14 Surprisingly Awesome HubSpot Alternatives Compared

Summary

HubSpot is awesome, but surprisingly, there are even more awesome alternatives to HubSpot. These include EngageBay (for huge savings!), ActiveCampaign (for cool marketing automation), GetResponse (for brilliant webinar marketing), and Salesforce (for huge companies). Read on for the most detailed article you can find on the web if you’re looking for HubSpot alternatives 🤓

Introduction

The HubSpot story in brief: In 2006, two MIT students named Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan founded a small company called HubSpot. In 2021, HubSpot’s revenue was more than a billion dollars. Talk about growth!

When it comes to sales, inbound marketing, and customer relationship management (CRM), HubSpot is the cream of the crop, right?

Yes and no.

The HubSpot CRM software has tough and growing competition. And there’s also another pain point. Despite HubSpot advertising some of its services as free, you need to go for a paid plan to get real work done.

It’s true that HubSpot is still the most well-known marketing software out there, but it is also among the most expensive. In fact, HubSpot can cost so much that it is often considered out of reach by small businesses and startups — their mandatory onboarding fees cost a whopping $12,000!

So, how much is HubSpot per month? Here’s a breakdown of HubSpot pricing:

HubSpot Marketing Hub	Starter	$18/mo
	Professional	$800/mo
	Enterprise	$3,600/mo
HubSpot Sales Hub	Starter	$18/mo
	Professional	$450/mo
	Enterprise	$1,200/mo
HubSpot Service Hub	Starter	$18/mo
	Professional	$450/mo
	Enterprise	$1,200/mo
HubSpot CRM Suite	Starter	$18/mo
	Professional	$1,600/mo
	Enterprise	$5,000/mo

Here’s what a Capterra review said about HubSpot: Expensive software like HubSpot offer powerful functionalities but are not ideal for small businesses. That’s why thousands of marketers and salespeople are always on the hunt for alternatives to HubSpot.

If you’re among them — wondering who HubSpot’s competitors are, you’re reading just the right blog. Why is HubSpot so expensive? We can’t say for sure — but we love it — both their website and the product. It is one of the best unified marketing, sales, and customer support software.

The only catch is that it is not ideal for small businesses and solopreneurs (the pricing for HubSpot alone can give you nightmares). Also, most enterprises and companies like HubSpot because of its ‘Flywheel’ approach, unifying marketing, sales, and customer support – all under one platform. Don’t worry. We have an affordable alternative for that, too!

In this article, we’ve explored some of the best HubSpot alternatives. We will discuss why they’re good, who they’re best for, and how much they cost. They all come with similar inbound marketing functionalities as HubSpot, but without the price tag that turns so many small businesses away.

Table of Contents

The Top 14 HubSpot Alternatives

These are 14 of the best Hubspot alternatives for most business needs:

EngageBay: Best all-in-one software for small businesses.
ActiveCampaign: Offers hundreds of integrations.
GetResponse: Great for webinars.
Sendinblue (Brevo): Amazing price-to-performance ratio.
Sharpspring: Customized features for industry verticals.
Drip: Affordable email marketing software.
Ontraport: Advanced referral management features.
Pipedrive: Sales CRM built for salespeople, by salespeople.
Insightly: Best for medium-sized businesses.
Zoho: Suite of tools for all business processes.
Freshworks: Best mid-range CRM.
Marketo: Largest enterprise marketing automation software.
Pardot: Acquired by Salesforce.
Salesforce: #1 CRM in the world.

These 14 platforms are similar to HubSpot in terms of features, but offer better pricing.

HubSpot alternative	Pricing (per month in USD) – No. of contacts
HubSpot alternative	1,000	5,000	10,000	20,000	50,000
HubSpot CRM Suite ‘Starter’	$18	$210	$410	$810	$2,010
EngageBay All-in-One	$55.24	$55.24	$101.99	$101.99	$101.99
ActiveCampaign ‘Plus’	$49	$149	$229	$379	Custom-priced
GetResponse ‘Email Marketing’	$15.58	$44.28	$64.78	$142.68	$245.18
Brevo (Sendinblue) ‘Business’ (based on 4 emails/contact/mo)	$58	$58	$67	$103	$188
Sharpspring	$449	$999	$999	$1,449	Custom-priced
Drip	$39	$89	$154	$289	$699
Ontraport ‘Plus’	$99	$166	$249	$416	Custom-priced
Insightly All-in-One ‘Professional’	Starts at $899/month for 20,000 marketing prospects

Let’s get started!

#1. EngageBay

Best all-in-one software for small businesses

HubSpot alternatives -- EngageBay — *Email marketing automation features in EngageBay*

What Is It?

First up is the only truly free HubSpot alternative, EngageBay. EngageBay is designed for startups and small businesses looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite — similar to the HubSpot bundles. We know firsthand how expensive the HubSpot CRM software can be for these businesses and how limited their options are.

That’s why we’ve created EngageBay, the perfect free HubSpot alternative. EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software with a unified CRM. Over 46,000 businesses globally love our services for the comprehensive yet tailored features at affordable pricing — the best CRM tool for small businesses, digital marketing agencies, and startups.

It’s a great CRM similar to HubSpot but won’t burn through your funds.

Why Should You Consider It?

EngageBay is highly affordable; in fact, you get a year’s worth of Pro plan subscription at a much lower cost than HubSpot’s onboarding cost! You also get most of the features that platforms like HubSpot offers, but without the exorbitant pricing.

The services are neatly classified into three Bays: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support.

In the Sales Bay, you can find CRM and sales enablement tools, a contact management dashboard, and an integrated calendar with appointment scheduling.
There’s email marketing with automation features, SMS marketing, web forms, landing pages, email sequences, and more in the Marketing Bay.
There is a powerful Help Desk and Live Chat tool on the support end.

What Do You Get In the Sales Bay?

These are the features offered in the Sales Bay:

CRM telephony lets you track the context and content of conversations to help you make targeted offers.
Appointment scheduling with Outlook 365 and Gmail Calendar integration and plenty of ways to customize your calendar.
Email tracking with Outlook 365 and Gmail integration with contact management, real-time updates, and notifications.

What About the Marketing Bay?

The Marketing automation software comes with:

Visual marketing automation builder to automate your routine marketing tasks.
Email personalization, email sequences, marketing campaign management, drip email campaigns, and built-in analytics to create a holistic marketing system, making EngageBay a great HubSpot CRM alternative.
Social Suite boosts your social media presence with brand mention monitoring and live engagement stats.
Marketing automation tool for generating and nurturing leads, tracking tasks, syncing your data, scheduling your email sends, and more.
Landing page designer and templates, with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.
Web forms builder with customization.

HubSpot alternatives -- EngageBay dashboards — *Simple customer data reports in EngageBay*

What’s in the Service Bay?

The Service Bay helps you offer exceptional customer support:

Integrated customer service software for speedy resolutions.
Simple ticket view and search functionality to help maintain and organize all the tickets.
View open, new, and closed tickets and keep track of the status of every ticket.
Get reports and analyze the efficiency of individual service agents as well as the whole support team.
Prebuilt answers to frequently asked questions through Canned Responses.
Service automation tool helps automate ticket routing, creation, and escalation.

EngageBay User Reviews

This is what users say about EngageBay:

EngageBay Pricing

EngageBay’s All-in-One Suite has four plans: Free, Basic, Growth, and Pro.

Free: This plan is free forever for up to 15 users and offers 500 contacts, 1,000 branded emails, email marketing, lead generation, autoresponders, email broadcasts, sequences, lead grabbers, landing pages, helpdesk, and Live Chat. This makes EngageBay a top choice among free HubSpot alternatives.
Basic: This plan costs $14.99 a month and adds a tag manager, social suite, third-party integration, SMS marketing, conversational inbox, AI-based predictive lead scoring, landing page builder, web pop-ups, and email templates. You also get 500 contacts and 3,000 branded emails.
Growth: This plan costs $64.99 a month and adds proposals, service automation, email form builder, call records, custom domain, A/B testing, site messages, push notifications, and inbound marketing automation feature. You can send 25,000 branded emails a month and store 5,000 contacts with this plan.
Pro: The Pro plan costs $119.99 a month and adds phone support, uptime SLA, a dedicated account manager, custom reporting, goals tracking, employee role management, and SSO. You also get proposal analytics, web analytics, marketing automation, 50,000 branded emails a month, and unlimited contacts.

You also get a 8% discount on annual plans and a 15% discount on two-year plans. This affordable pricing makes EngageBay one of the best HubSpot CRM alternatives.

Pros

Designed for small businesses and startups specifically as a cheaper alternative to HubSpot CRM.
Though there are expensive apps like HubSpot, EngageBay is one of the very few all-in-one solutions under $120.
Free (forever) plan for 15 users. Paid plans are easy on the pocket.
Easy to use, growing in features.

Cons

Can add more integrations (in the works).

	EngageBay	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	✔	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	15 days	30 days
Annual discount	8%	10%
G2 rating	4.6	4.4

Learn more about EngageBay:

#2. ActiveCampaign

Offers hundreds of integrations

What Is It?

Our second pick for HubSpot alternatives is ActiveCampaign. A marketing automation service with small business CRM and email marketing, ActiveCampaign has a large customer base and has been recognized well. It’s designed for sales, marketing, customer service teams, and verticals like higher education, software as a service or SaaS, eCommerce, and bloggers.

Why Should You Consider It?

The ActiveCampaign CRM solution offers a decent set of features and hundreds of integrations — making it one of the best HubSpot alternatives when it comes to sheer numbers. These include machine learning, messaging, CRM & sales, inbound marketing automation, and email marketing.

Machine Learning

Predictive sending based on email response behavior.
Win probability feature to predict the chances a lead will close a deal.

Messaging

Templates for early stages of the customer journey.
Facebook custom audiences.
SMS marketing with automation, notifications, and reminders.
Email marketing with personalization.

CRM & Sales

Deals CRM app for changing deals, calling leads, tracking tasks, and generating contact information on the go.
Sync with Gmail and Outlook via ActiveCampaign Chrome extension.
Automated segmentation, win probabilities, and lead scoring.
Sales process management.
CRM and sales automation for a hands-off approach.

Marketing Automation

Split testing or A/B testing.
Attribution across the customer lifecycle.
Goals tracking.
Advanced reporting.
Mitigation services to merge contacts, forms, emails, and automation.
Automated sign-up forms.
Site tracking to know who visits your pages and for how long.

Email Marketing

Email scheduling.
Automated email funnels.
Email autoresponders like lead magnets and welcome emails.
Triggered emails based on customer behavior.
Broadcast emails.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign is an excellent HubSpot competitor because of its pricing. It has four paid plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise.

Lite: This plan costs $29 a month for three users. You also get email and chat support, marketing automation, newsletters, email marketing, and unlimited emails. This makes ActiveCampaign a great alternative to expensive CRM like HubSpot.
Plus: With the Plus plan, you add SMS marketing, training, custom branding, a custom domain, and custom user permissions for $49 a month. You also get deep data integration, lead and contact scoring, sales automation CRM, unlimited email sending, and support for up to 25 users.
Professional: The Professional plan costs $149 a month and adds win probabilities, predictive sending, attributions, site messaging, and unlimited email sending.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan is custom-priced and adds uptime SLA, phone support, social data, design services, and onboarding support. There’s also a dedicated account rep, a custom mail server domain, custom reporting, and unlimited message sending.

Pros

Comprehensive service.
Lite plan is affordable for small businesses.
Many integrations.

Cons

Once you get past the $49 Plus plan, it gets pricey quickly.

	ActiveCampaign	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	𐄂	30 days
Annual discount	✔	10%
G2 rating	4.5	4.4

Too long to read? Just watch this video roundup of the best HubSpot alternatives instead:

#3. GetResponse

Great for webinars

What Is It?

Among the most popular HubSpot alternatives is GetResponse. This is a marketing software product catering to small businesses.

Why Should You Consider It?

GetResponse offers a wide range of marketing solutions — similar to HubSpot — including webinar support, autoresponders, landing pages, and a conversion funnel.

GetResponse’s webinar features make it one of the best HubSpot alternatives for companies that require a marketing tool without high pricing.

Autoresponders

Drag-and-drop editor for autoresponse messages.
Advanced timing controls.
Unlimited daily messages.

Website Support

SSL-encrypted webinar URLs with password protection.
Customizable webinar URLs.
Webinar platforms to stream and record your webinars.
Webinar analytics, including conversions, survey vote responses, time spent watching the webinar, and the location of viewers.

Marketing Automation

Automated communication with scoring and tagging.
Visual workflows with filters, actions, and conditions.
Drag-and-drop visual workflow builder.

Conversion Funnel

Webinar funnels, lead funnels, sales funnels.
Automated tracking of the customer journey.

GetResponse Pricing

GetResponse has five plans: Free, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, eCommerce Marketing, and GetResponse MAX. Pricing is based on the number of contacts.

GetResponse pricing

Free: The Free plan starts at $0/month and offers 500 contacts, 2,500 newsletters per month, website builder, and landing pages.
Email Marketing: With the Basic plan, you get Facebook Ads, exit pop-ups, surveys and forms, automation templates, landing pages, autoresponders, and email marketing. This plan costs $19 a month for 1,000 contacts.
Marketing Automation: ThePlus plan supports three users, webinars for 100 attendees, a webinar builder, contact tagging and scoring, and an automation builder for five workflows. This plan costs $59 monthly for 1,000 contacts and $114 monthly for 10,000 contacts.
E-Commerce Marketing: The Professional plan supports five users, unpaid webinars for up to 300 attendees, web push notifications, and an unlimited automation builder. This plan costs $119 monthly for 1,000 contacts and $199 for 10,000 contacts.
GetResponse MAX: This plan starts at $999/month and adds transactional emails, multiple accounts and users, account migration support, team and role management, and webinars for up to 1,000 attendees.

Pros

Extensive webinar support.
Conversion funnel to track the customer journey.
Free trial for 30 days.

This is what a user liked about GetResponse:

Cons

Not a full-fledged CRM software.
Costly for small businesses with a large contacts database.

Luis M, sales director of an SMB, shares his experience with the platform on G2:

	GetResponse	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	𐄂	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	30 days	30 days
Annual discount	18%	10%
G2 rating	4.3	4.4

#4. Brevo (fka Sendinblue)

Amazing price-to-performance ratio

What Is It?

Our fourth pick for marketing and sales software to try over HubSpot is Brevo (fka Sendinblue). A digital marketing resource, Brevo (Sendinblue) has served quite a few businesses for more than a decade.

Why Should You Consider It?

Brevo (Sendinblue) can help with your Facebook advertising, landing pages, signup forms, CRM, email & marketing automation, SMS marketing, and email marketing — making it one of the most versatile HubSpot alternatives. For Facebook Ads, landing pages, and web forms, you can use Brevo’s (Sendinblue) customizable templates and drag-and-drop editor.

CRM

Segmentation and transactional email design to personalize your messages.
Chat support.
Contact management to identify sales opportunities and target leads.

SMS Marketing

Transactional SMS features, including Sendinblue’s (Brevo) API.
Review KPIs and other metrics.

Email Marketing

Templates for email, drag-and-drop builder.
Personalized, dynamic content.
No limit on contacts and lists.
A/B tests.

Brevo (Sendinblue) Pricing

Sendinblue (Brevo) has four marketing pricing plans: Free, Starter, Business, and BrevoPlus.

Free: The Free plan lets you work with unlimited contacts but limits the emails to 300 per day. It doesn’t offer any other features. This is a great free alternative to HubSpot for small businesses.
Starter: The Lite plan for $25 per month is recommended for new marketers, with up to 20,000 emails, no daily sending limits, basic reporting and analytics, and email support.
Business: The Business plan is $65 a month and offers 20,000 emails, marketing automation, Facebook Ads, landing pages, multi-user access, and telephone support.
Enterprise: The BrevoPlus plan has custom pricing and adds priority support, a dedicated account manager, and features like retargeting ads, chat, send-time optimization, sub-account management, advanced integrations, tailored onboarding, and personalized support.

Pros

Free plan.
Affordable Starter plan for small businesses (a cheaper HubSpot alternative for small businesses)

Cons

Free plan has a limited number of features.
The BrevoPlus plan has few useful features over the Business plan and can get pricey for small businesses.

	Brevo (Sendinblue)	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	𐄂	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	𐄂	30 days
Annual discount	10%	10%
G2 rating	4.5	4.4

#5. SharpSpring

Customized features for industry verticals

What Is It?

SharpSpring was acquired by Constant Contact in 2021, and has since been rebranded as ‘Lead Gen & CRM’.

For more information, click here.

Sharpspring Pricing

SharpSpring, acquired by Constant Contact, now offers one plan: Lead Gen & CRM.

Lead Gen & CRM: This plan starts at $449/month and offers lead gen, lead scoring, marketing automation, CRM, pipeline management, sales automation, and analytics.

Pros

Features customized for industry verticals.

Cons

Too costly.

#6. Drip

Affordable email marketing software

What Is It?

The next pick for the top HubSpot competitors to try for your next campaign is Drip. This eCommerce CRM platform (ECRM) provides marketing automation services. Drip offers an enhanced email marketing automation system and improved customer data and insights with its ECRM.

Why Should You Consider It?

Drip’s features come under four categories: customer data, personalization, engagement, and optimization.

Customer Data

Integration with several other data apps.
Track customer journey with your website and brand.
Custom fields for personalization and engagement.
Tags to divide your audience into segments and your tasks for priority.

Personalization

Send segmented deals and messages like price-drop notifications.
Behavior-based email outreach.
Custom fields for segmentation of contacts.

Customer Engagement

Instagram and Facebook advertising based on customers’ shopping behavior.
Visual email builder.
Automated email campaigns.

Optimization

Analytics to track metrics like revenue per subscriber, rate of unsubscribes, clicks, and opens — a boon for your marketing team.

Drip Pricing

Drip’s pricing plan is based on a sliding-scale model:

For 2,500 contacts: $39 a month.
For 5,000 contacts: $89 a month.
For 10,000 contacts: $154 a month.
For 50,000 contacts: $699 a month.

HubSpot Alternatives -- Drip pricing — *Drip pricing*

Pros

Many integrations.
Relatively affordable for startups — making Drift a good marketing alternative to HubSpot.

Cons

Services are mostly limited to the ECRM or CRM sphere.

	Drip	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing tool	✔	✔
Sales automation	𐄂	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	14 days	30 days
Annual discount	𐄂	10%
G2 rating	4.4	4.4

#7. Ontraport

Advanced referral management features

What Is It?

Next, we’ve got Ontraport. It has attracted a relatively large customer base and has good reviews.

Why Should You Consider It?

With Ontraport, you get a host of solutions. There are referral programs, membership sites, business process automation, marketing analytics, CRM, landing pages, eCommerce, email marketing, sales force automation, and marketing automation.

Referral Programs

Stash referral program data in a referral management system.
Integrate with other referral programs you might have with Ontraport’s WordPress plugin (PilotPress).
Make your own partner center on WordPress for commissions, sales, and traffic management for your partners.
Share partner promotional tools for referrers, each with its own tracking.
Generate partner sales reports.
Use automated promo tools like emails, links, lightboxes, and banners for promoting referrals.

Membership Sites

Web forms for your WordPress website.
Customizable templates.
Web forms and landing pages.
Automation for membership levels.

Business Automation

Customer onboarding automation.
Resources and content automation like welcome emails.
Predictive results, lead management.
Sync data to a single dashboard.
Fulfillment lists that go out every month or week.
Automated customer follow-ups.
Automated tasks.

CRM

Business card-style contact organization.
Interaction tracking based on communication and behavior.
Contacts grouping by job title, demographics, and other data.
Email campaign assigning automation.
Tags based on behavior.

Landing Pages

Add responsiveness and mobile optimization to your landing pages.
Include one-click upsells or order bumps to your sales page.
Share lightbox pop-up forms that come pre-filled.
A/B testing for landing page elements.
Review landing page success with detailed analytics.

eCommerce

Keep a limited purchase data cache for customers to buy again.
Provide an add-on or upsell on the thank-you page.
Provide secure payment processing through secure gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, etc.
Share group or individual coupons for event promotions, holidays, birthdays, etc.
Ontraport Forms to make your own order forms branded to your company.

Marketing Automation

Automate appointment reminders, thank-you messages, greetings for holidays and birthdays, etc.
Text reminders for appointments.
Text-based opt-ins.
Response and bounce tracking.

Marketing Analytics

Split testing for emails.
UTM variable data lead source report filtering to track revenue, leads, etc.
Customizable analytics.
Conversion stats, such as time taken to finish surveys, open emails, etc.

Sales Force Automation

Weighted Random to assign more leads to the top salespeople.
Round Robin to distribute leads evenly to all salespeople.
Lead score degradation on older leads.
Follow-up funnels with automation.
Review of expected win percentages and deal values.

Ontraport Pricing

Ontraport offers four different plans: Basic, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise.

Basic: This plan costs $29 per month and can support one user. You get unlimited emails and 1,000 contacts.
Plus: The Plus plan costs $83 a month, adds a second user, and offers 2,500 contacts.
Pro: With the Pro plan, you can have three users and 10,000 contacts for $124 a month. You also get email consultations and unlimited emails.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan supports five users, more than 20,000 contacts, and 200,000 monthly emails for $249 a month. You get a personal account rep, email consultations, and Ontraport account set up.

They also offer free trials for all the plans.

Pros

A plethora of services.
Free trial for two weeks.
Useful integrations such as secure gateway payment processing through Stripe or PayPal.

Cons

Steep pricing.

	Ontraport	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	14 days	30 days
Annual discount	2 months free	10%
G2 rating	4.5	4.4

#8. Pipedrive

Sales CRM built for salespeople, by salespeople

What Is It?

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM software designed specifically for sales teams. Its visual sales pipeline feature is one of the best in the industry and helps you track leads through streamlined workflows. This makes Pipedrive an ideal sales CRM for both small and medium-sized businesses and offers a multitude of integrations.

Why Should You Consider It?

If you want a sales-first CRM, Pipedrive is the way to go. With numerous features and a tightly integrated toolkit, Pipedrive offers everything your sales reps need to close deals smoothly — one of the best HubSpot sales alternatives. This includes:

Managing Leads and Deals

Customizable pipelines and fields to add your own spin
Deal management for smooth deal closure
Deal rotting feature to let you be aware of idle/dead deals
Activity management to keep tabs on everything that goes on in your sales team
2-way email sync for improved productivity

Automation

Sales assistant that offers intelligent insights and advice to help win more deals
Workflow automation to set up a consistent sales workflow process and reduce manual work and errors

Reporting and Insights

Activity reports
Visual dashboards
Revenue reports
Team management

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive offers five plans: Essential, Advanced, Professional, Power, and Enterprise:

Essential: The Essential plan costs $9.90/month with a daily open deal limit of 3,000. The plan also offers lead and deal management, inbox, deal rotting, people management, AI sales assistant, and deal reports — an excellent HubSpot replacement.
Advanced: The Advanced plan costs $19.90/month for a daily open deal limit of 10,000. You also get 2-way email sync, customizable email templates, customizable signatures, schedulers for emails, meetings, and video calls, and more.
Professional: The Professional plan costs $39.90/month with a daily open deal limit of 100,000. The plan also offers advanced formula fields, contacts timeline, document tracking, workflow automation, team management, and more.
Power: The Power plan starts at $49.90/month and offers project planning, phone support, CRM, account permissions, and more.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan costs $59.90/month for unlimited open deals. It is essentially the Professional plan with unlimited access and enterprise-grade security and features.

Pros

Sales-focused and offers a vast set of sales features
Excellent deal management
Affordable

Cons

Report configuration can be hard sometimes, according to user reviews
Not an all-in-one CRM solution

	Pipedrive	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	14 days	30 days
Annual discount	17%	10%
G2 rating	4.2	4.4

#9. Insightly

Best for medium-sized businesses

What Is It?

Insightly is a unified customer relationship management software that aligns marketing, sales, and project teams around a single view of your customers. The platform is great for entrepreneurs and small business owners executing campaigns, managing contacts, and growing their audience list.

Why Should You Consider It?

Insightly has a clean and intuitive user interface making it the best alternative to HubSpot for people looking for a leaner CRM. In addition, it offers social media management and various products for specific marketing requirements.

Lead Management

Lead management, assignment, and routing.
Outbound email scheduling.
Web to lead capture.
Automatic social profile enrichment.

Customer Relationship Management

Contact and organization management.
Task and event management.
Relationship linking.

Sales Features

Opportunity management.
Customizable sales processes.
Sales teams assignment.
Batch update records.
Event activity sets.

Project Management

Integrated project management.
Milestones and associated task tracking.
Calendar synchronization.
Configurable project processes.

Insightly Pricing

Insightly CRM offers four plans: Free, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise.

Free: The Free plan offers Insightly CRM and other basic features for up to 2 users.
Plus: Costs $29/month and offers company collaboration tools, integrated project management, calendar synchronization, and more. This cost-effective pricing makes Insightly better than HubSpot.
Professional: Costs $49/month for lead management, email templates, social profile enrichment, opportunity management, and more.
Enterprise: Costs $99/month and adds relationship linking, task and event management, complete workflow automation, custom validation rules, and configurable profiles.

Insightly vs HubSpot: Pricing, Functionality, Features & More

Pros

Feature-rich.
Intuitive dashboards.
Affordable pricing.

Cons

Customer support is not reliable.

	Insightly	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	𐄂	30 days
Annual discount	𐄂	10%
G2 rating	4.2	4.4

#10. Zoho

Suite of tools for all business processes

What Is It?

Zoho is a great affordable solution for SMBs as it offers a complete business solution. In addition to a comprehensive CRM solution, they offer other products, too – from event management, webinars, eCommerce, loyalty management, and more.

Why Should You Consider It?

Zoho CRM makes it easy to integrate multiple products easily, offering a truly integrated solution. Let’s take a look at the key features of Zoho.

Field Management

Mobile application
On-field representatives
Field management
Easy-of-use

Sales Intelligence and Automation

Logic, rules, and triggers
automates both operational and data entry tasks
Creating and updating tasks
Automatic lead routing based on various factors

Pipelines

Deal management
360-degree customer views
Account management
Intuitive dashboards

Team Management

Admin control
Documentation library
Meeting scheduler
Restriction management
Easy management and collaboration

Zoho Pricing

Zoho offers four plans: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate:

Standard: Zoho’s Standard plan starts at $14/month and offers pipelines, sales forecasting, templates, task management, email insights, and other standard features.
Professional: The Professional plan is a popular Zoho plan and starts at $23/month for webhooks, email relays, macros, assignment rules, and custom reports and dashboards
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan costs $40/month for advanced features, including email parsers, custom functions, segmentation, developer sandbox, and advanced dashboard components.
Ultimate: The Ultimate plan costs $52/month and offers advanced features, scalability, and dedicated BI capabilities.

Pros

More affordable than some of its competitors, including Salesforce CRM, HubSpot, and more.
A powerful suite of features, along with numerous integrations
User-friendly integration

Cons

Customer support may not be as comprehensive
Each product of Zoho has to be paid separately, and the integrations may not always work

	Zoho	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	✔	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	15 days	30 days
Annual discount	Up to 34%	10%
G2 rating	4.0	4.4

#11. Freshworks

Best mid-range CRM

What Is It?

Freshworks offers Freshsales, a unified CRM to help businesses align their marketing and sales teams all from a single platform. While Freshworks CRM offers multiple platforms – Freshmarketer, Freshsales, and Freshdesk, we’ll focus on Freshsales.

Why Should You Consider It?

Freshsales is a great solution for both SMBs and startups as it offers a clean interface. Key features of Freshsales includes:

Sales Management

Sales campaign automation
Automated scheduling
Deal tracking
Deal management
Follow-up workflows
Goals and milestones

Deal Management

Freddy AI
Ability to recognize high-value prospects
Deal win probability

Profile Enrichment

Automatic data and lead information capture
CRM sync
Data organization

Advanced Filters

Territory management
Automatic contact assignment
Advanced filters and criteria

Freshworks Pricing

Freshsales offers three plans: Growth, Pro, and Enterprise:

Free: The Free plan offers sales dashboards, email templates, Kanban boards, and more for up to 3 users
Growth: The Growth plan starts at $15/month for sales sequences, deal management, contact management, and so much more.
Pro: The Pro plan starts from $39/month and offers territory management, time-based workflows, 3,000 bot sessions per month, sales pipelines, and more.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan starts at $69/month for advanced CRM, custom modules, a dedicated account manager, AI-based forecasting insights, and more.

Pros

Offers a robust set of features
Apps are updated regularly

Cons

Quality of integrations may not be good, as mentioned in some of the reviews
Reports may not be as robust as some of the competitors

	Freshsales	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	✔	✔
Free trial	21 days	30 days
Annual discount	✔	10%
G2 rating	4.5	4.4

#12. Marketo

Largest enterprise marketing automation software

What Is It?

Adobe Marketo is a marketing automation platform solely for enterprises and is touted as the ‘world’s largest marketing automation’ platform. The platform combines the power of automation, content, account-based marketing, and lead development to help enterprises engage with customers.

Why Should You Consider It?

For enterprises, Adobe Marketo is the way to go. It’s feature-rich and is designed from the ground up with enterprise-grade features and security. Let’s take a deep dive into the features of Adobe Marketo Engage.

Cross-Channel Marketing

Coordinate engagement across channels
Social media marketing with personalized messages, campaigns, and sweepstakes
Email marketing tool with impactful email campaigns
Real-time behavior analysis

Sales and Marketing

Sales insights through sales intelligence tools
Account profiling using AI-powered workflows
Target account management
Lead and account-based audiences

Data and Insights

Marketing Analytics
Advanced journey analytics
Multi-touch attribution

Marketo Pricing

Adobe Marketo offers four plans: Growth, Select, Prime, and Ultimate. All plans are custom-priced.

Growth: This plan offers 10 users, 20,000 API calls/day, lead and account database, native CRM integration, audience segmentation and targeting, advanced dynamic content, advanced personalization, and more.
Select: The Select plan offers 50,000 API calls/day, campaign user roles, intelligent cross-channel nurturing, scoring, email marketing, and dynamic chat.
Prime: The Prime plan offers target account management, predictive audiences, advanced journey analytics, sandbox, and more.
Ultimate: The Ultimate plan offers 25 users, 50,000 API calls/day, 50 assets for predictive content, workspaces, partitions, and discounted pricing for Marketo Measure.

Pros

World’s largest marketing automation platform
Great customer support and great community

Cons

Not suitable for SMBs, startups, and solopreneurs
Expensive plans
Limited analytics and reporting capabilities

	Adobe Marketo	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	𐄂	30 days
Annual discount	𐄂	10%
G2 rating	4.1	4.4

#13. Salesforce Pardot

Acquired by Salesforce

What Is It?

Pardot was acquired by Salesforce and rebranded as ‘Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’. The platform is designed for large businesses and helps them automate email marketing, lead generation, email campaigns, multi-channel marketing, and more.

Why Should You Consider It?

Pardot offers a powerful suite of features, including marketing analytics, landing pages, lead management, and more.

Marketing Analytics

Understand marketing effectiveness
Analyze conversions, interactions
Custom dashboards
Customer touchpoint analysis

Landing Pages and Forms

Landing page builder
Custom template styles

Lead Management

Lead management
Lead scoring
Grading
Data management
Customer personas

Pardot Pricing

Salesforce Pardot offers four plans: Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium.

Growth: The Growth plan starts at $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts, lead generation, qualification, management, email marketing, and personalization.
Plus: The Plus plan starts at $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts, advanced dynamic content, lead scoring and grading, ROI reporting, lead nurturing, and more.
Advanced: The Advanced plan costs $4,000/month for 10,000 contacts, business units, developer sandboxes, and artificial intelligence for marketing and sales.
Premium: The Premium plan costs $15,000/month for 75,000 contacts, predictive analytics, personalized product support, 100,000 external activity APIs, and more.

Note: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement requires an annual contract.

Pros

Great lead management features
CRM integrations with Salesforce
Enhanced data visualization and management

Cons

No free plan
Too expensive for SMBs
Limited team coordination and management

	Salesforce Pardot	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	✔	30 days
Annual discount	𐄂	10%
G2 rating	4.0	4.4

#14. Salesforce

#1 CRM in the world

What Is It?

Salesforce offers ‘Salesforce Business CRM’ developed specifically for small businesses. Rated the #1 CRM in the world, Salesforce offers a plethora of tools – from lead management, data insights, and more.

Why Should You Consider It?

Let’s take a look at the key features of Salesforce:

Lead management
Lead conversion
Social insights
Social media engagement
Real-time sales forecasting
AppExchange marketplace
Customized sales, marketing, and customer service

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce Small Business CRM offers four plans: Essentials, Sales Professional, Service Professional, and Pardot Growth.

Essentials: starts from $25/month
Sales Professional: starts from $80/month
Service Professional: starts from $80/month
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot Growth): starts at $1,250/month

Pros

Powerful CRM
Customizable features
Popular CRM platform, meaning it’s easy to hire sales professionals having experience with the software

Cons

Quite expensive compared to other HubSpot alternatives
Expensive add-ons
Complex setup
Steep learning curve

	Salesforce	HubSpot
Marketing automation	✔	✔
Email marketing	✔	✔
Sales automation	✔	✔
All-in-one	𐄂	✔
Free plan	𐄂	✔
Free trial	✔	30 days
Annual discount	𐄂	10%
G2 rating	—	4.4

Conclusion

While the HubSpot CRM software is a leader in the marketing and CRM automation niche, it is not suitable for small businesses and startups.

You might be fooled into thinking that the platform is quite affordable when you’ve just started, as the Starter plan only costs $18 a month for 1,000 contacts. But what happens when your company grows, and you need to store more contacts and have better features? That’s where all hell breaks loose.

Platforms like HubSpot initially lure you with enticing free plans and affordable packages, but it soon shoots up. The cost of HubSpot’s Starter plan jumps up to $1,035 a month for 25,000 contacts.

If your business has boomed and you need advanced features, you must choose the Enterprise plan. The pricing? HubSpot costs a whopping $5,000 a month for 10,000 contacts. Add to this the mandatory onboarding fee of $12,000, and your annual billing exceeds $70K!

That’s why small businesses need more affordable HubSpot alternatives, and we have done the homework for you. You might wonder, ‘What can I use instead of HubSpot?’. It depends on your business size and requirements. For enterprises, we recommend choosing Adobe Marketo.

For businesses needing complete customer experience automation with a lot of integrations, it’s better to go for ActiveCampaign. Small businesses that need an affordable all-in-one marketing, sales, and support solution can try EngageBay.

EngageBay is built from the ground up with affordability and ease of use in mind.

EngageBay Hubspot alternative — *EngageBay features*

You get a forever free version, the Basic plan only costs $14.99, and the Pro plan with a plethora of advanced tools — and unlimited contacts — costs just $102 a month! Try it today 🙂

HubSpot Alternatives Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What platforms are similar to HubSpot?

Here is a list of the best HubSpot alternatives for small businesses: EngageBay, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Sendinblue, Sharpspring, Drip, Ontraport, Pipedrive, Insightly, Zoho, and more.

Each platform caters to a different audience, and a few software like EngageBay are designed specifically for small businesses and startups. We love ActiveCampaign too, but it’s great only for marketing automation — you’ll need another CRM solution to go with it.

What is the catch with HubSpot free CRM?

The catch with HubSpot free CRM? Like any for-profit business, HubSpot’s free plan is designed in such a way that businesses will eventually have to upgrade to a paid plan to unlock more features.

We’ve laid it all down in this blog: Is HubSpot really free?, HubSpot’s free version does not offer automations. Once businesses grow and need advanced features, that’s when HubSpot’s high costs become painful. Leandro N., the owner of an e-learning company, offers an unfiltered view of HubSpot:

“I do not think there is any startup or early business that can afford to increase its marketing and CRM suite costs by 2,300%. Most businesses must make the painful decision to abandon Hubspot and find new CRM suites with much more reasonable cost escalations.” ~ Leandro N., on Capterra

Is HubSpot really worth it?

Is HubSpot good?

That’s the million-dollar question. HubSpot is an amazing all-in-one platform with all the bells and whistles. That said, HubSpot targets large corporations and businesses with deep pockets. For small businesses, HubSpot’s high price tag is definitely not worth it.

Imagine paying thousands of dollars just for onboarding! We recommend trying out more affordable HubSpot alternatives mentioned in this blog. For small businesses and startups, EngageBay has got the same all-in-one approach and ease of use as HubSpot, but without the exorbitant price tag.

Is there a better CRM than HubSpot?

For small businesses, EngageBay is a better CRM than HubSpot as it offers most of the features at a highly affordable price. Choosing EngageBay could mean saving more than 80% of costs.

Objectively speaking, there are better platforms than HubSpot. Salesforce has been ranked #1 CRM in the world by IDC – but top CRM providers like these are designed for corporations and large businesses. These CRM software are super expensive, complex, and require extensive training.

SMBs need an affordable, easy-to-use CRM software that can be quickly set up. This is exactly why EngageBay is the best HubSpot free alternative for small businesses, and that’s what many of our 46,500+ customers have said too

Is HubSpot difficult to use?

We love HubSpot’s UI – it’s clean, easy to use, and modern. But what we (and many small businesses) don’t like is how much they charge for their products — one of the biggest cons of HubSpot for SMBs. That’s why we built EngageBay: a CRM software that is as easy to set up and use without the need to pay thousands of dollars.

Our Pro plan with unlimited contacts costs just $101.99/month 🙂

Learn more about HubSpot’s pros and cons.

Do large companies use HubSpot?

Yes, HubSpot is designed for large companies with deep pockets. Some huge companies that use HubSpot include Trello, Headspace, BBC, and more.

Why do large companies choose HubSpot? It’s because HubSpot offers an integrated CRM system as opposed to point solutions (including tools like HubSpot CMS Hub). But what about small businesses? In our own experience, we found that HubSpot is not for SMBs, solopreneurs, and startups.

If that’s you, we recommend trying EngageBay to have everything in one place, or ActiveCampaign if you need only marketing automation.

Who competes against HubSpot?

There are several competitors to HubSpot, from Salesforce to ActiveCampaign and EngageBay.

Even though HubSpot is one of the best all-in-one CRM software for medium and large businesses, there are a lot of competitors when it comes to affordable CRM solutions. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most affordable CRM solutions in this blog.