Hubspot vs Marketo: The Key Differences

As you decide on the best CRM platform for your company, if you’ve had no prior experience, it can feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark. HubSpot and Marketo are a couple of the most used and popular CRMs on the market today, and instead of worrying about looking through thousands of marketing automation solutions to find the right one, choosing can be easier than you think.

To help you understand why HubSpot and Marketo are so popular, we’re going to unravel some of their top features, how they work, how they can benefit you, and, of course, their drawbacks, so you can see the full picture.

As an ambitious business, you’ll want to know which CRM automation platform is the best—let’s take a look at HubSpot vs Marketo in detail so you don’t have to do all the research.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a versatile customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform. It offers a system for you as a business to manage your marketing, sales, and customer service activities across multiple digital marketing platforms.

HubSpot offers tools for email campaigns, social media management, lead generation, website analytics, and many more. It also includes a CRM system to organise and track customer interactions and sales leads, making it simple for lead nurturing and converting your prospects into paying customers.

The CRM-powered marketing platform thriving on cloud-based software helps you, your sales team, and your marketing team to create and manage marketing campaigns, automate the majority of your daily repetitive tasks, and track the performance of marketing efforts. 

It also assists in sales pipeline management, helping you monitor and close deals efficiently, along with providing automated customer service for questions you receive frequently. 

Overall, HubSpot is suited to businesses of all sizes and will streamline all of your key business operations, making it easier to attract, engage, and delight customers, ultimately providing you with the perfect balance of inbound marketing techniques for steady business growth.

What is Marketo?

Marketo is a marketing automation software company that is owned and operated by Adobe, which essentially provides all kinds of marketing automation tools to businesses across the globe. Its main goal is to facilitate various tasks, including campaign management, lead nurturing, and customer engagement.

However, similar to HubSpot, they are both cloud-based software. They are based on the Google Cloud, meaning Marketo uses many of the Google services in order to hone in on email marketing, lead management, customer base marketing, and mobile marketing.

So whether you’re a small business, a medium-sized business, a creative professional, or just a marketer looking to broaden your horizons and try a new platform to manage your necessary tasks, Marketo is renowned for its all-in-one marketing software.

HubSpot vs Marketo: Comparing their features

To understand what a platform is great at, you first need to look at the features they provide and what they do well, as this can be the go-ahead for you to choose the platform with the features aligning to your goals. Let’s take a look in detail at the features that both HubSpot and Marketo provide:

Customer support

When first starting with a marketing platform, especially if you’re a beginner, you’re going to need all the support you can get, whether that be resources, a person to talk to on the platform, or videos to show you how to do certain tasks. 

When looking at HubSpot and Marketo support, they both differ, but they both offer extensive ways to reach out in need of help. HubSpot uses online live chat, their HubSpot community, phone/email, their HubSpot academy, and many more. Whereas Marketo offers its customer community, Marketo University, phone/email, etc.

Price of software

As a business or individual in the current economy, you’re looking to cut costs wherever you can, so the price of software is extremely important. HubSpot gives you access to a 14-day free trial, whereas Marketo doesn’t give you that luxury. 

Likewise, when you get into paid pricing, HubSpot is a clear winner as you have access to a free CRM, unlike Marketo, which, as a marketing automation solution, doesn’t offer free or paid CRM pricing at all.

Lead nurturing 

Building customer connections and offering the best customer journey/customer experience is paramount to maintaining long-term, meaningful relationships. HubSpot offers deal pipelines on all plans; however, the higher the tier, the more sales pipelines you can manage. Yet, they offer everything you need to organise, manage, convert, and retain your customers.

Marketo, on the other hand, is renowned for its lead management and structures its customer journey in a way where you can see the entire process, from first capturing a lead to it being a loyal, paying customer. Both HubSpot and Marketo have extensive features in this regard and will both play integral parts in generating more revenue on this side of the business.

Marketing integrations

When you look at e-commerce integrations, you want your marketing automation software to be flexible in terms of offering integrations for all business operations. HubSpot is a marketing hub, and HubSpot in general allows you to connect with some of the most popular integrations on the market, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Samcart, and more. 

Marketo, only really allows you to connect to Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) and Zapier, meaning you have little wiggle room if you want to use a different CMS or marketing integration. HubSpot is the clear winner in this realm, as you can connect to a wider variety of integrations.

Ease of use

As for the user interface on both of these platforms, they’re both relatively user-friendly. As you log on to both platforms, you can tell the developers and designers had user-friendliness at the top of their minds.

However, in terms of feature use, HubSpot and Marketo have similar ways in teaching their users how to perform everything (HubSpot Academy and Marketo University), so the ease of use really comes down to personal preference. 

HubSpot vs Marketo: Which platform should you pick?

Overall, if you’re looking for the biggest ROI (Return On Investment) while building customer relationships that will last a lifetime, HubSpot marketing automation software is the clear winner for the most optimal performance. 

Although Marketo is a healthy competitor, HubSpot is just more advanced in terms of all marketing tools while not sacrificing any difficulty for their audience to learn the ins and outs of the platform. 

If you’re looking to embark on your HubSpot journey, here at Fuelius, we’re within the top 1% of HubSpot agencies with over 25 years of experience in the digital marketing industry. So, if you want to talk about how we’ve been fortunate enough to help our clients internationally, don’t hesitate to book a discovery call below to see how we can help you!