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6 Best HubSpot Alternatives for CRM and Marketing in 2024

As someone who’s in the market for HubSpot alternatives, you’ve probably had a taste of the platform and seen for yourself just how complex its architecture is.

You see, while HubSpot touts itself as a CRM platform, it’s actually an intricate mega-suite of sales and marketing software. The extensive platform features multiple advanced tool suites, all of which can be difficult to wrap your head around. There’s a Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, plus an Operations Hub, and they’re all distributed as separate products.

hubspot alternatives

Another problem is their pricing, which is not affordable to solopreneurs and small businesses. You only get the full stack of sales and marketing automation tools after purchasing multiple hubs, each at a cost of $1,000+ per month.

Well, I say you don’t have to go through all that trouble. Allow me to introduce you to cheaper and simpler sales and marketing solutions from the best HubSpot alternatives…

What are the best alternatives to HubSpot?

While HubSpot has many strong competitors, these six have emerged as the overall best HubSpot alternatives:

This roundup is perfectly balanced to cover not just HubSpot CRM alternatives, but also HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives, as well as the best free HubSpot alternatives.

HubSpot alternatives for Marketing Hub

1. ActiveCampaign: Best HubSpot alternative for email marketing

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based platform that specializes in what it calls “customer experience automation.” You can think of it as a marketing automation solution that comes bundled with sales automation and CRM capabilities.

ActiveCampaign homepage

ActiveCampaign features ⚙️

  • On-site messaging.
  • Split automations.
  • Email marketing.
  • Pop-up forms.
  • Conditional content.
  • Landing pages.
  • Goal tracking.
  • Segmentation.
  • A/B split testing.

HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign 🤜 🆚 🤛

If you ever try to compare ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot, one thing you’ll notice is that they both offer CRM and marketing automation tool suites.

You can use them to create and manage trigger-based workflows that feature fully customizable deal stages and deal properties. They even provide a visual illustration of the customer journey, all the while sending out automated emails and updating the particulars of your deals.

It’s worth noting, however, that HubSpot is centered around its CRM, while ActiveCampaign is an email marketing solution that extends to cover customer relationship management.

At first, though, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub might seem more attractive because it offers a free plan – unlike ActiveCampaign. But, as it turns out, the free option doesn’t support marketing automation.

You’ll need at least $45 a month to start automating email campaigns on HubSpot, which then increases to $800 a month for omnichannel automation. Compare that to ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan, which facilitates omnichannel marketing automation for just $29 a month, and you can easily see which one is more affordable for small businesses.

ActiveCampaign pricing 💵

Starts from $29 a month.

2. Brevo: Best free HubSpot alternative

Coming in second in our roundup of the best HubSpot alternatives is Brevo – a platform that started out as email marketing software, before ultimately adding SMS marketing, social media messaging, CRM automation, and live chat to its suite.

HubSpot Alternatives: Brevo homepage

Brevo features ⚙️

  • Customizable email templates.
  • Send time optimization.
  • SMS and WhatsApp campaigns.
  • Transactional emails.
  • Drag and drop editor.
  • CRM automation.

HubSpot vs Brevo 🤜 🆚 🤛

With either Brevo or HubSpot, you should be able to deploy automated email marketing and SMS messaging campaigns, as well as chat with contacts right on your website and their social media inboxes.

Another similarity is, both HubSpot and Brevo offer permanently free plans across their marketing and CRM tool suites. The free feature offerings are not identical, though, as Brevo has significantly outdone HubSpot in generosity.

Whereas the free version of HubSpot Marketing Hub limits you to 1 million contacts and 2,000 emails a month, Brevo’s free package stretches to accommodate 300 email sends a day and an unlimited number of contacts.

But, the drama doesn’t end there. Brevo additionally has a free Sales CRM option that outshines HubSpot’s free CRM.

So, if you’re looking for the best free HubSpot alternative, this is it.

Brevo pricing 💵

Has a free version and premium plans that start from $25 a month.

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Best HubSpot alternative for B2B marketing

Salesforce is one of few HubSpot alternatives that have developed powerful products to take on not just the Marketing Hub, but also the accompanying Sales and Service Hubs.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in particular, has been an exceedingly competitive frontrunner since it was acquired from ExactTarget in 2014. This is what rivals HubSpot’s Marketing Hub when it comes to automating email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and on-site messaging.

HubSpot vs Salesforce: Salesforce homepage

Salesforce Marketing Cloud features ⚙️

  • Omnichannel intelligence.
  • Customer-centric engagement.
  • Real-time personalization.
  • AI-driven analytics.
  • Email, web, and mobile marketing.
  • Omnichannel customer journeys.
  • Unified view of customers.

HubSpot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud 🤜 🆚 🤛

On the question of HubSpot Marketing Hub vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we can appreciate that they’re two very powerful engines for driving personalized omnichannel campaigns across the entire sales pipeline. They’d especially fit quite well into the workflows of mid-sized to large businesses.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is, in fact, built purposely to serve highly demanding B2B enterprises that consistently interact with a large multitude of contacts.

To make those conversions seamless, it allows you to personalize omnichannel customer touchpoints based on real-time data. Plus, you can dive deep into its code to customize every marketing asset according to your precise needs.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, on the other hand, doesn’t support that sort of coding. You’ll, instead, be required to upgrade to a costlier plan to unlock more marketing assets.

So, you can think of Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the best HubSpot alternative for enterprise marketing teams.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing 💵

Starts from $1,250 a month for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

HubSpot alternatives for CRM

4. Zoho CRM: Best free HubSpot CRM alternative

When it comes to customer relationship management, Zoho CRM always comes out as one of the best HubSpot alternatives for very good reasons.

It empowers small to mid-sized businesses with an all-rounded CRM that automates sales workflows, tracks leads in real-time, segments contacts, drives omnichannel engagement, generates predictive intelligence, and manages deals.

HubSpot alternatives: Zoho CRM homepage

Zoho CRM features ⚙️

  • Segmentation.
  • Social profile integration.
  • Email authentication.
  • Custom modules.
  • Validation rules.
  • Workflow rules.
  • Data entry wizards.
  • Multiple scoring rules.
  • Macros.
  • Sales forecasting.
  • Multiple pipelines.
  • Tasks, calls, events.

HubSpot vs Zoho CRM 🤜 🆚 🤛

Zoho CRM and HubSpot have been close rivals for over a decade now, with both specializing in lead management, omnichannel automation, pipeline management, workflow automation, plus sales analytics. This is where you’ll find one of the best HubSpot CRM alternatives for managing sales activities, deals, accounts, and contacts.

Zoho CRM even has its own free HubSpot alternative. And while both offer contact management and deal pipelines, Zoho is the only one that additionally facilitates workflow automation for free. This provision supports up to five tasks, complete with conditions, triggers, and personalized emails.

That would, of course, qualify Zoho CRM as the best free HubSpot alternative in terms of value.

In contrast, HubSpot users have to spend at least $450 per month to leverage workflow automation. That’s still a lot more than the $35 monthly rate that a Zoho CRM user would need to access its full-scale automation and process management functionalities.

Zoho CRM pricing 💵

Starts with a free package, after which you could upgrade for as little as $12 per user per month.

5. Salesforce Sales Cloud: Best HubSpot alternative for lead scoring

Just as Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the best alternatives to HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce Sales Cloud can be leveraged as a replacement for HubSpot Sales Hub.

The Sales Cloud is where Salesforce holds its tools for managing and automating sales pipelines. It helps you close deals faster and sell more by supercharging your contact management, data analysis, and workflow collaboration.

HubSpot alternatives: Salesforce homepage

Salesforce Sales Cloud features ⚙️

  • Customer activity timeline.
  • Sales task automation.
  • Intelligent insights.
  • Drag-and-drop workflow builder.
  • Automated emails.
  • Opportunity tracking.
  • Sales collaboration.
  • Territory management.
  • Contact management.

HubSpot vs Salesforce Sales Cloud 🤜 🆚 🤛

HubSpot vs Salesforce Sales Cloud is a tale of two robust CRM systems that cover all the fundaments of sales pipeline management. You can trust both to automate your workflows while tracking all the deals and leads.

But, keep in mind that while HubSpot targets small to medium-sized B2C businesses, Salesforce Sales Cloud is provisioned to serve B2B enterprises. This makes Salesforce much more sophisticated than its counterpart, which in turn gives rise to a steeper learning curve.

Once you learn the ropes, though, you’ll appreciate that Salesforce Sales Cloud has smarter tools for lead scoring and analytics. It helps you make the best out of your sales opportunities by building predictive models from data gathered by its Einstein AI machine learning system.

Other than that, Salesforce Sales Cloud happens to be one of the most customizable HubSpot alternatives. Whereas HubSpot CRM restricts you to in-platform customization, Salesforce Sales Cloud grants access to its underlying code. What’s more, it supports over 3,400 integrations by default, dwarfing HubSpot’s 500.

Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing 💵

Starts from $25 per user per month.

6. Pipedrive: Best HubSpot alternative for managing deals

HubSpot alternatives: Pipedrive homepage

Pipedrive features ⚙️

  • Smart contact data.
  • Workflow automation.
  • Document open tracking.
  • Autofilled templates.
  • Contacts timeline.
  • Meeting scheduler.
  • Email scheduling.
  • Customizable email templates.
  • Activity management.
  • Deal rotting.
  • Customizable pipelines.
  • Lead and deal management.

Pipedrive touts itself as a CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople. This means that, while other HubSpot alternatives focus on giving executives full control of their sales and marketing automation workflows, Pipedrive dials down to the salesperson’s level by prioritizing the finer details that make all the difference.

It’s all about pipeline management here. Sales teams get to manage deals and leads, leverage AI-based opportunity analytics, automate sales tasks, and measure key activities.

HubSpot vs Pipedrive 🤜 🆚 🤛

Pipedrive vs HubSpot is a battle between a pipeline-oriented system and a suite that seeks to automate the entire customer experience journey.

You’ll find, for instance, that Pipedrive’s workflow automations are just meant to help you organize sales leads, track deals, qualify the most promising opportunities, and follow up with conversion-optimized email campaigns.

HubSpot, conversely, is a full-on customer relationship management system that drives lead engagement at every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. You could say it tries to maximize your connections with leads, whereas Pipedrive is more concerned with identifying and following up on the most promising deals.

Pipedrive pricing 💵

Starts from $9.95 per month.

Which is the best alternative to HubSpot? 🤔

Based on the features we’ve explored across these six HubSpot alternatives, it’s safe to say that the best HubSpot alternative for enterprises is Salesforce, the best free alternative to HubSpot CRM is Zoho CRM, the best HubSpot alternative for marketing is ActiveCampaign, the best HubSpot alternative for managing sales is Pipedrive, while the best free alternative to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is Brevo.

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Davis Porter

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