ActiveCampaign vs. HubSpot

Wondering which tool is right for you?

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are both top-notch tools that can help you manage your leads, craft personalized email content, and build engaging site content. They’re flexible and reliable, with features that cater to various needs. If you’re considering choosing one or the other, it’ll come down to what specific features you're after and how they fit into your overall strategy.

Let’s take a look at each platform before we dive into their features.

ActiveCampaign shines with its powerful email marketing features and CRM capabilities that make managing your customer relationships a breeze.

It’s designed to be user-friendly, so whether you’re just starting or scaling up, you can dive right in without a steep learning curve. With over 900 integrations across various platforms, ActiveCampaign lets you connect your email, SMS, social media, and more, ensuring your campaigns are cohesive and personalized. Plus, you can track customer interactions across all channels, giving you a clear picture of your marketing strategy's impact.

ActiveCampaign is a great fit for both small and large businesses because it offers the tools you need without overwhelming you with unnecessary extras. Its pros include advanced automation, easy-to-use features, and a smart CRM, while a potential downside might be that it requires some initial setup to fully leverage its capabilities.

But once you're up and running, it’s a great choice for businesses looking to create consistent and effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels. And you don’t have to pick between a handful of confusing bundled packages like you would with HubSpot. ActiveCampaign has four tiers with the option to select add-ons. Simplicity is powerful.

When you switch from HubSpot to ActiveCampaign, enjoy free 1:1 migration

Adopting a new or switching to another platform can be an undertaking but it’s inevitable if you’re hitting certain limits with your current tool. When you sign up for an ActiveCampaign Pro or Enterprise plan, we’ll migrate your email lists, transfer your templates, rebuild your automations, and set up your forms and landing pages. All for free.

You’ll get one-on-one sessions with a real person along with resources like help articles and our community to get you set up fast.

HubSpot is known for its comprehensive CRM, detailed reporting, and overall ease of use. It’s designed to help you manage your sales and marketing efforts from one platform, making it a solid choice if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution. HubSpot’s CRM is especially handy for outbound sales, and it’s built to handle a large number of users, so if you need to manage a big team, it’s got you covered.

However, while HubSpot offers a lot of value, the cost can quickly add up, especially if you need advanced features or plan to grow your team. It’s great if you need an outbound sales platform or want to manage a large number of contacts, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the pricing as your needs evolve.

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are both top-of-the-line products that are likely to meet just about any need you have.

ActiveCampaign excels with its powerful email marketing and automation features, making it a great choice for businesses focused on building personalized, multi-channel campaigns. It's user-friendly and integrates well with various platforms, allowing you to streamline your marketing efforts without getting bogged down by unnecessary extras.

HubSpot, on the other hand, is an all-in-one solution with a strong CRM and good reporting capabilities. It's particularly well-suited for businesses in search of a tool that can manage a large number of contacts. Although HubSpot is known for being user-friendly, ActiveCampaign goes beyond, providing incredible support and onboarding that’s built into each pricing tier. HubSpot charges for it.

If you need a versatile platform that covers all the bases, HubSpot is a great choice, while ActiveCampaign offers a more focused, cost-effective solution for targeted marketing efforts. There's no cut-and-dry "right" tool in this case, it depends on the specific features you need as a business. Let's look at some of these features at a glance.

EmailTooltester compared both platforms on things like ease of use, reporting, CRM, segmentation, automations, and more in this video.

Want to test out the features for yourself?

ActiveCampaign offers a powerful visual automation builder that lets you create complex, multi-step workflows involving email, SMS, site messages, and CRM actions. The platform is designed to be intuitive, allowing you to drag and drop different elements into your workflow, making it easy to see how everything connects.

What really sets ActiveCampaign apart is its ability to create highly personalized automation based on user behavior, lead scoring, and CRM data. This means your messages can be tailored to each individual, making your campaigns much more effective.

Some of ActiveCampaign’s standout features include:

• Dynamic content: Customize content within your emails based on the recipient’s behavior and preferences.
• Advanced segmentation: Easily segment your audience based on various criteria, ensuring that each group gets the most relevant messaging.
• AI features: ActiveCampaign’s AI can suggest improvements to your campaigns with predictive content and automation features, helping you optimize your strategy without extra effort.

Creating detailed, custom workflows in ActiveCampaign is straightforward, thanks to its user-friendly design. Even if your workflows are complex, the visual builder keeps everything organized and easy to manage.

HubSpot’s automation rules are customizable, allowing you to personalize and segment your audience in great detail, so your campaigns hit the mark every time.

They also excel at lead nurturing, with a variety of options for triggering workflows based on user actions, data points, or a combination of both.

HubSpot’s key features include:

• Customizable workflows: HubSpot offers flexibility in building workflows, enabling you to tailor each step to meet your business’s unique needs.
• A range of trigger options: You can start workflows based on a wide range of triggers, from form submissions to page views, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups.
• Good reporting: HubSpot provides in-depth reports on how your automation is performing, helping you gauge effectiveness and make data-driven improvements.

With HubSpot, the focus is on integrating various aspects of your business into cohesive workflows. While the builder is powerful, it might require a bit more time to master, especially if you’re setting up highly detailed processes.

What good is your email campaign if nobody sees it? From the past three deliverability tests EmailTooltester ran this year, ActiveCampaign scored first over all other platforms with a 93.4% deliverability rate.

On the other hand, HubSpot scored pretty poorly here with a 79.8% deliverability rate, coming in twelfth place overall. This proves that ActiveCampaign is the platform you should choose if you care about deliverability.

And you should, because an undelivered or lost to the spam folder email is practically useless.

When it comes to reporting, both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer impressive functionality.

ActiveCampaign offers a range of reporting tools that give you deep insights into your marketing campaigns. One of the standout features is the Marketing Revenue Report, which ties your marketing efforts directly to revenue. This report shows you exactly how your campaigns are impacting your bottom line, making it easier to see what’s working and where you might need to make adjustments.

With ActiveCampaign’s reporting, you can track email engagement, customer behavior, and sales performance. Customers can expect detailed analytics on everything from open rates and click-throughs to more advanced metrics like automation effectiveness and customer lifetime value. It’s designed to help you understand the full impact of your marketing strategies, whether you're focused on email campaigns, SMS, or broader automation workflows.

ActiveCampaign’s reporting features are great for businesses that prioritize detailed marketing analytics and want to build an automation strategy based on real, concrete data.

HubSpot also offers powerful reporting tools that cover a wide range of metrics across marketing, sales, and service. With HubSpot, you can create custom reports that pull data from different parts of your business, giving you a holistic view of your performance. Their reports can track everything from lead generation and customer acquisition to sales pipeline progress and customer satisfaction.

HubSpot’s reporting is designed to be highly customizable, allowing you to tailor your reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business. The platform also offers detailed dashboards where you can visualize your data in real time, making it easier to stay on top of key trends and make informed decisions.

When it comes to pipeline management, both platforms deliver.

ActiveCampaign comes with a built-in CRM that’s tightly integrated with its marketing and automation tools, making it easy to manage your sales pipeline alongside your marketing efforts. The platform offers flexible, kanban-style dashboards that let you visualize your sales process at a glance. You can drag and drop deals between stages which makes it straightforward to track progress and manage your pipeline.

One of the key benefits of ActiveCampaign’s pipeline management is how easily you can integrate deal management with automation. This means you can automatically move deals forward, send follow-up emails, or update contact details based on specific triggers. This integration is crucial because it saves time and guarantees that nothing slips through the cracks, allowing your sales team to focus on closing deals rather than managing tasks.

In contrast, HubSpot’s pipeline management is designed with large teams and complex sales processes in mind. Whether you need to create multiple pipelines for different products or tailor every stage of your sales process, HubSpot gives you the tools to mold the platform to fit your specific business needs. Customization like this ensures that even the most intricate sales processes can be managed effectively.

HubSpot is a good choice for giant teams because of the in-depth reporting and analytics it offers on pipeline performance. You can track everything from deal velocity to win rates, and even monitor the health of your entire pipeline. These detailed insights are crucial for large teams that need to stay on top of their sales metrics, identify bottlenecks, and forecast future sales accurately.

All of these features are powerful, but they’re really aimed at large operations that need to manage high volumes of leads and deals. If you’re on a leaner team that’s looking to integrate pipeline management alongside their marketing efforts, ActiveCampaign is probably the better option.

If you don’t currently have a dedicated content management system, you’ll be happy to hear that both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer CMS functionality. ActiveCampaign’s CMS is built with a focus on simplicity and effectiveness, offering just the features you’ll actually use, making it both powerful and practical.

Here’s a breakdown of what you can expect with ActiveCampaign:

• Intuitive landing page and form builders: Their landing page and form builders are designed to be user-friendly, so you can create on-brand content that keeps your messaging consistent across both marketing and sales. Building forms or landing pages is straightforward, allowing you to focus on capturing leads rather than getting bogged down in complicated design tools.
• Versatile form options: You can create various types of forms—inline forms, floating bars, and floating boxes—that help you capture leads effectively. These forms are customizable, so you can make sure they fit easily into your website or landing page. Plus, once someone fills out a form, you can automatically trigger actions within your automated workflows, like sending a welcome email or assigning a lead to a specific sales rep.

• Lead management and follow-up: All the information you collect from forms and landing pages is stored directly in your ActiveCampaign account. This makes it easy to follow up with relevant messaging and offers that are tailored to each lead. You can also segment your audience based on the data you’ve collected, ensuring that your emails are personalized and targeted to the right people.
• AI-powered messaging: ActiveCampaign’s AI tools add another layer of sophistication. By analyzing customer data, AI can help you craft messages that resonate with your audience, making it easier to connect with leads and move them through the sales funnel.

ActiveCampaign's CMS is easy to use and effective because it simplifies content creation and personalization with intuitive tools, so you can focus on engaging your audience without the headache.

HubSpot’s CMS is packed with features. It’s a comprehensive tool for managing your customer relationships and content all in one place but for small businesses, it can be a bit overwhelming.

Here’s a breakdown of what HubSpot offers:

• All-in-one content management: HubSpot is built like a CMS platform, offering everything you need to track customers who engage with your content. The platform allows you to manage the creation of landing pages, forms, blog posts, or running ads which makes it easy to see how your content is performing and how it’s driving customer engagement.
• Integrated marketing tools: HubSpot allows you to build landing pages, create forms to capture leads, manage your blog, and even run your social media campaigns. This integration ensures that all your marketing efforts are aligned and allows you to track how each piece of content contributes to your overall strategy.
• AI-powered content creation: They offer AI tools you can use to edit existing text or come up with new body copy and headlines. This is particularly useful for teams that need to produce a lot of content quickly.

HubSpot’s CMS is ideal for teams that require extensive tools and while not every team will need this level of functionality, it’s a decent option if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform.

When it comes to email marketing, ActiveCampaign will give you more features for what you pay. Plus, a lot of the features you’ll enjoy come at a much lower price than HubSpot.

ActiveCampaign is well-known for its powerful email marketing features, offering specific packages tailored to different needs—whether you’re looking for email and marketing automation, sales CRM, or transactional emails through Postmark.

Here’s a breakdown of what makes ActiveCampaign’s email marketing stand out:

• Advanced personalization: With ActiveCampaign, you can create highly personalized email campaigns. The platform allows you to segment your audience based on a variety of criteria, ensuring that each recipient gets the most relevant content. You can even use conditional content, which changes based on the recipient’s behavior or preferences. This level of personalization is what turns a customer into a brand advocate.

• Versatile campaign options: ActiveCampaign gives you the flexibility to choose from various types of email campaigns. Whether you want to send a one-time blast, set up autoresponders, create custom email sequences, or schedule posts for a later time, you can do it all. You can also set up RSS-triggered responses, which are perfect for automating updates, and run A/B tests to optimize your messaging.
• User-friendly email builder: The email builder in ActiveCampaign is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, so you can focus on crafting the perfect message without any confusion. You can drag and drop elements, customize your layout, and add personalized touches, all within a straightforward interface.
• Segmentation and automation: You can divide your audience into segments based on their behavior, demographics, or engagement levels, and then target each segment with tailored messaging. This makes your campaigns more relevant and increases the chances of engagement.
• A/B testing: You have the ability to test different subject lines, content, and send times to see what resonates best with your audience. A data-driven approach like this helps you continually improve your email marketing performance over time.

In short, ActiveCampaign’s email marketing features are designed to give you everything you need to run successful campaigns, from simple blasts to complex automated sequences.

HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite of email marketing tools that are well-integrated with its CRM. You can use its drag-and-drop builder to create professional emails, personalize them based on customer data, and set up automated workflows for tasks like nurturing leads.

In terms of email marketing, HubSpot offers:

• Integrated email tools: HubSpot’s email marketing tools are tightly integrated with its CRM, allowing you to create and manage email campaigns that are fully aligned with your customer data. This makes it easy to tailor your emails based on customer interactions, helping you send the right message at the right time.
• Drag-and-drop email builder: HubSpot offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder, which lets you create professional-looking emails without needing any design or coding skills. You can easily add text, images, buttons, and personalize content blocks to match your brand’s style.

• Basic automation: You can set up automated email workflows in HubSpot, such as welcome series, follow-up sequences, and lead nurturing campaigns. These automated sequences help you engage with your audience consistently without manual effort.
• A/B testing: HubSpot provides A/B testing options so you can optimize your emails. You can test different subject lines, content variations, and sending times to see what works best for your audience, helping you improve your campaign performance over time.

While both HubSpot and ActiveCampaign offer excellent email marketing functionality, they cater to different needs. ActiveCampaign stands out with its deep focus on email features and design, offering more advanced options for segmentation, personalization, and automation. HubSpot, on the other hand, provides a more integrated approach, combining email marketing with its broader CRM and marketing tools, making it ideal for big businesses looking for an all-in-one platform.

There are some differences between the two platforms when it comes to CRM features.

ActiveCampaign provides a user-friendly CRM that integrates well with its marketing automation tools, making it ideal for smaller teams or businesses looking for efficiency without complexity. HubSpot, on the other hand, is built for larger teams and offers extensive customization, in-depth reporting, and advanced features that can handle high volumes of data.

ActiveCampaign’s CRM is all about simplicity and effectiveness. It’s designed to provide just what you need to manage your sales and customer relationships without getting bogged down in unnecessary extras.

Here’s a quick look at what it offers:

• Built-in CRM: ActiveCampaign comes with a built-in CRM that’s integrated with its marketing automation tools. This means you can track deals, manage customer interactions, and automate follow-ups all from one place.
• Kanban-style dashboards: You get flexible, kanban-style dashboards that let you easily visualize your sales pipeline. Dragging and dropping deals between stages is a breeze, so you can quickly see where everything stands.

• Lead scoring: ActiveCampaign’s CRM includes lead scoring features that help you prioritize your leads based on their interactions and engagement. You can set up custom scoring rules based on factors like email opens, clicks, website visits, and more. This way, you can focus on the leads that are most likely to convert and tailor your follow-up strategies accordingly.
• Deal management integration: ActiveCampaign lets you integrate deal management with your automated workflows. This helps ensure that your sales tasks are aligned with your marketing efforts and that nothing falls through the cracks.

HubSpot’s CRM is built for scale and customization, making it well-suited for large teams with complex needs. Here’s what you can expect:

• Extensive customization: HubSpot offers a highly customizable CRM that lets you tailor pipelines, sales processes, and contact properties to fit your business’s unique needs. This level of detail is great for managing intricate sales workflows.
• Automation and customization: You can set up complex workflows and automation rules, which is ideal for managing high volumes of leads and deals. HubSpot’s CRM is built to handle sophisticated processes and provide detailed insights.

• Comprehensive integration: It integrates deeply with HubSpot’s marketing, sales, and service tools, providing a unified view of customer interactions across different departments.
• Good reporting and analytics: HubSpot’s CRM comes with powerful reporting and analytics features, allowing large teams to track performance metrics, monitor sales activities, and forecast future performance.

ActiveCampaign’s CRM is perfect if you’re looking for a tool that offers the essentials you need to manage your sales and customer interactions without any extra fluff. Its simplicity and integration with marketing automation make it great for teams big and small.

HubSpot’s CRM, on the other hand, is designed for larger teams that need extensive customization and in-depth reporting. It’s ideal if you have complex sales processes and need that extra functionality.

In ActiveCampaign’s app marketplace, you’ll find 950+ apps that integrate with various tools and platforms, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and other marketing tools. It supports connections with popular services like Salesforce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and hundreds more.

HubSpot also offers a sizable number of integrations with over 1000 on their app marketplace. Both platforms have no shortage of integrations to choose from, most likely connecting with the tools you’re trying to use them with. It will just depend on what your tech stack looks like and which platform can properly support you.

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot have pretty different pricing structures so we’ve broken it down for you below.

HubSpot pricing

For the sake of this comparison (and the number of plans/bundles HubSpot offers), we’ll be focusing on their Marketing plans.

While HubSpot does offer a free plan, it’s severely limited. For example, if you create a form on their free plan, you’ll only be able to automate one email on that form. Plus, you can only send up to 2,000 emails per month and are unable to remove the HubSpot branding.

Their Marketing Hub Starter plan runs you $15/month per seat and includes up to 1,000 contacts. This is the exact same pricing as ActiveCampaign’s entry-level pricing so let’s dig in here.

The Marketing Hub Starter plan allows you to send 5x your contact limit, so to stay at the $15/month price, you can send up to 5,000 emails a month. In contrast, ActiveCampaign allows up to 10,000 emails a month.

We should note here that HubSpot offers another plan at $15/month per seat with their Starter Customer Platform. This plan is under their Customer Platform plans which are bundled and discounted. Find more information here.

The final Marketing plan they offer is the Marketing Hub Professional plan which costs $800/month for three seats. Additional seats will start at $45/month. The Professional plan comes with 2,000 contacts and up to 20,000 email sends a month.

If you need a more extensive plan that offers things like lead generation and additional marketing automation tools, you may need to opt for one of HubSpot’s Marketing+ plans which cost $900/month or $3,800/month respectively.

ActiveCampaign pricing

Overall, ActiveCampaign is much more affordable as you scale.

For example, let’s say you have 10,000 contacts on an Enterprise plan. ActiveCampaign will cost $589/month while HubSpot will cost you $3,600. You get five seats in both plans but it’s clear that one platform is much more affordable.

Compared to similar enterprise-level automation tools like HubSpot or Salesforce, ActiveCampaign is pretty budget-friendly for the amount of features you get. They don’t offer a free plan (just a free two-week trial), but their Starter plan gives you access to some pretty advanced features for only $15/month.

To start, ActiveCampaign’s entry-level pricing starts at $15/month. This plan, aptly named the Starter plan, gives you access to multi-step marketing automation right out of the gate. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan only gives you basic automation. None of HubSpot’s plans, not even their Professional or Enterprise plans, state that they come with advanced automation.

Moving up to the Plus plan, you unlock more automation and powerful customer insights for $49/month with 1,000 contacts.

With the Plus plan and up, you can add on the pipeline enhanced CRM to manage your sales automation or the sales engagement CRM that includes additional email and AI capabilities.

ActiveCampaign’s Pro plan will cost you $79/month to unlock full omnichannel marketing automation. This is where you can truly elevate your email marketing. You’ll have monthly email sends 12x your contact limit and three users instead of one.

The Pro plan allows you to get more granular about how your email campaigns are performing and understand what content, messaging, and offers move the needle for your business. You’ll have total control over your email cadence.

Finally, ActiveCampaign’s Enterprise plan starts at $145/month for 1,000 contacts and allows you monthly email sends 15x your contact limit plus five users.

No matter which ActiveCampaign plan you choose, ActiveCampaign offers services like contact migration, customer enablement workshops, chat and ticket support, video tutorials, a knowledge base, and help guides to help you get the most out of the platform so you can focus on running your business.

We know you’re aware that you’re on the ActiveCampaign website reading a comparison between us and a competitor but there really is a reason why so many people choose to migrate away from HubSpot. We’ve seen plenty of customers migrate and see real results.

Artivive realized they lacked the resources they needed to create the engagement levels they wanted to reach. Plus, their communication gaps were creating issues with booking artists which was integral to their business.

After Artivive switched from HubSpot to ActiveCampaign they saw a 1000x growth from 100 to 100K users. They also improved their email interaction rate by 47%.

Free onboarding and extensive hands-on support are the only right answers.

ActiveCampaign offers free onboarding on all Professional and Enterprise plans as well as migration from your existing tool so you can get set up quickly. This will help you import contacts, preserve custom fields, remake your forms and landing pages, recreate email templates, and even translate your current workflows to their platform.

Some support perks you can expect with ActiveCampaign:

• In-person Study Hall workshops that allow you to learn how to use the platform in a hands-on experience
• Extensive support by means of video tutorials, help articles, 1:1 calls, and an active community you can go to when you have a question

HubSpot offers onboarding on their Professional and Enterprise plans but they will cost you ($3,000 and $7,000 to be exact). With this onboarding program, you’ll get recommendations on how to utilize your data in HubSpot, learn how to create automation and nurturing processes, and get best practices around lead generation and qualification

Some support perks you can expect with HubSpot:

• Email and chat support, with advanced phone support at the Professional level and up
• Their migration service for an additional $500
• Email template building service for an additional $250

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot: which is best for you?

The platform you choose will depend on which features above are most important to you (and which you need to grow your business).

HubSpot is best suited for large teams with substantial budgets and complex needs. It’s a comprehensive platform that offers a wide range of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service, but it can get expensive, especially as your team grows and you need more advanced features.

Choose HubSpot if… you have a huge team and no shortage of money to spend, value detailed reporting, and need extensive CMS functionality to create and keep track of content.

ActiveCampaign is a great fit for smaller teams or businesses that want powerful automation features without the hefty price tag. It’s packed with valuable tools that make it easy to manage your marketing and sales processes, all while keeping things simple and effective.

Choose ActiveCampaign if… you value email marketing and easily automating your processes, want to scale without spending big money out the gate, and want to send truly customized content.

Are customer stories too biased for you? We get it. Let’s look at a few reviews from real users.

"HubSpot allows us to take our communications and email it to the masses”

Source: G2

"HubSpot is the best all-in-one marketing software for sophisticated marketing teams”

Source: G2

“ActiveCampaign is very user-friendly. It was easy to get started, even with no experience.”

Source: G2

“ActiveCampaign is supportive and feature-rich”

Source: G2

Lingering questions? We've got you.

💡 Is ActiveCampaign good for e-commerce businesses?

ActiveCampaign is a great choice for e-commerce businesses, especially if you’re looking to automate your marketing and streamline customer interactions. With features like personalized email campaigns, automation workflows, and deep integration with platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, it helps you engage customers, boost sales, and keep everything running smoothly.

Learn more about ActiveCampaign’s e-commerce features.

💡 Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

ActiveCampaign is best for small to mid-sized teams that want powerful marketing automation and CRM features without the high cost. It’s perfect for businesses that need advanced tools like personalized email campaigns, lead scoring, and segmentation, all wrapped in a user-friendly platform.

If you’re looking for a solution that’s effective and straightforward, without unnecessary bells and whistles, ActiveCampaign is a great fit.

💡 Who is HubSpot best for?

HubSpot is best for large teams and businesses with complex needs and the budget to match. It’s ideal if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that covers everything from CRM to marketing automation. If you have a big team and need a powerful, integrated system to manage your sales, marketing, and customer service, HubSpot is a strong choice—just be prepared for the price tag.

💡 What is the biggest difference between ActiveCampaign and HubSpot?

The biggest difference between ActiveCampaign and HubSpot is that ActiveCampaign focuses on powerful, affordable automation tools for small to mid-sized businesses, while HubSpot is built for larger teams that need an all-in-one platform.

In short, ActiveCampaign is great for those who want simple, effective tools, whereas HubSpot is better suited for bigger companies with complex needs and bigger budgets.