11 Best HubSpot Alternatives for Support, CRM, and Marketing
If you’ve ever looked for a CRM, marketing automation platform, or support software, chances are you’ve come across HubSpot.
A pioneer of inbound marketing, HubSpot dominates the industry space and for good reason: It’s a top-tier product with loads of great features.
You can pretty much do everything in HubSpot. From highly customizable automations to advanced segmentation options, HubSpot offers a powerful collection of tools for sales and marketing teams.
But while HubSpot positions itself as an all-in-one solution for businesses of any size, it’s not always the best option for everyone. If HubSpot isn't meeting your team's needs, there are plenty of HubSpot alternatives to consider for its CRM, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub products.
The disadvantages of HubSpot
The main issues with HubSpot are its price and its overwhelming number of features. HubSpot is priced as various separate products: There’s a Marketing Hub, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and a Service Hub.
While you can buy multiple subscriptions as bundles, it all adds up and can get pricey fast. A Starter bundle plan starts at $45/month for two users, while the next plan up — Professional — starts at $1,600/month.
There are also expensive onboarding costs to consider. HubSpot can be complicated software to set up, so that’s usually outsourced to a HubSpot professional to handle.
Although HubSpot has a free CRM for up to a million contacts, many of the platform’s best features (like attribution) are only offered in the higher-tier Pro and Enterprise plans. Businesses with limited budgets may find they’re left with just basic features like a few automation features or the CRM.
Pricey subscriptions also rule out smaller businesses or those looking to try the platform out.
The truth is, HubSpot is great for large teams looking for general software that’s a marketing solution with sales automation and customer support.
But choosing the right marketing automation software, CRM software, or support tool depends on your unique business needs and priorities. Before you commit to an expensive subscription, make sure to investigate all the possible options.
The 11 best HubSpot alternatives
Below, we’ll look at the eleven best HubSpot alternatives. To make browsing easier, we’ve divided the alternatives into three categories:
HubSpot Service Hub alternatives
HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives
HubSpot CRM alternatives
Although you’ll find some similarities and overlap in features with these tools, most have their own unique features that make them better suited to certain use cases.
HubSpot Service Hub alternatives
1. Help Scout
Best HubSpot alternative for customer service.
Help Scout is a powerful customer support platform that prioritizes both agent and customer experience. A key advantage is that no complex or time-consuming onboarding is needed — an intuitive and visual interface makes it easy for users to find their way around.
Customer management
Every customer wants to be treated as an individual, which is why every person your business has interacted with will have a profile in Help Scout.
You can view all customer data, app activity, and previous conversations alongside each customer request. That way, you’re already prepared and can deliver more proactive and personalized support.
Messages
With Messages, you can offer proactive customer support with trigger-based messages in real time. Plus, you can send messages from any blog, webpage, store, or app. The widget allows you to onboard customers, suggest helpful content, or announce a new feature.
You can also segment your audience using custom properties to deliver optimized messaging, and reports can help you see whether your messages resonate with customers.
Shared inboxes
Receive all your support requests in a shared inbox so you can manage all your customer conversations in one central place. Build a database of saved replies to make it easier to respond to requests, and create workflows to automatically assign conversations to available agents.
Handy features like collision detection stop multiple agents from replying to the same customer requests while private notes help your team collaborate on the same request before replying to the customer.
Live chat
Beacon offers live chat support and makes it ultra-simple for customers to find the right knowledge base article so they can find answers on their own. You can offer live chat when someone is available or direct customers to your email queue — that way they’re not waiting around for answers.
When chat is available, customers can choose the channel that works best for them. That way, you’re offering proactive chat support that gives customers what they need.
Data migration
Lastly, Help Scout makes the process of switching from other platforms easy. You can use their data migration capabilities to bring your existing customer data and conversation history with you without needing help from your IT department.
Pricing: Starting at $20/user per month.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. Freshdesk
Best HubSpot alternative for call center support.
Freshdesk offers a knowledge base, a shared inbox, and solid ticket management features. Easily change ticket priority, status, or assignment within ticket lists.
Social streams enable you to monitor specific keywords and incorporate them into your ticketing system. You could create a ticket from a tweet, DM, or Facebook post.
When you close a ticket, Freshdesk enables you to send out customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) to see how you did.
Free tiers enable smaller customers to get an understanding of the features, but key features like the chatbot, social signals, and dashboards are only available on higher-priced tiers.
Pricing: Free for limited features or from $18/agent per month.
3. Zendesk
Best HubSpot alternative for support teams at enterprise companies.
Zendesk suite combines a knowledge base, a self-service platform, chat software, and call center software.
Primarily help desk software, Zendesk has ticket management features to help support agents more easily manage their workloads. Agents can be assigned tickets based on their expertise, and automated workflows are able to update tickets according to certain events or after certain time periods.
Pricing: Starting at $19/agent per month.
Buyer’s Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool
Tailored to help you identify your customer support needs, this guide will help you find the right solution, simplify your purchase decision, and get leadership buy-in.
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HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives
4. ActiveCampaign
Best HubSpot alternative for marketing automation.
ActiveCampaign is a top tool for businesses looking for email marketing automation. It’s also a great option for ecommerce businesses.
There’s predictive sending, which learns when users prefer to open your emails. Using its advised sending times helps you send emails at the best time for your users, boosting both open rates and conversion rates.
Similar to HubSpot’s popular email automation feature, ActiveCampaign automates email sequences based on user activity. The software pulls user information from landing pages, live chat, social media, text messages, and other web content to automate targeted email marketing campaigns.
You can automate everything from a welcome email sequence to emails following a product download. Track micro-conversions like email opens and link clicks to see where people fall out of your funnel, and use automated emails to pull them back in. Integrations with apps like Shopify mean you can send out automated cart abandonment emails to boost purchases.
Goal reports track the effectiveness of your campaigns and let you view metrics like how many people saw your offer and how many purchased. Keep in mind that ActiveCampaign’s main limitation is that its reporting doesn’t drill into attribution, meaning it’s harder to properly track leads.
Pricing: Starting at $9/month.
5. Ontraport
Best HubSpot alternative for ecommerce businesses.
Ontraport bills itself as “powerful marketing automation without enterprise prices.” Based on that, budget-conscious businesses may find Ontraport is a great HubSpot Marketing Hub alternative for them.
Powerful integrations help you gather data and send it to third-party apps to better understand your customer base. For instance, deep funnel conversion reporting enables you to send conversion data to Google Analytics so you can see where your customers come from.
You can also add customers to Facebook Custom Audiences so you can retarget them with Facebook ads. Advanced lead source tracking shows what’s attracting people and encouraging them to buy, helping you to know where to focus your campaigns.
Use Ontraport’s split-testing features and A/B test your campaigns to create ultra-targeted marketing experiences across social media, the web, and SMS marketing campaigns.
Pricing: Starting at $79/user per month.
6. Wishpond
Best HubSpot alternative for marketing teams looking to boost lead generation.
Wishpond is another popular HubSpot alternative that has a solid all-in-one solution for marketing and sales teams. It’s got some of the premium automation features that HubSpot has without the premium price tag.
Using smart automation, you can send potential leads to your sales team inbox. It’s also easy to track lead activity and customer demographics for each of your email campaigns. Automate email workflows like welcome sequences, abandoned cart messages, and reminders so you spend less time following up with leads.
You can also personalize automated email sequences for leads depending on their behavior or assigned characteristics. Wishpond’s simple email builder has an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to help you customize campaigns for every device.
Captivate website visitors with an initial hook through Wishpond’s pop-up builder, where you can customize each pop-up’s functions and even add eye-catching animations.
Pricing: Contact Wishpond for pricing.
7. EngageBay
Best HubSpot Marketing Hub alternative for small businesses.
Just like HubSpot, EngageBay divides its products into marketing, sales, and support hubs. It’s a great choice for small businesses or startups that don’t have the budget for HubSpot but still want a complete software suite.
There are email marketing tools for sequencing, personalization, and running drip campaigns. EngageBay’s segmentation features make it easy to target a subset of users with filters like country, source, tags, and created date.
A free drag-and-drop landing page builder enables you to create customizable and responsive landing pages. Solid tracking tools let you monitor their performance by viewing the number of visitors, the number of subscribers, and the conversion rate.
Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans starting at $14.99/user per month.
HubSpot CRM alternatives
8. Aritic
Best HubSpot alternative for in-depth customer data.
Aritic is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and support platform for businesses of all sizes. The customer relationship management (CRM) software focuses on drilling down on customer data to close more potential deals. You can automatically log every page visit, form completion, and interaction to inform your understanding of customers.
Aritic’s data-informed lead scoring enables you to better categorize valuable potential customers. Through prebuilt workflows, you can track and monitor sales leads and build out your ideal automation workflow to match your business needs.
In terms of increasing productivity, key tools enable you to streamline your leads and build out customized workflows. Key integrations with popular platforms like Salesforce, Outlook, and WordPress make it easy to streamline your customer data across multiple apps.
Pricing: Free for one user or $49/user per month.
9. Insightly
Best HubSpot CRM alternative for small businesses.
Insightly is a cloud-based CRM platform solution geared toward small businesses. When you sign up, you can design a highly customizable dashboard to match your business requirements exactly.
Create visual graphs to uncover customer insights and chart progress toward your goals. It’s also easy to produce drag-and-drop reports and then share them with other team members.
Advanced workflow automations let you create multi-step business processes. Automate record updates, email notifications, and task generation for when opportunities are won, or execute custom business logic to sync external systems. Insightly’s social CRM enables you to identify potential leads and engagement on social media, too.
There are also Android and iOS mobile apps that make it simple to manage and update opportunities on the go via your CRM. You can easily avoid manual data entry by scanning business cards and uploading all contact information in just one click.
Pricing: Starting at $29/user per month.
10. Keap
Best HubSpot CRM alternative for entrepreneurs.
Keap (previously Infusionsoft) has easy-to-use CRM tools along with some marketing automation tools.
The automated lead capture tool ensures you don’t miss potential leads by automatically collecting and organizing contacts from custom lead forms, landing pages, and social media. Organize your leads with automatic tags and segments to trigger autoresponders and personalized follow-up sequences.
Through app integrations with platforms like Shopify, HelloSign, and QuickBooks, Keap makes it easy to streamline your customer data. A handy Gmail integration means any emails you send can be added to your CRM, too. Create sequences and email templates for incoming leads and existing customers to save time.
Free data migrations mean you can take your contact lists from platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact and access them on Keap.
Pricing: Starting at $56/month (plus $30 for each additional user).
11. Zoho CRM
Best HubSpot CRM alternative for organizing leads.
Zoho CRM is an affordable HubSpot CRM alternative geared toward small and mid-size businesses. You can store up to 100,000 contact records using the contact management feature, no matter the pricing plan you choose.
Zoho CRM shines at lead management features. You can assign leads to reps based on different criteria and create your own lead scoring guidelines. A social listening feature lets you see when a contact reaches out or tags your business via social media.
To help you better handle leads, Zoho uses automatic replies to leads that match certain criteria. For an additional safety layer, there’s also a reply approval workflow so that any communications or conversions receive approval from a supervisor.
Pricing: Starting at $20/user per month.
Choosing the best HubSpot alternative for your team
If you’re a big-budget enterprise that needs all of its complex features, HubSpot’s paid plans could be the right choice for your company. But for other teams, there are more specific solutions that give you the features you need without burning through your budget.
Reflect on what your goals are and which features are most important to your business. Choosing the right platform is much easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then, it’s simply a case of testing different options and seeing what works for your team.
Michael Keenan
