Marketo vs HubSpot

To truly transform your marketing you need an integrated set of tools that help you get found, engage and nurture leads, and ultimately tie all your marketing efforts back to ROI. 

In HubSpot, all of this functionality is already built into the product, with access to a broader set of tools and an expandable platform.

Marketo specializes in a handful of proven digital marketing channels and helps users create custom solutions for a narrower range of uses.

This favors a conventional approach to marketing operations through specialization, rather than new and innovative techniques or technology.

“HubSpot is by far the easiest, most intuitive CRM platform for marketers that I have used. It’s lightyears ahead of Pardot and Marketo. If you’re working on demand/lead generation, this platform is essential for running campaigns at scale and tracking your success.” - G2 Review, Mid-Market User (link)    

HubSpot empowers teams to create content using the tools and technologies they prefer, with products for both marketers and developers. Marketing Hub’s web tools are built with the same technology as our standalone CMS Hub, making it easy for marketers to create content quickly, using a library of pre-built templates or completely custom with your choice of a drag-and-drop editor or manual coding. 

Marketo includes the ability to create landing pages, but any customization will likely require a developer or experience writing HTML and CSS. Marketo excels at reaching known leads once they’ve been identified but lacks built-in tools for content marketing. Similarly, Social Media features require Admin involvement and consistently receive lower user ratings on online review sites. (source)

HubSpot Marketing Hub excels at attracting new leads through it’s intuitive and powerful top of funnel tools. Publish your blog on HubSpot and track engagement through your CRM, incorporate SEO recommendations, manage all your ad campaigns, build and execute social media campaigns, host videos directly in HubSpot, or leverage our chat bots to capture and qualify leads. 

Marketo is primarily designed for traditional email campaigns, and doesn’t enjoy the benefits of a complete marketing solution. Accordingly, fully integrating features like web forms, landing pages, and blogs with your emails campaigns may require additional tools and effort. 

“Across three brands, I've loved being able to use HubSpot as my one-stop shop for social, email marketing, and lead gen. I love how easy it is to use to post for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and our blog. I especially love that we can create workflows to perform nurture campaigns for lead gen for our B2B brands without having to use a separate app or software.” - G2 Review, Small Business User (link)

HubSpot is all-in-one marketing software that includes content creation, email, a CRM, and automation in a single platform so all your setup is available visually and doesn't require a single line of code. Whether you're creating just a single email or a holistic campaign that nurtures prospects into customers -- it's all available in Marketing Hub.

Marketo includes core capabilities of marketing automation, such as sending email, but requires integrations with CMS, CRM, and other tools to make the most of. Most integrations will require code to integrate into your applications and can take significant time to set up.

With Marketing Hub, you’ll attract the right customer and grow your audience faster, break through the noise with personalized messages delivered through the right channel, quickly turn attention into customers, and delight customers with a frictionless buying experience. With HubSpot, marketers become the architect of the flywheel, bringing marketing, sales, and service together. 

Marketo is an industry leader in marketing automation and has invested in deep integrations with many leading CRM solutions, like Salesforce.

It can also be used in different configurations to adapt to the needs of your business. 

Since being acquired by Adobe, however, the company has not added any organically developed CRM platform features and has continued to invest in core functionality.

HubSpot comes with all the tools you need to build your growth machine, create a delightful customer experience and drive results for your business. 

Combining HubSpot’s Marketing Automation platform, CMS and CRM into one easy-to-use platform unifies and aligns internal teams to report across systems, use data to better target customers and manage your website.

With Marketo, leaders need to entrust a handful of individuals with control over their tech stack. Instead of democratizing access to maximize effectiveness, your future growth is pinned to the skill, initiative, and availability of technical gatekeepers. 

In this model, linking marketing initiatives to sales or service data becomes a chore rather than an essential function. 

With HubSpot, all of your analytics are readily available in one place - from top of the funnel performance metrics all the way to multi-touch revenue attribution. With the ability to connect every customer interaction to revenue, you can make strategic decisions rooted in business value. No manual integration is required.

Using Marketo you have the ability to get robust reporting from high-level engagement analytics to revenue reporting. The reporting does require manual setup, which can take a significant amount of time.

With HubSpot, you can set up your ABM strategy with ease.  Tools to help identify target accounts, attract key accounts, engage and deepen relationships, communicate across marketing and sales, and measure performance of your powerful ABM program are all available in both Sales Hub and Marketing Hub Pro + Enterprise at no additional cost.  

Marketo's ABM features are unlocked with a paid add-on to your instance, and individual licenses are issued to users who require access. In order to align Sales and Marketing, you'll need to make sure your various admins are coordinating closely on integrations and that users understand how both systems function.

HubSpot is invested in your success from day one. Our world-class support and customer success teams are available to all customers– with phone and email support at no extra charge for Pro and Enterprise customers– and you won’t pay more for it as you grow. HubSpot Academy, consistently ranked as one of the top online learning platforms in the world (source), is also available right at your fingertips. 

Marketo provides a basic level of support with all subscriptions, and offers paid plans to access more complete coverage. Still, online reviewers consistently rate Marketo support below the industry average (source). Marketo University features some classes to help users get started, with several hours worth of content.

“Whilst the platform itself delivers, what stood out to me the most vs the competition was the customer service from HubSpot. Excellent onboarding and ongoing strategic support, which very much focuses on ‘us’ and delivering against our objectives”

- (G2) Enterprise User (>1000 emp.) Dec 2019 (link)