Activecampaign vs Hubspot Full Comparison (Updated!)

ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot Full Comparison (Updated!)

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are known for their robust email marketing features, data management capabilities, API integrations, social media support, CRM integration, mobile apps, and more.

However, how do you know which among these two is best for your needs as a business?
Small businesses have plenty of options, but choosing between one CRM and automation solution over another can be tricky.

While ActiveCampaign and Hubspot offer similar functionality, some features may suit different business needs better than others.

This post highlights the differences between both platforms from a user perspective. Here's everything you should know about them before making your choice.

About this ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot review

I am a consultant specializing in helping companies implement solutions like ActiveCampaign and Hubspot. I have used both platforms comprehensively and have helped many clients set up their ActiveCampaign and HubSpot automation which yielded outstanding results.

For many clients, it is often a challenge to choose which to go with, but after several consultations, I have helped clients determine which is best according to their particular needs.

Furthermore, being a user of these platforms, I have firsthand experience of how each can be used to build a persuasive sales and marketing automation system. I have also thoroughly examined both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot websites' features.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of ActiveCampaign and HubSpot to aid you in selecting the solution that is most suitable for your company. 

In this comparison, the benefits and drawbacks of each platform are openly discussed, including their features, ease of use, pricing, automation, email builder, and more.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a CRM and email marketing platform that allows small businesses to automate sales and customer support processes, track conversations and interactions between contacts, and send targeted emails based on each contact’s unique interests and preferences.

The software also supports multiple integrations like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Zapier, and Google Analytics.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is one of the world’s largest marketing automation software platforms for small and mid-sized businesses. It allows marketers to create, automate, track, measure, and optimize campaigns across email, landing pages, social, ads, analytics, CRM, and mobile apps in one place. 

If you want to build websites or increase conversions through lead generation or customer engagement, then HubSpot is a great tool that you should consider.

ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: Feature Comparison 

Active Campaign and HubSpot are robust Automation marketing tools with various features that allow businesses of all sizes to connect with customers. As I mentioned earlier, many businesses are often confused about what to use.

To help you decide, in this section, you’ll find an honest comparison of the two solutions, including the winner on each feature analyzed.

ActiveCampaign CRM vs HubSpot CRM

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are great web-based CRMs for small businesses. They offer similar features, such as lead generation, sales management, email marketing, and customer relationship management.

However, some features may suit different business needs better than others.
ActiveCampaign automation tool primarily targets email marketers in small businesses and does not have a free plan that gives you access to CRM functionalities. You have to pay to get access.

Although ActiveCampaign doesn't offer the same suite as HubSpot, it is still regarded as a vital CRM and email marketing software because of its strong automation and comprehensive reporting.
Concerning HubSpot, it offers various ‘hubs’ for sales, marketing, and customer service teams for any size of business. It also has a free plan to access its CRM functionalities.

It is essential to point out that, although HubSpot offers a wider range of features with its hubs, you won't have access to everything unless you commit to a paid plan.

Conclusion: Regarding CRM functionalities, HubSpot, with its ease of use and free CRM plan, is undoubtedly the winner.

Winner: HubSpot

Sales Pipeline and Deals 

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot have features that let you create and manage a sales pipeline. However, HubSpot goes a step further by letting you create your reporting dashboard from scratch with the option to choose which team members you want to share it with.

On ActiveCampaign, you can create custom sales pipelines through the deals section in your CRM account. Its drag-and-drop interface and design are identical to those used in any Kanban-based project management tool like Trello.

You can build as many phases in your pipeline as you need, and as new deals come in, you can add them along with their assigned contacts and team members. After completing each agreement, you can move it to the next phase.

This pipeline and deal process can be combined with automation to create a well-organized, and sophisticated sales funnel.

For instance, you may utilize it to have a follow-up event automatically triggered once a deal is changed to a specific category (autoresponder, notification for yourself, schedule a meeting).

Like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot consists of contacts and deals in its CRM system. However, the HubSpot sales pipeline and deals platform enables you to add more information and designate your contacts to a company.

In HubSpot, every activity involving a contact is auto-recorded in the main timeline, which you can use any time to take action, such as sending emails, scheduling meetings, adding new contacts, adding an event, etc.

Furthermore, HubSpot has a very efficient layout, and you can do almost anything you’d like with a contact from your page. 

As you generate new leads into your sales pipeline, you can add the companies they represent and then add the contacts to them. This ensures that you can keep track of all your work with a company in a single location, removing any redundant or unproductive tasks.

Now with these leads, you can build pipeline stages and add deals to the appropriate stage. Again, similar to ActiveCampaign, HubSpot has a Kanban-like design that you can drag and drop deals through the phases as you advance.

Conclusion: ActiveCampaign and HubSpot both have useful capabilities for keeping track of your sales pipeline and deals. However, HubSpot goes further with features that let you add more details for managing your sales.

Automations and workflows

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot allow you to automate specific workflows and repetitive tasks, including email marketing, contact management, sales processes, and more.

Both offers advanced automation that you can use to improve the performance of your email marketing efforts and support sales from any marketing channel through event tracking and workflows.

These automation features enable your organization to scale quickly. 

Furthermore, both platforms can connect to over 800+ applications via Zapier, allowing you to further automate your company processes.

Conclusion: Regarding automation and workflows, both platforms are on par. However, what gives ActiveCampaign the edge is that its plans are far less expensive and include functionality that HubSpot only offers on a much higher pricing plan.

Email Builder and Designs

ActiveCampaign and HubSpot include easy-to-use, drag-and-drop email builders that allow you to get creative with your designs. And both offer a variety of features and templates for developing attention-grabbing, compelling emails.

However, ActiveCampaign's email builder provides various features and templates for making beautiful, engaging emails on its most basic plan.

Also, ActiveCampaign lets you send unlimited emails while providing you with good templates that you can customize the design further in the email editor on its most basic plan, whereas in HubSpot, you would have to pay twice what ActiveCampaign charges for 1,000 contacts.

Conclusion: ActiveCampaign’s email builder and design allow users more design features on its most basic plan. However, I recommend giving more attention to a solid copy to improve your CRO rather than design.

Reporting

Both HubSpot and ActiveCampaign have great reporting features. 

ActiveCampaign provides a report for everything (contacts, deals, email newsletters, automation, e-commerce, etc.), which makes analyzing every facet of your sales and marketing efforts more effective. 

One interesting feature of ActiveCampaign is the Deal Task Overview Report, which provides you with data on tasks and results related to CRM, as shown in the image below.

For HubSpot, you can customize your reporting dashboard and see several reports simultaneously. This feature makes it seamless to gain a more comprehensive picture of what is working, who is working, and what isn't.

Furthermore, you can choose to share your reports publicly or privately and with whom precisely.

Conclusion: HubSpot wins in reporting compared to ActiveCampaign. I love the fact that I can create custom visual reports and dashboards. 

Although ActiveCampaign seems to be working on its reporting as it recently released several new reports. Its reporting is typically limited to pre-built reports, which are occasionally not very useful.

Dashboards

Both platforms have a simple dashboard that is easy to understand and gives you a detailed overview of your business.

With ActiveCampaign, you can get accurate information about what's happening in the system. However, that isn’t anything extra from what you will still get from HubSpot.

From my experience, HubSpot dashboards are easier to use with powerful features such as live chat support to assist you in case you get stuck.

Furthermore, it provides many options for customization without becoming overwhelming, as it does with stalwart CRMs like Salesforce.

Conclusion: HubSpot is the winner when it comes to dashboards. The fact that ActiveCampaign does not provide many options for customization makes HubSpot the better choice here.

Winner: HubSpot

Ease of use

In many cases, the more robust a software platform is, the more complex it becomes, making it more challenging to use, especially for beginners. Also, a more complex platform would imply that it may require a steep learning curve.

However, concerning ease of use, both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot are good.

The user interface of ActiveCampaign is user-friendly, but there are many sub-elements in the menu, which make it slightly less easy to use compared to HubSpot. In addition, there is the issue of not being able to add multiple email addresses for the same contact or lead. 

In contrast, HubSpot does allow users to add multiple email addresses.

HubSpot takes the cake for ease of use. The interface is designed to be easy to navigate and has many built-in templates, making things like landing pages quick and simple to create. 

Conclusion: Although both are good concerning ease of use, HubSpot, with its added features such as live chat support, the ability to add multiple email addresses, and a well-organized dashboard that shows vital information that’s important to you, makes me easily choose HubSpot over ActiveCampaign.

Winner: HubSpot

Getting started with ActiveCampaign and HubSpot

ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial period so you can test their software and see how it might work for your business-specific needs. However, you must first sign up for an account to take advantage of their free trial, which gives you access to their features.

On the other hand, HubSpot offers a 30-day free trial that allows you to try their platform. When you sign up for the free trial, you get full access to all of HubSpot's tools and customer-only resources.

Conclusion: It's seamless to get started on both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. However, HubSpot has the upper hand since its U/I is slightly easier than ActiveCampaign.

Winner: HubSpot

We help users get started with HubSpot and configure and activate their ActiveCampaign account.

Click the button below to get in touch with our team. We’d be happy to give you our feedback about which tool you should use and how to properly set it up.

ActiveCampaign Pricing vs HubSpot Pricing

ActiveCampaign pricing plans start at $9/month if you have up to 500 contacts. The price increases as your contacts increase. 

This plan includes email sending, Drag & Drop Email Builder, automation, Subscription Forms, and more. However, the price above is for its most basic plan; the price changes depending on the number of contacts you have and your chosen plan.

HubSpot has a free plan, but its paid plan, which can be pretty confusing, begins at 45$. But they’ve tried to make it as simple as possible. 

Of the 4 primary services (CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service) offered by HubSpot, there are up to 5 different plans. Some services have fewer plans than others, but the names and price ranges are consistent across all services.

• Free, Starter, and Basic plans – Targeted at individuals with a small user base and feature set.
• Professional – For businesses with small teams and includes almost all core features
• Enterprise – The best option designed for big teams.

Conclusion: ActiveCampaign is more affordable. Their plans are more straightforward and do not have hidden costs, as you may find with HubSpot.

Which features are unique to each platform?

Here, I briefly outline some of the features unique to each platform to help you decide.

What type of business do you have?

As I have mentioned, each platform has unique features that support different types of businesses’ specific needs. Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot cater to small businesses, but HubSpot also addresses the needs of much bigger companies, while ActiveCampaign doesn’t.

Below you’ll see my thoughts on the types of businesses best suited for each platform. Hopefully, this list should give you a rough notion of what would be suitable for you.

What types of businesses should use ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is perfect for small businesses, including 

• eCommerce businesses
• Agencies
• Bloggers
• Digital marketers
• SaaS companies that don’t want to build a CRM or marketing automation from the ground up

What types of businesses should use HubSpot

HubSpot has everything your sales, marketing, and customer support teams need to attract and service your customers online. It is ideal for small and mid-sized businesses, including

• eCommerce stores
• Business Services (legal, accounting, finance, IT, consulting)
• Retailers
• Media Companies
• Startups
• Healthcare, etc.

ActiveCampaign Support vs Hubspot Support

Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer excellent support for their users.

ActiveCampaign provides chat and email support on all plans, except for phone support which is only available on the Enterprise plan. 

Additionally, it provides a community forum, instructional videos, and a vast knowledge base. ActiveCampaign also has one-to-one training available for users on the Plus plan and above.

HubSpot has the HubSpot Community available for its free users, although you’ll need to upgrade to the Starter plan to gain access to in-app and email support. Phone support is only available to those on the Professional plan.

Furthermore, HubSpot has an excellent selection of resources in the form of free courses, guides, articles, and ebooks.

Be assured that both platforms take their customer support seriously, so if you do have a situation you can't handle, they will be there to offer assistance.

You can also get in touch with our team in case you need some assistance, our team is here 24/7 to answer any questions.

ActiveCampaign Reviews

In this ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot full comparison, I’ve given my complete and honest view. Still, do not take my word as absolute because I might be biased in this review as a human. 

Hence, I have searched for direct links to other independent review sites with hundreds of reviews from actual users.

GetApp: 4.6

Check out the full review and comments here.

G2Crowd: 4.6

Check out the full review and comments here.

Capterra: 4.6

Check out the full review and comments here.

G2Crowd: 4.4

Check out the full review and comments here.

Capterra: 4.5

Check out the full review and comments here.

ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: Who’s the winner?

I wish I could state explicitly who the winner in this comparison is. The reality is that it hinges on the specific needs of your business. 

Although ActiveCampaign is ideal for small businesses, HubSpot is best for small and mid-sized companies. The finest method to determine which platform is perfect for you is to sign up for a free trial of both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. 

This will allow you to test each platform to determine which is best for your business.

ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: Conclusion & Final Thoughts

It can be challenging to find a CRM and marketing automation software that meets your business requirements. 

In this ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot comparison, I have tried to make it easier for you to decide which is best for your specific needs by providing an overview of both platforms, emphasizing their essential features.

As you can see from this comparison, each has its pros and cons, so rather than wasting too much time attempting to determine which CRM is the best fit for your company, take the info from this article as a guide. 

Also, a question I frequently get asked is, “which CRM is the most appropriate for a particular firm?” And every time, I respond by saying that it depends on your needs. 

An accounting firm will benefit from HubSpot CRM features, and a lead generation business like a real estate agency may find ActiveCampaign more helpful.

Furthermore, it is essential to note that, in many cases, software and tools are only as good as the person using them. Hence, take time to understand your business needs; this will help you determine the best tools for you.

In writing this ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot comparison, I aim to help you with the most objective explanation possible of the key distinctions between the two platforms. 

I hope you find it helpful in your CRM and automation software decision-making. Please use the links below to share with anyone you know who’s considering marketing automation. I wish you luck with your choice and success in business.