HubSpot vs. Marketo in 2023: Side-by-Side Comparison

HubSpot and Marketo are both prominent platforms for inbound marketing. This means that HubSpot and Marketo are designed to attract customers via multi-channel marketing campaigns. 

The prime functionality empowering their prowess is marketing automation. Marketing automation tools are treasured assets for business growth. 

Marketing automation software can better engage you with your consumer base and optimize your day-to-day operations. 

Whether it’s social media marketing, content marketing, or search engine optimization (SEO), HubSpot and Marketo have the tooling to help your business thrive. 

As much as 75% of businesses use marketing automation tools. Ergo, it’s no surprise that business owners are comparing HubSpot vs. Marketo and asking which platform is best. 

If you’re starting to ask the same questions, stay tuned. The following information will compare and contrast HubSpot vs. Marketo in six key metrics where marketing platforms are concerned:

1. Pricing 
2. User Experience 
3. Tooling & Features
4. Integrations
5. Analytics 
6. Community & Support

You’ll learn more about HubSpot vs. Marketo right below!

What Is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a full-featured software with marketing, sales, and service sectors to enhance every part of your business affairs. However, the brunt of marketing strategies takes place in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. 

HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) system is carefully intertwined with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, so users can get the best of both worlds.

Your marketing team, customer service team, and even your sales team can all work together to attract, engage, and delight customers through HubSpot Marketing Hub and its attached CRM. 

Aside from tapping into your CRM with HubSpot, the marketing automation platform is also equipped with tools for email marketing, forms, landing pages, contact management, live chat, traffic, conversion analysis, and ad placement for a number of social networks. 

What Is Marketo?

Marketo is a marketing automation solution with mass popularity in the business world. The platform’s expertise is in content personalization, lead nurturing automation, and lead management. 

Marketo is part of Adobe Experience Cloud, a collection of online marketing and analytics products from Adobe, Inc. 

Email campaigns, particularly email nurturing and automation, explains some of Marketo’s core features. Marketo also includes two principal marketing tools — Marketo Engage and Bizible.

Marketo Engage is an application that allows users to create, manage, and employ personalized engagement strategies for a wide range of channels: email, web, mobile, and more. 

Bizible is a multi-touch revenue attribution solution that assesses the return on investment (ROI) for the channels you deploy towards user engagement. 

You’ll learn how customers know of your product and why they’re buying it, objectively determining the value of your marketing efforts. 

In short, Marketo can refine customer interactions and provide authentic experiences to potentials leads no matter where they occur.

HubSpot vs. Marketo

Finding the right marketing tool for your business can be a frustrating task. But even preliminary research will demonstrate that HubSpot and Marketo are both attractive options for streamlining otherwise complex marketing processes. 

Still, choosing between them is difficult. See how Marketo and HubSpot match up in these six major categories in order to make your final decision.

1. Pricing 

Marketo has several distinct modules for its services: marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based marketing, digital advertising, social marketing, and mobile marketing. 

You can use these modules individually or combine them which will alter the overall price of your purchase. The modules exist on scales with tier pricing, namely Select, Prime, Ultimate, and Enterprise. 

HubSpot does not veer far from this model. Its respective tiers are Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. 

And along with HubSpot Marketing Hub, there is HubSpot Sales Hub, HubSpot Service Hub, HubSpot Operations Hub, and a content management system (CMS) that can be integrated with all of HubSpot’s services. 

All of HubSpot’s services, including the Marketing Hub are priced based on the organization as a whole and do not have a user limit. 

A mere 1000 contacts in HubSpot Marketing Hub would cost $45 per month while 20,000 would cost approximately $9,072 a year with an annual discount factored in. 

To compare, the most basic version of Marketo includes 25 users. More users require an upgrade. And to have 20,000 contacts in your records, you will pay around $27,000 a year. 

Winner: HubSpot — There is no doubt that HubSpot is the more affordable choice between HubSpot and Marketo, hence it is well-suited for small businesses.

2. User Experience

Given its price point, it makes sense that Marketo’s primary audience revolves around enterprises and large businesses. 

Thus, the software is designed for advanced marketers with a knowledge base in information technology (IT) for handling more convoluted tooling. 

Although Market’s modular approach is well-defined, the tool takes a deep dive into each marketing segment it makes available to its users. 

Marketo prioritizes custom solutions. Customization and optimization are of the utmost importance for navigating Marketo software. 

Naturally, this comes at the cost of simplicity. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a worthy sacrifice for your business. 

If you have a dedicated marketing specialist on your hands, you likely won’t have any problems. But for someone who is new to CRM platforms, using Marketo won’t be easy. 

On the other hand, HubSpot was built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), making ease of use a priority for the software. 

Notice that, unlike Marketo, all of HubSpot’s marketing tools like lead management, and analytics are maintained under one umbrella in the Marketing Hub. 

Though the features of HubSpot are not as customizable as Marketo’s, the functionality remains intelligent enough to be a powerful staple for marketing teams. 

Step-by-step instructions for HubSpot’’s tools, as well as its Learning Center, boost the platform’s usability factor. 

As time passed, HubSpot expanded its palette to welcome businesses of all sizes, including large enterprises. 

HubSpot users can gain certifications for the platform, aiding their recognition as experts in the inbound marketing industry. 

Now, HubSpot can provide you with a vast diversity of marketing functions on top of a smooth user experience. 

Winner: HubSpot — HubSpot is simply easier to use than Marketo. 

3. Tooling & Features

Marketo and HubSpot overlap where it matters the most, but this is exactly why choosing between them is challenging. This means finding where the two platforms differ is even more critical. 

Here’s a comprehensive list of where HubSpot and Marketo align:

• Social media monitoring
• Social marketing/publishing
• Website monitoring
• SEO tools
• Landing pages
• A/B testing (for landing pages & email)
• Lead management
• List segmentation
• Dynamic content 
• Email marketing
• Marketing calendar
• Native mobile apps
• Sales dashboards
• Event marketing/webinars 
• Drip campaigns 
• Automation templates
• Event-based triggers
• Deliverability optimization

Taking all this into account, it’s clear that HubSpot and Marketo differ more in their priorities than their capabilities. 

First and foremost, you should keep in mind that Marketo is geared towards business-to-business (B2B) companies that are looking to work with other companies. 

In contrast, HubSpot is mainly for business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations that want to boost customer interaction with omnichannel strategizing. 

Aside from this, Marketo’s prized features include campaign creation and a cherished interface with a wealth of customization tools to play with. 

With Marketo, you can use a design suite with templates and drag-and-drop tooling to create a personalized campaign that fits your brand. Then, you can utilize scheduling and an automated response system to engage specific target audiences.  

Marketo also outshines HubSpot when it comes to filtering discrepancies in data and assigning multiple assets for different product channels. 

Though HubSpot and Marketo are similar in the channels they support, Marketo offers more personalization. 

HubSpot does, however, have a soft spot for lead intelligence, gathering the most relevant information across the channels your customers take to using. 

The fact that HubSpot hosts its own CMS also probably justifies its robust blog management features which Marketo fails to provide. 

That said, it is clear that Marketo has a soft spot for customizability that gives its features a healthy vigor. 

Winner: Marketo — The nuance of Marketo gives it an advantage over HubSpot. 

See also: HubSpot vs. Zoho - Side-by-Side Comparison

4. Integrations

Despite the fact that Marketo has several custom features at its helm, HubSpot’s winning feature is built-in CRM integration. 

For marketers who leverage HubSpot, they can take advantage of HubSpot CRM for a seamless experience or use native integration to connect with other leading CRMs like Salesforce or Zoho. 

Marketo can also integrate with Salesforce and the platform extends native integrations with Microsoft Dynamics and SAP in addition to certified integrations for Netsuite, Oracle, and SugarCRM. 

CRM integrations for Marketo — in line with the rest of Marketo’s featuring — are more advanced and have in-depth coverage. 

Yet HubSpot integrations are markedly user-friendly. And having a through-and-through CRM within the same marketing solution of your business is nothing but advantageous. 

Most professionals in the marketing industry agree that the HubSpot ecosystem is filled to the brim with numerous possibilities to sync systems together and ultimately grow your business.

HubSpot sports over 100+ native integrations for useful applications like Gmail, WordPress, Google Calendar, MailChimp, and the list goes on. 

Winner: HubSpot — HubSpot’s capacity for integration is relatively unparalleled in the industry. 

5. Analytics 

Critical insights drive successful marketing campaigns. Insights are the progeny of great data. Both HubSpot and Marketo can track performance, prospects, and customers, and generate detailed reports thereof. 

Unsurprisingly, Marketo reports are fully customizable. And Marketo goes so far as to monitor customer’s browsing and search history (which is apparently legal). 

Visual elements like charts and graphs accompany Marketo’s taste for made-to-order data collection. 

HubSpot, comparatively, does not lean so heavily on customization but presents users with a lightness of touch and agility that many have come to appreciate. 

The visual attributes for HubSpot reporting are colorful, but not as complex compared to Marketo. Though HubSpot’s built-in analytics tool is refreshingly accessible and operated under one simple dashboard. 

Winner: Marketo — Marketo excels in flourishing its complexity to better communicate with important stakeholders. 

6. Community & Support

As far as formal support goes, HubSpot renders phone and email support for all Professional and Enterprise plans. 

Marketo gives basic support to any user but full support comes at an additional cost. 

Withal, as humans, sometimes professional support just doesn’t feel as satisfying as reaching out to a friend. 

This is why building a community around any product or service is just as paramount as having a chatbot or technical support guy on call. 

To date, Marketo has a very active customer community. But in spite of the platform’s popularity, Marketo’s community does not measure up to HubSpot’s in the least bit. 

Likely, this is because Marketo attracts enterprise-level companies while HubSpot‘s penchant is for consumer marketing.

More recent numbers show that HubSpot has more than 121,000 customers in over 120 countries. 

For customers, this means more attention and serious intent when users carry an overarching opinion about a new feature or make a suggestion. 

Users also have a reliable network to talk and learn about the software, which in turn just promotes HubSpot more. 

In reality, no marketing and/or sales platform can compare to HubSpot in this regard. 

Winner: HubSpot — HubSpot is unequivocally more community-driven than Marketo. 

Conclusion

HubSpot vs. Marketo is a stimulating angle to explore the innovation of competing marketing solutions. 

In a nutshell, Marketo is a heavy-duty tool best suited for senior-level marketing experts or business owners. HubSpot is much more approachable for a layman wishing to quickly scale their business. 

Largely for this reason, HubSpot turned out on top at the end of the day. But it goes without saying, that the right choice comes down to your specific business needs. 

All the same, Trio is a software agency with certified HubSpot developers to assist you in making the best of HubSpot if you decide that’s what’s best for you. 

Trio HubSpot developers have been vetted and trained to tackle anything you throw at them. Should you be interested, come to Trio to scale your business with HubSpot!