Choosing the marketing platform for your business is an important decision. This page compares Act-On and HubSpot, so you can determine the best software to power your growth.
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HubSpot | Act-On | |
---|---|---|
Ranking |
RANKED #1by marketers. |
RANKED #4by marketers. |
Functionality |
EASY-TO-USE YET ROBUST SOFTWARE making it easier to get things done. |
PROVIDES BASIC FUNCTIONALITY suited for beginners, but marketers quickly grow out of. |
Value |
MARKETING DATA IN ONE PLACE giving you powerful analytics like campaign reporting and marketing ROI tracking. |
MULTIPLE TOOLS REQUIRED making it much harder to measure effectiveness |
Jump to any section to see how HubSpot and Act-On compare.
HubSpot customers benefit from the convenience of an all-in-one platform. What makes HubSpot different from others claiming to be a truly “all-in-one” system is its offering of a wide array of tools, all built to work together seamlessly. Because HubSpot is able to deliver more than surface-level results, we’ve been able to delight over 10,000 customers since 2006.
HubSpot customers using the robust and integrated platform gain the ability to:
Act-On is an all-in-one solution for beginner marketers. This, coupled with its low-cost month-to-month pricing, makes it a great tool for first-time digital marketers, but often drives them to switch to a more sophisticated platform as they outgrow Act-On’s limited functionality. The platform has many tools under one roof, but lacks a complete toolset or the level of integration needed by marketers with more than basic needs.
Some areas where Act-On’s platform lacks deep functionality and power include:
What makes HubSpot so appealing is its all-in-oneness. The fewer tools that I have to use, the better off I am. It's easier to get people trained. I'm less likely to have to jerry rig things together to make them happen."
HubSpot’s tools support inbound marketing activities for the entire marketing funnel, including the email channel. Because HubSpot and its customers maintain clean databases of contacts who have voluntarily opted-in to receive our emails, we’re able to provide our customers with extremely high email sender scores and deliverability rates. A higher sender score means that emails actually get delivered to prospects instead of bouncing from their inbox or getting marked as spam.
Many Act-On customers have publicly complained about poor e-mail deliverability rates, as well as the Act-On team’s inability to remedy the issues. Act-On customers often resort to buying email lists because Act-On does not enable an effective top-of-the-funnel lead generation strategy. When customers buy lists and send emails to people who have not opted-in their communications, it hurts their sender score and ultimately leads to poor email deliverability rates. Because customers on a marketing automation platform share sender scores, everyone’s deliverability rates can suffer when only one customer from the group employs questionable email tactics. That means that anyone on a platform that encourage spammy email tactics can suffer, no matter how great of an inbound marketer they are.
HubSpot’s Analytics Tools put all of your data in one single location with an easy-to understand interface. HubSpot provides you with micro and macro analytics for each tool in the platform. More than that, it integrates data from all of your tools into actionable reports and dashboards without any manual tracking URL or integrations needed. This gives you a complete and accurate set of data to report on, along with the flexibility to customize reports that track the progress of your marketing efforts against your goals over time. So you can do more than report on your efforts -- you can improve them.
HubSpot customers see many benefits from the platform’s analytics and reporting, including:
Act-On brings more digital marketing data to beginning marketers as compared to tools like Google Analytics. But once these marketers begin to understand how their digital marketing data impacts their business, Act-On's analytics and reporting often prove to be too elementary. For example, Act-On doesn't allow a marketer to see how different elements of a multi-channel campaign are performing against each other in real-time. Even though Act-On can be considered an “all-in-one” solution for executing marketing activities, it necessitates manual tracking URLs and integrating multiple tools for “all-in-one” reporting.
Some limitations Act-On customers face in analytics and reporting are that:
We can compare different marketing channels and how performance changes over time, allowing us to see where our marketing dollars are being spent most effectively."
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