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Updated December 16, 2024
Published August 19, 2023
HubSpot is a powerful inbound marketing tool and customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses create and track leads by analyzing key business metrics. Whether on its free or paid version, HubSpot CRM is valuable for customer service, sales, and marketing teams. It mainly helps monitor outbound and inbound leads, establish contact management, assist in email campaigns, and much more.
But while HubSpot has continuously been one of the best CRM platforms, it may lack some features your marketing team needs. This guide will discuss the best HubSpot alternatives that can help boost your business’s customer relations and lead management without breaking the bank.
Let’s dive in!
Before looking into the many potential HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives out there, it’s important to take a quick look at the pros and cons of this marketing tool:
HubSpot, with its array of products, might seem overwhelming initially. However, its user-friendly design, complemented by detailed tutorials, caters well to both tech-savvy and novice users.
HubSpot’s freemium plan manages up to a million contacts and offers robust tracking tools, rivaling many paid CRMs in terms of value.
HubSpot provides a comprehensive digital platform covering everything from email marketing to CRM, SEO tools, and workflows.
Stay updated with HubSpot’s real-time notifications, alerting you to significant shifts in your contacts’ behavior.
HubSpot’s inbound marketing tools turn the tables, attracting customers rather than chasing them.
HubSpot’s dynamic dashboard offers a real-time sales overview, with features to track leads and assign lifecycle stages.
HubSpot seamlessly integrates with scheduling apps and business tools like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Zapier.
Starting at $50/month, HubSpot’s costs can rise with the Professional plan and additional fees. New users might also face extra charges for technical support.
Basic plans offer limited A/B testing, with advanced features reserved for premium tiers.
HubSpot’s CRM excels when paired with its other products, potentially limiting flexibility for those using diverse software solutions.
Summary
HubSpot CRM has proven effective for thousands of businesses. Its value depends on three key factors:
If yes, you can try HubSpot for free.
You can also get more details about HubSpot in our comprehensive HubSpot review.
HubSpot Alternative | Description |
---|---|
Best HubSpot Marketing Hub alternative for email marketing automation. | |
Excellent sales-focused CRM for SMBs focused on lead management and building a converting sales pipeline. | |
All-in-one CRM tool for sales automation, lead tracking, and website creation. It seamlessly integrates with other tools in the Zoho Office Suite. | |
Best budget CRM tool for lead organization, AI-predictive contact scoring, and visual sales pipelines to follow up on leads. | |
Best marketing hub for content creators. It’s known for its email marketing features and newsletter monetization support. | |
Best budget email marketing platform for small businesses. It excels in email and newsletter campaigns, SMS marketing, and more. | |
Best HubSpot alternative for outbound marketing. It has a robust email builder for email campaigns and other marketing automation features. | |
Best affordable HubSpot CRM alternative. It offers sales and marketing automation, project management features, and customer service tools (Service Bay). | |
Comprehensive sales CRM platform for marketing automation and lead management. | |
Comprehensive email marketing platform for e-commerce businesses. It has an interactive marketing template builder and Dynamic Product Feed for personalized product recommendations. | |
A HubSpot alternative for lead generation and marketing automation tasks. It’s best for lead capture, list segmentation, and lead tracking. |
Our Verdict
ActiveCampaign is an excellent HubSpot CRM alternative due to its friendly and intuitive user interface, expansive templates for your sales and marketing processes, integration with content management system (CMS) platforms, and access to advanced marketing automation features. This CRM platform aims to boost your marketing and sales efforts at affordable pricing plans.
Best For
Email marketing automation for small to mid-sized businesses and experienced marketers
Price
Free to $386/mo.
Discount
Not available
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
ActiveCampaign is known for its email marketing automation features paired with an interactive workflow editor where you can set up follow-up campaigns and other smart sequences. It also has valuable CRM tools to automate tasks between marketing and sales teams, like drag-and-drop card-based sales pipelines and contact scoring.
Here’s a summary of its key features:
Pricing
ActiveCampaign offers a flexible pricing model, which is divided into three plans and three tiers:
Marketing (for Email and Marketing Automation)
Sales (CRM and Sales Engagement)
Bundles
They have a 14-day free trial which allows you to test the platform’s core features.
Our Verdict
Pipedrive is a sales CRM you can consider when finding a HubSpot Sales platform alternative. It’s a powerful tool for small business owners focusing on their sales pipelines. It’s also fully customizable depending on the needs and processes of your sales team.
Best For
Sales-focused CRM for growing businesses
Price
Free to $74.90/mo.; add-ons available
Discount
Up to 17% for annual billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Pipedrive is an excellent fit for small businesses finding a CRM platform to manage their sales leads. It provides detailed reports, intuitive dashboards, and access to analytics to build and manage a converting sales pipeline. It also uses AI to seamlessly guide a lead through the sales cycle and automate the process efficiently.
Here’s a list of its other key features:
Pricing
Pipedrive has a five-tier pricing plan, each with increasing features and a number of reports:
Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial for all pricing plans. Free trials are also available for add-ons, like LeadBooster, Campaigns, Web Visitors, and other tools.
Our Verdict
Zoho CRM is an all-in-one marketing platform and a known HubSpot CRM competitor due to its similar basic features. Its free CRM plan is already capable of tracking leads and managing contacts, making it a solid choice for small businesses. Zoho CRM also seamlessly integrates with other apps in the Zoho Office Suite and various third-party apps.
Best For
SMBs and e-commerce startups
Price
Free to $65/mo.
Discount
Up to 34% for annual billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Zoho CRM is one of the most easy-to-use marketing and customer relationship management platforms. It offers essential features like website creation, email hosting, and sales automation. It can also generate insightful and customized sales reports, which you can use to track deals and potential leads.
Here’s a summary of Zoho CRM’s key features:
Pricing
Zoho CRM features four main tiers on its affordable pricing plan:
You can first choose a free plan (up to three users) for Zoho CRM if you want to try out its core features. However, you’ll need to purchase one of the tiers above to access complete reports and more features. Zoho also offers a 15-day free trial on all of its pricing plans.
Our Verdict
Freshsales is a CRM software that’s an excellent fit for sales and marketing teams of small businesses and startups. It excels in getting key customer information through AI-powered chatbots and web forms; it also tracks and manages your leads efficiently compared to other tools. Freshsales is part of a business management suite called Freshworks.
Best For
Small businesses and startups
Price
Free to $83/mo.
Discount
Available for annual billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Freshsales is an excellent tool for lead organization and tracking while building strong customer relationships. This CRM software features AI-predictive contact scoring, which helps you prioritize leads based on their level of engagement and other key customer data. You can also monitor deal statuses through visual sales pipelines.
Here are other key features of Freshsales:
Pricing
Freshsales offers four main pricing plans, each with increased features and bot sessions with Freddy AI:
Once you’re signed up with Freshsales, you’re automatically eligible for a non-expiring free account. However, you must subscribe to any of the paid plans above to access key features like sales pipelines, lead scoring, and more.
Our Verdict
ConvertKit is an all-in-one general marketing hub and email marketing software. They mainly target content creators, like professional vloggers and streamers on YouTube, blog authors, course creators, and more. The platform helps to maintain and grow your audience using effective email marketing tools.
Best For
Email marketing for content creators
Price
Free to $29/mo.
Discount
Two months off in annual billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
ConvertKit is an excellent HubSpot alternative for e-commerce businesses and content creators due to its email marketing features. It can run targeted campaigns to specific leads and market your products or services through ConvertKit Commerce. You can check out our ConvertKit review for more details.
Here’s a summary of ConvertKit’s key features:
Pricing
ConvertKit offers three main pricing plans:
The free plan only covers up to 1,000 subscribers, while the two paid plans only cover up to 300. If you look to increase the threshold to 1,000 subscribers on the premium plans, the fee increases to $29/mo. for the Creator plan and $59/mo. for Creator Pro.
Our Verdict
Sendinblue was one of the best budget email marketing platforms suited for small businesses. In early 2023, it was rebranded to Brevo—an all-in-one CRM tool with marketing automation features and the ability to run ad campaigns on Facebook and WhatsApp. It’s a great alternative to HubSpot due to its competitive pricing and valuable features.
Best For
Email automation for small businesses
Price
Free to $65/mo.; add-ons available
Discount
Up to 10% for annual billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Brevo is an easy-to-use CRM software for scaling businesses on a tight budget. It is best for email marketing—especially for newsletter and email creation—using its built-in email campaign builder and expansive template library. You can also streamline other marketing tasks like sending transactional emails, SMS marketing, and conversations from leads on your social media channels and live chat.
Here’s a summary of its key features:
Pricing
Brevo offers separate pricing plans depending on your business needs. This section will focus on their Marketing Platform plan (comes with unlimited contacts):
You can customize your plan by increasing your monthly email volume, adding users, and additional landing pages. Brevo also has a pay-as-you-go pricing model for SMS and WhatsApp campaigns.
Our Verdict
Mailchimp is one of the best HubSpot alternatives for outbound marketing. It has superb email marketing tools, workflow automation features, and modern email templates. Mailchimp has also improved its CRM tools and supported platform integrations over time.
Best For
HubSpot alternative for email marketing
Price
Free to $350/mo.
Discount
Up to 50% on the first year
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Mailchimp is a leading email marketing and automation platform. It simplifies creating campaigns with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder and AI-powered suggestions. Mailchimp optimizes marketing efforts and provides robust analytics to gauge campaign performance across channels. The platform also enables easy website building. With its extensive features for targeted campaigns and data-driven insights, Mailchimp empowers companies to boost marketing productivity.
Here are other key features of Mailchimp:
Pricing
Mailchimp offers four main pricing tiers for their Marketing Platform plan, each with an increased number of email sends, users, and features:
For up to 500 contacts:
If you have up to 1,500 contacts, the Essentials plan increases to $13.25/mo. in the first year ($26.50 for succeeding months), and the Standard plan goes up to $30/mo. ($60/mo. for the second year). They also offer different pricing plans for website building, e-commerce, and transactional emails.
Our Verdict
EngageBay is an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform for small businesses. Like HubSpot, it divides its tools into sales, marketing, and customer support. It offers important features like contact management, email marketing, live chat integration, and more.
Best For
HubSpot Marketing Hub alternative for small businesses
Price
Free to $99.99/mo.
Discount
Up to 8% off for yearly billing and 15% off for biennial billing
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
EngageBay is one of the best HubSpot alternatives due to its extensive features at an affordable price point. Its email marketing tools are capable of sequencing and running drip campaigns. It also has a free drag-and-drop builder for creating landing pages that help convert audiences to leads.
Here’s a brief list of its key features:
Pricing
EngageBay has three main pricing plans—All-in-One, Marketing, and CRM & Sales Bay—and three billing options. This section will only focus on the All-in-One pricing plan:
Our Verdict
Salesforce CRM is one of the best sales platforms for marketing automation and lead management. It offers extensive sales forecasting and analytics solutions, customer service, and sales pipeline customization for monitoring potential deals. Salesforce is also a proven all-in-one software for large-scale businesses and sales teams.
Best For
Large businesses
Price
Free to $300/mo.; add-ons available
Discount
Not available
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Salesforce is an excellent fit for various growing businesses due to its versatile CRM features and customizable sales pipeline based on your team’s needs, making it among the top HubSpot competitors. You’ll also have access to an array of add-ons and several integrations to other productivity platforms if you need more functionality for your CRM.
Here are some key features of Salesforce:
Pricing
Salesforce offers various pricing plans depending on the edition and your business needs. In this section, we’ll focus on Sales Cloud:
Each plan is eligible for a 30-day free trial so you can try out their various sales CRM’s core features.
Our Verdict
Klaviyo is a popular email marketing platform for e-commerce businesses and online retailers. It excels in workflow automation and SMS marketing to provide visitors personalized products or services. It also has a powerful email builder and an extensive amount of templates for campaigns.
Best For
Email marketing for e-commerce businesses
Price
Free to $300/mo.; add-ons available
Discount
Not available
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Klaviyo is an excellent HubSpot alternative mainly due to its email marketing capabilities. Its drag-and-drop marketing template builder allows you to create professional-looking emails using built-in templates efficiently. Once you’ve integrated Klaviyo into your e-commerce platform, you can use Dynamic Product Feed—it sends personalized recommendations to users based on their last interaction with your site.
Here’s a summary of Klaviyo’s key features:
Pricing
Klaviyo offers three main pricing plans, depending on the approximate amount of your contacts:
Free
You can list up to 250 contacts and have 500 email sends. You’ll also have 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits for SMS marketing.
Up to $20 per month for 500 contacts and $45/mo. for 1,000 contacts. It includes 150 monthly SMS/MMS credits.
Email and SMS
It has the same price as the Email plan (at the same number of contacts) but increases depending on the monthly SMS credits you want to acquire (e.g., $20 per month fee for 500 contacts and 150 SMS credits increases to $35/mo. for 1,250 credits).
Tip: SMS/MMS credits are used when sending SMS campaigns. SMS and MMS messages cost differently in terms of credits, depending on the recipient’s location.
Our Verdict
Wishpond is a lead generation and marketing automation software. It has a built-in CRM, a landing page builder, a website builder, and more marketing features. It’s one of the better HubSpot alternatives due to its lead generation capabilities at an affordable price.
Best For
Lead generation and email marketing for SMBs
Price
Free to $199/mo.
Discount
Not available
Pros
Cons
Why We Picked It
Wishpond features various tools for lead management, like their drag-and-drop landing page editor, forms and pop-ups builder, and other tools for social promotions. It has tools for list segmentation to know more about your potential leads based on different criteria, like location, engagement, web activity, and more. It also has workflow automation tools to help your team save time and work on other tasks.
Here’s a summary of Wishpond’s key features:
Pricing
Wishpond offers three main pricing plans, which depend on the number of leads and features:
The Rapid Growth plan allows you to customize your maximum leads, which can increase or decrease your subscription fee. Wishpond also offers a 14-day free trial for each plan above.
Picking the right choice between the various HubSpot alternatives today can be challenging. But, you can make your decision easier by considering your current business or site goals; if you have a startup business, choosing an affordable yet effective CRM tool, like EngageBay, Zoho CRM, or Freshsales is ideal.
If you want to boost your leads as a content creator and monetize your content more, you can pick ConvertKit instead of HubSpot. Also, if you’re a beginner, consider selecting a user-friendly and affordable CRM to keep yourself comfortable with the basic tasks first before proceeding with other advanced tools.
As an all-in-one CRM, inbound marketing, and sales suite, HubSpot has diverse features that are more necessary than others. Here are some key features you’ll need to look for when finding HubSpot alternatives:
Della Yang is a marketing professional with a passion for the ever-changing digital landscape. She frequently writes tech news and reviews, sharing her knowledge and insights through blogs and various online platforms.