ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot

Marketing automation is essential for any scaling company. As you grow, actions that you used to do manually, such as sending nurturing emails at a regular cadence, are no longer feasible. You have too many contacts to manage, and too many other tasks taking up your time. Marketing automation lets you continue to give your customers a personalized experience, allowing you to focus on mission-critical tasks.

ActiveCampaigns’s marketing automation tool lets you use a drag and drop tool to create basic workflows to automate tasks like emails, segmentation, and contact updates. ActiveCampaign also has some limited ability to automate via API. However, ActiveCampaign contains fewer automated workflow enrollment trigger options and has one SMS integration option available, as well as a native one. Additionally, ActiveCampaign allows teams to see how workflows are connected, but does not give you the capability to to check how Workflows relate to other assets like Lists and Properties at a glance like HubSpot does.

HubSpot’s automation platform goes beyond just email. Triggering an email based on actions your contacts take is just the tip of the iceberg. HubSpot’s workflows tool lets you manage your contact database, rotate leads amongst your sales team, and even create support tickets automatically. You can also go a step further and add delays and conditional logic to your automation, allowing you to customize your workflows to meet the exact needs of your team. HubSpot’s automation platform is meant to assist your entire business — not just your email marketing.

Powerful marketing automation is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to crafting a best-in-class customer experience. To be truly successful, you need insight into what's working and what's not so you can adjust your strategy, effectively set goals, and identify strong coaching opportunities for your team.

HubSpot’s CRM platform brings all of your data together in one central place to help you easily answer key business questions and empower your whole team by giving them access to the data they need to do their jobs, without waiting for help from an analyst or spending hours a day merging data in spreadsheets.

ActiveCampaign also offers out-of-the-box reporting and a custom report builder. However, you’ll still need to address the underlying data issues. You will also need to consider how your various sources of data are syncing, their timing, accuracy, etc. Since ActiveCampaign focuses on fewer features, you will need to assess what (if any) additional data sources to incorporate.

HubSpot's Web traffic analytics connect all of your website traffic and engagement data with your CRM, turning volumes of data into actionable insights to give you a full picture of your customer journey. You can drill down further to analyze web, landing page, and blog page performance by domain, language, country, and more. Plus, you can see all of your sourcing data in one centralized place, making it easier to understand which key channels are driving traffic to your site, and whether those leads go on to become customers.

Sales forecasting helps sales leaders who need to actively understand their team’s performance to set goals and coach their teams to hit them. But forecasting is only as accurate as the CRM data added by your team.

The HubSpot CRM platform makes it easy for sales reps to input data, and automatically captures insights. You’ll get powerful forecasting in Sales Hub that helps you take control of your decision making.

Most marketers know that one of the best ways to engage contacts is through email marketing. Not only does email marketing have a high ROI--email generates $36 for every $1 spent (source), which is an astounding 3,600% ROI- but also, email marketing can be easy to implement given the tools at your disposal.

ActiveCampaign is mainly a tool equipped to help marketers with their email marketing.  You’ll be able to create subscription forms, dynamic content, email segmentation, and split testing to help you engage and nurture your contacts. The drag-and-drop email designer lets you set up campaigns in minutes. At the same time, you can select among various email templates, or start from scratch to create your own unique design. ActiveCampaign offers other channels besides email marketing but its leaner configuration is meant for businesses who plan to expand their marketing tech stack with other applications. Additionally, ActiveCampaign offers site messages (pop up messages on the site specific to a contact/organization) sentiment analysis SMS (native and partners) and A/B/C/D/E testing of emails.

HubSpot pioneered the inbound methodology to give power to the marketer via inbound marketing software. From there, HubSpot created best-in-class tools that help marketers tell their stories to their audiences. HubSpot offers the same email marketing features as ActiveCampaign, and a lot more. Our drag-and-drop email editor is easy to get started with, and we offer a variety of templates that you can personalize to meet your brand’s specific needs. You’ll also enjoy personalization features like smart send times, A/B testing, list segmentation, and personalization tokens using any information you’ve collected in the free HubSpot CRM. You’ll be able to report on all your emails using HubSpot’s email analytics, offering you in-house data with deep insights into how your marketing emails are performing. Inside the analytics tool, besides email specific analytics such as open and click rates, you can drill down into emails to see exactly which links are generating the most clicks compared to other links, without needing to use Google Analytics.

The real power of HubSpot’s marketing email tool comes when it’s combined with the CRM and our marketing automation platform. With HubSpot, you can create smart email campaigns that give each contact a customized experience based on the information you’ve gathered within the CRM. With more information on the contact record in HubSpot, imagine the possibilities that come when you want to create personalized emails for your contacts or connect nurturing emails to your sales process. This holistic, all-in-one capability in HubSpot is what separates it from ActiveCampaign, as you won’t need to use multiple tools to run and report on your marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing Features

Learn more about how you can create email marketing campaigns in HubSpot

Marketers rely on social media and ads to build brand awareness, keep contacts engaged, generate leads, and so much more. It’s crucial to have a marketing platform that helps you keep track of your social media content and performance so you don’t have to switch between disparate systems to get the big picture.

ActiveCampaign does not offer a native social tool. So you can’t post or report on your social media content via ActiveCampaign. If you want to create contacts based on Facebook lead ads, ActiveCampaign has partnered with a 3rd party to provide an integration bridge. You can add or remove contacts from your list based on email and ad campaigns.

HubSpot’s social media and ads tools give marketers the ability to manage their social accounts and ads all in one place. This means understanding which of your contacts have engaged with specific posts or clicked on an ad. You can imagine the targeting abilities that this opens to marketers who don’t have the time to cross-reference social accounts and their CRM.

Start by connecting all your social accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter) to HubSpot. Schedule out posts across each network, and quickly report on your success on each channel. You can also connect your YouTube account to HubSpot to see how your audience is engaging with your video content. With the social monitoring tool, you'll be able to keep track of specific trends and keyword phrases that are important to you and your brand, and reply directly to comments on your social posts within HubSpot.

Social Media and advertising features

Learn more about HubSpot's social media and ads tools

Having a house without a foundation is a recipe for disaster; so, too, is marketing and sales without a CRM. Having a CRM allows you to track your contacts through the entire sales process to ensure you’re using best practices. The ability to have all of your contact’s information in one place is also ideal for teams who are highly collaborative. Say, for example, a Sales Rep sees that a contact recently responded to a marketing email and filled out a form. If the marketing team or automation never notified the Sales Rep, then the Sales Rep would never have known about a potentially warm lead. This is why a CRM is the foundation that can elevate the growth of your business via better cross-team communication and enable personalization with a tight integration with marketing tools.

ActiveCampaign’s CRM makes it easy for you to centralize your contact data to perform actions such as notifying your sales team, updating deals, creating tasks, and nurturing leads automatically. You can also segment your contacts based on the data that you’ve collected, such as by campaign interactions, social data, or website activity. Diving into a contact’s record, you can review that contact’s history.

HubSpot’s strength comes from the cohesive underlying framework of a CRM platform, regardless of which Hub(s) you need. Our advanced CRM gives you extremely granular control over your contacts and how you manage them. Create as many custom properties as you need and use these properties’ values to create segmented lists that can be used within your marketing campaigns. Within a contact record, you can view every single touchpoint that you’ve had with the contact, from marketing emails, to one-to-one emails, to sales calls, to servicing tickets. You can also get personalized details of your contacts such as contact information and web page views. All of these interactions can be used to segment your contacts and reach your customers. You can also restrict who sees contacts by using team permissions, which is valuable for teams with regional offices or who handle different business types. On top of the features, the CRM interface is easy to navigate and is user-friendly for non-IT users, ensuring you and your team can get started quickly.

HubSpot is so much more than just email and marketing automation. With live chat, a managed CMS, SEO tools, social media and ads tools, and more, HubSpot has everything you need to get your marketing strategy started, with advanced features that you can grow into. Add your sales and service teams to HubSpot, too, and see how having all teams working out of one system reduces friction in your customer’s entire experience with your company.