ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot

More Than a Checkmark

Marketing automation is a ubiquitous tool for digital marketers to reach their audiences in more impactful and less disruptive ways. Advances in technology have lowered the threshold to entry for businesses of all sizes and maturity levels, but this has added confusion to the market. Solutions range in price from free (or almost free) to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and a quick review of public resources is unlikely to give you anything concrete to go on. If they’re all marketing automation platforms, why pay more? The truth is that there are qualitative differences that can’t be captured with a simple checkmark on a feature matrix.

Benefits of Smoother Automation

Creating a frictionless customer experience also depends on smooth internal operations. Silos between systems, departments, and users all cause friction--slowing the pace at which you can engage, and reducing the efficiency of all employees. Reclaiming 5-10 minutes per employee per day opens up any number of possibilities, relieving stress on team members or giving you time to focus on those ‘nice-to-have’ growth accelerators. HubSpot’s ground-up approach to our products means that we’re able to carve out these operational efficiencies at every stage--our data moves seamlessly between Sales, Marketing, and Service, users can accomplish more on their own before bringing in a specialist, leaders can access reporting and analytics without a dedicated staff of analysts, and resources can be reallocated to more strategic tasks instead of constantly struggling to keep the system afloat.

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. ActiveCampaign does not have key features like native web traffic analytics and sales forecasting.

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 $38 for every $1 spent (source), which is an astounding 3,800% 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. One thing to note about ActiveCampaign’s email editor is that it’s not a WYSIWYG HTML editor, so you may have to fiddle with certain editing blocks to achieve your intended design. ActiveCampaign is equipped to help marketers who solely rely on email marketing, and not social media, ads, or other channels. You’ll find it hard to send one-to-one emails from ActiveCampaign.

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 in ActiveCampaign based on Facebook lead ads, you can use an integration to bridge the two systems. 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 the 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.

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.