Hubspot Vs Marketo | The Ultimate Comparison (2023)

Worried about which marketing automation software to choose in 2023?

Here is a deep comparison of two of the best performing marketing automation software. HubSpot vs Marketo to help you select the best one.

Today, companies are using different marketing and sales strategies to attract customers. The more choices customers have, the more tactics businesses will use, which means marketers have to keep an eye on more things. This is where a marketing automation platform can help, and there are many options.

Marketing automation tools eliminate or at least simplify the routine efforts of creating, monitoring, delivering, and automating campaigns. Marketing automation tools let you use Cloud-based apps to create complex email sequences, design landing pages, manage contacts, and much more.

As the marketing world is completely based on automation, which platform should you select? All marketing automation vendors will claim that their product is the best, the most effective, and the most popular.

Picking the best and most suitable marketing automation platform is a big decision for any business. Not only at the software level, but it also requires various systematic changes in the business. It’s important to do it right.

So to help you make that decision, we have explored two of the biggest names in the modern marketing automation game: HubSpot and Marketo.

The two market leaders in the cloud industry have strong customer bases, high satisfaction ratings, and many overlapping features. But actually, they are not the same. This comparison will highlight some key differences to help you decide which tool is best for your company.

In a hurry? Read out the precise comparison of HubSpot vs Marketo below.

HubSpot Overview

HubSpot is designed to provide truly one-stop inbound marketing services. HubSpot is designed to provide truly one-stop inbound marketing services. HubSpot is a robust platform, to fulfill your digital marketing needs, including your website’s content management system. Moreover, it works as a social media scheduler, email marketing provider, CRM solution, and more.

It is one of the most famous tools in the market because of its features. It allows users to log in and perform multiple operations such as creating specialized landing pages, generating website traffic, scheduling social media posts, and much more. From the first interaction of your customer with your brand to turning into a loyal customer, HubSpot helps in managing your entire prospect lifecycle.

Marketo Overview

Marketo, launched in 2006 and acquired by Adobe in 2018, is one of the most renowned marketing automation tools. It performs effectively for every size of the business by using its tools such as email marketing, SEO optimization, and powerful third-party CRM integration.

It was created as a solution for large enterprises, especially those dealing with huge amounts of data and complex marketing strategies. The market is great for any business with robust email campaigns and multiple triggers and drips. It is also known for its sophisticated analytics. An additional feature of Marketo is its mobile application that allows users to keep in touch.

Breakdown Of Comparison

HubSpot Vs Marketo: Short Verdict

After calculating the scores and comparing the end results, we got a clear winner in the HubSpot vs Marketo faceoff……HubSpot!

HubSpot provides everything you need to implement your inbound strategy. With everything in a single place, you can track your campaign, get more accurate results, and it is absolutely easier than buying a separate automation system, social shedding, reporting platforms, and CMS.

HubSpot can do everything you need to run your entire marketing campaign, from building a website to closing leads. Over the past years, HubSpot has grown into not only a marketing platform but also a sales and customer service platform.

If you need a software platform to manage the entire lifecycle of your contacts, HubSpot with its three integrated hubs (Marketing, Sales, and Service) can help you. If you want an end-to-end solution, nothing is better than HubSpot. But Marketo has a lot that you’ll love.

Marketo has an upper edge in providing advanced analytics and email workflows. If you have a strong background in IT, you will definitely enjoy using the software and gaining more advanced features. Large organizations that need complex email campaigns for multiple customer bases can use Marketo to customize their email marketing to the smallest details.

1. Workflow Automation

While the focus is on automation, marketing automation software must do more than just automate its campaigns.

Marketing processes include working with the sales team to prep(nurture) leads for submission to the sales team. Sometimes, marketing continues to work with sales throughout the sales process to attract and retain leads.

So an automated tool must automate the classification of leads according to their sales readiness. It needs to determine those leads and their intent.

Let’s begin with HubSpot. The web platform offers an incredible workflow to understand leads and build an automated workflow from scratch. Alternatively, these workflows can be built in a more structured way, focusing on a lead’s goal and customer persona.

On the other hand, Marketo’s Customer Engagement Engine is an outstanding suite allowing marketers to develop more relevant dialogues that are easy to set up.

These dialogues are highly customizable and might be used in basic drip campaigns.

As neither of them has an upper hand over the other, this one is a tie.

Winner: Tie

2. Sales Process Tools

HubSpot CRM platform provides Sales Hub to help you in your business growth. Each product is good on its own but performs better when you use them together.

HubSpot Sales Hub provides advanced sales tools which include:

• Email Templates:

You can turn your best-performing sales emails into templates that you can share with your team.

• Email Tracking

Help you know when a lead opens an email, that helps you track and close deals at the right time. Guesswork is not involved.

•  Document Management and Tracking

Helpful sales content can be built for your team. Documents can be shared right from your Gmail or Outlook inbox and content that closes deals can be seen.

• Conversation Intelligence

Details can be easily captured from every call so you can understand the “why” behind team performance. Then discover Al-powered coaching opportunities.

• Call Tracking

It helps to prioritize your day’s sales call, make and record calls from your browsers and log them in your CRM automatically to increase efficiency.

• Sales Automation

With a personal touch, make your sales process automatic. Build personalized emails series, and follow-up tasks to stay on top of mind in the overall sales process.

Marketo offers a sales-performing tool called Sales Connect that includes Templates, tracking, analytics, and interactive calls. It is mainly used by the sales and marketing departments. The sales department uses it to focus on finding new business.

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Marketo Sales Connect makes it easy and quick to send messages to your audience.

It is a great tool for scheduling prospecting calls, planning outrage campaigns, and reaching multiple users at the same time.

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HubSpot Sales Hub is easier to use, set up, and administer than Marketo. Users find HubSpot Sales Hup better suited to business needs than Adobe Marketo Engage.

Winner: HubSpot

3. Marketing features

HubSpot Marketing Hub allows marketing teams to organize, manage, and track all activities such as lead generation, lead generation, and campaign tracking. It has a content toolbox that offers branding tools, blogging tools, SEO and more. Once the leads are attracted and qualified, you can send them to a customized CTA and landing pages to help you complete the process.

HubSpot’s powerful marketing tools allow users to drive new visitors to their inbound websites. Its Marketing Hub particularly, the professional and Enterprise, provides an exceptional user experience, from interface to the support team, and to a vast system of products and services.

Whereas, Marketo can take advantage of opportunities by responding to relevant calls or offers at the right time to convert customers. Marketo Engage is positioned as an end-to-end engagement platform. This platform helps processes.

HubSpot marketing automation suite takes the point for offering highly customizable tools. There are many features designed to support you from lead to conversion.

Business people mostly prefer to do business with the HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Reviewers find HubSpot Marketing Hub better suited to business needs than Adobe Marketo Engage. When comparing the quality of current product support, HubSpot Marketing Hub is the preferred option.

Winner: HubSpot

4. Pricing

The decision, of which marketing automation tool to invest in, should not be based on the price of each option. Because if you choose the right option, invest time and money, then the initial outlay will be covered by the dividends.

So who is more costly, HubSpot or Marketo? Pricing is pretty relative when you add all the premium features and analyze the top tiers of HubSpot and Marketo. Both provide various levels of packages, add-ons, and free trials.

But if you compare them, HubSpot has a free version of its platform that doesn’t offer all the benefits, but it can be a great way to start without up-front expenses.

HubSpot Marketing Hub has three tiers at three different prices.

• Starter for $,45 per month
• Professional for $800 per month
• Enterprise for $3200 per month

HubSpot is an affordable option for small businesses because its starter package is much cheaper than Marketo’s Select tier.

For small businesses, HubSpot is definitely a cheaper option as the Starter plan is much cheaper than the Preferred Marketo tier (prices are not available on the website, but you should contact the sales team directly – just buy the best price).

Marketo has seven main modules

• Lead management
• Email marketing
• Consumer marketing
• Customer-based marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Revenue attribution
• Account-based marketing

Depending on your business requirements, these modules can be purchased individually, in bundles, or altogether as a fully integrated platform.

So you can customize your solution, but some companies look for a more unified software. Marketo doesn’t include specific pricing information about their plans but groups them into the following tiers:

• SELECT provides essential marketing automation and measurement.
• PRIME offers full lead with account based marketing and Al personalization.
• ULTIMATE offers premium attribution with the most complete and powerful experience automation.
• ENTERPRISE offers a higher degree of scale and flexibility.

In pricing, Marketo is not as transparent as would like, but depending on the size of your database and features, the estimated range is from $960/month to over $7,000/month. Prices are not available on their website, so you have to contact their sales team directly.

Marketo can still be more expensive, as prices depend on the number of modules required. Costs can increase as most of the companies require more than one module.

However, HubSpot, in contrast, provides a more comprehensive package. Not only do you get all the tools with unlimited functionality, but you also get more for less.

So, the more features and users you choose, the higher the price, but generally HubSpot is cheaper than Marketo.

Winner: HubSpot

5. Reporting / Analytics

Successful marketing strategies are based on insights, and valuable insight comes from data, which includes information about leads, content interaction, leads customers, and business deliverables.

Marketing automation solutions that don’t provide data analysis tools are just robots.

There can be many great tools out there that provide a seamless user experience, but it doesn’t make sense if you don’t know which part of your strategy is working and which is not.

HubSpot built-in analytics tools help you to analyze your website’s performance with the help of key metrics and track your marketing funnel from acquisition to closure. And assessing it all from a single dashboard makes it easy to become a data-driven marketer, allowing you to make smarter decisions. After all, HubSpot is a powerful CRM platform that can simplify your strategy and boost your results as you grow.

HubSpot provides reporting and analytics in a user-friendly platform. HubSpot allows businesses to view and evaluate all analytics instantly, While Marketo provides robust reporting and analytics for a high level of engagement.

Marketo provides predictive analytics and modeling that are based on content preferences and digital behavior patterns.

Marketo offers fully customizable reports. Also, Marketo goes even further by tracking customer searches and browsing history. In contrast, HubSpot is less dependent on customization but gives users ease of use and flexibility.

Therefore, Marketo has an upper hand as it provides more attractive reports.

Winner: Marketo

6. Integration

Since marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) are closely related, most companies look for a marketing automation platform that integrates with CRM.

HubSpot has its built-in CRM, which can integrate with popular systems such as SugarCRM, Zoho, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics.

HubSpot contains over 100 native integrations which include:

• Customer Service integration: Intercom, SurveyMonkey, and Zendesk
• Popular integrations: Google Calendar, Gmail, and WordPress.
• Sales Integration: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, PandaDoc, and Calendly.
• Email marketing integration: MailerLite, MailOptin, Mailchimp.

While on the other hand, Marketo does not offer a built-in CRM module, their product is based on the Salesforce platform, providing some of the best and unique Salesforce integration in the industry. They offer native integrations for CRM leaders, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics which means marketers don’t lose out by choosing this platform.

Marketo lists over 550 partners to integrate, across various industries which includes:

• Popular integration: Adobe, NetSuite, Microsoft, and Mintigo.
• Social media integration: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more
• Event and webinar integration: Cisco WebEx, Zoom, and GoToWebinar.
• Sales integration: Fast Call, CallRail, and Salesforce.

Marketo offers more advanced CRM integration and offers wide coverage, but HubSpot is more user-friendly because, primarily, it is a CRM platform. It offers a range of products that can be built on top of CRM and combines a unified backend experience with a cohesive user interface to provide end-users with the power and ease of use.

HubSpot processing products that are in-built to its platform is the most prominent difference between HubSpot and Marketo integration.

Winner: HubSpot

7. Customer Support

HubSpot and Marketo have their own “Academy” and “University” to help customers learn their tools and become more experienced marketers.

Both platforms provide certification courses that can be chosen and completed online.

Not only this, HubSpot and Marketo offer paid training that depends upon business people’s requirements, such as individual training or text-based resources which includes HubSpot marketing resources, HubSpot Sales guide, HubSpot academy, HubSpot blog, Marketo resources, and Marketo blog.

HubSpot has more resources for not only inbound marketing and sales but for practicing software with free service and numerous tutorials and documents in the academy.

HubSpot’s effective help system helps you when you are facing any issue or you need any sort of help. Its external agencies, expert users, and in-house professors providing content resources to businessmen is a great way to engage your client’s business teams and improve their skills.

On the other hand, Marketo Education is neither free nor comprehensive like HubSpot. This is something to know if you are looking for a superficially trained or certified talent pool. Many online reviews declared that Marketo customer support is hit-or-miss. Particularly, it may be difficult to get someone on the phone, but once you get connected with the right person, the service is great.

Additionally, HubSpot also has tutorials and courses that are not limited to software but about their inbound strategies and methods. So HubSpot provides better customer support than Markto.

Winner: HubSpot

Final Thoughts

Based on the above comparison we got HubSpot as a winner. It provides better integration, more advanced sales, and marketing tools along with more cooperative customer support. HubSpot is admirably suited to marketers who are looking for an out-of-the-box and fully featured platform to meet their needs.

And if you look at Marketo, it’s a best-in-breed platform that is ideal for B2B marketers who already have a built-in MarTech stack and can customize their platform. Marketo is an incredible kit focused on performance and value.

Ultimately, the choice depends on what your team needs. And of course, it doesn’t matter how complex the features are, it’s about how easily you can get your desired information.