit those pages. 
  • Email Inbox Delivery: Identify daily priorities without logging into the platform with information about daily anonymous website visitors, leads, opportunities and customers delivered via email. 
  • Landing Page Templates: Create a series of linked pages to funnel visitors and prospects for lead generation by using predesigned templates. 
  • RSS Email Syndication: Automatically send email blog posts to a list of followers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Customize with thumbnail images, titles, dates and other dynamic content. 
  • Content Page Templates: Offers a library of prebuilt index and content page templates that are mobile responsive and can be edited from the blog editor. 
  • Campaign Tagging: Create custom categories and common tags such as email, Google, referrals, organic and offline to group, ungroup or break down campaigns. 
  • Social Notes: Promote internal collaboration with social avatars, “Mark as Read” tags and a clear conversation timeline. 
  • Webinar Integrations: Promote, share and improve web conferences through integration with WebEx and GoToWebinar. Capture lead data from sign-ups and link a dedicated sales funnel to each event to follow up with automated email workflows. 
  • CMS Compatibility: Supports all major content management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and more. 
  • Reminders: Create reminders from any page and attach them to opportunities and contacts to schedule a follow-up. Reminders can also be combined with social notes to assign tasks. 
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  • Make Sense of Digital Breadcrumbs: Better track and score campaigns with this piece of software. This tool helps marketers attain a high-level overview of their campaigns and enterprises.
  • Inbound Marketing: Act-On provides support for inbound marketing techniques, enabling users to organically and dynamically pull in leads from across channels.
  • Outbound Marketing: Automated campaigns, lead scoring and list management are built into the software to support outbound marketing techniques and conversion tracking.
  • Sales Effectiveness: The software helps to unify sales and marketing teams effectively by providing a sales-funnel overview and campaign attribution, assisting users in scoring their leads.
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  • Email Builder: Offers drag-and-drop email editor and HTML customization. Dynamic features and smart tags automate the process of customizing email messages. Designs can also be saved as templates for later use. 
  • Email Campaign Testing: Native integration with Litmus facilitates testing and previewing emails on dozens of applications, email providers and devices. 
  • Behavioral-Based Email Tracking: Gives complete information on visitor activity, including page visits, form fills, webinar sign-ups and white paper downloads from email campaigns. 
  • Web Form Builder: Provides: 
    • A drag-and-drop tool with auto-completion capabilities to design and customize web forms and CTA buttons.
    • The option to view and test forms before making them live.
    • CSS to customize forms.
    • Data sharing with other applications and databases by adding a Postback URL to sync information automatically.
  • Customer Segmentation: Offers lists that automatically update as contacts meet the list’s criteria such as location, visited pricing pages, product interest and more. Map a field in web forms to preset buyer personas, setting up questions accordingly. Responses aid list segmentation, allowing follow up with personalized information. 
  • Workflow Builder: Supports automation tasks and leverages branching logic, task combination and action groups to devise a path buyers should take. Responses use custom triggers and filters to personalize lead journeys. 
  • Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on engagement. Custom metrics allow increasing or decreasing scores, including page visits, filled out forms, content downloads and specific demographic characteristics. Assigning a decay rate on leads automatically decreases scores over time. 
  • Real-Time Alerts: Automated workflows can trigger notifications via email and SMS whenever a sale is made, a high-quality lead is created or a prospect moves along their buyer’s journey. 
  • Pipeline View: Create and customize custom deal stages to track the progress of an opportunity. Provides a drag-and-drop interface to move opportunities across deal stages to get an overview of each prospect’s progress through the sales cycle. 
  • VisitorID: Tracks anonymous visitor IP addresses with reverse IP lookup to identify companies that visit the business’ website. Records page visits, recognizes visitors’ views on an important page, determines where they came from and identifies which search terms led them to the website. 
  • Customer Timeline: Offers a timeline view of individual buyers’ journeys to track significant events associated with each contact. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG interface with HTML for customization. Pages can automatically adapt based on visitor preferences and behaviors. Supports optimizing for mobile and creating a series of linked pages to design a funnel for visitors and prospects. 
  • Content Calendar: Offers an interactive application with daily, weekly or monthly list views of all the planned content such as social activity, scheduled emails and blog posts. Share social media content immediately or at a later date. 
  • Site Tracking: Embeds a custom tracking code snippet in landing pages, websites, microsites or blogs to track every visit. Add media center links to track visits to external resources. 
  • Blog Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG blog and website editor that’s customizable with HTML views. Includes dynamic content that can automatically adapt to resonate with different audiences based on who they are, what interests them and how they behave on the blog and website. Also has an embeddable social sharing widget. 
  • Google Ads Integration: Tracks the ROI of paid search engine marketing campaigns and derives keyword data. 
  • Campaign Analytics Tracking: Automatically tracks website visitors conversions from the moment they first visit till the final sale. Detailed campaign analytics track campaign ROI goals and work offline without the need to set up conversion funnels. 
  • Social Listening: Find and filter social conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by hashtag, keyword and more. Spots customer queries, captures interactions to identify prospects that are ready to buy and offers affiliate programs to promote current customers to help close the next deal. 
  • Custom Reports: Customizable across campaigns, email, social media and CRM to include business-specific metrics. Measures and predicts present and future performance, turning data into insights. 
  • Open API: Developers have access to a platform-agnostic, open API that supports programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and more for building custom integrations with third-party software. 
  • Third-Party Integration: An app marketplace provides access to prebuilt extensions and integrations across categories such as CRM, accounting, analytics, forms and more, extending capabilities. 
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  • CRM Integration: Act-On can integrate with SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Infor and Simpleview. Using any of these integrated CRMs, marketers can engage segmented contacts through targeted account activity.
  • Account-Based Marketing Automation: Account profiles provide an overview of accounts and buyer behaviors, giving users a clear picture of aggregate customer behavior.
  • Progressive Profiling: Collect information without making customers fill out a large number of forms. Adaptive forms, which present and collect information incrementally over time, help users gain valuable insights without being intrusive.
  • Targeted Email Automation: With easy-to-use templates, code-free interfaces and a diverse template catalog, users have access to a variety of content to push out through automated email campaigns. Act-On also integrates its analytics platform into its email outreach, letting users track open rates and measure success.
  • Report Sharing: The solution’s analytics platform can generate robust and interactive reports for users to easily share with decisionmakers.
  • Data Studio: This program comes equipped with an analytical engine called Data Studio, which can pull data from a variety of sources such as CSV, Excel, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.
  • Social Media Engagement: Build brand awareness with automated social posting and metrics aggregation. Act-On’s content curation engine provides insights into content that can generate higher levels of engagement for a user’s business.
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Product Ranking

#7

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#50

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SharpSpring
Act-On
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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 86 35 0 54 100 91 90 92 100 0 50 100 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1663 reviews
Great User Sentiment 656 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

SharpSpring has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 1663 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

84%
of users recommend this product

Act-On has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 656 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.5 (571)
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4.26 (250)
4.5 (620)
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3.9 (472)
4.15 (406)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SharpSpring and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Email Campaign Management, Mobile Capabilities and Text Campaign Management.

Email Campaign Management Award
Mobile Capabilities Award
Text Campaign Management Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: The platform is easy to use, and the kanban boards, the marketing automation and drip campaigns are easy to adapt to, in the experience of 69% of users referring to this aspect.
Robust Lead Tracking: Over 60% of reviews about this feature appreciate the end-to-end tracking functionality for marketing and sales data, with the ability to generate, track, filter and score leads.
Customer Service: All reviews on support say it’s professional and highly responsive.
Updates: The system constantly keeps updating with new features and offers updated dashboards for use, a benefit according to 75% of users mentioning updates.
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Intuitive Interface: Act-On's user-friendly interface streamlines campaign creation and management, reducing the learning curve for users.
Robust Reporting: Advanced reporting capabilities provide detailed insights into campaign performance, allowing users to track results and optimize future efforts.
Email Marketing Automation: Automated email sequences nurture leads, deliver targeted content, and improve campaign efficiency.
Social Media Integration: Act-On seamlessly integrates with social media platforms, enabling users to manage campaigns and track engagement across multiple channels.
Excellent Customer Support: Act-On provides responsive and knowledgeable customer support, ensuring users receive assistance when needed.
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Mobile App: Every user referencing the mobile app suggests it’s inoperable, not relevant and lacks basic functionalities.
Limited Design Flexibility: The landing page builder lacks the ability to add custom code, restricting users' ability to fully customize their pages and potentially hindering brand consistency or advanced functionality.
Email Deliverability Issues: Some users report challenges with emails landing in spam folders, which can impact campaign performance and lead to missed opportunities. It's important to note that email deliverability can be influenced by various factors, so it's recommended to investigate and address potential causes to improve deliverability rates.
Reporting Limitations: Users mention that the reporting features could be more robust, particularly in terms of attribution and providing deeper insights into campaign performance. This might make it difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
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Unintuitive Interface: Act-On's user interface is often criticized for being complex and difficult to navigate, leading to a steep learning curve for new users.
Limited Integrations: Act-On lacks integrations with popular third-party applications, making it challenging to connect with other systems used in the marketing ecosystem.
Costly: Act-On's pricing can be prohibitive for small businesses and startups, with limited flexibility in pricing options.
Lack of Reporting Capabilities: Users have reported that Act-On's reporting features are limited, making it difficult to gain insights into campaign performance.
Poor Customer Support: Some users have experienced delays and unsatisfactory responses from Act-On's customer support team.
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SharpSpring combines CRM and marketing automation functionalities to provide robust, user-friendly features and performance. Users particularly appreciate its lead tracking and regular software updates that improve and add features. Comprehensive customer support is another prominent benefit. Some product limitations include a lack of display functionality in the form and landing page builders and a mobile app that isn’t user-friendly and lacks responsiveness. Custom stylesheets are also time-consuming to work with. Despite some drawbacks, it can be a solid option for businesses looking for a budget-friendly and intuitive sales and marketing solution.

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Act-On consistently receives high praise for its intuitive user interface, which allows marketers to quickly create and automate campaigns without extensive training. It is also lauded for its robust reporting capabilities, which provide detailed insights into campaign performance. However, some users have reported occasional bugs and glitches, and its customer support has been criticized for being slow to respond at times. Compared to competitors like HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Act-On is often seen as a more affordable and user-friendly option, particularly for small and mid-sized businesses. Its focus on ease of use and affordability sets it apart from more complex and expensive solutions. Act-On's intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create automated workflows, and its pre-built templates help users get started quickly. Overall, Act-On is a solid choice for businesses looking for an affordable and easy-to-use marketing automation solution. Its strengths lie in its user-friendly interface, robust reporting capabilities, and affordability. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of more expensive solutions, it offers a comprehensive suite of features that can meet the needs of most businesses.

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Screenshots

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Head-to-Head Comparison

SharpSpring VS AWeber
SharpSpring VS ActiveCampaign
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SharpSpring VS Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

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