Every business needs new software to support growth, and today you can use software to help with sales, marketing, customer relationship management, and even employee management.
It’s obvious and well documented that inbound marketing works better than outbound these days. You can’t just call customers and push them to buy your products.
When it comes to inbound marketing, well, HubSpot is king. We know that. Maybe you know it too.
You’ve tossed around the idea of using HubSpot, but you’ve heard horror stories about HubSpot’s pricing.
Is the cost of HubSpot really that bad?
HubSpot is great for large enterprises that require cutting-edge and complex technologies. But for small businesses and startups, the pricing is often unaffordable.
If you are a small business that needs a comprehensive yet affordable software, you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss two prominent HubSpot alternatives: EngageBay and ActiveCampaign. We’ll compare their pricing too.
Let’s get started!
HubSpot is pretty popular in the SaaS space. That said, it is one of the most expensive software out there.
Let’s briefly go over their products.
HubSpot has a suite of products to choose from for everything you need.
The Service Hub for customer support includes a knowledge base, live chat, conversational bots, and ticketing.
You get such services as email automation, meeting scheduling, and team email tracking in the Sales Hub.
The Marketing Hub boasts analytics, automation, and lead generation.
The CMS Hub has website themes, SEO recommendations, and a drag-and-drop editor for smart content management.
HubSpot’s CRM software lets you assign tasks, oversee deals, and study contact insights.
This all seems appealing at first glance. Curb your enthusiasm, though.
As we recently wrote about, HubSpot’s features can sometimes be surprisingly lacking.
Also, if you’re not willing to pay the full price for any of the above products, you have to sacrifice on essential features.
The result? You pay more for a plan that might not even have the features to meet your business needs.
Let’s explore the pricing plans for each of the marketing, sales, and service hubs.
You can select from Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise pricing plans from HubSpot’s individual marketing, sales, and service hubs.
To get started, the Free plan gives you the most limited features. You can use:
The Starter plan adds more features and add-ons, but not many. These features include:
For the Starter plan, you’d pay $50 a month.
The Professional plan in the Marketing Hub is the first real example of high HubSpot pricing.
Admittedly, you do get more features and add ons, such as the following:
The Professional plan costs $800 a month, billed at $9,600 a year.
The Enterprise plan is HubSpot’s most inclusive plan in the Marketing Hub.
You can access exclusive features by purchasing this plan, such as:
If you want 300 hierarchical teams and 5-page variations for adaptive testing, you need to buy the Enterprise plan.
That’s also true if you want to max out company scoring, calculated properties, custom reporting, automation workflows, social media, reporting dashboards, list segmentation, and ad spend.
Yet if you dig around, you’ll see that some of the features offered between the Professional and Enterprise plans are the same.
That goes for email send limits, custom properties, and Salesforce integration as well.
Ready for the hard facts?
You pay $3,200 a month for the Enterprise plan in the Marketing Hub. That’s a whopping $38,400 a year!
Related Blog: Copper CRM Pricing & Comparison With Top Small Business Software
That’s only one example of what you can anticipate with HubSpot pricing. Next, we move onto the HubSpot Sales Hub.
The Free plan limits you in terms of custom properties, deal pipelines, reporting dashboards, documents, snippets, and even email templates and team email tracking.
You’re also restricted to calls of 15 minutes and one conversational inbox.
The Starter plan adds on Stripe integration and quotes. Still, with those quotes, you lack payment integration and eSignature options.
The other features include:
Oh, and very importantly, you get 8 hours of phone calls. That will let your sales team actually get some work done.
For the Starter plan, you’re paying $50 a month for 2 paid users.
The Professional plan adds company scoring, record customization, calculated properties, and standard contact scoring.
You can integrate with Salesforce, request 100 custom reports, and automate 300 workflows.
You also get these features:
The Professional plan costs $500 a month for five paid users.
The Enterprise Plan
The Enterprise plan offers maxed-out features with a matching price tag.
This costs a whopping $1,200 a month or $14,400 per year.
These features are exclusive to the Enterprise plan:
HubSpot’s Service Hub helps your business provide a fantastic customer support experience.
The Starter Plan is billed at $50 per month and gives you access to:
The Professional plan starts at $400 per month and offers everything from the Starter plan, plus:
The Enterprise plan starts at a hefty $1,200 a month and offers the following (plus everything from the Professional plan):
Additionally, HubSpot’s award-winning customer support is there to help you through chat, phone, and email, depending on your plan.
Customer relationship management or CRM is the backbone of any growing company.
It should come as no surprise then that HubSpot offers its own CRM and Service Hub.
Amazingly, you don’t have to pay for HubSpot’s CRM.
According to HubSpot, their CRM and Service Hub is made for business owners, operations managers, customer service teams, marketing teams, salespeople, and sales leaders.
The features of HubSpot’s CRM software are as follows:
To reduce the cost of individual plans, HubSpot offers bundled services.
The Starter Growth Suite comes with the Service Hub Starter, Sales Hub Starter, Marketing Hub Starter, and HubSpot CRM.
You’d pay $112.50 for it.
On the surface, this seems like a great deal, right? But go back and look at what’s included in the Starter plan again.
You don’t get nearly enough features to make much use of HubSpot for your business.
That’s true even if you’re bundling together several Starter plans.
The Professional Growth Suite combines the Service Hub Professional, Sales Hub Professional, Marketing Hub Professional, and HubSpot CRM. Given the Professional-level features, this plan is more viable.
Sadly, the plan starts at $1,700, another example of high HubSpot pricing.
This is not a viable solution for small businesses on a tight budget.
The third bundle is the Enterprise Growth Suite.
This includes the Service Hub Enterprise, Sales Hub Enterprise, Marketing Hub Enterprise, and HubSpot CRM.
You’d pay $5,600 for this bundle, which is rather unthinkable for small businesses!
Granted, HubSpot does have a startup plan that it says could allow you to shave 90% off the costs of their services.
It’s called the Startups Program.
You have to apply to be approved, and pricing varies depending on your marketing, sales, and customer service hub contacts/seats.
Also, HubSpot expects that you have either about $2 million in funding.
That’s a bit of a lofty goal, we’d say!
Even if you find a good deal through a bundle or the HubSpot Startups Program, don’t assume you can avoid all the expenses of HubSpot pricing.
You still have to pay for their onboarding and setup fees. This is a one-time charge, but the prices can vary drastically.
On the lower end, you may pay $500 for setup and onboarding. On the higher end, it’s $59,400!
Related Blog: Is HubSpot CRM Truly Free? An Unbiased Guide (with User Reviews)
If you’re looking for an alternative to HubSpot, EngageBay is a product we’d highly recommend. It has everything you need.
EngageBay was born out of the need to give small business owners an affordable alternative to expensive software like HubSpot.
This all-in-one sales and marketing software includes a Service Bay, Sales & CRM Bay, and a Marketing Bay.
The tools offered by EngageBay are similar to that of HubSpot.
The difference lies in the price tags.
You’ll never go back to HubSpot pricing when you can save so much with EngageBay.
You can use many of our services for free, including EngageBay’s CRM and the Customer Service Bay with ticketing and Live Chat for customer support.
You can choose to bill monthly, yearly, or biennially.
The prices quoted here are for biennial subscriptions.
The All-in-One Suite includes free migration from the current platform you’re using for handy onboarding.
Signing up for the Free plan gives you:
The Basic Suite costs only $14.99 per month/user. You get 3,000 branded emails, 1,000 contacts, and all the free plan features.
You also add services like:
If your small business has 50,000 contacts, you need the Growth Suite. This costs $49.99 per month/user.
You now get these features in addition to the above:
The Pro plan supports 50,000 branded emails and unlimited contacts for $79.99 per month/user.
This plan offers advanced features, such as:
All the plans get a 20% discount on annual subscriptions and a 40% discount on biennial subscriptions.
EngageBay offers standalone software for businesses that don’t need the whole suite.
The free plan lets you send 1,000 branded emails and store up to 500 contacts.
Features include:
The Basic plan is priced at $7.70 per month/user. With this plan, you can store up to 1,000 contacts and send 2,500 branded emails. You also get access to all the Free plan features.
The Growth plan costs $14.99 per month/user and supports 20,000 branded emails and 20,000 contacts.
You get everything from the first two plans in addition to the following:
With the Pro plan, you get 30,000 contacts and 30,000 branded emails.
You get all these features for a highly affordable price of $29.99 per month/user.
The CRM & Sales Bay pricing is still structured into four plans.
The Free plan supports 500 contacts and 1,000 branded emails. You also get these great features under the Free plan:
For only $7.79 per month/user, the Basic plan lets you work with 1,000 contacts and send 2,500 branded emails. In addition to the Free plan features, you get 15 credits worth of calling minutes and custom deal milestones.
The Growth plan supports 20,000 contacts with 20,000 branded emails for $14.99 per month/user.
You’ll enjoy these Growth plan features:
The Pro plan supports 30,000 contacts and 30,000 branded emails for $29.99 per month/user.
The features of the Pro plan include everything above and:
If HubSpot pricing is too much for you, you can also look at ActiveCampaign.
Unlike HubSpot, ActiveCampaign promises no setup fees. You can also pay by the number of contacts your small business has. That said, the prices increase with additional contacts.
For example, let’s say you work with 500 contacts. Pricing is as follows:
At 2,500 contacts, the pricing is as follows:
When your small business grows to reach 10,000 contacts, the prices for ActiveCampaign are still more affordable than HubSpot: