Whether you’re on the hunt for an email marketing tool or an all-in-one marketing and CRM solution, you’ve more likely come across ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. The two platforms offer a wide range of tools businesses need to grow and nurture their leads, but at significantly varying monthly costs.
ActiveCampaign, more known as an email marketing tool, costs a lot less than HubSpot. While HubSpot is more expensive, it does offer far more robust CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service tools than ActiveCampaign. Suffice to say, choosing between the two depends on your budget and what specific features you need to run your business smoothly.
Contents
ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot Comparison Chart
| Model | ActiveCampaign | HubSpot |
 |  | |
| Price | Check Price at ActiveCampaign.com | Check Price at HubSpot.com |
| Free Forever Plan | No, only a 14-day free trial | Yes |
| Contact Tagging | Yes | No |
| Lead Scoring | Yes | Yes |
| Lead Segmentation | Yes | Yes |
| Marketing Automation | Yes | Yes, on higher-tier plans |
| Email Newsletters | Yes | Yes |
| Email Templates | Around 40 | Around 30 |
| Automation Recipes | 270+ | N/A |
| A/B Testing | Yes | Yes |
| Spam Check | Yes | Yes |
| Website Form Builder | Yes | Yes |
| CMS | No | Yes |
| Landing Page Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Customer Service Features | N/A | Ticketing, Live chat, chat bots, SSO, and more |
| Meeting and Scheduling | No | Yes |
| Native Integrations | 300+ | 500+ |
Pricing
While HubSpot has a free forever plan, ActiveCampaign’s plans are a lot more affordable
ActiveCampaign and HubSpot have very different pricing plans and features. ActiveCampaign offers four pricing tiers–Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise–and each tier’s pricing changes the more contacts/leads you have. The entry-level Lite Plan offers basic email marketing and automation features that most new or small businesses need.
Meanwhile, the higher-tier plan includes more advanced features and customization, including conditional content, contact scoring, SMS marketing, landing pages, and split automation. Custom reporting, contact enrichment, and unlimited email design testing are among the features only available in the highest-tier Enterprise Plan
HubSpot, on the other hand, has a free forever plan and three paid pricing tiers and bundles available for its different products. With the free forever plan, you’ll get free, albeit limited, marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM tools and up to 2,000 emails per calendar month. While it may be tempting to start with HubSpot’s free plans, it’s worth considering that HubSpot is not the cheapest option once your company and customer base starts growing.
HubSpot has four main paid products called hubs: Marketing, Sales (includes CRM), Customer Service, and CMS (content management system i.e. blog, website, etc). You can opt for just one hub and pay accordingly (see photo above), or get HubSpot’s Bundle Growth Suite to streamline your processes at a lower cost. The different pricing tiers for each hub–Starter, Professional, and Enterprise–vary in the number of marketing contacts, paid users, and features.
Email Marketing Features
ActiveCampaign offers more advanced email marketing features and automations
Here are some of the common email marketing features of ActiveCampaign and HubSpot:
- List segmentation
- Automation and sequences
- Workflow builder
- If/Else conditions
- Split testing
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Email designer and responsive templates
- Opt-in forms
- Analytics
- A/B Testing
While they may have similar features at a glance, the more advanced email marketing features on HubSpot are only available on its Professional and Enterprise Plans. HubSpot integrates seamlessly with major email providers such as G Suite, Office 365, Outlook, and Gmail.
Meanwhile, ActiveCampaign offers more email marketing features, such as lead scoring, tagging, spam check, automation recipes for different industries, and more email templates. With ActiveCampaign, you can test up to five different emails at once, something not available on HubSpot.
Sales, CRM & More Features
HubSpot has more CRM and sales tools than ActiveCampaign
Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot let you do the following:
- Pipeline management
- Conversion reporting
- Custom reporting
- Account management
- Sequences
HubSpot offers a lot more tools and features that will allow you to get rid of quite a few third-party integrations. These include meeting and scheduling, live chat, 1:1 video creation, eSignature, calculated properties, smart send times, quote-based workflows, and more. With that said, most of the advanced features are only available in the higher-tier plans.
If you want customer service and engagement tools, HubSpot is equipped with these as well. Features such as customer feedback surveys, help desk, ticket automation, SSO (single sign-in option), and conversations inbox are all available in HubSpot’s Service Hub. Should you want to start blogging on your website, you can also do so in the HubSpot CMS Hub. A lot of businesses only use HubSpot to run the backend of their business as it does offer almost everything you need in one place, thus improving efficiency.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign has around 300 integrations while HubSpot has over 500 paid and free apps
Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot can be integrated with major third-party online tools, including:
- Zapier
- Slack
- Zoom
- Salesforce
- WordPress
- Stripe
Knowing which native integrations are available to each platform is important to avoid having to use webhooks if they don’t have direct integrations with your existing tools. If you want to use webhooks, you can only do so on HubSpot’s highest-tier Enterprise Plan.
Verdict
ActiveCampaign delivers overall better value for your money than HubSpot
It’s hard to just say one is better over the other when comparing ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. They have very different pricing options and their features also reflect that. If your focus is on email marketing and engaging your customers through content and email, then ActiveCampaign is the better fit for you. You’ll need advanced email marketing and automation options if this is your focus, and you can do so with ActiveCampaign’s powerful tools and at a lower cost than HubSpot’s plans.
While HubSpot may be more expensive at a glance, it does help you streamline your process and get rid of many third-party software you may need (chatbots, ticketing, calendar, CMS, etc). Its suite of CRM, sales, customer service, and marketing tools become worth the price if you opt for the bundled plans and if you consider the efficiency that comes with having everything in one place. With that said, if you’re after an email marketing software, then HubSpot isn’t the best (and not the cheapest) in that department. CRM, sales, and customer service support are where HubSpot shines.
FAQs
ActiveCampaign offers CRM tools, but where it shines is in email marketing and its advanced automation and customization tools.
In terms of email marketing and cost, ActiveCampaign is better than HubSpot. However, if you’re after a more robust CRM and sales platform, go for HubSpot.
HubSpot has a forever free plan that gives you an idea of what HubSpot can do, although its features and functionalities are limited.
HubSpot consolidates most of the tools you need for inbound sales, marketing, and customer service so you don’t need to piece together a bunch of other third-party tools.
