HubSpot vs. Marketo: How to Choose the Best Software for Your Company

03/05/2021 2 min read Written by Kelly Groover

Is your company looking to onboard a marketing automation platform? If you’ve already started searching options, chances are you’ve come across HubSpot and Marketo. Both are robust systems that are regularly featured as top choices by G2 and other similar companies. Yet, one may better suit your organization.

The question is which one? Find out by looking at our comparison of Marketo and HubSpot.

What Are HubSpot and Marketo?

In case you’ve just started researching the two, here is a brief overview of each platform:

  1. HubSpot offers a wide array of software and tools for every team within your company – sales, service, and marketing. With integrations, you can extend its capability to finance and project management teams as well. Marketing Hub, which is Marketo’s counterpart, lets you create content for your prospects, turn your visitors, nurture your contacts, and analyze over time to optimize your marketing strategy. And you can do it all in one place!
  2. Marketo is another example of software aimed at marketing teams. Like HubSpot, it is a single tool that provides tools for account-based marketing and other services like email marketing, SEO, and content creation. Unlike HubSpot, its sole focus is on marketing automation and requires integrations to help sales or customer success initiatives.

How Are They Similar?

Both systems will help you save valuable time, create material for your prospects, offer a wide selection of landing page templates and native integrations. They also both offer capabilities such as:

  • Blogging
  • Landing page creation
  • SEO optimization
  • Form creation
  • A/B testing
  • Personalization
  • Drag and drop email builder
  • Personalization for email content
  • Contact-based segmentation
  • Automation branching logic
  • One directional sync with Salesforce company fields (HubSpot is bidirectional)

How Are They Different?

There are several core differences between the two that may help with your decision, such as:

  • As noted, HubSpot is not just a marketing automation system. You can purchase other software for sales management, content management, and helpdesk automation. For example, HubSpot offers a built-in CRM system that ties back to your marketing efforts, while Marketo doesn’t. Everything you would need to run your business could be in one place with HubSpot.
  • Marketo can handle transactional emails, or emails that a company sends to contacts, leads, or customers to follow up on some action the user has taken on their website. HubSpot cannot at this moment.
  • You can manage your blog through HubSpot’s built-in CMS tools or purchase CMS Hub to design and edit your website. Marketo doesn’t offer this kind of feature.
  • HubSpot offers different tiers of its platform and is better suited for business scalability. Marketo is aimed more at larger businesses.

What It All Comes Down To

Still not sold on either system? If so, consider these two scenarios:

  1. If you need a comprehensive marketing tool that can grow with you, you should choose HubSpot. It’s easy to use, efficient and offers different tiers so you can purchase more tools as needed. It’s also helpful to keep your marketing, CRM, and service all in a single location.
  2. Enterprise businesses that want to pinpoint prospects and convert them into customers through email and lead nurturing should lean toward Marketo. Its large-scale applications work well for revenue generation but are costly and may not be useful for smaller organizations.

If HubSpot Is Your Winner...

Are you leaning toward HubSpot now? Reach out if you have any questions about getting started!

By: Kelly Groover

Kelly serves as the Specialist of People and Talent for Lynton. She lives in Savannah, GA with her husband, daughter, and two dogs. When she's not managing conversion rates and lead generation for the company, she's typically playing soccer or watching football.

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