HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign: Which one should you Pick?

HubSpot enables marketers to analyze and manage all their campaigns in one place. One can quickly create an email, add social media posts, and build ad campaigns. HubSpot also helps leverage automation to streamline processes and create reports of campaigns through insightful analytics tools.

With the help of gathered information, you can leverage it to make your marketing efforts more personalized and customized as per the customer. HubSpot helps generate leads for the sales team, who can convert them into customers. HubSpot is ranked #1 in Marketing Automation by G2 Crowd, and #1 by Gartner.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is another software used by marketers to automate tasks such as website messaging and email marketing. It helps in sending tailored emails, nurturing contacts, and automating the sales and marketing processes. ActiveCampaign is ranked #2 in Marketing Automation by G2 Crowd and is not ranked by Gartner.

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Differences between HubSpot and ActiveCampaign

Email Marketing

HubSpot coined the term inbound and gave strong support to marketers through inbound marketing software and created the best-in-class tools to help marketers express themselves.

HubSpot offers a great variety of email templates and tools to personalize and tailor the email campaigns. The interface is really easy to get started with the help of drag and drop email editor, and there is a wide variety of templates to choose from and personalize them.

There are various features, such as list segmentation, A/B testing, scheduling, and personalization tokens. Email analytics helps you get insights into the campaigns through reports and helps to understand the performance better. You can find the insights about every email, such as its open rate, clicks, and other essential data, to know which emails generate more clicks.

HubSpot marketing email tool becomes more powerful when integrated with the HubSpot CRM. With the help of HubSpot, you can create smart email campaigns to personalize and tailor the emails as per the customer's journey.

With the growth of your business and the increase in the number of contacts, it becomes important to plan email campaigns as per the customer's activity on the web pages or to integrate nurturing emails with the sales process. 

This complete, all-in-one feature is what separates it from ActiveCampaign as you get everything on the go with all the tools in one place.

ActiveCampaign is a tool that focuses mainly on email marketing campaigns. It helps create dynamic content, email segmentation, subscription forms, and split testing to help in engaging and nurturing contacts. The campaigns can be easily set up with the help of a drag-and-drop email designer.

The drawback with ActiveCampaign's email editor is that it's not a WYSISYG HTML editor, so you find it difficult to understand and proceed with certain editing blocks to achieve the desired design.

 If a Marketer's sole reason is email marketing and not other tools, only then will it be useful, and moreover, you will face difficulty in sending one-to-one emails using ActiveCampaign. 

 

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Drag-and-drop email editor	✔	✔
Custom coded email templates	✔	✔
Ecommerce emails	✔	✔
Email personalization	✔	✔
A/B testing	✔	✔
Optimized for any device	✔	✔
Post-send email analytics	✔	✔
Comparative reports	✔	✔
Send 1-to-1 emails from the CRM	✔	Limited
Dynamic/smart send times	✔	❌
Holistic CRM personalization	✔	❌

Marketing Automation

HubSpot supports marketers by giving them the ability to personalize their marketing automation. The marketing hub provides best-in-class and robust features that are beyond event tracking and email follow-ups. You can easily initiate triggers on workflows to make your tasks automated.

Whenever a person initiates a trigger such as a form submission, specific page views, contact information, etc., the workflow starts to function. HubSpot's automation is integrated with the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hub, which helps to automate any changes made to the deal and service ticket status.

You can update contact properties and assign them to the right team member. If you require a complex and customized process, it can be done through API integrations and technical webhooks.

Let us suppose you are planning to run a promotional campaign. Using HubSpot, you can create a landing page with a form on that particular landing page to collect the information about those who are interested.

The next thing you can do is create and send emails to a list of contacts with a call-to-action, which will redirect them to that particular promotional landing page.

A/B testing can be done to get the best subject line, which will also help optimize the open rates. After that, you will dig into insights and reports of other emails, landing pages, and form submissions to optimize the contact's journey.

The best part is after you have collected all the information of your contacts, you can use automation workflows with triggers to enroll the contacts who have filled the form on the landing page so that they get timely emails of offers that you are offering. Follow up emails will help you to drive the contacts towards purchase.  

ActiveCampaign's drag and drop automation builder helps you to set up workflows aquickly. Using ActiveCampaign, you can automate your email and follow up, find your most engaged contacts by adding custom points to certain actions. In ActiveCampaign, you can track your contact's activity on your web-pages, and based on it; you can choose triggers for workflows through the help of event and site tracking. 

You can also tag the contacts to get it highlighted for the sales team to take further action according to the updated contact's status. Despite all the packed marketing automation features, its user interface is a bit difficult to understand and is not so robust.

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Automated kickback emails	✔	✔
Drip campaigns	✔	✔
Conditional if/then automation logic	✔	✔
Automate internal notifications and tasks	✔	✔
Automate lead management & segmentation	✔	✔
Custom automation through webhooks	✔	✔
Workflow automation performance report	✔	✔
Easy to set up automated email sequences	✔	❌
Easily test contacts in your automation	✔	❌

Get found Online

HubSpot provides you with a bunch of tools to help you get found online and optimize for better conversion using supportive landing pages, blogging, CMS, and forms submission. With the advantage of pre-built templates or drag and drop editor, you can easily create a landing page that matches your business type.

Then all you need is to create and include a form on your landing page to capture any contact information. When you are using HubSpot CMS, it becomes even more comfortable to manage and optimize your website for your blogging and campaign needs.

You can add a HubSpot tracking code to your site to bring the website analytics data into HubSpot if your website is built on any other CMS like WordPress.

HubSpot is smart enough to understand that form submission aims not to convert a visitor into the lead from the first time. Progressive profiling lets you change what a visitor views if they are already a contact in your database to make sure every form fill yields valuable information for your business.  

ActiveCampaign does not help marketers to create or edit content for their website. You need to use 3rd party apps or integrations to create landing pages or website pages. You will also face difficulties in planning as there is no option to get reports or analytics of the email marketing campaigns or how it is affecting conversion rates.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create forms for conversion such as inline, floating box, pop-up, and website floating bar in a simple form builder.

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Forms	✔	✔
Pop-up forms	✔	✔
Embedded forms	✔	✔
Custom form fields	✔	✔
Hidden form fields	✔	✔
Collect data from any form solution you use	✔	❌
Dependent form fields	✔	❌
Progressive profiling	✔	Limited through integration
Drag and drop page builder	✔	❌
Template/custom coded landing page development	✔	❌
Reporting and traffic analytics	✔	❌
Advance post scheduling	✔	❌
Optimized for mobile	✔	❌
Use custom domain	✔	❌
SEO tool	✔	❌
CMS (website pages)	✔	❌
Academy lessons	✔	❌

Social Media and Ads

HubSpot's social media and ads feature helps marketers to optimize and handle their social accounts and ads in one place. This gives clear reports of the contacts who have engaged with the social posts or have clicked on an advertisement. This integration is very much helpful for marketers as they can take targeted marketing to the next level.

You can start by integrating social media accounts ( LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook ) with HubSpot. Schedule your social media posts and analyze the engagement it is bringing on different channels. Social monitoring tool helps in keeping you informed about the latest trends and keyword phrases that are important to your brand's growth. 

ActiveCampaign lags in this feature, too, as it does not have any social tool. You need to integrate third-party apps to get your social media optimized in ActiveCampaign. It means you can't post or have any reports on your social posts. You will have to manually add or remove contacts from the list based on email and ad campaigns. Even for any lead generated through Facebook ads, you need to add contacts to create a list manually.

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Conversations on website	✔	✔
Social publishing, monitoring, and reporting	✔	❌
Ads tool publishing and reporting	✔	❌
Facebook/Instagram Ads	✔	❌
Google search and display ads	✔	❌
LinkedIn ads	✔	❌
Advanced website audiences	✔	❌
Contact list audiences	✔	syncing limited
Facebook lookalike audiences	✔	✔
Ads ROI reporting across attribution	✔	❌
Messenger conversations	✔	✔

Integrations

HubSpot's robust and best-in-class features include the integration of more than 300 apps. HubSpot is focusing on becoming an open platform, so they are always continuing to add more apps that integrate with it. In 2018, Zapier, MailChimp, Slack, WordPress, and Surveymonkey were the five most integrated apps with the HubSpot platform.

So, HubSpot is the best, which gives you the ability to integrate the apps easily as it is very necessary to incorporate certain apps for the smooth flow of the processes and the campaigns. Integrated apps in HubSpot will help to do actions like Shopify abandoned cart follow-ups, SalesForce lead syncing, etc.

ActiveCampaign also integrates with more than 200 apps such as analytics, CMS, sales and service, accounting, and lead generation apps. If you are using ActiveCampaign, you will need to depend on Zapier to ensure integrations are pushed through, and there are only four natively built integrations.

 

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampiagn
Create custom contact properties	✔	✔
Separate teams by hierarchy	✔	✔
3rd party integration tasks	✔	✔
Natively built integrations	✔	Only 4 "deep data" integrations
Native 2-WaySalesforce Integration	✔	❌

Sales and CRM

HubSpot is equipped with a powerful and technologically advance CRM that gives you precise control over your contacts and how you tend to manage them. You can choose among various properties to create segmented lists as per your requirement that can be used to manage your marketing campaigns, all within HubSpot's free CRM.

When you dig deep into a contact record, you can view every interchange you have had with the contact starting from marketing emails to sales calls and servicing tickets. You get personalized details of the contacts for your further plans. The CRM works across the HubSpot Growth Platform, so everything is aligned, which keeps your teams updated if any changes are made to the contacts.

You can restrict and set permission access to your team members to view contacts. This becomes of great use when you have multiple offices or who handle different types of business. The best part of the CRM is that it is effortless to understand and navigate through even if you are from a non-IT user. 

ActiveCampaign is also helpful for marketers. You can centralize your contact data to perform actions such as notifying the sales team, deals update, creation of tasks, and automatically nurturing leads. Same as HubSpot, you can view your interactions with the contacts, which would help you further to make segmented lists based on the campaign interactions, social media data, and website activity.

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Contact lead scoring	✔	✔
View contact activity	✔	✔
Win probability	✔	✔
Assign tasks	✔	✔
Add notes	✔	✔
User and team permissions	✔	✔
Create tasks for team members	✔	✔
Get a holistic view of the contact’s journey	✔	✔
Send one-to-one emails from the contact record	✔	Limited
Email communication	✔	Limited (Gmail only)
Mobile App	✔	IOS only (Android beta)
Make and log phone calls	✔	❌

Supported Languages

HubSpot has localized products and documentation to support your growing team in whatever language you choose.

ActiveCampaign offers support for several languages in their product, but documentation is only available in English and Portuguese.

 

Highlights	HubSpot		ActiveCampaign
Type	Product Language	Documentation Language	Product Language	Documentation Language
English	✔	✔	✔	✔
Portuguese	✔	✔	✔	✔
Spanish	✔	✔	✔	❌
French	✔	✔	✔	❌
German	✔	✔	✔	❌
Japanese	✔	✔	❌	❌

Grow with HubSpot

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.

 

Features	HubSpot	ActiveCampaign
Live chat tools	✔	✔
Programmable bots	✔	❌
Unified email & chat inbox	✔	✔
Blog	✔	❌
Website Management	✔	❌
SEO tools	✔	❌
Video hosting and management	✔	❌
Hierarchical teams	✔	❌
Meeting booking tool	✔	❌
Lead scoring	✔	✔
Automated sales sequences	✔	Limited
Ticket & deal automation	✔	Deals Only
Sales playbooks	✔	❌
Knowledge base tools	✔	❌
Customer feedback tools	✔	❌
Help desk tools	✔	❌
Academy and educational lessons	✔	Limited
On-boarding and consulting services	✔	Limited

Conclusion

Hope, this will be helpful and insightful to give you clear sights of the right CRM to choose for your business needs.

The differences are stated very precisely to help you with the decision-making because the right CRM for marketers helps them stay aligned to the objectives and makes planning and executing smoother.

It also helps them track their performance and make the necessary changes to take the business growth to the next level.

Need help setting up your HubSpot CRM?

Well, get in touch with us now. Our team of HubSpot experts will handle everything for you.