HubSpot Vs ActiveCampaign | ActiveCampaign Vs HubSpot [Comparison]

Introduction

Hubspot and ActiveCampaign are two of the best marketing automation tools in the market. Both tools offer exceptional services, marketing products and seamless experiences to users at affordable prices. So, if you are confused about which tool to use, keep reading this blog post until the end. 

In this blog post, we have done a complete comparison of Hubspot vs. Active Campaign on various factors such as their pricing point, features, user interface, ease of use, customer support and a lot more. 

At the end of the post, you’ll surely be able to decide which is a good tool to go with.

Brief overview of the significance of marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation tools like Hubspot & Active Campaign help to optmize and automate the daunting and repetitive marketing activities. This enables marketers and businesses to focus more on the productive task that has a direct impact on the profitability of a business. Tools like Hubspot and Active Campaign can also be used to speed up and improve the sales and profits of a business.

Following are some of the  benefits of marketing automation tools and platforms:

• Improves conversion rate 
• Improves the visibility of the campaign 
• Increases employee productivity 
• Improves customer retention
• Helps to drive traffic to the website
• Optimizes the marketing campaign

Understanding HubSpot

Hubspot is an all-one CRM platform that makes it easy for an entire company to work together. The platform can also be used by solopreneurs, small businesses and large-scale organizations. It is a combination of marketing tools, sales tools, service-based tools, CMS-based tools and operation tools. As of 2024, 180,000+ businesses across 120 countries use Hubspot to level up the marketing game.

Overview of HubSpot’s history and reputation in the industry

Hubspot was started by two fellow MIT graduates in 2004, Brian and Dharmesh, who noticed an in the way people shop and buy. By considering this shift, a company was born Hubspot. It was founded on the basis of inbound, which means customers no longer wanted to be targeted by marketers or salespersons forcing them to buy any product or service. In the year 2014, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange by offering its first initial public offer.

Since its inception in the year 2004, the company has launched various tools and software on its platform in the domain of social media, email marketing, website designing, blogging, content creation and a lot more. 

Today, the company is in direct competition with Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Microsoft CRM and other CRM and automation tools in the market. 

Highlight key features:

1. Marketing automation capabilities

Hubspot’s marketing and automation capabilities are surely the best in the world. 

It allows businesses of any size to automate their routine task such as sending emails, lead scoring, follow-ups with customers, live chat support and more. It will also help you to deliver the right marketing message to the right customer at right time. By streamlining your marketing activities, you can increase the effectiveness and quantity of your campaign.

2. Integration

Hubspot can also be integrated with loads of other tools and popular apps like Gmail, WordPress, Salesforce, Facebook Ads, Google Ads and lot more platforms. Integrating Hubspot with these apps will help you to reap more benefits out of your marketing activities. 

3. Content management and SEO tools

Content and SEO go hand in hand. Without content, you cannot get success in SEO and without good SEO, your content won’t rank on Google. Keeping this in mind, Hubspot has launched SEO marketing software to allow you to leash the true potential of SEO. 

Hubspot’s SEO software will allow you to optimize your content and keywords for your website. It will give you recommendations for keywords, which pages need to be updated on your site, what actions to take for further improve your site’s rank and so on.

You can also use this feature to plan your content strategy and outrank your competitors’ websites on Google. You can discover trending topics that your audience is looking at on the web. You will be getting suggestions based on competition, search volume, popularity and more.

4. Analytics and reporting

Do you want pinpoint and accurate data regarding your marketing campaigns? If yes, then Hubspot’s analytics and reporting tool has got your back covered. 

It will give you more data as compared to any other analytics tool in the market. You can use these data points to make better decisions about your marketing campaign. You can keep track on your website visitors, conversions, email marketing reports and more in one place.

Exploring ActiveCampaign

Active Campaign is a cloud-based software application system which offers a set of tools for small to mid-sized businesses. It is best known for its email marketing, sales, CRM and marketing automation tools. Currently, the tool is being used by 185,000 customers across the globe for marketing, email, CRM and more.

Overview of the Active Campaign’s background and market position

The company was started in the year 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. It started out as a consulting firm and later switched to an on-premises software provider to help small and mid-sized business automate their marketing tasks and manage contact. In the later years, the company fully converted into Saas business by focusing on marketing and sales automation.

As of 2024, the company had 185,000 customers on board helping them to generate $165 million on revenue with a customer base from 170 countries. The company is now headquartered in Chicago with offices in Indianapolis, Sydney, Dublin and Brazil.

One of the best things that we loved about Active Campaign is that they offer many features at a low price, which sets them apart from other CRM and marketing automation tools.

Highlight key features:

1. Email marketing and automation

Email marketing gives you the highest success rate of any other marketing channel. Active Campaign works really hard to take your email marketing game next level with its stunning email deliverability rate, integration, multi-user editing feature, email templates and lot more. 

There is also a segmentation and dynamic content feature that makes it easy for you to customize your messages and send highly targeted emails to the right audience.

Overall, Active Campaign has got features email marketing features as compared to Hubspot, which gives them one additional point. 

2. CRM functionality

Active Campaign’s CRM functionality is something that will help your sales to get the best conversions for your business. 

With the sales CRM tool of Active Campaign, you can automate your contact management, score leads, monitor deals and pipelines and track sales tasks very easily. In short, you can automate your entire sales process.

Another cool thing about the CRM functionality of Active Campaign is that you can manage your customer’s phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses in one central platform and automatically update contact details when needed.

Automated contact management lets you see your whole sales process at a glance. When you can automate task assignment and sales routing, your sales team is always on the same page. Track interaction at every stage of the sales cycle, and pick up where anyone else left off.

3. Advanced segmentation and personalization

Marketing segmentation and personalization are yet another core feature of Active Campaign. It will help you in sending personalized emails and messages to your contacts which will improve your overall conversion of the business. 

Besides, segmentation will allow you to send different messages to different customers based on their location, contact number, preferences and other parameters. 

This will allow you to engage better with your contact as you are sending right information to the right person. 

4.  E-commerce store automation 

Do you want to grow your e-commerce business? Are you looking for different ways to improve your sales of online stores? If yes, then Active Campaign’s e-commerce tools are here to help you out. 

It will allow you to create better rapport and communication with your customers based on their past browsing and shopping behaviour. You’ll also be getting tools that will help you to convert one-time buyers into brand loyalists in a matter of minutes. 

You can also personalize your messages with autoresponders and showcase your product catalogue, cross-sell different products, send abandon cart emails and more.

Feature Comparison

Side-by-side comparison of essential features:

1. Pricing and plans

Hubspot :

Active Campaign:

2. User interface and ease of use

Hubspot : 

Hubspot’s user interface is much more seamless and easy to with the right color combination, design, text ratio and intuitive elements. It will keep you away from distractions and focus more on your work. All thanks to its less intrusive design. 

Even if you are a beginner or someone who never used CRM and automation tools, you can still use it easily by just following the workflow and navigation elements. 

Active Campaign:

Active Campaign’s user interface is slightly complex as it is loaded with more features, which might confuse you. However, the design is kept minimalistic with stunning blue, white, grey and black color combinations. 

3. Email marketing capabilities

Hubspot :

Hubspot’s email marketing capabilities are surely one of the best in the world. 

Not only you can send highly attractive and conversational emails to your customers, but also design an email template right from the beginning without the help of designers or engineers. You can simply use the drag-and-drop editor and AI content generator to create the best email template for you.

You can also personalize the email text messages with AI content generator and send highly targeted emails. 

Active Campaign:

As you can see from the above image that Active Campaign’s user interface is more smooth and subtle as compared to Hubspot. The simple and minimalistic design with icons makes it easier to use for beginners and newbies. 

On the left-hand side you’ll find the complete features which you can simply scroll and navigate through.  You’ll get everything right in front of you by simply pointing your cursor on the right feature tab. 

4. CRM and contact management

Hubspot :

Hubspot’s CRM is free to use for businesses of all sizes.it comes with enterprise software for marketing, sales, customer services, content mangement and operations. To simply put, it will surely help you to streamline all your business activities and help you grow your online presence. Speaking about its sales feature, it will help your sales team to close more deals with less effort.

For customer relationships, you can use the live chat feature which will keep your website visitors engaged and answer their queries when they land on your site. 

You can also create several automation workflows, which will further help you to streamline the process. 

Active Campaign:

Active Campaign’s CRM capabilities are great for small and medium-sized businesses. CRM features are very easy peasy to use. Within a few clicks, you can set multiple sales pipelines, and edit or add new stages to your sales process. Also, the drag-and-drop tool makes it easy to move deals through the pipeline.

It has also got several CRM automation templates which makes your task easier. 

The pricing for Active Campaign CRM starts at $23 per month which is quite cheaper as compared to other tools out in the market. At this pricing point, you will advanced sales, marketing automation, contact and lead nurturing, email and SMS features as well.

5. Automation workflows

Hubspot :

Automation is yet another cool feature of Hubspot, especially for email marketing purposes. 

With Hubspot’s automation tools and software, you timely nurture your leads by automating campaigns and moving leads further down to the funnel. You can also set up triggers, actions, and conditions to send the right message to the right contact at the right time.

Besides, you can also automate simple marketing and sales task and increase the overall productivity of your business. Tasks such as webhooks, scoring leads, sending leads and managing data can be done easily by automation.

HubSpot’s marketing automation software is available for free, with no credit card required. If you’re looking for more advanced features to help automate and scale your marketing operations, HubSpot also offers premium features with the Starter, Professional, and Enterprise editions of Marketing Hub.

Active Campaign:

Automation is one of the most vital features of Active Campaign gives it one more extra point as compared to Hubspot. It will allow you to automate virtually anything from campaigns, deals, e-commerce automation, sms automation, contact management, email and lot more. The best part is that marketing automation is included in all their plans but sales automation comes only with a plus plan.

There are several automation templates avalaible on the tool’s marketplace.

Hubspot’s templates come with general features, whereas Active Campaign’s templates come with a hell lot of integration and added features to take your automation game next level. 

6. Reporting and analytics

Hubspot :

Hubspot’s reporting and analytics tool is surely one of the best in the world. 

It comes with a plethora of features to give marketers unlimited access to data than ever before. It will help you in making smart decisions about your email marketing, website performance, sales, and other core aspects of your business. You can get detailed marketing reports to make data-driven decisions as you grow. 

There are reports for every marketing aspect of your business, from your website to email, blog to posts, social media pages and more – everything is measurable by Hubspot’s analytics tool.

Active Campaign:

Analytics is quite boring Active Campaign and got as advanced as that of Hubspot. You can only use Active Campaign’s analytics tool for getting data about your email marketing campaign which you run on their platform. You cannot integrate it with other online tools like WordPress, social media profiles, blog and other third-party apps. 

7. Template Library 

Hubspot :

Hubspot comes with a wide rage of free templates to help you with your marketing efforts. It has got templates for email marketing, sales, website building and landing page building. 

The sales email template is my personal favourite option that will help you to craft stunning sales emails and send it to your potential customers. There are loads of pre-made designs available which you can choose from and customize each template based on your brand and content needs. With each template, you can get real-time insights into email open rates, attachments, clicks and more. 

Besides the email templates, I also loved the landing pages template that comes with Hubspot in various categories like party, marketing, business, sales and more. 

There are some highly convertible landing pages which might also skyrocket the sales and profits of your business. 

You can also use the AI content generator to quickly make content for your landing page. All the landing page templates are 100% mobile-friendly, meaning they’ll work like a charm on any device. 

In case you don’t like any template from their library, you can create your own landing page right from scratch by using their drag-and-drop editor. 

Active Campaign:

Whether you agree with me or not, Active Campaign’s template library is far better as compared to Hubspot. The moment I saw their templates, I was truly amazed with the look and feel, and design aspect. Each template design looks highly attractive and modern. The only thing which is lacking is to move the blocks around the page for editing. For example, you cannot move or edit any block on the template. 

However, that is the only downside. 

The templates are made available from a wide range of categories including marketing, business, fashion, sports, automobile, and a lot more. 

Another good feature which I loved is their drag-and-drop editor which really makes editing and designing easy. 

You can create your own template for email marketing or landing page as you want with ample editing options and tools at your fingertips. You also have room to add images, text and other intuitive elements to the page which might make it look more attractive. 

However, you cannot add image links directly. 

You can also include dynamic content and show different content to users based on their location and demographics. This will allow you to target your leads more intelligently.

8. Resources

Hubspot :

Learning hub and resources are something at which Active Campaign cannot beat Hubspot. At Hubspot, you’ll find enough content and room to expand your knowledge in the domain of digital marketing. They have got loads of blogs and guide posts on topics like marketing, sales, blogging, email marketing, SEO and lot more. 

They have also got free certification courses on various topics such as blogging, SEO, analytics, social media marketing and lot more. 

You can enrol in any of these free courses and expand your knowledge. Not to forget their weekly and monthly webinars is something to watch out for. 

Active Campaign:

Learning resources are in abundance with Active Campaign. They have their own community where you can ask anything about email marketing, tool, software, marketing and other general queries related to the tool. 

The good part about this community is that it is divided into forums, help docs, universities and partners.

The forum is a place where you can ask your doubts and queries with regard to marketing and active campaign tool. You can also build meaningful connections in the forum. 

Help docs are something that will help you to get started with the Active Campaign tool. It is a compilation of blogs and guideposts to help you with email marketing and how to use their tool. 

University, as the name says, it is a place where you can enrol in free courses and learn more about Active Camapign’s products. 

Partner is a program that will help you to earn extra income by joining as an affiliate for Acitive Campaign and promoting their products. 

9) Customer Support [Hubspot Vs ActiveCampaign]

Hubspot :

There are number of options avalaible by which you can contact Hubspot. It can be done either by directly calling them, sending them an email or doing a live chat with their team. 

The live chat system sucks and I have personally tried it. The reply from the team comes very late or it might not even come if you are not a premium customer of Hubspot. For general queries, they take it very lightly and do not respond to each request.

Active Campaign:

Active Campaign offers customer support via chat and email on their all plans and they have phone support only for upgraded plan. Their customer support team is very knowledgeable and they will guide you through your doubts very clearly. 

They have an in-house team of experts and all the customer support work is done by their team. They have not outsourced any of the support tasks, which means you’ll have first-hand information only. 

 

10) Pipeline Management: 

Hubspot

Hubspot’s deals and pipeline management is pretty easy and simple to use. It also allows you to customize everything based on your requirements and needs. 

You can edit each column, and row and add your own custom properties as you need. A search bar is also present to help you navigate easily. Drag and drag-and-drop editor is also present allowing you to edit pick and drop any deal at any time. 

Active Campaign

I personally liked the Active Campaign’s deal and pipeline management dashboard which is more clean and smooth as compared to Hubspot. It gives you ample room for customization so that you can edit your sales deals and manage them as per your wish. You can also create ultimate sales processes and streamline your operations to get more sales. 

HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign – FAQs