HubSpot Competitors and 9 Marketing Automation Alternatives Compared on Real Pricing

Who are HubSpot's biggest competitors?

HubSpot's biggest competitors are ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp for small and mid sized businesses, Salesforce and Adobe Marketo Engage for enterprise teams, Klaviyo for online stores and Brevo for buyers led by price. Which one is the real rival depends on the hub: Salesforce competes with the CRM, the email tools compete with Marketing Hub.

People search for HubSpot competitors for two very different reasons, and the best alternative depends entirely on which one you have. The first is price. HubSpot Marketing Hub is excellent and priced like it: Starter is $20 per seat per month, and the next real tier, Professional, is $890 a month plus a one-time $3,000 onboarding fee. There is essentially nothing in between, so a business that outgrows Starter features but not a Starter budget hits a roughly 44x wall. The second reason is quieter and shows up later: HubSpot is infrastructure that assumes marketing is being made. It does not write the email or the blog post. For a team without a dedicated marketer, that turns into an expensive, well-organized platform where very little actually gets published.

HubSpot competitors for email on a small budget

Sort the field by which problem you are solving and the choices get clear. If email is the real job and price is the pressure, Brevo is the aggressive-value pick: a free tier that sends 300 emails a day with unlimited contacts, Starter at $9 a month, and Standard at $18 a month once you need automation, with SMS sold as separate credits. Brevo bills on emails sent, not contacts, and the step above Standard is $499, which is laid out in our Brevo pricing breakdown. Mailchimp is the mature, familiar option, free up to 250 contacts and 500 sends, then roughly $13 for Essentials and $20 for Standard, with the caveat that it prices by contact count and inactive contacts keep counting until you archive them. The full ladder is on the Mailchimp pricing page.

HubSpot competitors with a CRM and real automation

For automation depth without enterprise pricing, ActiveCampaign is the default mid-market answer. Its Starter plan is $15 a month for 1,000 contacts, and the Plus plan at $49 a month adds a genuine CRM and sales automation, scaling with your list from there (see ActiveCampaign pricing by contact count). It is the tool most people mean when they say they want HubSpot-style workflows on a small-business budget, and the two are compared head to head in HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign. Zoho Marketing Automation is worth a look if you already live in the Zoho ecosystem, starting around $19 a month for a competent all-in-one.

Which HubSpot competitor is best for ecommerce?

If you sell online, the category changes. Klaviyo is built for ecommerce and prices by active profile: email-only is about $45 a month at 1,000 profiles, $150 at 10,000, and $720 at 50,000, with the billing rules in our Klaviyo pricing guide. It goes deep on abandoned-cart, browse-abandonment, and post-purchase flows in a way a general marketing suite treats as a side feature, and for a Shopify or DTC brand that behavioral depth is usually where the revenue is. If that is your situation, start from ecommerce marketing automation rather than a general suite.

Is Salesforce a competitor of HubSpot?

Yes. Salesforce is HubSpot's main competitor in CRM, and its Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement products compete directly with HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise. Salesforce usually wins in large companies with a dedicated admin team. HubSpot usually wins where a small team needs to be running in weeks without a consultant.

At the enterprise end, Marketo Engage (now Adobe) and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are the tools that compete with HubSpot Enterprise on lead scoring, multi-touch attribution, and account-based marketing. Both are custom-quoted, both typically start near or above $895 a month and climb into the thousands, and both assume you have a marketing operations team to run them. They are the right answer for a large organization and the wrong answer for a small one.

What HubSpot and its competitors cost at 5,000 contacts

At 5,000 marketing contacts on monthly billing, HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional costs about $1,140 a month, against $179 for ActiveCampaign Plus, $100 for Mailchimp Standard, $49 for MailerLite Comfort and $18 for Brevo Standard. Starting prices hide this gap, because every tool here looks cheap at 500 contacts.

The HubSpot row is the reason this search exists. A business with 5,000 contacts pays roughly six times the ActiveCampaign price and eleven times the Mailchimp price for Professional, and the first invoice also carries the onboarding fee. That premium buys reporting, a CRM that the whole company shares and a very deep feature set. It is a fair price for a team that uses those things and a heavy one for a team that mostly sends a newsletter. The tier by tier detail is on the HubSpot pricing page.

The HubSpot competitor that writes the marketing for you

Then there is the category that exists because of HubSpot's second problem, the one where the platform is not the bottleneck and production is. AutoMarketer does not try to be a better place to manage campaigns. It reads your website, builds a brand profile, and writes and exports the campaigns across SEO, ads, social, and email, on a flat plan that runs $49 a month for SEO and social and $149 with ads and email, with no onboarding fee and no per-contact pricing. It is not a CRM, so if a sales pipeline is what you need, keep HubSpot's free CRM, which is genuinely good. But if the reason your marketing is stalled is that nobody has hours to make it, a tool that organizes marketing will not fix that no matter how capable it is. That is the gap this fills, and it is covered in more detail on the HubSpot alternative page.

How to choose between HubSpot competitors

One honest caveat on all of the above: software pricing moves, and this page is built from each vendor's published pricing. Contact tiers, seat charges, and onboarding fees change more often than comparison pages get updated, so confirm the current numbers on the vendor's own pricing page before you commit to anything. The useful takeaway is not the exact dollar figure, it is the mapping: name your real problem, then pick the tool built for that problem rather than the one with the longest feature list.