HubSpot can transform your inbound marketing.
HubSpot can redefine your customer outreach and service.
HubSpot can add smooth automation to all your sales, marketing, and customer service workflows.
But HubSpot can also drain your marketing budget!
If your startup or small business is on a tight budget, you need the right HubSpot competitors.
And you’re in luck. It’s not 2006 anymore, so you can find many great alternatives to HubSpot that rival its marketing automation tools, including its CRM hub.
What’s even better is you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on these inbound marketing software. Saving on costs to use advanced tools for marketing and sales is not a pipedream anymore.
In today’s post, we’ll introduce 5 of the most viable HubSpot competitors in the market. We’ll go over each software in detail, explaining the pros and cons. You’ll get pricing details too.
Let’s get started!
HubSpot’s customer relationship management or CRM hub is like its crown jewel. According to HubSpot, they formulated their CRM hub for sales leaders.
Some features of HubSpot CRM are:
Unlike most of its services, HubSpot offers its CRM absolutely free. This isn’t on a trial basis, as the CRM is always free from the day you download it for as long as you use it.
While undoubtedly appealing to small businesses and startups, it can be misleading. HubSpot’s CRM is its only permanently free feature.
Related blog: 8 HubSpot Alternatives You Should Switch To in 2021
We’d be remiss to downplay the reputation of HubSpot. That reputation is huge for a reason: HubSpot does offer quality marketing and sales automation features.
However, digging deeper into HubSpot proves how exclusionary it can be if your budget is tight.
Here are the drawbacks of HubSpot.
Looks can be deceiving. Upon glancing at HubSpot’s pricing plans, you’ll undoubtedly be drawn to the Starter plan.
It lets you work with 1,000 contacts and costs $50 a month. Great! That’s perfect for your small business, right?
Not exactly. After some further inspection, you may notice that you get just a few features for your money. These include ad retargeting, email marketing service, list segmentation, forms, bots, live chat, ad management, landing pages, and free CRM.
That’s about it.
Your small business or startup likely can’t get by with those features alone, and who can blame you? That leaves you with the Professional plan, which makes a huge cost jump to $800 a month.
Not many small businesses can afford that.
As if you weren’t already spending enough on the Professional plan or even the Enterprise plan (at $3,200 a month), what if you need tech support? This doesn’t come free with HubSpot.
Yes, if you have connectivity issues or other fundamental problems with your software, you have to pay to get it resolved. That can incline you to try to fix the issue yourself, which isn’t always doable.
You end up in a lose-lose situation that hinders your productivity and revenue-earning capabilities.
For the premium prices of HubSpot’s services, you’d expect some of the most in-depth sales and marketing reporting out there. Yet that’s not exactly what you get.
HubSpot’s reporting lacks in a few areas, especially user navigation data and segmented traffic reports. Without this reporting, the blind spots in your company’s operations can lead to a business wreck.
Many similar software providers offer drag-and-drop templates for landing pages, opt-in forms, emails, and more. This allows you to make stunning-looking pages without being a master of coding.
Yet with your HubSpot subscription, to make the most of their templates, it’s recommended you’re at least somewhat good at CSS.
What is CSS? That’s short for Cascading Style Sheets, an HTML-like language used for making style sheets.
Not only do you have to spend more money on HubSpot than the competition, you also have to take the time to learn CSS before using their templates. That makes HubSpot a huge money-suck as well as a time-suck.
Scalability is always a primary concern when selecting sales and marketing tools. You want a marketing automation system that grows with your small business as you cross new milestones.
That won’t be HubSpot. Their contracts are written in stone.
If you want to cancel your HubSpot subscription three months in because it’s not meeting your expectations, you can’t.
Related blog: HubSpot Pros And Cons: A Candid Assessment In 2021
As a startup or small business, it’s easy to fall into the HubSpot trap. They have a solid brand image, so they can sometimes feel like your only option.
Before you know it, you’re stuck in a yearlong contract paying way more money than you’d prefer.
There’s a much better way, fortunately. The following 5 top HubSpot competitors offer very similar features, and often for a fraction of the cost of HubSpot.
Our list of the best and most cost-effective HubSpot alternatives includes:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
The first HubSpot competitor is a free alternative to HubSpot: EngageBay.
Designed as a HubSpot competitor for small businesses and startups, EngageBay offers a full-fledged sales and marketing CRM as well as features like:
EngageBay divvies up its services into products known as the Service Bay, Marketing Bay, and the CRM & Sales Bay.
More than 30,000 companies have trusted EngageBay for all their sales and marketing needs. (You can read some 5-star user reviews here).
EngageBay integrates with your favorite software, too, including SendGrid, Postmark, Mandrill, Mailgun, Xero, Zapier, and more.
EngageBay is an advantageous free alternative to HubSpot for the following reasons:
However, compared to some HubSpot competitors out there, EngageBay still needs more integrations. That list is growing all the time, though.
As mentioned, EngageBay has a plan that’s always free. This lets you send 1,000 branded emails to 1,000 contacts each month.
You can also use these features under the free plan:
Should you need more out of EngageBay, the Basic plan costs $8.99 a month, the Growth plan is $29.99 a month, and the Pro plan costs $47.99 a month.
The Pro plan offers advanced features, including account-based marketing, a dedicated account manager, custom nodes for automation, call scripts, a visual sales pipeline, reports for custom metrics, role management, API for 750,000 calls per month, and more.
The best thing (apart from the prices) about EngageBay is that there’s no learning curve here. It is designed for beginners and hence, you can just sign up and get started.
Read also: The 5 Best CRM Tools for Small Businesses in 2021
Another HubSpot competitor to consider is ActiveCampaign. This is a marketing automation platform designed for both marketers and sales teams.
ActiveCampaign offers these features:
ActiveCampaign is great for:
You should be aware of these downsides as well:
You can use ActiveCampaign with a limited duration free trial.
The most inexpensive plan called Lite, costs $9 a month. However, you only get support for three users and just a handful of features.
This incentivizes customers to pay for the Plus plan, which is heftier at $49 a month. The Professional plan is $129 a month and the Enterprise plan costs $229 a month.
Read more about ActiveCampaign pricing here.
Among the most popular HubSpot competitors is GetResponse. This is a marketing automation software catering to small businesses.
GetResponse offers a wide range of marketing solutions like webinar support, autoresponders, landing pages, and conversion funnel.
These are the features offered by GetResponse:
GetResponse has four plans.
The Basic plan starts at $15 a month, the Plus plan at $49 a month, and the Professional plan at $99 a month. All of these are for a contacts list of 1,000.
If you need up to 10,000 contacts, the Basic plan starts at $65 a month, the Plus plan at $95 a month, and the Professional plan at $165 a month.
For customized pricing, the Max plan adds transactional emails, multiple accounts and users, account migration support, team and role management, and webinars for up to 1,000 attendees.
Read also: SaaS Marketing Automation Explained (+ Top 5 Tools to Consider)
Continuing our list of HubSpot competitors, we have Insightly next.
Insightly combines project management, sales, and marketing into one platform. You can use these features with their marketing automation software:
As you shop around and consider your HubSpot competitors carefully, here are some upsides of using Insightly:
Here are the cons of Insightly:
The Insightly Marketing plans include the Plus plan for $299 a month, the Professional plan at $599 a month, and the Enterprise plan at $1,299 a month.
If you only need Insightly’s CRM, you can pay a lot less. This Plus plan starts at $29 a month, the Professional plan at $49 a month, and the Enterprise plan costs $99 a month.
Our last option on the list of HubSpot competitors is SharpSpring. As a platform for marketers and sales professionals, SharpSpring also includes a CRM service.
Here are the features included in their Sales & Marketing platform:
The advantages of a SharpSpring subscription are as follows:
On the downside:
SharpSpring’s pricing depends on whether you have an SMB, agency, or enterprise. Agency pricing and enterprise pricing are not disclosed on SharpSpring’s website.
Their SMB plans starts at $550 per month for 1,500 contacts, $850 a month for 10,000 contacts, and $1,250 a month for 20,000 contacts.
Read also: 9 Challenges of CRM Implementation & How to Dust Them Off
We understand that HubSpot is the oldest and biggest player in the inbound marketing industry today. But if it’s out of reach for your small business, how does it help you?
The 5 HubSpot competitors we discussed in this post are all worth your consideration. They can help you with effortless marketing, smooth sales, and efficient customer service.
As for the top pick among these 5 HubSpot competitors, we’d say that’s EngageBay. It is made for startups and small businesses, and it does nearly everything HubSpot can do.
EngageBay offers a comprehensive set of sales, marketing, and CRM software solutions. You can use it for free forever, and even an upgrade costs less than your weekly coffee budget!